Dr Simon Reads...

  John Cale is out, replaced by Doug Yule. From the opening track Candy Says, a mellow track about transgender Candy Darling, we get the sense that this is the Velvet Underground in their laid-back style; no tracks on here in the grindcore electric of White Light/White Heat. And although some of the tracks continue to touch on existential dread, they are overall lighter in tone, about the Pale Blue Eyes of a beloved, or matters of faith. Yule sings the opening track, and there’s a rare vocal performance from drummer Maureen Tucker on After Hours, which apparently she was super self-conscious about doing. There’s one track, The Murder Mystery, that touches on the experimentalism of previous albums, with all four band members providing a kind of spoken word accompaniment, two on each side of the stereo, about a murder mystery. It’s kind of like the disparate strands of a narrative all overlaid, implying how the truth of a matter requires several viewpoints and, to me, demonstrati...

  Thanks to their close association with the films Saturday Night Fever and Grease, I tend to think of the Bee Gees as a Seventies group, much parodied in my youth as the archetype of the “disco medallion man”. But this, in 1969, is their sixth album already, and it’s pretty far from disco (closer perhaps to Massachusetts and other swirling ballads in style). It was originally meant as a concept album based around the story of the first track Odessa, the disappearance of a fictional ship meant to evoke the Marie Celeste or the HMS Erebus. But although aurally the songs hang together, thematically they are about things as disparate as the invention of electric light (Edison) or Marley Purt Drive about a man overwhelmed with children. Most of the album is somewhat folk/country rock ballads with orchestral backing, one track (Give Your Best) is more like a Gram Parsons country track. The final quarter of the album (it’s a double/triple album) features orchestral tracks; Seven Seas S...

  Now I enjoy a bit of guitar-based rock as much as the next middle-aged white man, but it’s nice to have a change of pace after the full-on assault of the last album. Although the band and album name suggest we’re in for some country or country-rock again, this is more jazz-based psychedelic rock. The whole of the first “side” of the album is 27 minutes of a lengthy jam around Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love, broken down in the track listings as Who Do You Love (Parts 1 and 2) which sandwich When You Love, Where You Love, How You Love and Which Do You Love, which are more live movements within a large piece. The jazz inspirations are clear from the soloing going on, and I had to have a think about why this seemed good to me whereas the sax soloing on jazz records got on my nerves. And I think it’s partly because of the greater range. I looked it up – saxophones cover two and a half octaves, guitars can cover four (particularly electric guitars with the cutaway to allow you to rea...

  Although this is a live album, it’s one of those ones where the “live” elements – crowd sounds, banter, etc. have been removed to leave some raw performance footage. MC5 are very punky – fast, hard guitars and aggressive vocals with iconoclastic lyrics. Counterculture has moved from polite hippy dreams of peace to angry imprecations about the people in power. If this lot didn’t inspire The Ramones, I’d be very surprised.  The first half of the album is a lot more “punk”, especially the opener Ramblin’ Rose and the storming Kick Out The Jams. The second half becomes more bluesy, and is closer to the kind of blues-based hard rock of Led Zeppelin or Hendrix. Motor City Burning, about race riots in Chicago, is a chunky blues rhythm with squealing guitar solos over the top. The album closer Starship is a psychedelic odyssey into space, something like early Hawkwind, fading away to gentleness. Lead singer Rob Tyner leans fully into the almost sexualised vocal utterances and rock...

Time for a bit of Motown soul now, with what is the ninth studio album for The Temptations. This is apparently a bit of a departure for them sound-wise, heading into more funky territory on the advice of their producer Norman Whitfield, despite lead singer Otis Williams’ doubts on the matter. To some extent, perhaps Williams was right. The funkier tracks, mostly front-loaded on the album, like Cloud Nine or the extended jam Runaway Child, Running Wild, sound much more of a time (to me, early Seventies) with their wicky-wocky wah-wah guitars and congo beats, compared to the later tracks on the album like the Goffin/King Hey Girl or Don't Let Him Take Your Love From Me. These sound a lot more like “classic” soul. On the other hand, it’s the earlier tracks that to me are more interesting entirely because of that funk (and Runaway Child has, I assume Williams, doing some great vocal work by mimicking the wailing of a child, something that Ceelo Greene will come to later on). I have...

