1965
Simon and Garfunkel, SOUNDS OF SILENCE
The official origin myth is that rock music is derived from a fusion of the musics of black men working in horrible sweaty conditions, and white men also working in horrible sweaty conditions but at least getting to be called "cowboys" instead of the 1900 equivalent of "dickhead imbeciles". That adequately explains the country/blues megahits of Elvis Presley, as long as we factor in a few geeky electricians who did, after all, invent the necessary equipment (and maybe we also credit the unknown blues innovator whose I-IV-V patterns are as rigidly formalist as any Schoernberg 12-tone irritant). Still, several million eager consumers around 1965, and a few latecoming Gen X stragglers like me, believed that rock could gainfully be infused with certain traditions from ye olde English church, like melodies, harmonies, and for better or worse, clearly articulated words. On their first and best foray into electric rock music, Paul Simon turned a smart Edward Arlington Robinson (I think) poem into intelligent sing-along jangle-rock ("Richard Cory"), and elsewhere, in "I Am A Rock", "Sounds Of Silence", "A Most Peculiar Man" etc, provided tuneful original thought-pieces for overearnest 7th-graders. And frankly, whatever else is wrong with kids today (there is, in any today you care to ask the grownups about, something wrong with kids), it is not too much intellectual earnestness. SOUNDS OF SILENCE is intelligent, thoughful, rock-steady, a classicist model of varied but cohesive pacing, and gorgeously sung; "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and "We've Got A Groovy Thing Going, Baby" even provide an affirmative answer to "Yes, but does it kick ass?" SOUNDS was only the first of many many occasions that the fans were right, the critics a too-hip cadre of curmudgeonly idiots. "I was 21 years when I wrote this harangue/ I'm 24 now, but still can't think of a better rhyme than 'meringue'"... well, mostly idiots.
Eric Dolphy, OUT TO LUNCH
One of the only jazz albums I truly enjoy, and it has to come out just late enough to be here included. I don't understand jazz. This is an acknowledged classic by those who decide these things. And they do consider the title apt enough. You're welcome.
1966
Mothers (Of Invention), FREAK OUT.
Frank Zappa's first album of over 100, and--- I am speaking as someone who actually understands much of the math behind statistical sampling and trend analysis--- almost certainly his best. FREAK OUT is the closest Zappa ever came to deadpan normality, which means that it has many of his best melodies--- indeed, speaking this time as an owner of Zappa's LUMPY GRAVY and ZOOT ALLURES plus a couple of mix-tape samplers a friend made for me, I will even say it contains many of his only melodies. Besides, the Mothers were one great band: tight rhythm section, terrific four-part harmonies, and a rare appreciation of how cool xylophones are. "Anyway The Wind Blows" could be a standout song from a '50's prom, and perhaps so could "Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder", which I consider doo-wop's finest-ever moment and has only one, very mild, sexually perverted line (though imagery like "I've had my heart re-upholstered" is pleasingly off-kilter). "Wowie Zowie", delightful fast-paced bubblegum. might've raised eyebrows back in '66 wih couplets like "Wowie zowie baby you're so neat/ I don't even care if you shave your legs" or "Wowie zowie baby you're so fine/ I don't even care if your Dad's a he", but we are living in a maturer age, aware that rhyming is a useful memory aid but by no means an artistic requirement. "Trouble Every Day" is a 100% serious electric blues protest-song. Kazoos and weird (excellent) melodies bring avant-garde touches to "Hungry Freaks Daddy" and "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here" (aha! a theme song for my Geocities page!). Still, only "Help I'm A Rock", "It Can't Happen Here", and "Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet" (predating "jungle" music by 30 years, and the metal band it's named after by 25) are truly bizarre, and that's the right amount of bizarre. Zappa's liner notes bring to rock the off-putting I'm Better Than You attitude previously confined to classical recitals (e.g., "the song structure on this one is not revolutionary, but it is interesting. You don't care"). But if I intend to praise Yes and Dream Theatre and Squonk Opera for THEIR innovative thefts from 19th-century art music, I can't begrudge Zappa his, and it's an amusing read in a jerkish way. Also enjoy the music.
