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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 125. Jeff Beck – Truth (1968)

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  Jeff Beck, previously seen in this list as part of the Yardbirds, brings some bluesy rock, with a dash of Oscar Hammerstein (Ol’ Man River) and an acoustic guitar version of Tudor classic Greensleeves. Vocals are provided by certain Mr Rod Stewart, which I didn’t know until after listening to the album; what I thought was “Jeff Beck’s singing voice sounds a lot like Rod Stewart”. Ah. Well... Also present on the album are members of Led Zeppelin and The Who. It’s very crunchy and technically accomplished, as you’d expect from that line-up, but there’s something a bit “Dad Rock” about the whole thing – probably for the same reasons, since most of the personnel are now old geezers pulling out the same stuff they’ve been doing for decades. Partly, also, because it does sound more technical than emotional, so for some reason the music only manages to move me so far. It’s an interesting artifact too because of the star-studded line-up, many of whom are not yet stars in their own ri...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 124. The Band – Music From Big Pink (1968)

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  Bob Dylan’s backing band, formerly known as The Hawks, are here unleashed and allowed to do their own thing. Although several tracks are written by Dylan, and he provided the cover art (either charmingly naive or amateur rubbish depending on your point of view), Dylan decided in the end not to join the rest of The Band in the music recording, so that his presence didn’t become the focus and they were allowed to be their own act. Which was nice of him. Big Pink itself is the nickname for the house in New York county that Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson shared for a while, and where many tracks were composed. The music is very Americana, feeling often like adaptations of spirituals or gospel tracks. This is probably helped along by, say, the various Biblical references in a track like The Weight, where the singer “pulled into Nazareth” and met characters such as “Carmen and the Devil” and “Old Luke, waiting on the Judgment Day”. I thought this might have been a Dylan tra...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 123. Os Mutantes – Os Mutantes (1968)

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  We’ve had heavy psychedelia, folk psychedelia, English whimsy psychedelia, Scottish prog psychedelia, jazzy psychedelia, country psychedelia. So why not Brazilian psychedelia, a fusion of psychedelic pop and rock with the likes of samba and bossa nova, to give a sound known as Tropicália. Most of the tracks on here are in Portuguese, apart from a cover of a French song Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour. It’s unusual, but good, especially when the Latin beats kick in on tracks like Bat Macumba and Trem Fantasma, with good vocals from singer Rita Lee. There are some fun electronica as well, with Cláudio Baptista credited with “electronics”. The only track I recognised is A Minha Menina, which I think has been used on an advert, although it is a cover and has itself been covered, so it may not have been the Os Mutantes version. I suspect maybe it was used for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, but can’t be sure – Google betrays its Anglophone bias here and throws up nothing of much use when ...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 122. Iron Butterfly – In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968)

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  I knew the title track from a lengthy sequence in Michael Mann’s film Manhunter, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon featuring Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter and several years before Silence of the Lambs. The killer, Frances Dolarhyde, is besieged by FBI agents and there’s a long shoot-out with a version of the track In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida going on in the background. Not as long as the track In-A-Gadda-Da-Veda itself, which is another 17 minute monster, with a drum solo in the middle that goes on for longer than many songs. It’s good though. I have a feeling that we’ll keep seeing the 10-20 minute monster tracks for while now, probably at least into the mid-Eighties. Provided they don’t get padded out too much with prog-rock noise-noodling, I don’t mind them once in a while. Soundwise, Iron Butterfly are a little like a mid-way between The Doors (largely due to lead singer and writer Doug Ingle’s organ playing) and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Quite a hard-edged Californian psyc...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 121. Small Faces – Ogden's Nut Gone Flake (1968)

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  I’m most familiar with the Small Faces’ cheeky Cockney knees-up number Lazy Sunday (or as lead singer Steve Marriott styles it “Lazy Sundee h-afternoon-ah"), but there are only two other track on here that are of that ilk – Rene (about a lady who is the “ dockers’ delight ”) and the final track HappyDaysToyTown (that’s not a typo, it’s really strung together like one word) in which the meaning of life is revealed – apparently it's like a bowl of All-Bran; you wake up in the morning and there it is. Other tracks are more classic late-Sixties psychedelia/folk/rock, but done well, with some good thumping grooves going on. The second “side” is a great little surrealist rock opera, narrated by Stanley Unwin. Unwin was famous for his nonsense language Unwinese, a kind of tortured English that is close enough to be understandable and had a great rhythm to it. Oh deep joy in the highly mode! Unwin narrates the story of Happiness Stan, who sets out on a quest to discover why half...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 120. Johnny Cash – At Folsom Prison (1968)

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  Cash is one of those artists where you kind of know what you’re going to get. A voice like a man who has drunk all of the bourbon, singing country songs about a hard life and an easy death. Having written Folsom Prison Blues (“ I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die ”), Cash was keen to actually play in the prison itself, and here, after dragging himself out of addiction and getting a new manager willing to take the risk, he does just that, accompanied by June Carter on a couple of songs (including a rip-roaring version of their famous duet Jackson). Plenty of songs about prison life (The Wall, Green Green Grass of Home) but a few comic turns as well like Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog and the blackly comic 25 Minutes to Go where a condemned man counts down the minutes before his execution. Although he’s The Man in Black singing songs about prison, death, and murder, Cash has a wry sense of humour in the between-songs banter, and there are some interesting bits of prison life r...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 119. The Zombies – Odessey and Oracle (1968)

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  The Zombies are one of those bands where the name belies the kind of music they play. Named after flesh-eating undead, this album starts off with chirpy pop songs instead (see also Massive Attack, Savage Garden, and The Killers for bands with violent names and safe music). And the tracks aren’t bad, having something a bit more like Herman’s Hermits made a refreshing change from the experimental psychedelia and art-house stuff we’ve had recently. When some of the slower tracks started and there was some flute, I was worried we were back to Haight-Ashbury hippy noodlings, but thankfully not. We’re about as dangerous as Sgt. Pepper here. There’s a dip into folkiness with the anti-war Butcher’s Tale, which with its accordion accompaniment sounds more like Spiers and Boden/Bellowhead, and then the album finishes with the probably the most famous track, the almost impossibly laid-back Time of the Season. I think I first heard this as part of a film soundtrack – 1969, maybe. Anyway, t...
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