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Notes -
The Top Rock Albums, Part II
172 Stevie Wonder – Hotter Than July (1980)
This was Stevie Wonder’s last great album, the culmination of an incredible string of records starting with 1972’s Music of My Mind, where he was finally freed from Motown’s hit machine apparatus and allowed to branch out artistically. While the album nods in the direction of the musical trends that were prevalent at the time, Wonder’s personal genius overwhelms anything that could date this to 1980. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for the rest of his 1980s output, which shows occasional flashes of the old brilliance but lacks consistency, and is often overwhelmed by contemporary production styles. It also helps that “All I Do”, “Master Blaster”, “Do Like You”, “Lately”, and “Happy Birthday” are stone classics that equal the best material of Wonder’s career.
171 Bloomfield, Kooper & Stills – Super Session (1968)
A rock album that’s recorded like a jazz album, where the co-leaders pick tunes and sidemen and jam for a few sessions, leaving the record company to construct an album (or albums) out of the resulting material. Side 1 has organist Al Kooper paired with guitarist Mike Bloomfield on a series of blues jams. Bloomfield flaked out on the second day of recording, so Stephen Stills replaced him on guitar. The album is an object lesson in how important the effect of an individual musician is. Mike Bloomfield, who came up in Paul Butterfield’s band, is a blues guitarist through and through. When the more folk and country oriented Stills plays material that was originally intended for Bloomfield, the effect is entirely different.
170 The Pretty Things – S.F. Sorrow (1968)
Almost every review of this album mentions that it, and not Tommy was, in fact, the first Rock Opera, and while this is technically true, I won’t do more than mention it here, since it doesn’t really work as a Rock Opera—I’ve never even attempted to follow the story, and the lack of recurring themes makes it sound like a normal album. But what an album. American psychedelia grew out of the San Francisco folk scene and increasingly had a focus on instrumentation and jamming. British psychedelia, on the other hand, grew out of the same Beat Music scene that spawned all the great British Invasion acts, and had an aesthetic that can be summed up as “Kaleidoscope bicycle lollipop cloudy cloud man”. And while examples of great British psych are usually scattered about the brief discographies of minor bands, the Pretty Things distilled the best of the genre into a cohesive album.
169 Aretha Franklin – Lady Soul (1968)
While the Beatles transformed Rock music to an album-based genre as early as 1964, Soul music was still largely singles-based until around 1970. The upshot of this is that, for most classic Soul musicians, it makes more sense to listen to the singles than the albums, which are largely slapped-together without too much thought. Aretha Franklin is the exception. Since her move to Atlantic Records in 1967, her albums had been coherent pieces worthy off individual attention. Lady Soul is notable not just for the hits—though the inclusion of “Chain of Fools” and “(You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman)” would make almost any album worthwhile—but for the care that is given to everything that surrounds it. Soul albums of the era would often pad the running time with unspectacular covers, but here Aretha turns the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” into the soul dirge that you always felt was buried somewhere in there, and “Groovin’” deviates from the Rascals original while retaining the song’s unique vibe.
168 The Meters – Rejuvenation (1974)
The Meters got their start in the late ‘60s playing solid but largely unspectacular Jazz-Funk with a New Orleans twist. In the early ‘70s they began adding vocals to their recordings, and morphed into one of the best and most overlooked Funk bands of the era. While they never leaned into the New Orleans aesthetic full-throttle like Dr. John (who dressed like he was in a parading crewe and infused his work with voodoo imagery), they still infuse the album with plenty of classic ‘Nawlins swagger, while incorporating rock elements and extended jams.
167 Wishbone Ash – Argus (1972)
Wishbone Ash occupies a curious place in the history of Rock music. At the dawn of the ‘70s subgenres hadn’t differentiated themselves yet, and the music was simultaneously leading in a harder direction (exemplified by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple), and a more progressive direction (exemplified by Jethro Tull, Yes, and King Crimson). Yet at the time, it was all just Rock and Roll, and it wasn’t clear where the line would be drawn; the hard rock bands all had progressive tendencies, and Jethro Tull started off as a blues band. Wishbone Ash came from this same scene, but they never really distinguished themselves. Their music was too traditionally blues-based to be progressive but they used complex song structures and just didn’t rock as hard as their counterparts. The result is an album that manages to be unique without seeming unfamiliar.
