#0047: Buck Owens - I've Got A Tiger By The Tail [*]

The title does not bode well.  Sure enough, that ol' country bleating kicks in right on cue.  I shouldn't complain.  It's kinda like the Video Nasty outcry of the 80s.  Before VHS certification, people were taking home movies with titles like "Full Frontal Footage Of People Being Murdered With Power Tools" and then complain that they were violent and gory and unsuitable for their children.

Buck Owens is a Country name and I've Got A Tiger By The Tail is a very typical Country title.  It's meant to be dramatic, to express danger or some other intense situation but the image is...pants.  I could find a fancier word but pants does the job.  It's just pants.

The guitar work on Trouble And Me is pretty good and I like how the guitar solo switched from 335 to lap steel (or at least I think that's what they were) and his voice is a lot better than the nasal, hoovering-up-kittens vocal I've been subjected to previously.  

The production is glossier too with a much more rounded sound coming out.  So it's not void of merit even if it's not your preferred genre.  But to me these are songs based on the same two riffs over the same two rhythms telling stories with all the engrossing appeal of one of those over-confident, friendly and exuberant nerds going into intimate detail about the number of error codes defined in the hypertext willy fudge interface version 3.8 specification.

Your level of enthusiasm does not change the content or stop it being so fuck boring that you didn't even notice me use the phrase "willy fudge".  

Oh I dunno.  It's just pants. 

#0046: The Rolling Stones - England's Newest Hit Makers [**]

Okay, look, this isn't a Bob Dylan situation.  I don't hate the Rolling Stones.  I'm just a Beatles guy is all.  It's not like you have to choose.  I know a few people who don't have a preference.  I just genuinely, in general, prefer The Beatles.

That said, we're not really assessing even the Rolling Stones here.  This album is a set of other people's tunes that were possibly already well known before selected for this, the Stones first outing.  Can I Get A Witness was on the Dusty Springfield album I just listened to - and I have to say it was a better version.

It's difficult to separate the band whose original work includes some of the best songs of all time from the covers band on this recording.  The Stones sound is there and these versions are distinctive but it's still very much of a muchness.

I was gonna go with three stars but in all honesty, I don't think I'm ever going to listen to this again.

#0045: Dusty Springfield - A Girl Called Dusty [*****]

I wonder if the Simpsons ever did a gag with her name.  Like if there was a sandstorm or something.   Whatever.  This album blew my mind.

It is replete with real songs.  Each melody is disparate and recognisable.  Each fat, spacious arrangement is unique.  Okay, there has to be a full orchestra involved here.  The piano, for example, makes quite few appearances but when it does its presence is appropriate, necessary.  The backing singers have variety in what they're doing and they do it sparingly.  The strings are rich even when playing in high registers and it all serves to support Springfield's jaw dropping voice and piercing delivery.

There are so many classics on this record too.  I Only Wanna Be With You, You Don't Own Me, Can I Get A Witness, to name but 3.  New ones on me that have become instant favourites are I Wish I'd Never Loved You and He's Got Something.   Each of them with distinct character, both lyrically and melodically.  

Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa made me laugh.  In the Commitments - wow, I really should move that film into my top 5.  I seem to refer to it a lot.  In the beginning at the wedding reception, the band And And And* are playing but we only hear the first few bars and I never knew what it was.  I had assumed it was a hackneyed, worn out load of tits from some crooner like Andy Williams or Perry Como.  Turns out it's an excellent song being hacked to death with a blunt shovel by the gobshite in question. 

"Twenty Golden Greats".  How many times have you heard that expression on TV adverts for somebody's greatest hits collection?  How many times has it actually meant "two or three famous tunes and seventeen tracks of padding"?   With every song this states with simple confidence, "I am a greatest hits album in my own right and I claim my five stars." 

Take 'em, they're yours.

* - For those that want to reminisce or just want to establish what the fuck I'm on about.

JIMMY

What are you called?

OUTSPAN

And And And

JIMMY

And And fookin And?

OUTSPAN

We're thinking about putting an exclamation mark after the second 'And'.

JIMMY

What?

OUTSPAN

You think it should go at the end?

JIMMY

I think it should go up his arse.

