VARIOUS ARTISTS: 25 Rockin’ & Rollin’ Greats

(#117: 2 December 1972, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Rock Around The Clock (Bill Haley)/Shakin’ All Over (Johnny Kidd & the Pirates)/Be-Bop-A-Lula (Gene Vincent)/Wake Up Little Susie (The Everly Brothers)/Long Tall Sally (Little Richard)/The Great Pretender (The Platters)/Surfin’ U.S.A. (The Beach Boys)/Stagger Lee (Lloyd Price)/Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins)/Let’s Have A Party (Wanda Jackson)/It Hurts To Be In Love (Gene Pitney)/Rockin’ Robin (Bobby Day)/Glad All Over (The Dave Clark Five)/Lucille (Little Richard)/Shake Rattle & Roll (Bill Haley)/Sheila (Tommy Roe)/Wipe-Out (The Surfaris)/Lawdy Miss Clawdy (Lloyd Price)/Bird Dog (The Everly Brothers)/Cumberland Gap (Lonnie Donegan)/Remember (Walkin’ In The Sand) (The Shangri-La’s)/Rip It Up (Carl Perkins)/Oh Pretty Woman (Roy Orbison)/Bony Moronie (Ronnie Hawkins)/Please Don’t Touch (Johnny Kidd & the Pirates)

Intended as a companion volume to entry #116 – the bad cop to its predecessor’s good – 1972’s last “new” number one album suggests a wider picture of confused nostalgia; although glam and teenybop were now well established in the singles chart, and the Philly Sound was on the rise, many of the year’s biggest hits were recycled oldies from the fifties or pre/parallel-Beatles sixties. Certainly there was another craving for the simplicities of the old, direct rebellion that the classic rock ‘n’ roll sides and artists appeared still to propose. In World’s End, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Let It Rock boutique (with its attendant jukebox, furnished by castoffs from Ted Carroll’s Rock On stall in Shepherds Bush Market) was doing brisk business, and in August 1972 the hugely successful London Rock and Roll Show played at Wembley Arena; Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley, Little Richard and (topping the bill) Chuck Berry all turned up and were welcomed as heroes. Of these names, only two turn up on this compilation, and none of their two tracks apiece is the original recording.

Despite K-Tel’s primary selling point of Original Hits by Original Artists, the packaging for this album is subtly and cunningly different; “ORIGINAL HITS” and “ORIGINAL STARS” are both emblazoned across the cover, but there is no conjunctival “BY THE” to connect them. Together with the seemingly random nature of the rest of the material selected, it will not do to have this as a definitive response to the world which Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell et al had hitherto inhabited and defined, although at the same time its fished-out-of-the-dreck stance almost makes one want to damn “official” histories; this was probably closer to the chaotic melée of rock history as it stood at the time – listening to it is akin to sitting in somebody’s front room and sifting through their inexplicable collection of oldies (but isn’t everybody’s record collection inexplicable to all bar their owners?). Unsorted dustbin rejects, uncleared drains and cartons, idly dusted shelves, with (as yet) no Greil Marcus or Rhino Records to make their sense of it all.

“Rock Around The Clock” is a predictable off-kicker, but listening to the live versions of this and “Shake” is enough to query how either could have caused so much fuss; this “Clock” is stiff and unswinging, although both guitars and drums make an eleventh-hour sprint towards animation (the drum ending clatters like a sauced-up sarcophagus), and Haley’s giggle (“We’ll be go-oing strong”) suggests another night, another paycheck, keep them happy with memories of what once were. “Woah, that’s all!” he chuckles at the end of “Clock”; you were expecting the next step forward? Whereas the Little Richard selections – in their original form, some of the bloodiest and most apocalyptic yet sheerly happiest of rock ‘n’ roll (no wonder Eric Dolphy found the transition from Richard’s backing band to Mingus’ front line so natural) – these manifestations of “Sally” and “Lucille” are extracted from a long medley, clearly from the early seventies, with most of the roughness and cheek cancelled out by the showbiz house big band, Richard’s own approach more carefully gospel than raucously ripping anything up. Not that he should care: “Ooo mah soul,” he whispers to himself as “Lucille” fades out and into whoever knows what – his hijacking of Dick Cavett’s show was all he needed to do in the seventies to prove that he still counted (all the dead gunslingers who got what they wanted but lost what the original had).

Most of the remaining tracks are the original recordings (despite the copyright dates ascribed to them) but only “Be-Bop-A-Lula” really hurls forward the notion of freed, unalloyed sex and colour which supposedly attracted so many of us to this music in the first place. Vincent clings to his “team”s and “love”s like the last atoms of oxygen available on Earth, continually shivering and shaking as though he cannot believe the war is over and he’s free to fuck; Cliff Gallup’s guitar persuades, teases and injects (although the Western Swing influence still rides high in his playing), fifteen-year-old drummer Dickie “Be Bop” Harrell yells at the end of each verse to let his parents know he’s there and fires machine gun snare fusillades at Vincent’s final quatrain of “my baby love.”

The rest is tributaries and digressions. Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” (a more sophisticated measuring out of C&W and R&B elements) warns merrily not to try it, but the Everly Brothers (who might at one time wanted to be the Louvins, but did they realise how many young men would subsequently want to be them?) know that the game’s a bogey, that if you do not own yourself – if you are subject to small town Americana pseudo-morals, or the power and influence of your parents and your friends (“Susie”), then you know full well that someone’s going to walk right over your blue suede shoes the second you come out of the house (those acoustic guitars, sharp as sharks’ teeth, like the sharks who are going to step on your head, never mind your shoes, the minute you become an adult). But that doesn’t negate the possibility of small triumphs; “Bird Dog” is sneakily triumphant; joker Johnnie will probably end up in the joker’s jailhouse, or, worse, a middle-aged neurotic wretch, just as Phil and Don wrap up their mortgage payments.

“The Great Pretender” is definitely a re-recording, and a bloated and ponderous one at that; Tony Williams’ grief at his societal duplicity is still real (as is his subsequent influence in both subject matter and delivery on Smokey Robinson – his “like a clown”) but now rather hammed up, and the superfluous piano flurries indicate, pace Stan Freberg, that the original minimalism of “clink-clink-clink” was there for a reason. Worse, the syrup-of-figs string arrangement all but drowns the song (and there is audible tonality/pitch disagreement between voices and strings). Better to venture a year forward, to Richard Manuel’s quiet but intense reading of the song on The Band’s Moondog Matinee, or even fifteen years to Freddie Mercury’s end-of-pier-synthesiser version (as with Manuel, the song acts as a premature obituary, Mercury having in 1987 recently tested positive for HIV) or, best of all, a decade forward to Lester Bowie’s loving, adoring dissection and reconstruction of the song (and he doesn’t bother to conceal its ineffable, unreachable core of acid sadness).

Tommy Roe’s “Sheila” is an unapologetic Buddy Holly ripoff (at least in part, since it’s only when the second verse begins that Roe audibly switches to a Holly impression) with a curious attitude towards the object of its desire (“She looks a little nosy”). But following it up with “Wipe-Out” joins some important dots, namely the influence of the fast-paced, treble-heavy Holly/Crickets drum patterns on surf music (although some of Roy Orbison’s Sun sides also predicate surf music more directly, e.g. “Go Go Go”). And out of all this, and the absent Chuck Berry (who at the time of this album’s spell at the top was number one in the UK singles chart with “My Ding-A-Ling”), came the Beach Boys. “If everybody had a notion across the U.S.A.” (and the Sometimes A Great Notion spell of “Goodnight Irene” briefly returns to view) and it’s impossible not to feel good for these young Californians, with their already skilful fusing of soon-to-be-outdated tropes (the Johnny and the Hurricanes organ solo) with eternal truths (the roaring Berry guitar). So much joy, so much life ahead of them...

Some of the diversions here are completely unexpected. Lloyd Price begins his “Stagger Lee” with his own, familiar prelude, before his “down” ushers in the door-kicking drums and band. The old, old story which will eventually pass through Riot and Superfly and then outward again into hip-hop. But this is not quite the familiar version of gambling and violent death; here Stagger and Billy merely argue about a “girlfriend,” make a mutually beneficial deal and agree to get on with each other in future. This is in fact the now extremely rare alternate version of “Stagger Lee” recorded at the behest of Dick Clark and American Bandstand (since Clark was loath to have his teen audience exposed to a performance which downright celebrated gambling and murder). It did come out as the “official” 45 version but the original has prevailed and is what you almost invariably hear on compilations and oldies radio. The odd thing about this reading, however, is how much more committed and urgent the band sounds than they do on the explicit original; the tenor sax dragging itself through two choruses, drums and piano hammering, even the Ray Conniff-style chorus (“Go, Sta-gger Lee!”) sounding as though willing blood to be shed. As with Elvis’ supposedly watered-down “One Night,” what cannot be said accentuates and accelerates the dynamism of what is eventually expressed (Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was recorded at the same session with the same personnel and is pleasing enough, if not a patch on his quietly seductive 1952 original).

The only female journey undertaken on this record says enough in itself; there’s Wanda Jackson, rasping her way through and beefing up Presley’s “Let’s Have A Party,” and half a decade later we encounter (bizarrely) the Shangri-La’s, a group of nice, mild-mannered girls from Queen’s trying very hard to portray themselves as street toughs (in direct contrast to most other girl groups of the period, streetwise and hard-centred but attempting to come across as dainty and sweet). Now the fight that Wanda had in her tongue seems to have evaporated, and we are left with one of Shadow Morton’s oblique (virtually Cassavetes-like) character studies; “Sand” alternating between strident lament, piano and drums falling like axe hammers over Mary Weiss’ “oh no”s, and groundless, ghostly fingersnaps of a deceased world, the seagulls evoking not a beach but the backdrop to Hitchcock’s The Birds.

There is Bobby Day’s “Rockin’ Robin,” presumably present because of the then-recent hit cover by Michael Jackson; the original sounds fuller but less harmonically ingenious than Jackson’s. We get one of the rare piccolo solos in rock and a strange wolf-whistle/rattle coda but it’s hardly the essence of anything. Neither the Pitney nor Orbison selections really belong here; each man assumed the two faces of coping with loss or grief or betrayal, Pitney suffering in clear, loud view, blasting his pain into our ears and hearts, and Orbison the lifelong fatal stoic, heroically standing tall and attempting to remain erect as the world shits upon him. Pitney comes off worse here; he needed to suffer in slow motion and was rarely convincing uptempo. “It Hurts To Be In Love” starts off like a Northern Soul wannabe with its “The In Crowd” drums hijacked by a Del Shannon high keyboard figure and Pitney’s pain is quickly revealed as a dangerous obsession (“KEEPHERTOMYSELF!”), wanting to preserve his Other in pickle rather than run the risk of any further bird dogs queering his trail.

When Pitney was permitted to be happy, he acted bewildered, dazed (“Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”). But the Big O always sounded triumphant when he was let off the hook – the nailbiting payoff of “Running Scared” which may too betray its own hazardous notions of possession, and the slowly-dawning suprise and smile on the singer as the “Pretty Woman” turns around and walks back to him. He expected tomorrow just to be like tonight and last night but that’s not going to happen any more, and no wonder this went to number one in our Beatles-dominated 1964; we know he’s more than earned the right to be happy.

