A Lifetime-Plus of Music

     In another unusual burst of productivity, today we review the 2^nd album released by the Grateful Dead, “American Beauty”.  When combined with “Workingman’s Dead”, these two albums comprise most of the radio play tracks for the Dead, at least until their resurgence in the late 1980s.  “American Beauty” is the #215 rated album on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

     The album opens with “Box of Rain”, which is the excessively slow and uninteresting part of the Dead to me.  The album picks up quickly after that, with “Friend of the Devil” and “Sugar Magnolia”, which will always stand out as my favorite Bob Weir Grateful Dead song.  I’m not a huge fan of Pigpen McKernan’s “Operator”, but I do like Jerry Garcia’s side one closer, “Candyman”.

     Two days ago on social media, I sadly saw a post from a father lamenting the passing of his 24-year-old son, which hit a little too close to home for me.  In his post, he noted that their favorite song to share together was “Ripple” by the Dead, which opens side two.  It is a beautiful song, and from now on it will always be in my head as this heartbreaking tribute from father to son.  “Till the Morning Comes” is an upbeat song that characterizes the vibe of their live show, with the fans moving in mass unison, and the closer on side two, “Truckin” is the perfect ode to the nomadic lifestyle of the Grateful Dead and their passionately devoted fanbase.

     I will always associate the Dead with a unique and one-of-a-kind friend we met in college who opened all of our collective eyes to the world of the Dead.  It has been many, many years since we shared the finer things in life with our good friend Lo, but I think we can all agree on one thing…

“What a long, strange trip it’s been…”

     In 24 months, Led Zeppelin played several hundred shows, and recorded and released three albums.  It always amazes me how much high-quality material these bands (Led Zep, The Doors, CCR, The Beatles, The Beach Boys) among others could write, record and release in a compressed time frame.  “Led Zeppelin III” was inspired by a visit to a Scottish cottage (Bron-Yr-Aur) that included Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, where they got back to the simplicities of nature with acoustic guitars and limited accommodations.  The third album is considered their “acoustic” album, and while there is some validity to this, it is a bit of a misnomer because A), they have lots of acoustic-based songs on the first two albums, and B), there are several electric guitar-based rockers on this album as well.

     Many people look at this album as a bit of a step back from the first two albums in overall enduring quality, and I would tend to agree, although the band would consider it more of a continuous change and evolution of their music.  I believe this album has two timeless classics, one really good song, and the rest of the album is good, but not great.  There is one song at the end I would swap out if I could, and I will explain more shortly.

     Side one opens with “Immigrant Song”, one of their most famous short, riff-based anthems.  It has never been a big favorite of mine, and I think that the main reason is the production somehow has the bass and drums, a trademark of Led Zeppelin heaviness, buried and softer in the mix.  Next come “Friends” and “Celebration Day”, both of which are in that good but not great category.  In particular, I think “Celebration Day” is one of the few Led Zeppelin songs that is significantly stronger performed live than this studio version.  They do hit a home run with the next song, “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, their first true original blues anthem.  This formula, which they would revisit two more times in their catalog, is primarily a Page and Plant showcase, and both are at their very best here, but the drum performance is noticeably great, which once again separates John Bonham to a level above others.  How many blues tracks do you listen to and hone in on the crispness and standout sound of the drums?  Exactly.  John Paul Jones layers in a perfect organ and bass accompaniment; this is Led Zeppelin at their creative and most powerful best.  Side one ends with another short rocker, “Out On The Tiles”, which like a lot of the album, just doesn’t seem to have the intense depth and powerful impact as similar tracks on their first two albums.

     Side two, the “acoustic” side, opens with “Gallows Pole”, a remake of a traditional song focusing on a person’s last moments leading up to his execution by hanging.  I do love the tempo increase and one-off banjo from Jimmy Page on this song.  “Tangerine” follows, a bit on the melancholy side and not a great song, but then comes “That’s The Way”, one of their two best acoustic songs ever that is amazing here and performed live as a trio, with Page on guitar and John Paul Jones on mandolin.  I also love “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”, which comes next, another acoustic song but up-tempo with John Bonham’s thumping drums as Robert Plant sings a love song to his beloved dog, “Strider”.  Bonzo sings a great harmony vocal on this when they play it live.