Beach Boys, PET SOUNDS
Mentioned here due to historical importance, particularly as a direct, enthusiastically acknowledged forebear of LIsa Germano's EXCERPTS FROM A LOVE CIRCUS and Cindy Lee Berryhill's GARAGE ORCHESTRA. I don't get PET SOUNDS. Here we had this nice, inoffensive but catchy band singing songs about the beach and the fun-fun-fun T-Birds whose use required nice new pavement over the beach and whose ozone destruction forced all those lovely California girls to bury themselves under umbrellas, and they were teeny and cute and fun. I don't have their records, but I'm happy to hear "Surfin USA" in passing any ol' time. Suddenly Brian Wilson makes them record this slow, mournful, tinny-souinding set of orchestrations, including this curiously understated cover of David Bowie's "God Only Knows", a completely unnecessary nigh-unto offensive rewrite of Frank Black's classic "Hang On To Your Ego", an admittedly catchy expansion from some TV commercial called "Wouldn't It Be Nice", and as a peak moment, an arrangement of "Sloop John B", which has been around so long no-one even knows who wrote it. It's all pleasant in a depresso way, I guess, but it takes technology that these days is found in Goodwills and doesn't use it very well. Crucial, obselete, let it be.
Okay already... Scene 4, Take 2. The PET SOUNDS review above is not a dumb joke; it's an intelligent joke with serious points to make. That doesn't make it fair. PET SOUNDS really is a good album, with lovingly constructed melodies, orchestrations in which Brian Wilson builds imaginatively on the ground laid by producers Phil Spector and Joe Meek, and song structures that in those days were utterly daring. If I'd heard it in 1966, going forward through time like the initial buyers, I would've gone "Wow!", just when all the real intial buyers were warning their friends "Better skip this one. They've gone crazy". But but current standards, it _is_ tinny--- noticeably more so, in fact, than simutaneous Beatles records. The song structures don't sound unusually daring to me; I have to use my imagination and historical knowledge to recognize that they were. The arrangements _do_ sound wrong when you know other people's versions first (Brian's "God Only Knows" is better than Bowie's, but hearing the original, I can't help missing a couple of the update's better features). The lyrics do nothing for me, and Brian sings them skillfully but is cursed with an unexpressively glib voice. And the first 3 times I heard this album, all I enjoyed was "Sloop John B", and sans headphones (I own them, but am none too reconciled to the concept of "sitting still") I couldn't really tell (shoddy sound has consequences) that the album opened with beautifully-out-of-tune piano-harp plucking or that bicycle bells appeared anywhere. So hearing it in 1998 with no hype, maybe it's a bad album: nothing inherent to the record provokes re-listens. But on the third hand, of course, I already knew better when I wrote that first review. In the context of a decade during which enough smart people have belatedly rallied around the album that I kept listening as a simple game of "Do I see what you see?", it's fine indeed. How many minor albums of the era would be even better if they'd gotten the same treatment? We'll never know; they didn't.
