From Elvis In Memphis by Elvis Presley

After leaving a whole generation of white American teens all shook up and a brief spell in the army in 1960, Elvis’ manager Colonel Tom Parker took the bizarre decision to focus his career into making cheesy B movies and soundtrack albums.

Not surprisingly, Elvis grew increasingly unhappy with this arrangement and after his legendary 68 comeback special, wanted to record a new LP in Memphis with a change of musical direction. After some wrangling over publishing rights and contracts, he finally got into the studio and recorded a set of songs with styles ranging from Memphis Soul to country and blues, with a touch of gospel.

This album is a great showcase for Elvis at his vocal crooning best, even if some of the songs are on the mawkish side. This re-release includes some non album singles including the great Suspicious Minds but offset by the atrocious Don’t Cry Daddy.

Ghetto-tastic!

Bleed, New Leaves

A daimyo is no more
A poet turns a new leaf

Stems, Fire

Rose stems neatly pruned
Trimmed, stacked, fuel for the bonfire
Thorns crackle in flames

Cozy, Full Moon

Red firelight fading
Full moon rising in the sky
A cozy night in

Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & The Holding Company & Janis Joplin

Let’s start with the good. Janis Joplin blazed a trail as one of the very few women in the 60s fronting a band and she brings a very powerful voice to this album, full of raw emotion and cracking in places. As well as a couple of original tracks, her versions of Summertime by George Gershwin and Another Piece of My Heart are genuine classics.

The bad is the bait and switch with this album posing as a live recording. Only one of the tracks was actually live (at least on the original release) with the rest featuring recorded audience noises played in. To be fair, the recording does have a raw, live feel that captures the energy of a top notch rock band, but it feels a little bit of a cheat all the same.

The ugly is the cover art by Robert Crumb, which features crude racist and sexist stereotypes of the worst sort. Apparently Crumb claimed later that he was satirizing those attitudes and that his audience would have understood the context, but it really leaves a sour taste even after all this time.

The final tragedy is that just two years after this record, Joplin joined the pantheon of dead rock stars, dying from a heroin overdose at the age of just 27. What a waste.

Comfort, Sowing

Hot chocolate and cream
Sowing the seeds of sweet dreams
Comfort in a mug

American Beauty by Grateful Dead

I’d often wondered about the music of the Grateful Dead. What was it that inspired legions of Deadheads to follow a band of aging hippies on endless tours across America? They were not the sort of band who got played on the radio in the UK, so it was a long time before I actually listened to an album and then on the insistence of a friend, one of the many carefully curated bootleg concerts.

It wasn’t the cosmic psychedelic space jam that I was expecting. It was … ok. Mellow blues and cosy Americana with a hint of country. It struck me listening to this album this morning that the music is really quite incidental to the experience of tripping out in a field in the California sunshine with a genuine community of like minded friends, before packing up the microbus and driving a couple of hundred miles to the next gig.

This album won’t knock your socks off, but it’s not trying to. It’s the perfect expression of the hippie ethos of tuning in, turning on and dropping out, and I wish there was more of it in the world today.

Vincebus Eruptum by Blue Cheer

There’s a general rule of thumb with this list, that if there’s a sixties band that you haven’t heard of, then there’s generally a good reason for it. In this case, aside from an entertaining hard rock cover of Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran, the rest of the album manages to be tedious and overblown which is quite a trick when it’s only half an hour long.

File under historical curiosity only.

Groan, Warm Sun

Ancient bones creaking
She stretches in the warm sun
Lets out a small groan

Copper Blue by Sugar

I’d always assumed that Bob Mould was some sort of punk name and therefore slightly disappointed when Hüsker Dü imploded that he didn’t form a band with Fred Fungus and Terry Toadstool. Anyhoo, Mr Mould is on good form here with some excellent post-punk/indie guitar rock with a slightly more mellow and melodic edge.

Most of the songs are about dysfunctional relationships and I can’t help wondering if lines like “The act, we wear it thin again” are a reference to the acrimonious breakup with his former bandmate and drummer Grant Hart. Apparently the only time they re-united for a benefit gig the only songs they played were “Hardly Getting Over It” and “Never Talking to You Again”. Yikes.

