Another year from the halcyon period of the mid-sixties through the mid-seventies with too many albums to recommend. All killer, no filler, let’s rock.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #32 in the series. My random number generator says that our next year to tackle will be 1985.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1970
Yet again and to nobody’s surprise (least of all mine) I have struck gold in this era of music. To put it in perspective, I am halfway through the research for my next post and do not have ten albums I would recommend listening to yet, much less enough to make a compelling top ten list. If pressed on it, hip hop might be my favorite musical genre, and still I consistently consider the early 70’s years as the best even though said genre didn’t exist yet (and there was only one metal act, to boot). I think by this point in the series I’ve regaled you plenty with the genius of the musical landscape of this timeframe, so let me instead use this space to give some shine to a few of the year’s highlights that didn’t quite make the cut. The anguished debate over the #10 spot boiled down to three albums. The two that were ultimately left out in the cold are the Doors’ underrated psychedelic blues record, Morrison Hotel, and Frank Sinatra’s late-career, divorce concept album, Watertown. Both offer very different, but very rewarding delights to those that are interested in checking them out. My favorite song of the year, outside of the top ten at least, is probably Tower of Power’s “Back On the Streets Again”. I declared it as the official song of the summer to my friends last year, even before realizing how apropos it was given that it was the first season that many of us felt comfortable going out and frequenting bars, restaurants, and (for some of us) Guns N’ Roses concerts since the pandemic began. Of course, now that I look back across my honorable mentions, the top spot could just as likely go to Ray Baretto’s “Right On” or Sixto Rodriguez’s “Sugarman” or “High as Apple Pie – Slice II” by Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band. Beyond the relative high quality of the best music of the year, 1970 also has an abundance of worthwhile albums outside of the top ten. This was the very end of the era where artists saw fit to measure their release schedules in months, not years, and so half of the acts on the list released a second album across the year. My point is simply that you can’t go wrong by throwing all of this music into a playlist and letting it rip, so consider that as appropriate accompaniment as you digest 7000 words on the start of my favorite musical decade.
Paranoid – Black Sabbath
We start with the most important heavy metal album of all time. That may seem like a slightly peculiar proclamation, given that Black Sabbath released their self-titled debut seven months prior. Yes, that album’s title track spawned what we now know as doom metal, and while hard rock had been moving towards a heavier sound you could certainly make the case that it was the very first heavy metal album full stop. Yet, it was still a bit of a transitional record with heavily blues-based tunes and even a commercial concession in their cover of Crow’s “Evil Woman”. Paranoid is where the band fully realized their vision, and it came so soon after their debut that we can’t really know what that album’s impact would have been in isolation. Plus, it is simply the better album with the better songs. Songs that prominent metal acts like Faith No More and Pantera would cover reverently in the coming decades. Songs that, unlike the entire rest of their catalog, you can hear on rock radio.* By the end of the first track, Black Sabbath have laid out the blueprint for everything we cherish about heavy metal in one neat package. Think about “Disposable Heroes”, or “Holy Wars… The Punishment Due”, or “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, or “Lateralus” or “Chop Suey” – All of their common elements are right there in “War Pigs”. You have diverse musical passages linked by clever transitions. You have lyrics that cover social issues and religious symbolism. You have independently dynamic instrumental performances that are coherently presented as a whole. It’s loud. It’s aggressive. It slaps. It curls your upper lip and clenches your fists. In all honesty, I think I’m talking myself into the fact that it is the most important heavy metal song of all time, and the album is just getting started.
