1967

                First of all, 1967 seems to be the first year where the album, rather than the single, is the big-deal medium.  We’ve had albums, and even great albums, before this, but they never seemed quite as much a single statement  rather than a collection of songs.  Certainly Revolver was more a collection of songs, although Pet Sounds was more of a single piece (also maybe Bringing It All Back Home).  But it isn’t until 1967 that carving up different UK and US albums stops being common practice, so that means something, I think.  Not to be overstated, though.  If Sgt. Pepper counts as a concept album because its songs are centered around a common theme, then I give the nod for “first concept album” to Chubby Checker’s Your Twist Party, which seems to be a concept album about, well, doing the twist.  This is all well and good, except it makes my “listen to all the songs in a given year on shuffle” MO less effective.  So this may slow the project down some.  Life goes on.

                1967 is also the big year of psychedelia.  We saw some precursors last year (the Yardbirds, some of the Beatles’ stuff, etc.), but it’s all over this year.  And I struggled for awhile to find something to say about it.  I think ultimately it comes down to this: psychedelia is a genre (maybe the genre) where I find the most divergent swings between transcendently excellent and mind-numbingly bad.  Some genres for me rarely diverge from “ok”, and the bands tend to cluster around the mean (this is a big reason why I don’t love indie-rock in its 2010s incarnation: it’s all just so…pleasant but unremarkable; nice enough, but does anyone apart from their moms really get excited about bands like Wye Oak or Beach House or whoever?).  In some, its slanted heavily in one direction or the other (I think most techno/electronica/whatever is fairly bad, but the genre has some great examples).  But I almost never think that psych is “ok.”  Either it’s some of my favorite music of all time, or it’s so terrible I’m embarrassed to be listening to it.  Which, fine, is true of a lot of genres.  What frustrates me about psych is that I can’t seem to figure out what separates ‘good’ from ‘bad’ in my ears except to say “I like it” or “I don’t like it”.  By contrast, I can basically tell you what I think constitutes a country song I’ll like, for instance, and it leans heavily toward the ‘outlaw country’ of the 1970s.  There’ll be the occasional example that breaks those rules (either me liking something I didn’t expect, or not liking something I expected to).  I can’t find any real logic to why I do or don’t like a psych song.  It’s not whether it’s pop or what I think of as ‘deep’ psych.  Sometimes the pop stuff is glorious noise, other times it’s treacle.  Sometimes the deep stuff is magnificently outré, other times it’s a pretentious draggy mess.  It’s not whether it’s orchestrated or not, whether it’s jammy or not.  It’s not even whether or not I think the singer is a pretentious ass.  I think “Horse Latitudes” by the Doors is an example of everything wrong with circa 1967 psycheldelia, but I love me some 13^th Floor Elevators, and Roky Erickson is no more or less a pretentious pseudo-mystical ass than Jim Morrison.  But anyway, on to the details.

                I suppose a good place to start with psychedelia is with one of the few “classic” psych albums that I think lives up to its hype and more, Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.  I’m enough of a fan of the later, prog Floyd to not be one of those people who say it’s the best, or even moreso the “only real” Floyd album, but it is the lone example of ‘psychedelic whimsy’ that comes off as genuinely unnerving & a little terrifying in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way, as opposed to just goofy and embarrassing.  It really doesn’t sound like much else in 1967, although it sounds like a lot of the ’67 bands tried to mimic it.  Too bad it’s a style that’s almost impossible to get right (certainly even the rest of Floyd couldn’t do it after they lost Syd).

                The two biggest bands in rock, the Beatles and the Stones, both released their psychedelic records this year, the very good but overrated Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the underrated but fairly bad Their Satanic Majesties’ Request.  This probably requires a bit of explaining.  The Boomers, for whatever reason, have picked Pepper as the Beatles album, and I’m not really sure why.  It’s not their best (Revolver), it’s not their most ambitious (The White Album), it’s not their great leap forward (Rubber Soul), it’s not their biggest in terms of musical impact (Please Please Me, probably).  Really, it’s just a continuation & expansion of their Rubber Soul-Revolver sound.  I don’t want to slam it too hard, though; it’s a very good record, but it’s neither in contention to be my favorite Beatles record or my favorite record of 1967.  The Stones, on the other hand, may have gotten slammed for chasing trends, but Satanic Majesties  is a fantastically brave record, really.  Even acknowledging that the Stones were much more of a Beatlesesque pop band in 1965-67 than they’ll be remembered, this is a big dip into Pink Floyd-style deep psych, not the relatively conservative pop-psych of Pepper.  (and by Floyd-style, I’m talking Piper At The Gates Floyd, not Dark Side of the Moon).  So I give credit to them for being musically adventurous.  Unfortunately, the results are…uneven.  And pretty much all the worthwhile stuff was released as singles (In Another Land/The Lantern & She’s A Rainbow/2000 Light Years From Home).  “2000 Man” is good, and “The Citadel” isn’t terrible, but the rest is really, really bad.  On the other hand, “2000 Light Years From Home” is fantastic.  Also, their non-album 1967 single, “We Love You”/”Dandelion” is also tremendous.  “We Love You” is actually one of my favorite psych singles of all time, and definitely the most unjustly-forgotten Stones single. 

