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