83. Love - Da Capo

1. Stephanie Knows Who
2. Orange Skies
3. Que Vida
4. Seven And Seven Is
5. Castle
6. She Comes In Colors
7. Revelation

 Proving that Love really does overcome all, especially in terms of band names. I have absolutely no doubt that much of my opinion towards this album relies on how much better a band name Love is compared to the psychedelic hangover of "Moby Grape" Anything that makes me think of a grape soda endorsed by Moby is bound to go bad.

Anyway, to the real meat and potatoes: This album is good. The first 6 songs are truly psychedelic  pop masterpieces, awash in orchestration that thankfully manages to avoid the more nauseating cliched sounds that were all over the damned place in this decade. Not only that, but the band's ultra-huge line up (well, 7 was a lot of people for 1967!) for this album means we get a lot of cool stuff thrown into every song, like the ever-inescapable harpsichord.
 Which may or may not have anything to do with how much I liked this record. My secret harpsichord fetish must never be revealed to th

There's a good healthy mix of rockers and mellow tunes on the first half to keep the blandness at bay. Of particular note is 'Seven and Seven Is', the band's only hit, which is a punkish-flavored song that just keeps building and building with furious energy before ending in an explosion. Probably the most exciting thing on this list since the Sonics!

The more laid back songs are nothing to shake a stick at either, though I have no idea why one would want to shake a stick at a song, especially since as the Insane Clown Posse so eloquently put it, you can't even see that shit. Music is all magic, man.

Anyway, they're pretty good songs, though sometimes they may come off as a bit cheesy/dated, particularly Orange Skies. I'd like to see the man who can turn the lyric "Orange skies, carnivals and cotton candy" into something that ISN'T cheesy. And that flute that sounds like it was taken straight off of some sixties lounge record doesn't help matters, although in this context it provides a light and breezy melody that slips the surly bonds of cheesiness and flies off into the stratosphere of taste. Ditto for ¡Que Vida!, which is so impossibly light that you're scared that the song's gonna fly right off of the album.

After 6 very solid songs, I was eagerly anticipating Revelations, the 19 minute elephant in the room taking up the entire second half of the album like it's entitled to do that. Unfortunately, I was quick to discover that it was just a shitty blues jam. Remember Going Home, that 11 minute Rolling Stones song from Aftermath? The one that didn't really go anywhere and Mick Jagger wouldn't shut the hell up? Take that, add a few more interesting bits and solos, and you've got this song. While I liked this a lot more than I liked Going Home, largely because the lead singer has the sense to back the fuck off (though not entirely, unfortunately), it's still not deserving at all of its lofty 19 minute length. There's even a goddamned drum solo. You know you're padding a song far too much when you decide that a drum solo is a good idea.

Despite all my complaining about the second side, the first half of this album is good enough to not wreck the grade curve. I guess it's true that all you need is love everything is terrible! 8/10

82. Moby Grape - Moby Grape (1967)

1. Hey Grandma
2. Mr Blues
3. Fall On You
4. 8.05
5. Come In The Morning
6. Omaha
7. Naked If I Want To
8. Someday
9. Ain't No Use
10. Sitting By The Window
11. Changes
12. Lazy Me
13. Indifference

Words cannot even begin to describe the unfathomable okayness of this album. This album is so utterly decent that whilst listening to it, I almost moved twice. In  time, my fingers were even twitching to the high levels of tolerability that I was being exposed to.


Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that this album, while being enjoyable to listen to and certainly a well put together piece of work, it's about as exciting as a trip to your grandma's house (unless your grandma is Betty White). Simply put, it's nothing that I haven't heard before.


What baffles me the most about this album's critical following (and it DOES have one) is how it has been held up as one of the great psychedelic classics of '67. I'm convinced that this only happened because the band came from San Francisco, because there's very little overtly psychedelic about any of these songs. The closest they get are little weird bits like the intro to Omaha, but in light of the great masterpieces I've heard so far, wacky intros are not gonna cut it. Frank Zappa's got more psychedelic weirdness in his tailbone than all of these songs combined. Fer Chrissake, the longest song on here is 4 minutes long! The audience wouldn't even be tripping yet!


What this album does sound like is sort of a mishmash of every other contemporary sound in rock, complete with the folksiness of Buffalo Springfield, the harmonies of the Byrds, and the oh-so-hilarious R&B rave-ups (well, Changes is actually a pretty good song. You've got me there, you Grape bastards!) The harmonies are actually one of the better parts of the album, actually. I'm saying that because without them, this would be the most dull "psychedelic rock" album since the time Syd Barrett had a bad trip and accidentally left the tape recorder running. 7/10

81. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Safe as Milk (1967)

1. Sure Nuff 'n' Yes I Do
2. Zig Zag Wanderer
3. Call On Me
4. Dropout Boogie
5. I'm Glad
6. Electricity
7. Yellow Brick Road
8. Abba Zaba
9. Plastic Factory
10. Where There's Woman
11. Grown So Ugly
12. Autumn's Child

In this post-mad cow disease world, not even milk is safe anymore.

That's the tagline to what may be the worst film yet to be written, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to write it anyway. But first, I must write about Captain Beefheart, a noted eccentric and contemporary of Frank Zappa. Aside from a few tracks here and there, I hadn't really given him a full listen before this album, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was actually quite accessible. 


Yeah, really. You wouldn't expect it from a guy named Captain Beefheart, but this was a fun and engaging listen. It just might be the best white blues album on the list so far, in fact. The first track sounds like a Muddy Waters track if Muddy Waters dropped some acid and wrote his thoughts down. 


This album tends to oscillate between straight R&B songs like 'Call on Me' that already must have started to sound out of date in the wild Spirit of '67 and some of the freakiest blues this side of the Mississippi. 'Electricity' is nothing short of WILD, maaaaaan. It's even got a Theremin! How many blues songs do you know of with a theremin? 'Abba Zabba' is another particular delight, with its pseudo-African rhythms, which might be the first time a rock band ever used those. Hey, you're getting your world music into my blues! Stop it!

