Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Deja Vu

Released - March 1970

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash & Neil Young

Selected Personnel - David Crosby (Vocals/Guitar); Stephen Stills (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Bass/Percussion); Graham Nash (Vocals/Keyboards/Guitar/Percussion); Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Harmonica); Dallas Taylor (Drums/Percussion); Greg Reeves (Bass); Jerry Garcia (Pedal Steel Guitar); John Sebastian (Harmonica)

Standout Track - Almost Cut My Hair

On my review of Buffalo Springfield's second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, I was fairly disparaging about the sum efforts of all of Neil Young's collaborators across both that band and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which wasn't particularly fair of me considering I'd based that opinion solely on that one album and on CSNY's 1974 best-of So Far. I've since dug a little deeper and am willing to redress my opinion slightly, though I still maintain that Young is an infinitely more original and interesting musician than any of Crosby, Stills, Nash or Richie Furay, and I'm still not remotely moved to investigate the solo discographies of any of them - their partnership with Young remains the main reason I'm interested in any of them. Nonetheless, I am willing to concede that, far from being a collection of tired West Coast folk rock tropes as I half-expected them to be, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were capable of recording a genuinely brilliant album, and Deja Vu is just that.

As a brief side note - I've also recently listened to Buffalo Springfield's self-titled first album and so have heard "For What It's Worth," a song which, incredibly, I'd never heard before. As a result, Stephen Stills' reputation as a songwriter suddenly makes sense, as that song's a masterpiece. Its parent album is very middle-of-the-road, however, and I've yet to hear anything by Stills that comes close to it, but at least the respect he commandeers suddenly makes a bit more sense.

Anyway, on to CSN. In the wake of the disbanding of Buffalo Springfield, and of David Crosby's dismissal from the Byrds as a result of high tensions within the group, Stills and Crosby started jamming together and soon added the Hollies' Graham Nash to their lineup thanks to his skill with close-part harmonies, and recorded a hit album with their self-titled debut. Neil Young, meanwhile, forged out as a solo artist with his own self-titled debut, which failed to impress many people, but followed it up with the brilliant collaboration with new backing band Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which cemented him as one of the most serious and credible country-rock musicians around - one who was more interested in lengthy, hard rock jams rather than radio-friendly singles, more interested in doing things his way than anybody else's.

The Crosby, Stills & Nash album, by contrast, achieved great chart success and radio play, and the result was the need to expand their lineup in order to tour successfully, considering Stills played the majority of the instruments on the record. At the suggestion of their manager Ahmet Ertegun, they recalled Young to the lineup, and put out their great masterpiece, Deja Vu, as a quartet. Young's relationship with the others seems a strained and fractious one - he insisted on being given equal billing in the band's title if he were to be involved, but then occasionally sat out certain albums and tours from then on, causing the band's name to fluctuate depending on whether he was interested at the time or not. His contributions as a songwriter also seemed to be very dependent on whims - shortly after the release of Deja Vu he would record the blistering protest song "Ohio" pretty much as a solo record, and then casually let them put it out as a CSNY single. His attitude very much seemed to indicate that he found the context of CSNY occasionally interesting to work in, but that they ultimately needed him more than he needed them.

Nonetheless, and the obsessive Neil Young fanboy in me is shocked to say it, Young's contributions to Deja Vu aren't even the best on the album, and perhaps the presence of a genuinely credible, serious musician caused the others to up their game on the songwriting front and aim for more than just radio-friendly folk rock singles. I mentioned on my review of Buffalo Springfield Again that one of that band's failings was that it never quite gelled into what really felt like a single identity, instead lurching between the different styles and approaches of the main songwriters Stills, Young and Furay. The same is, of course, true of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but this time it doesn't feel like a missed opportunity - the entire supergroup concept is built around the idea of four different creative figureheads coming together to force their approaches to work in concert with each other, so the different tones and styles on the resultant album feel more like a deliberate attempt to do something interesting than like a band that's failed to find a strong identity for itself as it did with Buffalo Springfield.

For my money, the one who comes off best here is David Crosby, who contributes two of the album's very best songs in the hippie anthem "Almost Cut My Hair" and the title track. "Almost Cut My Hair" features fiery, angry guitar licks under Crosby's barking, guttural vocals. Its lyrical content is, in hindsight, almost a pastiche of late 60s/early 70s hippie counter-culture ("I feel like letting my freak flag fly!"), but Crosby pulls it off with such commitment and passion that it never feels corny. "Deja Vu" itself is a much more complicated song, one with less gutsy fire in its belly than "Almost Cut My Hair," but far more intricate in veering between the fast, syncopated, close-harmony intro to its slow, mysterious middle section. Those close harmonies that were a CSNY staple also get a good workout on Stills' rousing opening track, "Carry On," driven by the insistent strum of acoustic guitar. Stills' other contribution is the pleasant but not hugely memorable ballad "4+20."

Young, meanwhile, places his two contributions at opposite ends in terms of effort. "Helpless" is a bland, plodding piece of country rock that remains a live favourite in his repertoire to this day, a fact which always baffles me as I find it one of the most boring songs he's ever written. At the other end of the spectrum, he also offers the complicated multi-part suite of "Country Girl," a brilliant piece of epic, cinematic music that climaxes in perhaps the grandest, most overblown moment of the record in its stirring finale. Then, of course, there's Graham Nash. Perhaps it's unfair of me to have formed this opinion being totally unfamiliar with the Hollies and with Nash's work elsewhere in his career, but I always get the feeling with Nash that he was a totally different sort of musician to the others and probably couldn't believe his luck that he'd become part of a classic rock supergroup. His songs are jaunty, novelty little pop songs that are totally out of touch with the folk rock vibe on the rest of the album, and to me sound reminiscent of the sort of stuff Paul McCartney was contributing to later Beatles albums, the kind of thing John Lennon dismissed as "Paul's granny music." Don't get me wrong, it's not even that I dislike it - "Teach Your Children" is pretty bland, but "Our House" is genuinely fun and lovely in its wide-eyed, innocent silliness. It's just that his compositions stick out like a sore thumb and are clearly pursuing a different kind of tone than everything else, though that's not necessarily to the album's detriment. I just find it endlessly amusing that the man who wrote the lyrics "Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy 'cos of you - la la, la-la-la, la, la-la-la, la!" went on to write an autobiography called "Wild Tales - A Rock & Roll Life."

The final two songs on the album consist of "Everybody I Love You," a great little rock song and another album highlight co-written by Stills and Young (though it seems more Stills' work than Young's, being reminiscent of his excellent "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.") Then there's the cover of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock." Mitchell has since expressed frustration that David Crosby formed the opinion that she had written "Woodstock" about them after they returned from playing at the festival and told her about it, when it was actually an idea she was already exploring in her writing and then worked some of their own thoughts on Woodstock into it rather than basing the entire thing on their exploits. Indeed, the song is far less about the experience of a rock band playing the festival itself, and much more on the spiritual journey that that gathering of people represents - "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden" ties the song into a much more religious, redemptive arc than any story Crosby might have told her about playing a rock festival could have been. Nonetheless, the band, convinced the song was about them, decided to record an upbeat, hard rock cover of it. The idea itself is ludicrous - one of Mitchell's most intense, atmospheric and contemplative songs sped up to double speed and covered in intense guitar solos. Bizarrely, though, it works. It doesn't come close to the emotional intensity of Mitchell's original version from Ladies Of The Canyon, but they do manage to pull off making into an enjoyable rock song.