Then there are the other survivors. Carl Perkins makes a surprisingly decent fist of “Rip It Up,” recorded for the 1970 album Boppin’ The Blues with an early manifestation of NRBQ (two of whose number, Steve Ferguson and Terry Adams, would go on to work with Carla Bley – and using Adams’ clavinet as lead instrument here was an astute arrangemental choice). And honorary Canadian Ronnie Hawkins does a gutsy, knowing take on “Bony Moronie,” recorded in Nashville (in 1972) for his Rock & Roll Resurrection album; the Hawks are nowhere to be seen, but he rolls by regardless, virtually willing on the Canadian rock history which he pretty much invented (in all senses). “Hang on to me, brethren!” he remarks as the track fades, and you can hear them doing so.

This leaves a quartet of British tracks. The presence of “Glad All Over,” a great record but not, strictly speaking, a rock ‘n’ roll record, is surprising (especially as canny businessman Dave Clark is normally notoriously reluctant to license DC5 tracks to compilation albums). Moreover, the marked differences in Mike Smith’s vocal performance suggest this to be an alternate take (rather than a re-recording). Still, it is popstrologically my birth song and a remarkable work of sonic art; listening to it now conjures up not so much the Beat Boom (since Clark and producer/engineer Adrian Kerrigan were meticulously careful in their use of studio echo, compression and bass response to make DC5 records sound louder and less immediately dated than their contemporaries) as an early reaction to ska; listen to the carefully layered factors of nearly hymnal organ set against ceaselessly chattering single-note guitar and rasping saxophone and you could be forgiven for thinking this an early manifestation of 2-Tone, in particular The Beat.

Then there are Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, shaking in a more decidedly British fashion than Gene Vincent. Kidd’s vocal dips on the verses of “Shakin’” now remind me of (of all people) Midge Ure (although he only really gets going with the sensuality thing on fadeout) and although the record is skilfully assembled and executed (that unexpected 6/8 drum break midsong, guitarist Mick Green’s careful shepherding along of nascent British rock) it doesn’t have the apocalyptic impact of the subsequent cover by Canada’s Chad Allen and the Expressions (a group who would eventually become The Guess Who; Burton Cummings sings, Randy Bachman rips his guitar to shreds). Likewise, “Please Don’t Touch” is a bit like Kenneth More trying to get a bit saucy, although its more determined dynamics point pretty clearly to the Beatles. Again, Kidd issues some promising growls, too late for the record to have more impact.

And finally, the man who started it all here, Lonnie Donegan, and “Cumberland Gap” still sounds by some distance the most askew, noisy and future-anticipating thing on this record; it starts out as a typical fast-paced steam train skiffle shuffle, but something else possesses Donegan and his group and the pace steps up to beyond the point of hysteria – Denny Wright’s guitar solo and the group’s response to it are unhinged, Donegan screaming and hiccuping throughout, and by the time of the final verse he has gone even beyond music hall capers into unintelligble yelps. Not even in sight of the two-minute marker, it sounds like the ultimate ejection and rejection of everything that came before it; no more cosy “family” routines on variety shows, no more snigger-unworthy novelty numbers – this was blood and sweat and punk twenty years before it happened, Donegan’s whine willing the infant John Lydon to come under its waterfall. Still a future to be had, therefore, and 1973’s entries will demonstrate at some length how some of its brightest pupils handled it.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: 20 All Time Greats Of The 50’s

(#116: 7 October 1972, 8 weeks; 23 December 1972, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Yellow Rose Of Texas (Mitch Miller with his Orchestra and Chorus)/I’ll Never Fall In Love Again (Johnnie Ray)/The Twelfth Of Never (Johnny Mathis)/A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation) (Marty Robbins)/Don’t Take Your Guns To Town (Johnny Cash)/Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (The Four Lads)/Mack The Knife (Louis Armstrong)/Arrivederci, Roma (Vic Damone)/High Noon (Frankie Laine)/Singing The Blues (Guy Mitchell)/Waterloo (Stonewall Jackson)/Wonderful, Wonderful (Johnny Mathis)/Cry (Johnnie Ray)/Young Warm And Wonderful (Tony Bennett)/Heartaches By The Number (Guy Mitchell)/Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera) (Doris Day)/Jezebel (Frankie Laine)/Moments To Remember (The Four Lads)/Goodnight, Irene (Les Paul & Mary Ford)/Tennessee Waltz (Patti Page)

It has been a while, I know, but moving house also means – at least, in our case – moving a rather large record collection, packing the story, unpacking it and rearranging it into a new picture, and such things take time. Still, there are few more delightful and rewarding pleasures than loading the items out of their boxes; in one sense it is comparable to Christmas, in others to retrieving spirits long thought fled (if I have to encourage you to read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for one reason only, even though there are many reasons, then it is to read the section set in Cromer where Kathy finds the cassette that has been missing from her life for a decade, in a street full of charity shops; the mixture of dread, subtle disappointment and suppressed joy involved in such rediscoveries has never been better expressed in literature) – do we still have this? Whatever happened to him or them? What part did these things play in our former lives, and what new part can they still play in our present and future one?

So it took a little while to get back to 20 All Time Greats Of The ‘50s; this was the last entry to which we listened in our old home, and not much revision was required. And yet I continue to wonder (in the sense of “wondrous” rather than not knowing) at the type of person, or people, who would have bought this record with its utilitarian sleeve design and matter-of-fact track listings (for sanity’s sake I have relied on the listings printed on the labels rather than the frequently inaccurate and misspelt one on the album’s rear cover) and kept it at the top of the chart for almost all of the remainder of its year?

For this record means taking things back to the very beginning of the tale, and indeed some time before the tale began; it does make me pause to consider how far, if anywhere, we have come in the sixteen years which the story so far spans. Many preferred, evidently, to stay at the beginning. Ostensibly the record is an example of the logical school of marketing thought which K-Tel would have adopted; we’ve done so well with current or recent hits, why not go right back into the catalogue? A deal was done with CBS and the record appeared with characteristic saturation TV advertising coverage, reaching out once more to that forgotten constituency, people who don’t normally buy records, or stopped buying them regularly some time back, maybe even when Elvis began to come a little too close.

But, on listening, it doesn’t sound like a cynical exercise in repackaging, nor as random an exercise as the track listing might suggest. The record does begin with “Yellow Rose Of Texas,” which track and performer (or mastermind; Miller’s Satanic beard and grin persisted, like an over-luminous mayfly) might properly be said to represent everything the following decade-and-a-half set itself against. I have nothing to add to Lena’s splendid piece on the subject other than to note the steamroller irony of its use in the film Giant, as it plays on the jukebox during the climactic fight scene in the redneck diner where Rock Hudson’s magnate finally sees the error of his racist ways and stands up against the bullying owner; the scene plays as though the beliefs expressed or implied in the song are being swiftly demolished – Hudson loses the fight, but the bigger battle is on its way to being won.

The confident march of “Rose,” however, seems something of a red herring in light of what follows it, since the overall feeling engendered by the album is not one of cosy nostalgia but hard-fought remembrance; there are shadows of doubt, spirals of trouble, to go with the knickerbockering glories. Both Frankie Laine songs, as well as the Johnny Cash one, toy with, or bite, notions of violent death. “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town” is quite different from anything else on the album; delivered slowly and hesitantly with choruses which appear to wander in limbo, time suspended to Promethean or Euclidian levels, as though its singer is willing, wanting, Billy Joe to stay on the farm – the fatality-foreshadowing tick of ride cymbal following the pause after “his mother cried as he walked out” is not immediately set upon, and drums do not enter the chick-a-chick picture until the third verse; Cash’s guitar scratches like an irritated skunk as Billy Joe’s ascent to manhood is immediately, and predictably, followed by instant death. Like Kafka, Cash preferred to play hide and seek with death, and when it finally came calling for him, he received it with a grace almost too searing and grand to qualify as noble.

The Laine catfight opera belters are necessarily less multilayered emotionally, but no less marvellous; “Jezebel”’s arrangement is acrobatic, the singer’s “If ever an angel fellllllll...” answered by a spiralling descent of strings which could have come out of Herrmann’s score for Vertigo, and the four-way perspectival twists generated by acoustic guitar, double bass, percussion and purposely melodramatic choir remain a three-dimensional delight. “High Noon” sees its singer approaching his possible doom with a resignation and openness comparable to Cash in “Hurt”; his own shit is scaring him inside but he will persist and prevail (the Homeric comparisons with Gary Cooper’s sheriff already being understood).

Then there is the tactic of disguising bottomless, wracked pain and grief as jaunty uptempo singalongs. Mitch Miller gave Al Cernik his brand name of “Guy Mitchell” and as a singer he rarely sounded down, although there are still flashes; his final “Whyyyyyyy...” in “Singing The Blues,” and the unsettling air in the superficially cheerful “Heartaches By The Number” that Mitchell is getting off on the pain his cheating Other is causing him, indeed cannot continue to thrive or even survive without it (see, from 2010 alone, Gary Allan’s Get Off On The Pain album, or, more intuitively and directly, Rihanna’s “S&M” and the hardly played “Love The Way You Lie, Part II,” the latter possibly 2010’s most unsettling piece of music).

Or if you were Johnnie Ray, you simply let it out and watched for the after-effects of the explosion. The man who swung the first widely visible hammer at the wall of post-swing era popular singing politesse is represented here by his first and last major hits. “Cry” is a wonder, wherein he lays down every good rule of pop for the next half-century, completely breaking out of the neutralising Horlicks choir and celeste wall (and yes there was doowop and R&B, but as I said, this was the first major gesture that the mainstream noticed, or chose to notice). Observe the cover of his Showcase collection; he is almost inventing 1981.

“I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” – “It’s all over now” – tries for Victory At Sea pseudo-contentment but there are too many emotional holes in Ray’s delivery to make us feel comfortable; the disguised disgrace would eventually be dragged out by Portishead when they sampled and mutilated the song for “Biscuit,” the terrifying pre-coda of 1994’s Dummy with its barely gasped-out tales of mother’s sons leaving the singer sheer (“The shores I seek/Are crimson tastes divine,” “Got hurt a long time ago”). Of all artists, Portishead have the surest grip on the fatal inclination of reviving broken memories; records scraped down to their performers’ fingernails, Beth Gibbons occasionally letting the Janis Joplin buried within her erupt and rip the cut (the Roseland version of “Sour Times”), Geoff Barrow’s turntables creasing like Grandmaster Flymo. This record could have been compiled for them.

The not-so-vague undercurrent of androgyny in Ray’s performances, both onstage and on record, is brought out further by the indeterminate (asexual?) voice of Johnny Mathis, here appearing with two of his earliest hits. He takes “Twelfth Of Never” in a, for him, unusually low register (and I liked the whole tone choral figures at track’s end), whereas “Wonderful, Wonderful,” on the Billboard chart for ten months through 1958-9, suggests the first glimpse of a sunny utopia with its whistling/chorus unisons, but listen how hard Mathis has to struggle to achieve transcendence, how patient he is, steadily working his way up the register like John Surman or Henryk Gorecki, all to celebrate “the glow of your unspoken love.” Given that Mathis eventually came out as gay, this song may be more subversive than originally thought.