  Gram Parsons returns with his continuing quest to update country music, having fallen out with The Byrds because they were touring South Africa. Boo! Apartheid enablers! Parsons may not have played Sun City, but he did play a track called Sin City on this album (see what I did there?). Some of this album is fairly traditional – steel guitars twang and slide over waltz-time tunes about losing one’s girl and finding one’s religion (e.g. Juanita), there are other elements mixed in. Parsons covers soul classic Do Right Woman in a country style. The track Hot Burrito #1 sounds from the title like it ought to be a funky instrumental, in fact it’s more country rock in a clear evolutionary step towards the sound that The Eagles will give us. Meanwhile Hot Burrito #2 is more R&B influenced and sounds like something Carole King would have written. Of the more country-sounding songs, I liked Wheels, which is again a little Eagles-esque, and the final track Hippie Boy, which is a lit...

  After the serious workout of Led Zeppelin, now for a bit of soothing Dusty. My researches uncovered a surprising connection here, as well. John Paul Jones had played backing for Springfield and it was her suggestion that Atlantic Records sign up Led Zeppelin. How marvelous that the two are connected. Since I noticed how great her voice was on A Girl Called Dusty, it remains so on this album thankfully. I was expecting that it would maybe be some country covers, but actually it’s R&B, apart from a cover of the more chanson-style Windmills of Your Mind. (For context, The Thomas Crown Affair which heavily featured the Noel Harrison version of Windmills had been released in 1968). A large number of these tracks are Goffin/King compositions, with a couple of Randy Newnams and a Bacharach/David, so she’s got some big guns behind her. The best known track, selling well at the time and revived by Quentin Tarantino, is Son of A Preacher Man, a gloriously laid-back soulful piece back...

  Hold onto your hats, the first wave of British Heavy Metal is on its way. Although, for their first album, there’s only really the driving down-stroke power chords of Communication Breakdown that are truly heavy metal, the rest is hard rock at best, and this particular Led Zep album is the most bluesy, especially You Shook Me and Dazed and Confused. Although Jimi Hendrix and Blue Cheer got there first, the Zep put the stamp on the hard rock sound. Robert Plant’s rock wail of a voice, Jimmy Page’s frenetic guitar soloing, John Bonham’s hard and heavy drumming. But by gum are they a tight unit. This is fully on display with the start-stop composition of the album opener, Good Times/Bad Times, but is present throughout, with every part placed exactly where it needs to go. Some tracks, notably Babe I’m Gonna Leave You and Dazed and Confused, develop into rock fantasia. Listening to it as part of the 1001 Albums in context, I can hear how some of the elements of jazz informs many ...

  Ugh, that cover induces motion sickness. Despite coming from California, this album is very much themed around New Orleans and Louisiana. Opening with the country-rock track Born to the Bayou, and also featuring a more R&B track that Tina Turner took and ran away with – Proud Mary, the name of a Mississippi river boat. The rest of the album is some crunchy blues-rock including the extended jams of Graveyard Train (the most bluesiest title there ever was and, yes, it does include that blues staple of a harmonica mimicking a train whistle), and Keep on Chooglin’. I’m not sure how one choogles, but the jump-blues bass line to this I guess encourages that particular action. You can draw a through-line from BB King through John Mayall, to Creedance Clearwater Revival, possibly diverting en route to Cream, and you can see how the blues form has become more loose and more rocky as time has gone on. Singer John Fogerty’s voice (another one of those that invokes laryngitis just hearin...

  Ignoramuses such as myself may wonder who Caetono Veloso is. He’s kind of the “Brazilian Bob Dylan”, a singer-songwriter and activist against what was at the time a fascistic government in place in Brazil. A friend of fellow 1001-listers Gilberto Gil, and Os Mutantes, Veloso was (is) part of the Tropicalia movement of Brazilian musicians. There are elements of bossa nova and samba to the beats of these tunes, almost inevitably, but with rockier overtones, and a touch of raga (on the track Eles) and psychedelia. So although it’s a bit like some of the samba albums of the 1950s, it has a more late-Sixties feel to the music – it's the same kind of thing otherwise, with hypnotic Latin American rhythms driving the rest of the song forwards and inspiring imaginations of dancing the samba. I’m presuming it’s in Portuguese, but it sounded more Spanish than Portuguese usually does; whichever it is, my language skills aren’t up to much to be able to fully understand the lyrics. Ah – so...

