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The 50 Essential Albums of 1967
From the Doors' debut to Aretha Franklin's first
smash
By David Fricke & Robert Christgau
This survey of the most important and influential albums released
in 1967 was first published in
2007 to mark Rolling Stone's
40th anniversary and the records that inspired and fueled its
birth. The list, now presented alphabetically, has 10 new entries in
honor of the half-century mark. Everything else is intact and
enduring, as continually exciting and inspirational as the year they
celebrate: 12 months in which rock & roll and the long-playing
album, together, challenged and changed the world around them,
detonating revolutions in cultural expression, studio technology,
social conversation and emotional candor.
This is how fast the world turned at 33 1/3 RPM--in soul, noise,
songwriting, jamming and dancing--in 1967. Three of the turning-point
debut albums in this list were issued within a week of each other,
between March 10th and 17th: Aretha Franklin's I Never Loved a Man
the Way I Love You, the young R&B singer's explosive arrival
on Atlantic Records; an avant-rock cataclysm from New York City,
The Velvet Underground and Nico; and The Grateful Dead,
the self-titled first album by a notorious improvising-blues band from
the new psychedelic scene in San Francisco.
It should be noted that some of the albums here--records that
define the power, joy and legacy of 1967--were made in 1966: The
Doors, in August of that year, after the Los Angeles band's
transformative summer as the house band at the Whisky a Go Go;
Jefferson Airplane's Summer of Love soundtrack, Surrealistic
Pillow. And Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding arrived in the
very last days of '67, a quiet alert to the roots and introspection of
country rock in 1968 and the singer-songwriter movement.
This list does not cover jazz (an American revolution in itself) or
mainstream country, a genre then still moving at 45 RPM. And some
albums here were lost or ignored at the time, awaiting decades (in
some cases) for reappraisal. And like every list of this nature, it is
a product of the editors' and writers' subjective passions: Everyone
who was there has a '67 of their own. Anyone who wasn't has a
soundtrack for what they missed. These 50 albums are not the complete
1967. They are simply the best--in rock, folk, blues, soul,
psychedelia and dreaming.
The year was like this almost every day--on records and radio. It
still sounds like history in the making.
Review authors marked [RC] and [DF].
The Beach Boys, Smiley Smile
In the year of Pepper-mania, the Beach Boys' Smile was
expected to gallop out of the West and reclaim the honor of rock for
its nation of origin. But Smile didn't materialize until 2004,
stitched together from old bits and pieces and revived as repertory by
a solo Brian Wilson and his enablers. Instead, Wilson retreated into
his lonely room and oversaw this hastily recorded half measure--"a
bunt instead of a grand slam," groused brother Carl. Towering it's
not; some kind of hit it is. Without this product-on-demand, we'd lack
such impossible trifles as the wiggy "She's Goin' Bald," the potted
"Little Pad" and "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter," a transitional
bagatelle featuring squeezebox and imitation woodpecker. [RC]
The Beach Boys, Wild Honey
Produced mostly by Carl Wilson, this 24-minute album followed
Smiley Smile by three months and got no respect from those who
believed trick harmonies and arcane changes were what made the group
artistic. Called their "soul" album, perhaps for its Stevie Wonder
cover or its use of the term "out of sight," but more likely because
it emphasized emotive lead vocals, its special gifts are an achieved
naiveté; and irrepressible good humor as Southern Californian as
baggies and woodies. There's not a deep or wasted second on it. [RC]
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
Because it begins with the lame theme to their worst movie and the
sappy "Fool on the Hill," few realize that this serves up three worthy
obscurities forthwith--bet Beck knows the sour-and-sweet instrumental
"Flying" by heart. Then it A/Bs three fabulous singles. "Penny
Lane"/"Strawberry Fields Forever" may be the finest two-sided record
in history. Goo goo g'joob, so may "Hello Goodbye"/"I Am the Walrus."
