Dr Simon Reads...

  Knowing what I do of George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic output, I was expecting the kind of prog-funk that makes up most of this album. What I was not exp ecting was the opening, eponymous, track that is largely a guitar solo from Eddie Hazel that blends the hig h, sustained, mournful notes of David Gilmour with the fuzzy, grungy licks of Jimi Hendrix, over the top of a barely-there piano riff , with applied echo effects and stereo pannning to make a gorgeous dreamlike sound.   I recognised the second track, Can You Get To That, featuring both the vocal harmonies of Isaac Hayes’ backing group Hot Butter ed Soul, and the practically subterranean vocals of Raymond Davis; it was used as the theme song to an Australian comedy-drama Sisters .   The rest are similar modernised funk – what Wikipedia calls “psychedelic funk” , but in my mind I called “acid funk” , and are all pretty good tracks. As with the Serge Gainsbourg album, this one is bookended by longer tracks ...

  The Allman Brother are Floridians Duane and Gregg, Duane providing guitar and Gregg keyboards and vocals. Lead guitar duties are doubled up with Dickey Betts, and there are two drummers Jai Johanny Johnson and the improbably named Butch Trucks , leaving just Berry Oakley on bass. The band members seem to have shared a tragic penchant for dying in motorcycle accidents – Duane Allman not long after this recording, Berry Oakley the year after.   They’re not a band I’d heard of , although I may have heard one of their hits and not known it. This is a live album very much in the style of the Grateful Dead’s Live/Dead, with extended jam sessions (one lasting the whole side of one of the albums). The Allmans are more bluesy , with the album opening with some fairly typical blues standards (covers of tracks by old Bluesmen like Blind Willie McTell). Here we get a taste of Allman D .’s characteristic slide guitar, high, slidey , slightly distorted, kind of reminded me somebody letti...

  This is one of those albums that, if you have an album by the artist, you own this one, and is much lauded as Mitchell’s masterwork. Quite often these read like a Greatest Hits, but I was surprised that only a few of the regular radio favourites are on here. No Big Yellow Taxi, no Clouds. But the tracks that *are* on here are finely polished little gems of raw emotion.   The arrangement is sparse, usually just Mitchell’s vocals (with her characteristic yodel) and acoustic guitar or piano. There’s a running theme of the transience of human relationships, not all romantic. Carey, for example, is about the kind of friendship that can be instantly rekindled after a long absence, while Little Green is a beautiful track about a child growing up, made even more heart-wrenching when you discover the Mitchell wrote it about a daughter that she had to give up for adoption when she was impoverished.   And I think it’s the fact that these songs are so raw and autobiographical...

  And so the onward march of prog continues. Emerson is keyboardist Keith Emerson, Lake is singer and guitarist (and bassist) Greg Lake, formerly of King Crimson, and Palmer is drummer Carl Palmer. Emerson seems to take the lead on this album, with a lot of it very keyboard-led using Hammond, Moog, Minimoog, piano, and at one point a church organ.   Prog blends a lot of jazz and classical elements with rock, and here there are couple of showy- offy tracks where Emerson just noodles around with jazz (Infinite Space) or classical (The Only Way) which with its baroque stylings made me think of Spinal Tap again, and Nigel Tufnel’s “midway between Mozart and Bach, a sort of Mach piece” composition Lick My Love Pump. There are all manner of weird time signatures on the album, that would make even Dave Brubeck weep with inadequacy.   The showcase track is the Tarkus suite, taking up one side of the album and comprised of several movements that blend together better than th...

  It’s odd that I’ve never really taken to Stewart’s raspy voice , while I really liked Janis Joplin who is roughly (no pun intended) the female equivalent. Maybe it’s because Joplin tended towards more bluesy, soul numbers that suit that kind of voice better, or she had some more force behind it when required, I don’t know.   Listening with a critical ear to these tracks, Stewart tends towards a kind of Mid-Atlantic Roots style; it’s not just country-rock, neither is it folk-rock, but a blend of the two. Take the track Mandolin Wind , for example. US country steel guitars from Ronnie Wood meet Planxty-style mandolin by … probably Ray Jackson , but apparently there’s some confusion over the identity of the performer. Considering how much Stewart likes to use the mandolin, notably on the hit track Maggie May on this album, you’d think he’d remember the name of the guy that played it.    Mandolin Wind, and the final ballad (Find A) Reason To Believe do the best from ...

  Some smooth-as-silk soul from Marvin Gaye , with a few jazz breaks thrown in. But the overall smooth sound of the music belies the social commentary underneath , wondering What’s Going On with racial prejudice, violence, poverty and even ecological damage , addressed in the track Mercy Mercy Me (later covered by Robert Palmer, as I recall). But Gaye’s message is one of hope, driven by faith. There are various tracks that address the nature of faith ( God Is Love, Wholly Holy) and how it can be used to inspire hope in the face of seeming endless darkness.   All of the tracks blend together , making it feel like all of one piece – it gets called a “song cycle”, and is unusual as a soul concept album (at least one that's not the soundtrack to a Blaxploitation film). As I’ve noted before, I seem to prefer music with a few rough corners to it, so the smooth sound isn’t really my thing, but there are a couple of funky tracks on here – Right On, and Inner City Blues – that sto...

Here’s another album that I owned and used to listen to quite a lot. But one thing first, recall that Jagger is supposed to have claimed that The Flamin ’ Groovies did modernized rock and roll better than this album – Mick, there ain’t no rock and roll/rockabilly tracks on here (he may have been thinking of Exile On Main Street - see later). There’s a classical blues song, You Gotta Move, done very much in the old Mississippi style and sounding like an old recording – it’s a cover of a Reverend Gary Davies track, so the homage is clear. There’s also a country rock track Dead Flowers, with honky-tonk guitar work from both Keith Richards and the new guitarist Mick Taylor , with the lyric “ I’ll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoon ” thematically linking it to the previous track Sister Morphine . This track, Sister Morphine, is a wandering and wistful a rt -rock track co-written with Marianne Faithful and Ry Cooder providing little grace notes of slide guitar throughout. ...