Rockin' In The Not-So-Free World: The Best Albums of the Early Seventies

When he wasn't waging war on underdeveloped nations
or destroying a generation's faith in democracy,
Dick liked to rock out with his little Republican cock out. 

I've never really been all that nostalgic.  I don't buy souvenirs when I travel, or try to keep the panties of the women I've had sex with.  I toss Christmas and birthday cards in the garbage immediately after reading them and believe that interrupting an experience so you can photograph it and look at it later, kind of spoils the here and now.  I've never even owned a camera.  For me, life is not a series of fucking photo ops.

My high school days in particular are not a time I get all misty-eyed about.  Not that I have no pleasant memories.  Like most guys, I recall my first taste of beer and pussy with a certain fondness, but when I think back Summer of 69-style, I rarely delude myself that those were "the best days of my life."  They weren't.

Veronica later dropped the charges,
not wanting to spoil Riverdale's chances
in the big game.

The Riverdale of my youth was a place of almost impenetrable darkness, a gloomy swathe of burbage whose dank vapours seemed to blot out all warmth and light.  Some creatures thrive in this sort of nocturnal environment.  I just wasn't one of them.  While the Archies and Reggies of the night were chugging brewskis, doing doughnuts in their camaros in the mall parking lot, and tag-teaming Veronica behind the Chocklit Shop, I was sitting in my room, smoking cigarettes, jerking off, or seething with misanthropic pretension like the protagonist in some Smiths song.  I was a frightened, angry little shit.  I possessed neither the ability nor the energy to seek out others of like mind and would have had no idea how to connect with them even if I did.  To say I was a lone wolf would be a bullshit romanticization.  I was just alone.

I don't spend a lot of time snivelling or even thinking about it anymore.  I feel no ill-will, no Nietzschean resentment toward Archie and Reggie.  I have no desire for revenge, nothing to prove to anyone, and very few regrets.  If anything, I'm retrospectively thankful for this long, dark, and lonesome night of the soul.  It gave me time to think.

Later, back at the Dojo,
Sensai would show Johnny
what he really means by "sweep the leg
and finish him."

Perhaps most importantly, it prevented me from having any delusional expectations about what the future might hold.  I learned the truth at seventeen that life, perhaps sadly, is largely devoid of Karate Kid moments.  Mr. Miyagi may get you to paint his fence and wax his car, but if he does, he's exploiting you, not imparting oriental wisdom.  The lesson learned here may make you less naive, but it will not make you a better fighter or a better lover.  You will never kick Johnny's ass.  You will never get to fuck Elizabeth Shue.  Life, as the Buddha teaches us, is suffering - a Cobra Kai boot driving its heel down into Ralph Macchio's face forever.

Okay, maybe not quite so bad as that.  The truth is, we suffer because we cling to our hatred of Johnny, to our lust for Elizabeth Shue.  We suffer because we want to live in a world where retards kick winning field goals like they do at the end of Disney movies.  Where anyone can be a rock star, or a professional athlete, or a millionaire if they work hard enough.

But we don't.  Besides the retards, the world has little in common with a Disney movie.  

This can be a terrible truth and it's not surprising that lots of people don't want to face it.  As such, nostalgia remains a totally understandable impulse, a temporary escape from meaninglessness, and a holding out of hope that maybe one day, someday, life will always be as sweet as it was in our sweetest moments.

Adam: This is all your fault.
Eve: Whatever, dumb-ass.

This seems to be an almost universal human desire.  Almost all cultures are at least partially nostalgic, although they talk about it in somewhat more cosmic terms.  The Jews and Christians have Eden before the fall.  The Germans have their pre-Gotterdammerung Valhalla.  The Greeks speek of a Golden Age before Zeus cut his father's cock and balls off and banished him to Tartarus.

And the rest of us have our youth.  After Reggie and Veronica leave for Princeton, Archie and Jughead will no doubt hit the pub after a hard day at the meat rendering plant, get drunk, play some Springsteen on the jukebox, and reminisce about the touchdowns and blowjobs of their own glory days.

And who can blame them?  I mean, fuck, you do what you gotta do to keep doing what you gotta do.  Not everyone can walk the path of the Boddhisattva.  I sure as fuck can't.  That's why God created drugs and television and organized religion.

And music.

20 years later and still "killin' your brain
like a poisonous mushroom.  Deadly!"

Like I said before, I'm not all that nostalgic.  I love music, but I try to be objective about it, and to separate my assessments of its quality from my own biography as much as possible.  For me, "Ice Ice Baby" is neither good nor bad because I was happy or sad the first time I heard it.  It's just bad.  Really, really, really fucking bad.  Many would disagree with me here.  To them it's great because of that time they fingerbanged Molly Stinkysnapper in the back of her dad's Suburu while Vanilla "worked the mic like a vandal, lit up the stage and burned a chump like a candle."  Try as I might, I can no more convince them otherwise than I could those who think the world is controlled by a cabal of malevolent Jews.  Some people are simply immune to appeals to reason, common sense, and evidence.

But if I had to pick an Eden, a Valhalla, a Golden Age of pop music, some period of time worth waxing nostalgic over, I'd go with the 70s.  Again, many would disagree with me.  For lots of people, it was the fifties and sixties that were pop culture's Friday and Saturday nights, the seventies being more like the Sunday morning hangover.

And as far as the mainstream goes, this is no doubt true.  Much of the dewy youthfulness and idealistic sheen that briefly characterized the culture was sullied by the end of the sixties.  Many blame it on the war, on Nixon, on the drugs, but I think a lot of it had to do with a particular portion of the baby boom just growing up, getting jobs, and not really giving a fuck anymore.  The true believers stuck around, but most of them went underground and/or got more radical, and thus escaped the notice of those who like their shit light, happy, and on the surface.

Marx: I'm gonna expropriate your punk ass.
Smith: Whatever.  Laissez-faire, bitch.

As far as the music went, though, these developments were all good things.  A laissez-faire approach has many dangers, but there's no doubt that people do interesting things when you leave them the fuck alone.

Anyways, I'm going to break up the 70s into three parts: 1970-73, 74-76, and 77-79.

Here are the best albums of the early seventies.

Enjoy.

10.  New York Dolls: New York Dolls (1973)

Song Selected: "Personality Crisis."

Good things often have unforeseen negative consequences.  For example, say you meet some sexy such-and-such at your local drink and stink.  You get drunk, go home with them and, much to your surprise, they take you on a wild, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of the flesh.  I'm talking crazy-ass shit, here.  The ceiling cracks open.  The clouds part.  The moon behind them explodes.  Jesus appears, sparkling like a Twilight vampire.  And just as you do the old grunt and shiver, he winks at you and gives you the thumbs up.