"Baby You're a Rich Man"? OK, not in that league. Which is why it
bows humbly before "All You Need Is Love." [RC]
The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
One of the many remarkable things about the Concept Album Heard
'Round the World is how modest its individual parts are--as modest as
the antiquely unhip touring band they pretended to be. Beyond the
cosmic "Within You Without You," the all-encompassing "A Day in the
Life" and the overtly fanciful "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," every
unforgettable song is literal and legible, and not one truly rocks
out. Another thing: This consciously cross-generational youth-culture
summum is at its very strongest in Side One's three maturation
texts--"With a Little Help From My Friends," "Fixing a Hole" and
"Getting Better." Another: It runs under 40 minutes, climactic
diminuendo included. [RC]
The Bee Gees, Bee Gees' 1st
In August 1967, into a pop world totally besotted by
Sgt. Pepper, was born a pop album mostly indebted to
Revolver riding a rather literary hit called "New York Mining
Disaster 1941" and addressed to a "Mr. Jones" who couldn't have been
Bob Dylan's, right? The perpetrators were Manchester-born Australians
returned to a U.K. where Robert Stigwood would eventually transform
them into world-historic disco pop-up dolls and stars of the 1978
cinematic megaflop Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But here
they gave the world, among other sweetmeats, the soul standard "To
Love Somebody" and an opener set in a 1900 equipped with a town crier
and Robin Gibb's quaver. A tuneful hoot. [RC]
Big Brother and the Holding Company, Big Brother and the
Holding Company
Janis Joplin's first band is still dissed for its crude
musicianship, and its pre-Columbia album is still patronized for
failing to showcase Joplin the blues singer. Only she wasn't a blues
singer, she was a rock singer--a rock singer who learned to conceal
her country twang after she cut these 10 crazed songs. Most are by her
bandmates, whose folk-schooled garage-blues licks provide goofy
hooks. One that isn't is the definitive Joplin original "Women Is
Losers." She sensed what was coming--you know she did. [RC]
Bobby "Blue" Bland, Touch of the Blues
B.B. King was preaching the blues to psychedelic kids at the
Fillmore Auditorium; Otis Redding turned them on at the Monterey Pop
Festival and made a quantum songwriting leap in the folk-soul majesty
of "The Dock of the Bay." But vocal lion Bobby "Blue" Bland spent his
1967 standing tall and still, belting these 10 tracks of heartache and
bedroom triumph as if he'd just turned the calendar page on his '57
smash "Farther Up the Road" and the '61 hits "I Pity the Fool" and
"Turn On Your Love Light." There were hints of modernism: the
Stax-like gait of "Sweet Loving"; Bland's heated exchange with a
female vocalist in "Sad Feeling," suggesting the call-response
dynamite of Sly and the Family Stone. But the best moments, like the
immolation of Charles Brown's 1945 chestnut "Driftin' Blues," were
robust purism--the reason why white fans like Eric Clapton and the
Grateful Dead adored and covered Bland, doing his crossover work for
him. [DF]
James Brown, Cold Sweat
The modal title milestone one-upped Wilson Pickett's "Funky
Broadway" and introduced JB's funky drummer number two, Clyde
Stubblefield. But the uptempo oldies Brown added to the hit to make an
album--Lloyd Price's "Stagger Lee," Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas City,"
Little Willie John's "Fever" and Roy Brown's "Good Rockin'
Tonight"--smelled a little fishy at the time. Now, however, they're
caviar--JB's full voice and flawless time yoking proven classics to
some of the tightest big-band blues ever recorded. The slow side pits
Brown's ballad falsetto and ballad scream against some of the most
elaborate R&B strings ever recorded. Especially on the two Nat
"King" Cole numbers and an over-the-top "Come Rain or Come Shine," the
falsetto wins by a mile. [RC]
Tim Buckley, Goodbye and Hello
Tim Buckley's second album was a far cry from the folk-rock
conventions of his 1966 debut, rich in acid-Renaissance trimmings
(harpsichord, harmonium) and dominated by the elaborate title
suite. Compared to the radical vocal freedom and liquid sadness of
Buckley's imminent classics (1969's Happy Sad, 1971's
Starsailor), Goodbye and Hello--produced by Lovin'
Spoonful guitarist Jerry Yester--was a triumph of form, with Buckley's
light tenor voice curling through "Hallucinations" and "Morning Glory"
like incense smoke. But Goodbye and Hello was also a deeply
personal album, even though Buckley wrote lyrics to only half of the
10 songs (he co-wrote the others with Larry Beckett). In the thrilling
gallop and stratospheric scat-singing of "I Never Asked to Be Your
Mountain," Buckley soars in desperate need yet defends the wanderlust
that was breaking up his marriage. The song was so important to
him--the child in the second verse, "wrapped in bitter tales and
heartache," was his then-infant son, Jeff--that Buckley did 23 vocal
takes, singing live with the studio band. [DF]
Buffalo Springfield, Buffalo Springfield Again
Fractious from the moment they formed, Buffalo Springfield made
