Joan Baez - Joan Baez/5

Released - October 1964

Genre - Folk

Producer - Maynard Solomon

Selected Personnel - Joan Baez (Vocals/Guitar); David Soyer (Cello)

Standout Track - There But For Fortune

This is actually an album I've been familiar with for many years, but has only recently crept its way onto this list. Joan Baez is an artist I've admired and enjoyed for a long time, largely down to my undying love of "Diamonds & Rust," a song of hers from 1975. It's one of the finest love songs ever written and is certainly the finest song Baez herself ever wrote, as well as being, quite possibly, also the best thing she ever recorded. It's also blatantly obvious listening to it that she had a real talent for songwriting that, had she chosen to indulge it more often, might have seen her ultimately remembered as one of the truly great singer-songwriters in folk music, in the vein of the likes of Joni Mitchell, as she certainly had the talent for it. But, for whatever reason, she chose most often to limit herself to interpreting the songs of others, or traditional folk tunes. It's possible that this tendency of hers is part of the reason why she's always remained an artist I enjoy and admire and never become one who's truly captivated me in the way that Mitchell has - there's a lot to be said for cover versions and how a new interpretation or a new voice behind a familiar song can render it totally different, or introduce its message to a new audience, but the artists I've always identified with most tend to be the ones who choose to express their own ideas creatively through writing, while Baez's decision to stay principally rooted to music's past rather than trying to create anything new makes her a slightly less interesting figure to me. It's particularly curious considering she was such an outspoken and passionate activist in matters like war, human and civil rights, the environment and much more besides - she was clearly somebody with something to say and a passion to say it, but it's odd that she so rarely chose to try and express that creatively through writing her own music.

As such, when I first started listening to Baez, I never got much further than a small handful of albums, including Diamonds & Rust, her self-titled debut and this, her third studio album (but fifth album overall including live albums, hence its title). Joan Baez I went for because I wanted to hear how she started out, this I went for because I liked the pretty picture of a tree on the front. At the time, it didn't do much to excite me, although I always loved her cover of Phil Ochs' "There But For Fortune." However, I recently listened to her second album, Joan Baez, Vol. 2, which is another collection of solo acoustic interpretations of traditional folk songs in the same template as her debut, although slightly less successfully achieved in my view. I revisited Joan Baez/5 to listen to it all the way through for the first time in an age and was surprised by how much I found myself enjoying it. If anything, it's actually perhaps better than 1960's Joan Baez in that it sees the range of her musical interests beginning to expand, though it still delivers the same requisite amount of lovely, simple folk tunes sung beautifully as that earlier record did.

Joan Baez/5 was the first time Baez broadened her influences beyond traditional folk and included contemporary songs by artists like Bob Dylan (who would only recently have begun to achieve renown with 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) and Phil Ochs, and also sees her including classical material in "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5," an operatic aria that, ultimately, feels out of place and has always been a bugbear of mine on this album. I'm not a huge fan of opera but it can be powerful enough in the right context. But here, amongst a collection of more homely and comforting folk music, it feels like a forced inclusion, while the striking clarity and multi-octave range of Baez's voice, usually qualities that mark her out as such an exceptional talent, become genuinely quite grating when given free range over such an acrobatic and overwrought piece of music. Still, it's the only moment of the record that I genuinely struggle to get through - there are moments of fairly flat and uninspiring filler, like "The Death Of Queen Jane" or the faintly plodding ode-to-a-racehorse of "Stewball," but there are also some beautiful tunes here that Baez really owns.

The finest is the aforementioned "There But For Fortune," a song as powerful in its bleak and insightful assessment of the world's problems in the mid-60s as it is blessed by a truly beautiful tune. Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" is another lovely tune whose virtues become all the more apparent when sung by a voice like Baez's rather than Dylan's own nasal whine. "Go 'Way From My Window" is hauntingly quiet and pleading, while there's a sort of knees-up sense of fun to the faster-paced "When You Hear Them Cuckoos Hollerin'". There's a sense here that as well as broadening her musical styles, Baez is experimenting in different moods more often than on her earlier records, from the world-weariness of "There But For Fortune" or the soft fear of "Go 'Way From My Window" to songs more feelgood and frivolous like the Latin fun of "O' Cangaceiro", in contrast to the more consistently whimsical and folksy atmosphere of her first album.

It's an album I find I have to go into with expectations adjusted accordingly, telling myself I just want to listen to some nice folk music sung prettily. Ultimately, that's no bad reason to enjoy a collection of good music, but there's something about it that keeps it from truly exciting me. What I enjoy most about great music is the sense of being able to get into the mind of the artist and explore a creative idea, whether that's necessarily solely through writing or by choice reinterpretations of older songs. With Baez, I often feel that she sticks to covering older material purely because she's sticking doggedly to folk traditions, and I rarely get a strong sense of her own viewpoint or character through her music. By 1964 she had already begun her vocal support of the civil rights movement, and her live performance of Pete Seeger's "We Shall Overcome" in 1963 had seen her touted as an important new protest singer. But even with all that passion to explore, there's not a great sense of it here, and only "There But For Fortune" has any sense within it of trying to assess the state of the world around her.

Still, it obviously wasn't an issue that much concerned Baez herself, or her legions of fans at the time. She was a singer who simply enjoyed singing music that touched or moved or inspired, and ultimately it's only the old cynic in me that can really have a problem with that. And when a singer has a voice as crystal-clear and beautiful as Baez, then it's impossibly to deny that sitting and listening to her sing through these songs is a really pleasant experience, and this record is genuinely lovely as long as you're comfortable with its relative lack of ambition. I've not delved into Baez's discography beyond this point - it sees her continue to diversify beyond traditional folk music to incorporate classical orchestration and to experiment with country rock music as well as folk, but by the 70s her greatest period of acclaim and success was behind her. Perhaps it was that sense of no longer being in the spotlight that gave her the requisite space she needed to try and write more often and deliver her finest work in 1975. 