166 Talking Heads – The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads (1982)
I made a comment earlier about how live albums are usually superfluous, and how that goes double for double live albums. This is another one in the latter category, but it’s rarer still in that the bonus material added in the CD release made it better. The biggest problem with most live releases is that most bands simply aren’t great live, and while the huge productions that Rock concerts had become by the mid-‘70s weren’t bad, coordinating 40 techs and a light show left little room for spontaneity. The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads gets around that problem by presenting material from multiple eras of the band, giving the listener a sense of how the band changed over time, putting an exclamation point on it by including “Psycho Killer” twice, once as part of a 1977 set that absolutely cooks, and again as part of a more sophisticated 1979 set.
165 Psyche Origami – IS Ellipsis (2005)
In the early ‘00s, mainstream rap was in something of a cultural sewer. The music dominated the charts, but it was mostly guys like Ludacris rapping about bangin’ hos and buying expensive wheel rims, all set to irritating, simplistic beats. Oddly enough, the underground rap scene was having something of a golden age, as rappers with any shred of artistic credibility were shut out of the mainstream entirely and thus freed from commercial expectations. Is Ellipsis is the apotheosis of the whole scene—jazz-inspired beats a la A Tribe Called Quest, a vocal style that harkened back to the old school, a degree of dark weirdness that Dangerdoom was incorporating at the time, and no parental advisory label. Of course, no one has ever heard of this album, even among white boy underground rap afficionados, which only adds to the charm.
164 Nick Drake – Bryter Layter (1971)
Nick Drake is best known for the spare, introspective folk of Pink Moon, but only a year prior he was making more upbeat music with full accompaniment—drums, horns, piano, strings, anything. And it still manages to work. The production is full but not overbearing, and the songwriting (and guitar playing) hadn’t yet reached the point where anything other than a solo acoustic performance would be distracting. It’s not that the introspection isn’t there, but the songs are melodic enough that they benefit from fuller arrangements.
163 Aretha Franklin – Spirit in the Dark (1970)
This isn’t Aretha Franklin’s best-known album (it doesn’t contain any staples of oldies radio), but it’s definitely her most personal album. Well, at least it sounds like her most personal album. She was in the midst of a divorce from her husband and manager, and while Aretha was always the consummate professional, giving her all regardless of the material she was provided, here she seems to be infusing the performances with a little extra oomph. Her biggest strength had always been her ability to turn virtually any song into a gospel dirge, and to do it convincingly. Usually, she holds off occasionally for the sake of variety, but here she just lets it fly, and it works for the better.
162 Lynyrd Skynyrd – Street Survivors (1977)
Skynyrd had fallen into a bit of a rut since the departure of lead guitarist Ed King in 1975. 1976’s Gimmie Back My Bullets* was easily the bands worst album thus far, and while Allen Collins was able to take up the slack from a guitar perspective, King’s songwriting was sorely missed. Then the band added Steve Gaines, and everything changed. Not only did he contribute four songs, his guitar added a dimension the band hadn’t had previously. Skynyrd was (mostly) a three guitar band, two leads and one rhythm. The rhythm guitarist was Gary Rossington, who had a blues-influenced style. Allen Collis was also heavily blues influenced, but he played lead with a sort of sloppy abandon that was endearing but had its limitations. Ed King was the polished California guy. They all complemented each other well. When Gaines came in the band got back some of King’s polish but added a level of technical precision that was almost unheard of in Southern Rock, but since he was only one of three guitarists his style complemented the sound without dominating it. He and lead singer Ronnie Van Zandt would tragically die in a plane crash just a few days after this album was released, and the rest of the band would call it quits, but this was one hell of a way to go out.
This is a mostly random and unrelated comment, but any time I run into the name "Aretha Franklin," I'm reminded of how for the longest time, I had thought that her name was "Arethra Franklin" due to a typo in an MP3 file I downloaded from Napster back in the day. Having never run into either "Aretha" or "Arethra" as a name before, I used its similarity to "urethra" as a mnemonic device to remember the name of that singer who sang "Respect." I thought the similarity was pretty weird, but names in general can be pretty weird, so I didn't think much of it until I was corrected some years later.
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