Deja Vu deservedly proved to be another big hit for the band, and cemented them as one of the biggest supergroups of the early 70s. As a result, the various solo albums each of its members put out later in 1970 all achieved massively increased exposure and acclaim, including Young's After The Gold Rush. However, the increased success of each of them as solo artists made it more difficult to continue operating as a collective going forward. Young, as mentioned above, relased "Ohio" as a CSNY record, but CSNY as a group would falter in the next few years as they all focused on their solo work, with the odd exception of the occasional tour or the release of So Far as a sort of stop gap in 1974. By the time the next album appeared (with Young noticeably absent) it was 1977 and it would be fair to say that interest had waned.

Track Listing:

1. Carry On (Stephen Stills)

2. Teach Your Children (Graham Nash)

3. Almost Cut My Hair (David Crosby)

4. Helpless (Neil Young)

5. Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)

6. Deja Vu (David Crosby)

7. Our House (Graham Nash)

8. 4 + 20 (Stephen Stills)

9. Country Girl: Whiskey Boot Hill/Down Down Down/Country Girl (I Think You're Pretty) (Neil Young)

10. Everybody I Love You (Stephen Stills & Neil Young)

Miles Davis - In A Silent Way

Released - July 1969

Genre - Jazz Fusion

Producer - Teo Macero

Selected Personnel - Miles Davis (Trumpet); Wayne Shorter (Saxophone); John McLaughlin (Guitar); Chick Corea (Keyboards); Herbie Hancock (Keyboards); Joe Zawinul (Organ); Dave Holland (Double Bass); Tony Williams (Drums)

Standout Track - In A Silent Way/It's About That Time

As I've vaguely intimated in a few other reviews on this blog, there are certain areas of music I feel I can write about with a certain degree of confidence in my opinions. Others less so. Jazz is, by and large, in the latter category. I'm certainly not totally ignorant about jazz music - a number of landmark jazz records stand as some of my favourites, and I'm basically familiar with the general evolution and development of jazz music, and its influence on rock music. But the general thrust and direction of my interests has already leaned more towards classic and art rock, and my awareness of the inner workings of jazz music are just less intricate. It means that writing a review of something like In A Silent Way poses a significant challenge - it's an album by one of the greatest ever jazz legends, but one that saw him deliberately turning away from the hallmarks and traditions of jazz music, yet neither wholly embracing the styles of psychedelic rock music either. What emerges is an album very difficult to categorise and even more difficult to actually talk about, but ultimately my approach to complicated, challenging albums like In A Silent Way comes down to the age-old defence of "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." This is an album that might have emerged out of experimentation within a whole range of different genres and traditions, but regardless of how much you know about those traditions, it's undeniably beautiful, ambitious and hugely atmospheric.

Miles Davis is one of those artists who I've never become obsessive about, but who I enjoy and admire enough to keep track of their career milestones, from the early promise of Birth Of The Cool through the all-time classic Kind Of Blue, all the way up to the ambitious but messy jazz fusion landmark Bitches Brew in 1970. In A Silent Way is the most recent of his classic albums that I've listened to, and easily on a par with Kind Of Blue, albeit an entirely different kind of record. On that earlier album, Davis had taken a pioneering attitude to jazz music, stripping it of its reliance on rhythm, melody or virtuoso solos, creating a new style of jazz that was more atmospheric and more able to play with the space it occupied. On In A Silent Way, ten years later, he takes that same attitude to its logical extreme, but this time incoporating psychedelic rock elements and ultimately combining them to create what is almost a proto-ambient record. In the ten years since Kind Of Blue, Davis had gradually been incorporating more rock elements into his band, with the addition of the likes of Joe Zawinul on organ alongside the more long-standing members and traditional instrumentalists like Wayne Shorter on saxophone and Herbie Hancock on piano. The most recent addition to the lineup prior to the recording of In A Silent Way was guitarist John McLaughlin, who Davis invited to join the sessions literally the day before after meeting him and being hugely impressed by his playing.

The addition of electric guitar to Davis's pallette of instruments was of course sacrilegious to more traditionalist jazz enthusiasts, and the extent to which he would continue to radicalise his sound on Bitches Brew the following year would presumably only alienate them further. I've never been a huge fan of Bitches Brew - in its attempt to match some of the rhythmic structures of psychedelic rock to the improvisational traditions of cool jazz, I feel it ends up being a collection of over-long, meandering pieces that struggle to find much of a melody or a memorable hook, going more for assault-on-the-senses overload than for anything genuinely musically compelling. In A Silent Way, while it still has the same experimental spirit of trying to marry disparate styles and instruments together, is infinitely superior in its dedication to being something all its own, never relentlessly jamming in search of a tune but always content to just explore the space around it. It might be equally tuneless and formless, but the fact that it gives itself time and space rather than forcing itself into song-structures makes it infinitely more enjoyable.

Producer Teo Macero used the classical structural methods of piecing together sonatas, assembling lengthy, formless pieces into an ABA structure so that they achieve a kind of progression and resolution. In both of them, Davis's trumpet drifts in and out, never the strident, fiery blasts of Bitches Brew but always soft and contemplative, while the organ and electric keyboards played by the likes of Hancock and Chick Corea create a constant, shimmering soundscape throughout both the album's lengthy tracks. McLaughlin, Shorter and Zawinul, like Davis, drift in and out as the occasional guests, McLaughlin indulging in spidery, rapid-fire guitar work, or Shorter free-flowing through similarly low-key and thoughtful solos. Drummer Tony Williams is a hugely significant presence throughout as well - his urgent, frenetic cymbal work on "Shh/Peaceful" and metronomic, insistent drum beat in the middle section of "In A Silent Way/It's About That Time" anchor the entire album and keep it moving with an urgent rhythm that might otherwise abandon it in its more loose, atmospheric moments.

The only moments where Williams' drumming stops, thanks to its constant insistence elsewhere, feel truly breath-taking as a result. The free-form section that starts and ends "In A Silent Way/It's About That Time" is perhaps the closest thing anybody had recorded to genuine ambient music prior to Brian Eno actually codifying it as a genre in the 70s. The shimmering keyboards, McLaughlin's slow, languid guitar and the occasional drifts of saxophone and trumpet feel so detached and dreamlike as to be fragments of sound floating through space, and it's easily one of the most achingly beautiful things Davis ever recorded.

Further analysis of the album's scant two tracks would both require more technical knowledge than I have, and would also largely be unnecessary - in this album, Miles Davis succeeded in creating something totally unclassifiable that drew influence magpie-like from wherever he cast his eye and ultimately creates an incredible array of moods and atmospheres and sounds unlike anything any jazz musician had before created. Jazz fans, of course, hated it, feeling Davis had abandoned the genre in response to its declining popularity, and only over the coming years would they begin to see just how radically he was trying to revitalise the genre by incorporating new elements. Rock fans were cautiously positive about In A Silent Way, however, appreciating the way a jazz musician they would previously have ignored was taking steps to imitate what they considered good, and it was In A Silent Way that opened the door for such rock fans to follow Davis on an increasingly eclectic musical journey in the future. These days, it's regarded as one of his great masterpieces, and rightly so. Ultimately, it wasn't as big a seller as the following year's Bitches Brew, but for me it will always be more profoundly beautiful, more imaginative, more coherent and more enjoyable than that slightly messy follow-up.

