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)

The Beatles - The Beatles

Released - November 1968

Genre - Rock

Producer - George Martin

Selected Personnel - John Lennon (Vocals/Guitar/Organ/Piano/Effects/Percussion); Paul McCartney (Vocals/Guitar/Bass/Piano/Organ/Percussion/Recorder); George Harrison (Guitar/Organ/Percussion); Ringo Starr (Drums/Percussion/Vocals); Eric Clapton (Guitar); Mal Evans (Percussion/Vocals); Yoko Ono (Percussion/Vocals/Effects); Harry Klein (Saxophone)

Standout Track - Blackbird

Back when I was first covering 60s albums before I took half a year off from this blog and listened to loads of other 60s music I've now had to go back and fill in, I chose not to include the Beatles' 1968 self-titled double album (generally referred to as The White Album thanks to its minimalistic, inscrutable cover art). I was well aware of it but it didn't do enough to excite me for me to include it. I've since changed my opinion of it, though not by much. Double albums tend to fall into one of a few categories - there's a very small minority that manage to be solidly brilliant (I'm thinking Pink Floyd's The Wall). There are a few that more or less justify their length but have a fair bit of filler (maybe Prince's Sign "O" The Times). There are some that would've made a good single album, but therefore contain an entire normal album's worth of uninspiring stuff. And then there are some that don't even have enough decent material in them to justify a single album, let alone two (Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans). The White Album sits in the penultimate category, and I usually feel with such albums that it's not worth including albums of which I don't enjoy at least half of them. But, on repeated listens, it's dawned on me that the good single album hidden away within this overlong mess would have been one of the Beatles' finest, and some of their very best songs are to be found here. As such, I've decided to include it.

We also get an interesting glimpse at the Beatles functioning as a particular kind of band we never saw anywhere else. There's so much music here of so many different styles that, of course, it's naturally going to draw on many of the different kinds of music they turned their hands to during their career, but the stuff here feels tangibly different from the straightforward rock & roll of A Hard Day's Night or Rubber Soul, tangibly different from the self-consciously experimental psychedelic rock of Revolver or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and tangibly different from the symphonic rock, verging on prog, of Abbey Road. The material is more mature and musically interesting than their early pop rock, but (with one notable exception) is less self-consciously experimental than their later stuff. As such, we get a rare insight into the band as a straightforward rock band, neither pandering to a commercial market nor trying very hard to do something challenging and different. (Admittedly, the first half of Abbey Road gives us a glimpse at the same kind of thing, but even that had stuff like "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," while that album's second half with its symphonic complexities tips the balance the other way).

Having basically changed the world with Sgt. Pepper, the band went on a transcendental meditation retreat in India, following through on their newfound obsession with Indian culture that had been kickstarted by George Harrison's passion for Ravi Shankar's music that influenced a lot of Revolver. While there they refrained from their experiments with hallucinogenic drugs and therefore regained some of their songwriting clarity and started assembling some of the songs that would form their next, tangled mess of an album. The recording sessions were among the most turbulent the band ever had - they no longer functioned well as a unit, with several of the songs being worked on as solo pieces. The band rarely recorded all together, and on many of the Lennon-McCartney songs, the respective songwriter would have to add all the overdubs themselves due to the other's refusal to be involved (Lennon infamously dismissed "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" as "granny music shit," and the following year refused to have anything to do with recording "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" on Abbey Road for the same reason. I have to agree with him on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," although I love "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.") The growing tensions meant that Ringo briefly quit the band altogether, only to be eventually coaxed back.

