The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is the only Pink Floyd album I like all the way through: probably because of the Syd Barrett influence.

The morse code at the start of the album did catch out a lot of folk, who searched for hidden messages...... people try to hard to decipher rather than just enjoy (or in your case, arabchanter, not enjoy!). Syd Barrett was reportedly a young man full of fun and mischief who wrecked his brain and life with hallucinogenics. 

At a later point, when he was still in Pink Floyd, he arrived at rehearsals with a new song called 'Have you Got It Yet?' The band were confused by the structure of the song, Barrett kept changing the chord sequences, timing, chorus and so on, until it finally dawned on the rest of the band that he was simply playing an elaborate game with them.

After he'd been encouraged to leave the band, I felt they came to take themselves a tad too seriously, as a result I was never a big fan.

But I like this album, both for the altered instrumentation and phasing effects and the nursery rhyme like qualities of several of the songs.

Last edited by PatReilly (07/11/2017 8:46 am)

DAY 90.
The Who................Sell Out    (1967)




I have never listened to this album, how many years have I wasted?


For me Sell Out is if not the best, definitely in the top two Who albums I have ever listened to, I have to confess that I much prefer the pre Tommy stuff, not that I didn't like Tommy and beyond, but this album for me, is an example of them enjoying and having fun with their music, before they started taking their pretensions seriously, just just fine songs.

Going through the album I really don't have any favourite track, which often means they are all so-so, but in this instance I do find them all very good, if pushed to choose one track off of this album, I would pick "Tattoo" but it could easily have been Entwistle's "Silas Stingy" or any of the others.

Summing up, listening to this you could hear where Tommy was coming from, "Sunrise" what a beautiful song, had shades of for me what would become "Pinball Wizard" in the riff although slower, and "Rael" I'm sure I've heard in parts of Tommy.

I was really taken with this album and will be adding it to my collection, and would recommend you give this album a listen, I'm quite sure you won't be disappointed.

How beautiful is this?




Bits & Bobs

Odorono

He added this tune about underarm perspiration, "was a little story, and although it's a good song, it was about something groovy - underarm perspiration." Townshend then went on to say that the song's male love interest rushes backstage to congratulate the song's female protagonist, "and it looks like she's all set, not only for stardom but also for true love. And then, underarm perspiration cuts the whole thing. And you know, without getting too serious about it, because it's supposed to be very light, that's life. It really is. That really is life.


"Pete Townshend rather than Roger Daltrey was the lead vocalist on this song. In fact either Townshend or bass guitarist John Entwistle were the sole lead vocalist on seven of the songs on The Who Sell Out.


One of the panels on the front cover of the The Who Sell Out album shows Townshend applying some Odorono deodorant from an oversized stick. The fictitious brand name was named after an actual product called Odo-Ro-No, which was the first underarm deodorant that was marketed specifically for women. In 1919 an advert for Odo-Ro-No coined the term "B.O." Women were warned in the ad, that if they had "B.O." they might never get a man.



I Can See For Miles

• Pete Townshend wrote this shortly after meeting his future wife Karen. It was a reminder that even though he was on the road, he could still keep an eye on her from miles away. The song was inspired by the jealousy and suspicion that would well up inside him when he left to tour, but the song is written in character as a vindictive type who wants to get back at a girl. It's a little creepy:
Well, here's a poke at you
You're gonna choke on it too
You're gonna lose that smile
Because all the while
I can see for miles and miles

He's warning her that she can't get out of his sight.



In real life, Townshend married Karen Astley in 1968. They were together until their divorce in 2009.Townshend's guitar was overdubbed in the studio. They rarely played this live because it was impossible to recreate the sound with one guitar.


Pete Townshend considered this some of his best songwriting, calling it "a remarkable song." He thought it would be a huge hit and was disappointed when it wasn't.Townshend's played a one-note guitar solo on this song. According to an interview he conducted with his mate Richard Barnes for the book The Story of Tommy, Townshend did this because he "couldn't be bothered." He later admitted that he felt very intimidated at the arrival of Hendrix on the London scene during that time and that he couldn't ever compete in the guitar solo stakes.

•  
• Paul McCartney set out to write "Helter Skelter" shortly after reading a Pete Townshend interview, which described this track as, "The most raucous rock 'n' roll, the dirtiest thing they'd ever done.
•  
• "Sunrise"
•  
• Amid the fake commercials, psychedelic freakouts and bizarre comic twists on The Who Sell Out sits "Sunrise," a lovely acoustic track featuring just Townshend's voice and his Harmony 12-string. The song's bright melody, nimble finger-picking and melancholy lyrics were a break from the Who's chaotic intensity, and not everyone in the band was thrilled to see Townshend branching out. "Keith didn't want that on the record," Townshend said in 1980. "In a way, that's a bit of a giveaway to the fact that at the time I was studying a bit of this jazz thing. I wrote it for my mother to show her that I could write real music."
•  
 You could call the album cover for The Who Sell Out (1967) tongue-in-cheek, but that would imply some sort of subtlety on behalf of the British rockers. The Who may have been the ultimate "stick it to the man" band of the 1960s, even when they enjoyed substantial commercial success. The problem with being an anti-corporate band that's immensely popular, though, is that over time your rebellious anti-whatever attitude is eventually bought and sold, turned into a brand. What was Pete Townshend, at the height of the Who's popularity, but a windmilling advertisement for rock and roll? What was Keith Moon but an Animal from the Muppets-esque endorsement of rock debauchery?That said, the design of the cover is a nice little nod to the idea of selling out and how, in many ways, it's an unavoidable part of being in the music industry. It's that whole die a hero or live long enough to become the vill... blah blah blah, The Dark Knight. With The Who Sell Out, the band managed to both play the game by acknowledging the inevitable co-option of their style and attitude, while also creating a cover that pokes fun at the ludicrous nature of commercialized music.

