Dr Simon Reads...

  Considering none of the tracks on here are ones that I recognise from the hits and Best of...s, this is an extremely strong album where Hendrix and co. massively   raise their game in terms of songwriting and sound palette sophistication. Although there are some tracks, like Spanish Castle Magic, that evoke the prior album of distortion and wall of heavy sound, others are more delicate and nuanced. Little Wing features glockenspiel elements, while She’s So Fine features bass player Noel Redding on lead vocals and is a more poppy sounding affair. I thought there was use of wah-wah pedal as well, but apparently Hendrix played through a rotating Leslie speaker (the characteristic of a Hammond organ), which took me down a rabbit hole looking at when various pedals and effects came about, because that plays a large part in the distinctive sounds of a particular era. The Crybaby Wah-wah appears around now (late Sixties), but is more associated with the funk sound which I think...

  The Seventies feel continues, as Eric Clapton develops his sound from the bluesy work done with John Mayall to using distortion, overdrive, and a bit of wah-wah, combined with drummer Ginger Baker (probably the inspiration behind Animal from The Muppets with his frenetic drumming and difficult behaviour). Strange Brew and Sunshine of Your Love are the tracks that get the airplay, and they by-and-large exemplify what to expect from this album. Emerging out of psychedelia and blues, this is more purely (hard-ish) rock, apart from the pub singalong of an old music hall song, Mother’s Lament (“My baby ‘as gorn dahn the plug’ole”) where I expected John Gorman of The Scaffold to make an appearance. It’s good without being brilliant, but part of that I think is how familiar a lot of it feels compared to how it was at the time - I had a "Best of Eric Clapton" compilation many years ago that featured these tracks. Cream are billed as a “supergroup”, and it’s been my experience wit...

I mentioned in my brief discussion on Buffalo Springfield’s album that things were starting to sound more Seventies than Sixties, and this album is another step towards the pleasantly unchallenging guitar-based toolings of the likes of The Eagles. Vaguely folk-rock, mainly because acoustic guitars still appear, but the specifics of folk and country aren’t really present. This is a step on the evolutionary chain, and I think in part due to band member Arthur Lee’s growing disillusionment with the Flower Power movement. I can understand that – a burst of optimism in the “Summer of Love” that peace and love will prevail, and there are still civil rights riots, war in Vietnam, Six Day War and so on. There was one single released from this album - Alone Again Or - which to me sounds like it has Spanish flamenco inspiration but is apparently based on a piece of music by Provofiev. There are more classical and flamenco guitar elements that appear elsewhere on the album. Alone Again Or is pr...

  Well done, if you're reading this, on making it to the hundredth album. As I've mentioned a few times prior, feel free to comment with your experiences or opinions on any of the albums on this list. Although this is a Nico solo album, there’s a lot of involvement from her former Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and John Cale, who wrote some of the tracks (arguably the best ones) and play backing. Nico apparently wanted drums, of which there are none, and hated that the arrangers added strings and flute overdubs to her recording. I’m kind of inclined to agree with her on this, the strings and flute make the music softer and a little bit bland, her raw (and sometimes a bit flat, to be honest) voice was better suited with the Velvet Underground sound, the overdubs want to turn her into an Ella Fitzgerald kind of vocalist, and she’s not. The first two tracks – The Fairest Of The Season and These Days are pretty good, sounding a little like a Nick Drake with their opening...

  This is a bit of a mixed bag, musically speaking. My original notes called it fairly Seventies-style polished country-rock, but there’s more to it than that. Given that the band features Stephen Stills and Neil Young, both of whom we will hear more of later, and how Stills moves towards the adult-oriented country rock while Young fluctuates between folk and grunge, it’s probably no surprise that it should be so. Reading the production history of this album, it’s one of those where each member almost did their own thing and then glued it together at the end, and pretty much anything with Neil Young involved seems to be feature him being an awkward nugget. He’s still doing it as I write, blowing hot and cold over playing Glastonbury 2025. The Neil Young songs are pretty obvious once you’ve heard some of his other stuff, and the wandering acid guitar is already prevalent, if not quite as sketchy and grungy as he will later do with Crazy Horse. Mr Soul is a little like the Rolling ...