One of the major reasons for Lennon's increasing frustrations with the band, and their growing frustrations with him was, of course, the presence of Yoko Ono, the Japanese conceptual artist he had fallen in love with. Lennon insisted on Yoko having more input into the recording process, and her avant-garde ideas didn't sit well with the rest of the band. Lennon and Yoko were also in the throes of a heroin addiction, which massively affected his mood and temper, while the whole affair also obviously impacted hugely on Lennon's relationship with his wife and son. We may as well deal first, then, with Yoko's biggest impact on the band's recorded output altogether, the hugely divisive "Revolution 9." It's a bizarre, confounding sound collage underpinned by somebody speaking the words "Number nine" looped over and over and mixed in with all sorts of tape effects, fragments of musique concrete and occasional spoken word overdubs by Yoko and Lennon. Harrison contributed to its assembly, but McCartney refused to have anything to do with it. Ringo was probably absent at the time. Altogether, while it's a fascinating piece of art, it falls into my "interesting, horrible to listen to" category, and I can't count myself as a fan.

Elsewhere, McCartney wins overall in the battle of contributing great songs to the album. Most of the album's out-and-out highlights are his, from the exhilarating, cartoony surf rock of "Back In The U.S.S.R.", complete with its Beach Boys-inspired backing vocals and occasional electrifying guitar riffs from Harrison, to the gorgeous, unaccompanied acoustic ballad of "Blackbird," easily one of the most beautiful songs the band ever produced, though it's entirely a solo McCartney effort. There's also the aforementioned "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," one of the more successful of McCartney's forays into ridiculous, cartoonish pop music, this one apparently intended as a pastiche of ska music. Lennon, by contrast, contributes a number of great songs but few of them stand out as true highlights of the album. "Rocky Raccoon" is a lovely song I'm a big fan of which builds from its plaintive, acoustic, almost Dylan-esque intro to a fun, honky-tonk breakdown towards its end, all underpinning Lennon's fantastical, Wild West narrative. There's also the gorgeous closing lullaby of "Good Night," sung with characteristic unpretentiousness by Ringo and functioning as a lush, over-the-top orchestral piece intended as a lullaby for Lennon's song Julian (himself also the subject of one of the band's finest songs, "Hey Jude," written by McCartney as an attempt to comfort Julian in the wake of his father's infidelity to his mother and absconding with Yoko).

Harrison, meanwhile, contributes what comfortably sits alongside "Here Comes The Sun" as one of his two finest songs in the dark, dramatic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," distinguished by its pounding piano riff and its fiery guitar solos from Cream's Eric Clapton (Clapton does a fine job on it, though it's a shame Harrison didn't take the opportunity to truly own his song by doing the solos himself). Elsewhere, his compositional contributions are fairly forgettable ("Piggies," "Long, Long, Long" and so on), and it's clear that the occasional rumour that Harrison could've been just as strong and prolific a songwriter for the band as Lennon and McCartney are mostly unfounded - he clearly wouldn't have been able to match their output, and is far better served by just occasionally turning out the odd stone-cold classic like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

The album also features a couple of reminders of how great the band could be when they genuinely did rely on collaboration rather than functioning as a bunch of solo artists vying for attention. "Birthday" is the only song on the album that Lennon and McCartney genuinely wrote together and is an exciting, ferocious rock song, while the blisteringly aggressive "Helter Skelter" emerged out of a whole band jam session and is one of the album's most refreshingly different moments - the sheer anger and ferocity on show almost sounds like proto-metal, and culminates in Ringo's enraged scream of "I've got blisters on me fingers!" that he exploded with after flinging his drumsticks away after the 18th take of such an intense song.

And...that's it. Those are pretty much the only songs I really feel compelled to write about. There are some other nice songs on show, for sure - brief shout-outs for "I Will" and "Revolution 1," a slowed-down early version of what would become a bigger hit for them simply retitled "Revolution" in a different version, are in order. But the album has a whole host of stuff that's either totally forgettable, or verges on the irritating (weird experimental pieces like "Wild Honey Pie" don't do anything to engage your interest in the way the experiments on Sgt. Pepper did, and simply serve to further bloat the running time). If a good half of the content here had been whittled away, the band could have had a truly great, more straightforward rock album on their hands. Instead, it stands as one of their most fascinating missteps and greatest follies. It of course topped the charts on release, but confounded fans and critics to this day - debates still rage as to whether there is anything of artistic merit in "Revolution 9" or whether it's just a bunch of nonsense. It remains an interesting look at how, even under intense pressure and when all at each other's throats, the Beatles were interesting enough musicians to produce some works of real quality. You just have to sift through some rubbish to get to them.