Track Listing:

1. Shh/Peaceful (Miles Davis)

2. In A Silent Way/It's About That Time (Joe Zawinul & Miles Davis)

Frank Zappa - Hot Rats

Released - October 1969

Genre - Jazz Fusion

Producer - Frank Zappa

Selected Personnel - Frank Zappa (Guitar/Bass/Percussion); Ian Underwood (Piano/Organ/Clarinet/Flute/Saxophone); Max Bennett (Bass); Captain Beefheart (Vocals); John Guerin (Drums); Don Harris (Violin)

Standout Track - Willie The Pimp

I've a theory that for Frank Zappa, the Mothers of Invention were less a conventional band per se and more an ideological representation of a particular way of working. As I mentioned in my review of the Mothers' ridiculous 1968 album We're Only In It For The Money, it's rare listening to a Mothers album that the listener feels compelled to pay much attention to the individual contributions of the band members rather than just being swept along with the bizarre explosion of creativity that Zappa's brain had indulged itself in. The music he produced with the Mothers tended towards fairly simple tunes, some of which tended towards very basic song structures like nursery rhymes or 50s doo-wop style tunes, and the bulk of what really made their output interesting were Zappa's pioneering editing techniques and use of sound collages. The only occasions where things began to get really musically challenging were in musique concrete pieces like "The Chrome-Plated Megaphone Of Destiny," which consisted of tuneless clatters and scrapes and noises. By 1969, it seemed that this particular style of working was something he was no longer as interested in, and as such, the Mothers may as well be consigned to the past. By '69, Zappa had started composing lengthy, complicated jazz fusion instrumental pieces which he would make the Mothers of Invention play in concert, causing great confusion amongst their fans who couldn't reconcile what they heard live with what they heard on record. As such, with the Mothers not proving commercially successful and acting as a big drain on his funds, Zappa broke up the band and set about working on solo material. (The "Mothers being a way of working rather than a band" theory is largely based on the fact that, over subsequent years, he would still release certain albums under the name "Frank Zappa and the Mothers," even if it was a new lineup that bore little resemblance to the old band, and I think often the name just offered him a route towards doing certain things, while other projects felt more like the kind of thing he wanted to do under his own name).

Freed from the constraints of being the frontman of the Mothers of Invention, Zappa was able to make an album in which he could fully indulge his new musical ideas without having to worry about putting off an audience who expected a particular thing. So we get Hot Rats, an album of six (mostly) instrumental jazz fusion pieces. Zappa is very much the lead creative figure here, having composed and arranged everything, playing lead guitar and producing the album, but he certainly didn't turn his hand to solo work purely to showboat and show off, as the importance of his collaborator Ian Underwood on Hot Rats can't be understated. Underwood was the only former Mother who Zappa retained, and here he plays more instruments even than his former bandleader, principally saxophones, clarinets, flutes and other woodwinds, but also piano and organ. Of course, the tight, complex arrangements come from Zappa, but the sheer volume of stuff Underwood gamely turns his hand to is enormously impressive.

Thanks to Zappa's pioneering recording techniques, on several tracks Underwood is able to record multiple tracks of the same instrument - "Peaches En Regalia" and "Son Of Mr Green Genes," for instance, feature multitracked woodwinds performing intricate, dizzying horn charts, all enabled by one of the earliest uses of 16-track recording techniques that allowed many more separate parts to be recorded than ever before. The clarity of sound on every single instrument is vastly improved as a result, with even the drums recorded onto four separate tracks to allow stereo sound in the rhythm section for the first time ever in music history. Zappa's other production experiments include the varying of recording speeds - several of the instruments, including the bass and organ on "Peaches En Regalia," are recorded at half-speed and then sped up, giving them a strange, alien quality. It's the same kind of audio tampering that Brian Eno would follow up on years later to treat the sound of pre-recorded instrumental parts to create entirely new instruments like the "snake guitar" - here, Zappa's half-speed bass solo is christened the "octave bass."

But, while he finds plenty of time to indulge on studio tinkering here, there is much less of a sense of the studio editing and production tricks actively obscuring the content as on We're Only In It For The Money, and instead the music is allowed to really occupy the space by itself, with the complexity and weirdness of Zappa's composition taking centre stage rather than his eccentric production decisions. "Peaches En Regalia" kicks things off, a fast, jazzy, almost militaristic overture almost entirely given over to Underwood's buzzy horn charts, with only the brief octave bass solo serving to give Zappa himself much attention. It's become one of his most enduring pieces of music, and even became a live staple of his son Dweezil Zappa's (to whom Hot Rats was dedicated) touring tribute project Zappa Plays Zappa. It's followed up by the album's standout moment, the incredible, explosive nine-minute onslaught of "Willie The Pimp." Here, Don "Sugarcane" Harris contributes a loping, sinewy electric violin part that loops throughout the whole thing, and none other than Captain Beefheart gives one of his best ever vocal performances (earlier in '69, Zappa had produced Beefheart's landmark album Trout Mask Replica after setting up his own record label with his manager Herb Cohen - it's a hilarious album, and endlessly imaginative, but sadly totally unlistenable, such is its devil-may-care attitude). Beefheart, sounding more than ever before like a prototype Tom Waits, roars and bellows and snarls his way through Zappa's nonsense lyrics ("Man in a suit with the bowtie neck!") before Zappa's own fiery guitar solo simply explodes all over the rest of the song. It's to his eternal credit that Zappa didn't just slop massive guitar solos over every single song he ever wrote but chose only to indulge in them when they really served a purpose, because when he really goes for it they're among the most incendiary, surprising and impactful guitar solos anywhere on record.

The rest of Hot Rats has a tough time following on from the onslaught of "Willie The Pimp" - "Son Of Mr Green Genes" feels a bit like a retread of similar territory to "Peaches En Regalia" and "Little Umbrellas" is fun and sprightly but feels a little lightweight in the context of the rest of the album. Then there's the sprawling, 16-minute jazz fusion epic of "The Gumbo Variations," propelled by Zappa's driving, chugging guitar riff which underpins a vast soundscape for Underwood to solo all over with squawking, squealing sax. Later, Harris returns on electric violin in another blistering solo. It's also the one song where John Guerin's drums are really given a chance to shine - he smashes and pounds his way through the whole epic. Finally, "It Must Be A Camel," a showcase for Underwood's piano, almost comes close to having a conventional lounge jazz vibe to it but its stuttering rhythms and clattering percussion keep reminding us that this is Zappa playing with musical conventions rather than conceding to writing a traditional piece of jazz music.