#0044: Solomon Burke - Rock & Soul [***]

I first heard the name Solomon Burke when Phil Collins mentioned him at a Genesis gig in the middle of a big medley they'd been steadily adding to as a finale to their show, which included the Solomon Burke co-penned classic Everybody Needs Somebody To Love made infamous by the Blues Brothers.

Other people may have sought out more Solomon Burke to listen to.  I just thought it was cool that my favourite band were doing something from one of my favourite films.

I wish I'd discovered this guy sooner though.  In general I expected something punchier so it was a surprise to find Goodbye Baby, the unlikely opening track, was a country-gospel fusion with Burke's voice bleeding like a wound through the weave.  Cry To Me picks up the pace then it's my favourite track on the album.  Its seductive, urgent but somehow simultaneously lackadaisical groove just makes me start bumping and grinding right here at my desk.

Won't You Give Him offers another change of pace and features an acoustic guitar line that underlines the variety provided by this collection.  It doesn't hold out for long though as over the next few tracks we slip into a rut where the backing singers become overused,  They sound like gospel singers as opposed to a group of soul backing vocalists and that makes the sound a little square for my liking.  One of them is louder than the rest by some margin and either that internal balance in the group or their presence in the general mix becomes off-putting.

We get a break from all the partial lyric repetition in Hard Ain't It Hard, Can't Nobody Love You.  At least it seems that way as these are stronger songs and break what has become the enduring sound of the album.  Just Out Of Reach is also an exception but not in a good way.  It plods along like an old trail song and Burke's emery board voice is quite incongruous in the setting where all that's missing is a guy with two coconut shells.

The final song is yet another ballad but, like so many of these early albums, it is the one they got right.  He'll Have To Go is a haunting and seditious exposition of the love triangle theme.  I've been on both ends of the two-guys-chasing-the-same-girl situation and take it from me, on either foot the boot kinda pinches.  But there is something about this song that makes you forget about the fact this guy is trying to steal another man's girlfriend*.  You just feel the pain of his longing.

If it had more meat in the sound and the backing singers didn't linger like some cheesy vocal group named after an impossibly square sounding bloke like The Kenneth Braithwait Singers, I'd give this four stars.  But it's gonna be three; and mostly because of Cry To Me and He'll Have To Go.





* - If love triangles are your thing I wrote a song called Stolen Girl once you may be interested to hear.  If I ever record it, I'll post a link.

#0043: Jacques Brel - A L'Olympia []

My French isn't good enough to understand the lyrics.  I have never heard of this man and I have no idea what he is singing about.  It's accordion, piano, bass and drums and what sounds like pennywhistle occasionally.  It sounds like the theme music to Twelve Monkeys, which is great if you're watching Twelve Monkeys.  Firstly, it's a real mood setter for the film.  Secondly, it only goes on for a minute or two at its longest.

Oh!  I just caught the words "dans les jardins".  So, something's happening in the gardens, apparently.  Perhaps the Army of the 12 Monkeys has released a deadly virus.  Yet Monsieur Brel remains unharmed.  Is that justice?

C'est trop facile de guarder un mauvais souvenir.  Donc, je doit oublier ces chansons et abandonner M Brel parce que mon -

[It's too easy to keep bad memories.  So I have to forget these songs and forgive Mr Brel because my - ]

Hang on - he just said "les Anglaises".  Twice.  That's "The English", that is.  I did French in school.   Hmmm: references to the English in a French song in the 1960s.  I think he might be being a bit racist, you know.  So, in the spirit of the album and of unity with my fellow Britons, the English, I'm going to indulge in a bit of racial stereotyping.

C'est la guerre.

The crowd in the theatre this was recorded in are going absolutely mental.  I can only assume they're French.  And that the lyrics are amazing.  After a few tracks it does kinda grow on you, but that may well be Stockholm syndrome.  Whatever it is, I can't say I'm terribly comfortable with this strange urge to bath in garlic and onions, remove my trousers and wee in the street.

#0042: The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night [*****]

I breathed a sigh of relief when I realised this was next.  That's all I really need to say to warrant the five stars.  When the idea of hearing something gives you a sense of relief that you can trust what you're about to hear, then it's a five star album.  I've actually listened to this twice.  It's like the CDs I have in the car.  I let them go round a couple of times before I change them over.