  Since I’m going into these albums blind, with no notion of why they were included in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, sometimes it’s a fun guessing game as to why they were included. Some are obviously examples of a well-known artist, or an early form of a particular genre, sometimes I think the compilers just liked it and felt it was overlooked. And so it was a bit of a guessing game for this one. The Pretty Things, when I looked them up, are another of those bands that are pretty much still around with constant changes in personnel, although off the top of my head I couldn’t name what their biggest chart hit was (if any). This album feels like what is by now standard, if pretty good, raga-rock/psychedelia/baroque pop kind of a mix such as we’ve seen on many prior albums. There’s a throughline concerning the character SF Sorrow, from his birth, through experiences in war (with a very moving piece where the names of the fallen are spoken underneath the music), an...

  There’s a bit of everything on this album – classical, jazz, blues, rock, gospel, soul. Sometimes in the same track. But for all that, it doesn’t feel kitchen sink prog-rock, but a glorious fusion of sounds. If you look the band up, they’ve had about a billion members over the years (only a slight exaggeration) and are still going. Al Kooper (formerly of The Band) had left by the time of this, their second album, and this is the era of soul-voiced David Clayton-Thomas on lead vocals. Founder members Dick Halligan on keyboards and flute, and Steve Katz on guitar bring the melodies and there’s a substantial horns section as well. Overall the sound mix is very rich, but not overwhelming – each contributor can be picked out rather than muddy into the mix. There were two tracks on here that I recognised but wasn’t sure if it was the Blood, Sweat, and Tears version or not. These are the Motown track You’ve Made Me Very Happy, and the funky Spinning Wheel (“ what goes up, must come ...

  Pondering the title, I suppose a “beggar’s banquet” would be a crust of old bread or something like that, but this album is much better than that. Starting with the classic Sympathy For The Devil, which I think kind of gives away the question “ can’t you guess my name? ” asked in the song, where the Devil basically says, hey, spreading human misery is just my job, don’t hate me for it. Probably pretty daring for the time and sure to make some conservative-types' heads explode, especially coupled with its driving Afro-beat rhythm. I do like a song that gradually builds in the instruments (see also Jethro Tull’s Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day), and that’s what this does, although there aren’t many layers. The conga rhythm, the piano, the woo-woos, and some bass (plus a scratchy guitar break). The other famous track is Street Fighting Man, probably the rockiest number on here. Most of the rest are a return to the Stones’ bluesy roots, with a bit of country as well e.g. ...

  Given the contribution that Ireland has made to music, from Christy Marx to Denise Chaila by way of U2, Thin Lizzy, Sinead O’Connor, The Pogues etc. etc., punching way above its weight as a relatively small country, it’s a surprise that this is the first Irish artist on this list (that I’m aware of). And Van Morrison is one of that pantheon. The fact that he’s from Northern Ireland, part of the UK, and not Republic of Ireland is probably overlooked when it comes to claiming him as “Irish”, although having lived through the Seventies I know how prickly *that* topic is. He’s still as Irish as Tom Jones is Welsh, being in a non-England part of the UK doesn’t erase that identity. Anyway, on to this album itself. The tracks on it are all pretty much along the same lines, with ethereal backing music provided by acoustic guitar, flute, violin, I think I detected vibrophone in there at one point. Over the top of this, which is mixed quite low, Morrison explores free-form sounding fli...

  When I last heard this, some billion years ago, I remember it feeling like a bunch of good tracks held together with filler in order to justify it being a double album, but this time around I’ve revised my opinion of the other tracks, as it’s a real smorgasbord of different musical genres and subjects – like the previous Kinks album ramped up to eleven. Yes, the album is absolutely chock-full of Beatles classics, from Revolution and Back In The USSR, which sound like Revolver-era, through more psychedelia such as Glass Onion, Savoy Truffle, or Helter Skelter (approaching the genre from different directions), a typical McCartney ballad in Blackbird, a typical Lennon reverie in Dear Prudence, and arguably Harrison’s finest composition, While My Guitar Gently Weeps. There’s even a Ringo composition that is completely straight – Don't Pass Me By. Other bits that I probably saw as filler are often more music-hall or Twenties jazz themed, like Honey Pie, Bungalow Bill, or Rocky Rac...