Track Listing:

All songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney except where noted.

1. Back In The U.S.S.R.

2. Dear Prudence

3. Glass Onion

4. Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da

5. Wild Honey Pie

6. The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill

7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps (George Harrison)

8. Happiness Is A Warm Gun

9. Martha My Dear

10. I'm So Tired

11. Blackbird

12. Piggies (George Harrison)

13. Rocky Raccoon

14. Don't Pass Me By (Ringo Starr)

15. Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

16. I Will

17. Julia

18. Birthday

19. Yer Blues

20. Mother Nature's Son

21. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey

22. Sexy Sadie

23. Helter Skelter

24. Long, Long, Long (George Harrison)

25. Revolution 1

26. Honey Pie

27. Savoy Truffle (George Harrison)

28. Cry, Baby, Cry

29. Revolution 9

30. Good Night

Aretha Franklin - Lady Soul

Released - January 1968

Genre - Soul

Producer - Jerry Wexler

Selected Personnel - Aretha Franklin (Vocals/Piano); Jimmy Johnson (Guitar); Joe South (Guitar); Spooner Oldham (Keyboards); Tommy Cogbill (Bass); Roger Hawkins (Drums); Bobby Womack (Guitar); King Curtis (Saxophone); Eric Clapton (Guitar); Arif Mardin (String Arrangements); Carolyn Franklin (Backing Vocals); Erma Franklin (Backing Vocals); Ellie Greenwich (Backing Vocals)

Standout Track - Ain't No Way

Aretha Franklin's 1967 breakthrough album I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You represented a previously mis-managed and poorly handled artist finally finding a creative team that helped her play to her strengths in producer Jerry Wexler and the legendary backing band of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (the likes of guitarist Jimmy Johnson and keyboardist Spooner Oldham). She had a huge amount to prove, and the brimming confidence of recordings like her iconic cover of Otis Redding's "Respect" helped her more than prove it. With so much riding on it, however, there's still the occasional sense of fragility and uncertainty in that album, as though Wexler and co. were aware their gamble on this artist who had been around for over a decade and had yet to achieve major success might not pay off. That uncertainty and fragility has entirely disappeared a year later, on Lady Soul. The confidence of crowning herself with such a title isn't hubris here, it's simply a testament to how completely Aretha had come to dominate soul music in the subsequent year.

Whereas barnstormers such as "Respect" had sat alongside more plaintive ballads on the earlier record, here every single song, even the slower numbers, brim with total confidence, Aretha's magnificently strident voice owning every single one. Franklin, Wexler and the Muscle Shoals band had recorded another album in between these two, 1967's Aretha Arrives, which I've not heard but which allegedly showcased her limitations as singer as well as her strengths, perhaps trying to be too eclectic in its range of styles in the wake of a very concise album that really played to her strengths in I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You. The album did nothing to halt her ascent as a huge star, however, so Wexler took the decision on Lady Soul to again really home in on the two styles that were best suited to Aretha's voice - R&B and gospel.

The album is slightly weighted towards the former, with intensely rhythmic R&B workouts dominating in the form of the brilliant opener "Chain Of Fools," its spidery guitar riff interacting brilliantly with the wonderful, chanted "Chain, chain, chain" refrain, staged as a call-and-response between Aretha and her backing vocalists, the Sweet Inspirations (partly comprised of her own sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin). Elsewhere, the swampy, bluesy "Niki Hoeky" or the upbeat rock vibe of "Since You've Been Gone (Sweet Sweet Baby)" further help to push the sassy, R&B vibe of the album to the forefront. The punchy horn section on the latter, in particular, is a highlight of the record. Softer, gospel-flavoured ballads are also given strong outings, however, with a brilliantly celebratory and jubilant cover of Curtis Mayfield's gospel classic "People Get Ready," or the definitive version of Carole King, Gerry Goffin and Jerry Wexler's "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman." King was at this point a staff songwriter for the New York-based Dimension Records, and had yet to launch herself as a solo artist - her own reinterpretation of her own song on her classic album Tapestry was a few years away yet, meaning Aretha had free reign to put her iconic stamp on the song before its own author even had the chance to have a stab at it. Her version is obviously great, and has become a classic, but personally I've always preferred the extra sense of fragility in Carole King's version - there's less of a sassy ownership of the tune, but a greater sense of emotional depth to it.