What is so great about AHDN?  The opening track has that incredible chord to start things off and it just blasts you with its energy.  The Beatles product is maturing and while this may not be their Thriller, their Brothers In Arms or their Parallel Lines, there's a ton of hits on this and the other songs ooze melodic genius.

I Should Have Known Better, with that wonderful braying harmonica hook is sticking two brazen fingers up to Bob Dylan.  Y'see Bob?  This is what can be done when you're not tone fucking deaf.

The simplicity of the sentiment in I Love Her, Things We Said Today and I'll Be Back steers the songs away from the schmaltzy pap they could so easily have been.

The anger in You Can't Do That, even though it's wildly inappropriate in terms of social values, controlling your partner etc, is just so cheekily delivered that you can't help but sympathise with this very jealous guy.

I'll Be Back is the stand out track for me.  I first heard this as a snippet on the very first Stars On 45 record that came out back in...1981 I think.  I was already very late to the Beatles party.  A couple of my friends at school had already discovered them but it's not a race right?

The song cuts right into me and brings me instantly to the verge of tears.  I was 11 or 12 and I'd fallen in love with a girl.  The fuck I had but for the sake of brevity, let's say that I did actually fall in love with her rather than it being a simulacrum I created in order to feel normal among my peer group.

I would listen to this and it spoke to me of the long-suffering nature of true love.  How peaceful love is in its obstinate persistence.  How void of need for reward or validation its selfless understanding.  I'm very fortunate to have been given that quality of love in my life.  Not at the time.  I was openly ridiculed and persecuted for my pathetic little crush and they tore my fat, bespectacled ass to pieces as only a cluster of poisonous cunty pre-teens can.  But the song has stayed with me and remains unpolluted by their prepubescent vitriol.

#0041: Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - Getz-Gilberto [***]

With a Spanish dude singing over the top it doesn't sound as sickly sweet and cheesy as the previous Stan Getz album on the list.  I think the version of Girl From Ipanema on this is pretty famous.  I've certainly heard it many times.

The latin rhythms in this are soft and understated and Getz sounds like a different player.  Maybe it was the production on the last offering that was the problem.  This is lovely.  I'd shag to it.

#0040: James Brown - Live At The Apollo [**]

Remember Eddie Murphy when he was funny?  "What the fuck is James talking about?"  Listening to this old stuff is like watching the Tony Hancock show clips on comedy nostalgia shows.  It's funny but you wouldn't wanna watch an hour of it.  

Brown attacks his performance with unparalleled exuberance and his vocal prowess is unquestionable.  This recording is kinda choppy and rough though.  The sound of the crowd I have previously praised is too loud in this and overpowers the drums and the bass, which I think aren't being played that hard to be fair.  The horns get a fair shake but without the substance of the rhythm section, it's just a lot of screeching and parping.

I'm gonna give it two stars cuz I believe I would enjoy this if I heard it live or indeed if it was just engineered properly. 

#0039: Charles Mingus - The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady []

Sometimes you just know.  Call it judging a book by the cover if you will but I had a horrible feeling about this album based on the title and the fact it is four very long tracks with very similar names.  It came across like a study in weird for weird's sake.  And guess what?  That's exactly what it is.

Clarinets whining, saxophones suffering in the furthest thing from silence you can imagine with the most harrowing bass and percussion track produce a cacophony unlike anything I've been tortured by since Bitches Brew.

It's like the soundtrack to the worst possible film noir.  

"I should've known something was rotten in the estate of Daneshill when I awoke on a Tuesday with half my face hanging off.  I got out of bed and duct taped it up and then went for a dump.  There were tiny fragments of vinyl all over the bathroom floor.  I leaned down and picked up what looked like a piece of the label at the centre of the record.   It just read 'Ming'.

"Ming".  The only record I own that would have "Ming" on the label is the Flash Gordon soundtrack.  I listen to that occasionally when I'm reminiscing about my school days.  But why would I have smashed up the record?  It had been signed by a Freddie Mercury lookalike at an office party some years ago and would be worth something.

I pondered the clue while I wiped my ass.  After seven dry wipes and even running the toilet paper under the tap to make a sponge, the next wipe still came back with a brown spot but I figured my underwear could take it and decided to call it quits.