                Also worth noting is that both the Stones and the Beatles released 2(!) albums in 1967.  A big contrast from the average every 2-3 year cycle nowadays.  Magical Mystery Tour is uneven, as befits its odds-&-sods nature; the EP/Side One part especially so.  Still, there are days I like it better than Pepper.  And Between The Buttons is, I think, the most underrated Stones album.  It’s basically their version of the Kinks’ contemporary sound, and there’s a bunch of great songs there.

                Speaking of the Kinks, they don’t sound as out-of-time as revisionist historians would have you believe.  They’re not getting into the fuzzy psych stuff, but the Beatles on Pepper sound closer to the Kinks on Something Else than they do to Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd.  At least in 1967, they don’t sound a lot different from their peers.  Also not sounding especially psychedelic, but putting out one of the best albums of their career is the Who, my prime example of how you’re now starting to get to albums that need to be treated as albums.  Apart from the fact that it’s got some of their best songs, I love that The Who Sell Out has a real sense of humor.  Even if Pete Townshend does turn an otherwise lovely song into a joke about deodorant (“Odorono”). 

                Also catching up on misc. British Invasion groups, Cream finally sound like they’ve caught up with the Beck-era Yardbirds.  Disraeli Gears sounds like Clapton doing his version of the Beck-birds sound.  Not that he’s mimicking, but more like it’s what they’d have sounded like if he’d stayed in the group and done his take on fuzz rock, right down to the weak singing and the album with an uneven fantastic/forgettable track listing.  I’m sure there are Cream die-hards out there, but for my money, if you pick up The Very Best of Cream, you’re not missing more than one or two essential songs off the albums.  Of course, I do have 3 of the 4 Cream albums, so who am I to talk?  The Yardbirds themselves, though, are running out of gas, unfortunately.  Jeff Beck is out and Jimmy Page is in, and while Page is a great guitarist, his album with them (their second, remarkably enough) is pretty uneven, moreso than Roger The Engineer.  Some of it’s great in its own right (esp. “Glimpses” – classic chant-y Yardbirds psych), some of it is interesting as presaging Led Zeppelin (esp. “White Summer” aka “Black Mountain Side” and (as a bonus track on my version) “Dazed And Confused”).  Also, one last Beck-Page Yardbirds song came out this year, a (really good) rewrite of “Train Kept A Rollin’”.  I’d have loved to have heard that lineup keep going a little longer.

                Leaving both Cream and the Yardbirds in the dust, though, is Jimi Hendrix.  You can trace precedents for a lot of what he did (the guitar sound from Jeff Beck, the stagecraft from Pete Townshend), but it’s all just giant step above.   Are You Experienced? is such a fantastic breakthrough of a record, with so much influence on everything that came after.  Not just psychedelia and metal, either.  Give a listen to songs like “Purple Haze” or “Are You Experienced?”, imagine them with a Mike Thorne or Martin Hannett production, and they’d sound like Wire.  I’m not saying that Jimi Hendrix was a proto-post-punk (or whatever elaborate construction), just that he was remarkable not just as a player, or because he added fuzz tone, but compositionally as well.  Here I come back to my theme that, in order to do deconstruction, you need to be able to do construction well first.  Hendrix spent years as a journeyman sideman for various artists, and it shows in how his songs aren’t just well-played, or entertainingly noisy, but really tight constructions.  Similarly (in this way if few others), what the Velvet Underground were doing on their debut really works both because of Lou Reed’s years in the pop-songwriting mill and because they put otherwise solid but not radical pop songs like “Sunday Morning” and “There She Goes Again” next to cacophonous songs like “Venus In Furs” and “The Black Angel’s Death Song.”  It really reminds you that they’re doing this on purpose, and not (Fugs-style) because they’re not good enough to do otherwise.