The ballad that Aretha 100% nails here is the beautiful "Ain't No Way," written by her sister Carolyn. Perhaps it was the fact that it came from somewhere far closer to home (Wexler actually had Franklin and the Muscle Shoals band travel across America to New York to meet with King and Goffin for the sessions for "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,"), but you really get a sense that she gets under the skin of the song rather than just belting out a pretty melody that had been penned by somebody she had never met before. It's a truly beautiful song that aches with longing and a pleading for understanding - "Ain't no way for me to love you if you won't let me," even if its gender politics are a tad regressive from a modern standpoint ("I know that it's a woman's duty to love and help a man, and that's the way it was planned" is a faintly depressing line to modern ears, but you can't deny the passion and the beauty with which Aretha sings it). It's my hope that the standout, soaring backing vocalist given a lot of prominence in the song is Carolyn herself, as it'd be nice if she had such a significant role within the recording of her own song, though sadly I haven't been able to ascertain exactly which of the Sweet Inspirations it is.

Carolyn's role as songwriter for the album's best song raises an interesting issue with Lady Soul - here, Aretha herself contributes to the writing of only two songs, compared to the four she wrote on I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You. One is one of the album's highlights, the great R&B workout of "Since You've Been Gone (Sweet Sweet Baby)" and the other is the more forgettable "Good To Me As I Am To You." It seems odd, considering what a progressive step it was in 1967 for Wexler to let Aretha write nearly half of the album, something that rarely happened with female soul artists at the time, who were largely working at the behest of the label and producer and were denied much creative input. Presumably, given her total chart dominance in the previous year, Aretha's diminished songwriting input was a decision she was totally complicit with rather than one she was forced into by Atlantic Records, and perhaps it's purely down to the rapid turnaround of these albums that she didn't have time to write much material, but it does seem odd that her increased star power resulted in smaller creative involvement. Still, it does free up space on the album for her to cover established soul classic, like the aforementioned Curtis Mayfield cover or, elsewhere, the opportunity to cover another soul legend in her take on James Brown's "Money Won't Change You."

After the less universally loved Aretha Arrives, Lady Soul again cemented Franklin as the brightest light in soul music, and in 1968 she won her first Grammy and was awarded a day in her honour. She continued to achieve further success throughout the rest of the 60s and the early 70s, but that late 60s pairing of albums in I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You and Lady Soul remain a definitive portrait of the woman at her most confident, having the most fun with her favourite styles of music. Lady Soul possibly just takes the lead for me thanks to the brilliant "Chain Of Fools" and "Ain't No Way," and thanks to its more domineering sense of total control, but both are brilliant, and it'd be difficult to find many soul artists who produced two similarly great albums within a year of one another.

Track Listing:

1. Chain Of Fools (Don Covay)

2. Money Won't Change You (James Brown & Nat Jones)

3. People Get Ready (Curtis Mayfield)

4. Niki Hoeky (Jim Ford, Lolly Vegas & Pat Vegas)

5. (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (Gerry Goffin, Carole King & Jerry Wexler)

