Today I Have Been Playing 20th Century Great Recordings
Back in June 1992, Wire magazine listed 100 recordings that defined the 20th century. These are just some I spun and what Wire said.
1969 THE ROLLING STONES Let It Bleed (London/Decca) I wonder how Merry Clayton feels today, when she has the radio on and the verse she took in "Gimme Shelter" comes up - does she think she was ripped off, used and tossed aside, or does she smile at the fact that she has her place in the greatest rock'n'roll recording ever made? There was a whole new way of being in the world in the solo Keith Richards played, just as there was in the licks Car1 Perkins played in "Blue Suede Shoes"; the trouble was, it was a whole new world, too. GM
1968 SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE Dance To The Music (Epic) Of the series of precisely distilled summer evocations that Sly and the Family Stone released between 1967 and 1971, this isn't necessarily the best or the most ambitious, simply the purest, the most stripped down: nothing but music exhausting you and pleading with you to react to more music. Sylvester Stewart started as a teenage DJ in Oakland -at 21 he was producing Beatle soundalikes (the Beau Brummels, the Mojomen); at 23 he'd formed with Family. When Sly asks them - they were, let's face it , Magical Beings, citizens from a paradisiacal 21st century- each to take a turn with their instruments, it's a microcosm of how Summers Of Love SHOULD be. Over time this single - its horns a love parade, it's bass a creature from the psychedelic lagoon - has sometimes seemed naive. At other times (and now is one such), it's seemed uncannily prescient, promising an equality-in-hedonism only just out of reach. KE
1969 SCOTT WALKER Scott 3 (Philips) Still unlike any other singer and songwriter, Walker's astonishing series of largely self-composed records paved the way for the bedsit bards of the 70s but did so with an infinitely grander, more personal, more ambitious music than anything the idiom subsequently achieved for itself. Whether portraying other lives or, seemingly, his own, Scott Engel Walker chronicled his feelings with an elegance and insight that was matched by peerless orchestration, superb production, sumptuous sound-values. It speaks now, sadly, of a vanished time, in record-making as in the songs: orchestras and that great tenor voice will never be recorded this way again, just as the characters of "Big Louise", "Rosemary" and "Butterfly" are lost back there in 1969. But the supernatural chill of "Winter Night" haunts me for all time. RC
1972 STEVIE WONDER Innervisions (Tamla Motown) Despite Wonder's plethora of deeply funky soul recordings there's no dispute that lnnervision is his classic. Inherently tuneful tracks not only groove like crazy but are steeped with not-quite-naive social statements - "Living In The City" the prime example - that make it all the more moving. Introspective, melancholy, sassy and uplifting, it transcends all notions of soul as schmaltz. It may have come out of the fashions of the 70s but it still sounds fresh and relevant in the 90s. Timeless music (the imitations are too numerous to count). LC .. and still is i say!
1972 VARIOUS ARTISTS Nuggets - Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 (Sire) Such was the state of the wannabe nation in those days. Young white America - deeply if incoherently aware of the bankruptcy of the culture and moral order i t was expected to inherit - preferred to believe it wanted to be Brit, not black: helped, of course, by the success of 64-66 (as noted above). Lenny Kaye, future guitarist for Patti Smith, put this together in 1972, rock's first ought-is-not-is stab for a "truer" history than the one we all got. It featured 20 chart should-have-beens - The Mojo Men, The Third Rail, The Strangeloves, Mouse, The Barbarians etc - on the grounds that they'd have invented this sound if the UK hadn't got there first. Would the world have been different if The Cryan Shames - rather than The Beatles had held down the top five places in the US Billboard chart one week in April 1965? Of course not. HG
I have these on CD.
1969 THE ROLLING STONES Let It Bleed (London/Decca) I wonder how Merry Clayton feels today, when she has the radio on and the verse she took in "Gimme Shelter" comes up - does she think she was ripped off, used and tossed aside, or does she smile at the fact that she has her place in the greatest rock'n'roll recording ever made? There was a whole new way of being in the world in the solo Keith Richards played, just as there was in the licks Car1 Perkins played in "Blue Suede Shoes"; the trouble was, it was a whole new world, too. GM
1968 SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE Dance To The Music (Epic) Of the series of precisely distilled summer evocations that Sly and the Family Stone released between 1967 and 1971, this isn't necessarily the best or the most ambitious, simply the purest, the most stripped down: nothing but music exhausting you and pleading with you to react to more music. Sylvester Stewart started as a teenage DJ in Oakland -at 21 he was producing Beatle soundalikes (the Beau Brummels, the Mojomen); at 23 he'd formed with Family. When Sly asks them - they were, let's face it , Magical Beings, citizens from a paradisiacal 21st century- each to take a turn with their instruments, it's a microcosm of how Summers Of Love SHOULD be. Over time this single - its horns a love parade, it's bass a creature from the psychedelic lagoon - has sometimes seemed naive. At other times (and now is one such), it's seemed uncannily prescient, promising an equality-in-hedonism only just out of reach. KE
1969 SCOTT WALKER Scott 3 (Philips) Still unlike any other singer and songwriter, Walker's astonishing series of largely self-composed records paved the way for the bedsit bards of the 70s but did so with an infinitely grander, more personal, more ambitious music than anything the idiom subsequently achieved for itself. Whether portraying other lives or, seemingly, his own, Scott Engel Walker chronicled his feelings with an elegance and insight that was matched by peerless orchestration, superb production, sumptuous sound-values. It speaks now, sadly, of a vanished time, in record-making as in the songs: orchestras and that great tenor voice will never be recorded this way again, just as the characters of "Big Louise", "Rosemary" and "Butterfly" are lost back there in 1969. But the supernatural chill of "Winter Night" haunts me for all time. RC
1972 STEVIE WONDER Innervisions (Tamla Motown) Despite Wonder's plethora of deeply funky soul recordings there's no dispute that lnnervision is his classic. Inherently tuneful tracks not only groove like crazy but are steeped with not-quite-naive social statements - "Living In The City" the prime example - that make it all the more moving. Introspective, melancholy, sassy and uplifting, it transcends all notions of soul as schmaltz. It may have come out of the fashions of the 70s but it still sounds fresh and relevant in the 90s. Timeless music (the imitations are too numerous to count). LC .. and still is i say!
1972 VARIOUS ARTISTS Nuggets - Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 (Sire) Such was the state of the wannabe nation in those days. Young white America - deeply if incoherently aware of the bankruptcy of the culture and moral order i t was expected to inherit - preferred to believe it wanted to be Brit, not black: helped, of course, by the success of 64-66 (as noted above). Lenny Kaye, future guitarist for Patti Smith, put this together in 1972, rock's first ought-is-not-is stab for a "truer" history than the one we all got. It featured 20 chart should-have-beens - The Mojo Men, The Third Rail, The Strangeloves, Mouse, The Barbarians etc - on the grounds that they'd have invented this sound if the UK hadn't got there first. Would the world have been different if The Cryan Shames - rather than The Beatles had held down the top five places in the US Billboard chart one week in April 1965? Of course not. HG
I have these on CD.