Some fit into the sunny chasms of CBS’ non-rock fifties better than others. Tony Bennett’s “Young Warm And Wonderful” has a nice alto flute coda but the singer never really settles into the song’s grain, if its icerink surface would imply any underlying grain (contrast with the unbending magnificence of his “Stranger In Paradise”). Marty Robbins has fun with “A White Sport Coat” (not “Sports” as the King Brothers subsequently covered it) but it’s hardly “They’re Hanging Me Tonight” or even “El Paso.” Satchmo slums his way (“Take it, Satch!” he says to himself, as though to stay awake) through Brecht and Weill a couple of years before Osie Johnson and Bobby Darin’s drastic reworkings; still, as Sidney Finkelstein said in his never-wiser words on Armstrong in Jazz: A People’s Music (originally published in very small numbers in 1948 and demanding immediate reissue), what else was the man to do – play “Gully Low Blues” for the rest of his life and starve, however good the musical results, rather than prove an example to his people?

Canada’s Four Lads – whose 1962 version of “Dem Bones” was mimed to by Alexis Kanner in Fall Out (and don’t tell me that then Observer TV critic Dennis Potter wasn’t watching) – gee up merrily with “Istanbul,” later and fittingly covered by They Might Be Giants as light relief on their 1990 masterpiece Flood, and it’s a lively arrangement, with sustained high female voices balancing out the Lads’ chants, and hitherto invisible big band finish. Their second contribution to this album, however, is markedly different.

The bridge is provided by, of all people, Vic Damone. His “Arrivederci, Roma” is largely agreeable sentimental tourist tat, or would be if there weren’t signs of something deeper and darker; the arrangement floats on water, with repeated triple echo cries of “Roma” heard from the middle distance. A song sung by someone sounding unsure of whether he’ll ever see his beloved, or his beloved city, ever again – there is, remember, a war going on throughout all this – and for those displaced from the mess that was post-war Italy the song carried an easy cargo of emotional luggage.

Then there is “Que Sera, Sera,” and Doris Day. Sweet and singable, but Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much - from which the song gained its popularity – is neither. A dark and unsettled outing, made all the more dark by the film’s unnaturally light exteriors; largely filmed in and around Camden Town, Hitchcock makes the landscape seem as transient and dispersed as the San Francisco of Vertigo. And remember the context in which Day sings the song in the film; her son is being held hostage in the next room to her, and she knows he’s there, and sings the song as a code, barely concealing the tears, trying to deny the song’s easy conclusions and resolutions. I don’t know whether the story of Sly Stone unsuccessfully attempting to persuade Day to do a cameo on his own radical 1973 cover is at all true, but wouldn’t it have been a fitting bookend if it had happened?

But “Moments To Remember.” My friend Mark Sinker speaks of it as being “ambushed by unexpected emotion,” and the astonishing triple coda to this supposedly throwaway album certainly did that to us. As if the Billy MacKenzie falsetto intro weren’t enough, the Four Lads give us an extremely moving account of a world, a life, coming to an end; the song, I gather, was intended to represent a college end-of-term/post-graduation parting of student ways, a swearing-in of lifelong mutual allegiance. The memories come seeping out – “The ballroom prize we almost won,” “Then we tore the goalposts down” – and suddenly I think of the Beach Boys (the nascent pain within “We’ve been having fun all summer long”). Then these words appear, and appear to explain the entire album:

“Though summer turns to winter
And the present disappears
The laughter we were glad to share
Will echo through the years.

When other nights and other days
May find us gone our separate ways
We will have these moments to remember.”

The emotion – complete with spoken passage - is almost too much to bear, and it becomes clear why this record existed and who bought it. In large parts it was “our” parents, the WW2 generation who still survived and thrived in the seventies, wanting a reminder of how things were for them and their lives once; when life was, as they retrospectively saw it, fun, uncomplicated, straightforward, revelatory. Then the cycle of youth renewed itself and suddenly they didn’t understand what was coming; hence the retreat, but hence also the subtle generational feeding – I can well imagine Morrissey’s (and Marr’s) parents owning this record, and Boy George’s parents, and John Lydon’s parents (do you notice the Celtic trend here?) and goodness knows how many others (and I nearly forgot to mention the stompy banjo riff-driven “Tom Dooley” variation “Waterloo” with Jackson’s somewhat out-of-tune vocal – “He lost his pants,” “Now he swings where the little birdies sing” – again, a handclapping, rousing song about a violent death). Pleasant, unspoilt and dreaming, especially the latter...this is what the record’s consumers were seeking.

The album continues its walk towards sleep, but a reasonably blessed one; Les Paul and Mary Ford – these two still undersung artisans, also poised to help invent the second half of the twentieth century – essay Leadbelly (via the Weavers)’s “Goodnight Irene;” Ford’s voices perch like a colony of spent lemmings on the word “dream” and, once more, nothing is straightforward: “Sometimes I had a great notion/To jump in that river and drown” – or, to put it another way, where did you sleep last night (and we’ll be getting back to that question in due course)?

Finally, “Tennessee Waltz,” the first song that the young Leonard Cohen learned to play, and possibly (as with Laine’s “Jezebel”) a re-recording, but no less compelling for all that; Page (with yet more multitracked one-woman chorales) mourns that she’s lost everything worth caring for, and the song eventually hovers on the brink of nothing, crawling to a halt, her voice vanishing amidst the Sargasso sea of the strings, circling like angels. An emotionally exhausting experience, cumulatively, but not one which denies a future (even if it often acknowledges it with a great deal of rue). But the album as a whole sounds like the end of something. But something else would immediately begin, and we will examine the ramifications of that in the next entry.

Rod STEWART: Never A Dull Moment

(#115: 16 September 1972, 2 weeks)

Track listing: True Blue/Lost Paraguayos/Mama You Been On My Mind/Italian Girls/Angel/Interludings/You Wear It Well/I’d Rather Go Blind/Twistin’ The Night Away

He greets us as though sending an annual familial round robin letter, “a year on, a year older, and perhaps a little more well endowed.” He has gone up a little in the world since last we met him, although whether he is happy in it is another question; he is sitting in the midst of a swirling Art Deco home of impossible dimensions, clearly rather the worse for wear on account of the falling-down water. Outside the solitary window – and what are the dimensions of this place? – there is a palm tree, and maybe a beach, but it looks windy, perhaps even hurricane force. Or are the pools the reflections of his own belated tears?

No sign of any of that self-doubt on the multiple inner foldout sleeve, however; there he is, leaning against the goalpost with most of the rest of his makeshift team, his faithful retinue, “Stewarty” with “Woody” and “Laneole” and the others, pretty much all returning from Every Picture (although Ian MacLagan and Kenney Jones, we are informed, “decided to stay in bed”). Elsewhere Stewart is entertaining a huge crowd at a stadium (the words “GOOD EVENING” flash up), interacting with Ronnie Wood, getting everyone going; it’s a family affair, again, and much better than the imposed solitude of “something better.”

He considers his imminent plight on the opening track, “True Blue”; true, we can nod smilingly at his determination never to be a millionaire or own a racehorse or private jet with the hindsight of knowing that he will get to achieve all of these, and more besides; here, however, the beat is righteously pulpy, MacLagan’s juicy Fender Rhodes pulling weights with Jones’ punchy drums (all the Faces are on board for this track only; elsewhere, Micky Waller makes a welcome return to the drumkit) while Ronnie Lane’s bass is extravagantly inventive. Jones offers a cynical triple drum triple in reply to Stewart’s “I’d better get myself back home” (yes, even in 1972, this question has not gone away). After his “Maybe I’ll never, ever decide,” huge purple gulfs for electric piano and bass open up before Wood’s guitar revs up (in response to the first of many “Whoo!”s from Rod) and the track then speeds up. “Gotta get home as soon as I can!” the wayfarer yelps. The track speeds up some more. “Oh yeah, oh yeah!” Straight out and down the track towards the fade, but not necessarily towards “home”; after all, as he says, “Back home I’m considered the fool.”

Indeed, on “Lost Paraguayos,” with the expected delicate acoustic introduction, Stewart seems more interested in escaping the rain, the continuing poverty (“Put another chair on the fire”) and going to South America (“Darling, I hate to tell you, but I think I’m catching a cold” is one of the great opening song lines). But he’s leaving someone behind, and someone with whom he really shouldn’t ought to be, given the references to her “ridiculous age” and the possibility of being incarcerated in a Mexican jail. “You know I wouldn’t tell you no lie, heh heh heh heeeehhh,” sniggers Stewart (and no, I don’t think anyone would get away with this nowadays). He calls for Waller’s drums to fill the picture (“Hurry up, or I’ll get pneumonia!”) and they burst in, Wood (here on bass) inspirational. “No lie, oh yeah!” hiccups Stewart as loping Brotherhood of Breath horns slip into the picture. “Goodbye honey, I know it ain’t funny, WHOOOO!!!” If Freddy Cannon had made Exile On Main Street he might sound like Rod here.

Then the Dylan cover, “Mama You Been On My Mind” (at that point, recorded by Johnny Cash and Joan Baez but not by Dylan himself), sets us back in Brit Flying Burritos land, with careful pedal steel (Gordon Huntley, on loan from Matthews’ Southern Comfort), dovetailing with empathetic “chest piano” (i.e. accordion, credited to someone simply listed as “Brian”) and Spike Heatley’s extraordinary double bass lines as Stewart wonders, over a “Maggie May” medium tempo, where he stands (apart from the “crossroads”); he’s thinking about someone and missing her, he’s too proud or dumb or smashed actually to want her back, or even call her (“Please understand me, I’ve no place, I’m calling you to go”); he avows that he’s not pleading, or pacing the floor, even though the dried juice in his vowels betray that that’s exactly what he’s doing, even if only to himself (“I’m just whispering to myself so I can pretend that I don’t know”) – but now, yet now, he can’t resist that final putdown, looking through her eyes into her mirror; can she really see herself as clearly as he thinks he can? Far more ambiguous and disturbing than its equivalent song on side two, “You Wear It Well” (where he is at least beginning to come to terms with his loss), it’s one of the finest Stewart interpretations, just as long as you can steel yourself to look him straight in his eyes and ask how clear his mind and soul really are.

“Italian Girls” closes up the first side, with its guitar/bass ratatouille riff which springs back throughout the song like a pestering slinky, and Martin Quittenton’s acoustic overlay. The number audibly speeds up. “Aw, take me!” cries Stewart in response to MacLagan’s florid piano rolls. He raunches through some familiar post-Stones tropes (“Stay in seventeen,” “She was tall, thin and tarty/And she drove a Maserati”) and does so hilariously (“Although I must have looked a creep/In my Army surplus jeep,” Oh, nonononoNOOO!!,” “Took me un-DER!”)...but then the song, and its singer, suddenly break down; there is an electric/acoustic guitar interlude, shortly augmented by piano and then by Stewart’s voice. “Get on back there as soon as I can!” he muses. “Take me away!” he shrieks, which then bends down towards a lost whisper; the turnaround in the song from swagger to regret, from muscular self-confidence to an unstable dream world, is truly remarkable. “Wait a minute!” he orders, before Dick Powell’s violin enters the picture, almost subliminally. He whimpers, “She broke my heart” twice (although these are followed by yet another “Whoo!”). The song slows down into mandolin nirvana (Lindisfarne’s Ray Jackson again, uncredited) with Stewart’s shattering triplicate “I miss the girl” and his rolled-away appendix of “so bad.”