6. Since You've Been Gone (Sweet Sweet Baby) (Aretha Franklin & Ted White)

7. Good To Me As I Am To You (Aretha Franklin & Ted White)

8. Come Back Baby (Walter Davis)

9. Groovin' (Felix Cavaliere & Eddie Brigati)

10. Ain't No Way (Carolyn Franklin)

Shivkumar Sharma, Brijbushan Kabra & Hariprasad Chaurasia - Call Of The Valley

Released - 1967

Genre - World

Producer - Unknown

Selected Personnel - Shivkumar Sharma (Santoor); Brijbushan Kabra (Slide Guitar); Hariprasad Chaurasia (Flute); Manikrao Popatkar (Tablas)

Standout Track - Bhoop Ghara

Of all the albums I've yet written about on this blog, this is the one I feel least well equipped to really discuss. I just know very little about the context and the cultures that surrounded it, considering my lack of experience regarding Indian classical music. I did study Indian music for around half a term back in school but remember very little, and the vast majority of my listening habits have come to be centred around western music, largely just as a result of my upbringing and what I've been exposed to. There are places where the music I've been into or the people I've known have opened up my awareness a bit more to music from the rest of the world, but rarely specifically to Indian music, which seems odd considering its huge influence on western rock music in the late 60s. I therefore decided to start my interest in Indian classical music with a piece of work often referred to as one of the pivotal releases and one that brought Indian music to the wider attention of the world in general, 1967's Call Of The Valley, a collaborative release by santoorist Shivkumar Sharma, guitarist Brijbushan Kabra and flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia.

Of course, knowing so little about the traditions and formulas of Indian classical music, it's difficult for me to talk about from this from a technical standpoint, so I just won't try to. The only technical thing I know about the record is that Indian classical music is built around various different rags, each rag being a sort of structural framework for the music, similar to structural confines like a symphony or a concerto in western classical music. Each rag is traditionally associated with a particular mood or theme, and on Call Of The Valley Sharma's plan was to use rags associated with particular times of day so that the album as a whole charted a day in the life of a shepherd. Quite how successful this is on a technical level is a matter for debate by someone other than me, as I don't know enough about the musical structures the musicians drew upon, but there's certainly a sleepiness and an early morning, hazy sense to the opening minutes of "Ahir Bhairav/Nat Bhairav" that bears out the theory of the album's concept.

Shivkumar Sharma had been learning the santoor since a very young age, schooled by his father who had researched the instrument extensively. The santoor was traditionally an instrument used in Indian folk music and had never been used in the more formal setting of classical music, but Sharma's father set his son the goal that he would be the first person to incorporate the instrument into classical composition. On Call Of The Valley, Sharma sets out to do just that, but does so while ingeniously playing to the western market at the same time. A huge amount of the credit for the growing western interest in Indian music can be attributed to the legendary sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar, who had been touring Europe and America since the mid-50s and gradually fostering interest in the music of his own culture. While it wasn't until around '66 or '67 that this truly exploded thanks to Shankar's championing by the likes of George Harrison or Yehudi Menuhin, Indian musicians can't have been unaware of the growing interest in their work further afield, and Sharma's use of the concept album approach masterfully tapped into the burgeoning interest in storytelling through music that mirrored the rise of the concept album in western music at the time - this wasn't just impenetrable world music that western listeners would struggle to jump aboard with, it was programmatic music that told an easily relateable story from start to finish. He also called upon guitarist Brijbushan Kabra to be a key collaborator for the album - the slide guitar, of course, had been a key instrument in Indian folk music for hundreds of years, but, like the santoor, had rarely been used in classical music. The instrument's prominence in western rock music at the time played a key part in this album's enthusiastic response from the rest of the world. It represented a totally new way of working with an instrument that listeners and musicians alike thought they had become overtly familiar with.

The interplay of the santoor and guitar become the atmospheric backdrop for the album - the santoor creates humming, glistening soundscapes through which the sinewy slide guitar snakes and twines, and over these the bansuri (a bamboo flute) of Hariprasad Chaurasia becomes, in a way, the most prominent and melodic voice, soaring up high and painting pictures in the air over the other instruments. While the shepherd storyline may be a mostly contextual and figurative idea for the record, Chaurasia's wonderfully acrobatic flute playing makes it easy to picture the valley itself, with the flute maybe characterised as a bird that soars high above the work and chores of the shepherd himself. Providing rhythmic support is Manikrao Popatkar on tablas, driving the music into a frenzy on occasion. It's a shame he's the only musician involved whose name doesn't make it into the album's accreditation - his work may be less prominent or atmospheric than the other three, but when the tablas do appear they lend a driving urgency to the music that really helps develop it, and his work shouldn't go unnoticed.