Hot Rats was enormously acclaimed upon its release - Zappa's longer, jazzier, more complicated musical ideas no longer confounded his fans by going against what they had come to be familiar with from the Mothers of Invention, but, rebranded under his own name, showed him for what he really was - not just the irreverent, chaotic absurdist of those earlier albums, but a genuinely innovative and virtuosic progressive rock musician. It would be another few years before Zappa's solo career really hit its stride again. During 1970 he recorded a few things with a brand new version of the Mothers while also indulging in making some arthouse films, turning his hand to whatever he felt like rather than feeling any pressing need to make a direct followup to Hot Rats. It was only a serious accident in 1971 that prompted him fully back into music-making. The intervening years saw some collections of unreleased earlier Mothers material see the light of day in the form of albums like Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, but it wouldn't be until 1972 that Zappa released another essential solo record.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Frank Zappa

1. Peaches En Regalia

2. Willie The Pimp

3. Son Of Mr Green Genes

4. Little Umbrellas

5. The Gumbo Variations

6. It Must Be A Camel

Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

Released - November 1968

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - Lewis Merenstein

Selected Personnel - Van Morrison (Vocals/Guitar); John Payne (Flute/Saxophone); Jay Berliner (Guitar); Richard Davis (Double Bass); Warren Smith, Jr. (Percussion); Connie Kay (Drums); Larry Fallon (Conductor/Orchestral Arrangements)

Standout Track - Astral Weeks

I mentioned in my last review, of the Mothers of Invention's We're Only In It For The Money, that Frank Zappa was one of my major new musical discoveries this year. The other is Van Morrison, although in the latter case it's already tipped over from "discovery" into "nascent obsession." I've been aware of Van Morrison for a long time, thanks to the ubiquity of his hit 1967 "Brown-Eyed Girl," which is a great song but caused me to always assume that the rest of his discography consisted of further lightweight, R&B-inflected pop. I bracketed him into the same part of my mind of the likes of Rod Stewart - enjoyable pop-rock singer-songwriters who would probably be fun to listen to but probably lacked much depth or insight to be really worth my time. It was only after my friend Adam talked a lot about being a big Van Morrison fan that I decided to pay him more attention - Adam and I don't always see eye-to-eye about music (he's a big fan of Fugazi), his taste usually at least tends towards the interesting, so I felt my preconceptions about Morrison might be wrong. I listened to his two landmark albums, Astral Weeks and Moondance, on a trip to South Africa earlier this year and enjoyed them massively (they're now inherently caught up with exotic ideas about travel, as albums you listen to on holiday tend to be) - they were both hugely enjoyable and deeply interesting. I started making a few furtive steps further into Morrison's work, but it wasn't until I read Greil Marcus's book Listening To Van Morrison, in which he expounds his understanding of what seems to be the central, spiritual ideology at the heart of the man's music, that his work really grabbed me and wouldn't let me go.

For me to really, totally invest in an artist, there tends to be more going on than just my enjoying their music, there tends to be some sort of identifiable stance that artist takes towards music and to creativity that speaks to me in some way. When I became obsessed with Tom Waits, I was fascinated by his insistence on doing things his way - his stubborn insistence on making obscure jazz-influenced records that everyone ignored for ten years until the lack of appreciation they received caused him to erupt in an explosion of creativity in the 80s that finally made everyone realise what a genius he had been all along. When I became obsessed with David Bowie, I was fascinated by his need to totally reinvent himself and his work every time he won a new audience of fans, discarding those he had won over and forcing them to accept whatever new version of himself he presented them with next. Van Morrison's philosophy on music, as explained by Greil Marcus, and this is without wanting to sound too fatalistic about it, but seemed to chime more specifically with my own approach to creativity than any other musician I'd listened to. Music has always been the art form I go to first to create a mood, rather than literature, film, poetry or whatever else - part of the reason why I always get annoyed with music that puts lyrical brilliance ahead of musical innovation is that there's something in the combination of music and words that can more immediately conjure up a mood or a feeling or a memory than any other artistic endeavour. There's something immediate and inexpressible about the way music affects a listener emotionally, that's not subject to reason or logic or anything quantifiable. Marcus suggests that Morrison's music is very much about trying to find those isolated, inexpressible moments, to let the music explore the space that surrounds it and try to find the perfect match of sound and word and note that grasps something inside of you and transforms it into a feeling, rather than necessarily following any strict logical progression either lyrically or musically. Marcus also explains that Morrison's writing often taps into the Celtic spiritual idea of the "yarragh" which, if I remember right, is a sort of guttural, spiritual essence that exists inside a person or inside the earth and lies there to be dug out of the ground or coughed out of a throat. Morrison himself has said that he stops working with words as soon as he's written them, and from that point on they just become sounds with which to find something more ephemeral and elemental, hence his famous vocal affectations of growls and grunts that snarls that find their way into his singing - he attempts to distort his own voice in order to find something new and surprising within a song he already knows well.

All this is perhaps over-analysing things, particularly considering the whole point of Van Morrison's music is to pursue elemental, transcendental moments in the listening to the music itself, but it provides a bit of a context as to why he quickly became such a fascinating figure to me, and feels particularly necessary prior to discussing an album so iconic as Astral Weeks. Prior to establishing himself as a solo act, Morrison had been the frontman of the R&B band Them, who had a string of minor hits in the mid-to-late 60s (including "Gloria," which would later be covered by the likes of the Doors and Patti Smith). After Them disbanded due to disagreements with their manager at Decca Records, their producer, Bert Berns, brought Morrison over to America to record an album for Bang Records, which turned out to be his underwhelming debut, Blowin' Your Mind! The album includes "Brown-Eyed Girl," which is of course a classic, but by and large consisted of uninspired blues and R&B numbers that showed little promise of coming from a particularly insightful or innovative musical mind. There followed a series of contractual and legal disputes with Bang, and while these were being resolved Morrison began experimenting by playing with acoustic musicians including flautist John Payne, writing new material that better suited his own questing, spiritual ideas about music. Having rediscovered a new sense of urgency and excitement in his music, Morrison signed with Warner Bros, fulfilling his contractual obligations to Bang Records by recording a series of short, deliberately terrible nonsense songs for them, and set about recording Astral Weeks.

Morrison has since been somewhat dismissive of Astral Weeks, saying it didn't deserve all the retroactive acclaim that was poured upon it (it sold poorly and to savage reviews on its release, and only began to gather critical acclaim some months and even years after it came out, being remembered as a sort of obscure, collector's item by the time Moondance came out in 1970). To be honest, I slightly agree with him - I think in its best moments it's absolutely sublime and sees Morrison truly connecting with those incredible moments he was in search of, but it's not my favourite album of his, and not his most consistent - there are moments where, by his own admission, the songs would benefit from more variation in their arrangements. But when it works, it works incredibly well.

The record was overseen by jazz producer Lewis Merenstein, who was keen to work with Morrison after hearing the early version of the title track and being reduced to tears. He brought in a group of jazz musicians who had previously worked with the likes of Charles Mingus, including bassist Richard Davis and guitarist Jay Berliner, keeping on Morrison's previous collaborator John Payne on flute. Morrison, a naturally introverted and insular man, had never worked with jazz musicians or in a jazz setting before, but simply closed himself off in a separate booth and told the others to play whatever they felt like feeling after hearing his initial versions of the songs. The result is an album that pulls wonderfully in two different directions, anchored by the folk-soul of Morrison's actual melodies and tunes and acoustic guitar parts, and dragged off to fascinating new territory by the more free-form jazz sensibilities of the bass, the flute, the horns and Berliner's counter-guitar part. Despite all the overt praise that Morrison fans seem to heap upon "Madame George" as the album's high-point, for me it has to be the breathlessly brilliant title track. With its light percussive beat, and insistent rhythm it feels like it soars through its seven minutes, Payne's flute floating and diving through Morrison's guitar part, and over it all is the man's questing, wondering, awestruck vocal dealing out dreamlike imagery - that initial proclamation of "If I ventured into the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream" is one of the most evocative vocal passages I've heard and instantly Morrison acquits himself as a poetic lyricist equal to Dylan. The difference is that, whereas Dylan often feels like he treats his own verses with reverence, here the words themselves feel less important than whatever Morrison is feeling while singing them. The track "Astral Weeks" is a beautiful quest in pursuit of the sublime, its closing, still insistent but quieter moments slowly dying down into silence as Morrison repeatedly sings "In another time, in another place."