                Otherwise in the US, it’s interesting to me how much West Coast psychedelia really sounds much more heavily-indebted to folk-rock than its UK counterpart.  At this point , the best of the San Fran bands is Moby Grape, a band otherwise forgotten by history, but apparently once hyped to be the ‘next big thing.’  They weren’t, but their first album is some very good folk-rock with a light touch of psychedelia.  And the songs and playing are both better than, for instance, the Jefferson Airplane or the pretty-amateurish Country Joe & the Fish or early Janis Joplin.  Still, the most exciting thing out of San Fran in 1967 was Sly & The Family Stone (more below).  Doing far better in 1967 is LA.  On the deep-psych end are two Doors albums.  I kinda feel about the Doors like I do about Nine Inch Nails (oddly enough).  Both are bands I loved in high school, but both are also bands I respect now without ever really wanting to listen to.  The Doors to me were always better thought of as an organ-driven rock band with a singer with a great voice; Morrison’s lyrics were to be tolerated because the sound was so great, not celebrated as poetry.  So, in terms of Doors epics from 1967, “The End” < “When The Music’s Over”, but “When The Music’s Over” << “Soul Kitchen”, the former just a rewrite of the later with more pretentious lyrics.  Also (leaving LA), the best extended poetry/jam by a Morrison was Van’s “TB Sheets,” which fuses the rocking energy of Them with the more abstract poetry of solo Van.  Also an absolutely stunning harmonica sound.

                The best album out of LA in 1967, though, was hands-down Love’s Forever Changes.  I don’t understand how this one was slept on.  It’s not hard-rocking in the mode of my other ’67 favorites, but it’s just about perfect.  And I don’t even know how to categorize it.  At times I hear elements of the Byrds (who Love sounded a lot like on their debut last year), Motown, and psych.  What I don’t hear a lot of is the much rougher psych-rock sound of their first 1967 lp (Da Capo).  More than anything, though, I think it sounds like a truer follow-up to Pet Sounds than anything the Beach Boys actually released.  Much weaker harmonies (of course), but following on that meticulous orchestral arrangement.  That makes it sound too derivative, though.  Just listen to it if you haven’t.  One of the best parts about the 1967 listening was reminding myself just how much I love this album, and realizing how unique it sounded, while also sounding very much of its time.  Da Capo is great too, for what it’s worth, or rather the first half is (in a more rocking sound than Forever Changes).  The second half is the first example of a highly-regrettable fad in late-60s records: the wanky side-long psychedelic jam (read: filler).  So I think of Da Capo as a great EP.

                The Beach Boys themselves tried (and failed) to put out SMiLE, which got a release in 2011 approximating what it would have sounded like.  It’s good, but I suspect the actual version would have been trimmed somewhat (the released version being twice as long as any other Beach Boys album to date).   Still, you can hear the original ambition: to do an album of songs as intricate & complex as “Good Vibrations.”  If they had pulled it off, it would have been an easy contender for best album of the year, and I would have loved to have heard what a fully-functional Beach Boys would go on to do.  They’re still good, but the actually-released Beach Boys stuff from here on out makes them sound more followers than leaders (until they get really bad in the 70s).  What I don’t think SMiLE would have been, though, is tremendously influential.  Love managed an approximation of the Pet Sounds sound, and others would later too, but the SMiLE multi-part pop-prog style is just too complex, and I doubt many could pull it off, or even attempt it credibly.

                Someone who does attempt it credibly, though, is surprisingly enough Neil Young.  I’d generally thought of Buffalo Springfield as fitting into the Byrds country/folk-rock continuum, but that’s really based on what their members would go on to do.  The Springfield themselves, though, were a fantastically diverse pop band, with, yes, some early country-rock leanings, but also a healthy dose of c. 1967 cutting edge pop music in the British Invasion style, Stones-style ragers, and most surprisingly enough, Neil Young’ s attempts to pull off a “Good Vibrations” or (more clearly) a “Heroes & Villains.”  Obviously not a straight copying of the sound, but songs like “Expecting to Fly” and (especially) “Broken Arrow” are definitely Neil’s attempts at that sound.  Obviously the members of Buffalo Springfield went on to long & interesting careers, but for the first time I find myself thinking of the band not just as a point of origin but a missed opportunity that I would have loved to have seen keep going beyond just one more contractual-obligation record the next year.

                In the world of soul, I have a lot less to say.  Not really a lot of change at either Stax or Motown.  Motown’s formula is starting to show a little bit.  I’d not noticed before this project, because in a vacuum the songs are all still excellent, but Motown’s been mining the same sound for most of the decade now, and while there have been a few tweaks here and there, it’s not nearly so fresh, esp. when on the rock side of things, it’s hard to believe it’s only been 5 years since the post-rockabilly doldrums.  Stax is a little more changeable, but not a lot of difference from 1966.  The most forward-sounding thing I heard in the world of soul/R&B came from Sly & the Family Stone.  Just a pair of singles released, but so remarkably ahead-of-their- time that I double-checked the dating.  They sound so much like the hard funk of the 1970s.  I didn’t realize how far ahead of the curve Sly & The Family Stone were.  I don’t know that they’d necessarily have been even classified as soul/R&B and not rock in 1967, but their influence is definitey felt more on the funk/R&B side of things, since rock (sadly) stops being dance music right about now.

                My last note on soul is that this is the year the Charmels released “As Long As I’ve Got You.”  You may not think you know it, but if you were listening to hip-hop in the 90s, you’ll recognize it immediately.  Cash rules everything around me.