Jumping from the sublime and haunting music of Buckley to the jaunty music-hall whimsy of the Kinks feels almost sacriligeous, but one soon gets dragged in. Compared to the previous Kinks album, this one heads more into the little vignettes of life and different characters (a bit like the way some Beatles songs are heading). Thus we get the singer’s jealously of golden-boy David Watts, the classic paeon to Waterloo Sunset and young lovers Terry and Julie, the sibling rivalry of Two Sisters, the Dylan-esque parade of circus characters in Death of a Clown. The music runs through a range of styles too, again with a bit of a music-hall feel. The jaunty Twenties jazz stylings of End of the Season, for example, or Harry Rag, which has a march tempo, but feels like a sea shanty despite being about a collection of characters consoling themselves with a cigarette – needs some accordion in there. It’s not as hard and rocky as prior Kinks outings, the overall soundscape is comprised of more d...

  Sort of similar to Donovan, but to my mind just a bit more sophisticated and complex in the songs. I’d heard Pleasant Street used as a background tune (in Channel 4's student comedy Fresh Meat) and hunted it down because it’s fab, and also came across Song To The Siren (not on this album) but for some reason evaded really going down the Buckley rabbit hole. Like Donovan, there are some troubador ballad songs, especially the title track Goodbye and Hello, which with it’s tempo changes throughout and references to kings, jesters, machine guns etc. feels like an early prog-rock tune. Pleasant Street is still one of the better tunes on the album, really showcasing Buckley’s vocal range, but the opener No Man Can Find The War is a barnstorming anti-war polemic, while I found Once I Was, a relatively short piece about a former love, to be profoundly beautiful. I had to look it up, because musically it’s a simple piece, doing the old 4-chord trick (Using chords based on the 1 st , 3 r...

  The third studio album from Donovan Leitch, and a movement into a more psychedelic rock sound. Donovan was friends with The Beatles and Brian Jones, somewhere on this album there may be Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones playing, he wrote one track (Fat Angel) for Mama Cass Elliott, another for Bert Jansch (Bert’s Blues) and namechecks Dylan, Janis [Joplin] and Jefferson Airplane in Fat Angel, and it seems like he was everywhere in the British and Californian music scenes of the time. There are essentially three types of track on this album; some troubadour/chanson ballads, usually featuring wizards and queens and knights (e.g. Legend of a Girl Child Linda, and Guinevere), or they’re more upbeat, genre-defying mixes of psychedelia, folk and rock, often with quite a funky tempo. The title track is a good example of this form, as is The Trip and what is probably my favourite track from the album, Season of The Witch. The timbre of Donovan’s voice is not so good for carrying the bal...

  Seeing this coming up, I had in my head for some reason that it was Saucerful of Secrets and that Dimery was skipping the debut album, the only one to feature the ill-fated Syd Barrett. But my mistake, this is the first Pink Floyd album released, but probably not the last on the list. This early Floyd is a different animal(s) from what they will become; here the psychedelia is ramped up to full. Other albums on this list so far, especially for 1966-7, belong within the psychedelia genre, but other than a bit of backwards overdub on Sergeant Pepper, none have really come close to sounding like an acid trip. Here the Floyd take us into some very wierd soundscapes. I described the track Help I’m a Rock from the Mothers of Invention album Freak Out! as sounding like jazz if the solo instrument was animal noises; here, Pink Floyd go further with a track like Interstellar Overdrive, which starts off a bit like some Hawkwind space rock but devolves into sound effects and general strange...

A San Francisco band named after an 18 th century English dandy, this is their fourth studio album and by this time they were reduced to a trio, hence the name of the album I guess. The music is a country rock/beat pop/psychedelia crossover that has a lot of variety to the style of the songs. Some tracks, such as Triangle or the Randy Newman cover Old Kentucky Home are in much more of a country style, while It Won’t Get Better is much more laid-back and bluesy. Are You Happy Now is a bit of lively folk/pop while Only Dreaming Now slows things down and brings in a bit of gypsy accordion. More psychedelic elements (inevitably for 1967) occur in the longer tracks (most of the tracks on here are of the two-and-a-bit minutes of the classic pop sing), with The Painter of Women being a bit baroque with harpsichord, and its parade of archetypal characters is both very Dylanesque and also prefigures elements of prog. The Keeper of Time manages somehow to sound like a mix of a lushly orches...