"Madame George" is another wonderful high-point, though, just not as good as "Astral Weeks" in my opinion. A violin twirls and swirls through Morrison's sinewy, snarling vocals as he narrates the character study of the ageing, broken transvestite Madame George (initially the song was called "Madame Joy," hence why that's what Morrison actually sings, but the title was changed after he recorded it). "Sweet Thing" is another of my favourites, which almost recaptures the similar sense of breathless exuberance as "Astral Weeks," crafting images of a pastoral paradise while strings soar alongside Payne's flute. Davis's nimble bass-playing takes more of a lead role here than on "Astral Weeks," and it feels like on this track Morrison opens things out to the rest of the band more than anywhere else on the album. Some of the other tracks, for me, feel a little too samey - "Beside You" and "Cyprus Avenue," for instance, tread a similar, slow, slightly plodding path, though that doesn't make them outright tedious, they just lose some of the excitement conjured up by the album's best moments. But all is forgiven for the album's closing track, its most understated masterpiece - the bleak lyricism of "Slim Slow Slider" is totally at odds with its fairly optimistic, pleasant melody, as Morrison sings, with apparent acceptance and peace, "I know you're dying, and I know you know it too" - quite who he's singing too or why isn't clear, and just as the song seems to be closing in on answers, the whole thing stutters into silence with a clatter of percussion and a squawk of saxophone. It's an incredibly beautiful and haunting piece of music, and the perfect way to close this album which has explored musically exciting territory and occasionally closed in on sublime emotional moments of real weight.

As said, "Astral Weeks" was released largely to indifference at the time - it sold poorly and was criticised for being slow and pretentious. It was only as the year drew to a close that critical consensus (spear-headed by Greil Marcus, no less) began to be kinder to it and as months and years went by, it slowly came to be remembered as an iconic cult classic. It came to be beloved by a diverse range of musicians, from rock singers like Bruce Springsteen, to hippie folk singers besides, capturing such a range of emotional feeling and musical styles. Morrison would later be fairly dismissive of it, feeling its iconic status overshadowed a lot of what he tried to do on subsequent releases, but there's no denying that for most of its runtime it's one of the most transcendentally powerful pieces of music he, or anyone, ever recorded. Warner Brothers Records were understandably keen to try and make something a little more commercial next time around (no singles were released from Astral Weeks due to the contractual requirements of Bang Records, though it's tough to know which of these lengthy jazz-inflected tunes would have worked as a single anyway), so on his next album Morrison would condense the same diverse compositional styles and spiritual themes into more radio-friendly songs, resulting in the excellent Moondance.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Van Morrison.

1. Astral Weeks

2. Beside You

3. Sweet Thing

4. Cyprus Avenue

5. The Way Young Lovers Do

6. Madame George

7. Ballerina

8. Slim Slow Slider

The Mothers Of Invention - We're Only In It For The Money

Released - March 1968

Genre - Psychedelic Rock

Producer - Frank Zappa

Selected Personnel - Frank Zappa (Guitar/Piano/Vocals/Effects); Jimmy Carl Black (Drums/Trumpet/Vocals); Roy Estrada (Bass/Vocals); Billy Mundi (Drums/Vocals); Bunk Gardner (Woodwinds); Ian Underwood (Piano/Woodwinds); James Sherwood (Saxophone)

Standout Track - Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance

In my previous review, for the Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, I mentioned the surprisingly refreshing experience earlier this year of rediscovering what it's like to listen to music that sounds genuinely weird and unlike anything I'd heard before. Years of listening to prog rock had slightly dulled my ability to really give much credit to self-consciously eccentric music, but this year a few artists managed to surprise me for the first time in ages. One was the Incredible String Band, but the more prominent one was the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa's backing band from the mid-to-late 60s. Zappa's become a new favourite of mine this year - his combination of pompous hard-rock virtuosity, complicated musical innovation and experimentation and tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, verging on an almost self-destructive impulse to take the piss out of everything he's doing, all appealed to me massively, but it was his early stuff with the Mothers that actually struck me as wholly unlike anything I'd heard before rather than his later solo stuff. His early 70s jazz fusion instrumental work was broadly similar to some other prog rock/jazz fusion stuff like Focus, while his more conventional mid-70s art rock stuff was like a more self-aware version of a number of some of the more out-there prog bands, while also anticipating the mutant blues and savage, nonsensical primal content of Tom Waits's 80s output.

The stuff with the Mothers is very different, in that there's not a great sense yet of Zappa as musician, something that would come to the fore in his solo work, which put so much emphasis on virtuosity and complex arrangements. Here, instead, it feels like what Zappa is most interested in is simply exploding his imagination onto a record and using unusual recording and production techniques to create something truly alien-sounding. The unusual guitar techniques and firebrand solos he would become known for are nowhere to be seen, the musical performances fairly restrained, but the sheer weight of weirdness loaded onto the record more than makes up for it. I find it difficult to really think of the Mothers of Invention as a band in the conventional sense, rather as a specific period of Zappa's own experiments - in the mid-70s he would resurrect the Mothers as a brand new band on albums like One Size Fits All, but its lineup was completely different, with himself being the only consistent element, which suggests to me that the whole set-up wasn't a band that relied massively on the contributions of its individual members, rather that it represented a particular context and method of working that Zappa occasionally found conducive to making good work, regardless of who was actually involved in it. Furthermore, the mess of sounds on show on We're Only In It For The Money is so convoluted and so overwhelming that we're never really listening to the contributions of its band members, trying to single out Roy Estrada's bass or Ian Underwood's piano, we're just listening to Zappa's bizarre mind being splattered all over the blank canvas he gave himself.

The Mothers of Invention had been founded in 1964, simply called the Mothers, and had started gigging on the LA scene, where they attracted the attention of manager Herb Cohen and producer Tom Wilson, already a legendary figure as one of Bob Dylan's producers. Wilson had signed the Mothers (then renamed the Mothers of Invention to avoid any potential confusion that their name might be seen as an abbreviation of "motherfuckers") on hearing their first single "Any Way The Wind Blows," a pleasant, faintly twee bluesy pop song, and only realised after granting them a double album (the second one ever after Dylan's Blonde On Blonde) that he had something far more unpredictable and strange on his hands. Their debut album, Freak Out!, has moments of genius but is overlong and it never quite feels like Zappa has been given the opportunity to really indulge his imagination.

The same can't be said for We're Only In It For The Money, which was part of a four-part cycle of albums the band recorded after relocating to New York. The four albums formed a grander project that Zappa called No Commercial Potential, also consisting of the albums Lumpy Gravy; Cruising With Ruben And The Jets and Uncle Meat. Zappa explained that the tapes for the four albums could have been slashed up in completely different places, rearranged and reassembled in a different order and it would still have made one grand, unified work, and all the music belonged to the same project. That remark, I feel, is the key to understanding We're Only In It For The Money. This isn't an album where we're necessarily supposed to really enjoy the songs themselves for their own merits, rather we're supposed to sit and be overwhelmed by the strange and discomfiting experience of listening to all these fragments of sounds and ideas and, occasionally, music, being spliced together and ripped apart and thrown in different directions, thus granting us an insight into one man's sonic experiment.