Before we can move on, though, consider how well constructed “War Pigs” is. One thing that Black Sabbath really understands is how to let a song breathe. That became a bit of a lost art as their progeny engaged in an arms race to play faster and cram more into each song, but “War Pigs” really takes its time. The space in between Ozzy’s verses ending and Iommi’s two-note guitar riffs punctuating the silence can feel cavernous, but that only amplifies the impact when those spaces start getting filled by a strategically placed guitar lick or funky Bill Ward drum fill. This approach allows each expertly mixed element to have maximum clarity, and when they start to converge as the song reaches its climax, you feel the weight of it all because you haven’t been hit with a non-stop wall of sound for the entire song. Sorry if that feels like a dissertation on just the opening track of the album, but as you can see, it really is a cipher for the genre as a whole. Elsewhere the band sets about offering a variety of styles while cementing their identity as something related to, but wholly other than, blues-based rock and roll. They incorporate psychedelic tones and funk, but couch it all in what we have come to accept as the foundational elements of heavy metal. The title track, coming directly after “War Pigs”, is the closest we get to traditional hard rock, with its chugging Geezer Butler rhythm and verse-chorus-verse song structure. Then they take a hard left turn into the hazy, phantasmagoric “Planet Caravan”. Psychedelic music and drugs have always been linked, but Sabbath make an effort to really replicate the feeling of being stoned with this one, and all of the instruments and studio effects combine to narcotic effect. With “Iron Man”, the band transitions back to straight-forward metal and doesn’t let up for the rest of the album. They are masters of using a range of tempos to add variety, and Bill Ward in particular is at the top of his game on Paranoid. Whether it’s the stuttering drum fills in “War Pigs” and “Faeries Wear Boots”, his supple conga playing on “Planet Caravan”, or his dynamic R&B-influenced intro to “Hand of Doom”, Ward is making all the right choices all over the place. For all of their influence, the individual styles of the band’s members remain unique, and that makes them not just worthy of reverence for being first, but still completely relevant all of these years later. Sabbath didn’t miss on their first four outings, but Paranoid remains their crowning achievement, and a crowning achievement of the genre that they spawned.
* This of course presupposes that rock radio is, in fact, still a thing that exists, and that its format hasn’t changed in the past twenty years since I was forced to listen to it because, I don’t know, my car’s CD player was busted, and that for some reason you are listening to it here in the two-thousand and twenty-second year of our Lord. Maybe it’s on in your dentist’s office or something.
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III – Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin III is weird. Not surprising, I suppose, because Led Zeppelin makes weird music. I know this is not a revelation for most people – In fact, I might be the last one to the party on this notion. I gravitated to Zeppelin in my pre-teens, at the very start of my musical journey. I was branching out from the popular rock music at the time (Motley Crue, Poison, Guns N’ Roses) and found myself, unsurprisingly, listening to the popular rock from the prior couple of decades that had influenced those acts. I was pretty omnivorous in my exploration, but two artists stood out as immediate favorites: Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. For as long as I can remember having such opinions, Zep was the de facto rock band in my mind, the reference to which other bands were judged. I remember DJing* my parents’ various get-togethers, and the usual batch of Eagles, CCR, Steve Miller and the Stones were swimmingly received, but Zeppelin, indiscriminate from the others in my young mind, received more mixed reviews. One of my Dad’s younger co-workers would be glad to hear them, and my Mom was a fan, but I can see now how Robert Plant’s primal scream therapy/simulated orgasm in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love” might have been a bit much for that crowd. I’ve long registered an unproportionately common distaste for Led Zeppelin among otherwise amenable classic rock fans, but I instinctively chalked it up to some defect of the listener rather than an unapproachable quality in their music. Only recently, in the last few years, have I come to internalize the fundamental strangeness of what they do. They are still the definitive rock band in my mind, however.
The oddness starts right away with “Immigrant Song”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a certified classic rock banger, of course, but that is almost in spite of its bizarre construction. Instead of working the groove until it is perfect, the band seems to over-work it just a little, like Page throws a couple of extraneous notes into the riff which puts it slightly at odds with the rhythm section. Then Plant does his Robert Plant thing with a series of banshee screams ahead of the first verse. Plant is a fearless singer. Can you even imagine Mick Jagger or Paul Rodgers attempting that? Understandably no, because it is well outside of their vocal range, and… it’s pushing it for Plant. The venerated Zeppelin frontman is an exceptional rock singer, but he’s a little more limited as a singer singer. Yet, he consistently pushes himself to approach vocals in ways that are different from his contemporaries. Finally, “Immigrant Song” is unusual in the context of the album that it kicks off. Nothing else on III sounds like “Immigrant Song”. Overall, the album is the band’s most folk-influenced work, but it is far more eclectic than a single genre signifier would indicate. “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is a lush blues guitar work out in the vein of their first album, but with the benefit of much-improved production quality. “Friends”, “Out on the Tiles”, and “Celebration Day” blend folk and rock and that inimitable Zeppelin weirdness in a compelling manner. The three-song stretch that makes the album for me, however, starts with the darkly comic “Gallows Pole”. I love the way the song begins somberly, builds in intensity along with the protagonist’s hope for a respite, then climaxes with the punchline from the hangman’s point of view. It’s a tidy little story in a dynamic package. Next, “Tangerine” is the perfect Zeppelin ballad: Tender vocals, gorgeous melody, verse chorus bridge and coda, all delivered economically and leaving you wanting more. Finally, “That’s the Way” contains my favorite set of Plant lyrics. They are more evocative and recondite than the prior two tracks, but if I’m not precisely sure what he means by “And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying, have they got you hypnotized?”, that doesn’t blunt the emotional impact every time I hear it. I have a hard time ranking Led Zeppelin albums, at least until the universally accepted downturn following Physical Graffiti. There are times when Led Zeppelin III is my favorite, and times when it is not, but the thing that never wavers is an appreciation for how much diversity, creativity and, yes, weirdness that they packed into their first three albums over the course of 22 months.