their superb second album in fits and starts alternately dominated by
combative singer-guitarist-songwriters Stephen Stills and Neil
Young. The latter predicted the wild eclecticism of his solo career
with the California Stones-style fury of "Mr. Soul" and the symphonic
restlessness of "Expecting to Fly," written after Young briefly quit
the group in the summer of 1967. A gilded spider web of guitars and
harmonies, Stills' "Rock & Roll Woman" pointed to his subsequent
lifetime with Crosby, Stills and Nash: David Crosby is an uncredited
voice on the track. It was left to singer-guitarist Richie Furay, who
later co-founded Poco, to lament the internal warring in the stone
country of "A Child's Claim to Fame," written in frustration with
Young's coming and going. Young took no offense, contributing vocals
and sharp down-home guitar. [DF]
The Byrds, Younger Than Yesterday
The Byrds that made this album in late 1966 were a mess: reeling
from the loss of singer-composer Gene Clark and the tensions between
singer-guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby. Yet Younger Than
Yesterday was the Byrds' first mature album, a blend of space-flight
twang and electric hoedown infused with the imminent glow of 1967 yet
underlined with crackling realism. The galloping "So You Want to Be a
Rock 'N' Roll Star" mocked overnight success, including the Byrds' own
(the teen screams were taped at one of their gigs). Crosby's ballad
"Everybody's Been Burned" hinted at the stress that soon culminated in
his firing. And in "My Back Pages," McGuinn's stoic vocal captured the
crisis and experience in Bob Dylan's lyrics, a lesson reflected in his
own determination to keep the band alive. [DF]
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Safe as Milk
This debut album could have been Captain Beefheart's ticket to ride,
the bellowing singer and dada-blues lyricist's 1967
breakthrough. Co-produced with offbeat, commercial nuance by Richard
Perry (his first big job on the way to Number Ones for Ringo Starr and
Carly Simon) and featuring a young Ry Cooder on lead guitar, Safe as
Milk was a thrilling whiplash of cheerfully craggy electric blues and
twisted-pop ambition. But Safe as Milk never charted,
inaugurating Beefheart's life sentence as a cult hero. The writing and
ruckus here were steeped in the Delta blues and raw R&B that
Beefheart and Frank Zappa obsessively studied as teenage pals, and the
former's otherworldly scalded-Howlin' Wolf voice is a fully formed
phenomenon. But the jubilantly twisted roots and futurism in "Sure
'Nuff N' Yes I Do," "Abba Zaba" and "Electricity" are also clear,
feral steps to the impending, iconoclastic legend of 1969's Trout
Mask Replica and 1980's Doc at the Radar Station. [DF]
Country Joe and the Fish, Electric Music for the Mind and
Body
At first, Country Joe and the Fish were indie rockers. Three
tracks on this trip-music classic, including the stoner's hymn "Bass
Strings" and the drifting instrumental "Section 43," were initially
cut by the Berkeley band for a 1966 EP on singer-songwriter Joe
McDonald's agitprop label, Rag Baby. He started the Fish as a protest
jug band (the name combines nods to Joseph Stalin and Mao Tsetung) but
here temporarily kept his left-wing zest in check. Flanked by the
electric organ of David Cohen and Barry Melton's biting-treble guitar,
McDonald spread with a preacher's zeal and spearing wit the local
gospel of chemical travel and carnal freedom in "Flying High,"
"Happiness Is a Porpoise Mouth" and "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine." In
fact, Vanguard insisted the Fish not include one of their most popular
tunes, a McDonald zinger that later became a singalong pillar of the
anti-war movement: "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." [DF]
Cream, Disraeli Gears
Cream's best album distilled their prodigious chops and rhythmic
interplay into psychedelic pop that never strayed far from their blues
roots. Except for the electricity, "Outside Woman Blues" is nearly
identical to Arthur Reynolds' 1930s original. And the riff to
"Sunshine of Your Love," written by bassist Jack Bruce, is Delta blues
in jab and drive. But Disraeli Gears decisively broke with British
blues purism in the ecstatic jangle of "Dance the Night Away," the
climbing dismay of "We're Going Wrong" (driven by Ginger Baker's
circular drumming) and the wah-wah grandeur of "Tales of Brave
Ulysses." Producer Felix Pappalardi and engineer Tom Dowd contributed
song sense and studio expertise; lyricist Pete Brown was unique in his
union of Dada and confession. When Bruce sang "And the rainbow has a
beard" in "SWLABR," you knew that didn't come from Robert Johnson. [DF]
Donovan, Mellow Yellow
"Mellow Yellow," a Number Two hit in the U.S., was a
burlesque-brass grind a la Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,"
scored by John Paul Jones (later of Led Zeppelin) with whispering
vocals by Paul McCartney. The rest of Mellow Yellow is gently
magnificent introspection, rooted in the modern acoustic folk scene
then emerging in Britain ("House of Jansch" refers to guitarist Bert
Jansch) and draped in John Cameron's pastoral-jazz
arrangements. Donovan later noted that "Hampstead Incident" was partly