  This album is run through with nostalgia for a by-gone age that may never have existed. The title track (gorgeously covered by Kate Rusby) is all about “ protecting the old ways from being abused ”, as well as “ preserving the new ways for me and for you ”, an eclectic mix of things from strawberry jam to Sherlock Holmes, but also weirdly laced through with Americanisms like Donald Duck. The theme is revisited in Village Green, which is a more direct paeon to a simpler way of life. Do You Remember Walter is about an old friend, Last of the Steam-Powered Trains is again about a vanishing facet of life, but also feels like a metaphor. Told from the point of view of the train, the narrator feels abandoned by the modern world, a relic of a bygone age. Musically, this album is more varied compared to earlier Kinks, heading more to their music-hall style songs (All of My Friends Were There), a calypso number (Monica), and the weird mix of psychedelia and a children’s story that is Th...

  Wikipedia labels this album as “folk rock”, but it’s really not very folky. More funky, to be honest. Maybe it gets classed as folk rock because it features some acoustic instruments like flute and piano, but it also has some of the old psychedelic ingredients, notably organ. The sound is more melodic though, and less grungy, than most psychedelic stuff. In fact, this is the most Seventies sounding album yet, much more lightly mixed and sophisticated in sound, which is probably why it defies an easy pigeon-holing. I really didn’t write very much about this album at all, so this is me trying to rectify that by going back and listening again as I feel I at least ought to highlight a couple of tracks or be a bit more specific about the album or the band. It feels like a contest between Dave Mason and the writing team of Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi, with Mason not really appearing much on the Winwood/Capaldi tracks. You Can All Join In is a pop-country tune of Mason’s that soun...

Sorry, I didn't use the cover with the naked women. I'm probably obscure enough to escape notice from any censorial types in the Google-verse, but I'm playing it safe. Although the best known tracks from this album are Crosstown Traffic, All Along The Watchtower (where Hendrix shows the Byrds how a Dylan cover *should* be done), and Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), which are all similar in sound to tracks on Are You Experienced, overall this album has a much more mellow sound to it. Some tracks, notably those parenthesised by Rainy Day, Dream Away and Still Raining, Still Dreaming (muses about becoming a merman) are more like an extended jazz jam that anything Hendrix has done before, while the first Voodoo Chile (not the Slight Return) is a lengthy blues jam (with a drum solo by Mitch Mitchell that just manages to stay within the time boundaries of drum solos before they get merely indulgent and annoying). Little Miss Strange is more like a pop song.  But within all of that...

  The Byrds lean almost completely into the country side of their occasional country-rock sound, and apart from the track One Hundred Years From Now (with McGuinn/Parsons joint vocals), this is more of a Gram Parsons album.  Mostly lots of picky steel guitar, but with a few tracks that are a bit more bluegrass banjo (I Am A Pilgrim), this is a collection of Parsons tunes, with some typical Bob Dylan covers, from Dylan’s own forays into country with You Ain’t Going Nowhere (not as good as the version on Basement Tapes) and Nothing Was Delivered. There’s a bit of Louvin Brothers (The Christian Life) and Woody Guthrie (Pretty Boy Floyd), but mostly the tracks tend to sound a bit samey.  It’s interesting that The Byrds are choosing to step away from the Sixties sounds, but odd in a way that they’ve stepped back in time to the likes of Buck Owens. I think this is kind of their waning days, and the newer country sound is emerging out this album like a chrysalis, but we shall se...

  I tend to listen to these albums without doing any prior research, nor knowing why they were included in the list, and so it was partway through the first track that I thought “That sounds like Janis Joplin”. And, indeed, it is; the second of two albums she did with Big Brother before going solo, before sadly joining the 27 Club a couple of years later. Like Jeff Beck’s album last time, this is largely blues-rock, with an added dash of psychedelia (because it’s 1968 and therefore almost compulsory), bits of soul, R&B and even a bit of Gershwin, but sounds a lot more visceral and real compared to Beck. A big part of this is due to Joplin’s emotive vocals with a voice like an angel made of sandpaper. She’s a lot better at sounding authentic.  Many of the songs are funkier than Beck as well, with a groovy bassline from Pete Aldrin, and the double guitars of Sam Andrew and James Gurley. I listened to the re-release version, and all of the tracks are good – for Joplin the s...

  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...

  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...

  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 ...

  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...

  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...