And unfortunately, I've just found out that he's dead while writing this review. I'm hoping this isn't the start of some terrible curse relating to my blog, but all jokes aside, this is quite a sad loss to music and to art in general. Artists as rare and unique as Don Van Vliet don't come around too often: They should be treasured and remembered, and most importantly, celebrated. 9/10

80. Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield Again (1967)

1. Mr. Soul
2. Child's Claim To Fame
3. Everydays
4. Expecting To Fly
5. Bluebird
6. Hung Upside Down
7. Sad Memory
8. Good Time Boy
9. Rock 'n' Roll Woman
10. Broken Arrow

And now we must deal with one of the more annoying aspects of the blog. After all, it's a bit daft listening to Buffalo Springfield Again when we haven't even given Buffalo Springfield a proper listening-to. But, I suppose that is a quest for another, much longer blog than my tragically limited scope.

This album brings us a first glimpse at what will soon become a very familiar face in the upcoming decade: Mr. Neil Young, one of Canada's finest exports, giving them a reputation that they have since tried their best to dismantle by giving the world Justin Bieber and Bryan Adams. For shame, Canada. No wonder you're stuck as the eternal Oates to the USA's dynamic and forceful Hall (In case you were wondering, Oates' mustache represents Quebec). But enough about them. 

Neil Young is by far the coolest member of this band, and it certainly shows in his songwriting. 'Mr. Soul', although the riff sounds like a shameless ripoff of 'Satisfaction' by the Stones, is a nice slice of mid '60s rock, complete with one of the first examples of Neil Young's awesome soloing. It wasn't all distortion and riffs with Neil, though, as evidenced by his other two songs, 'Expecting To Fly' and 'Broken Arrow'. For whatever reason, he decided to experiment with orchestral arrangements that sound completely unlike anything else on the album. 'Expecting' is a nice enough song, if a little bland, but 'Broken Arrow' is about as overtly psychedelic as Neil ever got, awash in sound effects and bizarre jazz interludes, and even a live recording of Mr. Soul just for the hell of it. All those sound effects result in a relatively disjointed song, but I think it works in its favor. It's by far the most interesting song on the album.


Stephen Stills, the other major figure in the band, has his own share of good songs that aren't quite as interesting. 'Bluebird' is probably his best song here, with oh-so-groovy harmonies that just scream Sixties and a banjo-driven coda, because there haven't been nearly enough banjos on this list. 'Everydays' is an interesting experiment into what psychedelic lounge would sound like if anyone cared to make it a genre, and 'Rock and Roll Woman' is so sixties it hurts.


Oh, and there was another guy who wrote songs named Richie Furay. His songs are fairly nondescript, except for 'Good Time Boy', the sore thumb of the album with its punchy brass arrangements and its SOCK IT TO ME vocals like the band decided to be Aretha Franklin for a day. It doesn't quite work.


At the end of the day, this album didn't really blow my mind or make my jaw drop to the floor with its amazing musicality or songwriting innovations, but it was a very well played record, without any true failures, and even a couple strong standouts! And perhaps most importantly, it's got Neil Young. 8/10

79. Country Joe and the Fish - Electric Music for the Mind and Body (1967)

1. Flying High
2. Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine
3. Death Sound Blues
4. Porpoise Mouth
5. Section 43
6. Super Bird
7. Sad And Lonely Times
8. Love
9. Bass Strings
10. Masked Marauder
11. Grace

After being relentlessly beaten into submission by finals, it is once again time to remember there's a blog going on. And what better way than with this day-glo artifact of the '60s? This album contains most of the psychedelic tropes that we know and love: incredibly cheesy organ, a bunch of mind-expanding jargon in the lyrics, including a particularly subtle bit where "LSD" is whispered at the end of a song....it's music that you can put over a montage of hippies dancing in parks and then sell to baby boomers. They'll eat it up.


This album isn't really what anyone would call catchy, but Country Joe and his ilk make up for it with psychedelic inventiveness. There's a pretty good range of sounds on here, from psych-blues ('Death Sound Blues', shockingly enough!) to a couple of longer tracks where the band lets their considerably long hair down and gets to jamming. 'Section 43' is a standout and just might be the best song on the record, but 'Grace' just sort of meanders along without any sense of where it's going to go.


There's honestly not a lot to write here about this album. It seems to function more as a sort of time capsule to 1967 San Francisco as it actually was, not how it was romanticized in a series of bland pop hits about wearing flowers in your hair and what have you. Like the 13th Floor Elevators before them, these guys were waaaaaaaay too freaky to possibly land a hit record. But when you have a song about making LBJ take acid, who needs hits? 8.5/10

78. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. With A Little Help From My Friends
3. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
4. Getting Better
5. Fixing A Hole
6. She's Leaving Home
7. Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite
8. Within You Without You
9. When I'm Sixty Four
10. Lovely Rita
11. Good Morning Good Morning

12. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
13. A Day In The Life

Well, shit. You complain about this book starting a year off badly and then you get one of the most famous albums of all time dropped on you. I don't know who put these albums in order, but they sure as hell did a fantastic job of confusing everybody!

So, here we are, Sgt. Pepper. Unlike some of the more obscure albums I've reviewed so far, you're more or less bound to know this one. Seriously, if you haven't heard this by now, you must be under several layers of rock and halfway through the process of turning into fossil fuels. This album is one of those very special albums that gets a massive cult built up around it, one that renders it nearly impossible to badmouth it in any way, no matter how much I wanted to. Not that I would really need to, since I'm so biased towards the Beatles that you'd think Apple was giving me a stipend.