• Four panels adorn the original LP, with all photographs taken by David Montgomery. The farce of the cover is the fact that the branding is so outsize that it's practically cartoonish. Pete Townshend is seen with a giant roll of Odorono deodorant, and even wrote "Odorono" for the album, a song about a man named Mr. Davidson who leans in to kiss a female singer before being completely turned off by her body odor (I wish I was making that up). Keith Moon is seen applying Medac to a disgusting pimple and John Entwistle is dressed in leopard skin with a tall blonde while the caption proclaims the wonders of the Charles Atlas weightlifting program. It's all a big joke, partly a dissection of capitalism and partly an understanding that it's nearly impossible to evade the system.

PatReilly wrote:

I was never a big Who fan: when young I viewed them as Kinks Kopyists, which on reflection they clearly weren't. However, always enjoyed their singles, and I Can See For Miles is my second favourite to I'm A Boy. So for this album, the opening track and closing track on the original side one are favourites..... and the first track was written by an outsider.

It's Pete Townsend I have an aversion to, never liked him.

The outsider was Speedy Keen, this was the only time someone from outside the Who's material was used on any of their albums.

Keen wrote the only UK No.1 that Pete Townsend has so far been a part, Thunderclap Newman's, 1969 anthem "Something In The Air," Townsend produced and played the bass part on the track, (for contractual reasons he was listed on the credits as Bijou Drains.)

Keen was seemingly Townsend's aide-de-camp, his flatmate and driver,




 

DAY 91.
The Velvet Underground.................The Velvet Underground And Nico     (1967)










This is going to be short and sweet, In my opinion this is one of the best albums I have ever heard.
A bold statement I hear you say, but for me this album has everything, there isn't one track that I don't like and the more I played it over the years, instead of getting stale seemed to grow with me.


I often. when listening try to think which track is my favourite?
And every time I come up with a different track, so maybe this album tends to work on whatever mood your in, one day "Sunday Morning" is you favourite then it's "I'll be Your Mirror" and the next it's "I'm Waiting For The Man," but what I will say is whatever day, whatever mood you're in there will be something on this album that will, make you thank God you gave it a listen.

As I said in the last post, if I didn't already have this on vinyl,cassette,CD and downloaded on mp3 and flac It would without any shadow of a doubt be added to my collection.

I would thoroughly recommend to anyone to give this album a listen, and to remember this album is actually 50 years old, and still grows on me by the day.


Please indulge me and give this a listen,






The proverbial bits & bobs;

• In the 2003 book Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, Lou Reed was asked to describe the Velvet Underground's part in the multimedia events organized by Andy Warhol. He said, "Andy shows movies and we f--k dogs on stage."



• Lou Reed's father was a tax accountant, who raised him with the expectation that he would take over the family business. When little Lou turned out to be more of a handful than they'd bargained for, his parents signed their son over to the Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital, where Lou Reed suffered eight weeks of electroshock therapy at the age of 17.



• Along with his other activities at Syracuse University, Lou Reed hosted his own college radio show.



• John Cale's mentor at the University of London was Cornelius Cardew, a pivotal person in introducing avant-garde music to the US. He died in 1981, the victim of a hit-and-run car accident near his London home. At least one colleague has raised the possibility that he was assassinated because of his prominent Marxist-Leninist involvement.



• Lou Reed's first act of culture-jamming was to assemble a fictitious group called "The Primitives" which produced one song, a garage-rock stomper called "The Ostrich." It was Reed's satire of hit-inspired dance crazes, with lyrics such as "You bend forward, put your head between your knees. Do the ostrich, do the ostrich."



• The original drummer was Angus MacLise, who angrily left the group upon their landing of their first paying gig ($75 at a New Jersey high school). MacLise thought of that as "selling out." Imagine leaving The Velvet Underground for being too commercialized! He later attempted to rejoin the group (after they'd gotten some success) while Lou Reed was hospitalized with hepatitis, but Reed refused to accept him back.



• The group gets its name from the 1963 paperback book of the same title. Cover quote on the book: "Here is an incredible book. It will shock and amaze you. But as a documentary on the sexual corruption of our age, it is a must for every thinking adult." It came with an introduction by Louis Berg, M.D. Cover price: sixty cents. Lou Reed called it "the funniest dirty book he'd ever read."



• Drummer "Mo" Tucker began drumming at the age of 19, practicing strictly for her own amusement, while her day job at the time was as a keypunch operator for IBM. And what did "Mo" Tucker do after the Velvet Underground? She moved to Georgia to raise her family and worked at... Wal-Mart!



• Despite "Mo" Tucker's androgynous appearance, she had a sweet, feminine singing voice and took a leave of absence from the band due to pregnancy.



• The defining quote about Velvet Underground is "Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band." the problem is, nobody seems to know anymore who said it first.


• Lou Reed has been romantically linked to the musician, multi-media and performance artist Laurie Anderson since 1995. They married on April 12, 2008 in a quiet ceremony in Boulder, Colorado.