* “DJing” in this case meant manning the CD player while everyone else ate and drank and mingled. I loved it, of course. And that “Whole Lotta Love” example is pulled straight from my memory banks. I can still recall the befuddled expressions and comments from the table closest to the stereo while they picked their crabs and drank their beer. “Hey Luke,” quipped a random gray-hair whose name I can’t recall, “I think someone’s dying over here or something…”
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Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs – Derek & the Dominoes
“It’s all wrong, but it’s all right, the way that you treat me baby.” That’s a lyric from the soulful ballad “Bell Bottom Blues”, one of my favorite tunes of all time and an easy highlight of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. It’s a great standalone line, but also one that gets to the heart of what Eric Clapton has to say on this album. For those that don’t traffic in classic rock lore, Clapton (and I should point out here that this is ostensibly a Clapton album, despite the only-once-used band name) had fallen in love with a woman named Pattie Harrison. Not particularly noteworthy, except that Harrison was not her maiden name, but rather the name she took from George Harrison, ex-Beatles guitarist and Clapton’s best friend. Clapton was so infatuated with her that he made this album about her and his unrequited love. Derek and Layla are really Eric and Pattie, in other words. So with that bit of background out of the way, let’s unpack that line from “Bell Bottom Blues”. The way that you (my best friend’s wife) treat me (your husband’s best friend) is all wrong, but it’s ok, I forgive you. Presumably, the treatment which is giving such offense is Pattie not returning Eric’s unspoken(?) love and viewing him like, I don’t know, a friend of her husband’s. It has real “incel posting angry screeds on Reddit” vibes, to be honest, but that frustration and obsession imbues his vocal with a palpable passion across the entire album. You have him singing “Why does love got to be so sad?” and “If you believed in me, the way that I believed in you, we would have a love so true” and iconically “You got me on my knees!”, and each lyric feels achingly raw and confessional even before you know the story behind them. The rest of the band feeds off of that emotion, resulting in an album that has an immediacy, almost an urgency to it, like they have to get this music off their chest right now. That also results in an uncharacteristic lack of polish for a Clapton project, but I’m on the fence as to whether that helps or hinders the cause. Layla is similarly uncharacteristic for a Clapton album in that he is not the best guitarist to be featured, with Eric asking Duane Allman to sit in with the band after seeing him in concert. Allman brings his technically brilliant yet warm and soulful playing to bear on most of the album’s tracks, and, naturally, it really puts the musicianship over the top. The band careens through longing originals, rousing blues covers, and yes, that famous title track with its epic piano coda is also probably worth mentioning. For what it’s worth, Eric ended up marrying Pattie (and later divorcing her) and somehow stayed friends with George along the way. There’s probably a movie in there somewhere, but until then, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs stands as a near-perfect document of the story anyway.
