My Vinyl Listening for the End of October
As I said a couple of weeks ago I’m going to try to do a playlist every week of what I’ve been listening to on vinyl the week before, along with a brief update on where things are for me with things like the podcast, so long as it doesn’t interfere with me getting my main work done. I actually made this playlist over a week ago, but didn’t finish writing the annotations because I spent much of last week in crunch mode trying to get the Bowie episode of the podcast done. I also didn’t listen to much vinyl last week for the same reason, but I’ve started up again now that I’ve finished the Bowie episode, so you’ll get a playlist next week (along with, I hope, a Patreon bonus on Jesus Christ Superstar, which I’ve started work on).
Anyway, here’s the link to the playlist. Like last time there’s one track for each vinyl album I listened to for a week, in order (with exceptions noted). The Tunemymusic link should open it in your streaming service of choice (though as always if you really like something, it’s a good idea to buy the album if you can afford it). Listen along with my notes if you feel like it.
https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/yYlT45ysT7
Bron-Y-Aur Stomp by Led Zeppelin is from Led Zeppelin III, and I listened to the deluxe double-vinyl edition with demos and alternate versions on the second disc. Growing up I always thought that Led Zeppelin peaked with the first two albums, but as I grow older I become less keen on Jimmy Page ripping off Willie Dixon songs with an electric guitar and Robert Plant singing about his penis, and more interested in Jimmy Page ripping off Bert Jansch on an acoustic guitar and Robert Plant singing about… well, still usually his penis, to be honest, but sometimes also hobbits.
I mock, because Led Zeppelin are an easy band to mock (and Page and Bonham at least were also truly irredeemable human beings), but they also made some absolutely fantastic records, and I really love their folkier work like this. (And if you get a chance to see Robert Plant performing with his folk group Saving Grace, do so — they’re one of the best live bands around).
Chalkhills and Children by XTC is from Oranges and Lemons, one of several contenders among their fans for their best album. To my ears, it’s closer to the middle of the pack — there’s a bit too much of an eighties sheen to the production for my taste, though it still contains some of their greatest songs. This is one of those, and Andy Partridge has referred to it as XTC’s “theme song”. Like a lot of their better stuff, the influence of Brian Wilson is all over it, not in an obvious pastiche way but just in the use of falsetto and counterpoint. The lyrics are mostly about Partridge’s rejection of the idea of fame and wanting to have a private, normal life. I’m sure everyone who has to have any kind of public profile to do work that’s important to them can relate.
Harvest for the World by The Isley Brothers is the title track of their album of the same name, and a song you’re almost certainly familiar with. The Isleys are possibly the most underrated band in music history, a band who have managed to remain musically relevant for over sixty years — they started their career in the 1950s and recorded their first truly important record, “Shout!”, in 1959, and they had their most recent R&B top twenty hits in 2022. This is a band who influenced the Beatles and Stones, who recorded for Motown, who had Jimi Hendrix as their guitarist, but who also influenced Notorious B.I.G. and worked with R. Kelly , Snoop Dogg and Beyonce. While Ron Isley is an old man now and his voice is weaker than it once was (though the Isleys still put on a wonderful show when I saw them on the Beach Boys Cruise in 2023) it would not surprise me too much if they manage to have a hit for their seventieth anniversary as a recording act next year.
Just how good a band they are is shown by the fact that “Harvest For the World” was actually recorded on the same day as “Fight the Power”, but held over for the next album. There are very few bands that have done two tracks that good and that different in a single day.
Indian Gin and Whisky Dry by The Bee Gees is another example of my current Bee Gees obsession (which will continue in the next couple of these playlists assuming I do these). From the Idea album, this is credited to all three Gibb brothers, but seems to be a mostly Robin song, and it’s him on lead. While the subject seems to be alcoholism, it’s a far cheerier song than many of Robin’s songs. Idea is one of the most Robin-dominated Bee Gees albums, and one of their strongest. The version I listened to was the British vinyl — the American release missed out the one non-Gibb song, Vince Melouney’s “Such a Shame”, and replaced it with “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You”, which in the UK was a non-album single. In this case the US version is probably slightly better than the UK (and has a better cover — the UK version has a lightbulb signifying an idea, while the US one has a Klaus Voorman drawing of a collage face with elements of all five then members of the Bee Gees (though given the family resemblance between the three Gibbs, the result just looks like a drawing of Barry, which may have been intentional).