     The last song on the album is my least favorite, and the one I would have swapped out.  Let me explain.  The song, “Hats off To (Roy) Harper”, is named in tribute to their eclectic friend, UK folk-rock singer Roy Harper, but is a distorted, unusual remake of the Bukka White blues song “Shake ‘Em On Down”.  It is just a bit too much reverberation and Plant wailing for my tastes.  What I believe they should have done is inserted their classic song “Hey, Hey What Can I Do” as the perfect closer for this album, which they instead released as a B side to “Immigrant Song”.  “Hey, Hey What Can I Do” is in my opinion, one of the very greatest Led Zeppelin songs of all time, allowing them to deliver that light-and-shade within a song, as an acoustic song that hits heavy and powerful at the same time.  Unfortunately, they did not consult with me before finalizing the album.

     “Led Zeppelin III” will never by my favorite Zeppelin album, but like all of them, it does have its moments of greatness, and really branches out their reach across many different genres of music beyond just hard guitar rock.

     Another Woodstock veteran today, the album of the day is “Abraxas” by Carlos Santana and his band, including keyboardist and lead vocalist Gregg Rollie, who would go on to form Journey with Neal Schon, another Santana alum.  This album is rated as album #334 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

     Carlos Santana is an iconic guitar player whose career has seen many regenerations commercially, fairly impressive for an artist who is never featured on lead vocals.  It is this classic sound of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that I connect with most naturally.  On this album, some songs are instrumental only, some have vocals in English, and some have vocals in Spanish.  I find myself most naturally drawn to the beautiful sounding Spanish vocals, they seem much more colorful and appealing.  It reminds me of whenever I travel to Miami, one of my first steps is to turn the radio to one of several Spanish-only stations.

     This album is well-known in the rock music genre, it features perhaps Santana’s two most prominent songs from that era, a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Black Magic Woman”, and a Tito Puente cover, “Oye Como Va”. As noted above, I particularly love the percussion and strong Mexican tone of “Oye Como Va”.  I also like the mellow vibe of “Samba Pa Ti” and the high energy rhythm closer, “El Nicoya”.

     I love how the modern musical world has embraced the greatness of Carlos Santana, as he also provides one of the few remaining timeless bridges back to the Woodstock era.  A great album, and no surprise it was so well received and rated, then and now.

     We look today at “After The Gold Rush”, the third album from solo artist and multi-group member Neil Young, who by this point had not only released solo albums but also recorded and performed with Crosby, Stills and Nash as well as Buffalo Springfield, also featuring Stephen Stills.  This album, mixing country folk with an occasional harder edge, with Neil being a very accomplished guitarist along with his strong high-end vocals.   The album is rated #90 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

     My appreciation for Neil Young has grown a lot over the years.  Once upon a time, I found both his voice and guitar playing to be a bit jarring, and the production of “Southern Man”, one of the most notable tracks on this album, is a good example of this.  As many of you know, it was this song that prompted the lyrical response and reference from Lynyrd Skynyrd when they wrote “Sweet Home Alabama” and called out Neil Young.  And while I do appreciate this side of Neil Young, it is typically some of his more melodic and basic tunes that really pull me in. On this album, the best example of this is the beautiful song “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”.   The highest-selling single from the album, the harmonies and simplicity of the song are fantastic, and it is the perfect centerpiece for other similar songs like “Tell Me Why”, the title track “After the Gold Rush”, and the closer, “Cripple Creek Ferry”.

     I find this album and its melancholy tracks to be very comforting, especially on a quiet summer afternoon like today.  I can piece together the images and the time of the early 1970s, hand in hand with music like Neil Young and it is a feeling of blissful warmth.

     1970 was a remarkably productive year for the band Black Sabbath.  Following their debut release earlier in the year, in September they released their second album, “Paranoid”.  With these two albums alone, the foundation of Black Sabbath’s most significant and successful music was produced within a single year.  Even more successful than their debut, this album rates as the #139 selection on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums of All Time.

     The album opens with “War Pigs”, which is probably my favorite and most powerful Sabbath song ever.  Continuing the same formula of rough and raw chords and Ozzy Osbourne’s dark lyrics, “War Pigs” brutally confronts the hypocritical war machine and its misguided, perverted motivations for existence.  Following that, the title track “Paranoid”, a gold standard for quick, intense and fast paced metal rocking.   Side one takes a breather with the distorted psychedelic “Planet Caravan”, before crushing with a wallop, closing with “Iron Man”.  Another legendary Sabbath tune, I also will always associate this great song with the unquestioned all-time greatest wrestling duo, The Road Warriors.  If there is a better “walk-up” song that “Iron Man”, I haven’t heard it yet.