Listening to this album years and years after the event can make one wonder how on earth this came to be known as the greatest album of all time. A very good collection of songs, to be  sure, but the greatest album ever? Well, not quite. I've always had a bit of an axe to grind where this album is concerned, but that's only because I'm a snob who thinks Revolver is better anyway. When an album is acclaimed to the hyperunrealistic degree that this is, it's inevitable for a bit of backlash to occur.

The only real thing that bugs me about the constant barrage of praise for this album is the constant parroting that this is the first concept album ever. This is blatantly untrue. For one, the phrase 'concept album' can be applied loosely enough that Frank Sinatra's 'In The Wee Small Hours', the very first album reviewed here, could be called one. If you want to get into semantics and argue about 'intellectual' concepts greater than 'sad songs' or 'songs about cars', then I direct you to 'Freak Out', which has a much more solid and significant concept than this one.

Which brings me to complaint #2: This album isn't a concept album. It started as a concept album, sure, but it isn't one. The original idea came after their decision to quit touring in '66, an extraordinarily stressful time for the group that found them wanting to escape their public personalities and perform under the guise of another (fictional) band. And so Sgt. Pepper was born.

...But the Beatles, being human beings, got lazy. So we have two songs and a reprise, and that is all that remains of the album's grand concept. Like almost every other achievement the Beatles made, they were not first, but through the virtues of their immense fame they codified the idea of concept albums for years to come. And all this without even making a proper concept album!

Much of the album's reputation stems from the reception it received at the time. This album plowed into the music world with the force of an atomic bomb. The reception was so huge that even the mainstream press had to take notice. A review in the London Times called it "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation", which, while it seems a bit much, perfectly encapsulates the reaction many people had to this album. Before Pepper (BP?), rock music was frequently derided as meaningless music for teenagers that could never aspire for greatness or to be labeled by that lofty term, "art", not like jazz music. This album changed all that. From here on we enter fully into the Age of the Album. It is perhaps symbolic that this would be the Beatles' first American LP that would be left untouched by Capital Records, which had a rather nasty habit of cutting up the track lists of their earlier albums, making a bunch of weird patchwork albums. Needless to say, the Beatles didn't like that very much at all. No more of that nonsense, though. From here on, the album would be fully acknowledged as a genuine artistic statement. And even if this album does suffer from being overrated, any album that has that on their claim to fame is alright by me.

So, I've written all these big lofty paragraphs about how this album was an Event, but I haven't even mentioned any of the songs yet. Christ, Pitchfork oughta hire me.

Despite my whinging earlier, this really is an exceptional album. You've got the iconic intro, replete with sound effects, followed by Ringo getting a song that, for once, isn't way worse than the other members' songs. It's nice that they finally threw Ringo a bone for once. Sure, Ringo may never be an amazing singer, and Joe Cocker's well known cover knocks this song out of the park, but forget all that. Give Ringo some credit for once!

'Lucy' has always amused me on some level. John Lennon's famously denied the LSD allegations over and over, but with lyrics like that, not to mention the sweet acid-fried haze that the song's trapped in, who does he think he's fooling?

Following this, we get 'Getting Better', 'Fixing A Hole', 'She's Leaving Home'...a veritable Paul blitzkrieg. Come to think of it, Paul seems to be doing the heavy lifting on this album, taking up half the record while John gets a paltry 3 and a half songs. The first two tracks' boundless optimism and cheery feeling are perfectly deflated by the depressing 'She's Leaving Home'. With that harp intro and those oh-so-melodramatic strings, it's merely inches away from sliding into unbearably sentimentality. However, one of McCartney's greatest gifts in the Beatles was his ability to fall just short of that line, making cheesy sentimental pop music (famously derided as 'Paul's granny music' by Lennon during that period where he couldn't let a day pass without bitching about Paul and the Beatles), music that is undeniably syrupy, but somehow without leaving a bad taste in your mouth. And as if that wasn't enough, he does the exact same thing in 'When I'm 64', whose music hall atmosphere sounded dated even then.

George is no slouch either, even if it may feel that way on first listen, since he only gets one song, and his role as lead guitarist was rather diminished in the wave of their studio craziness. He still finds time to throw down bitchin' solos here and there, and he's definitely brought the Indian influence up a notch. 'Within You Without You' seems to be the most disliked track here, being a five minute raga-influenced piece with rather preachy lyrics, but forget the haters, this track is fire. Seriously, listen to it again.

I've always felt that 'Mr. Kite' is the underrated gem on this record, for some reason. Although the lyrics reveal Lennon's sheer songwriting laziness that plagued him throughout their later period, taken almost completely from a 19th century circus poster, the song's instrumentation is nothing short of magical. It seems hard to believe that the instrumental breaks were written by humans.

And finally, we can't really go too far without mentioning 'A Day In The Life', can we? This song represents one of the last true songwriting collaborations between John and Paul, mashing their two individual songs together to make a combination that would melt faces for all time. The way the orchestra just keeps building and building...it still sounds jarring today, I can only imagine how it must've sounded back then. While A Hard Day's Night, released a mere 3 years before this (can you believe that?) has one of the most iconic opening chords of all time, Pepper has the most iconic closing chord-a dramatic,climactic finish that closes the curtain on an era in rock history, but not without showing a glimpse of the exciting turns yet to come. 10/10

77. Nico - Chelsea Girl (1967)

1. Fairest Of The Seasons
2. These Days
3. Little Sister
4. Winter Song
5. It Was A Pleasure Then
6. Chelsea Girl
7. I'll Keep It With Mine
8. Somewhere There's A Feather
9. Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams (And Dream Your Troubles Away)
10. Eulogy To Lenny Bruce

EEEEEEEEEY NICO MY CAAAHSIN! WANNA GO SHOOT SOME POOL?!

Actually, never mind. This album would sound terrible if it were in Grand Theft Auto 4. I'd be way too moody to kill anybody. It'd be the most miserable thing in the world. This album is the sort of thing you'd play in a coffee club to chase out the bourgeois. It's "chamber folk" which as far as I can tell means they forgot to tell the string section to leave the recording studio.

