Dr Simon Reads...

  Along comes Frank Zappa (and The Mothers) to do what he does, and compared to some later Zappa albums I’ve heard, pretty much all of his typical elements are already in place. There’s some cla ssic rock and roll tracks, but done in a tongue-in-cheek goof y style , often with silly or exaggerated voices - Wowie Zowie seems like a pastiche of the Four Seasons’ Sherry, while Go Cry O n Someone Else ’ s Shoulder is a do-wop song made silly.   There’s also savage satire in Hungry Freaks , Daddy about the American school system, and the driving bluesy Trouble Every Day about race riots . The final tracks on the album, Help, I ’m a Rock and The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet, are wandering jazz odysseys, if AM-radio tuning, wave generators, swanee whistle, and jungle noises were the instruments in a jazz band.    I wondered where the kind of absurdist humour of Zappa fell in relation to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and the Bonzo’s first album was also rel...

  I didn’t mention it on his earlier albums, but Dylan is, I think, the first artist on the list that I’ve seen live. Not back in the Sixties, I’m not that old. It was in 1995 at the Phoenix Festival, a shor t-lived Mean Fiddler-run event set near Stratford-Upon-Avon , that got mired with staging issues and became merged with Reading/ Leeds . But I thought it was good. There was some behind the scenes brouhaha where Suede and Dylan vied for the top spot, in the end Dylan taking the penultimate slot of the night.   Given his infamous reputation for being a prickly performer, it was entirely possible that he might do one song and leave, or play a desultory set facing away from the audience, but he and his band turned up in force and rocked the festival , bursting out with a barnstorming version of Rainy Day Women. In retrospect, a good festival choice with a chorus where everyone can shout out “Everybody must get stoned!” You wouldn’t expect th ere’d be a mosh pit forming at ...

You know, for such an iconic album, I was expecting more of the “surf rock” stuff that the Beach Boys are most famous for, but according to Professor Wikipedia these days happened before the Beach Boys even made it to Dimery’s list.    What I do know about this album, is it’s notable for the complexity of the track mixings which at the time had to involve all kinds of shenanigans with physically cutting and gluing tapes together, weaving together lots of different layers made in different takes. The final track on the album, Caroline No , includes various sound effects as well, which really weren’t a thing up until now (trains passing, dogs barking etc.). The pinnacle of this kind of sound collage is arguably going to be on the Pink Floyd albums coming up later; Brian Wilson and co. did it here long before.   There are three well known tracks off this album – God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, and Sloop John B. Wouldn’t It Be Nice is probably the most “classic” Beac...

  The keyboard player for this band is actually called Paul Revere, lending the band and the album title an excuse for a whole Revolutionary War theme, including the costumes that they (still) wea r on stage. The sound is m idway between folk/country rock and psychedelia, a little bit early Kinks, a little bit Animals - jangly yet also fuzzy. There’s an anti-drug message to the excellent track Kicks , ironic in light of my comments for the past few bands and how drug-(ab)use fuelled their changes in sound . The best known song on here is probably I’m Not Your Stepping Stone , thanks mainly to the Monkees cover rather than this original version. It’s an okay album and the tunes are good, but it’s another one where I wonder why it was included in the list since other bands do the same thing but with more historical impact. Unles s I’m such a complete musical pleb and everybody else has heard of Paul Revere and the Raiders and their important role in music history.

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. Frederick Saberhagen The first thing I needed to get straight concerning Saberhagen is: how is his name supposed to be pronounced? Which A’s are long and which are short. Turns out both are long – “Say-ber-hay-gun”. Glad I sorted that out. Saberhagen was born in Chicago, but later moved to Albuquerque (with or without taking a left turn is uncertain). He served in the Korean War and began writing while working as an electronic technician for the Motorola Corporation. Although he’s probably best known for the Berserker series of science fiction novels, and perhaps the Swords series as well, these are not the ones given in Appendix N. Compared to ma...

  It feels a little like the Stones picked up a bit of The Monks’ darkness for this album, with the classically dark hymn to depression Paint It Black, and the misogynistic lyrics of Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl. A lot of relationship issues going on at the time fuel the songs, with women cast as objects of revenge, hated for being desired.   That said, it’s also more mainstream compared to The Monks. It’s more rock, country, blues, like the previous Stones offering, but also a bit darker, a bit more polished. Just as the Beatles had been dabbling with drugs prior to Rubber Soul, so too had the Stones become more deeply mired in the rock and roll lifestyle, and the pain and darkness shines through here but conversely power the music to greater heights (can darkness shine?) .   The final track, Goin’ Home, is an 11-minute epic that starts out as a jaunty country number, then spirals into a psychedelic Jim Morrison- esque odyssey where Jagger chants and vocalises al...