• Lou Reed's life was saved by a liver transplant in April 2013. He underwent an emergency procedure in Cleveland after his own liver failed as a result of years of drug usage. "It's as serious as it gets - he was dying," said Laurie Anderson. "You send out two planes, one for the donor, one for the recipient, at the same time. You bring the donor in live and take him off life support. It's a technological feat. I was completely awestruck."



• John Cale was born in Wales and didn't speak English until he was seven (he grew up speaking Welsh.)



"Sunday Morning"

•  
Lou Reed wrote this on a Sunday morning around 6am. Andy Warhol, who helped finance the album, suggested he write a song about the paranoia associated with the effects of a drug wearing off.


 Reed wrote this for Nico but then decided not to let the German ex-model sing it. Instead he impersonated her himself.


 The production on this song is more lavish than the other tracks on the album. It was intended for release as a single and they wanted to make it radio friendly
Nico thought of this uncharacteristically upbeat tune as "Sun Day Mourning." It tells you a bit about how Nico's mind worked, and also the split that The Velvet Underground would have with Nico and her mentor Andy Warhol.


"I'm Waiting For The Man"

 This song is all about last-minute changes. The inclusion of the track on their first album was literally penciled in, Reed decided to take over vocals at the last minute as they walked into the studio to record it, and John Cale noticed a celesta in the studio and decided to include the instrument for the song on the spot. Cale also played the viola on the song.
His is another in the Velvet Underground's canon of songs about drugs. Not only does it fit nicely with "Heroin," it was also on the same album, and was also written by Lou Reed at about the same time as "Heroin," during Reed's attendance at Syracuse University in the early 1960s.

It describes a trip to a Harlem brownstone near the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 125th Street to buy drugs from a dealer, "the man" of the title. Once again, it neither condones nor condemns the experience, but merely describes it.

 The song is about scoring 26 dollars worth of heroin in Harlem. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Reed said: "Everything about that song holds true, except the price."

  "I'm Waiting For The Man," "Heroin," and "Venus In Furs" were what kept The Velvet Underground out of a record contract with Atlantic Records. Atlantic executive Ahmet Ertegun wouldn't take them unless they dropped these songs, and the Velvets, typically putting ideas ahead of money, just couldn't live with that. So their first album ended up with MGM Records instead. Even after their signing with Atlantic for their fourth album, Loaded, Ahmet specifically told them to tone down controversial material.


 Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, and Maureen Tucker have all recorded solo versions of the song.


 This song was a big influence on David Bowie, who explained to Performing Songwriter magazine in 2003: "I actually played 'Waiting for the Man' in Britain with my band before the album was even released in America. Talk about oneupsmanship.


A friend of mine came over to the states to do some work with Andy Warhol at The Factory, and as he was leaving, Andy said, 'Oh, I just made this album with some people. Maybe you can take it back to England and see if you can get any interest over there.' And it was still the vinyl test pressing. It hadn't got a company or anything at the time. I still have it. There's a white label on it, and it says 'Warhol.' He signed it. My friend gave it to me and he said, 'This is crap. You like weird stuff, so maybe you'll enjoy it.' I played it and it was like 'Ah, this is the future of music!' I was in awe. It was serious and dangerous and I loved it. And I literally went into a band rehearsal the next day, put the album down and said, 'We're going to learn this song. It is unlike anything I've ever heard.' We learned 'Waiting for the Man' right then and there, and we were playing it on stage within a week. I told Lou that, and he loved it. I must have been the first person in the world to cover a Velvet Underground song."



David Bowie covered the song in 1972, and included it on his album BBC Sessions. Lou Reed sang it in a duet with Bowie during Bowie's 50th birthday concert, known as "Live at 50." Bowie's version is on the soundtrack of the movie Almost Famous.

•  

 Besides David Bowie, amongst the many acts to cover "I'm Waiting For The Man," the most notable are Cheap Trick, Bauhaus, and the U.K. Subs. It shares credit with the Ramones' "53 and 3d for being a famous song related to drugs (the Ramones one is about turning a trick for drug money) pinned to a specific New York intersection.


"Femme Fatale"


he inspiration for this song was actress Edie Sedgwick, who was a member of Andy Warhol's "Factory" crowd. Warhol was the manager of the Velvet Underground for a time, and good friends with Lou Reed. He asked for this song to be written for Edie.during Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, Warhol's right-hand man, Gerard Malanga, would get onstage in a leather outfit and crack a whip during this number. S&m was a common theme in 1960s culture, especially around Warhol's New York, and of course it was a large influence on early Velvet Underground songs.


The band's name itself came from journalist Michael Leigh's 1963 paperback The Velvet Underground, an exposé of the sexual revolution going on in the USA at the time. The book included hyperbole-laden examinations of S&m, polyamory, homosexuality, and other practices then seen as "deviant." Tony Conrad, a filmmaker friend of the band, accidentally dropped the book for Lou Reed to find, who pounced on it and adopted the title; he liked it less for the S&m aspect and more for the word "underground" which would associate them with the underground film and music scene. Lou Reed himself in a 1969 interview with Open City would later call the book "the funniest dirty book I've ever read."