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After the Gold Rush – Neil Young
I read an article recently that put forward an interesting perspective on Neil Young’s 70’s output. I’m paraphrasing here, but it basically posits that Young joined Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1970, co-opted their style, and pretty much perfected it right under their noses, which is the basis for the most beloved period of his solo career. I hadn’t really heard or considered it that way before, but from the vantage point of someone who has just explored the music of 1970 it feels almost indisputable. CSN&Y released the great but uneven Deja Vu in March, and immediately it is clear that Young is more than pulling his weight in his first effort with the band. He contributed the excellent “Country Girl” suite, partnered with Stephen Stills on up-tempo album closer “Everybody I Love You”, and provided the band with one of their signature moments on the show-stopping “Helpless”. Contrast that to founding member Graham Nash, who turned in the admittedly popular but beyond treacly and maudlin “Our House” and “Teach Your Children”, and it is clear who left the more significant artistic mark on the album. Fast forward six months, and Young comes out with his solo masterpiece After the Gold Rush. The album excels at every element that makes CS&N (and CSN&Y) special, with the exception of the silky harmonies. It is packed with tender, country-influenced folk songs featuring thoughtful lyrics and killer melodies, with very few bells and whistles. The songs are forced to stand on their own because they are completely unadorned with flashy feats of musicianship or obviously catchy hooks. The album is a marvel of efficiency, where you are so wrapped up in its spell that even the jaunty trifle “Cripple Creek Ferry” has a big impact because it expands the palette of the project just enough to inject a new feeling into it. There is an unshakable cohesion to the record, but enough variation to make listening to it a delight. “Tell Me Why” kicks things off with the most overtly CS&N-ish presentation on the album, providing a gentle slope into Young’s work for the fans who were still digesting Deja Vu. The album then segues into the title track, an evocative ballad that Young has been a bit cagey about, but I currently read as a parable about humanity destroying the earth and needing to be rescued by aliens to try again on another planet. Regardless of the intent, the poetic lyrics are enthralling and the naked vulnerability of Young’s voice makes it a perfect companion piece to “Helpless”. Elsewhere, Young is able to tap into the melancholy of Don Gibson’s “Oh, Lonesome Me” in a way that the original doesn’t even attempt, and he channels his rage into the pointed indignation of “Southern Man”. It doesn’t matter if he is covering a popular country tune from the 50’s or getting pissed off and rocking out, everything works on After the Gold Rush. It remains the best thing he ever did, by my estimation, and that is saying something for a career that has the longevity and integrity of Neil Young’s.
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American Beauty – Grateful Dead
In a tableau that has likely played out in similar manner across college campuses for fifty years, I got into the Grateful Dead when a dorm-mate introduced me to a bootleg tape of one of their shows. Introduced is maybe the wrong word – it’s more that he indoctrinated me through constant repetition. He lived across the hall from me and I spent a lot of time in his room, which inevitably had a cassette recording of the band’s 06/25/1991 performance at the Sandstone Amphitheatre* playing on loop. There is nothing particularly special about this recording, one of dozens he had in his collection and thousands that have been lovingly captured for posterity by their fans, but it was the one he happened to be obsessed with in the Fall of 1996. I never liked the Dead in high school, assuming that they were a limp jam band with crappy singing that only sounded good if you were on drugs. A harsh take, for sure, but not one that is entirely baseless. Before we unpack those assumptions however, back to my quasi-Deadhead origin story – Over time I came to appreciate that recording for the song selections, both the covers and the originals, the fluidity of the playing and transitions between songs, and maybe most importantly the pace. The Dead were never in a hurry to get to the next tune, and that breathing room is an essential part of listening to their music. I made a copy of the tape, conceivably the tenth generation of that particular recording (perhaps higher), and a few of the others in his collection by the end of the school year. I officially liked the Grateful Dead, but I still considered them as a live act almost exclusively.