  The Young Rascals are included, I think, as an exemplar of the “blue-eyed soul” genre; soul music played by white people, in other words. Imagine if The Monkees played covers of Dusty Springfield songs, and that’s kind of what we get here. Some tracks, such as A Girl Like You and I’m So Happy Now are upbeat, punctuated by horns, very poppy soul, sounding a little like Happy Together by The Turtles, while others are slower, like Find Somebody and How Can I be Sure?, but still souful. And, actually, what I said in the opening paragraph is reversed, as it was Springfield who did a cover of How Can I Be Sure. It also sounds like Cilla Black could have sung it, with its waltz beat and traces of French accordian. Bits and bobs of other musical influences can be found as well – Sueno uses Spanish guitar, while the title track Groovin’ uses laid-back Latin beats. If you’ve heard any tracks off this album, chances are that it’s Groovin’, which was one of the Rascals’ biggest hits. The...

  Beefheart, real name Don van Vliet, is known to me as being somewhat Zappa-like (he and Zappa work together quite a lot), but this, his debut album, starts off fairly straightforward, with the hard rock/blues Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I Do, then onto more psychedelia rock with Zig Zag Wanderer and Call on Me. There’s more blues in Plastic Factory and Where There’s Woman. Since the album features a young Ry Cooder it’s perhaps not surprising that there are a lot of blues. Dropout Boogie is much more like a Zappa track, a chant-like exaggerated vocal over a mix of hard grind and twinkly breaks. Like Zappa, it’s fundamentally a good tune that kind of satirises itself by going over the top – Beefheart has a slightly quavery voice like he’s putting on a silly voice, but I think this is his natural singing voice. As does I’m Glad, which is a kind of slow rock and roll/soul number. Electricity is a fun track featuring a theramin, and here Beefheart’s tight-throat vocals really work with the...

  The next batch of albums feature three artists I’ve never heard of, and one that I have heard *of* but (aside from a collaboration with Frank Zappa), I’ve never heard (Captain Beefheart). But first, Moby Grape, part of the San Francisco sound, and maybe a little like Jefferson Airplane in sound, but more towards country rock and less psychedelic. And they’re good, by gum, when they’re good. I’m picking up a bit of Wishbone Ash as well, which is unsurprising perhaps as both groups have multiple inter-weaving lead guitars. Maybe a little like another overlooked group, Fanny (yes, British readers, that was their name). The trajectory of Moby Grape is a sad one, because they could have been much bigger than they were, could easily have been a familiar name like many of the other groups arising from the Summer of Love. But they were beset with mental illness, legal and money problems, lengthy disputes with a grasping manager, but they somehow limped on into the start of the twenty...

I mean ... there’d be riot and blood in the streets if this one didn’t make it into any “best albums” list. Does it live up to its reputation? I think so. It’s not necessarily the first “concept” album in the sense of thematically linked songs (in fact, Sinatra started the whole list off with one of those), but it is an early example of the tracks being held together by an overall soundscape. Not as much as Pink Floyd will do later on, but the overall sense is that the album is a concert by performed the Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s very musically varied. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds dabbles in psychedelia (but after a steady diet of Californian psychedelia actually feels quite quaint and polite). She’s Leaving Home, with its strings, feels more like a tune from a musical, and is all the better for it.   Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite is quite vaudevillian. Ringo’s best song, IMO, With A Little Help From My Friends, along with When I’m Sixty Four and Lovely Rita are probably th...

  This is the first album where the Monkees got to write their own material and play their own instruments, their third studio album that came after the first season of their TV show; I guess they wanted to demonstrate that they were something other than a manufactured band. Since it charted at Number 2 to the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, it can’t be too bad, and it isn’t. The only one that I’ve heard on compilation albums is the delicate, and somewhat wistful, Shades of Grey sung by Davy Jones. The others vary from a little bit jangly Byrds style like You Just May Be The One to more vaudevillean Kinks-esque observational songs like Mr Webster (about a retiree), or Randy Scouse Git (which isn’t, as you might think, a pop at any of The Beatles although it was inspired by a party held by them that the Monkees attended. It’s actually a reference to the character in Til Death Us Do Part played by Tony Blair’s father-in-law, Tony Booth). Others are little nuggets of oddness, like Band ...