Old Molly Metcalfe by Jake Thackray is a gorgeous mostly a capella song about a shepherdess dying alone on the moors. Thackray was dismissed as a light entertainer during his lifetime, and while his work has had some reassessment since his death a couple of deacdes ago, he still may be the most criminally underrated songwriter in history. The man had an enormous range as a writer, from deeply empathetic short stories about the simple joys and quiet tragedies of rural life like this, to religious songs with a deeply humanist, Yorkshire, version of Catholicism (“Country Boy” does more to make Jesus seem like someone it would be worth emulating than millennia of sermons have managed), to utterly filthy low humour.
Some of that low humour has unfortunately dated rather badly — on the album this is from, Bantam Cock, there are two songs (the title song and “Brother Gorilla”, his adaptation of a George Brassens song) with jokes about sexual assault of the kind that were absolutely endemic among British humour of the early 1970s — but on the same album the other comedy songs all still stand up without caveats, and there’s a warmth, humanism, and fundamental decency to even his dodgiest stuff which shines through. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, I urge you to listen to the four-CD box set of all his EMI studio recordings, Jake in a Box. He belongs in the pantheon of great British songwriters in the same category as Ray Davies and Jarvis Cocker, but honestly was more consistently great than either.
Making Plans For Nigel (Live) by XTC is from Live Boots, an “official bootleg” of a 1981 live show that came out this year. The sound quality is lousy, but it does show what a great live band they were before Andy Partridge’s illness forced them to retire from the stage.
Tomorrow and Me by Michael Nesmith is the opening track from And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’, one of Nesmith’s best albums. Whereas before and after this he usually worked with full bands, here it’s just him and his pedal steel player Red Rhodes, though both are overdubbed multiple times, and it’s an incredible combination. Nesmith had one of the great voices of his generation — he is never spoken of as one of the great singers, but there were very few better — and Red Rhodes could make the pedal steel sing like nobody on Earth. The song itself, on paper, sounds like the most generic possible country song, about a man crying into his beer after a relationship breaks down, but as is often the case with Papa Nez is far more thoughtful than you might expect.
Lay it On Me by The Bee Gees is actually just by Maurice Gibb. It’s from their reunion album 2 Years On, and on that album relations between Robin and Barry were still strained. There are three songs on the album featuring all three Bee Gees — Barry and Robin only appeared on songs they wrote or co-wrote themselves, so they only both appear on the three songs written collaboratively by all three brothers. Maurice, who was both the man in the middle who acted as a buffer between his warring brothers and the group’s great unsung multiinstrumentalist, is on every track on the album, and as he wrote this song it’s a solo track. Maurice plays all the rhythm instruments on the track except possibly the drums — multiple layers of guitar, bass, and piano — and he was going through a swamp rock phase at the time, so you can definitely hear the influence of Tony Joe White on the track, while Gerry Shury’s string arrangement is a straight lift of the work Jimmie Haskell did for Bobbie Gentry (and no worse for that — if you’re going to steal, steal from the best). It’s a fun track, though Maurice, who may well have been the world’s nicest man, does not convince singing “I’m just a low-down critter who never did any good”.
Sunday Morning by The Velvet Underground and Nico is, of course, from their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. The version I’ve linked here is the stereo version as that’s what I could find on streaming, but the particular reason I was listening to the album is because I recently picked up a box set, The MGM/Verve Albums, containing the mono mixes of this and White Light/White Heat, the mono “closet mix” of the self-titled third album, the mono mix of Nico’s Chelsea Girl album, and the stereo mix of the 1969 odds-and-sods collection. I’ve always preferred the Velvets in gentle, melodic mode like this to the more abrasive stuff they’re better known for, though I like both, and here they seem to be as influenced by the Mamas and the Papas (it seems like a riposte to “Monday, Monday”, a song Reed mentioned hating) and the Monkees (many people have pointed out the musical resemblance to “I Wanna Be Free”) as any of the hipper influences that get mentioned.
Chelsea Girls by Nico is from the same box set, the almost-title track of her Chelsea Girl album. That album is to all intents and purposes half of a second Velvet Underground & Nico album — five of the ten tracks on the album are written by and feature members of the group in various combinations, with the other five having her backed by Jackson Browne, who wrote three of them (the other two are Browne backing her on covers of Dylan and Tim Hardin songs). This one is written by Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, who provide the guitars, and is one of the best things to come out of the extended Velvets project at the time. Nico later said that she disliked the orchestral arrangements that were overdubbed by producer Tom Wilson, and found the flute parts in particular unlistenable, but to my mind they give the album a chamber-pop feel that makes it — it would be a far lesser album without those parts.
Maria by The Mighty Sparrow is actually not the version I listened to, which is on a 70s album titled Peace and Love which doesn’t appear to be on streaming. Like many Calypsonians, Sparrow would often rerecord his more successful songs multiple times, and this one, “Maria”, was originally recorded in 1961 but I believe the version I found on streaming is a 1969 rerecording backed by Byron Lee and the Dragonaires. In whatever version, though, any track by Sparrow (who sadly died last month) is always a joy to listen to.
