Date: May 29, 1969
Release: Rhino / WEA #73290
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The ultimate Sixties supergroup, CSN‘s 1969 self-titled debut masterfully ushered in the singer-songwriter era. Comprised of veteran Byrd David Crosby, Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, and ex-Hollies vocalist Graham Nash, CSN proved the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With peerless vocal harmonies, song writing and melodic style, the trio (later expanded to include Neil Young) would rightfully become America’s most revered rock group between 1969-1971.
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Date: 1972-1975
Release: Collectables #5202
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Like Jimi Hendrix, the eight members of Cymande were all phenomenally adept self-taught musicians. And also like Hendrix, they were masters at synthesizing funk, soul, blues, and psychedelic sounds, creating a music that resists any convenient labeling. They could funk on a reggae groove, put a heavy dose of soul into a psychedelic jam, and lay down some bluesy riffs around a Caribbean spiced vocal.
Cymande‘s members came from Guyana, Jamaica, and St.Vincent, and they imported a strong island vibe into their cosmic sound. This album is at once raw and polished, extraordinarily diverse, and consistently grooving. The tunes run the gamut from the hypnotic Santana-influenced instrumental, “Dove,” to the New Orleans funk of “The Message,” which actually made it to #22 on the domestic R&B charts in 1974. The spectacularly funky “Bra” was included on Spike Lee‘s highly recommended “Crooklyn” soundtrack.
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Date: Jun 1, 1972 – Jun 6, 1972 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #63980
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An electrified and multidimensional burst of ass-shaking funk straight from the master himself. If Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix took a space ship to India together, they very well might have come up with something approximating On The Corner.
This utterly unique and unprecedented recording was savaged by a lot of the critics of its day. They blasted Miles for creating a new “anti-jazz” that fundamentally violated the genre’s integrity. Reviled as the jazz anti-Christ, his playing on this recording was indeed demonic. His trumpet spits out wah-wah distorted licks of fire and nastiness, and he grinds on the organ like it was a cheap date. He masterfully tangles and intertwines the varied sounds of the sitar, conga, electric guitar, tabla, organ, and electric bass to create thickly-layered rhythms of dazzling complexity. He throws in some heavy licks on top of it all, hitting hard with quick and punchy bursts from his horn that make the groove throb.
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Date: Feb 6, 1970 – Dec 19, 1970 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #65135
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There’s something about the way this music hits me. It’s not as if I haven’t been exposed to lots of hard, loud music – in fact, compared to some of the stuff that now gets called “fusion,” Miles Davis’ version can often seem quaint on the surface. At the time of the shows documented on this 1970 set, he was playing with a new band (something he was doing more often than in any period of his life theretofore), and playing music that, while broached in the previous couple of years by himself and very few others, was rather unheard of to most music listeners of the time, and certainly the canonical jazz guard.
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Date: 1968
Release: EPIC #EK 26420
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A memorable album filled with folk-tinged psychedelic pop gems by the man once touted as the British answer to Bob Dylan. While Donovan Leitch lacked the depth of Dylan, he certainly was capable of crafting catchy hits that were both cosmic and clever. Hurdy Gurdy Man is a prime example of Donovan’s creative powers. The title track, an enduring classic of the late ’60s, combines loud-guitars with mystical lyrics to great affect. The album’s second major hit, “Jennifer Juniper,” frolicks along with its flowery arrangements, precious melodies, broken French, and bouncing rhythms. This track begs you to dust off your love beads and skip through the forest with your true love holding hands.
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Date: October 21, 1970
Release: COLUMBIA CK 30290
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A finely crafted album of diverse and heartfelt songs. With New Morning, Dylan discards obscure and impenetrable lyrics for emotionally accessible songs about love and life. The title track sounds like a blueprint of what would become Van Morrison’s trademark semi-acoustic soul sound of the early 70s. In “Sign on the Window,” Dylan sings about the virtues of settling down and starting a family, which is exactly what he tried to do around this time with the birth of his now famous son, Jakob. “The Man In Me” reveals an openly self-critical side to Dylan, who admits that “it takes a woman like you/to get through to the man in me.” Backed by a soulful chorus of female singers, this song is an absolute classic, and was used to great effect in the Coen brother’s “The Big Lebowski.” Other highlights include the spare “Three Angels,” with its atmospheric organ and gospel-tinged chorus, the comic jazz-blues of “If Dogs Run Free,” and the classic Dylan cynicism of “Went to See the Gypsy.”
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Date: 1970
Release: WESTBOUND
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One of the few instances where a band’s name totally describes its sound. With their 1970 self-titled debut album, we hear the raw funk rhythms of the Meters collide with the psychedelic soul sounds of Jimi Hendrix, giving rise to the musical revolution that was Funkadelic. A raw and nasty musical manifesto loudly expressing the madness of King George Clinton, founding father to the “extraterrestrial brothers” of Funkadelic and Parliament. This album is designed to answer the one burning question it asks in the title of the first track: “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” Definitive bits of Clinton’s strange take on the universe are to be found throughout this hard-grooving acid-trip of an album, such as “soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper,” and “I got a thing / you got a thing / everybody’s got a thing.”
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Date: March 24, 1971 (release)
Release: Polygram International #548429
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“Ugliness has more going for it than beauty. It endures.”
Serge Gainsbourg
“The man who looked like a louche turtle cross-bred with a dissipated, chain-smoking wolf was also a singer, songwriter, actor, painter, cutting-edge composer, Eurovision Song Contest winner, novelist, screnwriter, film director, provocateur, sentimentalist, populist, intellectual, and the single most important person in the history of French pop music.”
Sylvie Simmons, Mojo Magazine
I wish I could speak better French, so that I might fully understand the words on Histoire de Melody Nelson. According to my trusted French friends, Gainsbourg’s lyrics are pure poetry, Read more »
Date: September 17, 1969 (recording)
Release: Verve #2668
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Heavily accented, hesitantly breathy and child-like, Astrud Gilberto‘s vocals never fail to seduce me. As I play her records (particularly this one), I obsessively pore over the album photos, falling for the sweet faced girl with the adorable voice. An accidental star with no professional training, Astrud was catapulted to fame after singing on the bossa nova crossover hit, “The Girl From Ipanema.” The story is that her then husband, Brazilian singer-songwriter Joao Gilberto, was in the studio with saxophonist Stan Getz, when producer Creed Taylor suggested they record “Ipanema” in English in order to give the song a better chance at cracking the charts. By sheer luck, Astrud was the only Brazilian in the room with a sufficient grasp of the language to give it a shot.
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Date: Nov 10, 1969 (release)
Release: Warner Brothers #1830
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They were the longest-running continuous circus on Earth, and in the end, not even the main attraction at the show. They were a touchstone of controversy; an industry of merchandise and a free exchange; a hippie (then neo-hippie) theme park and gypsy caravan all rolled into one. They inspired a new catch-all suffix for obsession. Such is the English language, and such were the Dead.
The party is long over now. I went to my first and only Dead show in 1991 during a break in my freshman year of college. I was never a huge fan, but with the advent of my short-lived pot-smoking days, I had become interested in the scene and decided to check out a show before Jerry checked out permanently. Before I came home from Buffalo for the vacation, I drove out to the Indian reservation and bought a couple cartons of cigarettes. A week later I was hanging out in the parking lot of Giants (as Deadheads called Giants Stadium in New Jersey), trading packs of smokes for beers and joints. It was a good deal, a fine experiment in the Deadhead tradition, and an experience just as I’d hoped for. I got a glimpse into that world and understood the allure.
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