Radio City, Big Star, 1974

I had underrated this album. It’s more than "September Gurls" and "Back of a Car." It’s a genuine revelation. The big revelations this time are “Life Is White” and “Way Out West.” The album is remarkably consistent in musical tone and emotional tone. It looks ahead to Mitch Easter and Scott Miller and all the jangle-poppers but what distinguishes it as of its time is that the vocals are buried in the mix.

I think part of why the album didn’t click with me before is I was listening to it with impatient, punk-conditioned ears. It requires a bit of adjusting to its pace.

And how can I not mention William Eggleston’s cover, with its super-saturated red and the sex position posters cut off at the edge of the frame. The way it ignores the band and ostensibly, has no content whatever. Eggleston wasn’t famous yet in 1974.

The Big Star documentary, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, is going to be screened at SXSW as a work-in-progress.

"I Hear You Knocking", Dave Edmunds (single), 1971

In 1971, this was revivalism, and Edmunds channels his voice through some strange filter, to make it sound like it’s an old radio broadcast. Even the lyrics self-consciously mention 1952 and Chuck Berry. On the radio of that day, this stood out like a welcome sore thumb. John Lennon famously liked this single. and why wouldn’t he.

Too Much Too Soon, New York Dolls, 1974

Wow, they inhabit a different WORLD from Pink Floyd. One I’d much rather live in.

Sparks, Sparks, 1971 (orig. released as Halfnelson by Halfnelson)

Only good in tiny sparks. It has all the thought you expect from Sparks but not the tight pop songs.

Goats Head Soup, The Rolling Stones, 1973

This album is way better than I thought, especially "Coming Down Again" and "Heartbreaker." For reasons I can't remember, I was overly biased against this album. Jeez, even hearing "Angie" isn’t a terrible experience.

It’s an OK album, but what’s fascinating is that it’s one year after Exile and it’s not at all cut from the same cloth. Were the Stones distracted with extra-musical things? Everything, writing, playing, and recording, sounds half-assed sometimes.

Every Picture Tells a Story, Rod Stewart, 1971

Surprise, surprise. I didn’t even want to include Stewart in the corpus. The surprise is not only can I listen to this album without cringing, I like it.

Man, this is a great album. All the crap he did later ("Stay with Me," "Hot Legs," et too many cetera) had retrospectively colored my opinion toward the negative. Funny how that happens.

Every Picture is full of energy, unforced emotion and wit. The acoustic (twelve-string? help me, musos) in the title track is given its own generous space in the mix. When I was fourteen “the women I’ve known I wouldn’t let tie my shoes/they wouldn’t give you the time of day” resonated with me.

Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd, 1973

Wow, low energy, like on cough syrup or something. Or heroin. Where’s the sense of humor gone? It’s like Gray Floyd. Contrast this to what Bowie was doing at the same time. (Aladdin Sane and Pinups). Pink Floyd has the weight of world on their shoulders and it’s not pretty. It's bombastic without any leavening.

Pretties For You, Alice Cooper, 1969

Wow, this falls into the category of Big Surprises.  Not at all what I expected based on the Alice Cooper name, this is psychedelic-inflected jazz, like Captain Beefheart.  I think I like it, but it will require more listening to say anything more about.

Full Circle, The Doors (without Jim Morrison), 1972

I feel bad for hitting them when they’re down, but you must be fucking kidding me. This is dire. Never mind half assed, this misses the ass entirely,. It’s worse when they evoke the old Doors, like on “4 Billion Souls.” I like this lyric - “Year 2000 is the cutoff point.”

BONUS - The truly awful album cover

"New York City Serenade" from The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, Bruce Springsteen, 1973

I still love love love this song. Compared to what else was going on in 1973, Springsteen appears to be living on his own musical planet. This is an elaborately produced, long, leisurely song. This whole album appears to be by an old soul, someone who knows exactly what he wants to do and has nothing to prove.

The one thing in my recent musical diet this reminds me of is The Hold Steady, with its journalistic/painterly focus on a subculture.