I stood up and flushed but the toilet was blocked.  The plunger wasn't helping so I had to bite the bullet and put my hand down there.  I felt around and caught the corner of a piece of cardboard so I grabbed it and pulled it gently out of the pan so as not to spatter myself with my own shit water.  It was pretty badly crumpled and when I straightened it out I could see it was an LP called "The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady" by Charles Mingus.

I tossed it into the bin and put a hand up to my wounded face to sooth the lacerations stinging in the adhesive.  As I did so I noticed little tiny pieces of flesh underneath my nails and everything became clear.  This album must have been so awful I had clawed off my own face.  Then, realising what it had made me do to myself I had smashed the record and tried to flush the sleeve down the toilet.

I got dressed and went into the living room.  My friend Larry was there sitting on the sofa, very matter of factly with his head blown off.  A pump action shotgun was leaning up against the door frame.  Larry couldn't have shot himself and then put the gun there so who had killed my friend Larry?

I walked over to the body.  There was a piece of paper sticking out of his shirt pocket.  I pulled it out and read it.

'1001 albums to choose from and this is the one you bring over?  Fuck you, Larry.'

My handwriting - I guess people should exercise extreme caution when introducing me to new music.

I packed a bag, took all the bills out of Larry's wallet and headed for the emergency room."

#0038: Sam Cooke - Live at the Harlem Square Club [****]

Once again it's the sound of a crowd letting go of their troubles and getting washed away with the tide of the music that makes this recording the vibrant, breathing, sweating picture of an electrifying performance.  They were already warm as you can hear from the ambient noise during the announcement but that doesn't take anything away from what follows.  Sam Cooke just comes out and knocks them silly for 40 minutes.

Every single song drives forward creating momentum for the irresistable rhythms.  Even the classic croonfest that is Bring It On Home To Me, so often milked titless, rolls along inexorably giving you the feeling that, shit, she should be bringing it home to this guy.  He's got something she can bring it home to.

Previous albums have turned me off when the style and chords have been so similar but something about the way these songs are rendered, his raspy, gloom-shattering voice being top of the list of suspects makes this an addictive, mood raising tour de force.

#0037: Phil Spector - A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector [****]

As far as Christmas Albums By Convicted Murderers go, this isn't half bad.  

Jokes aside, contained here you'll find 5 or 6 iconic versions of Christmas songs.  Spector's nigh-on proprietary Wall Of Sound production method is sitting fat, jolly and right at home with these bouncy,good time tunes.  

There is always a certain sadness that comes over me when I hear these tunes - and others in that Now-That's-What-I-Call-Christmas List, a sadness that reflects my own experiences at this time of year.  For all the joy and gluttony in the world, Christmas time is a magnet for heartbreak too.  The Universe is like water in that respect.  It finds a way of balancing itself out.

Is it Darlene Love's rich, samite textured voice that evokes these feelings?  Maybe: I certainly don't get this wistfully reminiscent for Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas.  It's a very special sound and no matter where he is now, or how fucking weird he looks, he gave us this gift and it keeps on giving.

Take care of yourselves this Christmas.  And watch yourself on the booze.  Baby Jesus loves a drama.

#0036: Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin Bob Dylan [*]

I have been dreading this moment.  Anybody reading this who knows me personally will be familiar with my policy regarding Robert Allen Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan (among other things).  Nevertheless, I am going to attempt objectivity.  

Blowing In The Wind and The Girl From The North Country are quite good.   He only wrote the words though, having taken the tunes from elsewhere.  And even the words were mostly lifted direct or else reiterated the tone of the original songs: an old spiritual and a folk song.  

Of Dylan's own work here catalogued, I will say he has a decent guitar technique. Due to his tight-throated straining to stay on a note it is almost irrelevant that the songs are all in a very small group of keys.  I say almost irrelevant because the inexpensive addition of a couple of differently pitched harmonicas and a capo would have provided some relief from his excruciatingly dull pattern of sucking and blowing what little life there was in these songs to begin with. 