Despite my snarkiness, this is a highly compelling album. It's beautiful, cold, forlorn, and if you listen to it like I did, lying on the Squiggle staring into the stars, it can even be spellbinding. You might remember Nico from the super-acclaimed Velvet Underground debut, and most of the members of that group were involved with writing and recording the album in some way. Save for one song , though, you wouldn't really know it. This is music far removed from the famed discordance of the Velvet Underground. While their music is perfectly suited for interpreting the throes of heroin addiction, the music here is tailored towards its subjects. Take 'Chelsea Girls', the toe-tapping (well, if you haven't got a pulse...) title track. It's already a sad song as it is, but when you factor in the oh-so Baroque strings and Nico's strange emotionally detached German voice, it becomes nearly heartbreaking. Listen to the flute, man. According to an interview given years later, Nico didn't like this album because she had very little creative control over how it would sound, and she hated it, particularly the flute: "But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute." Well, so did I, but that's because it's a sad fuckin' flute, man! Take that away and the song loses so much of its tragic melancholy air!


Basically what I'm saying is that I am better than Nico at music. What's she gonna do, haunt me?


Oh yeah, there are other songs here too. Including, much to my surprise, two rather good songs written by a 19 year old Jackson Browne! Speaking as a fellow 19 year old, fuck you. Pretty much all the songs on this album follow the same formula, except for the sore thumb 'It Was A Pleasure Then' which is where the Velvet Underground sound comes out of nowhere. Psychedelic, discordant strings, eh? I'm not quite sure how I feel about this song. There were aspects of it that I liked, particularly some moments at the beginning that were downright Sigur Ros-y 30 years too early, but I don't really like how completely different it is from every other song on the album. If it had been placed elsewhere, perhaps it would be recognized for the beautiful (if slightly misshapen) snowflake that it is.


This album didn't necessarily seem like an album that I would enjoy, but maybe it's just the overcast skies, the autumn air, and my general moodiness as of late that  made this album speak to me so much. Whatever it is, it's certainly nice to find an album that soundtracks my setting so well, even if it is on a pre-ordered list. I guess sometimes things just work that way. 9/10

76. Astrud Gilberto - Beach Samba (1967)

1. Stay
2. Misty Roses
3. Face I Love
4. Banda (Parade)
5. Oba, Oba
6. Canoeiro
7. I Had the Craziest Dream
8. Bossa Na Praia (Beach Samba)
9. My Foolish Heart
10. Dia das Rosas (I Think of You)
11. You Didn't Have to Be So Nice
12. Não Bate O Coração

I'm sorry, but I was under the impression that I had to hear these albums before I died. I mean, that's what the book is called, isn't it? In some imagined scenario, this crazy bastard's got a gun to my head and if I don't educate myself about the most important and influential albums of the past 50 years, I'm fuckin' DEAD, right?

It is albums like these that makes this imaginary death threat seem that much more hollow. I'm pretty damn sure that if I had died without listening to this album, I'd be just fine. In fact, I'd have had an extra half hour of my time.


It's not as though this album is bad. Considering some of the albums  I've heard/forced myself to listen to over the years, this was at least listenable. But that's just it: that's  all it is. There's nothing at all groundbreaking about this album. In fact, considering it's the first album from 1967 which I can already tell you is one hell of an exciting year, this shit sounds downright anachronistic. It's the sort of music I'd expect one of the characters from Mad Men to have playing in the background in 1962, not touted as one of the greatest/most influential albums of 1967. It's bossa nova at its most cliche and pedestrian. Essentially, it's entirely made up of songs that sound like 'Girl from Ipanema' but aren't as good.


I suppose this would be the part of the review where I mention the individual songs, but what good what that do? The only individual comment I could make is to wonder why the hell she thought having a duet with her kid was a good idea.  Children just shouldn't be allowed to sing, just look at Justin Bieber. Yeah, I know, he's actually 16 or something, but as far as I'm concerned, he's been caught in a temporal causality loop and is forever stuck as a high voiced android.


But I digress. Welcome to the year 1967. You thought '66 was some hot shit? This is even better. Although most of the sounds associated with '67 started in earnest the year before, this was the year that they entered the public conscience in a big way. In this year, rock began to be taken seriously as a viable artistic medium, rather than just a bunch of catchy pop tunes. This shift in thinking would result in some of the greatest and most influential albums of all time. This is not one of them. 3/10

75. Nina Simone - Wild is the Wind (1966)

1. I Love Your Lovin' Ways
2. Four Women
3. What More Can I Say
4. Lilac Wine
5. That's All I Ask
6. Break Down And Let It All Out
7. Why Keep On Breaking My Heart
8. Wild Is The Wind
9. Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair
10. If I Should Lose You
11. Either Way I Lose

My very first thought upon starting this album was 'Since when did Nina Simone become a man?' Which is always a nice first impression to have.

Nina Simon is gifted with one of the more unique voices in R&B music. It has a tremendous range of expression, able to evoke any number of emotions. The album too displays a very wide range, but unfortunately it doesn't quite manage to hold itself up as successfully. Like a lot of R&B albums from this period, this thing was haphazardly flung together from a variety of sessions taking place over a few years, with the result that this record flip flops faster than John Kerry under pressure.


While in other cases this would be seen as showing the artist's true diversity, here it comes across as some douchebags not knowing how to structure an album properly. The songs are a jarring split between more 'pop' sounding soul records like 'I Love Your Lovin' Ways' that sound like they're meant for radio play, and introspective darker songs like 'Four Women' and the title track. You can imagine that they don't mix together very well. 


The conventional tracks are listenable, but mostly rather slight. The only ones that stick out are the first one (go figure) and the rather interesting 'Break Down and Let It All Out', which if you sent it forward in time 10 years and gave it to a disco diva, would've been a massive hit. It's uncanny.