Anyway, this is great breezy stuff to put on when you’ve just been dumped and need something to cheer yourself up. Even if you haven’t been dumped, you just want to take Bob out for a beer and sympathise. Favourite tracks are probably Hoover Dam and If I Can’t Change Your Mind, which even features some lovely harmonies.

Vivid, Clouds

The sky stained scarlet
Vivid clouds reflect the sun
A shepherd’s warning

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, illustrated by Tove Jansson

Whilst I've read The Lord of the Rings multiple times over the years, I don't think I've sat down and read the Hobbit from cover to cover since I was small. When this edition was announced, featuring illustrations created by Tove Jansson for the Swedish edition of the book, I couldn't resist. I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves on their trek to the Lonely Mountain to reclaim their treasures from the mighty dragon Smaug.

The illustrations definitely add to the story, with a unique perspective on familiar characters. I particularly loved this version of Gollum that Jansson produced because it wasn't clear (at least from the text that she was working from) how big the character was supposed to be! All of the illustrations have been collected here but I highly recommend buying this book to see them in context.

 

Night Chill

Awake in darkness
Too scared to turn on the light
Frozen by night chills

Green by R.E.M.

This is an unlikely candidate for one of the biggest selling albums of the 80s. It’s an archetypal example of the Athens, Georgia sound, with jangly guitars, Michael Stipe’s distinctive, plaintive vocals and some nice touches on some tracks with mandolins, cello and pedal steel guitar giving a touch of country/Americana.

The thing that really sets this album is the utterly baffling nature of the lyrics, with gnomic allusions turned into sing along hooks. I had no idea what lines like “I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my orange crush” meant at the time and I’m still not much clearer even after reading the wikipedia page.

Does it matter if it doesn’t make sense? Maybe, maybe not, but perhaps that’s where its charm lies.

Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

I’m a sucker for a good concept album, and it doesn’t get a much higher concept than a series of albums each devoted to a detailed history of one of the American states. Sadly we only got Michigan and Illinois before the project was abandoned.

There was a lot that I enjoyed about this, particularly the ambitious scope of the music which reminded me in places of the minimalist operas of composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, crossed with the breezy jazz of Vince Guaraldi and even a nod to the Cure’s “Close To Me” on the title track “Come on! Feel the Illinoise” (which was a lost opportunity to cover Slade).

What I didn’t like was a piece about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy dressing up as a clown to murder people. Seriously, this should have come with a content warning. This one track was enough to almost put me off listening to the rest of the album. Seriously, skip this one or don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The rest of the lyrics are a lot more interesting with what sound like autobiographical insights into Steven’s life and beliefs, and they are quite moving in an obtuse way. I think I’d like to read a commentary about what he’s alluding to on some of these.

This would have been five stars, but minus one for Killer Klowns and minus another one for giving up after two states. Lazy, lazy Sufjan Stevens.

Frost

Start of October
Twenty degrees, no frost yet
I'm sure this is fine

Haystack

Carefully climbing
Then a leap of faith into
A handy haystack

Closer by Joy Division

This album was a difficult listen back in 1980 and the passage of time hasn’t made it much easier. Knowing how desperately ill lead singer Ian Curtis was during the recording and then hearing lines like “Gotta find some therapy … gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late” hits home in a way that very few songs do. Perhaps he could have been helped, but there are too many ‘what ifs’ to answer.

The sound of this album defined the 80s for me, being the antithesis of plastic pop for yuppies. Without this album we wouldn’t have had so much of the music that exploded from the Manchester scene throughout that decade and beyond. As with Bowie’s Blackstar, this deserves to be listened to properly and not shuffled or playlisted.

Mushrooms, Evening

Fried mushrooms for tea
As the evenings draw in
And gentle rains fall

The Idiot by Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop is one of rock and roll’s greatest survivors. After the Stooges broke up in 1974, he had a moment of clarity and realised that the drug culture of LA and his heroin addiction in particular was going to kill him, so he moved to France with his pal David Bowie (who was at a similar low point in his life) and they recorded an album together.

The Idiot feels like a reset for both of them, as they kicked their respective drug habits, and experimented with new sounds, bouncing ideas off each other in the studio before handing the tapes over to producer Tony Visconti who made sense of them and pulled the album together. There’s a notable shift from the proto-punk of Raw Power, with synths, saxophones and moody lyrics, but contrary to some opinions this is very much an Iggy album and informed his subsequent work.

Idiot-tastic!