Only a handful of songs have reached number one twice (when recorded by different artists). “Lean on Me,” originally performed by Bill Withers and subsequently performed by Club Nouveau, is one of those exceptional songs. While a chart topping song is often the only standout track on an album, Still Bill by Bill Withers is an outlier in that regard. All of its songs are well-crafted gems.
Produced by Benorce Blackmon, Bill Withers, James Gadson, Melvin Dunlap, and Ray Jackson, Still Bill sold over 500,000 copies in 1972, the year it was released. Containing the singles “Lean on Me” and “Use Me,” Still Bill is so good that really any song could have been a single.
Still Bill excels as a singer/songwriter album, but to not recognize its genius as a funk/soul masterpiece would be a disservice. Generally, when good songs and good players meet in the studio under good direction, the outcome is a good recording. Still Bill obviouslymet all of those conditions. But it also picked up a rare, transcendent quality that most albums lack. Check it out and you’ll hear what I mean.
Not having been too familiar with Bill Withers before listening to Still Bill, what struck me most was Benorce Blackmon’s versatility as a guitar player. On some songs he’s playing straight funk parts, while on others—like “I Don’t Know”—he steps out and plays a charming jazz guitar solo. I find no faults in Still Bill.
The Who makes three appearances in this album exploration. The Who has made magnificent albums, but, so often, compilations cherry pick the best single moments from those albums. An anthology cannot express the width and breadth of an epic like Tommy or Quadrophenia. Who’s Next contains the Greatest Hits staples “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baby O’Riley,” and “Behind Blue Eyes,” while offering a solid host of album cuts. As with My Generation, it’s been easy for me to pass over Who’s Next because its singles are so ambitious.
Produced by The Who and Glyn Johns and released on August 14, 1971, Who’s Next has sold over 3 million copies. While the album works just fine as a traditional album, Who’s Next was culled from the ashes of a concept album that was to be called Lifehouse. Lifehouse was to be a futuristic rock opera and follow up to their highly successful rock opera, Tommy. Townsend’s writing process was, in part, feeding biographic data into nascent computer technology.
The most notable difference between Who’s Next and earlier Who albums is the use of the synthesizer. Townsend intended for the arpeggiated synthesizer parts to be in the foreground on many tracks. The synth offers compelling textures to a spacious and bombastic album. Keith Moon’s drumming challenges all who would subsequently get behind a drum set. Chances are, no drummer will ever approach the drums with such explosive musicality. Daltrey’s vocals on “Behind Blue Eyes” are splendid and Entwistle’s vocal, performance, and writing contributions are significant.
The Who’s Next album cover is as iconic as its music. Entwistle, Townshend, Moon, and Daltrey are standing near a trash pylon, each having just peed on it and each zipping up his fly. Legend has it that the band just happened to be passing by the area and randomly chose the site. Three years prior, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted and featured a dark monolith that eluded explanation. No one knew what it meant. The Who didn’t care what it meant, what with having pissed on a similar monolith.
I love the space and size of the album. It’s one of the first rock albums that sounded huge from the opening notes through the end. The synth parts on “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” hypnotize me every time I hear them. Daltrey gives rock n’roll one of its best vocal howls at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” At one point, someone licensed the song “Bargain” to a car commercial and it ruined the song for me. Whenever I hear it, I see slow motion wheels peeling out in the desert. That’s not a blemish on the album itself, just in how it’s been used.
I’m in the minority of human beings who consider Carlos Santana’s 1999 album Supernatural unappealing. While it sold over 30 million copies worldwide, won just about every Grammy possible, and has a lot of really good songs, there’s something about it that seems like a blatant cash grab. Even though Santana and industry mogul Clive Davis did team up to construct the album that became Supernatural, it outsold everyone’s expectations. It’s one of those sorry/not sorry scenarios. Radio’s welcoming embrace of Supernatural and its subsequent overplaying of Supernatural’s six successful singles deterred me from exploring Carlos Santana’s back catalog for decades. Abraxas, his 1970 album, is one such album and I’m glad I’ve gotten over my issues with Santana’s music.