There are moments, as in Bob Dylan's Dream, when something genuinely heartfelt and insightful happens.  He still wilfully disregards any kind of meter, leading us to believe that he isn't going for conversational, rambling and quirky but rather he's incapable of form.  There are some nice lyrical ideas in the World War III blues but the guitar pattern is already getting very tired by this point and the ubiquitous harp is there to rescue me from any chance of enjoying it even in the smallest way.

I'll give it one star but only cuz I don't wanna seem churlish.  So, my policy remains unchanged.  Bob Dylan Can Fuck Off.

#0035: The Beatles - With The Beatles [**]

Their first album, Please Please Me did not make it to the list even though the Rolling Stone 500 pegs it 381 places ahead of this at #420.  I'm not saying Rolling Stone are the be-all-and-end-all of album reviews but these first 2 offerings from the Fab Four sit at the extremes of that list and I believe that is noteworthy.

I don't know Please Please Me any better than I do this album so I can't perform a comparison.  Indeed, it's my reaction to With The Beatles on its own merit that I should be cataloguing as I should with all 1001.

It begins well.  I was expecting a tedious a 50s-reminiscent twangathon.  Nice harmonies, boys, but it gets old fast.  The opening track It Won't Be Long surprised me though and with the significant mood change of All I Gotta Do I was settling into the idea that I may have misjudged the mopheaded gods.  All My Loving then swooped in to cement my new found faith and I was starting to feel a slight rush of Beatlemania 50 years after the fact.

The album was apparently recorded in 6 days, a hasty follow up to fan what was already a wildfire of hype. I don't mean to single George Harrison out for criticism but it's Don't Bother Me that prompts the first indignant jolt of disappointment.  Little Child manages to get it back but from then on it all goes a bit flabby and seems like they're playing for time.  Perfectly decent songs in their own right though they may be and popular covers to play live I'm sure they were, should Roll Over Beethoven and Please Mr Postman really be included here?  Another couple of weeks in the studio wouldn't have killed them and in hindsight, songwriters that prolific would surely have come up with the goods.

Thanks to I Wanna Be Your Man and Money, all is not lost as the album limps towards its short even for the period, 33 minutes total elapsed time.  But I can't bring myself to give it even 3 stars.  It was the first record to sell a million copies, but I wouldn't have bought one.  Shame - they're worth a pretty penny these days.

#0034: Ray Price - Night Life []

This is the music the old lady is listening to when the psycho killer sneaks into her apartment and cuts her to pieces.  And it fills me with the urge to do the same thing to Ray Price.  The soft, clippety clop of the trail song rhythm - a terrifying foreboding of Tammy Wynette - underpins the slow wail of a lap steel guitar in mind numbingly hackneyed harmony with itself.  The velvet tone of Ray Price's over polished voice serves up a fat spoonful of sugar to go with that syrup and the horror is complete.

#0033: Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd - Jazz Samba [*]

Well, it's not a misleading title so I'll give it a star for honesty.  Stan Getz and his breathy tenor are responsible for bringing The Girl From Ipanema into our lives (apparently).  Presumably Charlie Byrd's proclivity to Latin styles is what bonded him to Mr Getz on this project or maybe the twanging of his guitar is supposed to put an edge on the otherwise marble surface of Getz's sound.

It's every kind of smooth creep sidling up to an innocent woman drinking alone.  Originator of the cliches though it may be, that doesn't make it any easier to listen to - which is ironic considering this is smack damn in the middle of the easy listening sector of the musical spectrum. 

There's no denying the precision of both players' techniques but it's too perfect.  It's the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl and without that grit, it's just a gob full of phlegm on the half shell.

#0032: Booker T & The MGs - Green Onions [***]

1991.  Or thereabouts.  There was a club just off Mumbles Pier in Swansea called Cinderella's.  When the students and other quasi-miscreants such as myself and my group of friends were done drinking in the Uplands and/or the Mumbles Mile, we'd head for Cinderella's.  A giant laminate dance floor in the middle of a massive club slowly became filled with increasingly wasted people.  The DJ played everything from rock to disco and we lurched from one foot to another, trying to make awkward small talk with any female unfortunate enough find themselves facing us while we nursed our pints of mega diesel.