     Side two isn’t quite as hit laden, but still rocks at the same pitch, closing out with “Fairies Wear Boots”.  Preceded by “Electric Funeral” and “Hand of Doom”, Black Sabbath completely delivers on their target of aggressive, haunting, and slightly terrifying rock like no other band of their time.  To this day, these first two albums compose the beginnings of a genre that is still taking no prisoners fifty years later.

     Where does the fine line between funk and soul blur?  Today’s album is “Curtis” by Curtis Mayfield, former star of The Impressions, and author of one of my all-time favorites, “People Get Ready”.  This album is rated #8 on the digitaldreamdoor.com Top 10 Funk albums of all time, and while it is a powerful album, I would tend to label this as soul more than funk.  What is the difference, from the eyes of someone who clearly has limitations in this area from a musical and cultural background?  To me, I associate funk with an edgier, guitar and bass-driven sound, often powered with off-beat drums.  Most of the music on this album is keyboard, horn and even string accompanied, and thus has much more of a soul or R&B feel.

     It matters not, let’s look at the album instead.  This album is a great representation of the empowered black artist scene of the early 70s, breaking through the singles-oriented Motown sound of the 60s to address socially conscious and relevant songs, all of which continue to ring true 50 years later.  Look no further than the title of the third song, “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue”.  As you can imagine, that song has been rediscovered by many in the last year.  The signature song from this album is “Move On Up”, a great song that really accentuates the powerful use of percussion and drums on the extended track.  The outro on this song reminds a bit of the bongo frenzy by Santana at the beginning of their set at Woodstock.  I also loved “Miss Black America” for its message and music, and the entire album, while not quite as funky as what I would typically lean towards, is a great showcase for Mayfield’s high range voice and impactful songwriting.

     Mayfield was tragically paralyzed in 1990 when a piece of stage lighting fell on him during a performance, but he continued to write and record until his death in 1999.  Funk or soul, this sound was a baseline for black music in the early 1970s, leading us further down the road towards the up-tempo disco sound of the late 1970s and the explosion of hip-hop in the 1980s.

     Today we return to the hardest working man in show business, James Brown, and his latest live album release, “Sex Machine”.  Another highly regarded album from the Godfather of Soul, “Sex Machine”, a double album of “live” material, is rated as album #439 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

     This album is a bit of an odd one.  Not surprisingly, the gold standard for James Brown live albums will always be his release from 1963, “Live at the Apollo”.  In comparison, I find this album to be much less sharp and focused, which isn’t that surprising as James and his band are all older and a bit more frazzled from the lives they respectively lead.  Even with the opening track, “Sex Machine”, which is a James Brown classic, it goes on for over ten minutes, and like several of the tracks on this album, there is just too much of James echoing back and forth with his band and less actual singing and song performance.  In reading about this album, I learned that the first two of the four album sides are actually studio tracks with audience sounds and reverberation overdubbed in, which makes this track even more unusual.

     Sides three and four are more traditional live tracks from various performances, and songs like “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and “Mother Popcorn” give us a better, if not perfect glimpse of James Brown at his live-performing peak.  Of the several James Brown albums I have listened to during this journey, this is probably the one I am least like to put back on the turntable in the near future, but still an enjoyable and never dull ride with James, no matter what.

     A highly significant step towards a new genre today, as we delve into punk rock origins with “Fun House” by the Stooges, led by punk pioneer Iggy Pop.  This album, like many on this list, was not an immediate commercial success, but it has risen in consideration over time and is rated as the #94 album on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

     I have always had an unusual, awkward and often uncomfortable relationship with punk rock.  One of my earliest concert memories is with a dear friend and sometimes reader here who took me to see the Circle Jerks in a small concert hall in Denver in the 1980s.  Fully immersed in classic rock at the time, the chaotic intensity of the music and show was frankly too much for me, and I quickly retired across the street to K-Mart to look at more traditional rock albums while I waited for my friend to exit once the show was over.  A few years later, a band that really isn’t that punk, The Red Hot Chili Peppers came to my college as an up-and-coming group, and I was shocked and frankly pissed off when people began throwing themselves at me at full speed once the music began to play.  I like the raw intensity of punk, especially in short, explosive bursts, and I prefer it when it still has a trace of hook and melody to the track versus complete abrasiveness.  I tend to drift as the song runs on, and the repetition of the idea can be drawn out excessively, and of course this mindset applies to most music I listen to.