Track Listing:

1. There But For Fortune (Phil Ochs)

2. Stewball (Ralph Rinzler, Bob Yellin & John Herald)

3. It Ain't Me Babe (Bob Dylan)

4. The Death Of Queen Jane (Traditional)

5. Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (Heitor Villa-Lobos)

6. Go 'Way From My Window (Traditional, Arranged by John Jacob Niles)

7. I Still Miss Someone (Johnny Cash & Roy Cash Jr.)

8. When You Hear Them Cuckoos Hollerin' (Traditional)

9. Birmingham Sunday (Richard Farina)

10. So We'll Go No More A-Roving (Richard Dyer-Bennet & Lord Byron)

11. O Cangaceiro (Alfredo Ricardo do Nascimento)

12. The Unquiet Grave (Traditional)

Randy Newman - Good Old Boys

Released - September 1974

Genre - Jazz Rock

Producer - Lenny Waronker & Russ Titelman

Selected Personnel - Randy Newman (Vocals/Piano/Synthesiser/Arrangements); Ry Cooder (Guitar); Jon Platania (Guitar); Ron Elliott (Guitar); Al Perkins (Pedal Steel Guitar); Russ Titelman (Bass); Willy Weeks (Bass); Jim Keltner (Drums); Andy Newmark (Drums); Milt Holland (Percussion); Glenn Frey (Backing Vocals); Don Henley (Backing Vocals)

Standout Track - Louisiana, 1927

Randy Newman's 1972 release Sail Away was, in essence, his breakthrough record as a recording artist in his own right. Up to that point he had been beavering away behind the scenes of the music industry as a songwriter for the likes of Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, but with the (admittedly very modest) success of Sail Away, it first became apparent that Newman was even better suited recording his own work. Ultimately, Newman will be principally remembered as a composer and songwriter, but for me, his work is always at its most potent, funny, biting and powerful when sung and performed by the man himself. There's something about his strangled, gloopy vocals and bright, jazzy sensibilities that really brings out the layered cynicism or the sense of mischievous fun within his music that no number of covers of "I Think It's Going To Rain Today" or "You Can Leave Your Hat On" will ever achieve. In 1974, though, Newman came the closest he would ever come to stardom in his own right via an album that not only sold well but has gone down as a classic.

The original vision for Good Old Boys was for it to be a fairly ambitious and cinematic concept album following the life of a character named Johnny Cutler - Newman had already firmly established on Sail Away that his writing naturally tended towards speaking in the voices of characters far removed from himself, be it the slave trader of the title track or God himself in "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)," so a character-based conceptual album seems a natural progression for him as a writer. The story was to explore issues of racism in the Deep South via the character of Cutler, and a series of demo recordings eventually released under the title Johnny Cutler's Birthday in 2002 show a real sense of cinematic scale to Newman's initial vision that is impressive but difficult to realise. As he talks through his ideas between songs, Newman suggests shifts of perspective between scenes that would be difficult to really make much sense of in any medium besides film, so it's perhaps for the best that the final version of Good Old Boys is a far simpler thing, consisting of a series of short, simple songs. Many of them are united by their themes of life in the Deep South in the mid-70s, though it's less clear if Newman is still trying to tie these songs into a story or if that idea has been entirely abandoned. References to characters such as Johnny's wife Marie are still present, but in general, it feels like the concept has been loosened to consist simply of a series of snapshots of various everyman characters within the world Newman is constructing.

Though the concept is established as an exploration of life in the Southern States, Newman is careful to very early on establish the precise position of his own politics. Whereas on "Southern Man" Neil Young had prompted the ire of Southerners everywhere (particularly Lynyrd Skynyrd, who would rebuff him years later with "Sweet Home Alabama") by dismissing them as backwards racists, on the opening "Rednecks" Newman makes a far more sophisticated and interesting point. While he mocks the racial prejudices of Southerners, it's actually the hypocritical righteousness of the responses of Northern states that emerges looking most ludicrous - "Down here we're too ignorant to realise that the North has set the nigger free. Yes he's free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City, and he's free to be put in a cage on the South Side of Chicago." With biting, provocative cynicism, Newman is careful to paint all of America as a nation steeped either in prejudice or hypocrisy that prevents it from making true progress, and it's this cynical worldview against which he paints his portrait of the South, rather than against one of lofty finger-pointing. That such a provocative political point is wrapped up in a song as jazzy and feelgood as "Rednecks" is just another level to Randy Newman's mischievous genius.

If there's one criticism that can be made of Good Old Boys, it's that the musical style and sound of the record becomes fairly predictable fairly quickly. Either we're presented with bouncy, jazzy pop songs in the vein of "Rednecks" or "Birmingham," or we're given slower, undeniably beautiful ballads replete with lush string orchestrations. Musically, there's very little thrown in to surprise the listener, particularly a listener who's already familiar with the musical style Newman had established on Sail Away. There's not a bad tune here, but there's also very little that really makes you sit up and pay attention. Through the familiar template, Newman smuggles in a series of ideas just as daring as the more controversial moments of Sail Away and then some, from the direct plea to Richard Nixon for social reform of "Mr President (Have Pity On The Working Man)" to the attempt to humanise and draw with empathy a drug-addled, alcoholic wreck on "Guilty." The woozy, slightly off-key string and woodwind harmonies on "Guilty" create a sort of wonky, dreamlike idyll against which Newman's images of cocaine and alcohol addiction unfold.

Halfway through the album comes its crowning achievement, the beautiful "Louisiana, 1927," a slow but stately lament telling the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Told from the perspective of an eyewitness, it's almost incongruously majestic, its orchestral arrangements swelling to one of the prettiest choruses Newman ever penned. Its depictions of domestic destruction and homelessness jar with its stirring, beautiful melody, but Newman has always excelled at wrapping up challenging ideas in misleading musical contexts. The album's second half has fewer standout tracks than the first, although the fun, galloping pianos and percussion of "Naked Man" are good fun, and "Back On My Feet Again," while fairly slight, is one of Newman's most immediately catchy and memorable little pop tunes. There's also some disappointing filler like the Newman-ballad-by-numbers that is "A Wedding In Cherokee County." There's also a nice touch in the inclusion of a cover of "Every Man A King" (featuring vocal contributions from the Eagles), a song penned in 1935 by Louisiana's then governor, Huey Long.