1967
Circus Maximus, WITH JERRY JEFF WALKER
Not the best album of the hippie era, but darn good, and probably the album that most makes me wish I'd been there. Not that marketing executives were feeble and powerless--- I believe WITH JERRY JEFF WALKER was a title appended to later press runs to celebrate him becoming a much bigger solo star than Maximus had managed with him. Fair enough, Jerry Jeff's a great singer, and a large part of what allows this skilled but ordinary band to make such an era-defining record. It was widely taken for granted, in those days when no self-respecting web-addict (had there been such) would have 3-line described his page "Ska!! Ska!! Ska!!", that all forms of music were different points on one continuum, and that anyone could freely drift north and south on it, so that Yes opening for Jimi Hendrix was no odder than Black Sabbath opening for Jethro Tull, or Joan Baez pairing with the increasingly eccentric Bob Dylan. But few bands could manage, with Circus Maximus's aplomb and off-hand skill, to start with a casual blues jam and a proto-thrash-raga guitar solo, flip through jangle-folk and a jazzy outro into the fuzz-noir of "You Know I've Got The Rest Of My Life To Go", followed by the sincere and pleasant life-into-chess metaphor "Chess Game" (yes, I know, how very undergrad), working Broadway-into-jazz piano, a preview of Deep Purple's virtuoso organ/guitar flailings, and a couple of other tricks by album's end, singer reincarnating perfectly for each persona- the one quite useful unifying factor of the album is the ultra-trebly, lightly-echoing guitar picking. Yet the lyrics really grab me. They are slightly-above-ordinary in the same way that Green Day are slightly-above-ordinary for our era, yet they were singing about "Then go off wandering far from tanglement, drifting off in wonderment where time is spent in beauty for itself", or "Look at all the politics we play with our dress/ each actor in the costume for whetever he protests", or simple adequately-phrased urgings to be good to each other, stop getting into pointless conflicts, and go solve real problems. And by and large, people didn't laugh! (Well, I hope they laughed at the attempted metaphor "I killed a young girl/ I found a woman", which does conjure images of capturing and dissecting cannibals for biology class). So their generation gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Environental Protection Agency, and the last-minute cancellation of Nixon's orders to nuke Vietnam (Operation Duck Hook, look it up). My generation is the audience that bought 130-page Entertainment Weekly special editions filled with "Seinfeld" factoids, then whined because the show's finale tried to make them think. Teen spirit smells real different these days. Too much carbon monoxide? Too much bull manure? Our rock stars dress as sexlessly now as then, so it can't be pheromones...
Beatles, SGT PEPPER
So here we come to what IS the best album of the hippie era--- look, I'm happy to endorse lost-to-the-ages nothings, but I won't force it. The Beatles had already invented the power-pop genre and become major stars by doing it better than anyone else would until the late '70's, so they needed to grow and change and, well, if you don't know the story, it's an easy one to learn about. Most of the albums of the era that sound credible these days are the folky ones, competing with the Luddites of the current generation on even terms. The amazing thing about SGT PEPPER is that it _still_ sounds amazing 30+ years later having influenced half the most talented songwriters who followed.
Beatles, MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
Short-term, of course, the most obvious effect of SGT PEPPER's effortfully effervescent stew of pop, cabaret, raga, strings, and calliope was that the Beatles were so creatively exhausted that they took more than half a year to record their next album, which doesn't really have any stone-cold classics except the beautifully avant-garde "Strawberry Fields Forever" and the raucous lunacy of "I Am The Walrus". And maybe the french-horn tinged hometown reminiscence "Penny Lane", and no one had really heard anything quite like the chords and phasing and note-eliding of "Blue Jay Way" before. But the rest is just quite good, and that's all. By 1969 the Beatles would even be down to 1 album per year, and the end was nigh.
Mothers (Of Invention), ABSOLUTELY FREE
Frank Zappa's 2nd album (of over 100), and probably still his 2nd best, and even that's a demotion based only on its being 20 minutes shorter than the 2-LP FREAK OUT. Funny, brilliant, and weirder than before, ABSOLUTELY FREE mixes rock'n'roll with free jazz with satiric silliness, styles that soon Zappa would wrongly begin to differentiate. "Plastic People" insults popular, successful people to mutated "Louie, Louie" music; "Duke Of Prunes" combines piano flash with a merrily ridiculous love song; "Call Any Vegetable", which surrounds the 7-minute jazz instrumental "Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin", is extraordinary, part song and part pitchman at work, the finest homage to the essential humanity of our green leafy friends ever set to disc (hmm... after that Circus Maximus review, I'd better specify that Zappa and I are both joking, shouldn't I?). "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" is maybe 20 songs in one, a cheerfully mean precursor to They Might Be Giants' "Fingertips". "Status Back Baby" sounds like a good Sesame Street song, with lyrics from the perspective of a school-spirited high schooler who probably hasn't outgrown the show. An album both for lovers of experimental pop, and for people who have lots of grudges left over from high school.