inspired by Nina Simone and the chord progression in "Anji," by
British guitarist Davy Graham. Ironically, the beauty of Mellow Yellow
was obscured by the rumor that the title single advocated smoking
banana peels as a legal alternative to marijuana. In fact, the
"electrical banana" in the third verse is a vibrator. [DF]
The Doors, The Doors
In a year of historic debut albums, no record by a new American
band so immediately electrified the world as The Doors, the first and
best documentation of singer Jim Morrison's Byronic fury and the
locomotive jazz-inflected drive of organist Ray Manzarek, guitarist
Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore. The band was just a year old
when it recorded these 11 songs in six days in August 1966. But in the
crisp funk of "Soul Kitchen," the extended pop art of "Light My Fire"
and the Shakespearean violence of "The End," the Doors perfected an
airtight resolution of their live prowess (refined nightly that summer
at the Whisky a Go Go) and Morrison's improvised explosions of lyric
transgression. [DF]
The Doors, Strange Days
The Doors' second album lacks the shock value and cohesion of the
first, mostly because they made it in the manic wake of their Number
One hit, "Light My Fire," and in the precious time between live
gigs. "Moonlight Drive" and "My Eyes Have Seen You" were already two
years old, first cut as demos in 1965. But the Doors channeled the
daily chaos of their new fortunes into fierce performances--"Strange
Days," the headlong lust of "Love Me Two Times"--climaxing with "When
the Music's Over," an anthem for change driven home by Jim Morrison's
ferocious, outraged demand: "We want the world and we want
it--now!" [DF]
Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding
Recorded in Nashville in three sessions, Bob Dylan's first album
after the electric warfare of his 1966 tour and subsequent retreat to
Woodstock was shockingly austere: an almost crooning Dylan with just a
soft-shoe rhythm section and a few sighs of steel guitar. But that
calm was a perfect contrast to the sermonizing fire be unleashed in
"All Along the Watchtower" and the crossroads parable "The Ballad of
Frankie Lee and Judas Priest." The moral fiber and martyr's temper in
these songs were fierce and immediate. Dylan wrote "Frankie Lee," "I
Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" and "Drifter's Escape" en route to the
first session, on the train from New York. But there was unembarrassed
loving, too: "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," recorded on the last day,
pointed the way to the country comfort of his next album, 1969's
Nashville Skyline. [DF]
The Four Tops, Reach Out
This Motown vocal institution's sixth album was a greatest-hits
collection in all but title. Six of the 12 tracks were Top 20 pop
singles. Three of those comprised what proved to be the climactic
sweep of the Tops' bond with writer-producers Holland-Dozier-Holland:
the theatrical urgency of the late-'66 Number One "Reach Out I'll Be
There"; the galloping Top Ten followup "Standing in the Shadows of
Love"; and early '67's "Bernadette," with its hammering keyboard riff
and a harrowing shout by lead singer Levi Stubbs in the plunge of
silence before the final choruses. The collaborative momentum was so
hot that "I'll Turn to Stone," originally a B side to the mid-'67
single "7-Rooms of Gloom," made Billboard's R&B Top 50. But
Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland soon turned their
backs on Motown, over royalties, and stranded the Tops, who shuffled
between producers and didn't score another Top 10 record until
1972--for another label. [DF]
Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
Aretha Franklin didn't emerge fully formed from the head of Jerry
Wexler--she had many minor hits on Columbia before Atlantic made her a
goddess. But with its mix of superb new soul songs (Franklin helped
write four) and perfect old R&B standards (from Ray Charles, King
Curtis, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding), this is a living monument to a
singer and the style she first epitomized and then transcended. Wexler
wanted the Stax band to ground his great hope but was refused, so he
turned to the white guys down the road in Muscle Shoals--who cut most
of the album in New York. [RC]
The Grateful Dead, The Grateful Dead
One of the year's few supposedly psychedelic LPs that wasn't actually
a pop LP (cf. Sgt. Pepper, Forever Changes, Mellow
Yellow), the already legendary San Francisco band-collective's
debut stood out and stands tall because its boogieing folk rock
epitomizes the San Francisco ballroom ethos--blues-based tunes played
by musicians who came to rhythm late, expanded so they were equally
suitable for dancing and for tripping out. It's also the only studio
album that respects the impact of Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who died in
1973 of cirrhosis of the liver. McKernan's organ is almost as
pervasive as Jerry Garcia's guitar. And although Garcia and Bob Weir
both take vocal leads, their singing styles are still in Pigpen's
white-blues thrall. [RC]
Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant
No one captured hippie politics better than Woody's 20-year-old son