Bring it on Home to Me (Live at the Harlem Square Club) by Sam Cooke is from one of the greatest live albums of all time. Cooke recorded two live albums close to each other, showing very different versions of his act, and in this case he is playing to a Black club audience and doing the chitlin’ circuit version of his show, full of soul and audience participation and with extra grit in his vocals. Listening to this album you can see exactly how big an influence Cooke was on Otis Redding in particular.
Everyday I Wonder by Wizzard , from Introducing Eddy and the Falcons, is one of Roy Wood’s genre exercises — the Eddy and the Falcons album was Wizzard doing pastiches of different pre-Beatles rock acts like Duane Eddy, Neil Sedaka, and Elvis. On this one, they’re doing Del Shannon, with an intro that’s ripped straight from “Runaway”, though the song is much more structurally complex and denser in arrangement than anything Shannon would have done. While Wizzard were technically a group, with a bass player, drummer, two saxophonists, and a piano player as well as Wood, Wood is credited on the album with “vocals, guitars, drums, oboe, cello, bass guitar, keyboards, bassoon, upright bass, tenor and baritone saxophones, percussion” and it’s likely this is, if not quite a solo performance, largely built up by overdubs of multiple Roys Wood.
We then have Contrapunctus 1 from Glenn Gould’s performance of Bach’s Art of the Fugue. I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable about classical music as I’d like to be, but I love Bach, especially his solo keyboard pieces, and I love Gould’s performances of them in particular. Bach for me is almost pure, distilled, music — if you want to just point to one composer and say “he sums up all of what music means”, Bach is as good a choice as any.
White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground is the title track of the album of the same name. This is the band in a very different mode from “Sunday Morning” and “Chelsea Girls” — this is scuzzy garage rock proto-punk, proto-glam Velvets. It’s almost impossible to hear how shocking this must have sounded at the time, because in one way or another all guitar music made since the mid-seventies has been either inspired by this or in reaction to it. The Eno quote about everyone who heard the first Velvets album forming a band is facile, but there’s a reason that quote gets dragged out all the time. You don’t get punk or Bowie or indie or grunge without this.
All This Making Love by The Bee Gees on the other hand is a track that represents a style of music that’s pretty much entirely died out, though it made up a huge chunk of seventies art rock. From Main Course, the album that started their second and most successful phase (it’s the one with “Jive Talkin’” and “Nights on Broadway”, where they discovered dance music and the power of Barry’s falsetto), unlike some of their later albums that concentrate specifically on the disco style, that one still showed the group’s versatility. While Main Course mostly shows the influence of Stevie Wonder and the Stylistics, it also has room for some sad balladry from Robin, country pastiche, the psychedelic “Edge of the Universe”, and this track which sounds at different points like 10CC, Queen at their most theatrical, Roy Wood, or Supertramp. It’s one of many Bee Gees album tracks where if you’re only familiar with the hits you might have real difficulty believing that it was the same band.
Twistin’ the Night Away by Sam Cooke is from the other live album that Cooke recorded, At the Copa, a show recorded in front of a predominantly white audience, and part of Cooke’s planned move towards a more “mainstream” audience. His vocals are smoother, and the material is mostly made up of popular folk tunes both traditional (“Bill Bailey”, “Frankie and Johnny”) and contemporary (“Blowin’ in the Wind”, “If I Had a Hammer”) plus songs from the Great American Songbook and only two of his own hits, this and “You Send Me”. A fascinating document of a time when there was an expected career path that everybody in showbiz would follow, and that was just what you did. While it's not as good as his other live album, it's still as good as this kind of music gets.
Pale Blue Eyes by The Velvet Underground is from their third, self-titled, album, and is once again Lou Reed in gentle ballad mode. There’s not much to say about this one that hasn’t already been said, of course, but again this is my favourite style of Velvet Underground music.
Free Jazz Parts 1 & 2 is not a single track, except it is. Ornette Coleman’s classic album is a single half-hour performance. On vinyl, which is how I listened to it, it fades out half way through and then fades in for side two, but on all digital releases it’s just presented as a single track, which is how it is here (so skip it if jazz isn’t your thing). This is the classic album from which the genre of free jazz takes its name, and it’s impressive if sometimes difficult listening.
Two full jazz quartets (each with a wind player, a brass player, a bassist and drummer), one in each speaker, free-improvising for half an hour. It's not completely spontaneous – there are a handful of prearranged bits triggered by a hand signal from Coleman where they'd briefly play in unison for a couple of bars before switching to a soloist in an order chosen beforehand. But almost all of it is composed in the moment by the musicians.