Ultimately, it strikes me as odd that Good Old Boys remains the commercial and critical peak of Randy Newman's career as, based purely on the albums I've heard of his (which is only about four or five, admittedly), it's probably my least favourite. There are a couple of wonderful tunes in "Rednecks" and "Louisiana, 1927," and some typically incisive and provocative political ideas that make the slave-trade piss-take of "Sail Away" look fairly tame by comparison, and there's a gleeful sense of fun to the whole thing, but purely in musical terms, it's a long way from being his most compelling record. Too often things are limited to bouncy piano, twaning country guitar and Newman's yowling vocals, all arranged in a familiar country-jazz-pop setting that doesn't do much to surprise anybody who's already familiar with Newman's work. It's by no means a bad album, but I'm always surprised that 1977's wonderful Little Criminals doesn't get more love. Admittedly, lyrically Little Criminals is far less insightful or opinionated even though its songs are far superior, so perhaps it's purely for its political chutzpah and cheeky sense of satire that Good Old Boys wins all the plaudits. On those terms, it certainly delivers, but as an overall package, it's still Little Criminals or Sail Away that takes the prize for me.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Randy Newman except where noted.

1. Rednecks

2. Birmingham

3. Marie

4. Mr President (Have Pity On The Working Man)

5. Guilty

6. Louisiana, 1927

7. Every Man A King (Huey P. Long & Castro Carazo)

8. Kingfish

9. Naked Man

10. Wedding In Cherokee County

11. Back On My Feet Again

12. Rollin'

Neil Young - On The Beach

Released - July 1974

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - Neil Young; David Briggs; Mark Harman & Al Schmitt

Selected Personnel - Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar/Piano/Harmonica); Ben Keith (Slide Guitar/Dobro/Organ/Percussion/Bass); Tim Drummond (Bass/Percussion); Ralph Molina (Drums/Percussion); Billy Talbot (Bass); David Crosby (Guitar); Graham Nash (Piano)

Standout Track - On The Beach

Over the last few months, Neil Young has slowly been creeping his way from my list of artists I enjoy but don't feel obsessively compelled by, into my list of artists who've come to mean a huge amount to me and who I'd like to try and get a more complete appreciation of. That's for a number of reasons, really - from my very first encounter with Young's music via After The Gold Rush and Harvest about five years ago, he'd already established himself in my mind as one of the finest American folk singer-songwriters, and somebody with a poetic and beautiful insight into life, love, ageing and the like. As I slowly started listening to Young's other records, particularly some of his albums recorded with Crazy Horse, it became clear that what Young was able to achieve and express was so much more than the faintly Dylanesque troubadour image I'd built up of him. Equally as comfortable expressing rage, frustration, despair and bewilderment as at writing a poetic little ditty about lost love or the passing of time, he was also a musician as at home playing brutal, punishing hard rock as with mellow, countrified folk. The man's obvious versatility as a musician and writer slowly caught my interest, and I'm currently in the midst of gradually trying to listen to a greater spread of his discography. The album that first prompted my further interest in him was On The Beach, which I first listened to a little over a year ago.

Musically, On The Beach feels not too far removed from the melodic country folk of Harvest, but there's a bleakness and a sense of despair at play that marks it out as a very different beast. In the wake of the enormous success of Harvest and, in particular, the classic song "Heart Of Gold," Young was dismayed to suddenly find himself heralded as some sort of pop icon. Determined to avoid being perceived as a middle-of-the-road musican, he vowed to head into "the ditch" to maintain his own integrity. What followed was to be remembered as the "Ditch Trilogy," a series of three albums that failed to capitalise on the commercial breakthrough of Harvest but that achieved his artistic ambitions in their frank and raw explorations of despair. The first such record was a live album entitled Time Fades Away that Young was ultimately dissatisfied with. During the tour that resulted in the recording of Time Fades Away, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten had to be dismissed from the band due to his increasing instability and unreliability due to his growing drug dependency. Not long after, Whitten died from a drug overdose, an event which haunted Young for a long time. The death of Whitten, along with the simultaneous death of roadie Bruce Berry, would be the lurking presence behind the 1973 recording of Tonight's The Night, an album that I'll talk about more when we get to 1975.

Unremittingly bleak and unabashedly raw and lo-fi, Tonight's The Night wasn't met enthusiastically by Young's record label, Reprise, who refused to release it (they would eventually agree at Young's insistence a couple of years later). In the interim, Young set about recording another new album that still allowed him to explore his feelings of desolation and loss but that tried to achieve a slightly more commercial sound that would satisfy Reprise. The result was On The Beach, recorded by a lineup that included former Stray Gators Ben Keith and Tim Drummond alongside Crazy Horse musicians like Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot. The album's first half in particular feels like a bone throne to appease the people at Reprise - opener "Walk On," with its bright, clanging electric guitar riff, sounds like a sunny slice of wholesome optimism, while its lyrics espouse an acceptance of one's mistakes and problems and moving ahead with life. It's arguably one of Young's most effortlessly feelgood songs, and a mischievous piece of misdirection considering how bleak much of the rest of the album would get. "See The Sky About To Rain" is another fairly upbeat song, again suggesting a kind of "weather the storm" optimism, while its pleasant melody and gentle keyboard part make it another genuinely lovely song.

But with "Revolution Blues" Young's genuine mental state and preoccupations begin to come to the fore. A more brutal rock song driven by an angry, ringing guitar riff, it's a character study of murderer Charles Manson, replete with all the rage and highly-strung insecurity that drove him to extremes. "I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them more than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars," is among the most devastatingly angry lyrics Young ever wrote. The last two songs of the first half see a slight dip in quality, with the blandly meditative "For The Turnstiles" and the slightly goofy and hamfisted attack on oil corporations that is "Vampire Blues," but the album's second half is a sort of distillation of Young's creative genius. The sun-kissed, mellow mood of Harvest or the upbeat pop moments of After The Gold Rush are almost completely absent, as is the angry posing of a more attention-grabbing rock song like "Southern Man" or "Cinnamon Girl." Instead, there's an unremittingly bleak and very sad exploration of the man's feelings of isolation in response to his newfound fame.

The extended, bluesy meanderings of "On The Beach" amount to one of Neil Young's very greatest moments. In a series of wonderfully realised images he effortlessly draws the picture of a man trying to find solace in his success but still feeling a yearning for something more meaninful - "I need a crowd of people but I can't face them day to day...now I'm living out here on the beach, but those seagulls are still out of reach." It's a wonderfully sad portrait, and one reinforced even further by the following track, "Motion Pictures," on which Young reimagines himself as a normal guy with very little who hates the idea of trading his simple life for one of fame and success. It's a much more content and warm-sounding song, but one made all the more poignant by the realisation that its criticism of celebrity figures essentially involves Young admonishing himself. "Ambulance Blues" is another lengthy, slow, meditative song, and one that involves some of his most cryptic lyrics, full of oblique references to contemporary American culture and politics as well as to specific personal details of his own past and career. It's difficult to make sense of every reference, but essentially the entire thing dissolves down into one lengthy, weary, defeated reflection on the slow death of hippy counter-culture, and the growing sense of apathy that pervaded American culture in the mid-70s. It's testament to Young's ability as a writer and musician that through nine minutes of barely varying acoustic music, he still maintains a sense of compelling world-weariness that never lets up.