Then a few weeks later you find out you've got the clap.

The music of the New York Dolls is kind of like this.  On the good side, they provided the ferocious stomp and swagger that would prove to be a central sonic ingredient in the punk rock that came later.  Then again, their penchant for mindless debauchery and women's fashion lingered in the cultural bloodstream like an infectious agent, spawning musical STDs like Poison, Warrant, and Motley Crue.  This is not the Dolls' fault, though they would not have given a shit even if it was.

9.  Doris Duke: I'm A Loser (1970)

Song Selected: "I Can't Do Without You."

As the title suggests, this Swamp Dogg-produced album is no happy affair.  Songs called "He's Gone," "I Don't Care Anymore," and the above-mentioned "I Can't Do Without You" should give you a pretty good idea of its overarching themes are.  Need a hint?  We're talking full-on failure and soul-destroying heartbreak, kids.  Of heartbreak one can only assume, but of failure, she was certainly no stranger.  Before recording this album, she floundered in nowheresville for most of the 1960s.  Afterwards, not much changed.  Like most things associated with Swamp Dogg, I'm a Loser was artistically great, but commercially, well...  There was a very minor hit ("To The Other Woman, I'm the Other Woman"), but the label soon failed and she sank once again into the quicksand pit of obscurity.  In fact, no one seems to even know where she is anymore or if she's even still alive.  History, however, has been kinder to Doris Duke than the marketplace.  I'm a Loser is now often regarded as a deep-soul masterpiece.  And those who regard it so are right.

8.  Donny Hathaway: Donny Hathaway Live (1972)

Song Selected: "The Ghetto"

Donny Hathaway probably isn't the first name that comes to mind when you're putting together a list of R&B greats, but maybe he should be.  His albums were always well-received critically throughout his career.  He even had some hits (particularly his Grammy-winning work with Roberta Flack which, frankly, I'm not all that crazy about).  And like Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding, he died tragically and too soon, killing himself by jumping from his 15th floor balcony in 1979.  This alone, given our culture's necrophiliac tendencies, should have made him a legend.  But it didn't.  Which is too bad.  Almost all his albums are great, although Donny Hathaway Live is both my favourite, and my all-time favourite live album.  Like Curtis Live by Curtis Mayfield, Root Down by Jimmy Smith, and Live at the Club Mozambique by Dr. Lonnie Smith, it has this very particular gritty, sweaty, intimate, small-club R&B feel that's rarely even captured in a live venue and never ever ever in the studio.  When the audience sings along with Donny to "You've Got A Friend," it almost makes you like James Taylor.  Almost.

7.  Waylon Jennings: Honky Tonk Heroes (1973)

Song Selected: "Black Rose"

February 3, 1959 may have been the day the music died, but not for Waylon Jennings.  At the time, he was a guitar player in Buddy Holly's band and, being less of an outlaw than one might think, he gave up his seat on the plane to The Big Bopper, who, apparently had a really bad cold.  Few moments in the history of rock 'n' roll, with the possible exceptions of the deaths of Michael Hutchence and Shannon Hoon, provide such compelling evidence for the existence of a just and loving god.  And not many have done more following such a brush with the reaper.  Besides Johnny Cash and maybe Willie Nelson and David Allan Coe, no one in the history of country music has as large and consistently excellent a body of work as Waylon Jennings and this very well may the best of it.  If you're curious about Outlaw Country (and you should be) this is a good place to start.

6.  Swamp Dogg: Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970)

Song Selected: "Total Destruction To Your Mind"

Today, its commonplace for African American artists to claim they "don't give a shit."  It almost goes without saying.  Personally, I don't believe many of them.  But if you want to meet a motherfucker who really didn't give a shit, meet Swamp Dogg.  During the sixties heyday of Atlantic Records, he was a successful producer, engineer, and songwriter there.  Did Swamp Dogg give a shit?  No fucking way.  He bailed and started making his own crazy-ass brand of funky R&B.  Did Swamp Dogg give a shit about marketing to the mainstream and making a big pile of cash?  No fucking way.  He sang about fucking whatever and liked to feature his short, chubby, swamp-doggedy self on his album covers, lying on a pile of garbage in his underwear, riding a giant rat, or surfing in Harlem.  This brand of confrontational apathy may lead you to believe that his albums are sloppy, ramshackle affairs.  Again, no fucking way.  They're all great.  But this one's the best.  

5.  Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters (1973)

Song Selected: "Chameleon"

This classic fusion of jazz, funk, and African music is deservingly one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, and a perfect example of what is possible when artists of high calibre put aside notions of genre supremacy and attempt to preach to people other than the converted.  Only idiots only like one kind of music, and Head Hunters will appeal to everyone everyone with a pulse, a three-digit I.Q., and even the most rudimentary capacity for distinguishing between truffles and turds.  A funky masterpiece.

4.  Can: Tago Mago (1971)

Song Selected: "Halleluwah"

When people think of the music of the 70s, too often what comes to mind is either the jammy soft-cock noodlings of the Steve Miller Band, the Eagles, and others of their pestilential ilk, or the decade spanning works of arena-rock rape gangs like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.  In terms of consistent quality of output, though, the best band of the 70s was none of the above.  From 1969 until 1979, these Krautrock fuhrers released 10 albums that are all better than anything you're likely to hear on classic rock radio.  Though Soon Over Babaluma, Future Days, and Ege Bamyasi are all equally heil-worthy, in terms of instrumental excellence, jackboot-stomping groove, and experimental weirdness, Tago Mago is just a goose-step above.

3. Sly & The Family Stone: There's A Riot Goin' On (1971)

Song Selected: "Family Affair"

It's too bad Sly Stone couldn't keep his sht together.  For a few years in the late sixties and early seventies, Sly and his Family Stone were, perhaps even more than the Beatles, the most universally loved band in the world.  Everyone dug these cats: hippies, rock fans, the R&B audience, even jazz musicians listened to, appreciated, and were influenced by them.  Like many from this generation, however, the drugs eventually took their toll, and while they didn't kill Sly, they pretty much incapacitated him from about 1975 onwards.  The band's earlier work was, like the Beatles, distinctly utopian - a kind of groovy interracial orgy.  Here the band's music, like the culture as a whole, takes a darker, funkier, angrier, more exclusive, and more dystopian turn.  The band was still interracial but, be forewarned whitey, this album has way more of a Black Panther growl to it than its predecessors.  

2.  Marvin Gaye: What's Goin' On? (1971)

Song Selected: "What's Goin' On?"