While I'm usually a very analytical person, and this kind of jazz is a very intellectual music, it's about the only music I listen to that I don't analyse (except when I need to for my podcast) and don't really have a vocabulary for. My response to this is, rather, along the lines of "they're going screech skronk squawk plonk, but in a really good way. I like it when they go skronk."
Sweet Song of Summer by the Bee Gees is from their last British album before they moved to Miami, To Whom it May Concern, and coincidentally features the drumming of the great session player Clem Cattini, who died this week after I put the playlist together. To Whom it May Concern is an album that the group always somewhat dismissed later, saying that the title was a sign that they didn’t know who their audience was, but in fact it’s one of their better efforts. This, the closing track, is one of those songs you could play to people and they wouldn’t guess in a million years that it’s the Bee Gees. Had this been released in 1967 it would now be hailed as a psychedelic classic — it’s obviously influenced, if not by actual Indian music, then by the music of the time that was influenced by Indian music, and while it’s not actually a drone (there are quite a few chord changes) it sounds like a drone. Coming out as an album track in 1972 though, it was ignored.
While Barry and Robin are the lead vocalists, the real stars of the recording are Cattini, giving a very impressive performance, and Maurice Gibb, who plays almost everything else on the track. Barry Gibb or Alan Kendall might be playing the acoustic guitar that’s faintly in the mix — though that might also be Maurice — but it’s Maurice playing the McCartneyesque bass part and the multiple layers of Moog (an instrument still so new and unfamiliar that they had to get Mike Vickers, ex of Manfred Mann, to help set it up — he’s credited as “Moog engineer”) and mellotron.
I do worry slightly if Robin’s wordless melisma in the extended fade might cross the line slightly into racist caricature , but this is a track that definitely should be listened to with headphones, because it keeps revealing extra little details.
Some of Shelly’s Blues by Michael Nesmith is from Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash, which is probably the weakest of Nez’s RCA albums, but that’s a relative assessment — all those albums are never less than listenable. But Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash was his sixth album in three years (and his last for the label) and there’s a slight sense of him needing to refill the well a bit. His previous albums included a couple of actual masterpieces and every album had multiple classic tracks on it, while this one is “only” a very good country-rock album that’s a pleasure to listen to. This is the best track — a remake of a song he’d recorded a few years earlier with the Monkees, but which hadn’t yet been released when this came out.
I’ve seen some people criticise the lyrics to this track as sounding very controlling, and I think Nez himself later regretted them somewhat — when I saw him live in 2012 (sadly the only time I got to — I had a ticket to see him and Micky on the Beach Boys Cruise in 2022, but of course he died before the show) he reframed the lyrics by telling a quite long story beforehand, making the protagonist of the song much more sympathetic. But I think that (unlike for example some of the songs Davy Jones was given to sing in the Monkees, which often have unambiguously horrible protagonists) there are ways of reading the song that don’t come out that way, mostly because of the meaning in Nez’s tone rather than the lyrics. I don’t blame anyone who finds this one a little uncomfortable though.
Rock on the Moon by The Cramps is ridiculous fun, from their Songs The Lord Taught Us album — a hyper-accelerated cover of an obscure rockabilly track by one Jimmy Stewart (not the film star, and also not the one Wikipedia credits). As I said on Bluesky when I was listening to the album, I sometimes wonder why every band isn’t The Cramps — just people who’ve thought "you know what's cool? Rockabilly records and voodoo R&B and surf guitar and werewolves and spaceships and sex and garage rock and bikinis and ridiculous hair and zombies. We should do a band that's all that stuff and nothing else."
Sometimes you want serious lyrics about important concepts, and sometimes you just want someone yelping “rock on the moon, rock rock rock”. This is the latter, and it's great.
And we finish up with Ride Into the Sun by The Velvet Underground — not the version most people know from the Loaded sessions with Doug Yule on vocals, and not the same version that Lou Reed did on his eponymous first solo album either, this is an instrumental outtake that was originally released on the 1986 compilation Another View, and I listened to it on 1969, a compilation of outtakes from that year included as the final disc in the MGM/Verve Albums box set (and which should not be confused with 1969: Velvet Underground Live, which is a live album).
I find this interesting because it shows just how important Reed’s melodies were in distinguishing his songs from each other. The backing track here sounds at points like it’s just a fuzzed-up arrangement of “Pale Blue Eyes”, but when you hear the two songs with their lead vocals you’d never think of confusing the two. Reed doesn’t often get much credit as a melodist, but he was actually really good at writing strong Beach Boys and doo-wop influenced melodies that worked with his limited vocal range.
That’s the end of this week’s playlist, and I hope I’ll get another one to you in a week or so.