By the time the album winds up, the sense of world-beating optimism that enlivened "Walk On" has been long forgotten, and a sense of sad nostalgia persists. It's all wrapped up in a far more commercial-sounding arrangement and production than the grittiness of Tonight's The Night, meaning Reprise agreed to put it out, though it didn't do particularly big business. Nonetheless, in the years since it's come to be seen as one of the artistic peaks of Young's career, and on a personal note, it was the first time I began to wake up to the fact that Neil Young was far more than just a feelgood poet and songwriter, but a man of far more substance and depth. Tonight's The Night finally saw the light of day the following year and has come to be seen as the pinnacle of Young's bleak "Ditch Trilogy," even though it's On The Beach for me that wins the laurels. Having perhaps finally worked out some of the issues that had been troubling him for the last couple of years, in the wake of that album Young reunited with Crazy Horse and set about trying to record something less personal and pessimistic and more in the vein of traditional rock music, delivering the great Zuma in the same year.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Neil Young.

1. Walk On

2. See The Sky About To Rain

3. Revolution Blues

4. For The Turnstiles

5. Vampire Blues

6. On The Beach

7. Motion Pictures

8. Ambulance Blues

Mike Oldfield - Hergest Ridge

Released - August 1974

Genre - New Age

Producer - Tom Newman & Mike Oldfield

Selected Personnel - Mike Oldfield (Guitar/Organ/Keyboards/Percussion/Mandolin); Lindsay Cooper (Oboe); Ted Hobart (Trumpet); Sally Oldfield (Vocals); Terry Oldfield (Woodwinds); Clodagh Simmonds (Vocals)

Standout Track - Hergest Ridge (Part I)

Mike Oldfield had plenty of reasons to be cheerful in 1974. His pioneering one-man-symphony Tubular Bells had quickly become one of the biggest-selling and most talked-about albums of the previous year, providing Richard Branson and Virign Records with the hit they needed to get the fledgling record company off the ground, thus giving them the impetus to become the huge business empire they would eventually grow into. Tubular Bells, with its complex symphonic structures, tapped into the prog-rock obsession with complexity and artistic ambition, and yet the music's eclectic styles and influences also captured the imaginations of those beginning to tire of prog's formula and looking for further ways to develop music in new directions. Not only that, but the use of the opening motif of Tubular Bells as the main theme to William Friedkin's hit film The Exorcist ensured it was a hit in the US too. But, in the huge media scrutiny that surrounded him in the wake of such a hit, Oldfield found little to take comfort in. He was a painfully shy and introverted individual (to the extent that it was only after several personal counselling sessions to raise his self-confidence later in the 70s that he was ever able to consider touring or performing live), and hated the sudden pressure to talk about his music and publicise it and answer questions about it, preferring to let it speak for itself. He was that rare thing in rock music, a hugely talented musician who did what he did not remotely for any of the ego-boosting or fame or repute it might get him, but purely because he loved creating music and pushing himself into new territories.

Virgin, understandably, were keen to push for an immediate follow-up, but Oldfield felt he had to address his own feelings of intimidation and insecurity first, and so retreated to his country home near the town of Kington on the Welsh border, near a hill named Hergest Ridge, to work on his next project. What emerged was an album which, while perhaps being inherently less groundbreaking or surprising as Tubular Bells, was far more mature, intelligent, heartfelt and beautiful than what had come before. The problem I've always had with Tubular Bells is that it feels more like a man trying out lots of different ideas and not being sure how to coalesce them all together - every one of them is compelling and imaginative and brilliant in its own way, but I find that, as an album, it slightly struggles to all come together. Oldfield would go a long way towards rectifying this with Hergest Ridge, the album he would eventually name in tribute to the countryside that helped to inform it.

That sense of peace and introversion and solitude bleeds through in every moment of Hergest Ridge - it's a more intensely personal work than Tubular Bells (ironically so considering that here Oldfield did actually delegate some of the instrumental work to musicians other than himself). But one can hear his desperation for solitude on this record, his need to be on his own and in control of his mood and his music rather than letting it be debated and picked over by consumers. The whole thing is far more stately and more placid, and the sheer feel of the countryside and its effect on Oldfield's psyche is powerfully audible, from the plaintive cor anglais melody halfway through Part I to the muted, textured vocal effects. Oldfield was keen to diversify and push in new directions in some areas, and in others to be more restrained and controlled. He incorporated a broader instrumental palette, including his brother Terry on woodwinds and sister Sally on vocals. He still wasn't keen to actually write vocal melodies, however, and the vocal parts are deliberately kept low in the mix so their effect is purely atmospheric rather than melodic, with his own electric guitar or Terry's woodwinds more often carrying the lead melody. But, while in terms of instrumentation he was allowing himself to be more ambitious, this time things are kept far more restrained in terms of the musical structure, with themes and melodies slowly layering on top of each other and rolling quietly and elegantly into the next passage rather than leaping abruptly into the next musical idea as on Tubular Bells.

On "Part I," the first twelve minutes or so are spent slowly building and layering a single melodic idea via the woodwind parts, while Oldfield's acoustic guitar and organ effects build up several layers of lush and gorgeous sonic architecture before a more up-tempo section is introduced that sounds almost threatening until the addition of sleigh bells shifts the music in a new, jauntier direction as the first half winds to a close with a fine electric guitar solo. "Part II," for me, has always been the less successful side of "Hergest Ridge," in that its aggressive mid-section has always felt totally out of place to me on the album. In general, Hergest Ridge feels particularly powerful and poignant for me because of its stateliness, calmness and sense of repose. Even in its more upbeat and faster-moving moments, its purpose, I feel, is to articulate the sense of peace and bliss gained from solitude, and then there's a thunderous, discordant mashing of layered electric guitars all screaming together which I find too tuneless and angry to even work that well as hard rock music - it's just a wall of noise that disrupts the mood of the album itself. Of course, this was almost certainly Oldfield's intention, perhaps trying to articulate his own sense of discomfort at how the media's intrusion had shattered his own sense of solitude while working on his music, or perhaps that's reading far too much into it. Either way, whether it's intended as a statement or not, it's a moment that breaks the spell of the album for me and that I never really enjoy sitting through.