Fifty Foot Hose, CAULDRON
And of course, 1967 marks the invention of synth-pop, in the form of Fifty Foot Hose, the most sonically experimental band rock had yet seen, whose album is, as of this writing, in print (the nice thing about music is how many businessmen in it seem blissfully unaware of the profit motive). Like United States Of America--- the band, see below, not the worthy nation which invented the Constitution, the Itchy and Scratchy Show, and Baskin-Robbins--- 50FH designed their own, state-of-the-art electronic instruments to create wild soundscapes for usually female-sung melodies. Their range was daring, from the insanely abrasive, catchy single "Bad Trip" to the proto-Hawkwind space jam "Fantasy" to a respectful though bizarre cover of Billie Holliday's "God Bless The Child" to the spooky/funny unparalleled "Cauldron" to the weird conflicting time signatures of the great "If Not This Time". 50FH were ordinary lyricists (of a trippy bent, big shock), didn't show much humor, and had the poor judgment to start the album with a continuous 2:05 drone. Still, if you want a variety-pak of unique, out-of-time soundscapes to hum along with, this is a CD worth special-ordering.
1968
United States Of America, S/T
The Greatest Lost Band of the '60's, as far as I know, which isn't very becuase most of those bands have been lost. USA featured five musicians with avant-garde cred as composers, inventors of instruments, and players, yet they could have been a pop success as easily as not. "American Metaphysical Circus" sounds like the Beatles' "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite" made ominous and cosmic (a good late-60's word, that); "Garden Of Earthly Delight", "Hard Coming Love", and "Coming Down" have the feel of good Doors songs, though Manzarek's keyboards are replaced by mind-bending electronics, and USA singer Dorothy Moskowitz doesn't over-emote. "I Wouldn't Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar" plays the knob-twiddling for maximum goofiness behind a great musical-comedy-ish celebration of perverted sex. "Stranded In Time" is a fine, understated McCartney-like tune with incisive lyrics. "Cloud Song" foreshadows Enya's best work, and Enya ships quadruple platinum. But USA were overcredentialled, and soon became a 1-album rarity. This one's been reissued on CD too though. Will wonders please never cease.
Lothar and the Hand People, S/T
An enjoyably minor time-capsule affair, in which five suburban guys from Connecticut take second billing to their theremin, the instrument played by waving your hands over it that provided so many of the best ooky-spook horror-movie music. My favorite songs are the silliest: "Machines" has an apt clanking rhythm while the guys sing in deep smiling-clown voices about being enslaved by technology, and "Sex & Violence" is mostly a capella harmony-pop consisting entirely of lyrics like "Sex and violence. Se-e-ex and violence. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, violence! I love it!". The rest is straight harmonized country-pop like the Everly Brothers (including a cover of "Bye Bye Love") with a theremin and voices like reasonably earnest cartoons. The Everly Brothers made nifty records. This may be niftier. Use this info as you will.
Giles, Giles, and Fripp, THE CHEERFUL INSANITY OF...
Another enjoyably minor time-capsule affair, made even nicer by the fact that Robert Fripp, here making his first LP appearance, would soon become, as King Crimson leader, one of modern music's foremost dazzling innovators and pretentious assholes (not that, if I liked his music more, I wouldn't regard the first description as more than justifying the second). CHEERFUL INSANITY, a true team effort, is another of the immediate post-SGT PEPPER fallout, one of the more technically modest ones (post-REVOLVER fallout, do I mean?), comparable to Elephant's Memory or OGDEN'S NUT GONE FLAKE by the Small Faces. Many of the songs integrate clearly jazz melodic ideas to the more lush and relaxed of the Beatle experiments, or in "Erudite Eyes"'s case, consist entirely of fiery jazz-rock playing, kind of a primitive model of Crimson's LARKS' TONGUE IN ASPIC. The elegant "How Do They Know" and "the Sun Is Shining" could pass for Burt Bacharach compositions. "Newly-Weds" and "One In A Million" use flutes; the former song is driven by heavily phased fretless bass and a slow, careful, piano/ fuzz-bass duet, while the latter is focused on a clipped, barely-sung narration celebrating a man who "doesn't have a point of view. Maybe he's wrong, maybe he's right, he's one in a million" (in case you didn't believe me when I said the '60's were different; by current estimates this man is 768,124 in a million). "Thursday Morning" has strings and wrong-miked vocals and a Moody Blues loveliness. "Suite #1" is just that, with a guitar solo attempting to provide a new standard for those just a bit tired of "Flight Of The Bumblebee" fading into a part II where the one-note-per-2-measures rhythm guitar moves to the front with strings, which slowly is taken over by a harpsichord piece, which blends seamlessly into a simpler guitar solo partly refrcting the first movement. "The Crukster" could be one of Ken Nordine's silly intoned beat-jazz thingies, while the five-part "Saga Of Rodney Toady" and four-part "Just George" are amusing 10-to-30 second doses of spoken-word that are too brief to ever become annoying, at least if (like me) you're pleased enough to hear pleasant-voiced British fellows playing around with exaggerations of their own accents. This skillful, attractive album is as far from a stylistic manifesto as anything I could name, but it's also far too gentle to approach chaos; it's 45 minutes of "here's some stuff we've come up with, do you like it?".
