Dr Simon Reads...

  The Zep get a bit more acoustic with this album. Although it opens with the barnstorming rock anthem about Viking invasions, The Immigrant Song, it then turns to the much more stripped back Friends, which manages to use chord progressions and a melody line that evoke a sense of unease and incompletion. Gallows Pole is an arrangement of a traditional folk tune (trying to think if it’s been done in this list before, I don’t think so. Bellowhead did a version). There’s a bit of banjo in this one to give it a slightly blue-grass feel. The track Tangerine starts off acoustic, but also includes some electric steel guitar, and sounds very very like a Byrds or Crosby, Stills and Nash number (Dave Bleedin’ Crosby again). This was apparently written when Page was still with The Yardbirds, hence why it sounds more like that style of music than the hard rock of previous Led Zeppelin. Apart from Immigrant Song, the other more classically Zep track is probably the bluesy Since I’ve Been Lovi...

  I think of Santana as being a Latin-beat version of The Grateful Dead, possibly because the timbre of the guitar sound used by Carlos Santana is very similar to that of Jerry Garcia, as are the modes used in soloing. Unlike the Dead, however, Santana’s songs tend to be shorter, and are backed by the Afro-Latin conga beats, in this instance provided by Jose “Chepito” Areas and Michael Carabello. Probably the biggest track on this album, certainly one I’d heard before on the splendidly straight-named “Rock Anthems” compilation album popular among my friends back in college days, is the cover of Black Magic Woman, originally by the Peter Green version of Fleetwood Mac. In my opinion, the Santana version is better, evoking a seductive-yet-dangerous feel with an ominous, sinuous organ riff. The rest are a mix of catchy samba instrumentals, or some with sparse Spanish lyrics such as Oye Como Va written by old friend Tito Puente, or the excellent Samba Pa Ti. Hope You’re Feeling Bet...

  The albums for this year are really jumping back and forth between hard and soft, aren’t they? Back around 1968 it was All Psychedelia, All The Time (or so it felt). But this time we’ve gone from The Carpenters to Black Sabbath, and now to Neil Young in his folky mode (Young basically has two modes – folky and grungy). I don’t remember who unearthed them, but I do remember this album and Harvest doing the rounds among my friends back in college, so it was fun to revisit again. It’s a very lo-fi affair, some tracks being just Young with acoustic guitar (Tell Me Why) or piano (After The Gold Rush, which also features a bit of flugelhorn). The title track is for me one of the best on the album a three verse reverie set in the past (“ I dreamed I saw the knights in armour ”), present (“ I was lying in a burned-out basement ”) and future (“ I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships ”), ending with mankind setting off to colonise new worlds in a track reminiscent of Queen’s ’39. It was q...

  Back to some heavy metal again, and here Sabbath up the heaviness just a notch, as well as the overall quality; this is a much more assured album than the debut one, which was fine but felt perhaps a little tentative at times. Here, musically and thematically, the group are just a little more mature. The black magic elements are largely gone for this album, except for a reference in the first song War Pigs of generals gathering “ like witches at Black Masses ”. Which is somewhat ironic as the album was originally going to be called Walpurgis but the band shied away this time from anything too satanic. There’s more, if anything, a science fiction theme to this album, with Iron Man not being anything to do with Tony Stark, but is closer to Ted Hughes’ Iron Giant. Iron Man in this song is a man returned from the future to warn of an impending apocalypse, but transformed into a metal monster and becoming the cause of the apocalypse (shades of The Umbrella Academy). The following ...

  If the last album was radio-friendly material, this is material that’s more than friendly with the radio, it’s married it and had three kids with it. Karen Carpenter’s voice is unique and unmistakable, somehow managing to sound like she’s multitracked over herself with her rich tones (and indeed sometimes she is). When the songs do bring in Richar d Carpenter in harmonies (which they don’t need, really) the effect is exponential. There are some songs written by Carpenter, R. on here, and he’s a pretty good songwriter, holding his own against the other tracks by the likes of Bacharach/David and Lennon-McCartney (a cover of Help). I thought that some of the tracks were King-Goffin ones, but they’re not. The classic love song forever linked to images of happy newlyeds, We’ve Only Just Begun, is actually by Paul “Rainbow Connection” Williams and Roger Nichols, who also provide I Kept On Loving You where, unusually, Richard sings without his sister. It's Burt Bacharach and Hal David w...