That aside, though, Hergest Ridge is generally a perfect evocation of stillness and solitary peace, and a clear sign of Oldfield's maturation as a composer and musician. It's naturally less exciting a record than Tubular Bells, as by this point the general premise of Oldfield's one-man New Age symphonies was no longer surprising, but it's certainly, overall, an improvement over his earlier album and a big step towards the career peak that would come the following year with Ommadawn. Hergest Ridge, while not quite selling at the level that Tubular Bells did, was another big hit and reached the top of the album charts before being knocked off by Tubular Bells itself, which was still riding high even a year later.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Mike Oldfield.

1. Hergest Ridge (Part I)

2. Hergest Ridge (Part II)

Etta James - Top Ten

Released - 1963

Genre - Blues

Producer - Leonard Chess

Selected Personnel - Etta James (Vocals)

Standout Track - At Last

It's a bit of an anomalous entry, this one, really, in that Etta James's Top Ten is an album I didn't even know I owned until yesterday, and that I immediately included on my "Greatest Albums" list before I'd even listened to it all the way through as an album. I'll explain. Etta James, one of the most iconic and timeless stars of soul, blues and R&B music, has been firmly enshrined as one of my favourite artists for the majority of my life. I remember her unforgettably sassy, raunchy cover of Willie Dixon's "I Just Want To Make Love To You" (first recorded by blues legend Muddy Waters) when it was used in a Pepsi ad in the mid-90s. The surprisingly (for the early 60s) upfront sexiness pretty much went over my head as a six or seven-year-old and I remember just thinking it sounded cool, and it became one of the first songs that I enjoyed enough and that made a big enough impression on me for me to really remember it and let it lodge itself in my memory. Of course, I was too young to start taking an active interest in musical artists off the back of one song, but even as I was growing up I continued to be surrounded by Etta James's music as she has been responsible for so many songs that have become unavoidable due to their classic status.

By the time I was able to start developing proper musical tastes and interests of my own, Etta James, the woman behind that song that had made me sit up and pay attention as a very young child, was high on my list, and I availed myself of a number of greatest hits compilations and extensive retrospective anthologies, but never once bothered to listen to an Etta James studio album. My reasons for this, essentially, are that the business of making music was very different before the mid-60s and certainly didn't have the same focus on studio albums as began to develop in that decade. While jazz musicians started making interesting albums in the 50s that they had creative control over, like Miles Davis's wonderful Kind Of Blue, it wasn't really until the rise of folk and rock in the mid-60s that more mainstream popular music began to focus more on albums as well. Before that, within the world of pop, soul and R&B music, everything was very much controlled and created by record companies, who would assign songs and session musicians to particular artists, orchestrate the sessions for recording the songs and market the resultant recordings as singles. Albums were rarely much more than a collection of recent singles from that particular artist, and the pop music of the late 50s and early 60s has just always struck me as an era that's equally well represented through greatest hits compilations and retrospective best-of's as through studio albums, which simply didn't have the same level of care and creativity put into them as became typical in the 60s.

But, while researching Etta James's studio discography in an idle moment I happened to notice that, among the greatest hits I owned across the compilations I'd become familiar with, I happened to have all the songs that made up a 1963 album of hers entitled Top Ten. On looking further I found that that album consisted of a number of my very favourites of hers, and it was immediately a shoe-in for talking about here - an album containing some of my very favourite songs by one of my favourite singers, what's not to love? That said, its inclusion here does have to come with caveats, in that it's still not, strictly speaking, a true studio album in that it consists mostly of Etta's best-selling singles from the previous two years along with three new songs in the form of "Pushover," "Stop The Wedding" and "Would It Make Any Difference To You." The inclusion of new material just about scrapes it a "studio album" status, although it doesn't quite fit in with my rules. Still, the now established notion of what a studio album even is is one that wasn't really fully understood by the music industry at large until the mid-60s, so the fact that this comes close is good enough for me, and quite apart from anything else, it lets me talk briefly about an artist I've loved my whole life but assumed I wouldn't ever get round to talking about on this blog as I never thought I'd end up listening to one of her actual albums.

Essentially, what this album does is provide a concise overview of just how astoundingly good Etta James's music was even in the first two years of her solo career. Her voice is equally at home in the smooth, breathy registers of ballads like "A Sunday Kind Of Love" as it is making hoarse, passionate cries of protest on more upbeat songs like "Stop The Wedding." The music, too, is impressively diverse for an early 60s popstar, who are so often manipulated and sculpted by record executives into repeating a particular formula until it exhausts itself. There are high-tempo R&B numbers like "Something's Got A Hold On Me" alongside more lushly orchestrated jazzy ballads like "Trust In Me." Somehow, despite her being one of a vast number of young soul singers in the early 60s, Etta's music has always struck me as being far more individual and far more noteworthy than any number of similar artists at the time, and her relationship with label chief Leonard Chess seems to bear that out. For one thing, although Chess was convinced James would become a success making popular, mass-appeal ballads and encouraged her to record more songs of that genre, he never succeeded (if indeed he ever attempted) to totally convince her to leave behind her blues and R&B roots entirely, and there is always that earthier, rawer energy to her music alongside the lush sentimentality of the ballads. Not only that, but on pretty much every album she released there was at least one or two songs co-written by Etta herself, which suggests a greater degree of creative control over her musical style and identity than many similar artists were allowed at the time.

Etta's history before she became a musical icon is a fascinating one, too, and helps to further suggest that spirit of creative independence that shines through even on her most popular and commercial songs. Having never known her father and rarely seeing her mother, she was raised by a series of different foster parents and started being given musical training from the age of five (hence why a voice so masterfully mature, diverse and majestic could emerge from such a young woman) and ended up becoming a sort of local attraction, being beaten and intimidated by her music tutor so that she would give public performances. From this she developed a lifelong fear of being ordered to sing on demand, and this seems a fascinating glimpse into why she chose to pursue music as a career - she had enough negative memories of performance to give her a lifelong complex about it, but still took enough joy and pleasure in singing itself to make it into the thing that defined her, as long as she was permitted to do it entirely on her terms. Within this context, the striking individuality and independence of her music becomes not just a curious indicator of her talent, but a fascinating insight into the mentality and the creative drive that fuelled all her work.