 The subject of this song, Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick, was an actress, socialite, model, and heiress. Her fame extended well beyond the (Warholian) proverbial fifteen minutes - her great-great-great grandfather, William Ellery, was a signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence, and her family history blooms out from there touching almost every corner of United States history from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the founding of New York's Central Park. In spite of this impressive family tree, Sedgwick was to find only limited success outside of Andy Warhol's flock, struggle with substance abuse, and die from overdose of alcohol and barbiturate at the age of 28.



Perhaps this is a good point to mention that Velvet Underground's producer and mentor, Andy Warhol, had the nickname of "Drella" - a name derived from a contraction of Dracula and Cinderella. The reference was to how Andy could make you famous, but at the price of sucking some of that fame away for himself. This brought Lou Reed and John Cale, long since split from The Velvet Underground, to name their 1990 collaborative album Songs For Drella, in tribute to Warhol, who died in 1987.


"Venus In Furs" is inspired by the novella of the same title, written and published by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in 1870. It tells the story of a man who wishes to be dominated and treated as a slave by the woman he loves. We get the word "masochism" from Sacher-Masoch's last name, and the entire practice of dominance and submission from this and the works of Marquis de Sade, a male author who wrote from the opposite position of dominating women and treating them as slaves.


Today's modern lifestyle knows this song's subject as "BDSM." That's a combined acronym: "B&D" for "Bondage and Discipline," "D&S" for "Dominance and Submission," and "S&M" for "Sadism and Masochism." That last part was originally written "sado-masochism," and in the 1960s was regarded as a mental illness and a deviant behavior, to be treated with electro-shock therapy and abhorred by society.


Even today in the United States, similar to the outdated laws against homosexuality, there are various state laws against practicing any BDSM-associated activity. That is, even using a whip or handcuffs to play with your spouse (even with their full consent!) can land you in jail, or in other states merely selling such paraphernalia (such as a frat paddle or nipple clips) is a heavy offense. This stems from the original association with prostitution - it was thought at the time that no one would be willing to participate in gratifying such "perverted" desires without being paid for it. For this reason, it became yet another consenting-adult, victimless-crime prosecuted by law and thus subsequently embraced by the counter-culture, which explains why it was a popular theme for both underground arthouses and underground bands.


"All Tomorrow's Parties"

•  
Written by group leader Lou Reed, this song is about Andy Warhol and the intriguing people he surrounded himself with ("Warhol's Factory"). Reed was good friends with Warhol, and they shared similar artistic sensibilities.


 This was one of 3 songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico that Nico sang lead on. She also recorded it as a solo artist and included it in her live shows. Other artists who have covered the song include Jeff Buckley, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and Simple Minds
This is reportedly Andy Warhol's favorite Velvet Underground song, though probably more for having Nico (born Christa Päffgen) sing the lead than Velvet Underground's part in it. It was about a 50/50 shot whether flyers and posters for Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances around this time would have Nico's name before Velvet Underground's - with Nico sometimes billed as "pop girl of '66." In the pages of the Village Voice, rock critic Richard Goldstein called Nico "half goddess, half icicle," and reviewed her, saying "She sings in perfect mellow ovals. It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning."


 If Moe Tucker's drumming sounds a little mechanical here, consider that her previous job was working as a keypunch operator for IBM. As Lou Reed once said, "There are two kinds of drummers - Moe Tucker and everybody else."


"Heroin"

•  
While there are many alternative interpretations of this song, it seems to be the case that Lou Reed was merely describing the effects of the drug, while neither condemning it nor condoning it. It might have been done merely for shock value, or because Reed liked gritty subjects, or as a dark poem of addiction; the beauty of this song is that it works on all of these levels, and many more, at the same time. In many of his songs, we have cases where Lou Reed kept the focus on providing an objective description of the topic without taking a moral stance on the matter.



For the record, Lou Reed spoke of the meaning of some of his songs in a 1971 interview with creem magazine: "I meant those songs to sort of exorcise the darkness, or the self-destructive element in me, and hoped other people would take them the same way. But when I saw how people were responding to them, it was disturbing. Because, like, people would come up and say, 'I shot up to 'Heroin,' things like that. For a while, I was even thinking that some of my songs might have contributed formatively to the consciousness of all these addictions and things going down with the kids today. But I don't think that anymore; it's really too awful a thing to consider."Lou Reed wrote "Heroin" while attending Syracuse University - he would have been close to the age of 18.

The unique screeching, droning viola sound in this and other early Velvet Underground songs was produced by bassist John Cale, a classically trained violist, playing an electric viola with three guitar strings, a cello bow and plenty of feedback. This preceded The Creation, who were the first to play a guitar with a cello bow in 1966. Few other bands exploited feedback and noise to the same degree as the Velvet Underground until the noise-rock scene developed in the 1980s.


"There She Goes Again"


There She Goes Again" is the 8th track from the Velvet Underground's debut album, reaching up the Billboard Hot 100 charts at... oh, wait, the Velvet Underground never charted. However as Velvet Underground songs go, this one is perhaps the most mainstream-sounding.
The lyrics more than make up for the ear-friendly notes, however, when you realize that this song is about a woman falling into prostitution. And in fact it does so with gritty references to being on her knees and walking the streets - maybe not so shocking today, but monocle-popping in 1967.


Musically, this song does borrow from Marvin Gaye's "Hitch Hike" - give it a listen. It's even more obvious of an influence if you listen to the Rolling Stones cover on the Out of Our Heads album - there's the guitar riff and the pronounced stops.