Kinks, ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY
I keep using the term "melodic" or "tuneful", and that's vague enough to warrant a moment of pondering. After all, technically, Metallica are highly melodic, for rarely if ever does James Hetfield sing more than 3 or 4 syllables without moving to a new pitch, usually as a precursor to extending the melody yet further by also moving his voice back to the original note! Then there's bands like Social Distortion or Bad Religion (I don't seem to be thinking "the sixties" as I write this particular essay), who use more, er, tuneful tunes, more different notes given more production emphasis. They aren't quite what I mean either, though--- they use the same tunes over and over with mild variations, the same tunes as each other even, and that doesn't rule out quality records but it does lead to the thought that color-by-numbers pictures requiring 4 crayons aren't ultimately more challenging than those requiring just 2. The true melodists are the ones who regularly make modestly unusual note-to-note or chord-to-chord progressions, and who once in a while make a seriously daring juxtaposition of notes--- and it works. Furthermore, I give bonus points if, rather than repeating the same daring melody line 20 times a song, they unfold continuous streams of melody. If, that is, they sound like the Kinks on ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN etc. The instrumentation is light and a bit beyond power-trio limits, not quite rock but definitely rollicking. Breezy high-pitched male vocals tell of "people taking pictures of each other/ to prove that they really existed" and other features of modern versus olden times, in an attitude poised between ridicule and earnestness without ever deciding which direction to jump in. It's cute, infinitely likeable, a little bit discomfiting in its thoughts, and enough fun to whistle that I'd excuse it for much worse sins than it ever bothers to commit. It's not a timeless classic exactly--- something about late-60's recordings enable them to simultaneously reveal lush ambitions and a nonetheless thin sound that I've never encountered in later records--- but that's okay. It's a classic in a nostalgiacally time-locked way. Which is sort of the album's concept in the first place.
Ian and Sylvia, NASHVILLE
After wasting their wonderful singing on maybe ten albums of uninspired (but fairly popular) '60's folk, Ian & Sylvia turned country (not a promising notion) and went to using electric guitars (nice, but the electric pieces on Continuous Country Classics Radio were almost as awful as the acoustics when my job required me to listen all day). They came up with NASHVILLE, and it's brilliant. Parts of it are unclassifiably eclectic: "Southern Comfort" starts with gorgeous and astonishingly complex 2-part harmony over classical guitar, slips easily into hard country, then winds up with Ian sing-speaking over intricate jazzy interplay between drums, bass, and steel guitar. "House Of Cars" sounds like the best of John Mellencamp's SCARECROW plus female vocals and a wordless-harmony bridge. But even the country ranges from definitive hook-filled versions of two Dylan songs; through "Takin' Care Of Business", which melds three separate tempos and styles of country, shifting in logical accord to the lyrics; to "Renegade", a quiety strummed song of a political American Indian driven to drunken suicide when his Mom marries a white man. The straight electric C+W is good too, catchy. If it weren't for folks who keep challenging my safe dislikes, I'd spend a lot less money. I'd be less happy, too. Damn.