With his re-interpretation of Hendrix’s “Angel,” Stewart enters the world of the aqueous on side two; every hint of strut reduced to a confessional. Guitar, organ and glockenspiel feed the melody topline, Speedy Acquaye’s congas creep dramatically into the choruses, and note how Lane’s bass holds and contains the tension over the bridges; but here Stewart is rescued – she comes down from heaven, loves him, promises she’ll be back tomorrow and forever, and sure enough, it happens (one could swim in the rapids of Stewart’s hugely regretful, pre-redemption, third “fly away” in the first chorus).

After a brief Wood acoustic guitar interlude we reach “You Wear It Well.” I have made reserved comments about this song as a single in the past, but, as always, hearing it in its original and intended context brings out its strengths – and its strengths are in its emotional weaknesses. Although it may not have been planned as an intentional sequel to “Maggie May,” that’s how most of the world took it (in Britain, sufficiently so to give Stewart his second UK number one single with the song). Wood’s electric guitar and MacLagan’s organ sond coiled up in the introduction, although both Quittenton’s acoustic and Powell’s violin soon give the song light and space. He’s sitting in Minnesota, it’s a hot afternoon, and he’s writing her a letter. No, don’t get me wrong, “I ain’t begging or losing my head,” although it’s abundantly evident that he’s doing both; he’s thinking about old times and slightly less old fuck-ups; his “A little out of time but I don’t mind” is a nice nod to, and negation of, the sneering of “Out Of Time.” And yet, despite all the do-you-remembers and birthday gowns and tears (those tears, and that’s why he’s not there, anymore), there’s a hurt in the head here, encapsulated by the offbeat drums and seemingly separately pitched organ, bass and voice which we get just before Powell’s solo. “It’s been hard to carry on,” he confesses. Waller’s drums, hammering into his “’Cos I AIN’T! FOR! GETTIN’!,” are like nails on a crucifix. He deprecates his self (“Think of me and try not to laugh”) and reveals unexpected, if belated, tenderness (“You made me feel a millionaire,” “Madame Onassis got nothin’ on you”), but the song breaks down once more; another acoustic/electric guitar break with organ and Stewart’s quatrain of “I love you”s, as though the ink is drying up in his pen, rendered transparent by his tears, followed by a resigned “Oh yeah.” Drums and violin return, and although there is perhaps a bigger subtext to the song – hey, we both wear it well, we both made it out of the sixties alive! – it’s Stewart’s internal, rending sorrow which repeats on our emotions. “After all these years I hope it’s the same address”; the unexpected sadness encased in the realisation that she may never read these words. It fades into a piping uncertainty.

Following that anti-catharsis, the two cover versions which close the record might sound a little offhand, but although Stewart’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” adheres pretty closely to both Etta James and Chicken Shack templates, the performance is different; his empty “...it was over” which ushers in Waller’s funereal drums, his reference to “talking” (how rare in a 1972 number one album!), his low-cast, end-it-all voice. Wood’s guitar comments on his “Cry boy,” and he accents the words “girl” and “child” as though they were polar opposites rather than interchangeables. Doleful horns hover in the middleground, while Stewart’s duopoly of “I was JU-UST!”s sound like a man stripping his soul as though his head were but apple peel.

Finally, Stewart goes back home, to his original inspiration Sam Cooke; his “Twistin’” fades in, glam-stomp style. Wood’s louche guitar solo elicits the thousandth “Whoo!” from the singer, and note how the chorus is held back until the end of the song (although Stewart’s cue to the band is slightly mistimed), as the musical setting and tempo subtly change into foursquare hard rock. Waller’s dustbin drums call up a rabble-rousing climax, before Stewart dives right back into the song and fades out of the record’s thirty-three minutes mirthfully. Dull Moment isn’t as profound a record as Every Picture - there’s no single “Mandolin Wind”-type killer track and the album isn’t as “together” or “coherent” as its predecessor; but maybe that was never its intention. Just a salute, a wave, from Rod to his followers and compatriots; thanks for sticking with us, here’s how it’s going at the moment, how are you all doing, whose round is it anyway? Anything rather than waking up alone on an opulent morning and wondering whether those tears drying against the expensive windowpanes will be sufficient to pretend that there’s not a storm brewing, both outside and inside his mind.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: 20 Fantastic Hits

 

(#114: 12 August 1972, 5 weeks; 30 September 1972, 1 week)

Track listing: Maggie May (Rod Stewart)/One Bad Apple (The Osmonds)/Pushbike Song (The Mixtures)/Brand New Key (Melanie)/Early In The Morning (Vanity Fare)/Coz I Luv You (Slade)/Johnny Reggae (The Piglets)/(Blame It) On The Pony Express (Johnny Johnson & his Bandwagon)/My World (The Bee Gees)/Candida (Dawn)/Beg, Steal Or Borrow (The New Seekers)/La La Means I Love You (The Delfonics)/The Baby (The Hollies)/Puppy Love (Donny Osmond)/Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) (Edison Lighthouse)/I’m Gonna Make You Mine (Lou Christie)/Can’t Let You Go (Barry Ryan)/Beautiful Sunday (Daniel Boone)/What Have They Done To My Song Ma? (Melanie)/Blue Is The Colour (Chelsea Football Team)

Following the success of 20 Dynamic Hits, K-Tel’s would-be rivals were quick to offer competition, and the American-based Arcade company was first off the mark. On the face of it, 20 Fantastic Hits offers overall a better deal, with four number ones (four more than Dynamic) and a few tracks which have some relevance to 1972. As a listening experience, however, it falters badly; Dynamic may have been put together on the turn of a dime but its sequencing does have a dim sense of logic, whereas with the nearly unending broth of blandness offered on Fantastic, the wonder, again, is how glam took so long to happen, given the supposed competition.

It was all to do with licensing, of course, and where K-Tel had enlisted the cooperation and recent back catalogues of EMI and CBS, Arcade relied mainly on hits from the Polydor and Bell labels, with a smattering of offerings from Larry Page’s labels (Page One/Penny Farthing) and one from Mercury. The latter was “Maggie May” which is placed first in sequence – and uncut – as if to shame nearly everything that follows in its wake; this song recurs at least twice more in the course of the seventies, but one thinks, once more, of Ronnie Wood’s comments that these songs (the early Rod classics) were more or less “designed in the pub” and then taken to the studio for a good shakedown.

Next come the Osmonds; “One Bad Apple,” their sole US number one as a group, did no business here and it’s maybe not surprising to see why; as a Jackson 5 wannabe this song hunches down where it should stride, settles for politesse rather than explosions of freshness. And as a Michael Jackson hopeful (“NOOOO!!!”), Donny simply doesn’t cut it. He did much better on “Puppy Love,” the moment Britain capitulated (and also the moment that the family had passed its commercial peak in the States) – his pleas of “Someone help me! Help me PLEEEEEEASE!” are justly celebrated, but the remarkable thing about his vocal performance here is how much it resembles Karen Carpenter (a good deal more oomph, perhaps, but far closer to Karen than the currently overexposed Rumer). Then the Osmonds, as a group, cleaned up in Britain with some great singles (“Crazy Horses,” “Goin’ Home,” the Wilson-esque “Let Me In”) and a baffling and nearly brilliant concept album (The Plan), while Donny took care of the teens, Little Jimmy mopped up the pre-teens and Marie briefly entertained the country and western constituency before teaming up with Donny in an increasingly silly television series; why the duo never made a single out of “I’m A Little Bit Country/I’m A Little Bit Rock And Roll” remains a puzzle.

But “Pushbike Song” really is next to nothing; failing Melbourne beat group the Mixtures had, largely thanks to a 1970 radio ban on major record company product on Australian radio, experienced a brief career revival with a Xerox cover of Mungo Jerry’s “In The Summertime”; the soundalike “Pushbike” followed – an utterly charmless indulgence in the period’s quite uncalled-for boom in twee twenties revivalism which climbed to number two in our charts and stayed there for nearly half a year.

Yet more in the same nagging vein follows with the abominable Melanie. The fact that hers is not the worst version of “Brand New Key” to top anyone’s chart – a US number one, a UK #4 – does not reduce the death ray of Ms Safka’s appalling, migraine-inducing bleat. Worse yet is her original and interminable reading of “What Have They Done To My Song Ma?” (as it is listed on the sleeve, rather than “Look What They’ve Done...”) in which she whinges, in two languages, for several centuries. “It’s like listening to low fat yoghurt singing,” said Lena, and she, as ever, is right. How this buffoon ever conned enough bedsit inhabitants to keep her wretched Candles In The Rain on the album chart for eight months is yet another candidate for an episode of Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries.

It doesn’t get any better; not immediately, anyway. So restricted in choice were Arcade that they had to resort to including two tracks from 1969. Vanity Fare’s “Early In The Morning” is a pierced spitoon of pleomorphic piss, the exception to the general rule that records including harpsichords cannot be less than great, a soft-pop ballad so feeble you just want to pick it up, take it to the vet’s and have it humanely put out of its misery. One does see the point behind the success of “Hitchin’ A Ride,” an altogether superior song and record, but clearly the song’s co-author Mike Leander needed to drag himself closer to the lit window to get back into pop again. Could this really have gone as high as number eight in Britain and number twelve in the States? Were people content with this nullifying Nurofen pill of a pop record?

“Coz I Luv You” tramples all this crap into the ground, and dances proudly on their ashes. The arrival of Noddy Holder & Co. arrives like the most blessed blast of oxygen; at last, here is a pop record with architecture, attraction, cheek, nerve, uncertainty and vividly gaudy colours; building up very carefully from its “Have I The Right?” rhythmic template towards a terrifying but elating mass boot stomp climax, Holder displays all the rancorous vulnerability of Lennon at his best, while Jim Lea’s bass playing is several stops past inspired and his violin is better still, never quite deciding whether to be Dave Swarbrick or atomise into John Cale atonality; it’s the knife-edge that keeps us all hooked. It made number one in a fortnight and still feels like British pop being kicked awake with an electrified cattle prod, and I look forward to returning to Slade in more depth and detail in the very near future.

Skipping smartly past the deliberately daft yet distinctly disturbing bubblegum of “Johnny Reggae” (“He always looks me in the eye when he shoots,” squeals the record’s lead singer, Barbara Kay, whom you may recall ripping up “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” on Top Of The Pops Volume 18, while Johnny Arthey deftly sends up his own “Willesden Sound” string arranging style), the record relapses into hopeful blandness. Poor Johnny Johnson never quite surpassed “Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache,” and although “Pony Express” got him back into the top ten, its Macaulay/Greenaway/Cook confectionery is so fragile, it’s all he can do to keep the song and record afloat – James Brown grunts, howls, purrs; you name it, he tries it, but the song is too feeble to be supported. Taken by cancer at thirty-five, the New Yorker deserved much better.

The Gibb brothers, too, could have done with a better introduction into this tale; “My World” went transatlantic top twenty but sees them in the firmest of ruts, still in 1968 with their Fairchild-compressed big balladry – and this ballad mopes on forever, with the usual daft Gibb attention to lyrical detail (“I’ve written to you nearly every day”). No wonder Arif Mardin needed to save their hides with Mr Natural only a couple of years later. Side one slopes to an anticlimactic end with Dawn’s dreadful “Candida” (Lena’s response: “Cher would have something to say about gypsies!”) and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this side of music represents all the crappy things from the sixties, magnified and polished up, all the name of some elusive, i.e. non-existent, “authenticity.”