  The Experience comprise Hendrix, drummer Mitch Mitchell, and bassist Noel Redding, and the three form the archetypal “power trio” of rock. Between them they shout out some hard and heavy pure rock, but it’s arguably Hendrix doing things previously unheard with a guitar that really makes the sound. Fuzz and wah-wah, tremolo bends, and the most gloriously anarchic noise you can imagine. There are some classic on here – Purple Haze, Fire, Foxy Lady, but not all of them are powerful rock, which makes the whole album that much more interesting. Third Stone From The Sun is a trippy song with hypnotic beats, distorted vocals and noises. The Wind Cries Mary is a relatively gentle number although for me it’s never felt like Hendrix has the voice to carry of a song of this nature. Hey Joe, on the other hand, is a classic murder ballad given the Experience treatment, turning it into something that the Louvin Brothers or Ramblin’ Jack would barely recognize (but I hope would approve of). ...

  More San Francisco psychedelia, just what we need. But not to worry, as the album is pretty good, and the psychedelia is not overwhelming, becoming more pronounced as the album continues. “Country” Joe McDonald and Barry “The Fish” Melton are the main writers and musicians here, having worked together previously in a jug band, which would explain the presence of folk and blues elements to some of the tracks.   I’ve come to have a bit of a weird relationship with this album. The first time through, I made such sparse notes about it that I gave myself nothing to work with when I came back to write it up fully (going forwards, I’ve made more effort to do a full write-up as soon as possible). And I couldn’t remember the tracks particularly, so I went back and started to listen to it again, got about three tracks in, got distracted, and then started the whole thing over again.   And I still can’t clearly call to mind any of the tracks. Don’t get me wrong though, I’ve c...

  The Electric Prunes are another Californian band playing a mix of psychedelic and baroque rock, with a little bit of other genres. They were relatively short-lived, but resurged again at the end of the Nineties for a brief time. Probably the most famous tracks, certainly the tracks that I’d heard before, were the fuzzy Too Much To Dream Last Night, with characteristic psychedelia backwards-tracked fuzzy guitar, and Get Me To The World On Time, not a million miles from Jefferson Airplane and what The Byrds were doing at this time. Things get a   little jazzy with Quarter to Nine, while The King Is In His Counting House is a baroque-rock number, a little bit Kinks, little bit early Pink Floyd. Only the somewhat bluesy track Luvin’ was written by the band members, who apparently considered the bulk of the other tracks, written largely by the team of Annette Tucker and Nancie Metz, to be “filler”. For me, Too Much To Dream is the stand-out track, but it’s always hard to tell i...

  Here’s yet another version of The Girl From Ipanema, but since it was written by Jobim I can forgive its inclusion on this album. Of all versions, it’s probably either the Sinatra one or the Astrid Gilberto one that people will think of first. Sinatra makes it a bit more swing and a bit less bossa nova, but it works well for his style, I think. Also previously seen on Getz/Gilberto is Corcovado (a.k.a. Quiet Night of Quiet Stars) which was a stand-out track on that album, and is good here (although I prefer Astrid’s vocals to Frank’s). The other tracks are all bossa nova done Sinatra style, and as I assume Sinatra thought when he decided to make this album, the laid back Latin beat of bossa nova matches his swing vocals pretty well, making something smooth and relaxing, albeit not far adjacent to elevator/hold/test card music.

You know, this was completely coincidental, but this one got published on 25th March, which is Aretha Franklin's birthday. Like it was meant to be. Bring on the Queen of Soul, who arguably sets the bar to which all future female souls singers must aspire. She can belt out the powerful bits but can also do softly very nicely as well when the songs allow her to. Aside from the cover of the Civil Rights anthem A Change Is Gonna Come, most of the songs on this album are about the relationship between men and women, whether they be empowerment anthems demanding Respect (or rather R.E.S.P.E.C.T. as we all know it), or more quietly declaring that I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You as per the album title. Surprisingly this is the tenth studio album for Franklin, but her first with Atlantic Records, her previous work being mainly jazz standards. It was the producers at Atlantic that saw her potential in a more soul/gospel direction, so well done them. Respect is probably the stand-o...

  With both an artist name and an album title like that, you’d be forgiven for expecting some country, and that’s exactly what we get. Twangy steel guitars and songs about whiskey and women. There’s a quote attributed to Jean-Luc Goddard that “all you need to make a film is a gun and a girl”, and in many ways the same could be said to be true for country and American folk. At least it’s decidedly not psychedelia though, for a change. There are songs about prison life and songs about post-prison life and songs about avoiding prison. Haggard spent time in San Quentin as a young man after going off the rails after his father’s death, and although most of the songs weren’t written by him he evidently felt a connection to them. That’s very country music.