The Dead are almost exclusively a live act, actually, but they do have a handful of great studio recordings that offer a completely different take on their particular strengths. Two of those albums happened to come out in 1970. For a long time, my favorite was the slightly more country influenced Workingman’s Dead, but I have since settled on the beguiling folk songcraft of American Beauty. It features the same relaxed pace of the band’s live shows, but it is never aimless. The writing and composition on display is outstanding, leading to at least half a dozen of their best tunes. In fact, across the ten tracks I count eight classics, the middling “Operator”, and “Truckin’”, a classic to most and possibly their most famous song, but one that I’ve never liked for whatever reason. The most surprising thing about American Beauty is that it is not a very psychedelic record. This is the band relying on their stellar songwriting, their sweet harmonies, and their delicate yet tasteful guitar picking to create a mood that is much closer to After the Goldrush than 1969’s ramshackle and spacey Live/Dead. The opening strains of “Box of Rain” have a calming, almost euphoric affect, and that is a trick that is repeated on the next track, “Friend of the Devil”, and the next, “Sugar Magnolia”. The lyrics are uniformly excellent, mirroring the elegiac mood of the music with language that is at the same time evocative and plain-spoken. They frequently reference all things natural, with lines about birds and rivers and rain and sunlight. It is loose and breezy, but impeccably constructed to be so. It is decidedly not the type of art that could be achieved by a “limp jam band”, so let’s see if we can debunk teenage Lucas’ other assumptions. The singing on this album is not crappy, for starters. To be fair, the Grateful Dead do not, and have never, employed a great singer. Any live recording is going to have its share of dubious vocal moments, that’s just part of their sound. On their studio recordings, however, they tend to be very deliberate about which mediocre singer(s) they deploy on each track for maximum impact, and of course the recording process gives them plenty of opportunities to perfect each take. If you consider those opening three songs, you have Phil Lesh tackling “Box of Rain” in a plain but soulful manner and closing with some incredibly memorable phrasing changes in the chorus. That is followed by Jerry Garcia lending his ragged and weary voice to “Friend of the Devil”, mirroring the mindset of a man on the run from the law and his responsibilities in equal measure. It is also, notably, one of the only tracks without backing vocals, putting a finer point on the protagonist’s isolation (friends of friends excepted). Finally, Bob Weir turns in the vocal to “Sugar Magnolia”, a song he supposedly wrote about his long-time girlfriend, and he brings a buoyant, nonchalant energy that speaks to a lived-in affection for the song’s subject. Finally, to examine my last preconception, do Grateful Dead only sound good if you are on drugs? No, you don’t need drugs to enjoy their music, especially the thoughtfully conceived and professionally crafted American Beauty. Do Grateful Dead sound better if you are on drugs? I mean, come on. Every stereotype has some basis in reality.
* I was so enamored by that particular performance that I sought it out years later, after locating and playing my dubbed cassette was no longer a practical possibility. I actually tracked down a copy of the concert online, having only the year of the show and my memory about the setlist to guide me. Yet, while it was the same concert, it was not the same recording, and I discovered that it did not fully scratch the nostalgic itch I was hoping to sate by playing it again. It remains in my music collection but still a frustrating shadow of the performance that was burned into my psyche over and over again more than a quarter-century ago.
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Sex Machine – James Brown
The idea that James Brown is a titan of American popular music is not up for debate. He is on the short list of artists like Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, and Miles Davis who have an almost unfathomably massive impact on the shape of the artform. What is interesting about him is that it isn’t really on the back of his singing or song-writing that he was so influential. As a singer, Brown is very good, potentially great, but he doesn’t actually sing on a lot of his biggest songs. If you take the title track from this album, for example, he is performing vocals, and they are certainly syncopated, but I think it’s a stretch to say he is singing. I would debate how much song-writing is involved, either. Lyrically, there is nothing to it. It’s basically two and half commands (get up, get on up, stay on the scene) and a simile that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny (like a sex machine). There’s a little more to it, sure, but that’s the crux of the content. Even from a melodic perspective, there is nothing special going on here – it’s repetitive and sparse with the only moments of dynamism coming from the much ballyhooed bridge and a brief piano solo. Yet, it is undeniably a great song. Like, “probably pops up on most top 100 songs of all time lists” great. And that’s a microcosm of Brown’s appeal: He is maybe the most efficient musical genius of all time. By creating such a captivating groove, recruiting the best funk musicians he can find to play it (before funk was barely even a thing), and then demanding that they play it perfectly, he completely sidesteps the need for lyrics or singing or harmonies or complex song structure. Funk artists that came along later, after Brown had essentially created the form, re-incorporated many of those elements, but the Godfather had already proven them inessential. The first half of Sex Machine continues on after the title track in similar fashion with studio recordings in the typical Brown template produced to sound like a concert. They don’t actually sound like a concert, but that’s ok, the grooves carry all. Then, when the album shifts to actual concert recordings in the second half, a new side of James’ brilliance is on display. I mentioned his predilection for talent scouting already, and the live performance provides his supremely gifted band room to stretch out and improvise a little more. There is also an immediate warmth to the recordings that betrays the falseness of the first set of “pretend live” tracks. Finally, on tunes like “If I Ruled the World”, “Please, Please, Please” and “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”, we get to hear the raspy soulfulness of Brown’s singing voice and are reminded that he is more than a bandleader and hype man.* For all his talent and influence, and the fact that he was a prolific creator of music, he did not produce a lot of excellent records. So despite the slightly disjointed mashing of studio and live recordings, and the frankly distracting “sweetening” of those recordings with crowd sounds and reverb, this is one to treasure.