Mega diesel was Diesel 2.0.  Diesel 1.0 was Snakebite and black, whereas mega diesel was half a pint of Stella with a bottle of Strongbow 1080 thrown in with the obligatory blackcurrant cordial.  Mega diesel was the reason the carpeted areas of Cinders had a distinct purple tinge.  Spillage or spoutage, it really didn't matter.  The end result was the same.  Conversations like this took place the following day.

"Oh man, I got so drunk last night.  I snogged this girl.  All I could taste were her braces."
"You snogged a lamppost, dude."

Herds of people wound up walking the whole 5 miles back to Swansea cuz the Oystermouth cab rank was overrun.

The first time I heard Green Onions, I was on that dance floor with my mates.  The song started and the already crowded floor became an enormous mosh pit.  But it wasn't the kind of thrashing, swirling, jumping and gobbing pits I've seen at various gigs.  This was slow and intimate.  Everybody was hunched up with their elbows tucked in making half fists as they gently bumped into one another, rubbing shoulders in time to the groove.  It was incredible.  I will never forget it.

That's the opening track.  So for me, it's kinda done then.  It's impossible to follow a tune of that significance so poor old Booker T is on a hiding to nothing here.  The other tunes are good but much like Jimmy Smith, it's background stuff.  It's all pretty much in the same ballpark of sound but they nailed it on the first track.  The rest is just a long walk home.

#0031: Ray Charles - Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music [*]

I don't see why this album is included in the list when his previous entry is pretty much the same thing done better.  The swirly female choir is a sickening noise and in conjunction with the god-awful middle-of-an-extremely-dull-road strings just makes me wanna reach for the Andrews salts.

Why do they think this is important?  Apparently, it's because nobody had mixed these styles before.  He shouldn't have bothered.

#0030: Bill Evans - Sunday at the Village Vanguard [*]

The later you go with jazz, the more esoteric and self-involved it becomes.  This is a bit of a specialist offering featuring the double bass on the opening track.  If that doesn't tell you enough, maybe I should point out this band is piano, bass and drums only.  The pianist is Bill Evans, the man responsible for the keys on the 58 Sessions and Kind of Blue but that only paves the way for disappointment.

He never really takes the lead and plays an actual solo.  They never seem to play a head and get you used to a tune so you can appreciate the gymnastics they do with the progression during the breaks.  And the bass is just too loud in the mix.  All the time.  

I was really looking forward to this one as well.  What a let down.

It's kind of a petulant album, now that I think about it.  It's defiantly discordant and arrogantly arrhythmic.  The listening elite will nod and grimace in that pretentious way but what if Bill and the boys are punishing them too?  Maybe it's anti-jazz or maybe it's genuinely so far up its own arse it's in danger of causing a paradox.  Either way, it's no fun to listen to.

There's a reason they make jokes about the bass solo and this could well be where all that started.

#0029: Muddy Waters - At Newport [***]

Like the jazz albums recorded in this way, it is the ambient crowd noise that really makes it gripping listening.  If you compare the audience sound with any live album from the 70s and beyond, there is a certain sheen to it as if the producer has enhanced the noise to give the impression the people are going more crazy for it.  Granted, there's a lot more screaming and cheering in those later recordings but for some reason it feels to me as if these gig-goers pre-Beatles were having a better time.  Perhaps it's because this was a time when the hood of repression was being drawn back off the face of society.  What we're hearing isn't just the sound of people enthusiastic about the artist performing but of people being released from the multifarious torments of their daily lives by the Blues: this simple confined construct that somehow offers endless possibilities.

I don't go to blues nights and I'm not a particular fan of the style in general.  Perhaps that's because I haven't listened to very much that's good.  When something has a simple structure it becomes very easy to do badly. That said, I do ask a for a bit more from my progressions than the standard I, IV and V the vast majority of blues tunes are built on.  But my main objection to blues bands is the mix.  People don't leave enough space and you can never hear the fucking words cuz the guitar, bass and drums are all giving it way too large.

Muddy Waters, on the other hand, shows us here how it is to be done.  Clear vocals, plenty of space and a variety of rhythms are employed, which when set against the background of a bunch of people clearly having a wild time makes for a fun and interesting listen.  Not my bag, but a nice place to visit.