Beatles, THE BEATLES (PARTS 1 + 2)
Or, the White Album. Have you ever noticed how one of the favortite music-description adjectives is "Beatlesque", a.k.a. "Beatles-styled" or "Beatlesy"? That would already be the world's bizarrest adjective if it only was put to the task of finding a common element between "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (teenage guitar blare with some neato chord changes), "Eleanor Rigby" (reflective lyrics over energized string quartet), "Blue Jay Way" (slow tuneful space-out), "Lovely Rita" (Paul McCartney as smoothie 1930's vaudeville crooner), "Within You Without You" (George Harrison's lovably naive demonstration that "Look! I have a sitar!"), "Good Morning" (teenage sound-effect-laden blare with neato dynamic shifts), and "Tomorrow Never Knows" (a hundred quiet loops go in and out). With THE BEATLES, the band decided to play Back To Basics, though, so we have to add to the equation loopy children's song ("Rocky Raccoon"), riffology 101 ("Birthday"), riffology 101 extra credit doo-wop graft ("Revolution #!"), blues ("Why Don't We Do It In The Road?"), folk croon ("Julia"), lullably ("Dear Prudence"), cheeky parodies of MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR ("Glass Onion", "Back In The U.S.S.R."), and the first endless, but kinda cool, noise-and-samples meander ever to go multiplatinum ("Revolution #9"). Ooh, that's clear. But THE BEATLES is a ninety-minute package of music, containing one great record and one good one, and no, Virginia, there is not and never has been a "next Beatles". Actually I think "Revolution #9" was the only bit of the form to go platinum until Pearl Jam's "Stupid Mop", which came on the same album as lots of ponderous heavy rock, a couple rave-ups, and a paranoid accordian rant; does that make Pearl Jam the new Beatles? If so, I sincerely thank them for trying, but we need to check the warranty very closely.
Chad & Jeremy, OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
The Beatles apparently saw SGT PEPPER and MYSTERY TOUR as a Tale Of Two Cities-ish riot of excess requiring them to lead their own Thermodorian reaction into twenty-three different sets of rigid diktats (sorry there, but in '60's rock, pointless evocations of French Revolution historiography were just the sort of thing that was chic). Fortunately, other people saw them as challenges: how can _We_ expand rock's frontiers, they asked. Chad & Jeremy, for example, had been releasing gentle acoustic folk songs in favor of love and whatever hints at sex could be managed without worrying the censors. But in 1968, they peeled the shrinkwrap off a new Swiss-army-knife's worth of sonic tricks and pasted them into: A Concept Album on Modernity! And you know what? It's pretty friggin' neat! Part of the mix is an intelligent version of cliched 1968--- the delightful Lewis Carroll-inspired psychedelic color and their hippie clothes, the chessboard back cover, the peace + love idealism, titles like "Gentle Cold Of Dawn" and "The Progress Suite, Movements 1 thru 5", cutely parent-baiting acknowledgements of sexuality, and the fact that most of the phasing, orchestration, adventurous melodies et al are still presented genially and softly. Yet we also see a cliched 1992--- celebrating the deaths of devoted company men (albeit in adorably good-natured and empathetic it's-for-their-own-good manner), the shrugged proto-"whatever"s on the back cover ("At various times on this record Chad can be heard playing guitar, banjo, organ, tack piano, ukelin, and sitar. Ooh. Big deal"), and foreshadowing doom (movements 1-5 of "Progress Suite" are "Prologue, Decline, Editorial, Fall, Epilogue", and parts of that are _not_ gentle). What ultimately counts is that they really do know how to orchestrate a powerful side-long suite; that they really do have nice voices; that the commentary honestly is fairly clever; that there's a lot to hum. 1968 or 1368, that's a lot to admire.
1969
Chad & Jeremy, THE ARK
Nonetheless, it pleases me that in 1969 Chad & Jeremy reversed the standard course of that year by becoming more optimistic, less cynical, friendlier, as witnessed even by comparing opening tracks: OF CABBAGES's "Rest In Peace" has an untertaker discoursing pleasantly on why it's really just as well that boring people eventually run out of mortal coil, THE ARK's "the Emancipation Of Mr. X" tells of a businessman racing out of his office one day to frolic in a pond and have fun for the first time in his life (til the whitecoats come to take him away, ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee). Because getting their cynicism out of the way left them ready to make an expansive, warm album just as they were really getting expert at their new mode. OF CABBAGES, much as I like it, shows many traces of their wuss-music past, and they honestly weren't as good at that as their competitors had been anyway; the frequent left turns in the arrangements work maybe 50% of the time and prompt an "at least they're trying" shrug the other 50%; and the "Progress Suite", though excellent, begs the question of "isn't this the Pop/Rock bin?". THE ARK is a pop record, and reasonably close to flawless.