  Given how distinctive singer John Fogerty’s voice is,he covers a wide array of musical genres on this album, from a cover of Heard It Through The Grapevine to a mix of blues, country, rock and roll, and rockabilly. Unlike many of the change-of-decade albums recently, the songs on this one are not so much a blend of genres but have both feet firmly in one style. Ooby Dooby and My Baby Left me, for example, are straightforward rockabilly while Lookin’ Out My Back Door is straight up Bakersfield country. Like the late Steve Wright’s “Serious Jockin’” radio feature, CCR don’t use a terminal “g”, see also Travelin’ Band, which is a Little Richard style rock and roll track, harkening back around 15 years to when that style of music was last prevalent. I have a vague recollection about hearing some theory about 13-year cycles in music (or maybe that was cicadas), and I also remember from my childhood how many rock-and-roll revival artists there were in the mid-Seventies – Mud, Showaddyw...

  BAM! Now that’s what I call hard rocking. Compared to the Unholy Trinity of hard rock, which are unmistakably of the Seventies, this one still sounds current. It’s much more punk than the British hard rock bands, heavy pounding rhythms and crunchy guitar licks, with Iggy Pop’s vocals guttural and percussive over the top of it. When he sings “ When you cut me down ”, he spits out the word “cut” so that it’s almost onomatopoeic, cutting the air. This is the track Dirt, about the only thing on here that counts as a slower track, but it carries no less power for that, in fact to me it probably carries more and is one of the better tracks on here. The final track, L.A. Blues, has nothing blues about it, being almost entirely a wall of noise, like the final beats of a rock track dragged out to the entire five minutes and laced with primal scream therapy. In many ways it’s the perfect retrospective album for 1970, the birth of a new decade that comes not with the new hope promised by ...

  From the title I was expecting some folk-rock kind of deal, and the title track is kind of this, a cover of the traditional tune where the planting, harvesting, and milling of barley is turned into a kind of brutal ritualistic murder of the mythical figure John Barleycorn. Every folk singer and his or her dog has done this at some point, but the Traffic version is a nice addition. The rest of the album, though, is more funky. Classified as jazz-rock, it’s not so much jazz although it borrows some of the elements of jazz. The whole deal sounds tighter than that, yet with plenty of space for the different instruments – funky piano, mellow sax, and so on – to breathe. Steve Winwood’s voice is in fine form too, although some of the tracks, such as album opener Glad, are instrumental. I liked this a lot more than their debut album, and this is perhaps due to the departure of Dave Mason, whose songwriting style seems to have been at odds with the rest of the band. Without him, it f...

  Rod Stewart’s music is difficult to classify, which is a good thing I guess. It starts from the basis of rock, but uses a lot of blues and country elements, and as I was pondering that this was a bit like The Rolling Stones, along comes a cover of It’s All Over Now to back me up on that – although that’s in reality a Womack and Womack song that the Stones also did, which I didn’t know. Rod also likes to mix in folk bits – the man does like a bit of mandolin, which crops up on the title track Gasoline Alley as well as his big hits (that aren’t on here). Country Comfort is a good example of how he also mixes in a bit of Scottish folk as well (this is, in fact, an Elton John/Bernie Taupin tune); the resultant tracks are neither obviously one form or another, unlike some artists that use these genres (e.g. Dave Bleedin’ Crosby) it isn’t the case that this one is the blues track, this one is the country track etc. And I rather like that. Cut Across Shorty, for example, has a bit o...

  This is the first artist since Skip Spence that I’d not heard of before, although I have, apparently heard them since they were the backing band for at least some of Syd Barrett’s Madcap Laughs – Mike Ratledge on keyboards, Robert Wyatt on drums, Hugh Hopper on bass, and Elton Dean on saxophone. Some other session musicians join them for this record on clarinet, flute, and violin. It’s a mid-way point between electronica and jazz/rock fusion. It’s a double album, with four tracks, thus each track is an 18-19 minute piece all by itself, although some of them, notably Side 2’s Slightly All The Time sound more like disparate pieces stitched together than a lengthy coherent whole; compared, to, say Grateful Dead or Miles Davis who have both done 20ish-minute jazz-rock fusion pieces where the ongoing theme is evident. For me, the most interesting piece was Side 3’s The Moon In June, that features vocals, although more scat and stream of consciousness than lyrical, using the voice ...