Marvin Gaye was probably the sexiest motherfucker who ever lived.  When Marvin was a kid and the kids made fun of him about his last name, he would respond with, "Hey, say hi to your mom for me." And he meant it.  Because he had actually fucked their moms.  Even when singing about God, the children, and impending environmental catastrophe as he does here, he can still get your honey's cunny runny like you never will.  The man was smooth with a capital OO.  His own father shot him to death because his bitch wanted Marvin, not him.  Anyways, Marvin's the best R&B artist.  Ever.  And this is the best R&B album.  Ever.  But hey, don't take my word for it.  Put it on.  Kick back.  Unwind.  But watch out dudes, best keep your ladyfriend in check cuz Marvin's about to blow her fucking mind.

1.  The Stooges: Fun House (1970)

Song selected: "T.V. Eye"

The last and greatest album of the rock 'n' roll era.  The fusion of small-town angst, electric amplification, and rhythm and blues that produced rock 'n' roll is here taken to its inevitable and, ultimately, illogical conclusion.  The moment when the saxophone kicks in toward the end of "1970" is the musical equivalent of the Manson murders and the massacre at Altamont.  In the Ornette Coleman-inspired free jazzy freakout that follows, all the ridiculous and delusional notions of rock 'n' roll as a utopian force for positive social change are completely fucking obliterated.  Unlike Coleman's stuff, there are no theoretical underpinnings here that justify this violation of conventional notions of harmony and song structure - no suggestion of new beginnings.  This is the sound of the toilet of the 60s being flushed and a million screaming hippies going down the drain.

War, Hate, and Misunderstanding: The Best Albums of the Late Sixties

Who ya gonna call?

I've never been a particularly groovy guy.  I don't believe that smoking pot makes you smarter or more creative.  Nor do I believe in the magical properties of pyramids, magnets, or crystal deodorant.  I don't think that the position of the stars at the time of our birth influences our personality or that the human race was seeded by extra-terrestrials.  I maintain that the government's decisions to put fluoride in the water supply and inoculate infants against deadly diseases were good ones and not conspiratorial plots to poison us or track our whereabouts.  I also bathe regularly, I don't recycle, and I refuse to pay three times as much for eggs or produce because it has a sticker on it that says "organic."

Basically, I'm not a hippy.

Fox News Headline 1967:
Police dog defends self against taunting Negro.
"Boy was eyeballin' me," dog explains.   

Along with Vietnamese children running down the street with their skin on fire and police beating the shit out of black people for daring to want the civil rights they actually already legally had, hippies are among the first things that come to mind when people think about the sixties.  For me, it's the image of a dirty, lazy, stinky, hairy, Tommy Chonger falling out of a VW bus in a cloud of bong-smoke, face-first into a pile of dogshit, then getting up, adjusting his poop-smudged granny glasses, and mumbling, "oh, wow, man.  Far out," to no one in particular.

Down South, Santorum is still all over the place,
but elsewhere things have pretty much dried up.

Though I blame the hippies for much that is wrong with the world today, I still have mixed feelings about them.  Kind of like I do about Christians.  I mean, hey, Christians built the Sistine Chapel and Chartres Cathedral.  They include among their members some full-on, shitkicking motherfuckers like Dante, and St. Francis, and Leonardo da Vinci.  Then again, they also tore down the monuments of the ancient world, destroyed most of its art and literature, and plunged western civilisation into a dark age for over a thousand years.  They also gave us the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, witch-burning, and more recently, Rick Santorum.

The hippies, contrary to their inflated opinion of themselves, are obviously less historically important.  Nonetheless, few special interest groups have had a more pervasive influence on contemporary culture than Jerry Garcia and his patchouli-stanking ilk.

Let's start with the good stuff, which can be summarized simply, easily, and most importantly, obscenely:

Fucking.

One, no, make that two of the things
I like about hippies.

The hippies brought an awareness of fucking, in all its forms, into the forefront of popular culture: fucking each other, fucking the Man, fucking the dog, and getting all fucking fucked up.  Since then, AIDS, the war on drugs, and the rise of the religious right have pretty much put the kaibosh on all this, but hey, I still dig it the most, Daddy-O.  Calling in sick to work, laying in bed all day, getting high, playing with one another's peepees, and plotting the overthrow of the military-industrial complex is some groovy-ass shit.

Fuckin' A, man!

However, aside from championing the obvious merits of zonking and bonking, the hippies' emphasis on wishy-washy open-mindedness pretty much boils down to a philosophy in which the willful suspension of critical thinking is deemed a virtue.

And it is this unwillingness to recognize qualitative distinctions between things, much more than sex, drugs, and revolutionary sentiment, that has had an altogether pernicious effect on contemporary culture.  Since the sixties, people just don't seem to value or even use their reason much anymore.  Besides the harmless stupidity of mood rings, liking Pink Floyd, and thinking its okay for white people to have dreadlocks, we now live in a world where someone can have misgivings about the moon landing, the origin of species, and whether the holocaust happened, while remaining a steadfast believers in ESP, the trans-substantiation of communion wafers, and the reality of pro-wrestling.  And then run for elected office.  And win.  I mean, in Canada, the current science minister is a fucking chiropractor and a young-earth creationist.  The hippies made it okay for all of us to be entitled to our own opinions, even our own truths, regardless of whether they're contradicted by every shred of evidence anyone has ever found.

It's like, all relative, dude.

 At Nuremberg, Donald insisted he was "just
following Walt's orders."  

Okay, maybe you can't totally blame the hippies for the fact that people have seemingly become more irrational and retarded over the last forty years.  But even the best and brightest of them haven't exactly done much about it.  Throughout the seventies and eighties, while their enemies were out there in the world dismantling the welfare-state, breaking labour unions, bombing abortion clinics, and conducting a full-scale war on Blacks and Hispanics masquerading as a war on drugs, the hippy intelligentsia were sitting in their ivory towers, listening to Enya, while they whined about insensitive pronoun use, racist imagery in Disney movies, and how porn makes fat chicks feel shitty about themselves.  Not that these issues don't matter, it's just that, when the Man's ass-raping you, the first thing you do is try to get that dick out of there, not criticize his cocksmanship.

Anyways, despite all that, the late sixties was a great time for music, even if you're like me and not all that into The Beatles, The Stones, or Led Zeppelin.

...And some of it was even made by hippies.

Enjoy.

10.  The Shaggs: "Philosophy of the World, 1969"

Song Selected: Who Are Parents?"

Imagine a crazy old lady in rural New Hampshire has a premonition while reading her young son's palm.  Her gypsy intuition tells her he will marry a strawberry blonde and have three daughters.  The three girls will form a band and become famous musicians.  The son takes the old bat seriously, especially when the first two predictions came true.  When his daughters become teenagers, he buys them instruments and, even though the girls couldn't play all that well and have absolutely no knowledge of musical structure or convention, he gets them to write an album's worth of songs and books studio time in order to capture their sound "while it's still hot."