on the title cut, an autobiographical tall tale that for 18 minutes
reduced pacifist anti-authoritarianism to a diffident, confident,
skillfully timed cops-and-longhairs routine. The B side cuts four
forgettable song poems with two more jokes, one of them "The
Motorcycle Song," not yet the comic turn it became. NB: Guthrie
re-recorded the entire album 30 years later. The new "Alice" is four
minutes longer--and four minutes funnier. [RC]
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced
Jimi Hendrix's first album is one of the most exciting and
important records ever made, a reconception of the electric guitar as
a symphonic instrument that still sounds fresh and unprecedented. So
does Hendrix's fusion of galactic imagination, intense
self-examination and deep-blues roots in the raging "Manic
Depression," the R&B sigh "The Wind Cries Mary" and the sexy
whiplash "Foxey Lady." Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch
Mitchell made Experienced on the run, on rare days off the
road. Hendrix wrote "Purple Haze" backstage at a London club; "Red
House," a blues on the British version of the LP, was cut in 15
minutes. But Hendrix also spent several sessions building the
orchestral howl of "Third Stone From the Sun," with the passionate
diligence he would soon apply to his magnum opus, 1968's Electric
Ladyland. [DF]
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Axis: Bold As Love
Jimi Hendrix left the original finished masters for Side One in a
taxi and had to mix all of the tracks again in one session. Today,
Axis is Hendrix's most overlooked album. But it has some of his
best writing in the mighty "If 6 Was 9" and "Spanish Castle Magic," a
reflection on his boyhood in the Pacific Northwest. There was also the
heavy soul of "Little Wing," which Hendrix later told a reporter he'd
started writing when he was playing clubs in New York's Greenwich
Village. "I don't consider myself a songwriter," he said. "Not yet,
anyway." He was wrong. [DF]
The Hollies, Evolution
"Carrie Anne" is the only hit on this forgotten gem, which with no
apparent effort or self-consciousness--you barely notice the French
horn here and violin there--achieves the adolescent effervescence and
lovelorn sentiment that indie-pop adepts of the Elephant 6 ilk spend
years laboring after. Signature tracks: "Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe," which
concerns candy and features a harpsichord, and "Games We Play," which
concerns teen sex and features a knowing grin. [RC]
Mississippi John Hurt, The Immortal
Of all the rediscovered bluesmen of the folk revival, Mississippi
John Hurt was the least diminished by age because he was so unassuming
to begin with. Having first recorded at 35 in 1928, he was 73 when he
cut this posthumously released collection, which showcases his
intricately unflashy fingerpicking, begins and ends with hymns and
reprises both his moral take on "Stagolee" and his own
fashion-conscious "Richland Woman Blues": "With rosy-red garters/Pink
hose on my feet/Turkey-red bloomers/With a rumble seat." [RC]
Jefferson Airplane, After Bathing at Baxter's
Singer Marty Balin was so alienated by the acid-fueled indulgence
of the sessions for the Airplane's third album--four months in Los
Angeles, where the band stayed in a mansion that once housed the
Beatles--that he co-wrote only one song, "Young Girl Sunday Blues."
Yet Baxter's was the Airplane at their most defiantly psychedelic,
exploring outer limits of despair and song form in the dark urgency of
"The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil," Grace Slick's "Rejoyce"--a
protest-cabaret adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses--and the
nine-minute instrumental improvisation "Spare Chaynge." The raw
challenge of Baxter's was also a requiem for the Day-Glo life promised
a few months earlier by the Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow. In
the closing medley, "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon," Paul Kantner
looked back in longing at the Human Be-In of January '67, a new dawn
that already seemed a lifetime ago. [DF]
Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow
When vocalist Grace Slick joined Jefferson Airplane in the fall of
1966, she came with two songs from her old band, the Great
Society--"Somebody to Love," written by her brother-in-law Darby, and
"White Rabbit," her psychedelic translation of Alice in
Wonderland--that became Top 10 hits in the Airplane's grip, dosing
America with San Francisco Utopia. The rest of this second album is a
definitive catalog of the Airplane's acid-rock dynamics and rare
composing gifts: Jorma Kaukonen's metallic-snarl guitar and Jack
Casady's grumbling-funk bass; the beautiful agony of singer Marty
Balin's ballads (he wrote "Today" with Tony Bennett in mind); the
weave-and-soar interplay of Balin, Slick and singer-guitarist Paul
Kantner. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia attended the Los Angeles
sessions as a "musical and spiritual advisor," suggesting
arrangements, playing the delicate acoustic leads in "Comin' Back to
Me" and coining the album's title when he remarked, "This is as
surrealistic as a pillow." [DF]
Kaleidoscope, Side Trips