Side two offers little in the way of remedy. “Beg, Steal Or Borrow” was Britain’s 1972 Eurovision entry, and like so much else on this record, sounds like the musical interlude from the Morecambe And Wise Show - desperate not to offend anybody, harmless and toothless. What a deliverance, therefore, to come across “La La Means I Love You” – at last, here we have a record constructed with emotion, style and intelligence, a sunny punnet of deceptive strawberry lightness, Thom Bell’s proto-Philly magic approaching its bluest. It’s like a grown man amongst stultified children.

Whereas “The Baby” is just mystifying; not that it isn’t a good song – it was written by Chip Taylor and its sinister musings on “the passion of the spring” would be more intriguing if, say, Bobbie Gentry or Dobie Gray had sung it – but that, with its bongos, sitar-FX and strings, and, above all, its unstable deep lead vocal, it sounds nothing like the Hollies. Allan Clarke had briefly quit to pursue an unsuccessful solo career; in his absence the Swedish Mikael Rickfors was drafted in as lead singer, and abruptly introduced a darkness to the group absent since the departure of Graham Nash. Rickfors stayed for two albums and one tour; it seemed a brave attempt to break with the group’s past but audiences were baffled and/or hostile and Clarke soon returned. “The Baby” represents a modest but intriguing entry in the directory of what-ifs in British pop.

No need to dwell overly on “Love Grows”; its natural, smiling ebullience made it a fine choice for first UK number one of the seventies (it smiles “Here comes the new decade!,” hangs out the bunting, and is the well-mannered British equivalent to “I Want You Back”); Tony Burrows’ grin is both audible and infectious. “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” – the second 1969 track – works well within its limitations, too; Lou Christie was in fairly dire need of a hit, his startling experiments in sixties pop having slightly trailed off, and Tony Romeo duly supplied him with a lifeline, Christie’s joyous falsetto instinctively blends in with the female backing singers on each chorus, and the reputation of the harpsichord in pop is rescued. Still, it didn’t prepare unwary listeners for 1971’s astonishing Paint America Love album; track it down and you’ll believe that Walt Whitman was alive and well and living in Laurel Canyon with a harmonica and encyclopaedic orchestra for company.

These are about the last highlights on the record. Barry Ryan, together with his songwriting twin Paul (in the mid-sixties they were our Bros), had been responsible for some of the most startling records in turn-of-the-decade British pop; “Eloise” apparently helped inspire “Bohemian Rhapsody” and still sounds unreachable, abstruse, bewitching, frightening, while subsequent singles such as “Love Is Love,” “The Hunt,” “Kitsch” and “Red Man” did progressively less business at home but cleaned up on the Continent (Ryan became a superstar in Germany and Holland) and took the “Eloise” template out even further; the debut Barry Ryan Sings Paul Ryan and its eponymous follow-up both sound like an unholy marriage between Lionel Bart and Alban Berg (which, via Ryan’s vocal stylings, would eventually give birth to Meat Loaf). The experiments carried on until well into the seventies, following which Ryan’s other career as a photographer took priority (as it continues to do to this day), but by 1972 he was evidently in need of a hit at home, thus the wholly unremarkable Russ Ballard-authored proto-schaffel rocker “Can’t Let You Go” with only a moderately interested lead vocal and a flatness of production which bunked in at #32 on our chart. All that remains is to document the two contributions of Birmingham’s Daniel Boone; he had the original UK hit version of the Wayne Newton weepie “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” but “Beautiful Sunday,” endlessly played and covered at the time, was his moment; booming bass drum, early seventies British polite optimism, huge in Scotland. He also composed “Blue Is The Colour” for Chelsea’s 1972 League Cup campaign (they made it to the final but were unexpectedly beaten 2-1 by Stoke City) and while Osgood, Bonetti, Hudson and colleagues give it their best shot, and while it still remains an anthem at Stamford Bridge, it’s hardly the most dynamic of football anthems (perhaps it’s my being Scottish, and therefore being spoiled by “Easy, Easy” and “I Have A Dream,” but it lacks a certain chétif) and scarcely an arousing, or even awakening, end to this rather listless collection. For the most part, then, well-behaved middle-of-the-road pop with only a couple of spikes to indicate how rapidly all of this was going to be overturned - "Original Artists" or not.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: 20 Dynamic Hits

(#113: 17 June 1972, 8 weeks)

Track listing: Hold Your Head Up (Argent)/Storm In A Teacup (The Fortunes)/Fireball (Deep Purple)/Butterfly (Danyel Gerard)/When You Get Right Down To It (Ronnie Dyson)/Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight) (Cilla Black)/Witch Queen Of New Orleans (Redbone)/Tonight (The Move)/Say You Don’t Mind (Colin Blunstone)/Softly Whispering I Love You (The Congregation)/Oh Babe What Would You Say (Hurricane Smith)/Black Night (Deep Purple)/Iron Horse (Christie)/Family Affair (Sly & the Family Stone)/Everybody’s Everything (Santana)/Tom-Tom Turnaround (New World)/Rosetta (Fame & Price)/Banner Man (Blue Mink)/Don’t Let It Die (Hurricane Smith)/Go Down Gamblin’ (Blood, Sweat & Tears)

It may well have been hard for the solemner minds of 1972 to accept that the year’s album chart champion was a former Teflon pan salesman from Winnipeg. Philip Kives was the original brain behind K-Tel, which he gradually developed from its feather duster/amplified kitchen knife beginnings to incorporate pop music, or any music that could readily and quickly be identified as popular. Inspired by his success at selling devices directly via television, he applied the same principle to records; 1966’s 25 Great Country Artists Singing Their Original Hits was to most intents and purposes the first TV-marketed album, and the formula – expanded from what a reluctant Kives initially saw as a leftfield one-off venture – proved so workable that it was inevitably expanded outside America. Aided by his cousin Raymond and Australians Don Reedman and Ian Howard, K-Tel commenced its British operations in the early seventies, and 20 Dynamic Hits was its first attempt to repeat its success here. That it worked is an understatement; no album sold more copies in 1972 Britain, and K-Tel, together with its American rival Arcade Records, dominated the top of the album chart for the rest of the year; with one exception (entry #115), these compilations make up the remainder of the TPL 1972 tale.

How did they succeed? Primarily, it was by being so single-minded about the profit motive and not really worrying about aesthetic concerns; these records were not built to last, to be acknowledged Classic Albums, but rather to catch the crucial part of the record-buying public who had hitherto had to settle for the soundalike albums documented throughout the second half of 1971 and who were still unable or unwilling to splash out sizable sums of money for a substantial tranche of hit singles. There was no pretence to K-Tel’s procedurals; 20 Dynamic Hits, as with its many successors, was subject to a brash, in-our-faces TV advertising campaign with loud, excited voiceovers, rushed three-second snippets of the tracks featured and a packaging strategy which was, to put it mildly, utilitarian; gaudy, primary-coloured sleeves with unfeasibly large print, dotted by monochrome circled portraits of the featured artists. The design was intentionally disposable (“Look out for exciting new releases on the K-Tel label!”) and the intent unapologetic; these were, the publicity emphasised, the ORIGINAL HITS by the ORIGINAL STARS (i.e. NOT soundalike session covers), with rights and royalties negotiated directly with the artists and their record companies (the sleeve credits the album as a co-production with EMI and CBS). The albums were available in department stores, newsagents, supermarkets, even electrical goods stores – and they retailed at a canny midprice (since, unlike the budget Top Of The Pops/Hot Hits series, midprice albums were not at this stage excluded from the main album chart).

The novelty was overwhelming, so much so that most consumers didn’t really care that the “hits” featured on the album were for the most part considerably less than “dynamic”; there are three number two hits featured but no number ones, the tracks come almost exclusively from 1971, and indeed two of the tracks did not trouble our singles chart at all. If glam rock was in the ascendant you wouldn’t have known it from here; T Rex, Slade, Elton etc. are conspicuously absent, and the conclusion has to be that K-Tel settled for whatever tracks they could negotiate onto the record. Many tracks be familiar to TPL readers from the 1971 soundalike phase; “Tom-Tom Turnaround” and “Don’t Let It Die,” for instance, turn up for the third time in this tale.

Still, this doesn’t mean that all of the tracks on 20 Dynamic Hits aren’t worth writing about; far from it, since the best thing about the compilation boom is that it allows me to bring people directly into this story who otherwise would have remained outside. In addition, the seeming semi-randomness of the twenty selections here make for a jarring listen; one, for instance, realises that from this picture, British pop music is still mostly (but not wholly) stuck in a rut and America is running (away) to unexpected (and in one case extremely disturbing) places. As with future entries of this kind, I propose to divide it up into digestible sections, artist by artist, or movement by movement, even if only to prove that, although released only as a means of maximising income from songs past their commercial peak (and the income was quite considerable; the record labels got a 16% royalty rate per track), there are always unexpected social and aesthetic truths to be uncovered, or disproved.

The Zombies Diaspora

Thanks to K-Tel, I do get to write about the Zombies themselves at greater length at a later date, but it is worth noting that, even though the band had officially split after Odessey And Oracle, they never quite grew apart. Rod Argent and Chris White, quite apart from their own duties in the group Argent, are all over One Year, Colin Blunstone’s debut album, whether as backing musicians or songwriters or arrangers or producers. Their own “Hold Your Head Up” is a fairly unremarkable would-be rock anthem made interesting by the restless (and characteristically Zombies) bass, Rod Argent’s oscillating keyboards (like a conservatory-trained Eno) and some of the percussion work, especially the cowbell manipulation in the break and the upward acceleration of the drums following the line “Change a thing that you’re doing.”

But One Year is something else entirely. Conceived as a ten-song diary of a year in the life of its singer – July to July – it moves patiently through the mechanisms of a break-up, the hapless feelings of abandonment and loss, then the awkward grope to find the world again, and the final return of love. What gives the record its inner energy – quite apart from the faultlessly controlled voice of Blunstone himself – is its continuing sense of harmonic dissatisfaction. This begins from the moment that the bass descends in unexpected, partly dissonant paths out of the standard rock-out of “She Loves The Way They Love Her,” and towards the remarkable dialogue staged throughout the record between Blunstone and Chris Gunning’s string quartet; Tim Hardin’s oft-covered “Misty Roses” begins as a straightforward bossa nova duet with Alan Crosthwaite’s guitar before the gloomy, suspended entry of the string quartet turns the song into a Bartokian quasi-nightmare. Again, on “Though You Are Far Away,” the simple accompaniment of a solo harp is derailed by the questing strings, now seeming to be ruminating on some of the implications of Beethoven’s late quartets. The more conventional pop songs, such as “Caroline Goodbye” and “Mary Won’t You Warm My Bed,” despite their straighter-edged Tony Visconti string and brass charts, still betray the seeping of desperation; the odd accentuations of the drums, Blunstone’s gasping emphasis on consonants – he is trying to find his way back but it’s not going to be as simple as he thought. John Fiddy’s brass band cushion on “Let Me Come Closer To You” suggests that he’s nearly ready to accept love again.