Crazy, right?  The really crazy thing, though, is that this actually happened.  The girls are The Shaggs and the album they recorded is "Philosophy of the World," one of the most delightfully demented albums ever made.


9.  The Mothers of Invention: "Freak Out! 1966"

Song Selected: "Hungry Freaks Daddy"

A lot of people hate Frank Zappa.  Even hard-core fans of the Z-man, such as yours truly, have some difficulty disputing that his fusion of Edgar Varese, doo-wop, and sophomoric locker room humour is sometimes, well, kind of retarded.  But Zappa at his best and Zappa at his worst occasionally overlap in a sublimely ridiculous sort of way, as they do on this debut offering by The Mothers of Invention.  As well as being credited by many as being the first rock concept album and influencing both The Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," on "Hungry Freaks Daddy" and "Wowie Zowie," it also features the best use of xylophone and kazoo in the history of rock 'n' roll.  Let the Mothers help you get your freak on, bitches!


8.  The Fugs: "The Fugs' Second Album, 1966"

Song Selected: "Dirty Old Man"

The "Fugs' Second Album" evokes the all of best things about the sixties counterculture.  It's kind of like a Robert Crumb comic set to music:  an LSD-addled orgy of ejaculating cocks, hallucinatory gobbledeegook, dirty jokes, rabble-rousing faux-Marxist propaganda, and big, bouncing titties.

I could say more but I don't think I have to.


7.  Mississippi Fred McDowell: "I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll, 1969"

Song Selected: "Good Morning, Little School Girl"

Mississippi Fred McDowell is actually from Tennessee, not Mississippi, but he's still the shit as far as authentic Delta blues goes.  He was an old man by the time he was discovered by Alan Lomax in 1959 and had never recorded before.  Instead, he'd made his living share-cropping and busking outside a candy store in Como, Mississippi for extra cash.  What's great about this album is that you get to listen to old-time Delta blues recorded with modern techniques and equipment.  It's like getting to hear Charley Patton or Robert Johnson without having to aurally squint through the hissing crackle of a shitty 1920s or 30s recording.  It's also cool to hear McDowell babble almost incomprehensibly about all sorts of shit.  Like why he don't play no rock 'n' roll:

Because it sucks.


6.  Bob Dylan: "Blonde On Blonde, 1966"

Song Selected: "4th Time Around"

At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Dylan basically stuck his middle finger up at the American folk audience by going electric.  He got booed, but in typical Dylan fashion, he didn't give a rat's ass, and recorded a couple of raucous folk-rock albums, "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited," to rub their folky faces in it.  "Blonde On Blonde" is a much less grating and angular affair, softened as it is with C&W warmth and R&B soul.  Besides the ultra-irritating "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35" that opens the album (otherwise known as "Everybody Must Get Stoned"), every track on "Blonde On Blonde" is either, poignant, or interesting, or sublimely beautiful, or all three, as in the case of "Visions of Johanna," "One Of Us Must Know," "I Want You," "Just Like A Woman," and the above-mentioned "4th Time Around."  With the possible exception of 1975's "Blood On the Tracks," this is Dylan's best shit.


5.  Aretha Franklin: "I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, 1967"

Song Selected: "A Change Is Gonna Come"

Though her career as a recording artist goes all the way back to 1956, Aretha didn't really begin her reign as the Queen of Soul until she recorded "I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You."  Then she busted out into the popular consciousness like a pair of double Ds out of a B-cup bikini top.  "I Never Loved A Man..." is often cited as the best R&B album of all time and it'd be tough to dispute this, packed as it is with songs of sexy sin, sultry salvation, and full-on I-am-woman-hear-me-roar-type female empowerment.  Limp-dick, do-wrong motherfuckers beware!  The Queen'll bite that shit right off.  Respect!


4.  Sly & The Family Stone: "Stand! 1969"

Song Selected: "Everyday People"

James Brown may have been the first to hit it on the one and vamp it 'til it bleeds, but Sly Stone and his supergroovy family perfected it, tossing heaping scoops of rock, psychedelia, and utopian interracialism into the funky mix.  Sly later became rock's most notorious unfatal drug addict and scam artist, regularly ripping off promoters by getting advanced for performances he was always a no-show to, but for a few years during the late sixties and early seventies, he was probably the coolest and funkiest man alive.


3.  Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: "Trout Mask Replica, 1969"

Song Selected: "Moonlight On Vermont"

Featuring songs about the holocaust ("Dachau Blues"), the nocturnal hallucinations of aquatic invertebrates ("Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish"), and a two-movement homage to the female pudenda ("Hair Pie: Bake 1 & 2"), needless to say, this Zappa-produced offering from Don Van Vliet and his merry band of hippy freaks is truly one of the weirdest albums ever made.  It's also one of the best.

2.  The Beach Boys: "Pet Sounds, 1966"

Song Selected: "Hold On To Your Ego"

Ask yourself what kind of music Ludwig van Beethoven might make if he was reincarnated as a fat, ultra-uncool California kid who couldn't surf, was deaf in one ear, and was ruthlessly bullied by his dad.  The answer would be "Pet Sounds."  Brian Wilson here creates a rhapsodic symphonic soundscape in which to act out his own unrequited California dreams.  Though always seemingly but a swoon away, the fulfillment of these longings remains ever-elusive, like a hallucination of happiness you know in your heart of hearts isn't real, but that you refuse to give up believing in.  A heartbreakingly beautiful ode to joy from a man that madness and sadness would keep silent for almost forty years afterward.

1.  The Velvet Underground: "The Velvet Underground, 1969"

Song Selected: "What Goes On"

Many would argue that this eponymous third album by The Velvet Underground, while undoubtedly great, still pales in comparison to their Warhol-"produced" debut with the German chanteuse, Nico.  They would be wrong.  "The Velvet Underground & Nico" is unquestionably a revolutionary album and it sounds as such, replete with all the paradigm-overturning highs and frustratingly dated lows of what 1967's avant-garde thought the new world would sound like.  "The Velvet Underground," on the other hand, is the sonic equivalent of the perfect fuck: bursting with anticipatory swellings, sweaty, communion-inducing interplay, and climactic discharges of energy.  And it ends by snuggling up against you like a groggy lover while you drift off to a deliciously dreamy sleep.

Given a choice between fucking and fighting, I'll take fucking, and so should you.

***DICK'S PICKS*** 

for the week of March 11, 2012

New Shit:

Tennis: "Young And Old"

Song Selected: "My Better Self"

Great story about this band.  Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore met in college, fell in love, dropped out, bought a sailboat, and decided to spend a year exploring the eastern seaboard on it.  When they were done, they figured they'd write and record a bunch of songs about the experience.  The result was the fucking fantastic "Cape Dory," which beautifully commemorates their adventure of love on the not-so-high seas.  While the theme of "Cape Dory" is, as you might expect, largely nautical, "Young and Old," though slightly more earthy, is no less sun-soaked.  Kind of like a premonition of springtime during these darkest, coldest days of the year.  Check it out.


