Dr Simon Reads...

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...

  Well, it’s The Doors, and all of the seemingly obligatory 11-minute end tracks of prior albums feel like they’ve been priming the ground for the epic The End, as used to memorable effect in Apocalypse Now. Even that’s a cut-down version of the album track though, which is an epic that descends into Jim Morrison uttering gutteral noises to a chugging beat. Is this the f irst song in the list to feature swearing? I think it might be.   Although they’re more a bigger and more well-known band than many so far, to be honest I think they’d be pass able psyched e lic rock if it weren’t for the charisma and destruc t ive personality of Jim Morrison, and the distinctive org an sounds of Ray Manzarek . What would Light My Fire be without the intro and middle break , for example?    And... oddly that’s all I have to say on this album, but perhaps it’s because most of the tracks are aren’t a novelty to me, or probably to anybody who reads this.   

  The album opens with the track Dolphins, about “searching for the dolphins in the sea”, a ppropriate since Neil spent the last thirty years of his life (1970-2001) engaged in dolphin conservation. It’s a slow and steady folky muse with some raga goings-on, and Neil’s voice is like dark treacle, a deeper Scott Walker. It’s a gorgeous track that is probably on a Wes Anderson soundtrack somewhere.   That’s The Bag I’m In is more bluesy (“ They’ll p robably drop the atom bomb the day my shi p comes in ”) and is a catchy groove , as is Sweet Cocaine. The well-known one on the album is Everybody’s Talking, made more famous by Harry Neillson , and that through its appearance in the film Midnight Cowboy.  T he album ends with the obligatory lengthy jam Cynicrustpetefredjohn , with the also obligatory raga and psychedelia moments thrown in .   Neil is great to listen to, but never had massive success in his own right – he's one of the many artists on this list who are in...

  Love are another Californian band, with their fingers in the psychedelia pie, but they go beyond that with a mix of different genres , with a bit of beat pop, a bit of jazz , a bit of Latin, a bit of rock . Side two of the album is entirely taken up with a l ong tour de force of instrumental free-form jazz (Revelation) , which apparently the band hated but I loved. It may have been there as a snub to the label Elektra, by deliberately not writing any more songs, and it was app a rently cut down from an hour of the origina l jam to a mere 18 minutes and 57 seconds.   Probably the most well - known is the short and explosive 7 And 7 Is, a piece of proto-punk , but the rest are all growers. Stephanie Who Knows has demented timing, veering between 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 (I had in my notes “a bit like Take Five”) , jazzy sax and almost flamenco guitar, vocalist Arthur Lee falling somewhere between Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger . Orange Skies is a more wafty , floaty tune with a b...