#0028: Jimmy Smith - Back At The Chicken Shack [***]

As with Miles Davis Birth Of The Cool, one of the tracks on this album was also on the Best of Blue Note CD that old girlfriend got me.  So this one started with something familiar, which does give it a head start.  Jimmy Smith has a distinctive organ style and I like the mellow, walking blues style.  It's not really attention grabbing stuff though.  It's background music. It's the kind of cool, laid back, widdly fare that can make you look sophisticated if you have it playing when you have people round.  

I don't really have much else to say about it other than I think Jimmy Smith may have died recently.  Kinda wish he'd shown off a bit more.

#0027: The Everly Brothers - A Date With The Everly Brothers [**]

Ah what you gonna do, it's the Everly Brothers?

I tell you what you're gonna do.  You're gonna close your eyes and try to forget how much the harmonies remind you of the Louvin Brothers and wait patiently for Kathy's Clown.  It's the last track by the way and even though you've just listened to an album full of songs repeating the same formula, it still stands out as the one they got right.  Kind of like LSD.  It took Albert Hoffman 25 syntheses to get it right.  These guys took only 12 attempts to get one song right but in fairness there wasn't as much giggling or as many colours.  A date with the Everly Brothers?  It's was no acid trip and I certainly didn't feel like putting out at the end of it.

#0026: Miriam Makeba [**]

There's a track on here called Mbube.  It is unmistakably the reason The Lion Sleeps Tonight exists and by extension one of the few low points in the Friends story arc.

Worthy of ridicule though those things are, it would be an unwarranted slur to slag this album.  It is not something I would choose to put on to entertain myself but it is bursting with personality and authenticity.  When Paul Simon was running out of ideas, he turned to the indigenous music of Africa to rekindle the flame of his creativity.

This woman had suffered a great deal - apartheid being the tip of the iceberg - before she died of a heart attack in 2008.  She had a phenomenal voice; powerful but non-invasive  Having read the briefest of synopses of her life, I can hear that voice carrying the weight of those experiences, expressing them and overcoming them.

I guess the difference between this and some other equally beleaguered performers is that she just doesn't sound as needy as they do.  I'm glad to have heard this but it's not for me.

Interestingly, this features a version of House Of The Rising Sun, a song Joan Baez also included on her album.  I'll take this over that any day of the week.

#0025: Elvis Presley - Elvis Is Back [*]

When did Elvis really lose it?  Was it the later years in Vegas?  Or was it when he came back from the Army and trundled out this crock of shit?  There is no evidence of the vivacity we saw in the 50s.  The backing vocals do their best to fill gaps in his lacklustre mewling but it's a lost cause.  The songs are just not good enough.

He bought himself a nice reputation in the army and came back a hero, a smart way of ensuring this record would do well.  I'm not going to change any minds about this overrated, flaccid demigod and I don't need to flex my foil to whip up a handful of insults to go with those I've already dispensed.

It sucks.  You may disagree.  Let's move on.

#0024: Joan Baez [*]

And we're into the 60's.  Phew.

Okay, let's get this in perspective.  It's another Commitments reference I'm afraid.  A girl, a really odd looking alternative type shows up at Jimmy Rabbite's door and he asks, "Who are your influences?"  She tells him, "Joan Baez".  He slams the door.

It was funny.  But the rudeness of his actions need not apply to his opinion of Joan Baez or any of the other artists who weren't the right answer.  They just weren't soul artists and that was the kind of band he was trying to form.

Listening to this, I get the joke all over again.  It's soft, shrill, acoustic folk, not unlike Joni Mitchell's output years later.  I've heard of her just never heard anything I consciously knew was her.  Some of it does sound familiar though.  I'm sure I've heard this woman on film soundtracks.  It's definitely not soul, though.

I could put up with this if it was on quietly in the background while I was indulging my hippy side.  And by that I mean talking cosmic bollocks to crack on to some new age chick.  But that's about the extent of its appeal to me.  After a few songs that voice, high quality, controlled and earnest tho it is, that voice starts inserting razor blades between my vertebrae.  A glass has a shatter pitch and so does my spine.

Still eight tracks to go though.  No wonder they smoke weed when they listen to this stuff.  You need something to take the edge off.  Ironically it also slows time down.  It's a cleft stick all right.

