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.