I’m currently in a chunk of albums where I just made some brief notes during/after listening to them. After Sergeant Pepper I go back to making longer write-ups, because for a lot of these I really can’t recall the music and have had to listen again to say something more substantial. Take this album, for example. My notes simply read “Not as interesting as the last Byrds album, definitely can tell the Crosby parts though”. That’s it. So back I go to listen again, because surely there’s more to say about the album than that (even though Dimery seems to really have a thing about The Byrds). The opening track is So You Want To Be A Rock And Rolls Star, built around a driving repetitive phrase, slightly contrapuntal, decorated with mariachi horns and the sounds of screaming fans. There’s a drift towards their future country direction in the honky-tonk Time Between, but many of the other tracks (e.g Have You Seen Her Face) are very much in the jingle-jangle Byrds style of the previous...

  A mix of folk and psychedelia, this album epitomises what we could call the Haight-Ashbury sound, all very Californian hippie kind of stuff, sometimes with gentle guitar, sometimes fuzzing it up. The best songs are the ones where Grace Slick takes the lead vocals, and these are the ones that will be most familiar – the stomping Somebody To Love, and the steady build-up of White Rabbit, a Ravel’s Bolero style constant build to a climactic finale that highlights quite how trippy Lewis Carroll’s ideas actually were (the reference to pills and mushrooms sounding like comments on drug use in the hands of Slick, but are all things from the Alice books). Other tracks are either like a lesser version of Somebody To Love (e.g. She Has Funny Cars and 3/5 Mile in 10 Seconds, both of which feature Slick on backing vocals), or are gentle folky tunes (e.g. Today or Coming Back To Me), which are generally the ones written by and sung solely by Marty Balin. This is one of a batch of albums w...

  Arguably this album is about five years before its time, it feels much more like a Seventies album than a Sixties, although this is future me filling in my sketchy notes, and come late 1968 onwards the sound of the albums becomes much more towards the Seventies end than the Sixties. It’s also arguably a p ure art-house project overseen by Andy Warhol, who lumped the Velvets together with Nico to give a very varied style to the songs. He also designed the iconic banana cover with a peel-off sticker to reveal a peeled banana underneath, something that would almost certainly have got lost if my family had owned a copy.  (I can’t think of Warhol without thinking of David Bowie proclaiming “It’s War-HOL actually” at the start of the track about him. But I expect we’ll come to that eventually). Warhol's cover makes the whole album an art project, with it's iconic peelable banana sticker. The fact that the peeled banana underneath is pink, and therefore a bit phallic, is, I'm...

Here we go with s ome full-on country and western, with the Bakersfield steel guitars giving a b i t of slide and h o nky- tonk , but this time the songs are told from a female perspective . And so there are the hard-drinking men, the philandering men, the violent men. But whereas the male country singers either lionise these types , or if they sing of regret it’s usually with a good dose of fatalism, Lynn reveals the effect that such behaviour has on the women in the songs, the ones who have to fend off the unwanted advances of a drunken amorous husband, for example , i n the title song, which is somewhat autobiographical.   And if you think about those murder ballads, where the man kills a rival for his sweetheart’s affections, from her perspective she’s got one man dead, the other in prison and likely on death row – great job ruining my life, Mr Hero. Lynn does get in a bit of sauce for the goose though, with a cheating wife’s righteous indignation that I Got Caught (but...

  Slightly cheating, I think, in that the album is a recording from three years ago, plus see my previous comments on live albums being a bit of a music snob’s excuse for a Best Of – album . (On the subject of the year, though, the list I’m using orders the albums by as detailed release date as possible, and in some version I’ve seen, this one is put in 1964, the year it was recorded. It doesn’t m atter too much).   Brel is a Belgian singer of the traditional chanson songs, lyric-driven storie s. These are mixture of sad  ( see Les Vieux, Les Timide s , La Plat Pays which is nostalgia for a sad flat country ) and a bit of (often bawdy) humour (see Amsterdam, Les Jardins des Casinos and Toro ) . My French is n’t good enough to passively listen to these and get the full benefit, since the point of this style is in the story/lyrics, not the music, which is pretty simple; neither is Brel’s voice what you would call smooth , so they’re not something you could listen to ju...