* Bobby Byrd is the actual hype man, of course, but he really does play like a hype man to the hype man.
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Fun House – The Stooges
I don’t like punk music. I don’t mean that I dislike all music that could be reasonably categorized as punk (as this album’s placement should indicate) but out of all musical genres, punk music is probably the one I have the least interest in. Beyond that, it is probably the one I find the most abrasive. Now, I’m sure there is some branch of EDM or bubblegum pop or something that I would consider more distasteful, but as far as genres writ large (i.e. electronic, classical, etc.), punk is at the bottom of the list for me. I’m not sure why. I love the aggressiveness of heavy metal and gangster rap, I appreciate the speed of thrash and bluegrass, and I’m not one of those people that reveres technique over all else and thinks that Mike Portnoy is a more important drummer than Lars Ulrich or that Bob Dylan sucks because he wouldn’t make it past day one on American Idol. The technique thing is an interesting one, too, because the off-putting vibe I get from, say, the Sex Pistols is the same one I get from the Mothers of Invention, which is one of the most musically talented outfits of the past century. Which leads me to think it has more to do with an attitude than anything musical. Zappa and his buddies mainly cared about taking the piss out of everyone and everything, and barring a couple of gems*, that resulted in a body of work that I not only don’t care to listen to but am actively aggravated by. With much of punk music, I feel the same way, if not for precisely the same reason. It isn’t so much that the Sex Pistols and their ilk are taking the piss (although they definitely are), I think its more that the music seems ancillary to the posture. Who knows? I’m speculating a lot about a topic I don’t know much about and diminishing an artform that a lot of people are passionate about. I’m just trying to parse my own perceptions as an entre into unlocking how I can dislike punk music as a rule, while simultaneously loving one of the genre’s most sacred texts.
In a vacuum, Fun House is incredibly raw, sultry, aggressive… downright dirty. It feels like the concept of “sex and violence” in album form. In the context of the 1970 musical landscape, it is all of those things times ten. You can smell a pronounced funk and feel droplets of Iggy Pop’s sweat coming off of the record. The punk roots are there – the songs aren’t particularly tuneful, there is no polish or concession towards popularizing the music, it feels incredibly immediate. Yet at the time it was released, those qualities would have felt completely alien, and it was likely categorized next to dissonant art rock like the Velvet Underground. There are even moments that remind me of the Doors (which in turn reminds me of this excellent comedy sketch from the 90’s.) Yet if the thing that turns me off about punk artists in general is a perceived lack of investment into the music that they are making, that perception is entirely missing from Fun House. This is a band who sounds invested. They sound like making this music is core to their well-being, like it needs to be exorcized from their bodies. And I know it works for me because with only seven songs at 36 minutes they have the gall to include an avant garde jazz cacophony (“L.A. Blues”), and I don’t mind that. It works for them. And I don’t even like that shit when it’s performed by legitimate jazz virtuosos. Part of it is the trance they put you under with the gritty repetitive chugging of tracks like “Dirt” that makes you more susceptible to their flights of fancy, and part of it has to be attributed to the production of Don Galluci. Galluci is not a big name in the music world (he’s a former member of the Kingsman of “Louie Louie” fame) but he completely outclasses John Cale and David freaking Bowie who produced the other two Stooges records. Regardless of why this album works as well as it does, I find myself enraptured in its spell every time I listen to it. Maybe if the rest of the genre elicited the same reaction, I wouldn’t hold it in such disdain.
* For as little regard as I have for Zappa’s discography, I will tolerate no disparaging comments about “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” or the ever-so-sophisticated “Titties and Beer”.