"I'll Be Your Mirror"

•  
• Lou Reed wrote "I'll Be Your Mirror" for Nico, anecdotally after Nico approached Reed with this line after a 1965 stage show. It is said to be a favorite of Reed's.Guitarist Sterling Morrison told about the recording of this song in interviews. The band was frustrated with Nico for her loud, aggressive approach to the song when they wanted a more delicate vocal. they did take after take until finally she broke down and burst into tears. Then they had her do it one more time, and that's the take that made the cut.One of Andy Warhol's goofy ideas was to have the record album have a built-in crack so the final part of this song would repeat indefinitely until the listener moved the record player needle. That idea was abandoned, probably for the best.
•  
"European Son"


Lou Reed dedicated this song to Delmore Schwartz, who taught Reed at Syracuse University. The song is over 7 minutes long, but there are no lyrics after the first minute. This is in tribute to Schwartz, who spoke of hating lyrics in rock songs.


As the last track on the album, this song looks forward stylistically to their next album, White Light/White Heat, and its proto-punkish free-form improvisations. Oh, and that loud crash after the opening vocals? That would be John Cale smashing a stack of dishes with a metal chair!

•  

Another competing band was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The album The Velvet Underground and Nico was finished and waiting to be released by early 1966, but Verve Records held it back in favor of releasing Zappa and the Mother's Freak Out! This provoked guitarist Sterling Morrison into spending the rest of his life complaining about Zappa, sneeringly lumping him in with "that hippie music," along with other acts like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. This is ironic, considering that Zappa himself also hated the hippie scene, and in fact was mocking it the entire time the way he later would parody other musical genres

Last edited by arabchanter (09/11/2017 8:57 am)

PatReilly wrote:

It takes all sorts of tastes, but strangely, as much as you like the VU/Nico album, I found most of it uninspiring. A couple of great tracks (to me) in I'm Waiting for the Man and Venus in Furs, some other good songs, and some which I'd often skip.

We'd be at loggerheads over the music at an all night drinking party! Apart from I'm too old for that type of thing now.

I've got a funny feeling we are of a similar vintage, so I'm sure we would be able to find some sort of common ground about what music should be played at the old folks home, xmas perty  
 

DAY 92.
Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim....................Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim  (1967)







The best track on this album is "The Girl From Ipanema," but when you've heard it sung by so many different artists, and by no means least Astrud Gilberto on this very thread,  I'm afraid Francis Alberts rendition pales into significance.

To be honest the whole album was a bit so so for me,  and as a consequence wont be added to my collection.

For bits and bobs see previous Sinatra posts

There is this review with which I tend to concur;;


This one’s a bit problematic. Sure, The Voice is in fine form: few singers before or since have been possessed of such seemingly effortless control over their instrument. Sinatra handles the subtleties of the music ably (for the most part).The music contained in these sides certainly sailed against the prevailing musical tides of 1967. Though remaining a major concert draw, by the late 1960s Frank Sinatra couldn’t easily shift units like he once had. So his collaboration (a fairly rare instance of co-billing) with Brazilian guitarist/vocalist Antonio Carlos Jobim can be viewed as a bid for success in the “adult music” (or “good music,” as it was often called) market.

  But for people of a certain age — like this reviewer, who grew up on 60s AM radio — this sort of music falls into what we less-than-fondly remember as a genre perversely dubbed “easy listening.” As the too-hip-by-half liner notes admit, any rough edges this music might have had were dutifully sanded off in the recorded performances.

The strings are syrupy, the percussion muted, the arrangements quiet. Again, there’s the voice, and for that reason alone this compilation is worthwhile. But to say it’s less than exciting is to the commit an egregious act of understatement. A high point — though that label might be too strong a descriptor — is a cover of Cole Porter‘s “I Concentrate On You.” But Sinatra’s ad-libbed(?) “ding ding ding” vocalizing comes off as clichéd, and the arrangement owes more to Ray Conniff than, say, Billy May. The album’s overall tone is flat and one-dimensional: if you like “The Girl From Ipanema” and are okay with nine lesser variations on that theme, you’ll like this. Otherwise, perhaps not so much.





 

PatReilly wrote:

Didn't even listen to that Sinatra album: better things to do.

I'm hoping there are more albums from this side of the Atlantic up soon!

Kinda similar to the book ,Pat.
 

DAY 93.
The Doors.............The Doors   (1967)




This album seems very familiar although I've never listened to it,ever.


Obviously there are the stand outs "Break On Through To The Other Side," "Light My Fire" and "The End" but not far behind were," Alabama Song (whisky Bar,) " "Soul Kitchen" and my favourite of the so called second string, "Take It As It Comes."

Summing up I thought the musicianship on this album was top drawer, and I didn't dislike any of the tracks and as The Doors reminds me of when I lived In London (the Manager of the pub I drank in, used to plough a shitload of money into the jukebox, and 90% of the time it was The Doors he played, hence the familiarity.)
This album will be going into my collection mainly because I do think it's a fine album, but also reminds me of some really mental times back in the day.

Some Bits & Bobs;

• Their name came from Aldous Huxley's narrative about mescaline, The Doors Of Perception, which got its title from a quote by William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Huxley took LSD on his deathbed and tripped to his death on November 22, 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy was shot.