The songs collected together on Top Ten represent some of the very pinnacles of her recording career, culled from her early run of albums for the Chess label. The immortal "Something's Got A Hold On Me" starts with a slow, gospel vocal intro before picking up pace into a frenzied, impassioned celebration of love complete with gospel-styled call and response and an unforgettable melody. It's sadly now probably best known due to the fact that its intro was sampled and repurposed as the chorus of Flo Rida's "Good Feeling" a couple of years ago but, as fun as that song is, Etta's bluesy original is a far superior song. "At Last" is perhaps the most immortal and iconic song she ever recorded, a masterfully beautiful and romantic song with soft, chiming piano and swirling, swooning strings providing the perfect backing to Etta's soulful evocation of long-awaited love. "Fool That I Am" and "A Sunday Kind Of Love" are two more near-perfect ballads, evoking a kind of lazy sensuality that infuses most of the album's first half.

The second half contains all the new material, with main single "Pushover" an upbeat R&B number with squawking saxes and a fun, bouncy vocal turn from Etta. "All I Could Do Is Cry" takes a classic blues template and adorns it with woodwinds, choral vocals to turn it into a lovely pop ballad, while its theme (feeling miserable at the wedding of a loved one) also inspires the following "Stop The Wedding," another new single. With its opening spoken vocal from the priest, it's gloriously contrived and hilariously heavy-handed, but again shows Etta completely dominating and owning the tune, escalating her vocal into a series of declamatory outbursts towards its conclusion. The closing two tracks are slightly less iconic but still great examples of her vocal prowess.

Altogether, I do feel very much that I'm bending the rules here by including this album, as a collection of previously released singles plus a couple of new tracks hardly feels like an actual coherent, creative piece of work worthy of great analysis, but it's just nice to be able to say a few words in favour of a beloved artist whose studio discography happens to have passed me by. If nothing else, though, it's remarkable to think that, of the career-wide anthologies I'm already familiar with, so many of the very best songs happened to all come from this intense period of creativity in the early 60s, undoubtedly her peak of significance and achievement. Discovering this album has also made me feel that, one day, I ought to put more time and effort into listening to the full studio output of 50s and 60s artists I love who I'm mostly familiar with through greatest hits compilations (Nat King Cole and the Inkspots are two of my very favourite artists from this era, but again I've always had a nagging feeling that their greatest hits are the best way to listen to them given that their music was developed and marketed chiefly as singles anyway). One of these days perhaps I'll give them a more thorough exploration, but for now there are so many artists who have worked consciously on making albums that are full representations of their own creativity that most 50s and 60s artists are on the back burner for me. Perhaps one day this blog will be stuffed full of Etta James and Nat King Cole studio albums, but for now I'll continue to content myself with listening to their classic singles, and this semi-album serves as a nice way to salute her musical achievements and encourage a few more people to look into her work if they're not already familiar with it.

Track Listing:

1. Something's Got A Hold On Me (Etta James; Leroy Kirkland & Pearl Woods)

2. My Dearest Darling (Eddie Bocage & Paul Gayten)

3. At Last (Mack Gordon & Harvey Warren)

4. Fool That I Am (Floyd Hunt)

5. A Sunday Kind Of Love (Barbara Belle; Anita Leonard; Louis Prima & Stan Rhodes)

6. Pushover (Billy Davis & Tony Clarke)

7. All I Could Do Is Cry (Billy Davis)

8. Stop The Wedding (Freddy Johnson; Leroy Kirkland & Pearl Woods)

9. Trust In Me (Milton Ager; Jean Schwartz & Ned Wever)

10. Would It Make Any Difference To You (Bob Forshee)

King Crimson - Red

Released - October 1974

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - King Crimson

Selected Personnel - Robert Fripp (Guitar/Mellotron); John Wetton (Bass/Vocals); Bill Bruford (Drums/Percussion); David Cross (Violin); Mel Collins (Saxophone); Ian McDonald (Saxophone); Mark Charig (Cornet); Robin Miller (Oboe)

Standout Track - Starless

Red, the final album by the band that can truly be said to still count as King Crimson (in years to come a band under that name would re-emerge, but it's difficult to think of it as the same band) was actually the second of the band's albums I ever heard, after their iconic debut In The Court Of The Crimson King, and has long been vying with that classic for the top spot as my favourite Crimson album. In The Court... invariably always wins out in the end, but as the band dwindled to a halt in 1974 they managed to create an album that gives that earlier record a serious run for its money. Like a number of prominent prog musicians in '74, guitarist and de facto band leader Robert Fripp perhaps caught wind of what way music was headed, and was beginning to show interest in other projects. After the effective "reboot" of Larks' Tongues In Aspic in 1973, King Crimson was already a very different band from the jazz/classical/psychedelic beast they had been in 1969, replete with Medieval and classical imagery. They had become something far more weirder and more dangerous, incorporating weird, free-form violin solos into the mix as well as punishing guitar riffs and strange sonic textures. The next step had been Starless And Bible Black earlier in 1974, an album similar in tone but lacking as many truly great songs (although the mind-blowingly complicated "Fracture" is one of Crimson's finest songs).

Violinist David Cross, who had been a key element of some of the weird new sounds on the previous two albums, departed the band before doing much work on Red (his only contribution here is on the improvised live take "Providence,") effectively reducing King Crimson to a core trio of Fripp, bassist and vocalist John Wetton, and former Yes drummer Bill Bruford. As a result, the ideas within Red end up being far simpler than on the last couple of albums. Although horns and woodwinds are used sparingly on the songs (curiously, with founding member Ian McDonald, not involved with Crimson since 1970's In The Wake Of Poseidon, and another former member, Mel Collins, each contributing saxophone), the focus is kept squarely on the taut, rumbling bass of Wetton, the clattering drums of Bruford and, most prominently, Fripp's always savage and weird-sounding guitar effects. While prog has always been about musical invention and the incorporation of unusual sounds and ideas, I've always had a sense with Fripp around the time of Larks' Tongues In Aspic and Red that he's one of the few prog musicians, along with perhaps Peter Gabriel, to have a keen interest not just in musical experimentation, but in actually playing with sound itself in order to create something genuinely strange and unsettling. He had already undertaken a mammoth experiment in how to play with the sound of his guitar playing on (No Pussyfooting), his collaborative album with Brian Eno in 1973, and here he continues to incorporate a range of weird and alien sounds, from the almost synthesiser-like buzzing that laces "One More Red Nightmare" to the rubbery resonance of the note that opens "Fallen Angel."