Old Shit:

Chic: "Dance, Dance, Dance: The Best of Chic"



Song Selected: "Good Times"

Though Disco is, with some justification, the most maligned of R&B's many incarnations, only the seriously boogie-averse can resist the shit shaking appeal of Chic.  Chic was the brainchild of guitar and bass duo Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, who also created Sister Sledge and all that funky shit you used to hear on Sesame Street.  The twelve-inch singles collected here offer a utopian vision of a boogie wonderland where the champagne flows like the crystal streams in heaven and the cocaine never runs out.  Combined with a handful of Tylenol 3s, a bubble-bath, and a vigourous session of masturbation, "Dance, Dance, Dance, The Best of Chic" is also the best cure for a hangover I can think of.

Learning To Love The Bomb: The Best Albums of the Early 1960s

Is that a Mark 24 High-yield thermonuclear
device between your legs or are you just
happy to see me?

A couple of nights ago, I was startled from a deep and dreamless sleep by a piercing shriek reverberating repeatedly through my bedroom.

"Goddamn it," I thought, still only half awake.  "I must've miss-set my alarm again."

I don't know why or how, but this happens pretty often, and ever time, it always scares the shit out of me.  I don't know about you, but being jarred to consciousness in the middle of the night by the beep! beep! beep! of a cranked clock radio triggers an almost primordially violent reaction in me - an almost lizard-brain-like spasm of blind and mindless hate.  It's like being awakened by someone pissing in your mouth or jamming something up your ass.

Oh yeah?
Well you're all a bunch of fucking faggots!

Your eyes snap open.  The rectum recoils.  Arms lash out, again and again, like cobras lunging at imaginary mongeese, until finally - finally! your flailing fingers crash down upon the snooze bar, and the miserable, evil fucking thing falls venomized, and silenced.

But after I whacked at the alarm clock half a dozen times, I realized that it wasn't the source of the ungodly squeal.  It took me a minute, but I finally figured out what was doing it.  

It was my apartment intercom buzzer.

I threw on my kimono and bunny slippers and shuffled furiously toward the front door, all the while preparing a caustic blitzkrieg of profanity to unleash on whatever fuck-tard was on the other side of it.

I threw open the door, but before I could commence my torrent of abuse, a buddy of mine who, for legal reasons, shall remain nameless, stuffed a picture in my face of two naked, fake-titted hoochies dyking out in the back of a corvette, and then yelled, at the top of his lungs:

"Look, Dick.  Look!  The end is fucking nigh!  The end is fucking nigh!"

My buddy isn't campaigning for Rick Santorum, so it wasn't the mere fact of people engaging in a Biblically unsanctioned sex act that was making him lose his shit.  But it was only after a smoke or two and a calming couple of PBRs that he was finally able to wax coherent and tell me what the fuck was going on.

Its the end of the world as we know it,
and I feel fine.

Apparently, he'd been perusing the magazine section at the 24 hour Adult's Only Video store, when Penthouse's "2012 Girl + Girl Calendar" caught his leering eye.  He thumbed his way lasciviously through the monthly instalments of red-hot, girl-on-girl action, but when he got to December, a big, icky wave of fear and horror came crashing over him like a deluge from on high.

The calendar ended suddenly and inexplicably on December 31, 2012.

This could only mean one thing:

The Mayans were right, if a little off on their dating.

The world will end in late 2012!  Penthouse says so!

Ha, ha.  Mucho funny, gringo.
But on December 21, you will all die.

This may seem ridiculous, but it really isn't any more so than thinking the world will end because some ancient Mexicans left a job unfinished.  I mean, let's face it, working on a calendar is the ultimate exercise in futility.  In some ways, it's even worse than the degrading shit their descendants have to do nowadays for the all-you-can-eaters at the resorts in Cancun.  I'm thinking at some point the Mayans just said, "fuck this mierda," threw down their chisels, hopped into the 14th century equivalent of their El Caminos, and andele andele arribaed on home.

Anyways, my late-night visitor got me thinking - both about the end of the world and about the last time we actually had to worry about this.

Oh really, Nikita?  You ever fuck Marilyn Monroe?
No?  I didn't fucking think so.

It was way back in 1962.  JFK and Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev decided to have a "whose got the biggest dick" competition, or, as history remembers it, the Cuban Missile Crisis and gambled the lives of every living thing on the planet on it.  For thirteen days in October, terrified schoolchildren learned how to "duck and cover" from a nearby atomic blast by hiding under their desks, while Kennedy and Kruschev wiggled their peepees at one another and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

As it turned out, JFK had, and was, the biggest dick.  Lee Harvey Oswald thought so, too, and about a year later put a bullet in his head for good measure.

Kruschev was deposed for being a pussy, retired to the countryside, and wrote his memoirs in which he snivelled and moaned about what a bunch of traitors and ingrates his commie comrades were.  Then in 1971, he died of heart disease like a little bitch.

Assholes.

Sorry son, but we're out of food,
and I'm gonna need your sister as a breeder. 

But now for the really important question.

As Americans hoarded canned goods, cowered in their backyard bomb shelters, and thought about which of their daughters they'd like to begin repopulating the planet with, what kind of tunes were they listening to?

The truth is, the early 60s wasn't a great time for rock 'n' roll in general and the rock album in particular.  In fact, the album really didn't become a bona fide rock 'n' roll artform until 1966 when the Beach Boys and the Mothers of Invention released "Pet Sounds" and "Freak Out!", respectively.

After the halcyon days of its youth, rock 'n' roll had a bit of an adolescent slump in the early 1960s, partially due to severe cutbacks in top-notch personnel.  Elvis was drafted into the army.  Little Richard abandoned rock 'n' roll altogether and became a minister.  Jerry Lee Lewis' Kentucky-fried marriage to his twelve year old cousin didn't go over all that well up north and his career went down the outhouse hole.  These young marble giants, hewn like gods from the quarries of Mount Rockmore were replaced with singing Ken-dolls like Fabian and Frankie Avalon.  With a predictable diminishment in quality of output.

The truth is, the half-decade between 1960 and 1965 was still basically a jazz age, with Miles, Mingus, and Coltrane releasing mature and musically sophisticated masterpieces that exposes the early Beatles and Stones stuff for the bubble-gummy girly-pop it actually was.  But while rock suffered through its first growing pains, this period also saw the emergence of folk, the blues, and Brazilian bossanova, as major crossover forms.  All in all, it wasn't the best of times, but it wasn't the worst of times either.

