Dr Simon Reads...

  Sweet Baby Jesus. If you’ve been following me through this journey, you’ll know that I’m not averse to a spot of weirdness now and again, but this album makes even Mingus sound sane. Beefheart (Don van Vliet) sings or recites stream of consciousness style nonsense over polyphonic tracks where the guitar screeches through atonal notes and the drums play a polyrhythmic journey. After about 30 minutes of this my brain finally relaxed and it all started to make a strange kind of sense. Actually it’s like a beat poetry performance rather than music, but sometimes the body of quite a good tune emerges. It’s a little bit disappointing that for the hour-plus run time much of it is all the same kind of thing, so what inventiveness there is gets diluted. Some are easier than others – Neon Meat is pretty good, as is Sugar And Spikes (love that subversion of the title too). A few tracks are just Van Vliet himself with no instrumentation, and they sound more like they’re meant to mimic ...

  There’s more to Johnny Cash than playing gigs in prison, surely? But so far that’s what he gets in this list, probably because as an ongoing concept it’s something that he made his own. This particular gig is also recorded by Granada TV from the UK, and at times Cash expresses frustration at the way the film crew dictates affairs on the stage. As with Folsom Prison, there’s a bit of banter with the audience, although Cash sounds a bit more tired and low-key, boosted when June Carter joins him on stage for Darlin’ Companion. But this is also the first outing for A Boy Named Sue, as well as featuring performances of I Walk The Line and Folsom Prison Blues. There’s a track specially written for this concert, San Quentin, which is played twice. When you compare the original album release to some of the re-releases, there was a *lot* of material trimmed from the concert, and you can tell how chopped up the album was, with Cash talking about a new song called A Boy Named Sue before...

  When you combine Dave Crosby of The Byrds (Dimery’s favourite group?), Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, and Graham Nash from The Hollies (who haven’t appeared here so presumably were more of a singles group than an album group), you get some radio-friendly country/folk/rock that’s super laid-back and mellow; the next iteration of the California sound that will make its apogee in The Eagles. The biggest hit on this album is probably Marrakesh Express, a jaunty, dare I say twee, bimble along the hippie trail that still gets a lot of airplay. Listening to it again, I wondered if Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy was inspired by it to write National Express, taking a song about an exotic journey and turning it into a trip on a budget coach company. Maybe. One of my favourites is the track Wooden Ships, another one from the soundtrack to the film 1969. Laid-back to the point of horizontal, with a spoken word (ish) bit where two former enemy soldiers meet and share purple berr...

  Of all the remaining artists for 1969, this is the only one that I’d never heard of before, although it turns out I have heard him before. Alexander “Skip” Spence was the drummer for Moby Grape, as well as working with Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. On this album, he does everything – all vocals and instruments are him. What to make of it? What, even, to call it? It’s a little bit folky, a little bit country, all odd. At times Spencer sings in a rich deep voice that calls to mind Fred Neill, other times in a thin voice like a dying man. Which, in some ways, he was. Like Syd Barrett’s solo work, this is  outsider art from a man who is clearly not mentally in a good place, or at the very least is in a period of lucidity amidst other troubles. Not long before recording this album, for example, Spence had been hospitalised after chasing the other members of Moby Grape with an axe while spaced on LSD. Spence’s singing is often off-key and troubled, but...

  Here we go with arguably the first “rock opera”, although SF Sorrow by the Pretty Things makes some claim to this. Where The Who differ from the Pretty Things, however, is that Tommy is more deliberately operatic in nature, whereas SF Sorrow may have an over-arching biographical story, but it is comprised of songs that each fundamentally stand on their own. In some ways, Pink Floyd’s The Wall will build on both of these traditions – while it tells the story of the unhappy childhood, unhappy marriage, and unhappy success of its protagonist, each track more or less stands alone. With Tommy, however, many of the tracks are linking refrains, and returns to leitmotifs that run throughout the album. Listening to the whole thing, it’s unsurprising that Pinball Wizard is the only single from it, since it’s also the most entire and self-contained song. The plot starts with the apparent death of Captain Walker in the Great War, leaving his widow to raise his infant son Tommy alone (The...

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.   Margaret St. Clair     Born in Kansas in 1911, St. Clair (nee Neeley) had a fairly “lonely and bookish” upbringing after her father died when she was 7 years old , but otherwise doesn’t seem to have been plagued by the trials and tribulations that many of the authors in this series have had. She moved to Cali f ornia , where she graduated from UC Berkel e y and married Eric St. Clair, and the two of them did lot of travelling. She was also interested in Wicca, which certainly informs her writing . She died in 1995, but didn’t have any more publications from 1971 onwards . She’s the third and final woman to feature in Appendix N ...