Song of the Year:  “Purple Haze” – The Jimi Hendrix Experience, really without any close challengers.  A song that I still remember how it blew me away when I first heard it

Album of the Year:  Are You Experienced? – The Jimi Hendrix Experience.  It’s a year with some very good albums, but this one towers above all of them.  By no means perfect (“Third Stone From The Sun” is a waste of tape), but it practically divides rock into pre-Hendrix and post-Hendrix eras.  My runners-up are Buffalo Springfield Again, Love’s Forever Changes, and Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates of Dawn. 

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Sly & The Family Stone.  I hadn’t realized how far ahead of the curve, and how influential, they really were.

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  The Rolling Stones.  I’d bought into the revisionist hype that Satanic Majesties was a lost masterpiece, but it’s not.  The Stones made good psychedelic singles, but couldn’t cut it in album form

Albums Listened To:

13th Floor Elevators - Easter Everywhere

B.B. King - B.B. King

Bob Dylan - The Basement Tapes

Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 : Rare And Unreleased, 1963-1974

Buffalo Springfield – Again

Buffalo Springfield - Retrospective - The Best of Buffalo Springfield

Country Joe & the Fish - Electric Music for the Mind and Body

Country Joe & the Fish - I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die (mono)

Country Joe & the Fish - The Collected Country Joe & the Fish

Cream – Disraeli Gears

Cream - The Very Best Of Cream

David Bowie – Starting Point

Frank Zappa - Absolutely Free

Herman's Hermits - Their Greatest Hits

James Brown - 20 All Time Greatest Hits!

Jefferson Airplane - Surrealistic Pillow

John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990

Love – Da Capo

Love - Forever Changes

Merle Haggard - HAG: The Best Of Merle Haggard

Miles Davis Quintet - Miles Smiles

Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels – Sock It To Me!

Moby Grape – Moby Grape

Neil Young - Decade

Otis Redding - Remember Me

Otis Redding/Jimi Hendrix - Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival

Pink Floyd - The Pink Floyd Early Singles

Sly & The Family Stone - The Essential Sly & The Family Stone [Disc 1]

Stevie Wonder - At The Close Of A Century

The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions

The Beatles - 1967-1970

The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Byrds - II: Cruising Altitude

The Doors - The Doors

The Ethiopians - Everything Crash: The Best of The Ethiopians

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced?

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold As Love

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - BBC Sessions

The Kinks - Something Else By The Kinks

The Kinks - The Kink Kronikles

The Rolling Stones - Between The Buttons

The Rolling Stones - Singles Collection: The London Years

The Rolling Stones – Their Satanic Majesties’ Request

The Turtles - Happy Together

The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Who - The Ultimate Collection

The Who - The Who Sell Out

The Yardbirds - Having A Rave-Up

The Yardbirds - Little Games

Them - The Story Of Them

Traffic - Mr. Fantasy

V/A - Hitsville U.S.A.

V/A - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era

V/A - Psychedelic Pop

V/A - Rushmore

V/A - Samba Soul 70!

V/A - Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968

V/A - The Stax/Volt Revue: Live In London, Vol. 1

Van Morrison - Bang Masters

William Shatner - The Transformed Man

1966

                1966 is a year that has me thinking a lot about how what I’m doing reflects much more what my record collection looks like in a given year than what it probably was actually like to listen to the radio.  This is especially clear when 1966 most strikes me as the peak for garage rock.  In part this is because of idiosyncrasies in my own collection: I only have a couple of actual albums of 60’s garage rock, and two of them (The Monks’ Black Monk Time and Mitch Ryder’s Take A Ride!), so that skews the listening.  For what it’s worth, the Monks are the more interesting of the two, although I suspect Mitch Ryder put on a better concert.  The Monks are entertainingly ragged and gonzo, but I suspect they sounded pretty sloppy live.  Mitch Ryder, at least in 1966, does white-boy soul covers, but he does them energetically, and sounds like he can probably pull it off live pretty consistently.  The other factor making 1966 my year of garage rock, though, is that the compilers of the Nuggets set think it is, as a full 40% of their songs come from 1966.  So that makes a pretty convincing argument, since those songs are mostly really really good, but I don’t really have the collection of 45s (or enough rival garage-rock comps) to make a counter-argument for any other year.  I will say that, since I’ll get to the Children of Nugges sequel set soon enough, that one of the reasons the original garage rock is more exciting than much of the follow-up stuff is that even by the 1970s, garage rock was about formalism and trying to color within the lines of a classic sound.  But the bands in ’66 are just trying to play what they want as best they can.  So you get all sorts of little bits of weirdness or unexpected polish here and there that would seem out of character if you’re trying to do a formalist recreation later on.  Or maybe it’s just that this stuff isn’t so winking.