The more ambitious tracks almost save the record from mediocrity, and they're by far the most memorable. 'Four Women' tells the story of four black women and their tragic position in life. Here Simone's civil rights advocating background really shines through, especially in the oh-so dramatic ending ("MY NAME....IS PEACHEEEEEEEEEEEEES!").


'Wild Is The Wind' has been overshadowed a bit by the David Bowie cover, but her version is haunting and near theatrical in its phrasing. It's 7 minutes long, which is quite a feat, since most soul artists didn't dare go past the 3 minute mark back then. Props to Nina for straight not giving a shit.


This album's got some really good songs on it, but the filler clashes with it so bad that the listening experience is not as satisfying as it should be. It's sort of fitting that the last album I review for 1966 is thrown together like this, like so many albums were in this period. 6/10

74. Yardbirds - Roger the Engineer (1966)

1. Lost Woman
2. Over, Under, Sideways, Down
3. The Nazz Are Blue
4. I Can't Make Your Way
5. Rack My Mind
6. Farewell
7. Hot House Of Omagarashid
8. Jeff's Boogie
9. He's Always There
10. Turn Into Earth
11. What Do You Want
12. Ever Since The World Began


In which the great minds who came up with this list charmingly subject me to two blues rock albums in a row. Of course, this isn't blues the way John Mayall plays it, all straight and traditional. No, these guys are weird. Not 13th Floor Elevators weird, but it at least sounds good.


The Yardbirds are one of those second-tier British Invasion groups that had a decent number of hits, but an unstable lineup and disagreements leading to the band splitting up after only a few years. They're best known for having Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton as guitarists at varying points in the group's history (though rarely at the same time). This here album was recorded during the Beck era, soon before Jimmy Page showed up and then turned the band into Led Zeppelin using magic.


Despite being steeped in the blues, the Yardbirds manage to get a relatively diverse set of songs together. There's psych-esque Eastern-sounding riffs, and and this weird Latin-style chanting song called 'Hot House of Omagarashid' (say that ten times fast). There's even songs that sound like they're influenced by medieval music! 'Turn Into Earth' sounds like a combination of '60s rock and music I'd hear in some BBC documentary about the black plague.


'Over Under Sideways Down' matches an utterly unique guitar riff with a strangely somber sounding middle part. On paper, that doesn't exactly sound like hit single material, but it's really catchy and ended up being their last big hit. Sometimes it pays to experiment.


Naturally, this being 1966 and this not being a Beatles album, there's a good amount of filler. My life will not be adversely effected if I were suddenly unable to listen to 'Jeff's Boogie' again. Same with 'Hot House of M. Night Shyamalan'. They must've been on so many drugs. 8/10

73. John Mayall - Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (1966)

1. All Your Love
2. Hideaway
3. Little Girl
4. Another Man
5. Double Crossin' Time
6. What'd I Say
7. Key To Love
8. Parchman Farm
9. Have You Heard
10. Rambling On My Mind
11. Stepping Out
12. It Ain't Right

I believe it was one of the original black blues artists that said of the new generation of blues-loving Brits: "They wanted to play the blues real bad, so they played the blues, real bad."


So, after that disparaging comment, I suppose it's a bit weird of me to say that this album isn't really that bad. As much as it makes blues purists cringe, blues-rock is a wonderful thing. But screw them, it's no fun being a purist anyway!


This is the album that introduced a Mr. Eric Clapton to the world. Say what you want about...well, most everything the man's done since the '70s, but right here in '66 Eric Clapton will kick your ass. I never really appreciated his work too much before, but now that I've heard him in the context of this list, I realize now just why everyone was so amazed. The rock guitar solo was still in early stages of development back then. Hell, just listen to the guitar solos in early Beatles songs! They suck! Then all of a sudden this guy shows up and plays solos that make every other solo seem like a child fumbling with a guitar. I'd get excited too!


The material here is a tad generic, but what the hell do you want from a blues-rock album in 1966? A damn orchestra? The material is played well, which is what really matters. I really liked 'All Your Love', with its cool time changes and Eric kicking ass. No 'Wonderful Tonight' here, this was back when the man was still lean and raw with something to say. His solos on more or less every song are fantastic, with great tone and feeling and everything a guitar solo should be. He really does make the record, which I suppose is why he gets such high billing on the album cover. The worst song on here by far is the one without him, 'Another Man', featuring John Mayall (note that this is his album and I've mentioned him, like, once?) seemingly trying to be 'authentic' with some old blues tossoff featuring just him and a harmonica. It doesn't go over well, because while these guys have way more technical skill than Muddy Waters and company, they've got about a third of the charisma and swagger.


There's some other iffy moments on the record, like that drum solo interrupting a perfectly good rendition of 'What'd I Say", but this album surprised me with its accessibility and not-suckiness. This is when blues-rock (and through that, hard rock) really starts to take off and truly melt some faces. Well, almost. We're getting there. I promise, the face melting will happen soon.

Although Clapton's white, his appreciation for the material and love for the original artists is unchalle


"I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking (indecipherable) don’t belong here, we don’t want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome."-Clapton, 5 August 1976

Well, shit. That's the last time I end a review with a quote. 8/10

72. 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966)

1. You're Gonna Miss Me
2. Rollercoaster
3. Splash 1
4. Reverberation (Doubt)
5. Don't Fall Down
6. Fire Engine
7. Thru The Rhythm
8. You Don't Know
9. Kingdom Of Heaven
10. Monkey Island
11. Tried To Hide

Or: What happens when you give a Texas garage band access to hallucinogenics.

This is an intriguing little album. Reflecting the flourishing of overtly psychedelic music that was happening in '66, these guys release an album with 'psychedelic' in the title, no less. It's far from the tye-dye technicolor whirl most often associated with that music-being a garage band, these guys are coming from a far more simplistic style. All of these songs have the same basic structure: standard '60s R&B with this really murky tone that makes the band sound like they're coming out of a swamp or something, the lead singer alternating between being almost inaudible and shrieking his fool head off, and the inimitable electric jug.