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page called them "my ideal band" in a
1972 interview. "Far out and heading further," ex-Zeppelin singer
Robert Plant would later affirm on Twitter, citing the heady brew of
country blues, Middle Eastern modes and ascending improvisation on
Kaleidoscope's creative peak, the 1968 LP A Beacon From
Mars. This 1967 debut (featuring the multi-instrumental wizardry
of future Jackson Browne sidekick David Lindley) was even weirder, in
its way--that winding fusion chopped into too-short nuggets that
suggested someone restlessly switching stations on a short-wave
receiver. The brevity meant the Jazz Age corn and slavish Byrds
imitations passed quickly. Far more promising and influential,
particularly on Page and Plant's acoustic tangents on Led Zeppelin
III: the riffing oud, boogie cadence and prayer-call chorale in
"Egyptian Garden"; the desert-march air of the Appalachian lament "Oh
Death"; and the eerie Balkan-spiced blur of invitation and warning in
"Keep Your Mind Open." [DF]
B.B. King, Blues Is King
B.B. King wasn't yet a legend in the rock world in 1967. But props
from Eric Clapton and others meant he was getting there. His canonical
LP was 1965's Live at the Regal, which showcased his songbook
at Chicago's version of the Apollo. But this live album, cut at the
same town's International Club, is so raw vocally and untrammeled
instrumentally it cuts even that classic in retrospect. "Gambler's
Blues," which King never recorded again, tears and saws rather than
stings before it vows not to "crap out twice." Willie Nelson's
not-yet-standard "Night Life" is all riled up. Bobby Forte's tenor sax
adds a sour-mash kick throughout. [RC]
B.B. King, The Jungle
Although five of its dozen selections had attained the lower
reaches of the R&B chart twixt '65 and '67, few noticed this
slapdash piece of product when the Bihari brothers' L.A.-based indie
put it on the market. But as rereleased by Ace in 2009, it exemplifies
how great artists' lesser work comes to feel more precious when
they're gone. Otherwise unavailable highlights include the
poverty-fighting title track, a short and sweet "Ain't Nobody's
Business," and a "Beautician's Blues" that sics said blues on said
beautician. A guy his ma called Riley plays guitar on every track. [RC]
The Kinks, Something Else by the Kinks
Conceptually bound only by the compact genius of Ray Davies'
writing, Something Else was the Kinks' last great album of songs
before Davies became consumed by operatic studies of a disappearing
Britain (1968's The Village Green Preservation Society, 1969's
Arthur). The schoolyard romp "David Watts," the delicate envy
of "Two Sisters," the plaintive rapture in guitarist Dave Davies'
vocal on "Death of a Clown," the young lovers bathed in London
twilight in "Waterloo Sunset": They are all complete dramas, concise
in their emotional detail and depiction of fading majesty and morals,
with harpsichord and brass adding shades of loss and yearning to the
Kinks' basic spunk. A shocking commercial stiff (it peaked at Number
153 in Billboard on its U.S. release in early 1968),
Something Else may still be the best Kinks album you've never
heard. [DF]
Love, Forever Changes
Once unjustly ignored although it charted for 10 weeks, now
lionized beyond all reason although it's certainly a minor
masterpiece, the third album by Arthur Lee's interracial L.A. pop band
voiced Lee's crazy personal paranoia and paradigmatic political
paranoia. Its pretty, well-worked, somewhat fussy surface masks lyrics
of unfathomable if not unhinged darkness. Rooted in existential
despair and occult folderol, its aura of mystery is earned and
indelible, its songcraft undeniable and obscure. [RC]
Moby Grape, Moby Grape
Armed with three virtuoso guitarists and five members who could all
sing and write, Moby Grape had the greatest commercial potential of
any San Francisco band in 1967. They quickly blew it all thanks to
internal tensions, the acid-intensified psychological collapse of
guitarist Skip Spence and Columbia's hysterical hype, which included
releasing five simultaneous singles from this debut album. The irony:
All five deserved to be hits. Moby Grape was that good--a pop-smart
whirl of blazing white R&B, country twang and psychedelic
balladry, mostly cut live in the studio in three weeks for
$11,000. The cruel truth: Of those five singles, only one, Spence's
"Omaha," charted. It peaked at Number 88. [DF]
The Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed
In September 1967, the Moody Blues were asked by their label to
record an adaptation of Dvorak's Ninth Symphony--as a
stereo-demonstration LP. The struggling Moodies, a former white
R&B band that had gone without a hit since 1965, instead created
their own orchestral song cycle about a typical working day,
highlighted by singer-guitarist Justin Hayward's ballads, "Forever
Afternoon (Tuesday?)" and "Nights in White Satin." Days of Future
Passed (released in the U.S. the following year) is closer to
high-art pomp than psychedelia. But there is a sharp pop discretion to
the writing and a trippy romanticism in the mirroring effect of the
strings and Mike Finder's Mellotron. [DF]
Van Morrison, Blowin' Your Mind!