                Not a surprise that it’s a good year for garage rock, since it’s also a very good year for more professional rock, esp. of the British Invasion variety.  Although it’s definitely for the most part getting a bit less rocking and a bit more poppy.  The Stones have some of their best pop singles in 1966, but songs like “Paint It Black” and “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby” are definitely more poppy than last year’s crop of singles.  So that’s a takeaway from this project: that the early Stones were frequently not the bluesiest or most rockin’ band in any given year.  In fact, one insight is that Them were always a better British Iles blues bands the years they were both active.  Although by 1966, you can definitely hear the mellower, more experimental sound that would dominate Van’s solo career start to pop up.  A big year also for the Kinks and the Beatles.  The Beatles made their transition from early rock Beatles to mid-period pop Beatles last year, but Revolver and “Paperback Writer”/”Rain” together make this probably the single best year for the Beatles.  They’re more sophisticated than the early stuff, but they’ve both managed to keep the rocking energy up and trim out a lot of the schmaltz that crept into the earlier records (tracing a through-line from “A Taste of Honey” on the debut through “Michelle” on Rubber Soul).  The Kinks’ big leap forward is this year, though, with Face to Face.  It’s always been my least-favorite of their ‘classic’ run (from Face to Face through Muswell Hillbillies), not counting the Percy soundtrack, but coming after their early, fuzzy-singles era, it’s an interesting listen.  The later singles from last year mean this isn’t a jarring shock (probably less of a jump than the Beatles’ from Help! to Rubber Soul, for instance), but they’ve definitely made a shift to foregrounding composition over just rockin’ energy.  Makes me think I need to get The Kinks’ Kontroversy, though. 

                This is also the year that you start to get inklings of psychedelia coming through.  This is most notable from the Yardbirds, which is unsurprising, since their ’65 singles were already pointing in that direction.  That’s another insight of this project; how far the Yardbirds were ahead of the curve.  They were already in ’65 where the other rock bands would get in late ’66 or ’67 in terms of hard psychedelia.  More and more I wonder if the problem isn’t that they didn’t make albums.  I mean, here it’s 1966, and we finally get their debut LP (Roger The Engineer).  And it’s decidedly uneven, besides.  Some of it’s as good as they ever got (“Over Under Sideways Down” especially).  Some of it less so.  Also, the one single released by the Jeff Beck-Jimmy Page lineup is phenomenal (“Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”), although I always thought it sounded like Television.  Maybe that’s just what it sounds like when you throw two virtuoso guitarists together.  On the other hand, the b-side sounds like they wrote the lyrics while they were playing it.  It does offer helpful advice about how prevalent rice is in New Orleans cuisine, at least.

                Also Yardbird-releated is the debut of Cream.  A couple of people have pointed out that I was a bit harsh on old Eric Clapton, but let me just say that I do love Cream (even if they also never put out a start-to-finish all-killer-no-filler album).  First-album Cream sounds like Clapton heard what the Yardbirds did after he left, and decided that he wanted to try his hand at that sound, though.  Also, the stereo version is really poorly-done.  I was listening on headphones and thought one of my buds was broken until the lead guitar came in on “NSU.”  Definitely one where I need to get the mono version.

                Non-Yardbird related, we also see traces of psychedelia dripping through in its more pop form.  Mostly in a couple of singles here and there.  Obviously “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver.  Love’s debut album.  A distinct pop-psych form, only tangentially related to the rock-psych of the Yardbirds.  Not “Eight Miles High,” though.  It gets talked up as such, but apart from the kinda-spacey-but-mostly-Coltrane-derived intro, it mostly sounds like another (excellent) folk-pop song from the Byrds.  Not Dylan either, who’s got more of a full-band sound on his arguable-masterpiece Blonde on Blonde.  More sophisticated arrangements (although not Beach Boys territory or anything), lyrics that seem more meaningful than the off-the-cuff Bringing It All Back Home stuff, but also slightly less energy than that album’s amphetamine rush.  Still, nothing except a couple of Byrds singles really sounds close to Bob.  Also, while it would be interesting to speculate what a proper follow-up to Blonde on Blonde would have sounded like, I’m not-so-secretly pretty happy that Dylan would never try his hand at psychedelia.  He had a just-about-perfect three-album run of electric stuff, and I’m glad he didn’t’ run this sound into the ground.

                Also expanding in interesting ways is the world of soul.  Partly you see more sophisticated pop arrangements sneaking into the classic Motown sound, with flutes and other unexpected instrumentation, which sounds more up-tempo but not dissimilar otherwise from the similar experiments that Van Morrison is starting at the same time.   But the other two developments are I think more interesting.  The first is a move by a couple of big artists in the genre toward sounding more like peers of Frank Sinatra and the crooners than of the British Invasion.  They’re still keeping the backbeat of soul/rock, but at the same time there’s a foregrounding of the singer and song over the performers that recalls the crooners.  James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World,” for instance, you could hear Sinatra doing a version of.  And Otis Redding’s big song from 1966 (and my personal favorite of all of his singles), “Try A Little Tenderness,” was made famous first by Bing Crosby.  Not the only Redding Crosby cover, for what it’s worth.  Every Christmas, Liz & I argue over whether Otis’s version of “White Christmas” tops Bing’s.  It does.  Also, for what it’s worth, Sinatra seems to be returning the affection.  His album this year with Count Basie is arranged by Quincy Jones (of ‘wrote Thriller’ fame).