The groundwork for this experiment is established in the very first track, "Are You Hung Up?" in which we hear engineer Gary Kellgren whispering into a microphone about how Frank Zappa is in a control room listening to everything he says. Suddenly the sound is ripped away and we hear percussionist Jimmy Carl Black remark "Hi, I'm Jimmy Carl Black and I'm the Indian of the group," a remark repeated later in the album. From there, the entire album dissolves into a continued pattern of never settling into one idea, constantly dissolving into fragments of dialogue and bizarre sounds, be it the astonishing sped-up monologue of "Flower Punk" in which Zappa rails about the idea of being a rock musician and the falsehood and phoneyness of the whole process - "The youth of America today is so wonderful and I'm proud to be a part of this gigantic mass deception" - to the horrible gabbling sound in the closing seconds of the musique concrete sound collage of "Nasal Retentive Calliope Music."

The album's sense of total entropy actually acts as a satisfying mirror to its political message that it occasionally tries to foreground - Zappa was hugely dismissive and cynical about the hippie and pschedelic movement of the mid-to-late 60s, despite the fact that his own music was often labelled as such. He felt that any attempt to try and instigate a mass movement built on trying to position oneself as an outsider was inherently stupid and counter-productive. He was certainly not an establishment figure, and the first proper song, "Who Needs The Peace Corps?", effectively mocks both the savagery of right-wing politics and the short-sightedness of left-wing politics - "I will love everyone, I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street." "Flower Punk" similarly makes fun of the hippie flower-power movement. The album's title emerged late in its production after the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Zappa saw the Beatles as the epitome of everything he hated, the trend of trying to package outsider, counter-cultural movements into a commercial, sellable product, and so the album's artwork became a pastiche of the iconic Sgt. Pepper's cover, and its title became a parody of making music just for financial reward. The album's content, meanwhile, becomes not just a collection of disarming nonsense but an attempt to make something truly alternative, truly representative of outsiders and freaks and weirdos that don't fit into any cultural movement. Zappa is more artist here than musician, trying to make something truly representative of the chaos inside his head rather than trying to make great music people will buy.

There are moments on the album where the Mothers hit upon a genuinely compelling musical idea - the stately waltz of "Concentration Moon" and the doo-wop parody of "What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?" are great fun (doo-wop was one of Zappa's favourite musical styles, and pretty much every Mothers album contains at least one attempt to parody it), and "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" is easily the highlight of the album, a pounding, almost tribal pop song compelling the listener to really try and invite freedom into their lives. By and large, though, any attempt to try and talk about these songs as though they're real songs is futile and missing the point entirely. Usually, no sooner has the band alighted upon a decent tune than it's discarded and replaced by some discordant noise like the closing piece of musique concrete "The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny." This is never more true than on the album's other most tuneless track, "Nasal Retentive Calliope Music," which consists of a few minutes of random sound effects culminating in what sounds like it's going to be a genuinely enjoyable piece of surf music which is abandoned after literally about three seconds.

I've not yet listened to the other three albums that form the No Commercial Potential project, though presumably they consist of similar fragments and scraps of non-music and occasional genuine songwriting. I don't know if one really needs to listen to all four to appreciate what Zappa was doing - We're Only In It For The Money more than stands on its own as an artistic triumph, a total piss take of music-making for commercial gain, of trying to turn outsider-ism into something easily condensed and defined. At some point after the completion of the project, Zappa presumably became more interested in musical experimentation and in considering himself as an actual musician, and started working on solo projects that were very much built around complicated, symphonic songwriting rather than on production techniques and artistic expression. Personally, as a big lover of experimental music, I much prefer his solo symphonic prog rock stuff to the tuneless sound collages and general weirdness of his early experiments with the Mothers of Invention, but they're a fascinating and hugely enjoyable example of what the man's attitude and ideological approach to music-making was that grounds his later work wonderfully. Zappa would continue working with the Mothers of Invention until 1969, when he would disband them due to financial strain and continue working solo. As mentioned before, he would later resurrect the Mothers as a band name for occasional projects in the early 70s, but by and large it was an entirely new band with only the occasional guest appearance from older stalwarts like Ian Underwood. For the most part, though, Zappa's work going ahead would rightly place its entire focus on himself rather than pretending to be the work of an entire group.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Frank Zappa.

1. Are You Hung Up?

2. Who Needs The Peace Corps?

3. Concentration Moon

4. Mom & Dad

5. Bow Tie Daddy

6. Harry, You're A Beast

7. What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?

8. Absolutely Free

9. Flower Punk

10. Hot Poop

11. Nasal Retentive Calliope Music

12. Let's Make The Water Turn Black

13. The Idiot Bastard Son

14. Lonely Little Girl

15. Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance

16. What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body? (Reprise)

17. Mother People

18. The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny

The Incredible String Band - The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

Released - March 1968

Genre - Psychedelic Folk

Producer - Joe Boyd

Selected Personnel - Robin Williamson (Vocals/Guitar/Whistles/Percussion/Harmonica); Mike Heron (Vocals/Sitar/Organ/Keyboards/Guitar); Dolly Organs (Organ/Piano); David Snell (Harp); Licorice McKechnie (Vocals/Percussion); Richard Thompson (Vocals); Judy Dyble (Vocals)

Standout Track - A Very Cellular Song

The thing about spending many years developing an obsession with prog rock is it really inures your ear to weirdness. You spend so long getting into music that's full of bizarre theatrics and lengthy, pompous solos or weird arrangements and instrumentation that when you encounter a rock song that features any such eccentricities, they tend to wash over you rather than challenge you. It was a refreshing surprise, then, earlier this year to finally encounter music that genuinely made me sit up and pay attention to how incredibly weird it is. One of the major providers of such an experience was Frank Zappa, whose stuff I've got into in the last six months and was surprisingly different even with a decent schooling in jazz fusion and psychedelic rock. We'll get to Zappa later, though. The other massive surprise this year came in the form of the Incredible String Band, whose landmark 1968 record The Hangman's Incredible Daughter is one of the most brilliantly bizarre albums I've ever heard. 

Of course, with all such things it's probably just a case of familiarity breeding apathy - perhaps the Incredible String Band aren't objectively weirder than any of the big prog bands like King Crimson or Jethro Tull, and somebody really well-schooled in psychedelic folk would be surprised by the eccentricities of prog. But to me, I think the big shock coming to The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter was the fact that I'd never heard musicians favour experimentalism to such a degree within the specific constraints of folk music. There's presumably a huge swathe of bizarre, theatrical psychedelic folk out there that I've not heard, but in my listening habits folk music was largely a genre defined by its traditionalism, and its adherence to pastoral, rustic formulas of how to compose and perform music. Even the folk music I knew that was a part of the late-60s psychedelic folk music, like the Pentangle's Basket Of Light, sounds deeply conservative in comparison to what the Incredible String Band serve up here.

