#GreatAlbums1960s - #CaptainBeefheart & His Magic Band – Trout Mask Replica (1969). Part avant garde song cycle, part field recording, part fractured jam session, Beefheart’s infamous double-LP confounds anyone who approaches it with anything but a totally open mind. For all its weirdness, the music on TMR extends the mission of free jazz into a rock context, with occasional blues gestures (“China Pig” and the spoken “Well”) so you can stuff your brains back into your ears.
#GreatAlbums1960s - #TheMC5 – Kick Out the Jams (1969). This easy listening classic was the perfect background music for youngsters relaxing on the divan over a glass of warm milk and jelly sandwich. Its dulcet tones, gentle singalongs, and total lack of profanity made it a wholesome alternative to the raucous rock and roll polluting the airwaves in the late 1960s. Band members Rob Tyner, Wayne Kramer and Fred “Rogers” Smith were models of good manners and polite elocution.
#GreatAlbums1960s - #TheStooges – The Stooges (1969). The cover suggests Elektra thought they were getting another Doors (cue loud gameshow buzzer). Instead they got something altogether more outrageous as Iggy Stooge’s stage persona made Jim Morrison’s lizard king look like a house gecko. Nobody knew what to do with them in 1969, but by 1976 songs like “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “No Fun,” and “Real Cool Time” were the foundations of punk and most of its derivations thereafter.
#GreatAlbums1960s - #JethroTull – Stand Up (1969). A bluesier Tull than would emerge as the band began progging out a year later, Stand Up is another of those LPs (along with Jeff Beck/ Zeppelin/ King Crimson debuts) that pointed forward with imaginative flourishes to offset the heavy riffage on tunes like “A New Day Yesterday,” “Look into the Sun” and “Nothing is Easy.” Ian Anderson wasn’t rock’s only flautist, but he’s the only one who sounded like he was breathing fire.
#GreatAlbums1960s - #JeffBeckGroup – Truth (1968). The template for much of what would happen in rock over the next half dozen years, Truth revved up the blues like a dirigible taking flight, hammered old Yardbirds riffs till they pled for mercy, and, on “Beck’s Bolero,” segued a classical motif into a piledriving riff that was heavy metal two years before Sabbath. Rod Stewart and Ron Wood honed chops they would carry into Faces, and Beck himself sealed his guitar hero status.
#GreatAlbums1960s - #VanMorrison – Astral Weeks (1968). Van the Man never made another album quite like this one. Its jazz-inflected folk wanders through pastoral soundscapes as Morrison’s poetic lyrics and vocal improvisations trip through a personal cosmos of blissed-out emotion. “Beside You,” “Cyprus Avenue” and “Madame George” are what WB Yeats might have sounded like if he’d grown up among the beatniks and absorbed the lyrical cadences of sixties counterculture.
#GreatAlbums1960s - #Pentangle – The Pentangle (1968). Key to the British folk movement (along with Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, et. Al.), Pentangle filtered its original and traditional folk through the jazz colorings of bassist Danny Thompson and guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Broadsides such as “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme” feel modern without losing their pastoral flair, and the band’s own “Pentangling” and “Waltz” showcase their low-key virtuosity.
#GreatAlbums1960s - Small Faces – There Are But Four Small Faces (1968). This US version of the band’s second LP surpassed the original by including “Itchycoo Park,” “Tin Soldier” and “Here Come the Nice” – all pilfered for the singles market in the UK. The moddest of the Mods, the Small Faces bristle with impish energy under Steve Marriott’s bloozy rasp. The Who were more anthemic and Ray Davies was more prolific, but Marriott and the boys held their own in anyone’s fight.
#GreatAlbums1960s - #CrosbyStillsAndNash – Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969). The supertrio’s debut harnessed the strengths of all three members in a set greater than the sum of its parts. Stephen Stills, who plays nearly everything, contributes the folk-prog opener “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Graham Nash leads a hippy singalong on “Marrakech Express.” But the real triumph is David Crosby’s, whose pastoral “Guinnevere” and apocalyptic cowrite “Wooden Ships” hang like ominous shadows.
Great_Albums