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Abraxas – Santana
There are a slew of great guitarists represented on this list already: Tony Iommi, Jerry Garcia, Jimmy Page. For as iconic and influential as they are, however, I’m not sure any of them play as important a role in their bands’ sounds as Carlos Santana does for his. That’s not to disparage the contributions of the other members of the band – the percussionists in particular are excellent – but by far the most distinctive part of their sound is Carlos’ guitar work. In fact, he’s even more vital to the success of the band that bears his name than Eddie Van Halen, who had Diamond Dave’s swagger and his brother’s instantly identifiable, snare-happy drumming to add their share of flavor to the mix. Santana’s style is warm and rounded, technically complex but never in a grandstanding way. On the guitar genius color wheel, Carlos sits diametrically opposite of someone like Joe Satriani. No disrespect to Satriani – I used to listen to him as a teenager, he seems like a very genuine dude, we both like the Silver Surfer – but he has become kind of the poster boy for style-over-substance guitar shredding that justifies its own existence by how complicated and proficient it is. Now I doubt that Joe frames his music that way, he’s just expressing himself in the manner that comes naturally to him, but it isn’t easy as a listener to connect with the emotion of one of his solos. With Carlos, it’s like his guitar has a direct tap into his soul, and it comes bleeding out of the amp every time he plays a lick. That’s why Abraxas is the best guitar album of 1970, an absurd accomplishment in a year where Duane Allman and Eric Clapton made a record together. Abraxas is also Santana’s crowning achievement. In a catalog filled with jazz-rock odysseys and Latin-infused pop rock duets with the dude from Matchbox 20, this album stands out for bridging accessibility with artistry. Across several original compositions and a couple of choice covers (Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and Tito Puente) the band displays a wide array of styles while keeping the integrity of their vision intact. They also smartly deploy a few instrumental tracks that highlight Carlos’ absolutely singing guitar playing. His sound is immediately identifiable as his own, although you can tie his smooth conversational tone to B.B. King without squinting too hard. On the more rocking tracks, the three percussionists are able to build an avalanche of momentum and Carlos ups the pyrotechnics, foreshadowing the likes of Slash and John Frusciante. It remains a highly enjoyable and engaging listen from start to finish, and while there are other Santana projects worth exploring, Abraxas may be the only one that is essential.
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Cosmo’s Factory – Creedence Clearwater Revival
Cosmo’s Factory kicks off with an abberation in the CCR catalog. “Ramble Tamble” begins as a barn-storming country rock boogie very much in the Creedence mold, but then transitions into a moody, down-tempo bridge that builds in intensity for half of the song’s seven minute run time, before kicking back into the original groove. It is not a particularly complex or sophisticated musical transition for the decade that launched acts like Yes and Rush, but it stands apart from any other song the group ever produced. It also happens to be a killer tune that has been a staple of my Summer Rock playlist for years. A couple of tracks later, the band tackles “Ooby Dooby”, a 50’s doo wop number originally released by Roy Orbison that again takes them out of their comfort zone, this time to much less memorable or successful results. Other than those two departures, you would be forgiven for thinking that Cosmo’s Factory is a greatest hits record. Do any of these tunes sound familiar: “Travelin’ Band”, “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”, “Run Through the Jungle”, “Up Around the Bend”, “Who’ll Stop the Rain”, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, “Long as I Can See the Light”? If you are like me, each and every chorus of those songs played in your mind as you scanned the titles. All of those tracks appear on Cosmo’s Factory, CCR’s best overall album. If you set aside “Ramble Tamble” and their 11-minute cover of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, Creedence is a very economical band, playing only the notes required a sufficient number of times to get their point across. Even John Fogerty’s guitar solos are efficient, rarely taking any meandering or unexpected turns. If one thing stands out from their music, it’s Fogerty’s voice – loud, raspy, soulful in a Stax Records sort of way. He is also an underrated ballad writer, and he wrenches real pathos out of “Who’ll Stop the Rain” and the album closer “Long as I Can See the Light”. Between his visceral singing, his knack for catchy song-writing, his guitar work, and his production efforts on the album, Fogerty was clearly the driving force behind the band’s success. In fact, his domineering control of the group led to their dissolution after 1972’s slipshod Mardi Gras, while also highlighting that he probably should have never been challenged as the band’s de facto leader in the first place. That album was the only one to feature material from other band members, and its poor performance put an end to their brief, but hugely successful run of no-frills swamp rock albums from 1968-1970. That is a ridiculously short time to release so many resonant songs while never really deviating from their formula. Music history is littered with footnotes and one-hit wonders, but Fogerty and his band-mates were able to cement their pop culture legacy by simply stacking up great song after great song throughout their career. Nowhere is that more evident than on Cosmo’s Factory.