• Jim Morrison's father was a Rear Admiral in the Navy. Many people know that. But check this out: He was in command of the Carrier Division during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This makes him one of the people most responsible for the escalation of the Vietnam War (many credible historians believe there was something extremely shady about the phantom "attack" that occurred that day and justified American escalation). So, the son of one of the men most responsible for escalating the Vietnam War became, only three years later, one of the leading figures of the counterculture, which was based upon anti-Vietnam War sentiment.


They were the first band to have an album advertised on a billboard. Elektra Records paid $1500 to promote their first album on LA's Sunset Strip.


Morrison's middle name was Douglas, after General Douglas MacArthur. His father wanted him to join the military.


In a story he often recounted, when he was four years old, Morrison's drove by an auto accident in New Mexico where several Indians were dying along the road. Morrison felt their spirits leapt into his soul.


When the group started out, Morrison was very shy and even performed with his back to the audience, during the early days. As a result, Manzarek had to sing on a lot of the songs.


Both Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek attended the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Also there at the same time was Oscar-winning movie director Francis Ford Coppola. He later used The Doors' song "The End" in Apocalypse Now.


Morrison acquired a few nicknames over the years, including ‘The Lizard King’ after a poem he wrote appearing on the sleeve of The Doors’ “Waiting For The Sun” album.
But he is eternally known as Mr Mojo Risin’ after using the term as a refrain in the song ‘L.A Woman’.
Did you know: Mr Mojo Risin’ is also an anagram of Jim Morrison.

Before beginning his acting career, Harrison Ford worked as The Doors’ stagehand and second camera assistant.

On July 3, 1971, Morrison's girlfriend, Pamela Courson, found him dead in his bathtub. Cause of death was listed as "heart attack induced by respiratory problems." Some of the rumors were that he overdosed on heroin or that he faked his death. Courson died of a heroin overdose in 1974.


Jim Morrison’s grave remains one of Paris’ most popular tourist attractions.

Morrison's headstone reads: "Kata ton daimona eay toy," Greek for "True to his own spirit." His grave site is a popular tourist destination.

On any given day, masses of tourists surround his tombstone, which has been covered with graffiti by overenthusiastic fans and once featured a bust of Morrison before vandals claimed it as their own. Nearby tombstones have even been defaced, with arrows pointing visitors toward “Jim” — though cemetery staff has wiped them clean and erected metal barricades to curb unpermitted tributes.Established in 1804, the Pére-Lachaise cemetery in Paris contains the remains of thousands of celebrated artists including Edith Piaf, Max Ernst and Oscar Wilde, but Mr Mojo Risin’ remains by far the most popular.


"Light My Fire"

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• Most of the song was written by Doors guitarist Robby Krieger, who wanted to write about one of the elements: fire, air, earth, and water. He recalled to Uncut: "I was living with my parents in Pacific Palisades – I had my amp and SG. I asked Jim, what should I write about? He said, 'Something universal, which won't disappear two years from now. Something that people can interpret themselves.' I said to myself I'd write about the four elements; earth, air, fire, water, I picked fire, as I loved the Stones song, 'Play With Fire,' and that's how that came about."


Krieger came up with the melody and wrote most of the lyrics, which are about leaving inhibitions behind in flames of passion.



At first, the song had a folk flavor, but it ignited when Jim Morrison wrote the second verse ("our love become a funeral pyre...") and Ray Manzarek came up with the famous organ intro. Drummer John Densmore also contributed, coming up with the rhythm. Like all Doors songs of this era, the band shared composer credits.

 This became The Doors' signature song. Included on their first album, it was a huge hit and launched them to stardom. Before it was released, The Doors were an underground band popular in the Los Angeles area, but "Light My Fire" got the attention of a mass audience.

 On the album, which was released in January 1967, the song runs 6:50. The group's first single, "Break On Through (To The Other Side)," reached just #126 in America. "Light My Fire" was deemed too long for airplay, but radio stations (especially in Los Angeles) got requests for the song from listeners who heard it off the album. Their label, Elektra Records decided to release a shorter version so they had producer Paul Rothchild do an edit. By chopping out the guitar solos, he whittled it down to 2:52. This version was released as a single in April, and the song took off, giving The Doors their first big hit.



To many fans, the single edit was an abomination, and many DJs played the album version once the song took off.



Elektra founder Jaz Holzman recalled to Mojo magazine November 2010: "We had that huge problem with the time length - seven-and-a-half minutes. Nobody could figure out how to cut it. Finally I said to Rothchild, 'Nobody can cut it but you.' When he cut out the solo, there were screams. Except from Jim. Jim said, 'Imagine a kid in Minneapolis hearing even the cut version over the radio, it's going to turn his head around.' So they said, 'Go ahead, release it.' We released it with the full version on the other side."

 This was the first song Robby Krieger wrote to completion. Jim Morrison did most of the songwriting for the album, but he needed some help and asked Krieger to step in. The 20-year-old guitarist asked him what to write about, and Morrison replied, "Something universal."Jim Morrison indicated in his notebooks that he disliked this song and hated performing it. He also seemed to resent that the popularity of the band derived from this song, which he had just a small part in writing.
   This was the first rock song to feature both a guitar and keyboard in the instrumental section.

 This was the last song Jim Morrison performed live. It took place at the Doors concert at The Warehouse in New Orleans on December 12, 1970. Mid-way through the song, Morrison became exasperated and smashed his microphone into the floor, ending the show.