Yes, the electric jug. Perhaps the most well known fact about this band. See, Tommy Hall was an important figure in getting the band together, but he didn't actually play any instrument! The only solution, naturally, was to make up a really shitty instrument. Which puts him a step above Bez from Happy Mondays, I guess. But seriously, in a decade of exciting innovation and new sounds, the electric jug is one of the least appreciated, and for good reason. It's not capable of melody, in fact it's not really capable of anything besides making a bunch of funny sounding noise in the background of all the songs. Probably a lot easier to play when you're trippin' out on stage though.

Seriously, these guys were totally tripping balls all of the time. Like, Syd Barrett level tripping. Read this excerpt from the album's liner notes:

"Recently, it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state and thus alter his point of view (that is, his own basic relation with the outside world which determines how he stores his information). He can restructure his thinking and change his language so that his thoughts bear more relation to his life and his problems, therefore approaching them more sanely.

It is this quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this album."

Basically, you're only sane after you drop acid. You know, I think I may go to school with these guys.


Anyway, the songs. 'You're Gonna Miss Me' wins the slightly ignoble 'Clearly The Best Song' award by a long shot, being a nice slice of Sonics-esque garage rock with plenty of screaming, and, in case you forgot, electric jug all over the freakin' place. This song was the closest the Elevators got to fame, falling just short of being a hit song and being forced to live the rest of its life as an obscure garage classic, living on compilations just to get a rep, 'cause you can bet there's no way the buying public would've bought this bit of weirdness back then.


The rest of the songs tend to blend together in my head as one poorly-mixed jumble. They're not really bad, but for the most part none of them really stood out from each other! When all of your songs are forced to have a shitty gimmick instrument in them, it's gonna start hurting song writing quality, guys. No, stop licking the stickers, I'm trying to have a serious discussion. Mr. Hall, the electric jug is not for humping. Goddamnit, why couldn't I have managed the Monkees instead? I bet they don't have these fucking problems. 7/10

71. Simon & Garfunkel - Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966)

1. Scarborough Fair/Canticle
2. Patterns
3. Cloudy
4. Homeward Bound
5. Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
6. 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
7. Dangling Conversation
8. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall
9. Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert MacNamara'd Into Submission)
10. For Emily Whenever I May Find Her
11. Poem On The Underground Wall
12. 7 O'clock News/Silent Night

A perfect album as the weather begins to turn chilly and cloudy (go figure). That is, once it makes up its mind. Damned weather, it's about as reliable as the French. Especially if you take all their petrol and pensions!

Anyhow, this is the first we hear from the glorious soothing voices of Simon and Garfunkel, especially Simon because Garfunkel was kind of the '60s equivalent to apl.de.ap from the Black Eyed Peas, in that it was widely agreed that he had too stupid of a name for anyone to give a shit about his work outside the band (Can you hear that? It's the sound of Filipinos boycotting my blog!). Wonderful harmonies abound here.

Unfortunately, this album is a lot like Aftermath, in that it's got a smattering of classics amongst a regrettable amount of songs that just aren't as good. It's not like I'm being haunted by the Spectre of Filler again, but I can feel his icy breath on my neck as I write this. No, it's not that bad, but I just can't bring myself to care about songs like 'Cloudy', they just seem so slight.

There are a good number of triumphs here, however. 'Scarborough Fair/Canticle' is an arresting take on the folk classic, intertwined with anti-war lyrics that manage to stay far short of preachy and overwrought. Combine this with the intricate guitar and harpsichord and you've got yourself a Sawng.

The other great songs manage to conjure an autumnal sense of wistfulness that permeates across the whole album. 'Homeward Bound' and '59th St Bridge Song' both succeed in those terms. They make me feel...well, groovy. Or as groovy as it is possible to feel without the aid of psychedelics.

There's some weirdo songs on this album too! 'Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine' is supposed to be a satire on advertising, but 'A Simple Desultory Philippic' is a hilarious send up of Bob Dylan's folk rock style.  The music sounds like a low budget version of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' while Simon complains about things like 'I've been Ayn Randed, nearly branded a communist 'cause I'm left handed," It's a hard song to take seriously, but this is such an over the top parody for the usually serious group that its humor is its strength.

The final song, a mixture of Silent Night and a news broadcast, is really quite the downer ending. Listening to the reports remind you of just how insane and chaotic the '60s must've seemed. It's fascinating from a historical mindset.

This album, while it may have its fair share of forgettable songs, the good songs kick so much ass you'll forget the rest of them even existed. 8/10

70. The Rolling Stones - Aftermath (1966)

1. Paint it Black
2. Stupid Girl
3. Lady Jane
4. Under My Thumb
5. Doncha Bother Me
6. Think
7. Flight 505
8. High And Dry
9. It's Not Easy
10. I Am Waiting
11. Goin' Home

Oh, it's these guys again!

In the two years since their last album here, the Stones have gone through quite a bit of change. On their first album, Jagger and Richards only managed one complete song, and even that song was a bit of a Beatles ripoff. And now, for the very first time, the Stones have an album where they wrote every song all by themselves. They grow up so fast...

And they is grown, too. These songs are a far cry from the derivative blues covers and generic rockers of the early '60s. They've got a bunch of kooky instruments thrown into the mix, even a dulcimer! Did the Beatles ever use a dulcimer? Hell no. SUCK IT FAB FOUR!

The album starts off great with 'Paint It Black', a song that everybody in the entire world loves. The mysterious sitar part, Mick Jagger's melodramatic-as-shit vocals, the pounding drums and the meandering bassline...this song's got it all! It furthers the sitar's then-burgeoning status as the hippest new instrument in the rock set, despite the fact that almost none of them knew how to play the instrument properly.