Here are the top ten albums of the early 1960s (1960-1965).

10.  Glenn Gould: "Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, 1965"


















Song Selected: "Prelude and Fugue, Nos. 1 & 2"

Along with Wayne Gretzky, Neil Young, and Bret "The Hitman" Hart, Glenn Gould is one of The Great White North's all-time bests.  He was instrumental virtuoso of the highest calibre, the 20th-century's most important interpreter of the music of Johan Sebastian Bach, as well as being a fine composer in his own right.  He was also totally batshit crazy.  But unlike a lot of wack-jobs, particularly in the classical milieu, you can actually hear his insanity manifest itself on record.  Listen closely, and you can hear Gould humming, mumbling, and babbling to himself, creating a subtle, but delightfully kooky counterpoint to an utterly masterful solo piano performance of Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier."  It's crazy good.


9.  Johnny Cash: "Bitter Tears, 1964"

Song Selected: "White Girl"

Southerners often get a bad rap for being rednecked, racist sons of bitches, and not without some justification.  I mean, hey, they fought a war in order to defend their right to keep people as property and then when they got their asses handed to them, they took it out on their former slaves like a bunch of fucking sore losers.  But then there's Johnny Cash.  While many of his Dixieland compatriots were still getting their lynch on, the Man in Black was recording a tender and heartfelt elegy on the plight of the American natives.  The songs on "Bitter Tears" include ballads about racism, cultural genocide, and how assholes like Colonel Custer get what they deserve.  Fuck the Lone Ranger.  Cash is the real Kimosabe.  


8.  Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto: "Getz/Gilberto, 1964"

Song Selected: "Corcovado"

Although Getz's previous recording with Charlie Byrd, "Jazz Samba" was the first, this was the album that ignited the bossanova craze in American, which is the main reason the "Bossa 1" and "Bossa 2"  remain built-in rhythms on every electric keyboard.  It also introduced the non-Portugese speaking world to the beautiful songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the loping, sleepy guitar and vocals of Joao Gilberto and the uber-cool, deadpan singing of his wife, Astrud.  A bachelor-paddy classic.      


7.  Bob Dylan: "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan"



Song Selected: "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"

Unfortunately, this is a live video version of Dylan performing the song at the CBC in 1964.  Apparently Dylan or Sony records doesn't want his studio shit on YouTube.  Neither would surprise me.  The cunts at Sony, like all major-label douchebags, are well-known enemies of free-speech and Dylan is a notorious asshole.  But he's also a genius, arguably the greatest songwriter who ever lived.  Ironically, this was the album that channeled folk music into the mainstream of American culture.  Ironic in that, besides "Corrina, Corrina," none of the songs on this album are actually folk songs: they're Dylan songs - written in a traditional style, sure, but they're original compositions rather than tunes passed down through an endless chain of anonymous folkies.  And like the folk songs they so expertly mimic, "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Girl From the North County," "Masters of War," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" will no doubt remain alive in the American consciousness long after the asshole who wrote them has been forgotten.


6.  Junior Wells' Chicago Blues Band: "Hoodoo Man Blues, 1965"

Song Selected: "Snatch It Back And Hold It"

Although the blues remained largely a singles artform through the early sixties, there were some great albums during this period.  Howlin' Wolf's eponymous debut and "Muddy Waters at Newport" come to mind.  However, my favourite blues album of the early sixties is this gritty, funky, super-soulful debut from Junior Wells' Chicago Blues Band.  Wells' sex-charged vocals and sinewy harp lines wind their way around the snaps and pops of Buddy Guy's guitar and the shit-stomping rhythm section of Jack Myers and Billy Warren.  If you like the blues and don't have this album, get it.  Now.

5.  John Fahey: "The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favourites, 1965"

Song Selected: "On The Banks of the Owchita"

I fucking love John Fahey.  Pretty much all of his albums reward a close listener with an utterly unique aural experience and this album is certainly no exception.  Although his 1963 recording of "Death Chants, Breakdowns, and Military Waltzes" contains his first recordings of some of his finest tracks, I prefer his 1967 re-recording of the album, for the simple reason that it sound better.  Anyways, this makes "The Dance of Death..." in my opinion, both the best of his early albums and also one of the best albums of the early sixties.  Its a dank and haunting stew of bluesy folkishness from the best guitar player ever.

4.  Charles Mingus: "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, 1963"

Song Selected: "Stop! Look! And Listen, Sinner Jim Whitney!"

A much more challenging album than his earlier classic, "Mingus Ah Um," but what "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" lacks in easy-listenability it makes up for in passion and full-on ferocity.  In many ways, its a blues album, not structurally, but emotionally.  The thick and densely-layered arrangements of the four tracks that make up the album create an almost living sonic texture - one that moans, groans, sings, sobs, snarls, and slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.  A rough beast, indeed, but a fucking beautiful one.

3.  Miles Davis: "Sketches of Spain, 1960"

Song Selected: "Concierto de Aranjuez (Part 2 Ending)"

Miles Davis was a shitty human being.  He was among other things, an unrepentant drug addict, a cruel and abusive husband and lover, and a deadbeat dad (his first wife actually had him thrown in jail for not paying child support while she and her children starved and he spent his money on drugs and hookers). But like other dastardly characters in the annals of art, its important to separate the man from his work and, quite frankly, Miles is the greatest artist of the twentieth-century and one of the greatest of all time. Here, on the fourth of the five amazing albums he made with arranger, Gil Evans, he explores the "Spanish tinge" that Jelly Roll Morton spoke of as jazz's essential seasoning, the spice that distinguishes it from all other musical dishes.  One of Miles' tastiest.


Bill Evans: "Waltz For Debby, 1961"

Song Selected: "Some Other Time"

Of all those who have laid fingers to ivory in the history of jazz, Bill Evans is perhaps the greatest and most influential.  On Sunday, June 25, 1961 Bill Evans, bassist, Scott LaFaro, and percussionist, Paul Motian performed their legendary last performance at the Village Vanguard in New York (which also produced the "Sunday at the Village Vanguard" album).  Ten days later, LaFaro died in a car crash.  What makes these sessions special, though, besides the incredible artistry of the players, is Evans conception for both his trio and the recordings that commemorate them.  Unlike your typical piano trio, this is not merely a keyboardist soloing over top of a rhythm section.  Here, the musicians are equally great parts of a even greater whole, communicating almost telepathically with one another to create an example of ensemble playing that, at least philosophically, harkens back to the early days of jazz before it became a soloist's artform.  Revolutionary at the time and still extremely influential.  Nightclub jazz at its best.