The band had originated in Edinburgh as a trio consisting of folk musicians Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, later joined by rock musician Mike Heron after an audition. They became a fixture of the Scottish folk scene alongside the likes of Bert Jansch, later to be one of the founding members of the Pentangle. After the release of their first album as a trio, however, Palmer left to travel to India, and Williamson similarly departed the UK to travel to Morocco with his girlfriend, Licorice McKechnie. He returned after running out of money, bringing with him a number of exotic African instruments he had picked up on his travels. Williamson and Heron reunited and forged on with the Incredible String Band as a duo, and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter was the second album they recorded together without Palmer (the album does feature a few guest musicians in addition to the duo, including backing vocals from Richard Thompson, a frequent collaborator with John Martyn). On its predecessor, The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, they had begun to incorporate more exotic instruments, but on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter they went all-out via multi-tracking, being one of the earliest folk bands to use multiple overdubs. As such, it gave both Williamson and Heron the opportunity to showcase their talents on a whole host of instruments.

The sound is, frankly, cluttered, but that's all part of its unique charm and bewildering strange-ness. Within a few seconds there'll be buzzing kazoos, sawing violins, recorders, percussion, harpsichords, sitars, the twang of jaw-harps, all sorts of total nonsense going on around the melody itself. Interestingly, it's on record that Williamson and Heron really didn't get on, and that the band had only come together in its early days thanks to Palmer's role as a sort of intermediary between the two. Whether that's due to Heron's rock background clashing with Williamson's folk interests isn't clear, but apparently neither would agree to one of the other's songs being included on the record unless they were allowed to hugely overstuff it with their own instrumental arrangements and contributions, hence why the majority of the record sounds totally overstuffed with weird sounds, but that tension lends to a brilliantly chaotic, anarchic mood only just kept on the rails by the tunes underpinning everything.

Even the songs themselves are hardly particularly familiar, easily digestible things. It's hardly as though Williamson and Heron took very simple, conventional folk songs and then threw loads of weird instruments at them, rather that from the moment of composition onwards, the aim was to be as weird and unpredictable as possible. The opening "Koeeoaddi There" feels like about four different songs in one, leaping from more upbeat passages with twanging guitars to slower, sotto vocce passages of quiet intensity. Then there's the album's wonderful centrepiece, the 13-minute epic "A Very Cellular Song" (one of only three songs Heron contributes to the album, though its length means the running time of his three songs is only a few minutes behind the 7 of Williamson's). "A Very Cellular Song" is a bewildering, brilliant mess of a song, one that really struggles to find any central recurring musical motif or melody or theme - it's just a progression of strange ideas thrown together, just like the album as a whole. Its stand-out moments, by and large, are actually its more restrained ones. The gorgeous rendition of the Bahamian spiritual "I Bid You Goodnight" is my favourite moment on the whole record, where harmonised vocals are accompanied only by handclaps and organ as Heron recites "I remember quite well, I remember quite well, goodnight, goodnight, I was walking in Jerusalem just like John, goodnight, goodnight." Later there's the brilliant, hushed, whispered section where Heron sings from the perspective of an amoeba ("I just give a wriggle, and when I look there's two of me, just as handsome as can be") over a muted organ part. Then there's the song's closing section, the jubilant, recorder-laden celebration of "May The Long Time Sun Shine Upon You," which is one of the album's most joyous moments.

The album veers so frequently between obviously silly, tongue-in-cheek moments like the amoeba monologue, to more sincerely-felt spiritual moments like "I Bid You Goodnight" with such regularity that it's difficult to pin down exactly what its intended tone is. In this respect I feel like there's a certain significance to the album's producer, Joe Boyd. Boyd had been the Incredible String Band's manager and producer since their formation in 1966, and by the onset of the 70s would have become a veteran of producing oddly eccentric, whimsical pastoral folk albums after helming the likes of Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left (all three of his studio albums, in fact) and Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day. On my Nick Drake reviews I was a little dismissive of Boyd due to his decision to impose unnecessary orchestral arrangements onto Drake's songs, and I still stand by that, but the realisation that the same guy was behind The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Just Another Diamond Day has caused me to re-evaluate him as a producer.

On my review of Just Another Diamond Day I mentioned Vashti's uncanny ability to make music that seems to tap into some sort of pastoral, nostalgic timelessness that's more in tune with nature and the earth and the ground than it is with any sense of specificity or cynicism, where even the fey oddities of some of her music (the potentially absurdly twee "Rainbow River," for instance) dissolve in a greater sense of the rustic power and magic of the music itself. I get a similar feeling with Paul Giovanni's soundtrack for The Wicker Man - there's a certain style of psychedelic folk that feels very much tied to paganistic traditions and the worship of the land, the renewal of harvests and the like. It's obviously a world Joe Boyd feels very at home with, as that strange magical sensation is all over The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter - even apparent nonsense like "The Minotaur's Song," a piano-led music-hall parody in which Williamson takes on the role of the titular mythical beast, self-importantly intoning ludicrous lyrics like "I'm the original, discriminating buffalo man, and I'll do what's wrong as long as I can," somehow feels like there's something of greater significance going on, and of greater beauty.

The most startlingly beautiful moment on the record is the album closer, "Nightfall," which builds to a finale involving a soaringly beautiful sitar solo that twines in the air over the accompaniment and finishes the album on an achingly beautiful, contemplative note that we might have only occasionally seen coming during all the nonsense that preceded it. Not everything on the record is quite so captivating, mind - "Water Song" is a little too directionless for my liking, consisting of little more than sounds of water being poured, a reedy vocal and the occasional bashing at some obscure stringed instrument. "Three Is A Green Crown," meanwhile, is an extended workout on sitar, violin and tablas so starts with wonderfully diverse and exciting ingredients but just grinds on too long without ever really finding a tune or a really captivating musical idea. Other than these two missteps, though, this album is by turns uplifting, hilarious, totally impenetrable and occasionally deeply affecting. It became a landmark record cited as hugely influential by the likes of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, and even achieved chart success thanks to its being championed on the radio by John Peel. The Incredible String Band continued as a cult band of great significance in the psychedelic folk scene for the rest of the 60s before their output began to see diminishing returns in the early 70s and they disbanded in 1974 to pursue solo careers.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Robin Williamson except where noted.

1. Koeeoaddi There

2. The Minotaur's Song

3. Witches Hat

4. A Very Cellular Song (Mike Heron)

5. Mercy I Cry City (Mike Heron)

6. Waltz Of The New Moon

7. The Water Song

8. Three Is A Green Crown

9. Swift As The Wind (Mike Heron)

10. Nightfall

Fleetwood Mac - Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac

Released - February 1968

Genre - Blues

Producer - Mike Vernon

Selected Personnel - Peter Green (Vocals/Guitar/Harmonica); Jeremy Spencer (Vocals/Slide Guitar/Piano); John McVie (Bass); Mick Fleetwood (Drums)

Standout Track - My Heart Beat Like A Hammer

First things first - this album isn't actually called Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, but I'm calling it that for simplicity. Though it's subsequently been reissued under that title, it was initially just a self-titled record called Fleetwood Mac, but when the band's classic lineup, led by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, debuted in 1975 they decided to do so by releasing another self-titled album, presumably as an attempt to relaunch themselves as a brand new band, which in some ways they were. This album subsequently became known as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac to differentiate it.

It's easy to assume, given the statospheric success of Fleetwood Mac's later incarnation as one of the great soft-rock bands of all time, that their early years as a blues group must have seen them toiling away in obscurity for years until they finally found a successful formula after Buckingham and Nicks joined, but it's not the case. Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac was actually a hugely successful and influential album, and the band was one of the most successful British blues bands at the time (accepting, of course, that there wasn't a huge market or demand for British blues bands at the time - it remained, by and large, an American obsession, and the success of early Fleetwood Mac, alongside a few other early pioneers, contributed hugely to the rise of more blues bands from the UK, and probably paved the way for more blues-influenced rock bands like Free in the late 60s).