Released on September 23, 1970 and produced by Fred Catero and Carolos Santana, Abraxas has sold over 5 million copies. Containing remarkable versions of “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va,” originally recorded by Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and Tito Puente, respectively, Abraxas presents a classic sounding, accessible dive into latin-fusion rock.
Upon each listen of Abraxas, what strikes me most is Carlos Santana’s unique guitar tone. He approaches the guitar with sustain and distortion while still being smooth and melodic. Like any guitar great, one only needs to hear two or three notes to know it’s him who’s playing. Greg Rolie offers lead vocals on a handful of songs, but his presence does not detract from Santana’s, who is center stage on each track. Not one, but two percussion players compliment Michael Shrieve’s drumming—the three appear as a massive rhythm machine and give the album a distinct latin vibe.
Abraxas is a piece of the early fusion dialog that emerged in the late 1960‘s and eventually morphed into modern fusion by the 1980s. Fusion is traditionally thought of as the combination of rock and jazz. But with Santana, an unmistakable latin feel runs concurrently with rock and jazz. Latin tone, it seems, is more than just multiple percussion parts—it’s a vibe, a feel, and an instrumental philosophy. Take, for example, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. That album features twice the percussion players as Santana, but it sounds more like music from 50 years in the future than latin fusion.
Abraxas is a welcome addition to my record collection. It has few flaws, if any. Its title intrigues me. Purportedly taken from Hermann Hesse’s Demian, the title refers to a demon from the Gnostic tradition. Abraxas is said to be a deity or demigod who embraces both good and evil and recognizes just one force in the universe. I liked this idea so much that I wrote a short story about it. Any album that can get me to write is a good album in my book.
Pee Wee Herman introduced me to Sly and the Family Stone. During the first third of his 1981 stage show, Pee Wee Herman and Jelly Donuts performed a musical tribute to Sly Stone. If you remember it, Pee Wee’s hilarious and odd comedy special aired on HBO for most of the early 1980s. Pee Wee and the Jelly Donuts wove several Sly Stone songs together and performed them in caricature. As a kid, I remember thinking that the songs were catchy and fun. Fast forward to the late 90s and I picked up a Sly and the Family Stone anthology album that featured most of their singles and hits. As it would turn out, six of the eight tracks that comprise Stand! were also a part of that anthology. And, as it would turn out, many of the six songs on the anthology were cut-down single edits. So, in a lot of ways, I never really heard Stand! until recently, although I have been quite familiar with its songs.
Released on May 3, 1969 and produced by Sly Stone, Stand! sold 500,000 copies in its first year and over three million copies total. It contains the ubiquitous singles “Stand!” and “Everyday People” as well as celebrated deep cuts “You Can Make It If You Try” and “Sing a Simple Song.”
Stand! conveys the progressism of the 1960s. “Stand!” empowers listeners to stand up for what they believe to be right. “Everyday People” expresses the commonality of all people, in spite of color. “Don’t Call Me N*&&$#, Whitey” portrays racial tension felt both then and now.
The legacy of Stand! seems to be its inspired performances. The guitar riff and other elements of “Sing a Simple Song” would go on to be covered or sampled on several dozen occassions. After his groundbreaking Bitches Brew double LP, Miles Davis recorded A Tribute to Jack Johnson, which, at times, sounds inspired by Stand!. The near 14 minute “Sex Machine,” which takes up most of the second side of Stand!, resonates boldly among its shorter adjacent tracks.
I love the energy of Stand!, especially how it captures the band’s live sound. By 1969, rock music had become a staple on various television broadcasts. The few that are preserved on YouTube of Sly and the Family Stone from 1969 are pure gold.
Not far beneath the random silliness of We’re Only in It for the Money, there’s a salient message. As Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention perform their rather zany depictions of 60‘s counterculture, song by song, the sum amounts to a scathing rebuke of the Hippie movement. For Zappa, Hippiedom is complete sham—a tool for advancing self-interest that’s disguised by false community, faux spirituality, and lots and lots of drugs. We’re Only in It for the Money does more within its dense 39 minute romp than most artists accomplish in an entire career. It’s a reminder that Frank Zappa is a genre in and of himself and, in 1968, he made a remarkable album.