1.  John Coltrane: "A Love Supreme, 1965"

Song Selected: "Resolution (Part 2)"

For most of his career, John Coltrane was a talented but totally unreliable junky.  Though its arguable to what extent the monkey affected his actual playing, there's no doubt it caused him innumerable personal and professional problems, most notably getting him kicked out of the Miles Davis Quintet, where he both came into his own as an artist and did some of his best of his early work.  Then in 1964, he found God, kicked his habit cold turkey and in 1965 recorded "A Love Supreme," one of the most lyrical and sublimely beautiful performances ever captured on tape from this often skronky angry man of the tenor.  Its also Coltrane's best album, the second best jazz album of all time, and the best album of the early sixties.  Almost makes you want to believe.      

***DICK'S PICKS***

for the week of February 26, 2012

New Release:

Cloud Nothings: "Attack On Memory"

Song Selected: "Cut You"

2012 is still very, very young, but this is the best album I've heard so far this year.  Cloud Nothings do nothing new, really, (their overall sound is equal parts 80s hardcore punk and 90s indie rock) but they do it really well.  They're particularly good at transitioning from emotion to emotion: from moody brooding to suffering to full-on rage, to a cathartic outpouring of joy.  Kind of like the Descendents meets Slint, if that means anything to you.  If it doesn't, check out "Attack On Memory" anyways.

And then check out the Descendents and Slint.

Past Classic:

Taj Mahal: "Taj Mahal"

Song Selected: "Leaving Trunk"

Taj Mahal is essentially a bluesman, but one influenced almost as much by rock and pop as he is by the sounds of the Delta.  As such, his music is both funkier and more hook-laden them than that of many more traditionally-fixated contemporary players.  On this, his self-titled debut, Taj stomps and swaggers through some deep down and dirty territory, emerging stanky but smiling.  And I think you will, too.

Shit Your Grandma Liked: The Reverend Dick Picks the Best Albums of the 1950s

I don't know which I like best:
cooking, cleaning, or intercourse.
Cooking, I guess.

I hate Canada Geese.  They're nasty, miserable, filthy, stupid, vicious fucking things and if it wasn't for the demented laws protecting them as some sort of Canadian national symbol, I'd set up a non-profit association whose sole purpose would be to wipe them off the face of the earth forever.

Every Fall they migrate south, but the other day while I was riding my bike along the Seawall here in Vancouver, I noticed they were back, lunging at children, hissing at tourists, and shitting all over the place like the nasty, miserable, filthy, stupid, vicious fucking things they are.  As I passed by a small flock of them and extended my leg so I could give one or two of them a kick in the ass as I zipped by, it occurred to me that their return, though unfortunate, is not without it's upside:

It also means Spring is on its way at last.

Johnny Gill: Yo Bobby,
what you get Whitney
for Valentine's Day?
Bobby Brown: A coffin.
Ralph Tresvant: That's cold, bro.
Bobby: That's my prerogative.

I should have sensed it.  The return of the geese to their nesting grounds on the Seawall coincided almost exactly with the death of Whitney Houston, an event which also had a bit of a Springtimey vibe about it - kind of like when Dorothy's house landed on the witch in the Wizard of Oz and all the Munchkins started to sing and dance around.  For those of you with delicate sensibilities and terrible taste, I apologize, but I really can't get all that weepy about the death of a crackhead millionairess whose music makes my rectums recoil.

Quite frankly, she was dead to me already.

Anyways, with these seasonal themes of growth and change in mind, I've decided to spruce up the look of the Gospel a little bit.  Look closely and you'll note that I've switched the previous black background for a oh-so-slightly different black background.

Chuh-chuh-chuh-changes!

I've also added a new feature called "Dick's Picks," which you can find by scrolling down to the bottom of the page.  Each week, I'll administer a two LP-length dose of the good stuff I keep behind the counter: a recently released album that I think is worth checking out, as well as a forgotten or under-appreciated classic from the past.

I know four inches doesn't sound
like much, but it's thick.

Starting this week with the 1950s, I'm also going to take you bitches on a magic carpet ride through the history of the Long-Player Album.  Though there's obviously a shitload of recorded music prior to the invention of the LP in 1948, when your talking about albums, as I will be, the 1950s are pretty much where it starts.

Though rock acts really didn't start putting out great albums until the mid 1960s, almost immediately, the LP became pretty much the standard format for jazz.  Frank Sinatra also embraced the LP by the midway point in the decade, after Elvis and other rock 'n' roll acts began to eclipse him on the pop singles charts.  The result was a handful of albums that were among pop music's first masterpieces in the format.

Truman: Psst. Hey Joe.  Now that we've carved
the world up between us here, what say
we ditch fatso and go get us some bitches?

Anyways, here goes: the top 10 albums of the 1950s.
















10.  Ravi Shakar: "Three Ragas, 1956"

Song selected: "Raga Jog"

Though unfortunate associations with acid-headed hippies emerge almost as soon as you start listening to Indian classical music, there's actually a good reason why people started going all gaga for raga gurus like Ravi Shankar in the 1960s: he's a full-on shitkicking motherfucker of a sitar player.  No one ever has, is, or likely ever will be any better than him.  I mean, fuck, There are more ideas in what's called the alap or opening, free improvisation section of "Raga Jog" than Jimmy Page or Pete Townsend came up with in their entire lives.  This album probably would have ranked higher, but I had to knock Ravi down a couple of spots for fathering Norah Jones.


9.  Sun Ra & His Arkestra: "Sound Of Joy, 1956"

Song selected: "Ankh"

Sun Ra is one of jazz's great weirdos.  Sometime in the 1950s, he became convinced that he was an extra-terrestrial from Saturn, changed his name to Sun Ra, and developed a world view and personal philosophy that combined Egyptian mythology with some totally crazy-ass space alien shit.  Seriously.  Later on, his music would occasionally sound like it was made by someone suffering from mental health issues, but this earlier effort is just a top-notch, modern, big band swing album, one of the best ever, in fact.  Exquisitely arranged, beautifully performed, richly textured: a great example of swinging, space-ace, bachelor pad music.


8.  Ray Charles: "Ray Charles, 1957"

Song selected: "Sinner's Prayer"

No one sings gospel songs about fucking quite like Ray Charles, and his 1957 debut is one of the best examples of smutty soul I can think of.  It's hard to understand just how subversive a song like "I Got A Woman" or "Hallelujah, I Love Her So" were back in 1957 when they came out: nowadays, it'd be kind of like jacking off in public to a picture of the Virgin Mary.  This album also laid down the blueprint for much of the soul music of the 1960s: groove-oriented, gospel-inflected blues songs about - what else?  Love and sex.  Which for Ray Charles, seem to be pretty much the same thing.