The music is generally a sort of jazzy, freeform hard rock replete with menace and danger. The opening title track is a relentless instrumental that switches through a number of complicated time signatures and features a number of different guitar overdubs from Fripp. "Fallen Angel" starts out as a deceptively pretty tune, Wetton's always unusually strained (though not unpleasant to listen to) vocals crooning through a genuinely lovely tune decorated with cornet and oboe before the final few minutes pick up into a more ferocious and characteristically dangerous coda. "One More Red Nightmare," the only actual song (as opposed to instrumental) of the 1973-74 incarnation of Crimson to not feature lyrics by former Supertramp guitarist Richard Palmer-James, is allegedly about John Wetton's fear of flying, and opens with a high-tempo, jazzy tune that Wetton has a huge amount of fun belting out. Again, its final minutes involve a repeated, savage guitar riff over which McDonald's and Collins' saxophones warble and squeal.

What follows is another example of one of King Crimson's bad habits, which is the inclusion of extended supernumerary tracks involving nothing but quiet, tedious, mind-numbing improvised instrumentals. Improvisation can often be a huge virtue and a gateway to truly intuitive creativity, but only when anchored to a genuinely compelling musical idea whereas Crimson have a habit of just saying "Right, let's go for it" and seeing if something good can be conjured from literally nothing. "Providence" is highly reminiscent of the tedious instrumental segment of "Moonchild" on In The Court Of The Crimson King, and is essentially eight minutes of violin scrapes, guitar noodling and the odd percussive clatter. Not even interesting enough to be engaging. Thankfully, things pick up again at the end with one of the finest songs in King Crimson's discography. Fripp dusts off the timeless Crimson Mellotron one last time for a slow, mournful intro over which his distorted guitar weeps out a pretty riff. Halfway through this funereal song, after Wetton's meditative vocals, comes one of the most infuriatingly brilliant guitar solos of all time, in which Fripp manages to eke out several minutes' worth of soloing using only one note, in a passage that builds in intensity and threat until exploding into a breakneck cacophony of a conclusion that's as angry, troubled, mad and frightening as anything else Crimson ever recorded, and a fitting end to this stage of their history.

"Providence" aside, it's by far the most consistently brilliant and inventive and engaging album the band had made since In The Court... and only slightly falls down in comparison for the fact that this time it's coming from a band where some of their ideas feel familiar and is less of a sensational bolt from the blue as their debut was. It has all the mournful melancholy of "Epitaph," all the threatening intensity of "21st Century Schizoid Man" and all the grandiose drama of "The Court Of The Crimson King," but never feels like it's retreading ground as Fripp's visionary mind and ear for unusual sound keeps things feeling endlessly inventive. After Red, Fripp soon decided to call it a day with King Crimson, claiming he had no interest in the stardom afforded by fronting a high-profile rock band as he felt it was detrimental to his doing the work he wanted to do as an artist. Although he attempted to generate further record deals for an ongoing version of King Crimson consisting of Bruford, Wetton and McDonald but not him, that offer was rejected by his managers and he decided simply to abandon King Crimson "forever."

For the next year or so he would continue working on less high-profile and more eclectic musical projects that furthered his artistic explorations, such as another ambient collaboration with Eno entitled Evening Star. In the late 70s, after "retiring" from music for a few years, he then became a much sought-after session musician, playing for the likes of Bowie and Peter Gabriel, before eventually the new ideas and sonic inventions of art-rock and post-punk bands in the late 70s like Talking Heads seemed to renew his interest in being part of a rock band. Eventually, of course, King Crimson did return in the early 80s as a very different outfit indeed, one that's difficult to identify as the same band at all were it not for the involvement of Fripp and, for a while, Bruford, but that's something we'll look at another time. The King Crimson of old was finished, and Red is a fine full stop to their glorious musical legacy.

Track Listing:

1. Red (Robert Fripp)

2. Fallen Angel (Robert Fripp; Richard Palmer-James & John Wetton)

3. One More Red Nightmare (Robert Fripp & John Wetton)

4. Providence (Bill Bruford; David Cross; Robert Fripp & John Wetton)

5. Starless (Bill Bruford; David Cross; Robert Fripp; Richard Palmer-James & John Wetton)

The Stooges - Raw Power

Released - February 1973

Genre - Hard Rock

Producer - Iggy Pop & David Bowie

Selected Personnel - Iggy Pop (Vocals); James Williamson (Guitar); Ron Asheton (Bass/Backing Vocals); Scott Asheton (Drums)

Standout Track - Gimme Danger

Let's talk about punk a little bit, as it's a big topic I'm going to have to deal with at some point. The main chronology of this blog (we're at 1974, remember) is still a good year or so off the peak of punk's impact, but a recent interest in the post-punk movement has made me ever so slightly reappraise, if not punk itself, then at least some of its more significant ancestors. Essentially, punk arose in the mid-70s as a conscious reaction against the established traditions and formulae of rock music. It's also a genre I have always never shied away from saying I have absolutely no time for. Don't get me wrong - its theory is totally sound, in that any form of artistic expression needs always to be challenged to extremes in order to be reinvented and stopped from becoming predictable. In achieving that, punk should be commended. But one of the major things I've always resented about punk is that it successfully created the myth that the traditional, classic, art or prog rock of the early 70s was devoid of any artistic integrity or musical value, that it was either pomposity and showing off for the sake of it (in the case of prog rock and art rock) or that it was turgid, unimaginative recycling of established formulas (classic rock, blues rock, folk rock). It's a myth that too much of the world has taken on as established fact, nodding along to the idea that the traditional rock of, say, Neil Young, was devoid of emotional sincerity, or that the likes of King Crimson were all just bluster and demonstration and lacked any actual musical ingenuity. I'll argue against that lie until I'm blue in the face. Punk sought to burn rock to the ground by reducing it to the minimal ingredients, pushing a homemade, "anyone can do it" attitude of short, amateurish songs that consciously aimed for political comment and social outrage in order to restore authenticity and meaning to music.