  Or should that be “Deep Purple in RAWK \m/”? And so the final third of the “unholy trinity of rock” has arrived, and I think if anything they’re heavier in sound than Black Sabbath, and definitely heavier in sound than Led Zeppelin who at this stage are still tending towards both blues and folk. The distinctive sound for Deep Purple comes from them having John Lord on organ, where he rips it up and gets some really chunky sounds out of it, often doing call/response work against Ritchie Blackmore on lead guitar. Meanwhile the rhythm section, Roger Glover on bass, Ian Paice on drums, keep it driving and heavy, and Ritchie Blackmore breaks out with fast and squealy guitar solos.  Although other bands have done hard rock, it’s arguably Deep Purple that develop so many of the rock cliches, with lots of the tracks ending with a seemingly never-ending series of crescendos. As John Peel used to say, “Fuddle-a-dumpf. Just waiting for that.” There’s only one track, Child of Time, th...

  Once again I shall repeat my usual caveats about live albums: One, they are often just compilation albums that are acceptable to music snobs, and Two, if they are good they capture the feel of a particular time and place, otherwise they’re just albums tracks with applause at the end. Johnny Cash In Folsom was good at actually capturing the vibe, while, say, Ellington At Newport really didn’t, at least not the original release. Coming off that point is, how well does the album capture the event that you can feel like you were there, even if you weren’t? And then, more specifically, how well does this particular live album work? I listened to the extended version, which comparing the track listings is probably a much better experience than the original, very truncated, release. It was performed at Leeds University, according to Daltrey in one of his audience asides, their first gig in the UK for a long time. The sound is hard and heavy, with full-on wall of noise bass, and they...

  This is the first post-Beatles solo album, although I see Lennon and Harrison also release albums this year that make the list. I don’t think Ringo (I ought to call him Starr to be consistent, but that doesn’t sound right) has an album that Dimery considers noteworthy enough, which is odd considering his solo stuff tends to be the kind of country rock that Dimery (or his contributors) seem to love. But enough snide asides about the inexplicable obsession with Dave Crosby. This album feels more like a collection of demos than a finished product. It was recorded after McCartney had fled up to Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre following the dissolution of the Beatles, a man on the verge of (or undergoing) a nervous breakdown, and the music comes from his wife Linda’s suggestion that he try writing some songs to stop himself from going under. A lot of the tracks are acoustic guitar pieces that last a few minutes at most, and fade out. The album opener, The Lovely Linda, sounds l...

  I think if you’d said to me when I started this endeavour that I’d be looking forward to nearly two hours of jazz-rock fusion instrumental, I’d have been very surprised. If you’d said after Kind of Blue or Birth of the Cool that it would be a Miles Davis album, I’d have been more surprised. But I really liked his previous album on the list, In A Silent Way, and if it got me away from anything involving David Bleedin’ Crosby for a bit, all the better. This is a bit funkier than In A Silent Way, but continues Davis’ blending of electric guitar and electric piano with more traditional jazz instruments (mainly trumpet, naturally). The piano parts in particular leap up and down like the stereotypical sound used to indicate a computer working in Seventies film and TV, forming an overlay over mostly pretty fast and steady rhythm from the bass and drums, over the top of which the trumpet, sometimes sax, sometimes guitar, pick out solos. At times it feels like there are layers of the pi...

  I really hadn’t made any notes on this. Déjà vu indeed. At least, here, Neil Young has joined in again, as much as Neil Young ever seems to join in with things. This album, as far as the hits go, belongs to Nash, and his relationship with Joan Baez that informs a couple of tracks. One is a cover of Baez’s Woodstock, a much faster version than I’m used to, while Our House sings of domestic bliss, hearkening back to the ongoing theme of the former hippies moving from activism to domesticity. Darn those Boomers. Nash himself said that he finds Our House to be highly saccharine, which I find amusing. His third popular track on the album is Teach The Children, which is prime CSN with its harmonies and bouncy country style. Meanwhile, Neil Young is off doing his scratchy guitar solos, and falling somewhere between the kind of light folk of Harvest and the more grungy Crazy Horse sounds, while the Stills and Crosby tracks didn’t really make much of an impact on me. I know I’ve b...

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.   JRR Tolkien   Of all the people on this list, Tolkien probably requires the least introduction . He’s one of only a handful of British authors in the Appendix N, but arguably the grandfather of modern fantasy . Born in Bloemf o ntain , South Africa, in 1892, but grew up in the Midlands in the UK, serving in the First World War and eventually becoming Profess or of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford. Tolkien later retired to the coastal town of Bournemouth using the proceedings from Lord of the Rings. Tolkien specialised in Anglo-Saxon, and one of his more scholarly publications is a translation of Beowulf, which he a...