Come to think of it, my rhetorical question ending my PET SOUNDS review has at least one answer: I'd love it if THE ARK had occupied the historical niche Brian Wilson instead claimed. True, it came three crowded years later; I think its advances justify it. The similarities are all praiseworthy ones: the medlodic reach and depth, the wide use of non-standard rock instruments like flute and violin and piano, the abandonment of formulaic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-fade. Chad and Jeremy also brought in, intelligently and purposefully, sitar and banjo and all manner of African drums. They often set their widely expressive, pleasant vocal harmonies into rounds, conflicting rhythms, and the exploitation of creative miking and the ability to place sounds so they sound like they're coming from right by your ear, or out from Monty Python's concept of a Nuremberg rally (parts of "You Need Feet"), or from under a stifling pillow, or a cross-the-room stage whisper, or just from conversational distance (most often)--- indeed, this remains one of pop's finest vocal-arrangements albums. The instruments occasionally switch into dissonance, or flip major/minor, for just a note or a measure or two to lend effect, without disrupting the pop vibe. The playing is excellent, and I see no reason why young folk/classical guitar students shouldn't be carefully striving to master the lines from "Sidewalk Requiem" or "Pantheistic Study For Guitar And Large Bird". THE ARK is also one of the first albums to link every song together, and one of the few to do it for any better reason than "It's, like, possible, y'know?". All told, this is great art for the fun of it. Then they broke up to do other fun things they liked better (acting, production). Good for them!
Beatles, ABBEY ROAD
Side 2 of this album, of course, was another experiment in Let's Link All The Songs Together. In this case the reason was that the Beatles had all these nifty songs they didn't know how to (or just didn't want to) individually finish, and thus "Mean Mr. Mustard", "Polythene Pam", "Carry That Weight", and especially "You Never Give Me Your Money" joined the ranks of pop's greatest fragments (Guided By Voices' brilliant BEE THOUSAND was a later full-album take on the concept, but using 25 years of improved technology to sound far more inventively crappy than what the Beatles were using _their_ production genius to avoid). Meanwhile, "Come Together" and the last few minutes of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" are founding alloys of heavy metal, "the Octopus's Garden" is one of the most blissful classics in pop history, "Something" and "Here Comes The Sun" and "Golden Slumbers" are delicate pop songs like the Beatles long did so well, "Because" has a nice distorted harpsichord, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" lets Paul McCartney unload both his beer-hall singalong and serial-killer impulses (killing two birds, Brit slang meaning, with one stone?), and "Oh! Darlin" lets John Lennon oversing horribly and still manages to be good. Kind of mean of the Beatles to steal my album-of-the-year award from a duo that needed it more, but if the sky falls, I doubt this will be the reason.
Shaggs, PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD
I had doubts about this album. How could I not? Recorded by three pre-teen sisters, called "the worst band in the world" and suchlike by its _own fans_ (including Ornette Coleman and Michael Stipe), this could easily have been the music equivalent of Plan 9 From Outer Space, which I regard as a movie so bad it's bad, simple. But drummer Helen Wiggin doublehandedly makes this record a delight. Here I was, going through life passively praising drummers like Neal Peart and John Bonham and Simon Crowe and, who's that guy from the Beyond?, Neal Cooper, and suddenly I heard the Shaggs and realized: I have been one of the Talent Fascists (a good band name if you need one, btw). When standard-ideology drummers drum, their work is part of the song (one song at once), or maybe a solo (zero songs at once). The Shaggs' Ms. Wiggin drums, loudly and enthusiastically, to some completely separate, otherwise inaudible song: two for the time and price of one. So simple! So right! She makes "My Pal Foot Foot" and "Philosophy Of The World" instant classics! A pity the rest of the music is jangle-pop which, despite the uniquely inadvertent voice/guitar style, gets samey real fast. But I can live with it.
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