                The other move, at both Stax and Motown, is toward what I like to think of as a shift to a more “widescreen” sound.  Songs like the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and Sam & Dave’s “Hold On I’m Coming” have an epic sound that’s pretty much my favorite kind of soul.  And man, I didn’t realize how great “I Know I’m Losing You” is.  I can’t wait until I get to the point where I have actual Temptations albums…

                Finally, while last year I talked about how Ernest Tubb sounded radically out of place, this year Merle Haggard’s “Last Night The Bottle Let Me Down” does not, for whatever reason.  It’s much more stripped in sound than what the rock bands are doing, but doesn’t sound bad mixed in especially with the Texas garage bands.  Can’t really say why.  Maybe because they both have good use of space.

Song of the Year:  A tough year, with many contenders.  I’ve argued in the past that “Paperback Writer”/”Rain” is, minute-for-minute, the Beatles’ finest record – my favorite Paul song, plus John’s first psychedelic song.  I’ve mentioned how much I love both “Try A Little Tenderness” and “(I Know) I’m Losing You.”  “Paint It Black” is maybe the Stones’ best psych song, and the Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” for that matter, would be a contender most years.  Still, it has to be “Good Vibrations.”  It’s just the Beach Boys’ finest hour; so complex & intricate, yet a great pop song the whole time.  And the sort of thing that absolutely no one but them could do, either at the time or anytime since.

Album of the Year:  Another tough call.  Really on any given day it could go to Blonde On Blonde (maybe Dylan’s best), Revolver (probably the Beatles’ best), or Pet Sounds (without question the Beach Boys’ best).  Today I say Revolver, because I’m feeling more upbeat than Pet Sounds and I’m still feeling like I’d been overlooking Bringing It All Back Home in recent years.  But tomorrow, it could easily be either of the other two…

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Probably either the Temptations (I didn’t realize they got this good this early) or the Monks (who I didn’t appreciate how delightfully deranged they sounded in context.  Only Captain Beefheart (also on the basis of a lone single, “Diddy-Wah-Diddy”) really sounds as deliberately deranged.  Some of the other garage bands sound accidentally as deranged though.  Esp. the 13^th Floor Elevators). 

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  Maybe Bob Marley.  He’s still sounding more interestingly old-fashioned than good at this point.  And oddly tame for someone who would be such an important and musically innovative figure so soon. 

Albums From 1966

B.B. King - B.B. King

Bob Dylan - Blonde On Blonde

Bob Dylan - Live 1961-2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances

Bob Dylan - Vol. 2 : Rare And Unreleased, 1963-1974

Bob Dylan - Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack

Bob Marley & The Wailers - Trenchtown Days: Birth Of A Legend

Cream - The Very Best Of Cream

Frank Sinatra - Sinatra at the Sands (with the Count Basie Orchestra)

Frank Sinatra - Sinatra Reprise: The Very Good Years

Hank Williams - Alone & Forsaken

Hank Williams - Settin' The Woods On Fire

Herman's Hermits - Their Greatest Hits

James Brown - 20 All Time Greatest Hits!

John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990

Love - Love

Merle Haggard - HAG: The Best Of Merle Haggard

Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels - Take A Ride!

Neil Young - Decade

Phil Spector - Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound Retrospective

Stevie Wonder - At The Close Of A Century

The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds

The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions

The Beatles - Mono Masters

The Beatles - Revolver [Mono]

The Byrds - Byrds Box Set

The Ethiopians - Everything Crash: The Best of The Ethiopians

The Kinks - Face To Face

The Kinks - Greatest Hits

The Kinks - Kinks-Size / Kinks Kinkdom

The Kinks - The Kink Kronikles

The Monks - Black Monk Time

The Rolling Stones - Aftermath

The Rolling Stones - Singles Collection: The London Years

The Standells - Russ's Punk Mix

The Sunrays - The Best Of 60s Surf

The Who - The Ultimate Collection

The Yardbirds - Having A Rave-Up

The Yardbirds - Roger The Engineer / Over Under Sideways Down

Them - The Story Of Them

V/A - Hitsville U.S.A.