The next series of songs I have always found very amusingly placed. First you have 'Stupid Girl' whose lyrics are misogynist and sniping and perfectly suited for the Rolling Stones. Then you have 'Lady Jane', which is an honest to God psuedo-Elizabethan ballad, complete with dulcimer and 'I pledge my troth to Lady Jane' and all sorts of pansy-ass bullshit (good song, though!). Then, as if you weren't confused enough, the next song is 'Under My Thumb', where set to a catchy marimba shuffle, Mick Jagger finally discovers the most surefire way to attract women: compare them to pets. It really gets stuck in your head though!A surefire way to set back women's lib: catchy songs.

The rest of the songs range from fairly good to not so great. Unfortunately, the record suffers from the overstuffed first side, as there's nothing all that memorable on the second half. 'Think' has some pretty cool fuzz guitar, and 'I Am Waiting' actually has decent sounding harmonies for a band that couldn't really do harmonies (not yet at least). And though I suppose 'Goin' Home' was fairly progressive at the time, being an 11 minute blues song, but it really doesn't need to be 11 minutes at all. It seems more like they just forgot to turn off the tape instead of the freaked-out blues jam I was expecting. There's just not enough to hold my interest. And I really, really wish Mick Jagger would shut up. 7.5/10

69. The Mothers of Invention - Freak Out! (1966)

1. Hungry Freaks Daddy
2. I Ain't Got No Heart
3. Who Are The Brain Police
4. Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder
5. Motherly Love
6. How Could I Be Such A Fool
7. Wowie Zowie
8. You Didn't Try To Call Me
9. Any Way The Wind Blows
10. I'm Not Satisfied
11. You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here
12. Trouble Every Day
13. Help I'm A Rock
14. It Can't Happen Here
15. Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet

Listening to this album within the context of this list, I can more fully appreciate just how incredibly bizarre this album is. I can't imagine what your average record buyer in 1966 would've possibly thought as he put on this thing. Hell, even I wasn't sure what was going on when I heard it 40 years later.

What really endears this album to me is the sheer audacity of the whole thing. For one, he released it as a double album in an era when double albums were still very rare. I think the album ended up costing around $30,000 or something. On an album that clearly has very little commercial potential, especially in 1966. And this was his debut album! How on earth did he get away with this?

Another thing that strikes me is how sudden and upfront this record is. Most of the time (and especially in this era), bands develop their sound and image over their first few albums. Not so here. Zappa emerges from the womb fully formed, complete with goatee. The strange instrumentation, the random spoken asides, and the mocking of pop culture are all here from the start, and they would follow Frank for his entire career.


But enough waffling, on to the album! It's another concept album, with a bit more focus than the Kinks' earlier effort: It's a satirical observation of American pop culture, either directly attacked in sneering protest songs or mocked in bizarre pastiches of brain-dead pop music. Songs like 'Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder' are hilarious in their sheer banality. It's like '50s doo wop as sung by aliens or something. 'Wowie Zowie' is even better, taking the most puerile lyrics and setting them to an incredibly poppy xylophone-flavored arrangement. The liner notes make some comment about this song being designed to attract the 12 year old market or something, and it totally works in a completely hilarious way. Zappa, you clever bastard, you.


The harder edged songs are really something as well. 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy' is one of the more blistering countercultural attacks on mainstream society, along with a rockin' kazoo part (in fact, there are kazoos all over this album! It certainly suits it, I think). 'Trouble Every Day' is even better, a sort of Dylan-esque diatribe against the media's handling of events like the Watts Riot that inspired the song. It's a fairly standard blues rock number and surprisingly the most 'normal' sounding song of the whole album.


This album gets weird in the last third, though. 'Help I'm A Rock' is this weird sort of repetitive groove that has like 10 voices speaking some insane wall of gibberish, and it just gets weirder from there. 'It Can't Happen Here' is like if a barbershop quartet took a shitload of drugs, and all of this culminates in the 12 minute slice of madness that is 'The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet'. Interesting stuff, but it starts to drag on after a while. It wouldn't take too long for everyone else to get on the psychedelic freakout train, though.


While I wouldn't say it's his greatest album, it's always been one of my favorites, and it's one of the few records that remains brilliantly baffling to this day. 10/10

68. Paul Revere and the Raiders - Midnight Ride (1966)

1. Kicks
2. There's Always Tomorrow
3. Little Girl in the 4th Row
4. Ballad of a Useless Man
5. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone
6. There She Goes
7. All I Really Need Is You
8. Get It On
9. Louie, Go Home
10. Take a Look at Yourself
11. Melody for an Unknown Girl

In which Paul Revere comes back from the dead and finally realizes his ambition to form a rock group. But before he could produce his magnum opus concept album about the heroic struggles of the Revolutionary War (and even some of the non-heroic ones for good measure. I love a good tarring and feathering!) he had to cut his teeth in the rough and tumble world of bland pop albums.

And that's exactly what we have here. While the Mamas and the Papas got by on their neat arrangements, these guys don't even have that. I mean, these guys were basically one of those dime-a-dozen pop groups littering the musical landscape back then, like the Dave Clark 5 and Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Fuck Buttons (Ok, maybe not the last one). When you get such a band to record an album, it usually doesn't turn out that well! Musically, this album might as well be from '64 in terms of their sound.

Of course, there are some rather good songs on this record. The big hit, 'Kicks', is notable for being an anti-drug song that doesn't annoy me with overly moralistic anvil-dropping. Not only is it a catchy tune with a Byrds-y guitar riff, the lyrics aren't too preachy! Although songs like this would get washed under the tidal wave of psychedelia, it is at least interesting.

Also, 'I'm Not Your Stepping Stone', later covered by the Monkees and for some reason, a bunch of punk bands, is surprisingly a fairly hard rocker. The vocals get downright gritty! 'Louie, Go Home' is also fairly interesting, with faster/slower sections.