And then, finally, we get “Say You Don’t Mind,” written by Denny Laine in 1967 for his shortlived Electric String Band (ELO, effectively, five years ahead of schedule), and released twice as a single in its original version without success; here Blunstone turns the song’s desperate mixture of guilt, promise and faith into a performance of remarkable strength and vulnerability. The string quartet “rocks” after a fashion, but the responsibility is all the singer’s – he has spent half an hour, or twelve months, searching for this plateau, wanting love and life back, and now he has it he’s afraid that it will crumble; his “but I’m scared of you going” has a feathery pain to it which Laine doesn’t quite achieve (see also his four-syllable “po-oo-ooh-ool,” his “ha-a-a-ve”). This is something he has snatched back from the jaws of oblivion, such that as the strings dizzingly peak, circling around him like birds, and he reaches that terrible/liberated extended falsetto of “TIIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMEEEEE!!!,” one feels that this is the nirvana which Nick Drake was never quite intended to reach (and vocally and orchestrally there are obvious links with Bryter Layter, although there are also less obvious and arguably deeper links with Scott Walker; One Year is almost like an inversion of ’Til The Band Comes In, Walker’s doleful baritone replaced by Blunstone’s airy alto, everything scored high rather than deep, looking at the sun rather than pining for the moon). As a performance it soars out of the K-Tel grooves; heard in its original context it is cathartic to a level which few other British records of its period could match.

Speaking Of Birmingham...

The second time around for “Tonight” and it doesn’t grip any more firmly than it did the first. Message From The Country remains an untidy final Move album, which is hardly surprising since the group was already more than halfway towards turning into ELO but contractually obliged still to be the Move. Generally its tracks hark more towards Roy Wood’s Wizzard with their back-to-basics rock and multitracked sax smears, although Jeff Lynne is beginning to become a dominant voice (e.g. “The Words Of Aaron” and the title track). There is even a shift towards Zappa/Mothers-style musical expansion in tracks such as “It Wasn’t My Idea To Dance” (which would be explored further on Wizzard’s albums). “Tonight” itself did not form part of the original album, and it still sounds like a throwaway; vocally and musically divided equally between Wood and Lynne, it is nevertheless Lynne’s George Harrison-esque lead guitar which makes the greatest impression (although the closing quickfire “His Latest Flame” quote was almost certainly Wood’s idea). The Move were a great singles band which never quite progressed (if “progressed” is the correct word to use) towards making a great album, but “Tonight” itself was hardly one of their finest singles.

Also Appearing On The British Half Of The Bill

It really is an effort to find much to say about the majority of the British tracks on 20 Dynamic Hits. Most of them are so workaday and ineffectual that even Dale Winton would stifle a crafty yawn. “Storm In A Teacup,” for example; early Lynsey de Paul, a suburban Formica variant on “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” performed with great efficiency by Brumbeat sometime-rans the Fortunes (and sometimes when they weren’t in the charts they really did run; see, for example, their remarkable brace of 1967 singles, “Our Love Has Gone” and “The Idol”), pitter-patters out of one’s mind the second it fades. “Rosetta,” too; Georgie Fame and Alan Price, teaming up temporarily, always on The Two Ronnies with their two grand pianos diagonally facing each other, clearly having a good time with uncomplicated pub rock, but for Britain’s Mose Allison and for someone who was, and is, at his best, Britain’s Randy Newman, this is very thin meat indeed, a romp evidently far more fun to record than it is to hear.

As for Hurricane Smith, both of his major hits remain endearing – and “Don’t Let It Die” at times sounds like the missing link between the late Danny Ross (connoisseurs of vintage British radio comedy will recall him as Alfie Hall in the beyond-bizarre The Clitheroe Kid) and Roger Waters (and we have to remember that this is the man who produced Syd’s Floyd, and indeed went on to contribute half of the trumpets to Kilimanjaro by the Teardrop Explodes); heartfelt yet rather sinister. “Oh Babe,” in contrast, a UK #4 hit and a US #2, was an utterly charming trinket of twenties revivalism, beefed up by Frankie Hardcastle’s rasping tenor sax throughout.

Of “Iron Horse,” Christie’s third, final and least hit (one week at #47), there is almost nothing to say, except that singing “across the great divide” does not make you The Band, and that any advance on “Yellow River” (originally intended for the Tremeloes, but CBS decided to run with Jeff Christie’s own take) was invisible and indeed inconceivable.

Deep Purple

“Fireball” makes a welcome return here (and lends a supplementary premise of 20 Dynamic Hits being an examination of how different musicians fell out of the sixties, and where they landed) and “Black Night,” based on a James Burton lick from Rick Nelson’s cover of “Summertime” which Blackmore must have remembered from his Outlaws days, also appears here; good to hear a still relatively unconstrained Blackmore wig out in his first solo before his more pensive second one. The spirit of Meek continues to pervade both tracks.

The Two Rogers Question

Cook and Greenaway. Tireless songwriters, ever-present hitmakers of the time. And yet, what the hell is going on here?

There is “Something Tells Me,” the theme from Cilla’s then-current TV series which provided her with her last top ten hit, which tries without much success to be the theme from the Mary Tyler Moore Show; a muted climax to a musical career which had more than its share of unexpected delights (including a similarly discursive take on “Misty Roses”). There is the inexplicable “Banner Man” – a top three hit in the Orange Lodge style. There is the positively frightening (look at their picture on the sleeve!) “Softly Whispering” in which a boys’ choir fights with Glasgow’s Brian Keith, ex-of Plastic Penny (“Everything I Am,” top ten in early ’68), attempting to be a No Mean City Levi Stubbs. Apart from explaining with icy clarity why glam had to happen – what the hell is going on here?

Miscellaneous

“Tom-Tom Turnaround,” as previously mentioned, turns around for its third visit, this time in its original, in-tune version, and continues to leave no feelings in this listener other than finger-drumming impatience – were its composers really only eighteen months or so away from “Blockbuster”? Danyel Gerard was one of France’s first authentic rockers, up there with Johnny Hallyday, and “Butterfly” was simultaneously his most atypical and (internationally) his most popular song. The discordant guitar bends halfway through each verse demonstrate where he’d been but the singalong is strictly bier keller standard, even with choir, trumpets, and so forth. Redbone were at least authentic Red Indians and although “Witch Queen” still comes across as Tommy James doing Dr John, it still packs a minor punch, largely through its emphatic door-knocking drums and unstable string/Moog lines and wobbles. Ronnie Dyson probably deserved better in his brief life (he died in 1990, aged just forty) and his cover of the Delfonics’ “When You Get Right Down To It” was much more of a turntable hit on British radio than a hit single as such (it peaked at #34) but he handles Thom Bell’s curves well enough for Bell himself to produce a series of fine proto-Philly singles for Dyson shortly thereafter. Look out for the squelchy water-tap Moog which materialises under the line “Wash away the bad times” and the way in which the choir suddenly invades the song, like marigolds.

The Ones Which Didn’t Chart

Not quite the case with Santana, since Santana III, from which “Everybody’s Everything” is taken, was a substantial hit album here (#6). Nonetheless, in the face of such dithering pitter-patter, it is refreshing to bathe in this furious yet reassuring percussion/brass/organ workout; Carlos himself turns up near the end and the band’s other main guitarist, Neal Schon, prepares to begin his own jazz-rock group – Journey. My favourite Santana album, Caravanserai, came out towards the end of 1972 – and I will be returning to Santana in the very long term – but the track does fine in this (and any) context.

Blood, Sweat and Tears, in contrast, were past their peak; “Go Down Gamblin’”’s parent album, BS&T4, did no business here, and the Tom Jones-style vocal idiosyncrasies of Canada’s own David Clayton-Thomas may continue to grate for some, but this isn’t too bad a track in itself and a pretty strong and florid closer to the album as a whole, even if, for me, Canada’s Lighthouse (featuring the younger Howard Shore) did the whole jazz-soul-fusion thing a whole lot more lightly and a hell of a lot more convincingly.

But One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others...

YOU DON’T KNOW WHO TURNED YOU IN

But it wasn’t anyone in your family. You know what it’s like; Shaun Ryder certainly did when he revisited the scene of the imploding disaster in “Lazyitis” a generation later and a country apart. Sometimes you stick by people, blood being thicker than mud and everything, the pain being louder than that bomb tick of a drum machine. Some grow up good, others want to burn, maybe both themselves and others. But you stand by them when everything else falls apart, and even when it doesn’t.

And here they are, brother and sister (literally; that’s Rose Stone on Fender Rhodes and co-lead vocals), with Bobby Womack’s punching (out the clock) guitar, tick tock DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT’S LIKE?

“Family Affair” was always going to stand out like the reddest of veins on a record like this, but it drives us towards the mucked-up, fucked-up blood which stains this part of our tale like so much else of its time tried to do. Exile you could, and can, take; there is trouble, there is indeciperable code, murky moths of memory, but always that hope, always the rescuing cheek, the shared knowledge of a decade that the Stones had with their fans that this was where, finally, where we were all going to be heading; and we can come out the other end as well.

You don’t feel that with There’s A Riot Goin’ On, although newcomers to the record may point to the stalky lightness of its funk and wonder where the pain is lurking. Even though those of us of more hurtful experience can sense it, can sometimes breathe it – why is he yodelling through “Spaced Cowboy,” and why are we willing him on? Can’t we see that he’s destroying himself – or even his self?

Riot was the USA’s Christmas number one album of 1971, beating out even Led Zeppelin IV; many who didn’t have a stake in what it was suggesting didn’t want to know, tuned out (just as they would do a few months later with its semi-visible twin, Miles’ On The Corner) – hey, why bother us with this pain? It’s so ill-measured, so...impolite.

But the clock ticks all the way through Riot without an alarm setting; this was Sly telling us that everything he’d been telling us over the previous three years was a lie, that it was all coming apart, most of all his self, or even himself, that it was going to be every bastard for themselves from now on; the perception that “we” still have to hang together to change anything, but also the horrific self-realisation that he might not be a part of it, but apart from it. He didn’t have to say anything after Riot and by and large it was as if he didn’t. But who could have said anything after the gauntlet that record threw down? The pregnant, giving-birth wail/cry at the end of “Family Affair” keeps turning up all the way through the album; “Poet” and “(You Caught Me) Smilin’” hammer their own vowels into their crucifix, “Just Like A Baby” and “Brave & Strong” seem to imply that any way out will only turn out to be another drug. “Africa Talks To You ‘The Asphalt Jungle’” has Sly losing himself as comprehensively as the Bowie of Low, but unlike the latter he is actively being chased off his own record by the rest of his group (and whoever else would turn up, including Billy Preston, Miles and Ike Turner), screaming “TIMBERRRRRR!!!!” back at them before the remorseless horseshoe clips of the rhythm cut him off like a scythe. On “Runnin’ Away” he is hardly there; his singers appear to be laughing at him; you fucked up, you come back home – back to what, you dumbass sucker? Finally, a long, draggy, sloping upwards towards the cranium, haul through a more hopeful song of old, now just reduced to an eking out of existence, the crawl on the narrow window ledge; does he have enough energy to jump, or more energy to stay there, and throw society off the thirtieth floor instead?