Released on March 4, 1968 and produced by Frank Zappa, We’re Only in It for the Money peaked at number 30 on the Billboard 200 album chart. While the album sold a fraction of what Beggar’s Banquet by the Rolling Stones or the White Album by the Beatles sold, We’re Only in It for the Money dazzled critics with its razor sharp wit and insane production conventions. The album opens with an audio pastiche of Zappa’s whispers, variety of sounds, and the repeated phrase “Are you hung up?” Then, the record weaves in and out of several one to three minute songs before winding up to the six minute plus noise suite “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny.”
Controversy is Zappa’s center of gravity. The intended album cover for We’re Only in It for the Money parodied Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in an uncomfortable way. If you hold the Pepper and Money covers side by side (and squint your eyes), you might think the covers are the same. A closer inspection shows Zappa’s subversion of and irreverence for the Beatles. Rather than being dressed in marching band uniforms, the Mothers of Invention are dressed in drag. Like Sgt. Pepper, the big bass drum in the center of the album cover has the title of the album, but here, it implies that the Beatles and their late 60s triptik through the counterculture were “only in it for the money.” Oddly, Jimi Hendrix is actually in the photo, but he is surrounded by so many cardboard cutouts that he looks like a cutout. The record label relegated the intended cover to the inside of the album out of fear of litigation.
Zappa would go on to be a critic’s darling and all out innovator for the entirety of his career. His album Apostrophe would eventually be certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for selling over 500,000 copies. His talent attracted some of the best session/touring musicians imaginable, including guitar phenom Steve Vai, drumming greats Vinnie Colaluta and Terry Bozzio, and singer Ike Willis.
An album like We’re Only in It for the Money is difficult for me to listen to because I revere Sgt. Pepper and don’t take kindly to Zappa’s satire when it’s pointed at an album I love. But, satire aside, We’re Only in It for the Money is creative playground that’s fun to listen to. It lacks the beauty of Sgt. Pepper, and, at times, sounds like a band of Gru’s minions, but no one can colorably call Zappa’s genius into question.
For an album that only sold 30,000 copies during the year it was released, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a bit of an anomaly as influential albums go. When it debuted, The Velvet Underground & Nico was arguably too edgy to garner any airplay. But, as Brian Eno once said, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” In a way, Eno’s observation explains why so many aspects of indie rock can be traced to this very album. From the overused glockenspiel accompaniment heard in contemporary commercials (first heard on “Sunday Morning”) to the use background drones (heard all over the album in the form of John Cale’s viola), all that indie rock would ever become is contained in this single album.
Released on March 12, 1967 and produced by Andy Warhol and Tom Wilson, The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of the first commercial albums to prominently feature graphic and overt references to drug abuse, sadism & masochism, and prostitution. Lyricist and singer Lou Reed was heavily influenced by edgy poets like William S. Buroughs and Raymond Chandler. In this respect, Andy Warhol’s contribution—as the person who paid for the recording sessions—was key. What record label would touch the Velvet Underground with a 10-foot pole? The music was edgy, too. John Cale’s strung his signature viola with guitar and mandolin strings for that never before heard death drone that appears throughout the album.
The Velvet Underground & Nico sounds oddly modern for an album released in 1967. As the Beatles recorded Revolver and Sgt. Pepper with an at-the-time cutting edge 4 track tape machine, The Velvet Underground & Nico likely could not have been recorded with more than 4 tracks. Some studios were transitioning to 8 and 16 track systems in the late 60s, but the low recording cost ($3,000.00) leads me to believe the less-track option was used. Somewhere, a book of some kind reveals this mystery, but I haven’t found the information readily available on the internet.
If you were to trace back the bare bones approach of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago to its source, you’d end up at The Velvet Underground & Nico. The same can be said for just about any indie rock, lo-fi, or art rock recording. The album plays like the antithesis of convention, a giant, well-formed middle finger. The drums aren’t really played as much as hit now and again. The guitars carry much of the rhythm, which is strange because the album grooves well for having no acertainable rhythm section.