Van Morrison's well-known distaste for the record business starts
here. Fresh from leaving the Belfast band Them, he spent three days in
a New York studio with producer Bert Berns in search of a hit
single. When the cantina-heat lust of "Brown Eyed Girl" went Top 10
that summer (after he and Berns put it through 22 takes), Berns rushed
out this eight-song quickie from the sessions, infuriating
Morrison. But it catches him in heated, searching form, halfway
between his demon bark on Them's "Gloria" and the Celtic-dream soul of
1968's Astral Weeks. (Later issues of the Bang tracks revealed early
stabs at that album's "Beside You" and "Madame George.") The real
mind-blower here is "T.B. Sheets," which crystallizes Morrison's roots
and future in nine minutes of slow-burn blues and brutal honesty. [DF]
Wilson Pickett, The Best of Wilson Pickett
Not just for the half-rhyme's sake was this repurposed gospel
up-and-comer called the wicked Pickett. If there were a genre dubbed
hard soul, he'd exemplify it, and the reason there isn't is that none
of his rivals commanded a voice so tough or an attack so
unyielding. By his standards a love song is something suitable for a
phone booth wall at the midnight hour--"634-5789," perfect. That's one
reason dance records that don't quit such as "Funky Broadway" and
"Mustang Sally" were his wheelhouse. "Man and a Half" would come
later. So on this nonstop collection, make the theme statement a mere
"Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won't Do)." [RC]
Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
The twin peaks of British psychedelia--Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band and this historic debut album were both recorded
in the spring of 1967, in adjacent studios at Abbey Road in
London. But where the Beatles' album was a hermetic studio triumph,
Piper (produced by ex-Beatles engineer Norman Smith) re-created the
nuclear improvisation and double-edged whimsy of the Floyd's onstage
freakouts. Singer-guitarist Syd Barrett was already fading into the
acid-fueled mental illness that forced him out of the band in early
1968. But Piper was his triumph, dominated by his incisive songs of
paradise gained and endangered, and charged with his slashing
outer-blues guitar. [DF]
Procol Harum, Procol Harum
The success of Procol Harum's debut single, "A Whiter Shade of
Pale"--Top Five in the U.S. in the summer of '67--has long eclipsed
the hard-rock might of the group's first album. That is partly because
of its muddy sound--the band was recorded live in the studio, in
mono. Nevertheless, lyricist Keith Reid's surrealist studies in
melancholy and mortality rumble with a heavy-R&B noir powered by
Matthew Fisher's ruined church organ, the haunted-Hendrix scream of
Robin Trower's guitar and singer-pianist Gary Brooker's white-soul
growl. British progressive rock rarely sounded this bold and bruising
again. [DF]
Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, King and Queen
The epitome of raw soul, Otis Redding made better albums than any
other R&B artist of the Sixties. Carla Thomas was daughter to
Rufus Thomas of "Funky Chicken" fame, with the teen novelty "Gee Whiz"
and graduate school in English behind her. Together whenever
conflicting schedules didn't compel Carla to overdub, the sparrow and
the bear chuckled and moaned through the greatest duet album this side
of Ella and Louis. In addition to reconceiving Clovers and Sam Cooke
oldies and a bunch of current soul hits, they turned "Tramp" into
their own classic and "Knock on Wood" into everybody's. [RC]
The Rolling Stones, Between the Buttons
Accused of psychedelia, Beatlephobia and murky-mix syndrome, this
underrated keeper is distinguished by complex rhymes, complex sexual
stereotyping and the non-blues, oh-so-rock-&-roll pianos of Ian
Stewart, Jack Nitzsche, Nicky Hopkins and Brian Jones. Like all
Beatles and Stones albums till that time, it was released in different
American and British versions. The surefire U.S.-only "Let's Spend the
Night Together"/"Ruby Tuesday" single parlay is almost too much
because its greatness is understood--"Backstreet Girl," bumped to the
Flowers compilation released later that year, more closely resembles
such gemlike songs of experience as "Connection," "My Obsession" and
"She Smiled Sweetly." Capper: Mick and Keith's zonked music-hall
"Something Happened to Me Yesterday," the Stones' drollest
odd-track-out ever. [RC]
The Rolling Stones, Flowers
The Stones were cresting so high around 1967 that even this
pieced-together hodgepodge of singles and tracks left off the
U.S. releases of Aftermath and Between the Buttons has a
distinctness of style and invention about it. It re-recycles "Let's
Spend the Night Together"/"Ruby Tuesday," which shouldn't have been on
Between the Buttons to begin with. It disrespects the rightful
owners of 'My Girl" (the Temptations) and the target of "Mother's
Little Helper" (yo mama). As for "Lady Jane," what's that about?