“Nobody” (except Sly’s core constituency, i.e. the people the events on Riot were more likely to affect, and the scores of black musicians inspired or relighted by its example) wanted to hear this, just as “nobody” wanted to know about Lennon saying fuck the Beatles and the dream is over. Lena reckons that the record is a pretty accurate aural description of what it was like to be staggering through the California of 1971; for myself, I put it next to On The Corner, to Exile, to Escalator, as a stark yet rich portrait of what and how things really are. Think of those unspoken lines of Paul Haines’ near the end of Escalator, the ones about “A new day dawns/You do not want it/Only the humor that stops things from becoming funny.” Riot counts, as almost nothing else on 20 Dynamic Hits does, because we can dress life up in the loudest and flimsiest of colours, and have our fun, but look at those wrinkling corners, look at the only people here who don’t resemble 1972 darts or snooker champions – it’s 1972’s direst warning, and its burial in this least expected of packages perhaps makes it all the more frightening.

The ROLLING STONES: Exile On Main St.

 

(#112: 10 June 1972, 1 week)

Track listing: Rocks Off/Rip This Joint/Shake Your Hips/Casino Boogie/Tumbling Dice/Sweet Virginia/Torn And Frayed/Sweet Black Angel/Loving Cup/Happy/Turd On The Run/Ventilator Blues/I Just Want To See His Face/Let It Loose/All Down The Line/Stop Breaking Down/Shine A Light/Soul Survivor

”Say now baby, I’m the rank outsider.”

One reads so much about the darkness, the near nothingness, that engulfed the recording of Exile that it’s easy to get misled – that is, before the music itself begins to mislead the listener. For such a supposedly grim and dank record, the surprise comes in how light the record sounds, how completely assured and planned are its eighteen struts of bedpole-tipping and aisle-bending. Noticeable too is the sheer zip of the thing; its sixty-seven minutes fly by quickly, it plays like, if not quite a greatest hits collection, then a compilation of B-sides (as others have also previously noted). Hardly any time is wasted; only one track exceeds five minutes and most clock in at considerably less. There is no escaping the feeling that the Stones, contrary to all other reports, knew exactly what they were doing, even if that meant being the Stones better and longer than anybody else.

And that was perhaps their point. Is Exile really the white Riot? A caged crawl along an imaginary window ledge, wondering whether any of it, the fame, the money, has been worth anything, whether it was all an illusion, a schemata to keep the real world out and away from gurgling, self-consuming faces? Sonically there isn’t the uncommon fusing of weightlessness and heaviness that we get through Sly’s most tortured and torturing fifty minutes; Exile is the Stones assessing everything they’d learned in the preceding decade, bottling it up and gushing it out with a oneness (add the “l” for “loneness” if you’re so inclined) that was only theirs.

Is it their best album? Certainly it is their only album, and one of only a very few albums, about which this tale will have to write twice; and yet, outside Stones cognoscenti, who knows more than (if they’re lucky) three or four tracks on it at the most? The definitive portrait of the Stones as a working rock group from which its rhythm section is absent for about half the record. The contradictions are enough to crucify the unwary.

There’s “Rocks Off” for a start, and in my days of compiling tapes for friends to introduce them to a certain strand of rock I would always kick off Side A with this and follow it up with the New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis.” The rock is treble-heavy, and Jagger’s voice swoons and croaks around the song’s fibres (“Your mouth don’t move but I can hear you speak”). He’s lost, can only escape from the pirouetting come rush by dreaming; the city, the world, overwhelms him (“Headed for the overload/Splattered on the dusty road”), and he wishes to be kicked until he can feel pain no more – Keats checks in on Lou Reed’s credit card. Jim Price’s horns shake and shine like the Brotherhood of Breath, Charlie Watts disintegrates the song in its closing moments, subdividing the beat into Tony Williams fractions (though using the snare rather than the ride cymbal).

Maybe there’s a little too much eagerness here to not be construed as forced. “Rip This Joint” is the most furious rock and roll song that could be heard in 1972, so fast and unforgiving that its spits at Pat and Dick, at Alabama and Little Rock, are liable to whizz past the ears too readily (“WAOW YEAHH!!” Jagger exclaims at strategic points). Its pounding is a desperate one; tear those nails out of the coffin that Don McLean built (Bobby Keyes’ tenor is the definition of “ripping”). Yeah, they seem to say, you think we’re finished, you lousy little pseudo-poets? Not for the last time on this record, I think of what might have happened if Funhouse had gone triple platinum and Iggy had decided to go for the stadiums.

And then there’s “Shake Your Hips,” a shake-up of a Slim Harpo song from the time of Aftermath; Jagger does bad, bad things with his echoing purrs, almost willing his prey to be a robot, betraying things about the story of R&B that maybe 1972 R&B wanted to forget; even the knitting needle percussion is sexy, the tenor/bass creaking bedhead unison an invitation to slur up instructions, the whole crawling down to our level, wanting a word in our ear; the fuckness brilliance of not hiding or cleaning up desire. The Stones were still prepared to podie their pants in ’72; the song is almost like a précis of Meltzer’s Gulcher, while mentioning nothing about American football or supermarket prices.

It continues; “Casino Boogie” settles down to accommodate Mick Taylor’s old bluesbreaking ways while it sings about the lights going out, trapdoors vaporising to accommodate the noose, “grotesque music, million dollar sad”, and “Tumbling Dice” (the single, and the one song on Exile that “most people” know) which is just another of Jagger’s love ‘em but why they’re all cheating fucks anyway self-immolating laments which never quite frees itself from its own maze of structural and emotional locks.

If side one of Exile rocks, like the Pequod, then side two is where Exile reaches its lowest depths – and I mean “deep” as in “profound.” Did long-term French villa visitor Gram Parsons play on this sequence? Who can remember (he’s not listed on the credits), but I can’t imagine the spiritualised grace of the sequence being conceived without his influence. “Sweet Virginia” – pretty much about as extreme a difference 1972 could muster from, say, “Virginia Plain” – is a campfire singalong with acoustic guitars, barrelhouse piano, tenor sax, drums and Jagger’s harmonica, all slightly out of step with each other; it is akin to Christian Wolff tackling Folkways. Eventually there’s an emphatic on-beat, there are handclaps, Jagger’s “yeooowwww” on the final chorus being as peaceful and orgasmic a resolution as Molly Bloom’s. “Got to scrape that shit right off your shoes” indeed. “Torn And Frayed” is better still; listen to the way in which the harmonies dissolve into Jim Price’s organ, which hovers in the middle distance, underscored by Al Perkins’ steel guitar, slightly deviated by Nicky Hopkins’ piano, which appears to reach back into 1967 and “We Love You.” But then Keith Richards slides in with an elegant shrug for his brief solo, Jagger suppresses something resembling rage in the “way” of his “steal your heart a-way” before the song moves into Staxville for the fade, Steve Cropper licks and all; it’s impossible to not be touched by the simple belief in their work, as the Rolling Stones, which underpins the song; sure, the admin and the business might be shit most of the time, the drugs will never work, but come back to that guitar and that ripped coat you’ve had since you were nicking neighbours’ milk bottles in Edith Grove. “Sweet Black Angel” was for Angela Davis, with Richard Washington (billed as “Amyl Nitrate”) on marimbas, Jimmy Miller on distant clip-clop Tonto drums, a genteel acoustic shuffle with a purely rhythmic harmonica. The “judge” lines are delivered staccato, like Archie Shepp re-orchestrating Gilbert and Sullivan.

But finally it’s back to love and simple happiness; “Loving Cup” sums up the questing mood of its side with a clarity and truthfulness which are extremely moving. The gospel piano intro gives way to Miller’s dramatic drum entry, and we reach the nub, the core, of Exile; for maybe the first and last time on a Stones record, the revolution comes in the phrase “What a beautiful world.” Redemption, the uplifting of the uprising; we are here and we are fucked but fuck it we are happy and you can’t kill us. Jagger gasps a parched scream, horns blast their way in with ambiguous harmonies, and the mood changes, slowly and subtly, from the spiritual to the carnal (it is the sexual-religious equivalent of the near-unnoticeable transition from West to East that marks the Beach Boys’ “Cabinessence”). So low down are these Stones, yet so high up are they also; they have never sounded so much of either than here.

Did someone mention “Happy”? The second track that some people are most likely to know from Exile, and doesn’t Keith’s voice come across like Neil Young? Horns are strident, Taylor’s guitar rebounds like a safe house pinball machine. “Keep on dancing!” he exclaims as he aims for absurd high notes – and keeps getting them. “Turd On The Run” rolls, so to speak, but Jagger’s momentarily cornered; realising that it might all be for nothing, but where Keith can happily shrug off Lear jets, Jagger obsesses about diamond rings, Vaseline and disease, about throwing the bastard to the sharks, and is he singing to himself? “Ventilator Blues” is driven by sinisterly low-pitched bass, piano and drums, and even more unsettlingly settles for a refrain of “What’cha gonna do about it?” against Richards’ worrying guitar and Hopkins’ grave piano; a recall, conscious or unconscious, of the first hit by the Small Faces (“Don’t forget it!”). This leads without a break into the uncanny “I Just Want To See His Face” in which the Stones, essentially, do John Coltrane. It’s all there; the damaged veins of spiritualism, Miller making like Elvin with his drum accents, Richards’ quivering electric piano, the ghosts of 1964 Impulse! and Blue Note making themselves felt (and simultaneously getting ready for trip hop), the two basses (Bill Plummer on acoustic, Taylor on electric). “It’s all right!” strikes an unexpected Elvis – oh, come on, Crudup – gong.

Spiritual? “Let It Loose” could almost be the Stones’ condensed All Things Must Pass with its slow, Leslie cabinetted guitar, its “Dear Prudence” descents, its hymnal piano; the mood is Harrison and/or Clapton, the search perhaps truer. There ensues a brilliant sunrise of horns and Jagger’s most sheerly passionate vocal on the record. Other voices – among them, Shirley Goodman, Tami Lynn and Dr John – drift in and out; the salvation becomes commensural and as the whole dissolves into an unexpected refraction of the closing moments of side one of What’s Going On?, at least one message is clear; here, with the way we are and the way things are, anybody can be a Rolling Stone. Membership – before the gates subsequently closed again - was as open as that of the Scratch Orchestra.

“All Down The Line” is generic Stones rocking, but a fine example nonetheless, given extra vivacity by Keith McDonald’s androgynous backing vocal which at times threatens to obscure Jagger altogether, and by the horns, which render bebop lines rather than straight lines. And yet, at its centre, that same Anne Boleyn Secondary School sadness: “Won’t you be my little baby for a while?” asks Jagger, over and over, as though grasping for oxygen.

And then we get back to the source of everything (here); “Stop Breaking Down” finds them back with Robert Johnson, back where they began (the sleeve’s “Trad. arr.” credit notwithstanding). And yet this is not quite the old blues; Jagger’s harmonica bleeps out Morse code, the underlying carpet of troubled funk gives a prediction of “Superstition,” although Jagger’s concern here is the personal rather than the political; he’s had it, had more than enough of cheating and stealing and phoniness. Watts rolls over Taylor’s solo, while Richards places a Concorde drone under Taylor’s bottleneck. “Shine A Light” starts a little like “Sour Suite” by the Guess Who but soon moves into unexpected “Let It Be” solemnity (and there, on cue, is Billy Preston and his keyboards). The song alters the quiet and loud; and yet, all the while, there is this weariness, an exhausted plea for the next life: “Come on up, come on up now, come on up now.” Is he thinking of jumping?