V/A - Kill Bill, Vol. 1

V/A - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era

V/A - Psychedelic Pop

V/A - Rushmore

V/A - Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968

1965

                If I were to make a pithy summary of 1965, it would be that it was the year where you could start talking about “rock,” as opposed to “rock & roll” music.  Bands are starting to develop a sound that is more than just playing blues or rockabilly at a faster tempo or with a little more fuzz.  Esp. the Yardbirds and the Stones are starting to build their own distinct sounds.  This is probably the beginning of the Stones as generally remembered, with “Satisfaction” and “Get Off Of My Cloud.”  I actually think the ’64 singles were better, though.  Maybe because they’d do this fuzzy-rock style better later on, but they never returned to that early trebly sound.  The Yardbirds, though, are nothing but better.  It has been pointed out to me that I was rather harsh on Clapton, but I think that’s just a reaction to how over-praised he is.  And in part how much better the Yardbirds are with Jeff Beck.  Circa 1965, they were probably the most exciting rock band active.  Beck was making all sorts of weird sounds on his guitar, and the rest of the band had gone from sounding like geeky blues enthusiasts to a band more comfortable in its own skin.  Even the blues covers sound less like homages, and more like reworkings from a basic template (see esp. “Train Kept A’Rollin’”).

                1965 is also the year of the first Who album (they had one single last year).  It’s impressive how good they are right out of the gate.  It’s not perfect (really, no one should cover James Brown), but it’s much better than the singles-and-obvious-filler of the Kinks’ first couple of albums.  Also, they’re not even pretending to sound like a blues band (which is probably for the best).  It kinda makes Them, who are still excellent, sound a little less than cutting edge.

                The part of 1965 I enjoyed the most, though, was back in the US, out of the folk scene.  Most exciting is Bob Dylan going electric.  I hadn’t listened to Bringing It All Back Home in a bit, despite it being possibly my favorite album of my sophomore & junior years of college.  I’d forgotten how fantastic it is.  Side one (the electric side) might be the best side of music Dylan ever cut.  There’s a manic, rebellious energy to it as he willfully breaks all the rules of the purist NYC folk scene that he never captured again.  Probably because you can never reject your past so decisively ever again.  Dylan would later say that Blonde on Blonde was an attempt to capture a “thin wild mercury sound,” but it would be more accurate to say it was an attempt to recapture it after doing it here.  And falling short, despite how great that album would be.  And side two, where Dylan is acoustic but anything but folk almost seems like showing that he can beat the folkies with one hand tied behind his back.  Just absolutely fantastic stuff.  Even Highway 61 Revisited, also from ’65, pales in comparison, great as that record is.

                It also makes the debut of the Byrds seem less exciting, somewhat unfairly.  After all, 1) they were the beginning of the whole folk-rock, country-rock West Coast sound that would be dominant through the mid-70s, plus 2) their jangly sound would dominate 80s alt-rock, and (at least in my experience) continue to fascinate college-age music geeks into the 21^st century (speaking in no small part from personal experience here).  So I kinda love the Byrds, and they right away give the Beach Boys a serious run for their money as greatest active American rock band.

                I’ll also pause for a moment here to discuss the Beach Boys’ “She Knows Me Too Well,” which is sonically fine but lyrically seriously messed-up.  If you don’t recall it, it’s the one with the lyrics “I get so jealous of the other guy/And then I'm not happy til I make her break down and cry/When I look at other girls it must kill her inside/But it'd be another story if she looked at the guys//But she knows me too well.”  That’s the sort of lyrics where if John Lennon or Elvis Costello wrote it, I’d know that it’s supposed to be understood as seriously dysfunctional, but with Mike Love I kinda suspect he thinks that’s an ok sentiment.  Much like the Barbarians’ “Are You A Boy Or A Girl,” also from 1965, maybe it was a time when it was ok to be a massive d-bag in song.

                Speaking of being awful, but sonically this time, hands-down the worst album I listened to out of 1965 was The Fugs’ First Album.  Historically important because critics called it “the first underground rock album,” but as I ranted about a few posts back, apparently you can fool a lot of people (esp. professional critics) by saying you’re ‘deconstructing’ or ‘experimental,’ when you’re actually just incompetent.  I’d believe the Fugs if I thought they could actually play competently if they wanted to, but there’s nothing here to make me think they’re more than stoned hippies banging on things, devoid of musical talent but crafty enough to pretend it’s on purpose.  A sharp contrast to all the excellent garage bands starting to spring up like mushrooms in the mid-60s, who are pretty far from virtuosos, but have figured out how to still make some fantastically exciting rock that you can just enjoy, as opposed to pretending to enjoy the Fugs pretending to be experimental.