Personally, I don't enjoy punk music. I kind of understand the message and ethos behind it, even if I violently disagree with the idea that the music of the early 70s was in the dire need for revolution that they claimed it was, but the music itself just does nothing for me. It's of course easy to forget how fresh and exciting that music must have been at the time, but in a world that has become crowded with uninspired two-chord songs, the clumsy simplicity of punk no longer sounds exciting, it simply sounds slightly dim-witted and inept, certainly to me when contrasted with the more powerful and eye-opening ideas of accomplished and inventive musicians. One also has to raise an eyebrow to the fact that what made punk a "phenomenon" all of its own was more its timing and its marketing than its own ideas, as few of them were genuinely original.

The idea of making music that sounded primal and savage and clumsy rather than polished and accomplished was by no means invented by the artists to spearhead the punk movement like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. Garage rock had existed for years, and its most notable practitioners were probably the Stooges. Admittedly, punk threw in far more political ire than the Stooges ever bothered to concern themselves with, and also tried consciously to distance itself from the deliberate theatricality and ego of Iggy Pop's stage persona, but in that way I actually feel it's in some way inferior to what the Stooges aimed for. Their music may have been inane and savage, but at least the whole daft cacophony was purely in service to one man's ridiculous ego and sense of intuitive fun rather than trying to make some rather contrived political or social point. The first time I listened to the Stooges about a year ago, it was because of David Bowie's involvement with them, and I didn't like what I heard, finding it difficult to pinpoint much difference between them and the musical genre that left me totally cold. But, in the wake of getting more interested in post-punk music, I've gone back to the Stooges and suddenly felt like there are some great ideas within them, as well as a lot of fun to be had.

In their early years the Stooges, led by the idiot madman born James Osterberg but soon renamed Iggy Pop, established a reputation as one of the most dangerous and borderline psychotic bands around for their ridiculously over-the-top live shows, which made the Who's instrument-smashing antics look decidedly tame. Iggy would leap into the crowd and smear himself with peanut butter, strip naked and cut himself with glass onstage, creating an atmosphere of total riotous abandon that soon made the band legends. Their music was by no means tuneful or, it could even be said, particularly enjoyable, but the idea with this band was clear - the music was a means by which to channel a kind of psychotic energy rather than something that was supposed to be appreciated in and of itself. 1970's Fun House is an attempt to distil the live energy of the band into a record and has a few fun moments on it but also, as is inevitable in any attempt to capture that kind of experience, features a good few songs of nothing but thrashing, primal noise and Iggy's ear-splitting screaming. It's not an album I've ever quite been able to truly enjoy.

As the band's heroin habit began to destabilise their performances even further, they were soon dropped by their label and left in limbo, at which point Iggy ran into David Bowie for the first time. Bowie had been aware of Iggy for a while and, while their music was a million miles from one another, had taken Iggy's who-gives-a-damn, Messianic vision of himself in his stage persona as a model for his Ziggy Stardust alter-ego (as well as being an obvious inspiration for the name). Iggy has also gone on to say that Bowie was the only person at the time to actually recognise any genuine quality in Iggy's songwriting rather than just his live performances. Hoping to help Iggy's career to continue, Bowie brought him and Stooges guitarist James Williamson to Britain and helped secure them a deal with Columbia Records, eventually also bringing Stooges Ron and Scott Asheton to complete the lineup and record a new album. Bowie himself wasn't involved in the sessions, but ended up mixing the final album after Iggy attempted to do it himself and made a total mess of it.

The result was Raw Power, a record which sees Iggy, perhaps inspired by Bowie's confidence in him, focus slightly more on songwriting and less on primal savagery. Not that this is suddenly an album full of grandiose ballads or anything like that - the mood is still one of plodding, angry, noisy rock played with maximum energy and very little finesse, and there are still some songs that descend into fairly tuneless, thrashing onslaughts of noise, like the fairly numbing closer "Death Trip" or "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell." But Iggy really did channel a lot of time and energy this time into writing memorable hooks and riffs and vocal melodies (even if his swaggering, crooning, wailing vocal style makes it difficult to really call any of this tunes "melodies" as such). "Search And Destroy" sees Williamson thrashing out a vicious and raw guitar riff over which Iggy rants and raves, and "Gimme Danger" is an uncharacteristically slow and menacing song built around Williamson's strummed acoustic guitar. It also sees Iggy, for perhaps the first time, discovering some nuance and variation within his own vocal delivery, not leaping straight to furious, raging wails but simmering down into quiet menace. "Penetration" similarly sees Iggy hissing and panting his vocals over an insistently threatening riff, and "I Need Somebody," another unusually slow number, has him run the whole gamut from a rich, deep crooning verse to a hoarse, screamed chorus in a wonderfully sleazy, slow rocker that sounds like the aural equivalent of strutting through mud.

For me, the songs that work less well are actually the ones that stick closest to the Stooges' established template of high-tempo, thrashing noise rock, but then I'm not much of a one for tuneless aggression. It's not a perfect album and does occasionally fall victim to the same noisy failings as Fun House, but when it finds time to slow things down slightly and focus more on songcraft and dynamics than on pure aggression it actually manages to sound pretty cool. And, while this pits me against a huge number of people, I feel that music like this, that's chaotic and anarchic, is so much more enjoyable when that chaos is in service to theatricality and showing off than when it's in service to an overly principled, political ethos as in punk, a movement that started out with an agenda and quickly burned itself out as it immediately became a marketing-led phenomenon just as that which it had set out to replace had done.

As for Iggy and the Stooges, they formally disbanded not long after Raw Power due to Iggy's ongoing heroin dependency and increasing unpredictability and erratic behaviour. Having created the primal, noise-based template that punk could draw upon in order to stage its scorched earth approach to rock music a few years later, Iggy then retreated into rehab along with Bowie and emerged with an album called The Idiot that, along with Bowie's solo album Low, to which Iggy also contributed, would become a key template for the far more imaginative, inventive and exciting music of the post-punk scene, a movement that tried to look at the rubble of what punk had attempted to achieve and to transform its failures into something more constructive. But more of that another time. For now, suffice it to say that Raw Power, while imperfect, is a good testament to how fun the Stooges were able to be when they managed to reign themselves in a bit. It's easy for me to resent them for seeding an idea for the punks that enabled them to destroy my favourite genre of music, but ultimately they were just a bunch of idiots messing around and having fun with music, and it's impossible for some of that energy and madness not to come through on this album.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Iggy Pop and James Williamson.

1. Search And Destroy

2. Gimme Danger

3. Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell

4. Penetration

5. Raw Power

6. I Need Somebody

7. Shake Appeal

8. Death Trip