7.  Thelonius Monk: "The Genius of Modern Music, Volume 1, 1952"

Song Selected: "Ruby, My Dear"

It's hard to underestimate the greatness and importance of this album.  For one, this 1952 release by Thelonious Monk is the first masterpiece of the LP format.  It also documents one of the architects of bebop's first recording sessions as a leader.  Not to mention that the album contains the Monk compostions "Off Minor," "Ruby, My Dear," "Well, You Needn't," "Epistrophy," and "'Round About Midnight,"all of which would become standards and among the most recognized tunes in the jazz catalog.  Must-have music for any jazz collection.


6.  Ornette Coleman "The Shape Of Jazz To Come, 1959"

Song selected: "Congeniality"

The release of Ornette Coleman's 1959 Atlantic debut is a watershed moment in the history of jazz.  It is the birth of Free Jazz, a subgenre of hard bop that basically dispenses with the harmonic underpinnings of the music altogether, emphasizing instead the relationship between the melodic lines.  On his previous two releases, the largely ignored "Something Else!" and "Tomorrow Is The Question," Coleman was not entirely successful in realizing his new and altogether game-changing conception.  Both records still retain lingering traces of many of the harmonic and structural elements that Coleman would abandon completely on "The Shape of Jazz To Come."  Coleman's choice of sidemen have a lot to do with both his past failures and newfound success.  He stopped using a pianist after the first album, and in Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden, he finally finds a rhythm section that was open-minded and sensitive enough to follow him and Don Cherry outside the box, without losing touch with reality altogether.  Not all jazz to come would be shaped as Coleman suggests here, but like it or not, the music would never be the same again.


5.  Elvis Presley: "Elvis Presley, 1956"

Song Selected: "Blue Moon"


There's probably no album more historically important in the history of pop music than this one.  Elvis Presley's self-titled debut kicks off the rock 'n' roll era, and does so with blue-suede boot to the ass.  People often accuse Elvis of racistly appropriating black culture in order to sell a watered-down version of it to middle America, but that's a bunch of bullshit. This is to confuse him with his pigmentally-challenged imitators and with the suits who got filthy stinking rich peddling his funky white ass to America.  Elvis didn't invent rock 'n' roll, he WAS rock 'n' roll - its living, breathing embodiment.  Equal parts Country, R&B, and Gospel, The King is the real fucking deal.  Long may he reign.

4.  Frank Sinatra: "Songs For Swingin' Lovers, 1956"

Song Selected: "I've Got You Under My Skin"

In the 1950s, Frank Sinatra was the undisputed master of the album.  Between 1955 and 1959, he released 7 or 8 albums that are all fantastic, some dark and depressing: "Only The Lonely," "In The Wee Small Hours," "No One Cares," and "Where Are You?"; others upbeat and swinging: "Come Fly With Me," "Come Dance With Me", and "A Swingin' Affair" to name a few.  My favourite of them all, though is "Songs For Swingin' Lovers."  This is Old Blue Eyes at his rat-packy best: smooth, cool, loose as fuck, and yet in complete and total control.  Few, if any artists have mastered their medium the way Sinatra has the American Songbook.  The best crooner ever.


3.  Charles Mingus: "Mingus Ah Um, 1959"

Song Selected: "Better Git It In Your Soul"

With the possible exception of "The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady," "Mingus Ah Um" is the best, and certainly the most immediately appealing of Charles Mingus' large and excellent body of work.  The album is both musically forward looking and conscious of its history: nodding to past greats like Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton on "An Open Letter To Duke" and "Jelly Roll" while remaining very much a modern and progressive jazz album.  Not at all a bad place to start if you want to check out jazz in general or Mingus in particular and aren't into the skronky shit.


2.  Dave Brubeck Quartet: "Time Out, 1959"

Song Selected: "Take Five"

Largely because of its enormous popularity (Brubeck even graced the cover of Time magazine not long after its release) "Time Out" is often reviled as gimmicky, soulless, and almost self-consciously caucasian.  It's none of the above.  Among Brubeck's innovations here include the use of unusual time signatures like 5/4 and 7/8 as well as experimenting with contemporary avant garde compositional techniques like phasing and minimalism.  Although Miles Davis laid the foundation for the style on "The Birth Of The Cool," Brubeck's work, particularly on this album, along with that of Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan is what became known as West Coast Cool Jazz, a softer, less rhythmic, one might say, loungier version of jazz than the east coast Hard Bop of Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, or Charles Mingus.  This shit is too cool for school, Daddy-O.


1.  Miles Davis: "Kind Of Blue, 1959"

Song Selected: "So What?"

"Kind of Blue" is almost unequivocally cited by jazz-heads as the creme de la creme of the idiom and, quite frankly, I cannot help but concur.  Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the album is that the music on it is completely improvised: the musicians (who included John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb) actually had nothing to work with prior to recording other than some rough sketches of modes that Miles had scribbled down on a napkin before the session.  In terms of what is attainable when a small group of inspired and highly gifted artists gather together to make something beautiful, it is an unparalleled masterpiece.  This is not just the best album of the 50s, or of all time, it is, quite possibly, the greatest music ever created by human beings.  If you don't like it, there's almost undoubtedly something seriously fucking wrong with you.


Make sure to check out the Gospel next week for the top 10 albums of the early sixties (1960-65)

*** DICK'S PICKS *** for the Week of February 19, 2012.

New Release:

John Talabot: "Fin"

Song Selected: "Oro y Sangre"

Imagine your at a club, all fucked up on E, shaking your shit and your glow stick like it ain't no thang, when suddenly the ceiling splits open above you, letting in the blinding brightness of a fierce, Ibiza-like sun.  Indeed, the sunstroke electronica that Spanish DJ, John Talabot creates here almost seems better suited to a day at the beach rather than a night at the club.  "Fin" has a bit of that drugged out, sunshine supermanish feel to it that many, including myself, have found so appealing in the work of artists like DeLorean and Caribou, both of whom are worth checking out if you haven't already.  It may require some chemical supplementation in order to appreciate fully, but "Fin" is still one of the best new releases so far this year.  Although the year is still very, very young.


Past Classic:

Various Artists: "The Indestructible Beat of Soweto"

Song Selected: "Ohude Manikiniki" by Umahlathini Nabo.

That music such as this, so brimming with life and joy, could come gurgling up out of the tyrannical oppression and abject squalor of the apartheid-ravaged townships of South Africa is a testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit as well as of the Mbaqanga beat of Soweto.  Here, hopefulness emerges from a hopeless situation through an authentic and heroic engagement with the things that matter most.  If listening to this compilation of gloriously soulful psalms about life, love, and the struggles that abound does not make you ashamed of our culture's snivelling predilection for bitching and moaning about shit that in the great scheme of things is almost laughably petty, it is only a matter of time before you discover the dark and horrible truth about yourself:

You are a cyborg.