The Soft Machine (1968)

Just in case you thought this was turning into a classic rock rehash blog, here's one you don't see every day. The Soft Machine, despite initial early promise, never exceeded cult-following status in the States and was probably just too weird for the rest of the world. Nowadays they are considered the keystone band of the "Canterbury Scene", an off-the-beaten-path subgenre of prog rock, but way back around 1967 they were often mentioned in the same breath as much better know (today) bands like the Pink Floyd. They also opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience during an early American tour, an experience (no pun intended) that would alter the band's direction early on.

The early Soft Machine had two strong band members: Daevid Allen and Kevin Ayers. Due to circumstances I can't fully claim to understand, Allen left the band and formed the Continental-based Gong and all of its myriad related bands. This happened before the first Soft Machine album. Meanwhile, the band forged on, but the Hendrix tour wrecked Ayers to the point of contemplating quitting music altogether. Thanks to a personal appeal from Hendrix himself he would alter course into his own solo career, but still sever his connections with Soft Machine. However, he is present on this album, largely in a bass-playing role. Once Allen had quit, the band veered into a guitarless direction and became one of the very few guitarless trios that predated ELP.

The songs of the first album are undoubtedly weird, but still mostly grounding in 1960's rock. Ayers is the principal songwriter, and, as is solo career would later demonstrate, his tended to bundle his strangeness into groupings, so you get very weird ethereal stuff next to straight-ahead stuff. The "stable" feeling of the first album may also have something to do with the unlikely connection to Animals alumni Chas Chandler and Tom Wilson handling production duties.

The next album, which I found packaged with this one, is much different, with the Ayer-less band under the full sway of Frank Zappa. That fad in turn would give way to instrumental jazz, pushing the band far, far away from the mainstream. Eventually new band members would replace every single original member, giving Soft Machine the rare distinction of shedding its entire original membership (dating back to the first album anyway). Honestly, I've got bigger fish to fry than to try to hunt down the ten or so Soft Machine albums of the 1970's, but certain folks may find a strange appeal in them. For now, best to stick to the first album, and perhaps the early Kevin Ayers solo albums.

By the way, that's the British cover you see above. The American one airbrushed on a bikini. The human form has always been...challenging for us Americans.

Let It Bleed (The Rolling Stones, 1969)

Let It Bleed is the first Rolling Stones studio album I acquired and to this day I still recommend to those discerning to start with this album following some kind of greatest-hits package of the 1960's output. You get a good handful of hit songs - "Midnight Rambler", "You Can't Always Get What You Want", "Gimme Shelter" - plus some surprisingly good sleepers like "Monkey Man" and the first-ever all-Richards vocal outing, "You Got the Silver".

As observed with the Who the other day, the end of the sixties marked a big transitional moment, as the old "British Invasion" bands faded away and a new crop of hard rock bands rose up to take their place. The Stones had followed the familiar pattern of transforming from R&B to psych around 1966-1967, then promptly switching back to basics in the following year. Psych was never really their thing, as evidenced by the ridiculous Their Satanic Majesties Request. Let It Bleed follows right on the heels of the reactionary Beggar's Banquet. It's a musically sophisticated album (not everything was rolled back), but stripped of the ill-advised psych influences that led them astray a couple years back. There's still some nods to the past music, but the path is clearly laid out for what was to come. Rarely does a "transitional" album stand out so well, rather than end up half-baked.

Let It Bleed is also the final album to feature Brian Jones. Admittedly, his contributions were marginalized over the past year. The album was released after his death, but some of the recordings were cut a few months prior, so he's there, just in a very limited capacity. No "Paint It, Black" moments of instrumental genius here. Soon to be Rolling Stone (and ex-Bluesbreaker) Mick Taylor is also on the album, but mostly in a session-man capacity, playing on only a couple songs. Future albums, with Taylor fully on board, would further lead the Stones' sound to a more hard/country blues sound that they would be known for in the early 1970's.

Who's Next (The Who, 1971)

I won't be the first to say this, but the Who is truly one of the most surprising bands in rock history. I consider them one of the six foundational bands of the British Invasion. The were probably the most mod-influenced of them, and benefited from strong songwriting and musicianship, particularly from the overpowering Entwistle-Moon rhythm section. By 1970, three of the bands (The Beatles, The Animals, and The Yardbirds) were gone. While the Kinks and the Rolling Stones sought refuge in more rootsy territory (albeit in completely different ways), the Who, surprisingly moved comfortably into a new cohort of British hard rockers.

The Who's 1960's output is a lot of fun to listen to, but one gets a sense of a certain unsteadiness, and sometimes a sense of juvenile lyrics, which would hamper their ability to get serious songs like "I Can See for Miles" taken seriously. By 1968 they seemed to be falling behind their contemporaries, but then surprised the world with the "first" "rock opera", Tommy. There were still plenty of goofy-Who moments, but they were more tucked away inside a serious framework crafted by Pete Townshend. Not bad for a group that just the previous year was noodling around with "Magic Bus" and "Call Me Lightning".

Who's Next is decidedly NOT a rock opera, or concept album, though nestled between two of them (Quadrophenia being the other bookend). However its roots are in the failed "Lifehouse" project, and it isn't hard to detect the elements of some kind of unified work throughout the album. Sometimes the lyrics give it away, though most people didn't seem particularly bothered that they didn't know who "Sally" was in "Baba O'Reilly". Most clearly though it a powerful, simple riff that ripples through many of the songs on the album. I can't replicate it here in text but it shows up in most of the songs. Speaking of "powerful", maybe it's because they were coming off the Live at Leeds album (hailed as the loudest performance in rock history), but there is a lot more juice pumping through the album than previous ones. Yet it also has a "cold" feel to it, largely stripped of the old mod sounds and more sequenced keyboard sounds. Even the cover (look closely) has a certain bleakness not characteristic of earlier Who album artwork. This is an album of re-invention by a band that was already back on the upswing.

I'm kind of a latecomer to Who's Next. I've heard most of the songs on classic rock radio, and most of the songs work just fine on their own. I have not heard Townshend's resurrection of Lifehouse, which is such a gargantuan box set I wouldn't even know where to begin. Other than Tommy, in fact, I really didn't feel much motivation to invest in any Who albums until maybe around ten years back, as the greatest hits and regular radio rotation sufficed. The earlier albums have a lot of little surprises and The Who Sell Out was a particularly enjoyable listening experience once I got around to it. I can't say the much colder Who's Next provided me with the same warm fuzzies, but then again it's probably more the result of the album being a victim of its own success. All but two or three of the songs are radio regulars, and those oddballs don't offer much more.