The relative absence of British blues music in the mid-60s is in fact a key element of what makes early Fleetwood Mac, under Green's leadership, so interesting. In his book Listening To Van Morrison, rock critic Greil Marcus dedicates a chapter to discussion of Peter Green and what he describes his "belief in the blues as a kind of curse one puts on oneself," a theory mirrored elsewhere in Van Morrison's music, hence Marcus's discussion of it. In his early years as a musician, Green was deeply paranoid and self-conscious about what he perceived as his inability to be a truly great blues musician. He was hugely inspired by American legends like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, but well aware that their music had been drawn from the wellspring of generations of history and heritage. Blues had emerged from the melding of traditional African spirituals with European folk songs, from work songs and the vocal and oral chants of slaves. It was a genre of music that emerged from such origins and took on greater significance for marginalised and destitute people, being used as a creative means of expressing hardship and pain. As a fairly well-to-do white English guy, Green understandably felt like he had no reason to be able to contribute anything to the genre or be seen as one of its icons. From there, though, he developed his theory in this "curse one puts on oneself," of the blues being a sort of personal albatross you inflict upon yourself as a way of working through your demons. In a roundabout way, Green's paranoia and doubts over whether or not he could be a great blues musician made him a great blues musician, giving him the pain and heartache and longing he needed to be able to play with the same sort of world-weary passion as blues greats like Howlin' Wolf - or so goes the theory. It's noticeable, anyway, that the majority of Green's compositions on the album take the form of slow, introspective, soul-searching numbers in contrast to Jeremy Spencer's more fiery, upbeat blues rock songs.

Virtually all of the original lineup of Fleetwood Mac had previously been part of one of the very first British blues bands, John Mayall's Blues Breakers. Green had been recruited as guitarist for the band after Eric Clapton departed to form Cream, and he soon also recruited drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. When they eventually decided to split and form their own band, Green and Fleetwood teamed up with co-guitarist and vocalist Jeremy Spencer and bassist Bob Brunning. McVie initially refused to join the band, preferring the more stable income he earned as part of Mayall's band. However, after Fleetwood Mac (named in tribute to its original rhythm section, Fleetwood and McVie) started making waves from their live concerts, McVie agreed to join and Brunning was dismissed. It's a huge credit to Green as a bandleader that, despite the deeply personal voyage he was on to try and prove to himself that he could be a great blues musician, it very much comes across as a band album, not a vanity project. For a start, his sheer insistence that the band continue to be named after its rhythm section rather than impose his name on it (as mentioned before, the "Peter Green's" prefix that's often applied to the band's early incarnation was only retroactively applied later), and he also shares lead guitar and lead vocal duties with Spencer.

Spencer's guitar playing is more raucous and unpredictable (his opening riff to "Shake Your Moneymaker" grabs you by the neck and never lets go), where Green's is leaner and more economic and tonal, and Spencer's voice more incendiary and raspy, where Green's is smoky, soulful and expressive. Neither emerges as clearly superior, but the two opposing styles really come together to make a compelling whole, which is a great sign of a truly collaborative band. Fleetwood and McVie, meanwhile, make for a great rhythm section worthy of their titular billing - "Looking For Somebody" is perhaps their finest showcase, with McVie metronomic, pulsing bass underpinned by the distant clatter of Fleetwood's drums and the quiet, pulse-like pinging of his cymbals. What's also remarkable about this album is how many different moods and tones it manages to squeeze out of what has always been perceived as fairly meagre ingredients. The blues is a famously limited compositional form, being bound by repetition and very specific structural requirements, and yet here Green & co. manage to bring menacing, insistent quiet songs like "Looking For Somebody," blissed out romantic songs like "Merry Go Round" and upbeat rockers like "My Heart Beat Like A Hammer." Only in a couple of places does it begin to feel a little by-the-numbers, surprisingly in its covers rather than its originals. The cover of Howlin' Wolf's "No Place To Go" adds very little to the original, and it'd odd to hear that Green gets less satisfying results from reinterpreting the work of the blues legends he idolised as he did from working up his and Spencer's own material. The cover of Robert Johnson's "Hellhound On My Trail," though, is wonderful, its plodding, world-weary piano part getting increasingly weary and wayward before the whole thing collapses into Green's dismissive confession "I don't know the words to that, though."

On its release, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac proved hugely successful, providing blues music in a similar vein to that already catered for by John Mayall's Blues Breakers but feeling somehow more authentic and more organic. Green continued to lead the band for another few years, and wrote a number of truly brilliant songs that easily stand tall against anything the band later did in its Buckingham-Nicks incarnation. "Oh Well," "Rattlesnake Shake," the immortal instrumental "Albatross" and the superior early version of "Black Magic Woman," later covered to greater chart success by Santana, are all superb. The band struggled to make more great albums in this early incarnation, though, with most of these songs released as singles. The direct follow-up to this debut, Mr Wonderful, features Green's most intense soul-searching moment in the heartache of "Love That Burns," but also features four songs that use an identical Elmore James riff, and the whole thing begins to feel a bit repetitive.

By 1970, Green's experimenting with LSD had led to the onset of schizophrenia and he was increasingly unreliable and unstable and came into conflict with the rest of the band when he wanted to donate all the band's money to charity and they objected. They recorded one last song together entitled "The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Prong Crown)," easily the best thing any incarnation of Fleetwood Mac ever recorded, a menacing, terrifying prog song clearly born out of Green's paranoia and mental instability, replete with howls and crashing, cacophanous guitar riffs. It's a tantalising insight into just how great a prog rock band Fleetwood Mac could have been if Green had been able to regain some stability but continue mining similar musical ground, but sadly it wasn't to be and he departed the band. Five years later, they would achieve superstar status with the arrival of Buckingham and Nicks and the release of 1975's Fleetwood Mac. I've little burning desire to hear the music they made in between - while everybody knows their stuff from '75 onwards is great, and plenty of people talk about how underrated their early blues stuff with Green is, I've never once heard anybody say that their transitional material is worthy of more attention, so it remains unexplored to me. It would admittedly be interesting to see how Christine McVie (who joined the band on keyboards later in 1968 and later married bassist John McVie and came to be one of the band's principal vocalists and songwriters by the Buckingham-Nicks era) gradually came to have more prominence within the band. For now, though, this is probably the finest complete studio album documenting the band's early days, though the excellent early era compilation The Best Of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac is also well worth a listen for its inclusion of non-album tracks like "Black Magic Woman" and "The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Prong Crown)."

Track Listing:

1. My Heart Beat Like A Hammer (Jeremy Spencer)

2. Merry Go Round (Peter Green)

3. Long Grey Mare (Peter Green)

4. Hellhound On My Trail (Robert Johnson)

5. Shake Your Moneymaker (Elmore James)

6. Looking For Somebody (Peter Green)

7. No Place To Go (Chester Burnett)

8. My Baby's Good To Me (Jeremy Spencer)

9. I Loved Another Woman (Peter Green)

10. Cold Black Night (Jeremy Spencer)

11. The World Keep On Turning (Peter Green)

12. Got To Move (Elmore James & Marshall Seahorn)