     On “Fun House”, I hear some of each.  The first two tracks, “Down on the Street” and “Loose” are exactly what I want them to be.  Raw, rough, and edgy, particularly for 1970, full of anger and rebellion, exploding in three and half minutes of joyful rock.  After that, the album tends to drag a bit in my eyes, as songs like “Dirt”, “1970” and the title track, “Fun House”, are just a little too much of a good idea.  The last track is a struggle for me.  The punk rock equivalent to “Revolution #9” by the Beatles, it is almost five minutes of industrial rhythm, angst-ridden vocal wails and cacophonic sounds.  It is quite the ending to the album, but honestly, I was just glad it was over.

     I really appreciated this eye-opening music lesson today in a genre I know more by legacy, friendship and watching from afar than I know and understand up close.   Iggy Pop is compelling to watch and you can feel every ounce of his heart in this album, and at its best, sets a great blueprint for so many who would follow.

     From a cover of “Proud Mary” to the original creator, we come back to Creedence Clearwater Revival today for their album “Cosmo’s Factory”.  This album, which is rated #413 by Rolling Stone on their Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, is a hit factory, and despite what I said earlier about the #193 rated “Willy and the Poor Boys” album, this is probably their finest hour as a band.  And sadly, not unlike Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles, this triumph comes just a few months ahead of the pending initial dissolution of CCR.  John Fogerty’s strong personality and demanding ways became too much for all involved, to the point even his own brother Tom left the band before the end of 1970.

     That small fact aside, this album is fantastic.  Like most, it has a few items I could nitpick about.  I think the opener, “Ramble Tamble” rambles just a bit too much, and I could say the same about the extended run out of their version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, most of the rest of this album is stellar.  Starting off with the Little Richard-esque “Travelin’ Band”, we hit one familiar song after another, each a CCR classic.  “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”, “Run Through The Jungle”, “Up Around The Bend”, “Who’ll Stop The Rain”, and the above-mentioned “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”, this almost sounds like a greatest hits compilation.  It is no surprise this album was a massive and enduring success for the band.  They even do an altered take on the Elvis Presley song “That’s Alright, Mama”, reworking the title and lyrics (while still assigning proper songwriting credit to Arthur Crudup) into “My Baby Left Me”.  They also pay proper tribute to the blues with Bo Diddley’s “Before You Accuse Me”. 

     There is just so much to like here.  We could debate the relative merits of this album versus “Willy and the Poor Boys”… or we could just listen to both and make it a CCR kind of day.  It is unfortunate they have never found a way to properly reconcile professionally or personally, but sadly that is how some great relationships and partnerships end.  No matter, this band left a permanent impact on the American rock and roll world, and the world at large.

     Another compilation album today, we have “Proud Mary: The Best of Ike and Tina Turner”, covering a lengthy span of their troubled history together.  This time in 1970 made sense as it aligned with their iconic cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary”.  This album is rated #392 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

     Like the Spectors, we have another husband-and-wife team who were marred by the male being a completely abusive and repulsive human being.  Somehow through all of that, they did make some amazing music.  The first few songs on this album did not do much for me at all, they were early 60s Motown-knockoff songs that I felt were over-sung by Tina and an unfair ask of her vocal talents.  However, starting with the Beatles “Come Together” the rest of the album is a complete home run.  We go from that to a cover of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women”, which Tina and Mick Jagger later performed together at the 1989 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.  Then follows a cover of “I Want To Take You Higher” by Sly and the Family Stone, and after a less exciting “Workin’ Together”, we get their slow-then-frenzied historic take on “Proud Mary”.

     The rest of the album is one excellent song after another, showcasing Tina (and occasionally Ike) at their best.  I really loved “Sexy Ida (Part 2)”, as well as her version of the “Acid Queen” from “Tommy” by The Who.  Tina Turner portrayed “The Acid Queen” in their cinematic version of this album, and I think this may be the 4^th album to include music from “Tommy” in my blog.

     The older tracks are forgettable, but late 60s / early 70s funk Tina Turner was a true force.  I know some are more inclined to celebrate her musical rebirth in the 1980s, but I think this music is exponentially better.