 According to Ray Manzarek on BBC Radio 2's program Ray Manzarek's Summer of Love, the baseline to "Light My Fire" was inspired by Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill"


 Manzarek told About.com how the keyboard solo came about: "It was exactly what we were doing at the time at Whisky a Go Go - letting the music take us wherever it might lead in a particular performance, just improvising. And that?s exactly the same way that solo came about."

 The Doors didn't have a bass player, but there is some bass on this song. Determining who played it is an inexact science, as session musicians were not formally credited at the time, but Carol Kaye claims it was her. She was a first call studio pro at the time, and had performed on a lot of the hits that were recorded in Los Angeles, including many of Phil Spector's productions. She told us regarding her involvement: "The Doors weren't there. Just a couple of the guys were there in the booth. We cut the track. I'm playing on that, but I don't like to talk about it, because there's too many fanatics about that stuff. I'm a prude. I don't do drugs. I think it's stupid. I think for people to be into drugs and to die on stage, I think that's so stupid, and totally unnecessary. So I stay away from even talking about that. But I am on the contract, yeah, I played on the hit of that."

  Robby Krieger told Clash Music he put "every chord I knew into this song." Most of the group's songs to this point were three-chord compositions, so he wanted to do something more "adventurous."In concert, Robby Krieger never played the same guitar solo on this song. He would sometimes mix in bits of the Beatles song "Eleanor Rigby.

•  
• "The End"

• "The End" is death, although the song also deals with Jim Morrison's parents - it contains Oedipal themes of loving the mother and killing the father. Morrison was always vague as to the meaning, explaining: "It could be almost anything you want it to be."



• The Doors developed this song during live performances at the Whisky a Go Go, a Los Angeles club where they were the house band in 1966. They had to play two sets a night, so they were forced to extend their songs in order to fill the sets. This gave them a chance to experiment with their songs.



"The End" began as Jim Morrison's farewell to Mary Werbelow, his girlfriend who followed him from Florida to Los Angeles. It developed into an 11-minute epic.



• On August 21, 1966, Jim Morrison didn't show up for The Doors gig at the Whisky a Go Go. After playing the first set without him, the band retrieved Morrison from his apartment, where he had been tripping on acid. They always played "The End" as the last song, but Morrison decided to play it early in the set, and the band went along. When they got to the part where he could do a spoken improvisation, he started talking about a killer, and said, "Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to f--k you!" The crowd went nuts, but the band was fired right after the show. The Doors had recently signed a record deal and they had established a large following, so getting fired from the Whisky was not a crushing blow.



• Morrison sang this live as "F--k the mother," rather than "Screw the mother." At the time, the band couldn't cross what their engineer Bruce Botnick called "the f--k barrier," so they sanitized the lyric on the album. When Botnick remixed the album for a 1999 reissue, however, he put Morrison's "f--k"s back in, which is how the song was intended.



• This was famously used in the movie Apocalypse Now over scenes from the Vietnam War. Director Francis Ford Coppola had it remixed to include the line "F--k the mother."



Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek recalled in a 1995 MOJO interview: "To sit back in an audience and hear 'The End' come on at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, it's absolutely thrilling."



• Morrison was on an acid trip when they first tried to record this song. He kept singing "F--k the mother, kill the father" rather than the actual lyrics. In The Mojo Collection, it states: "Comprehensively wrecked, the singer wound up lying on the floor mumbling the words to his Oedipal nightmare. Then, suddenly animated, he rose and threw a TV at the control room window. Sent home by producer Paul Rothchild like a naughty schoolkid, he returned in the middle of the night, broke in, peeled off his clothes, yanked a fire extinguisher from the wall and drenched the studio. Alerted, Rothchild came back and persuaded the naked, foam-flecked Morrison to leave once more, advising the studio owner to charge the damage to Elektra; next day the band nailed the track in two takes. Morrison lived for only another five years."



• This is supposedly the last song Morrison heard. The night he died, he was playing old Doors albums, ending with this one. This was the last song on that album.



• This was recorded with the lights off and only one candle burning next to Morrison.



• The album version of the song is an edited combination of two takes, which took a total of about 30 minutes to record. Producer Paul Rothchild called it "one of the most beautiful moments I've ever had in a recording studio."



• Morrison would sometimes stop in the middle of this during concerts to get a reaction from the crowd.



• The instrumentation is meant to be like an Indian raga. The guitar imitates a sitar, with seemingly unrhythmic pluckings of diatonic notes. The drum beat is designed to sound like a tabla, and the keyboard is supposed to provide the humming support of a tambura.

• In this urgent song, Jim Morrison looks to shake things up, a common theme in his songwriting. In 1966, he said: "I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning."



• This was the first song on The Doors first album, and also their first single. It got some airplay on Los Angeles radio stations after their friends and fans kept requesting it.



• The original line in the chorus was "She gets high," but their producer Paul Rothchild thought that would limit the song's airplay potential, and convinced the group to leave it out. Instead, "high" was edited out, making it sound like, "she get uuggh," but the "high" line can be heard in live versions.



• Robby Krieger's guitar melody was inspired by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band of "Shake Your Money Maker," which was released on the group's debut album in 1965. Krieger was a huge fan of Butterfield, and found himself emulating the riff when they were working on "Break On Through."