The surprise is I love this now even more than then.

Kick Out the Jams, MC5, 1969

Man, where did they get their great reputation?  This is awful, there’s no other way to say it. Blues over amplified and played sloppily and shoutily.  And with a notable lack of humor, none of Iggy’s sexiness.

Buffalo Springfield Again, Buffalo Springfield, 1967

Awesome when Neil Young is at the controls  ("Mr Soul," "Expecting to Fly," and "Broken Arrow"). Otherwise a bunch of hippies playing at being country, with one exception -- "Bluebird" (Stills) is pretty good.

Diamond Dogs, David Bowie, 1974

Where do I start with how wonderful this album is? I only knew the singles "Diamond Dogs" and "Rebel Rebel" before this, had never listened to any of the lyrics.  Diamond Dogs is the biggest and best surprise to come out of this project so far for me. Dogs is a great album that belongs in the first rank of Bowie’s work. He deliberately made it dark, difficult, unpleasant, offputting, and insulting to the audience (“this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide!” as a rote crowd cheers).

Chris O' Leary, in his awesome Bowie blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, says that Dogs contains the remnants of three failed Bowie projects:

Diamond Dogs is a salvage job, a compilation of scraps from stillborn Bowie projects. There are remnants of a Ziggy Stardust musical (“Rebel Rebel” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me”), pieces of a barely comprehensible Oliver Twist-by-JG Ballard scenario (“Diamond Dogs,” “Future Legend” and “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family”), and fragments of Bowie’s grandest failed ambition, a musical of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “We Are the Dead,” “Big Brother” and, of course, “1984″ itself.   Link

Knowing this takes nothing away from the album's brilliance.  The pieces go together very well musically and thematically.

I especially like side two ("Rock 'n' Roll with Me," "We Are the Dead," "1984," "Big Brother," and "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family").  "Chant" is a great song to blast, with its sarcastic chants of “brother” that make me think of Big Brother’s zombies worshipping him.

Transformer, Lou Reed, 1972 and Exile on Main St., The Rolling Stones, 1972

I see parallels between Transformer and Exile on Main St. Lou using strings, piano - the Stones using horns and adding other instruments. Recall that Exile got bad reviews because it was not guitar driven and buried Jagger's vocals in the mix! (The 2010 reissue cleaned it up too much! Keith didn't like it.) 

Artists should take care with their old work.  Remember how the painter Gully Jimson (in Joyce Cary's wonderful novel The Horse's Mouth) was trying to get people to forget the Sara Monday paintings (while simultaneously trying, without much success, to wring money from them).

I don't like the "folk music" label

I want to reject putting Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, and their peers in the ghetto of "folk."  I don't think their music has anything to do with folk music. I'm not sure if it's rock, either. It leans on the American song tradition and on jazz. It draws from folk music too, but goes so far beyond it that it deserves another name.

I think in the years 1967-74 they were creating something wholly new and radical, something not heard before, something I think was dismissed at the time with the "folk" label. Even "singer/songwriter" doesn't satisfy me as a label, it describes what they are but not what they did.

Consider the storm of scorn and criticism Ochs got for wanting to be like Elvis (after Dylan's own famous problems. And now we think of it as Dylan "going electric". Like it's one way? You can't ever "go acoustic" after you've "been electric"??). People had categories in their minds and those categories had real consequences. Or look at the San Francisco bands of the period. The Dead and Airplane came from a bluegrass/folk scene, didn't they?

Maybe some of the divide between folk and rock was a class divide, that mirrored the race divide of the 1950's. Rock was seen as working class and greasy, while folk was seen as college educated and clean. As Dylan was told in "Talkin' New York," "You sound like a hillbilly, we want folksingers here!"

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd, 1967

This album is one of the pleasant surprises of this project.  I only had Ummagumma back then so only knew the songs from the live versions. And I liked them.  But the studio versions are better. It's rare that a band's live version of a song is better than same band's studio version. Piper really rocks and has humor.