(Secret answer: “Never.”)

I’m thinking of a lot of things here, not least My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (for Robert Johnson, read Gil Scott-Heron), where Kanye summons up everything he believes he’s learned over the past decade and lets it leak out over a marathon of self-loathing and occasional life-denying (is it a “masterpiece”? Scrambled-up anti-reportage might be closer), since Exile - or, at least, this version of it – concludes with “Soul Survivor,” the record’s most ostensibly “Rolling Stones” track, with a tiger of a riff which appears to have leapt straight out of the “Gimme Shelter” cage (and the riff then mutates into a predication of Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back”), but continually rising and rising until revolution, and not just of the record, seems more than a distinct probability, even if it comprises revolt against the self (“You’re gonna be the death of me!”), and again, that urge to chase the whale; “I’ll stowaway at sea/You make me mutiny.” The Stones, running away, or being driven, from their home (by the Inland Revenue), holing up at an old Nazi compound with neither food nor heating, and yet theirs is the most conspicuous and gaudy display on anybody’s Main Street. But theirs, in 1972, was maybe still the most unique; the word “concentrated” springs to mind, as if the Stones bunkered down and put everything they knew into its purest use, being the purest they could ever hope to be. And the purity paralleled their peak; where were the Beatles in 1972, where was anybody? Perhaps I can answer that question further as this tale is about to devolve into records by “everybody” and nobody in particular. But here we still are, the Stones say, still untouchable, unreachable, at the top of the mountain and we can’t get down but the loneliness – as in, who else is up here with us? - is also our oxygen. Keep those tears hid out of sight, since you down there at the bottom, all those freaks and antiques on Robert Frank's covers, all you Vietnam mourners, all you juke joint Coke-dippers; you are our mirrors. Look at that title again; not "Street," but "St." Saints? Why not? Everyone needs sympathy.

T. REX: Bolan Boogie

(#111: 20 May 1972, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Get It On/Beltane Walk/The King Of The Mountain Cometh/Jewel/She Was Born To Be My Unicorn/Dove/Woodland Rock/Ride A White Swan/Raw Ramp/Jeepster/Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart/By The Light Of A Magical Moon/Summertime Blues/Hot Love

From the sleeve design – the rear cover is a blurred, silvery shot of Marc in action – I wouldn’t expect that the people at Fly Records gave more than a couple of minutes’ attention towards putting this compilation together. Clearly exploring – and exploiting – the suddenly profitable back catalogue at their disposal, Bolan Boogie is nonetheless a very useful primer for the newer Bolan fans of 1972; as well as a handy summation of his hits to date, it also cunningly traces the route Bolan took towards usurping the Beatles (Ringo directed his Born To Boogie movie and nearly made number one with his Bolan pastiche-tribute “Back Off Boogaloo”); the route, to be specific, from acoustic to electric, from wistful to sensual, and how one didn’t necessarily supplant the other.

In fact Bolan Boogie takes off pretty much from where entry #110 left off, albeit cursorily from the Steve Peregrine Took perspective; “She Was Born To Be My Unicorn” appears as the sole representative of Unicorn, the third Tyrannosaurus Rex album and the last with Took; symbolically, Took’s percussion is now a distant bash – it could almost be a drum machine – while Bolan experiments with his voice and his arrangements; his climactic, smacking “high, high, high, high” suggests an increasing sexuality as a didgeridoo, or possibly a processed ‘cello, drones in the middle distance.

The fourth album, A Beard Of Stars, represented here by three tracks, brought both Mickey Finn and electricity on board and the transition is gradual but unmissable. Its single “By The Light Of A Magical Moon,” is the most immediately memorable of this trio, although Bolan is still working, or clawing his way, towards pop; the hooks are there but the mood remains somewhat shambolic (Bolan even presages Bryan Ferry in his vocal here to a minor extent). The profoundest of the three is “Dawn,” an early indication of how well Bolan would be able to carry off the pop ballad; the song is slow, crouched, low, and is a song of love, of yearning, of need, showing a rare humility and vulnerability in the singer; eventually he has to resolve the song into a winsome wordless alphabet with some markedly George Harrison-esque electric guitar commentary, underscored by a remarkable bass improvisation. “Fist Heart” is an energetic midtempo workout, and even here the listener should marvel at Bolan (and producer Tony Visconti)’s arranging genius; so many different things are going on throughout this track, some close up, others in the far distance, yet all are audible and relevant – a thousand variations of invention, and a fine presage of what was about to come.

1970’s T. Rex album – the group’s first to be credited as such – proved to be the crossover. In “Beltane Walk,” all the wonder present in Electric Warrior is apparent and radiant; Bolan’s extremely careful Estuary English pronunciations, the 45° angle between strings, tambourine and bass, the lovely and unexpected major-to-minor-to-Picardy-third chord changes, and a surprisingly simple message: “Gimme little love from God’s heart,” mutating into “Give us little love from your hearts.” The fusion of Chinese Opera strings and Chuck Berry riffing is past inspired, while Bolan’s voice cracks into throaty duality towards song’s end, his guitar, as Lena remarked, snarling “like this massive mosquito,” leading to a pair of crashing feedback clusters at the close. “Jewel” takes the acoustic Tyrannosaurus template, moving it past its unspoken missing link (“Oh Well” by Fleetwood Mac) towards electrified magic and a prediction of Suede in both Bolan’s vocals (Anderson) and guitar (Butler). The third chorus, however, suddenly explodes into a freeform miasma followed by a splenetic Bolan solo; the song ends rather in the manner of late eighties Sonic Youth.

And then there was the album’s single, the breakthrough smash “Ride A White Swan,” the highway back from the perfumed garden towards Route 66; along with Dave Edmunds’ “I Hear You Knocking,” its defiantly unassuming nature – Finn’s tambourine being the only percussion on the record – was immediately arresting, the lyrics silly enough to entrance younger listeners (including myself) and yet telling enough that their accidental profundities are easy to miss (“In the morning you’ll know all you know – oh”). After the posthumous apocalypse that was “Voodoo Chile,” here was a new start, something that even Lennon could understand and grab onto (“Rock and roll I can understand!”). Note the gently, upwardly undulating string line and Bolan’s Prince/Jackson-anticipating gulps, gasps and scats (the latter will be the unshakable core of T Rex’s pop work). As though to underline the continuity, its B-side was a take on “Summertime Blues” arguably more radical than the Who’s on Live At Leeds since Bolan turns it into a raga, with the intermittent entry of a blast furnace drone. The secondary riff toes a fat line between Duane Eddy and Ravi Shankar, while Finn’s hyperactive bongos sound like Tommy Hall’s jug in the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. The whole is so transformatively compelling that you hardly wonder at the prospect of a kid from Hackney calling his Congressman.

Then in the early spring of 1971 came “Hot Love,” their first number one, and it made the likes of Mungo Jerry sound like the 12th century. The song possesses such grace and glide of line; among its many highlights are the Gene Vincent guitar which leaps out like a friendly pink panther in the instrumental break (as well as its divine counterpart, two “OW!”s – why, hello there, Joan Jett! - and one deliciously stretched “OOOOHH!!,” from Marc), the undoubted stimulation of Bolan’s vibrato…and there was nothing tiresomely macho, and everything divinely androgynous, about lyrics such as: “I’m a labourer of love/In my Persian gloves.”

Those “uh-huhs,” those elemental repeats of “Well she’s my woman of gold/And she’s not very old” are so simple and clearly must have evoked what the Elvis of ’56 must have signified, or begun, in our forebears. Much more than “the new Beatles,” T Rex’s triumph was I think to re-engage the duende of that original Elvis. The long, increasingly ecstatic outro, which lasts nearly as long as the “song” itself, in combination with Visconti’s low-bearing ‘cellos and Flo and Eddie’s wailing sopranino backing vocals – and absolutely crucially, the kind timidity and artful generational placement of “I don’t mean to be bold/Ah, but-ah may I hold your hand?” (what a contrast to something like “Baby Jump”) spelled it out: for those of my generation, this was our “Hey Jude,” and really, even more than officially “starting the Seventies,” T Rex were the first pop group my generation could really call “ours”; it was as their sixties selves had been reincarnated, made anew, refined. The Grinderswitch rolling blues bass was there, as were the guitar references to Tony McPhee of the Groundhogs – but this was not a browning artefact of a recent past. It was a maxi-single, and both of its B-sides are also present here; the daft “Woodland Rock” motorvates like old school fifties bop until Bolan’s lead guitar starts chopping into the scenery like a shark for its solo. Strings do not enter until the end, and despite the “Don’t Be Cruel” quotes, there is still a curious detachment in the group’s performance. “The King Of The Mountain Cometh” plays like the last remnant of the extinct Tyrannosaurus, being largely acoustic and driven by Bolan’s organic, universal sigh-gasp mongrelisation at the end of each chorus, but Visconti is hard at work, too; the strings work up towards a high-pitched atonal screech and numerous other elements – didgeridoo, Jew’s harp, studio chatter – stumble in and out of the mix over the song’s endlessly repeated riff before shuffling into its station, startlingly in the manner of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”

There is no need to reiterate what I wrote about “Get It On” or “Jeepster” in my discussion of Electric Warrior except that here they represent the marvellous culmination of everything towards which Bolan had been working; completely assured, confident and sexy, sounding like little else in the 1971 charts. But there is an urgent need to write about “Raw Ramp,” the five-minute-plus B-side of “Get It On,” and the great lost T Rex track, which opens side two of Bolan Boogie to such astonishing effect. It begins as a stately ballad, very Lennon in its mood. Then, after a meaningful pause, it rocks up and turns practically Beefheartian in its smouldering strut (“Baby, your mouth is like a ghost”), transmogrifying freely towards its subject from “baby” to “woman” and back again (“I’m just crazy ‘bout your breasts!”). “You think you’re a champ,” snarls Bolan,” but you ain’t nothin’ but a RAW RAMP!” Both lead and backing vocals rise and fall like waves of something that is not water; even by Bolan’s own exceptional standards of sensuality, this busts open a few stubbornly closed doors. Bolan breaks into impure vocal abstraction before a second pause ensues – leading to a virtual replica (musically) of the introduction to “Get It On,” although, if the words are anything to go by, the story is that of Bobby Goldsboro’s “Summer (The First Time).” “I got on my knees and begged to the sun/And knew that my manhood had begun,” confesses Bolan before roaring “Electric boogie COME ON!” Fulfilled and complete, he sings, “Embrace your brother/Dance in the mud/Like a Palomino stud!” and the fadeout is exultant, triumphant and – yes – consummated. Record company cash-in or not, Bolan Boogie is an exhilarating listen, and yet, Various Artists compilations aside, marks the point where TPL takes its leave of Marc and T Rex; despite supposed six-figure advance orders, The Slider, the next T Rex album proper (and a severely underrated one), only peaked at #4, and the gentle downward incline of Bolan’s career began as his contemporaries not only caught up with him but also (as this tale will demonstrate when it reaches 1973) drastically outpaced and outran him. At the time of his death in 1977 he was on the verge of a major punk-inspired comeback, and one can only speculate how he would have fared in the age of New Pop and beyond. But, for now – and for many of his fans, for some considerable time thereafter – he had all the answers.