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Moondance – Van Morrison
Van Morrison’s output felt a bit schizophrenic at the dawn of his solo career towards the end of the 60’s. He released “Brown Eyed Girl” in 1967, a hugely popular pop-rock tune that probably remains his most recognizable song, but a track that I find uncharacteristically cloying and underwhelming. Then, in 1968, he produced Astral Weeks, an avant garde jazz-folk song cycle that ranks among my very favorite recordings of all time but has as much commercial appeal as the phrase “avant garde jazz-folk” would suggest. So which Van would we get on his follow-up effort, Moondance? A little bit of both, it turns out, and somehow that translated into one of the best albums in Morrison’s decades-spanning career. Moondance succeeds by harnessing Van’s knack for pop appeal but applying it to songs along the folk, jazz and soul spectrum to produce a tight, easily accessible, but also artistically fulfilling package. The title track is the most overtly jazzy tune on the album, but unlike Astral Weeks it is not improvisatory at all. Instead it feels more like a Sinatra standard, albeit with Morrison’s grittier and more R&B-influenced vocal approach. It’s a bit of an anomaly in his career, but a remarkably euphonious and romantic tune. Elsewhere, on “Brand New Day”, Van is in pure R&B mode with a trio of female backing vocalists and a gospel-tinged approach, and on “Everyone” he flashes some jaunty Irish folk stylings. With those boundaries established, he finds the most success by blending the seemingly disparate genres on individual tracks. He cleverly deploys horns in a way that sounds simultaneously like soul music and the folk of his home country. I’m not a big fan of the term “Blue-eyed soul”, a coded phrase that simply means white guys emulating black singers, which is approximately 87.3% of the history of popular music in this country, but if it could ever be applied in earnest it would be to describe Van Morrison. The trick for Van is that rather than copying specific singers or techniques, he channels real emotion in his voice, tapping into a seemingly endless well of pain and passion when he sings. In that regard, Moondance is one of his more refined performances, showing considerable restraint compared to the unbridled soul-bearing of works like Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. Yet for as sweet and controlled as he sings on “Crazy Love” or as contemplative and nuanced as he sings on the stunning “Into the Mystic”, that foundational soulfulness is always present and all the more impactful for its more measured deployment. If there is a nit to pick with this album, something keeping it from the top five perhaps, it’s that it is sequenced in such a way that the second half loses steam when compared to the back-to-back string of killer cuts on side one. I would have preferred a more balanced approach, and will admit that I sometimes get my fill after the first five songs, but this is still an undeniably mature and indelible record of an artist finding his voice in real time.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock: Morrison Hotel – The Doors; The Man Who Sold the World – David Bowie; Tumbleweed Connection – Elton John; Workingman’s Dead – Grateful Dead; Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath; Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One – The Kinks; John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band – John Lennon; Let It Be – The Beatles; All Things Must Pass – George Harrison; John Barleycorn Must Die – Traffic; Live at Leeds – The Who; Loaded – The Velvet Underground; Highway – Free; Idlewild South – The Allman Brothers Band; Magic Christian Man – Badfinger; Pendulum – Creedence Clearwater Revival; Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Band of Gypsys – Jimi Hendrix; Cold Fact – Sixto Rodriguez; Elton John – Elton John; Absolutely Live! – The Doors; Fire and Water – Free; Climbing! – Mountain; Eric Clapton – Eric Clapton
Country/Folk: Kristofferson – Kris Kristofferson; A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills) – Merle Haggard; Ladies of the Canyon – Joni Mitchell; His Band and Street Choir – Van Morrison; Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon & Garfunkel; Déjà vu – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Soul/Funk: Total Destruction to Your Mind – Swamp Dogg; This Girl’s in Love with You – Aretha Franklin; East Bay Grease – Tower of Power; Everything is Everything – Donny Hathaway; Spirit in the Dark – Aretha Franklin; Soul on Top – James Brown; The Delfonics – The Delfonics; Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow – Funkadelic; Tell the Truth – Otis Redding; Curtis – Curtis Mayfield
Jazz/Other: Watertown – Frank Sinatra; Tjader – Cal Tjader; Mwandishi – Herbie Hancock; Barretto Power – Ray Barretto; Black Gold – Nina Simone; Intensified – Desmond Dekker & the Aces; King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol II – Robert Johnson; Red Clay – Freddie Hubbard
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