Reflecting on the lyrics. Back in those days there was no Internet. To know the lyrics you would have to puzzle them out yourself, if there was no lyric sheet. To get the music you had to go to record stores. To meet other fans you had to go to concerts or clubs and talk to other fans. To get biographical and other info you had to read magazines (which you got by mail or at a store) or books ( which you got at bookstores). To know when a band was playing you read the Sunday Times or the Village Voice. To get discographical info there were books, or catalogs like Schwann. To share what you were listening to you invited someone over. It was a slower, simpler time.

The Corpus: What's Left Out

I decided to leave some things out of the corpus.  All studying requires choice, exclusion. So I excluded some things.

Paul McCartney
    I have to hear "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" again?  No thanks.  Too precious and lightweight.
Yes 
  I was a fan in those years, listened to them a lot.  Don't want to revisit that.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer 
  I know this direction in music was there then, I just don't want to think about it.
Cream, Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers 
  Listened to that stuff a lot then.  I can only take so much guitar-wank.  I might decide to add Cream later, though.
Jethro Tull 
  Maybe because I listened to them so much then. Or what they turned into later?  I don't know, I'd just rather not go there. Also may revisit that later.
The Eagles 
  They LA-fied country a bit too much for me.
The Monkees 
  Loved them then.  I don't think it'd hold up musically.

I also left out almost all live albums (I included a few that I consider essential), all greatest hits albums, and almost all of Motown.

Why did you leave out Motown?

A lot of their greatest work was done by 1967.  I'll include the odd great single if it strikes me.

The Corpus

To start the project, I assembled a list of recordings I am calling "the corpus."

For artists in this list, I am including everything they released from 1967 through 1974, except compilations and live albums.

ARTISTS WHOSE COMPLETE WORK FROM 1967-74 IS IN THE CORPUS

Alice Cooper
Badfinger
The Band
Barry White [singles]
The Beach Boys
The Beatles
Big Star
Billy Joel
Bob Dylan
Brian Eno
Bruce Springsteen
Buffalo Springfield
The Byrds
Captain Beefheart
David Bowie
The Doors
Elton John
Fairport Convention
Fleetwood Mac
Flying Burrito Brothers
George Harrison
Gram Parsons
Grateful Dead
James Brown [singles]
Janis Joplin [solo and with bands]
Jefferson Airplane
Jimi Hendrix
Jobriath
John Cale
John Lennon
Joni Mitchell
The Kinks
Laura Nyro
Led Zeppelin
Leonard Cohen
Lou Reed
Loudon Wainwright III
Love
The MC5
The Mothers of Invention
Mott the Hoople
Neil Young
New York Dolls
Nick Drake
Nico
Pete Townshend
Phil Ochs
Pink Floyd
Queen
Rod Stewart
The Rolling Stones
Roxy Music
Scott Walker
Sparks
Steely Dan
The Stooges [also Iggy & the Stooges]
T. Rex [also Tyrannosaurus Rex]
Tim Buckley
Todd Rundgren
Van Morrison
The Velvet Underground
The Who

There are other artists in the corpus, but not their complete work from 1967-74.

The 1967 to 1974 Project

What is this?

Hi, my name is Larry Kooper (aka stormville). This is the blog of The 1967 to 1974 Project. A couple of weeks ago I decided to start listening to music (mostly rock and pop, more about boundaries later) from 1967 to 1974, and write about it.

 Why 1967-1974?

 In 1967, several important things happened in music:

 - Sgt Pepper
 - Rock changed from singles to albums.
 - The singer/songwriter explosion (Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen)
 - The San Francisco Sound explosion (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead)

I chose 1974 because:

 - It coincided with the end of glam rock
 - The beginnings of disco
 - To exclude punk and new wave; I know those well and don’t need to study them now.

A lot of the reason for the project is to listen to things that are completely new to me, or to listen to things I've already heard but with new ears, and even to revisit things I knew well and see what my attitude is to them now.