                Switching gears, I’ve got this live Ernest Tubb record from 1965 that itunes shuffle loves for some reason.  It’s a solid country album, but it’s incredibly jarring mixed in with the rock & soul that otherwise dominates my 1965 collection.  I’ve got other non-rock/soul music from ’65 (some Chuck Berry, some Miles Davis, some Frank Sinatra (including the pretty-great “It Was A Very Good Year”), but none of it’s as jarring to shift to as Ernest Tubb.  Last post I talked about how there wasn’t yet a divide between the rock/pop and soul/R&B worlds, but this is a pretty sharp reminder that there was a big big divide between those more urban/international styles and what was happening in country music.  I suppose reflecting the cultural divide, if you want to get all Boomer-retrospective on it, but pretty striking musically.  Chuck Berry sounds old-fashioned, Frank Sinatra sounds more ‘adult’, the jazz stuff is obviously less song-based, but none of them sound so radically foreign as Ernest Tubb, who might as well be from another world.

                Dipping into Jamiacan music, I’ve gotten very fond of the Skatalites, and I’ll miss them when they’re gone (they break up August 1965).  It makes me really miss the era of the jazz single; these great 3 minute instrumental pieces.  Also, considering I’ve got 3 hours of music from them from 1965, they came up on shuffle a lot.  It’ll be jarring to have my First Wave content drop dramatically tomorrow.  It also was convenient that 1965 in my little project coincided with a couple of unseasonably warm days here in DC; even without this project, I’d probably be listening to them. 

                Oh!  And I didn’t mention at all that the Beatles put out Rubber Soul, the one that’s commonly acclaimed as the start of the “classic” Beatles.  Even though this project has given me a greater appreciation of the early Beatles, I can’t deny that this is a big leap forward.  But, you know, you can only say so much about the Beatles without sounding like one of those public television pledge-drive documentaries.  They’re great, they’re ahead of the curve, send me $80 and I’ll mail you a tote bag.

Song of the Year:  (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones.  Really, how couldn’t it be.  The Stones themselves, to say nothing of countless garage bands, would spend significant chunks of their career rewriting it for a reason.

Album of the Year:  Bringing It All Back Home – Bob Dylan.  I think I talked enough about this above.

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  The Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds.  I think they got a bit forgotten by history because, while they released a whole lot of classic singles, the Beck-birds only released one uneven proper album (next year!).  But those singles were as bold and experimental and rockin’ as anything put out in 1965.  Not as catchy as the Beatles or Stones, maybe, but in their league otherwise.  Also, the good Clapton-era single (“For Your Love”) came out in `65.

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  Not sure I really have one for 1965.  The Kinks still aren’t putting out consistent albums, but their 2^nd is better than their 1^st (and the only Kinks record I’m missing from 1964 to 1973 is the second one they put out in 1965).  Plus the Kinks’ ’65 singles are extremely good.  So I can’t give it to them, and if not them, maybe Phil Spector?  The only Spector stuff I have from 1965 is by the Righteous Brothers, though, and I never thought they were all that great.

Also, by popular demand (one request), a list of what I actually listened to:

Artist                                                     Album

Bob Dylan                                            Bringing It All Back Home (2010 Mono Version)

Bob Dylan                                            Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan                                            Live 1961-2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances

Bob Dylan                                            Bootleg Series, Vol. 2 : Rare And Unreleased, 1963-1974

Bob Dylan                                            Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack

Bob Marley & The Wailers            Trenchtown Days: Birth Of A Legend

Chuck Berry                                        His 30 Greatest Hits

Davie Allan and the Arrows         Apache

Elmore James                                    Golden Hits

Elvis Presley                                       Elvis 30 #1 Hits

Ernest Tubb                                        The Complete Live 1965 Show

Frank Sinatra                                      Sinatra Reprise: The Very Good Years

Herman's Hermits                            Their Greatest Hits

James Brown                                     20 All Time Greatest Hits!

John Lee Hooker                              The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990

Miles Davis                                         E.S.P.

Stevie Wonder                                  At The Close Of A Century [Disc 1]

Sun Ra                                                  unknown

The Beach Boys                                Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys

The Beatles                                        Help!

The Beatles                                        Live at the BBC

The Beatles                                        Mono Masters

The Beatles                                        Past Masters

The Beatles                                        Rubber Soul

The Byrds                                            Byrds [box set]

The Fugs                                              First Album

The Kinks                                             Greatest Hits

The Kinks                                             Kinda Kinks

The Kinks                                             Kinks-Size / Kinks Kinkdom

The Kinks                                             Rushmore

The Rolling Stones                           Singles Collection: The London Years

The Skatalites                                    Foundation Ska [Disc 1]

The Skatalites                                    The Skatalites Anthology

The Staple Singers                           Freedom Highway

The Supremes                                   More Hits By The Supremes

The Who                                              The Ultimate Collection

The Who                                              The Who Sings My Generation

The Yardbirds                                    For Your Love

The Yardbirds                                    Having A Rave-Up

Them                                                    The Story Of Them

Toots & The Maytals                       Time Tough - The Anthology

V/A                                                        Hitsville U.S.A.

V/A                                                        Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era

V/A                                                        Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound Retrospective

V/A                                                        Stax/Volt Singles IV: 1959-1968