The music in general feels closest, if anything, to ambient music when listened to in a western context. It's a million miles away from western classical music, which so often imposes form and structure and ornamentation onto composition. Here, the most potent thing about the music is the space afforded to it - there are times, as on the opening of "Rag Piloo," when the acres of space between the soft, reedy sound of Chaurasia's flute and Sharma's humming santoor seem to distend the music itself and the time it takes to hear it in a way that feels similar to some of the principles of ambient music, which wouldn't even be invented for another ten years. Of course, the context and technical approach between the two kind of music are wholly different, but it strikes me whenever listening to Call Of The Valley how well it works as an ambient record in a similar vein to the likes of Laraaji's zither and dulcimer masterpiece Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance.

Such was the popularity of Sharma, Kabra and Chaurasia's record that it firmly set a precedent for the santoor's incorporation into Indian classical music, achieving the dreams that Sharma's father had set for him. It also hugely captured the imagination of western musicians, riding the wave of the growing interest in Indian music that Ravi Shankar had initiated. The likes of George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and David Crosby all went on to become fans of the album, while the musicians themselves became great successes at home in India. Sharma and Chaurasia went on to start a musical partnership with which they would write a number of soundtracks for hit Bollywood movies, while Kabra's guitar playing made him a hero of 70s hippy culture and he would continue to make several popular records.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Shivkumar Sharma, Brijbushan Kabra & Hariprasad Chaurasia.

1. Ahir Bhairav/Nat Bhairav

2. Rag Piloo

3. Bhoop Ghara

4. Rag Des

5. Rag Pahadi

John Martyn - London Conversation

Released - October 1967

Genre - Folk

Producer - Theo Johnson

Selected Personnel - John Martyn (Vocals/Guitar/Harmonica/Keyboards)

Standout Track - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

When I first started getting into John Martyn and Nick Drake a couple of years ago, I found the tendency for the two of them to be compared and discussed together rather odd. They were contemporaries of the London folk scene in the late 60s and Martyn became a key figure in trying to support Drake through his depression and emotional problems in the early 70s, but as far as I could tell they were very different musicians, with Drake's work very much focused on pastoral, conventional acoustic folk. By contrast, I had started my forays into Martyn's work with his landmark 1973 record Solid Air, which marked the point at which he wholeheartedly left traditional folk music behind and started to incorporate blues and jazz styles into his music, while also experimenting with the sound of his voice and his guitar. Even Bless The Weather, the album that preceded Solid Air, while more obviously indebted to rustic folk music, still felt more musically diverse than records like Nick Drake's Pink Moon. Experimental tracks like "Glistening Glyndebourne" showed that Martyn was already stretching beyond folk music even on that more traditional-sounding album.

Then, about a month ago, I finally listened to Martyn's first two albums, London Conversation and The Tumbler and the comparisons suddenly made sense. Here we get to hear John Martyn the folk singer, just a man with an acoustic guitar strumming his way through pretty acoustic, pastoral folk tunes, some covers, some traditionals, a bunch of originals, all of them imbued with the same sense of rustic peace and heartwarming nostalgia as any of Drake's records. Quite simply, it's wonderful - the breadth of the man's musical ambitions has yet to really take hold - there's little sense that this guy would go on to experiment with Echoplexes and distortion on his guitar sound to try and innovate within the framework of his music, simply that we're listening to a truly great singer-songwriter, although Martyn's obvious talent with the guitar means that even with the simplest acoustic riffs and patterns we're still kept riveted by his sensitivity with the music, never feeling like things are becoming too repetitious or familiar as can sometimes happen with traditional acoustic folk. His voice is also clearer and purer than anywhere else in his record - I'm a big fan of the swirling, bearlike, smokey voice he would adopt on later records, but there's something rather pleasant about hearing him just wrap his voice in its purest form around a bunch of really gorgeous tunes. It's a similar experience to first hearing Tom Waits's actual voice on Closing Time before his growling rasp set in - it may not be as unique as the voice he later adopted, but it's really nice to hear the words for once.