I’m embarrased that the first time I heard this album was just a few weeks ago. Lou Reed’s compositions are sharp, poignant, and challenging. Nico’s presence, which was at the insistance of Andy Warhol, is a divisive element in the Velvet Underground canon, but I rather like the tambre she brings to the three songs on which she sings lead. Few albums are both perfect and groundbreaking—this is one of them.
One of Bob Baker’s 151 easy music promotion activities from The Five-Minute Music Marketer is, “Don’t create in isolation. Upload a demo version or early mix of a song you are working on.” Seems like good advice.
This past week, I began mixing a song I wrote last year called “Crashed on Neptune.” Building on the piano centered theme from Semigloss Albatross, I’m attempting to expand that sound to a more realized production. I hesitate to use the term “commercial” because I’m not sure anyone really knows what that means anymore.
Where Semigloss Albatross focused on the song and only the song—most of the record was just me and a piano—this new project is full-bodied. I’m finding that these particular songs lend themselves to a narrative of sounds.
The first few bars of a song are fairly important because they should employ some kind of hook that causes the listener to keep listening. This particular song has a chunky electric guitar in the front that seemed fair enough but begged for something more. I imagined a delay that morphed somehow as it echoed. What I came up with was running the sound through a delay effect and the delay return through a wah-wah pedal plug-in. Pretty cool. Check it out.
“Crashed on Neptune” – IntroI achieved the sound by routing the guitar to an off-time delay, which then hit a wah pedal plug-in.
1966 was a good year for music. Revolver by the Beatles, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan, and Aftermath by the Rolling Stones are just four of the incredible albums released in 1966. When selecting a 1966 album for this project, I found that I had heard just about all of the highly rate albums from that year. One record that had generally favorable reviews I had never heard:1 The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators by the 13th Floor Elevators.
Released on October 17, 1966 and produced by Lelan Rogers, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators is the first known use of the term “psychedelic” in an album title as to describe the music therein. “Psychedelic” means “relating to or denoting drugs (especially LSD) that produce hallucinations and apparent expansion of consciousness.”2
The opening guitar phrase of Psychedelic Sounds rings like a surf rock piece from the 1950s before decending into madness. The triplets on the ride cymbal and the ferociousness of the percussion set the mood for an album unlike anything heard before. The frantic mid-range of the electric jug adds a unique texture to the fray. “You gotta open up your mind and let everything come through,” as Roky Erikson sings in the second song, seems to the the overriding theme of Psychedelic Sounds.
Psychedelic Sounds is one of the first acid rock albums. Acid rock is a sub-genre of music that expresses an interest in taking mind altering drugs and attempts to capture the experience of taking LSD. Acid rock would continue through the late 60s and early 70s as a formidable genre. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, and Iron Butterfly, while offering cleaner masters, are all predated by Psychedelic Sounds. It that way, it ranks as an important album. At times, one can hear sounds that likely influenced The Pixies and early R.E.M.
Psychedelic Sounds, while groundbreaking for historical and cultural purposes, leaves much to be desired in sonic quality. The album could benefit from a remix and re-mastering. In my view, there’s too much high midrange in the guitars and the album is difficult for me to listen to for extended listenings. But still, moments like “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and “Fire Engine” are unstoppable, unforgettable moments that have me tempting fate with repeated listenings, in spite of the harshness. That’s good rock ‘n roll for you.
B-
Year
Featured Album
Other Notable Albums
1966
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators by the 13th Floor Elevators
Revolver by the Beatles Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan Aftermath by the Rolling Stones
1965
My Generation by The Who
Rubber Soul by The Beatles Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan
1964
Kinks by The Kinks
A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles Beatles for Sale by The Beatles
1 This ongoing chart will catalog the albums that I feature in this blog. I include my personal favorite albums under “Other Notable Albums.”
2Psychedelic, New Oxford American Dictionary, Online Ed.