I can take or leave the rest of these songs, though. They're all fairly indistinguished early Beatles-esque tunes. The only songs that truly make my bile rise are the ballads. I could scarcely hear any of the singing in 'Little Girl in the 4th Row' over the comparatively mighty sound of my yawning. And 'Melody for an Unknown Girl' is nothing short of an attack on my poor sensibilities, consisting of an incredibly ham-fisted spoken word intro that begins to repeat itself as the song fades out, reminding you of the endless torment of hell. After this, a saxophone solo that reminds me uncannily of Kenny G a full 20 years before he began vomiting his dentist's waiting room bilge onto the unsuspecting American public in a way that BP would be proud of. It annoyed me so much that I'm going to take even more points off the score, because there's no reason that I should have to endure such a song. 5/10

67. The Mamas and the Papas - If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966)

1. Monday Monday
2. Straight Shooter
3. Got A Feelin'
4. I Call Your Name
5. Do You Wanna Dance
6. Go Where You Wanna Go
7. California Dreamin'
8. Spanish Harlem
9. Somebody Groovy
10. Hey Girl
11. You Baby
12. In Crowd

And now, for the special 'Take a bath, you stinkin' hippies!' edition of my blog, we present the Mamas and the Papas. With a name like that, there was no way they were gonna last very long, but during their 2 years of popularity they managed to get a fair amount of hits. 

'Monday Monday' and 'California Dreamin'' are by far the most well known tracks here, serving as nice morose slices of pop music to dilute the sometimes all-too-sunshiney sound of '60s pop. 

While the 2 big hits are unquestionably the best songs on the album, I was very pleased to find that the album tracks weren't as bad as I thought they were going to be. They're a sort of grab bag of originals and cover songs. 'Do You Wanna Dance?' is surprisingly not danceable at all, but it is much prettier for it. Oh, and 'Straight Shooter' is actually a decent rock song!


Unfortunately, there's not much I can really say about  this album other than that it was better than I expected it to be. When you're faced with such staggering pop albums like Pet Sounds with all its intricate vocal harmonies and instrumentation, you can't help but be left a little cold with something like this. It's a good demonstration of the increasing diversification of pop music in the '60s, but it's not worth choking on a ham sandwich over (by far one of the funnier urban legends in rock's storied history) 7.5/10

66. The Kinks - Face to Face (1966)

1. Party Line
2. Rosie Won't You Please Come Home
3. Dandy
4. Too Much on My Mind
5. Session Man
6. Rainy Day in June
7. House in the Country
8. Holiday in Waikiki
9. Most Exclusive Residence for Sale
10. Fancy
11. Little Miss Queen of Darkness
12. You're Lookin' Fine
13. Sunny Afternoon
14. I'll Remember

The Kinks: one of the few bands that actually truly mattered during the British Invasion. Unfortunately, by the time they began turning into a truly great band, most Americans had already stopped caring. That suited the Kinks just fine, though, because if there's one thing I've noticed about this album, it's actually British. I know, half the damn list is British, but since rock music came from the States, most of their music was trying to emulate the American sound. The Kinks decide 'Sod that!' and went off to write what is called one of the earliest concept albums in rock music. It's a pretty simplistic concept (character sketches of ordinary British people), but it does the trick.


The Kinks certainly have changed quite a bit from their power-chord abusing beginnings. These songs, while they aren't quite the ultra-constructed music of Pet Sounds, have stuff like random sound effects and a surprisingly large amount of harpsichord. Which, by the way, is played by Nicky Hopkins, who appears on quite a lot of these albums, and he even gets a song written about him called 'Session Man', which has to be the first rock song on this list to satirize an aspect of the music industry.


There's a lot of good and witty material on here, as you would expect from a record with song titles like 'Most Exclusive Residence For Sale'. 'Sunny Afternoon', the big hit here, is a wonderful satirical barb at the upper crust of British society (they get brought up a lot on this album. I guess Ray Davies wasn't making as much money as he'd have liked) that totally turns Taxman on its head. 'Dandy' was rather interesting because for years I only knew the Herman's Hermits version, but here we have the original in all its rough-around-the-edges glory.


Basically, the Kinks invented Britpop. Years and years before it actually became popular. While the songs aren't quite as fully realized as they would be within a year or so, this album is a bold step in an exciting new direction. 8/10

65. The Monks - Black Monk Time (1966)

1. Monk Time
2. Shut Up
3. Boys Are Boys And Girls Are Choice
4. Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy
5. I Hate You
6. Oh How To Do Now
7. Complication
8. We Do Wie Du
9. Drunken Maria
10. Love Came Tumblin' Down
11. Blast Off
12. That's My Girl

 IT'S MONK TIME!!!!

This album is something else right here. It's another one of those lost classics of the time that would only become influential years and years later, when weirdos like The Fall listened to it. As worn out as this cliche is, this album sounded like nothing else at the time. It's intensely rhythmic, loud, and bizarre in a way that most people besides the Fugs and Frank Zappa couldn't even think of in 1966.

These guys were a group of American army folks stationed in Germany in the mid-60s who decided to form a band. At first they were your stand,ard '60s garage band with the simplistic music and the endless Louie Louie covers, but then they turned into something far, far different. I suppose they figured that since they obviously weren't going to become a massive success in the English-speaking world by playing to Germans, they could experiment as much as they wanted to. The Germans just wanted loud beat music, they weren't going to care about the lyrical content! As a result we get lyrics like 'Why do you kill all those kids in Vietnam!? Mad Viet Cong! My brother died in Vietnam! James Bond, who was he?' screamed in an absolutely manic voice.

The band also chose to experiment musically as well. These guys  have the loudness and the rhythmic attack of the Sonics, but much more proficient in their musicianship. There's a lot of great organ solos on here. Oh, did I mention that one of the members plays a banjo? And every instrument is fuzzed up to maximum potential. The Sonics brought the loud and simplistic playing to punk, but these guys gave it something far more important: an attitude. 9/10