• The Doors didn't have a bass player, so their keyboard player Ray Manzarek created most of the low-end sounds. On this track, he borrowed the bass notes from the Ray Charles song "What'd I Say"




• John Densmore added the knocking drum sound by hitting his drum stick sideways across the snare.



• The vocals are a mix of two of Morrison's takes.


In an episode of The Simpsons, Krusty the Klown sings this when he shows the crowd a tape of him when he was younger

A big influence on one of my punk favourites, The Stranglers, were The Doors.

One of my pals had a birthday party where, instead of a dj and disco, he hired a Doors tribute band (from Alloa I think). Held in Camelon Labour Club, it didn't go down well! But the important thing: he enjoyed it.

Great album that, brings back a few memories.

Last edited by PatReilly (11/11/2017 9:59 am)

PatReilly wrote:

A big influence on one of my punk favourites, The Stranglers, were The Doors.

One of my pals had a birthday party where, instead of a dj and disco, he hired a Doors tribute band (from Alloa I think). Held in Camelon Labour Club, it didn't go down well! But the important thing: he enjoyed it.

Great album that, brings back a few memories.

That for me is the magic of music, I think every bit of music you hear tends to leave a memory, hopefully they're mostly good.
 

DAY 94.
The Byrds................Younger Than Yesterday    (1967)







Not another Byrds Album?
Well that's what I thought, but on listening to it I have to confess I was really enjoying it until, as seems to be the way in this decade, they threw the perpetual spanner in the works with track 8,  "Mind Gardens," what a load of pish that was, whether it's a filler or they think they sound clever and superhip who knows, but  it really hurt my ears.

The rest of the album was relatively Eaglesque/C,S,N&Y which to be honest rolled along quite merrily, from "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star," to Dylan's " My Back Pages" and onto "The Girl with No Name" and "Why"
and were all in my opinion quite passable, but track eight should have a "proceed with caution" notice.


This one won't be going in to my collection, but if someone were to give it to me as a Xmas present, I'm sure I would have to ask them  "have you still got the receipt?"


Done this mob twice already so just a couple of bits about songs on the album;


So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star This was a tongue-in-cheek treatise on fame and the pop music industry. Many interpreted it as a swipe at the success of manufactured rock bands like The Monkees, but Roger McGuinn has confirmed that he and Chris Hillman were not writing about about The Monkees, but instead the whole music business.


The recording was dubbed with the sound of screaming girls, taped at a Byrds show in Bournemouth, England during the band's 1965 UK tour


South African Jazz musician Hugh Masekela contributed the clarion trumpet solo.



. Everybody's Been Burned



This song was written by David Crosby a year or so before he joined up with Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark to form The Byrds. It was a melancholic take on temperance and trustworthiness.


The chord changes in this track are jazzier than what was happening in pop music at the time. Crosby has commended his fellow band members, especially Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, for being open-minded about such matters.


In an interview with Steve Silberman in 1995, David Crosby said that he thought this was "the first actually passable song that I wrote."


My Back Pages


Already skilled at turning acoustic Dylan folk tunes into melodic, electric folk-rockers, the Byrds struck gold when they decided to take this somewhat nondescript Dylan tune from 1964 and electrify it for their fourth album. Leader Roger McGuinn cut out two of the more abstract verses and fashioned a chorus where there really wasn't one, utilizing David Crosby's harmony singing. McGuinn also does a classic 12-string Rickenbacker solo and Van Dyke Parks fills things out with a soft but essential organ part. As a single it stalled at #30 in 1967, but its reputation as a rock classic has grown through the years.


Dylan recorded his version in 1964 on his Another Side of Bob Dylan album. The song is famous for the lyrics, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

With lines like "My pathway led by confusion boats" and "I dreamed romantic facts of musketeers," this is a rather cryptic song, even by Dylan standards. What does it all mean? Depends on who's listening.



Roger McGuinn of The Byrds said: "I don't try to interpret what Bob meant when he wrote the song. He doesn't do that, and to do that, you spoil it for people who have a different meaning of the song."


The phrase "back pages" never shows up in the lyrics, but it became a favorite saying amongst music writers, who used the term to describe an archive, either literal or figurative.


The Girl with No Name


Bass guitarist Chris Hillman contributed two Country Rock-flavored songs to The Byrds' fourth album, Younger Than Yesterday, anticipating The Byrds' future experimentation with the Country Rock genre. Whilst "Time Between" was a Paul McCartney-influenced pop song, "The Girl with No Name" was inspired by a young lady with the unusual moniker of Girl Freiberg.


Girl Freiberg was a friend of David Crosby. Her parents gave Girl her nickname as she was the only female out of their six children. A follower of the San Francisco '60s folk scene, she ran away from home at the age of 16 and married fellow scenester and Quicksilver Messenger Service bassist David Freiberg in order to avoid juvenile hall.



David Freiberg would later play with Crosby on his first solo album in 1971 and joined the Jefferson Airplane in 1972. He stayed with that band after it morphed into the Jefferson Starship in 1974, remaining with them until 1984 when he quit the group following the departure of Paul Kantner.

Sorry woke up late, and have a hoor of a day ahead, will listen to yesterdays and todays tonight.

Last edited by arabchanter (13/11/2017 12:36 pm)

The Byrds were for the birds. Or the bird.

What happened to the Young Rascals? To be fair, I'd have ignore that album too 

Only enjoyed the two Grace Slick songs off that Jefferson Airplane album, plus the virtuoso instrumental 'Embryonic Journey'.