Nevertheless, every track connects. That's more than can be said of
Their Satanic Majesties Request, which is better than its rep
even so. [RC]
The Serpent Power, The Serpent Power
Think of the Serpent Power as the Bay Area's version of the Velvet
Underground. Led by poet David Meltzer, with Meltzer on untutored
post-folk guitar, Meltzer and his wife, Tina, singing his songs, poet
Clark Coolidge clattering behind on drums and the soon-vanished John
Payne fixing a hole on organ, their music was minimalist folk rock
with noise--the climactic, electric banjo augmented "Endless Tunnel"
goes on for 13 minutes. Some songs began as poems, others didn't, but
all feature notable lyrics--some romantic, some gruff, some both. And
all but a few are graced by excellent tunes, none more winsome than
that of the lost classic "Up and Down." [RC]
The Supremes, Diana Ross and the Supremes Greatest Hits
In August 1964, "Where Did Our Love Go" began the Supremes' run of
chart-topping singles. By the end of 1967, they'd scored 10 of
them. In the same timespan, so had the Beatles. Nobody else came
close. All 10 are arrayed on this chart-topping 20-track double-LP
along with well-remembered also-rans like "Nothing but Heartaches" and
"Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart" and filler sure to grow on you
as you down yet another round of upbeat erotic longing. Forlorn more
often than fulfilled, Ross' sexy love is an up either way thanks to
the irresistible Motown rhythm section and a soprano so sweet and
lucid that half a century on it still gives the gift of optimism
against all odds. [RC]
Howard Tate, Get It While You Can
Macon-born and Philadelphia-raised, Howard Tate never went Top 10
even on the soul charts but is remembered along with James Carr as the
great lost soul man. "Ain't Nobody Home" became a B.B. King perennial,
"Look at Granny Run Run" was the best thing to happen to senior sex
till Levitra, and "Get It While You Can" was taken up as a showstopper
by none other than Janis Joplin. The album didn't chart at all. But
Tate had a supernal falsetto shriek to complement his rough howl, and
writer-producer Jerry Ragovoy knew how to milk them both--among other
things, by adding two blues standards to his own sharp songs, which
even for a guy who retired on "Piece of My Heart" got pretty peaky
here. [RC]
The 13th Floor Elevators, Easter Everywhere
Pioneers have it tough everywhere. But these Texas acid eaters paid
especially hard for their zealotry, harassed by local lawmen to the
point that in 1969 singer Roky Erickson went to a mental facility on a
marijuana-possession bust. In 1967, the Elevators were still true
believers and just back from a spell in San Francisco, reflected in
this title's promise of heaven on earth and the sinewy raga guitar all
over the record. The Elevators were punks, too, and the spiritualism
was salted with the rare intensity of Erickson's wolf-man bleating and
the bubbling-lava menace of Tommy Hall's electric-jug blowing. Forty
years later, when Erickson crows, "I've got levitation," you still get
liftoff. [DF]
The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & Nico
The hippies and the marketplace both passed on this NYC classic,
which proved as prophetic stylistically as Sgt. Pepper was
conceptually. Its flat beats, atonal noise, bluesless singing, "urban
decadent" subject matter and bummer vibe proved the wellspring of punk
which, culturally if not stylistically, leads directly to the entire
alt-rock subculture. Great songs here include the disillusioned
"Sunday Morning" and "There She Goes Again" and the jonesing "Heroin"
and "I'm Waiting for the Man." "Venus in Furs" and "The Black Angel's
Death Song" remain subcultural in a rather specialized way. [RC]
Dionne Warwick, Golden Hits/Part One
By 1967, "Alfie" and the like had Warwick on the road to divahood,
but that didn't mean this best-of, marked CIRCA 1962-1964 in gold on
the cover, was perceived as an oldies record. Girl groups weren't
considered quaint yet, and Warwick has never been more tuneful or
charming than when she and Bacharach-David had them to contend
with. The selling points here are Warwick standards like "Walk On By"
and "Don't Make Me Over." But obscurities long vanished from her canon
are only a shade less compelling: the delicate "Any Old Time of Day"
or her proud, quiet cover of the Shirelles' "It's Love That Really
Counts." [RC]
The Who, The Who Sell Out
While making a full meal of their most delectable concept, a
pirate-radio broadcast, the Who's finest album exemplifies how pop
this famously psychedelic year was. The mock jingles--for pimple
cream, deodorant, baked beans--are pop at its grubbiest. The fictional
singles, typified but not necessarily topped by the actual hit "I Can
See for Miles," are pop soaring like the dream of youth it
is--exalted, visionary, even, in their crafty way, psychedelic. All
the rest is English eccentricity. [RC]
The Youngbloods, The Youngbloods
Founded in Boston and named after an early solo album by
singer-bassist Jesse Colin Young, the Youngbloods were a good-time
schizophrenia in New York clubs--a Lovin' Spoonful--style coffee-house
menu of courtly-ballad jangle and garage-band blues racket--when the
original quartet recorded this modestly delightful debut, heavy on the
covers (Jimmy Reed, Fred Neil). But the Youngbloods, who soon
emigrated to the West Coast 1969 (losing guitarist Jerry Corbitt along
the way), already had leaving on their minds. "I guess she's gone to
Frisco-oh-oh/To dance it there," Young sang, dragging out the
namecheck in "Grizzly Bear," a prescient allusion to his band's high
rotation on Fillmore-concert posters. And while the Youngbloods were
late to Dino Valenti's Aquarian standard "Get Together" (Jefferson
Airplane's version came out in August 1966), the hint of last-chance
dread in Young's fluid croon and the spare raga-flavored tangle of the
guitars definitively caught the fragility of the song's--and
1967's--utopian certainty. [DF]
Rolling Stone, September 19, 2017
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