Ultimately, I feel like John Martyn is much more a musician than Nick Drake, and Drake more of a poet. Drake has an incredible gift for melodies and harmonies, of course, and is by no means a weak songwriter, but the fact that in his (admittedly tragically brief) discography he never felt the impulse to innovate musically to the same degree Martyn did suggests that to him the words and ideas in the songs were more important than trying to experiment with the format they were communicated in. Accordingly, the themes and ideas Martyn explores on London Conversation lack the emotional depths of something like Five Leaves Left - there's nothing to come close to "River Man" here in terms of profound emotional impact, but while his themes may feel simpler, he has a real gift for a striking turn of phrase. "You've been drinking all your years like wine" on "Ballad Of An Elder Woman" is a beautifully poignant snapshot of the passing of time.

Elsewhere, Martyn indulges in fantasy on "Fairy Tale Lullaby" to really have some fun with the folk tune. Here, he taps into the same sort of timeless, pastoral folk that Vashti Bunyan so effortlessly expresses on Just Another Diamond Day. The purity of the arrangement with Martyn's voice and guitar is so perfect that we almost feel like this music could have come from some fairytale realm populated by goblins and fairies and the like, and Martyn's entreaty to "bring [your friends] all along" is heart-warmingly innocent and carefree. It's also blessed with one of the prettiest melodies of the album, along with the gorgeously forlorn cover of "Sandy Grey," and the beautiful homecoming ballad of "Back To Stay." Perhaps the finest moment of the album, though, comes with the closing cover of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." Amazingly, Martyn manages to turn in a version that feels completely different to Dylan's original without actually doing much to the arrangement of it. It's not sped up or slowed down or rewritten for different instruments, it's still just a man with a guitar singing the song, but Martyn really plays with the melody, taking it off in slightly different directions whenever it feels like it's become familiar and turning in a version that's pleasingly different and new and maybe even more poignantly pretty than the original.

The other song worth marking out is "Rolling Home," a song that proves that even with this very early record, Martyn was already looking to be more than just a traditional folk singer. It's a lengthy song on which Martyn accompanies himself on sitar, tapping into the growing western interest in Indian music that built in the late 60s. He creates a sort of looping, twining soundscape with the instrument over which his voice and an uncredited flautist swoop and dive, anticipating the more self-consciously experimental guitar soundscapes he would build later, from "Glistening Glyndebourne" on Bless The Weather to his career peak, "Small Hours" on One World.

The follow-up to London Conversation, 1968's The Tumbler, sees Martyn replicating the same pastoral folk sound but this time prioritising the growing innovations with his guitar techniques. It has a few beautiful songs but too many that simply involve Martyn's lengthy experimental guitar solos with not quite enough quality songwriting to back it up. The next two records after that would be collaborations with his wife Beverley that further experimented with Echoplex and guitar sounds, before Island records decided he was better marketed as a solo act and he put out Bless The Weather in 1971. This remains a fascinating and beautiful look at the folk singer he started out as, however.

Track Listing:

All songs written by John Martyn except where indicated.

1. Fairy Tale Lullaby

2. Sandy Grey (Robin Frederick)

3. London Conversation (John Martyn & J. Sundell)

4. Ballad Of An Elder Woman

5. Cocaine (Traditional, arranged by John Martyn)

6. Run Honey Run

7. Back To Stay

8. Rolling Home

9. Who's Grown Up Now

10. Golden Girl

11. This Time

12. Don't Think Twice, It's Alright (Bob Dylan)