#0023: Dave Brubeck - Time Out [****]

This is a jazz album for people who say they don't like jazz.  The arrangements are very carefully planned - or they seem to be.  You can hear and follow the tunes in all of these instrumental pieces.  After a while you could even sing a long to them.

Probably his most famous tune, Take Five is on this album but it doesn't really stick out as the only decent track, beguiling buyers to purchase the album like the deceitful Vogue on Madonna's catastrophic soundtrack I'm Breathless.  No, every track has merit and its own personality.

Perhaps its secret is Brubeck's trademark juxtaposition of rhythm and unusual time signatures.  They keep you on your toes so even if his harmonic choices grow a little old there's still some mileage in his percussive imagination.

#0022: Marty Robbins - Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs [*]

I get how music can make you question things: social values, the meaning of life, whether you were a selfish, meanie to your ex-girlfriend or whether she was just a duplicitous whore. The question raised in my mind by this album is "Why?"  More specifically, why is this an album I must hear before I die?  Did this guy really gun a man down in some obscure town in the Old West and then write a song about it?  That would be interesting.  It'd be a pretty stupid move for a popular singer to confess his crime to a comparatively large audience.  But it would at least makes these stories interesting.

Yessirreee bub it's another country album.  This one's got more than 2 parts to its harmonies and the guitar playing has a bit more finesse to it but it's still whiny old toss.  I wouldn't normally judge.  I'm sure the people of the time welcomed this kind of noise to drown out the bedlam of those moonshine voices in their heads.
Each to his own.  But songs and/or a sound important enough to be required listening more than a half a century later?  I don't think so.

#0021: Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis [****]

I do believe this makes him the first artist to appear twice in the list.  And fair enough.  If Sarah Vaughan's album is a sure fire way to get lucky then this album should come with a money off voucher for the morning after pill.

You put this on and the lights dim inside your head.  The sweet stupor of inhibition-lowering alcohol washes over you without imbibing a drop.  I don't want to call it smooth cuz that'll put the aural image of Kenny G in your head and this is a far cry from the synthetic nature of those productions.

This glides.

From the opening bars of what is almost certainly the album's most well known track - So What - to the end of...the last one (depending on which issue you're playing), it is seductive and deliciously relaxing.  The laid-back, who-gives-a-fuck message of track 1 permeates the mood throughout.

This is another of the albums that I already knew very well, by the way.  I've fallen asleep listening to it many times but its soporific qualities are in this case a positive.  Yep, I've fallen asleep to this many times.  I didn't say I was alone or what I was doing beforehand ;-)

#0020: Ray Charles - The Genius Of Ray Charles [***]

This album is, according to the reading I just did a few seconds ago, a breakaway album.  Ray Charles was already a well established RnB* player by the time he made this record.  The comparison could be brashly made with The Beatles almost decade later, who broke away from their establish sound to make Sgt Pepper.  I don't think this move is worthy of that comparison, however.  In Sgt Pepper people got something they hadn't heard before whereas this set simply joins an already crowded mainstream of big band singers.

Having said that, the presence of players from Count Basie's and Duke Ellington's bands is noticeable albeit in a hindsight kinda way.  "Aaah _that_'s why it sounded great."  Quincy Jones was also involved in this and with credentials like that, who's gonna knock it?  Charles himself with his funky piano style and road-worn vocal texture breathes into these songs life that may hitherto have been beaten out of them with soulless repetition.

Altogether it's damn enjoyable but I wouldn't go so far as to ascribe it genius.  Certainly it's better than anything I could've produced that year, being as I was still a decade away from the first Higgs-Boson of a glint in my father's puritanical eye.

But I have fond memories of Ray Charles.  His duet with Billy Joel remains a firm favourite of mine and I can't think of Ray Charles without being reminded of that scene in the Commitments where Jimmy tells the piano player he has to perform without his spectacles.

Stephen: But I'm blind without me glasses!
Jimmy: So was Ray Charles.

His piano playing is beyond reproach and this album contains consistent evidence of that.  So in case there's any doubt, "I don't think there's anything wrong with the action on this piano."

* - And by RnB, I mean actual rhythm and blues where the tunes are carried with emotion rather than with a desperate sense of self comparison to Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and the interminable pantheon of caterwaulers littering unimaginative backing tracks with their unimaginative vocal cadenzas.