Barclay James Harvest

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Fifty Year Friday: November 1972

STEELY DAN: CAN’T BUY A THRILL

Released in November of 1972, this is the first of Donald Fagen’s and Walter Becker’s string of excellent albums. The music ranges from pop to rock to folk-rock to jazz-based rock with engaging and intelligent chord progressions and a healthy use of minor seventh and ninth chords.

THE EDGAR WINTER GROUP: THEY ONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT

Skillfully produced by Rick Derringer, this is Edgar Winter’s most solid album with a number of songs that for the rest of 1972 and early into 1973 found a prominent place on AM radio, FM radio, at high school parties, or in the repertoire of high school dance bands. “Hangin’ Around”, “Free Ride”, “We All Had a Real Good Time” and the instrumental “Frankenstein” are hard rock classics that have effectively captured and preserved the spirit of early seventies hard rock, providing, today, an effortless means for us to travel back in time fifty years ago.

LOU REED: TRANSFORMER

Released on November 8, 1972, Lou Reed’s Transformer excels at creating a level of nonchalance and casualness that was more reminiscent of the beat movement of the 1950s than typical of an early 70’s rock album. Aided by David Bowie, Mick Ronson and Trever Bolder and elegantly produced by Bowie and Ronson, this album, along with the success of its glam, transexual and sometimes banned single, “Walk on the Wild Side”, brought Lou Reed out of the shadows of the Underground and into the commercial spotlight. The album is considered a classic by many and has had substantial influence on many Indie Rock artists that came later.

WAR: THE WORLD IS A GHETTO

War’s fifth studio album, released around November of 1972, opens with the once relentlessly-played AM single, “Cisco Kid”, which though annoying for those of us that heard it in spring of 1973 played through third-rate speakers of a school bus for multiple weeks almost every morning on our ride to school, was a welcome relief from the equally often-played, but far less bearable “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ol’ Oak Tree.” That said, now hearing “Cisco Kid” on a first-class audio set up almost fifty years later, the quality of performance and the arrangement almost make up for the melodic and harmonic mediocrity of the track. More importantly though, the rest of the album is quite good, starting with the infectious, funky “Where was You At” and the effervescent jazz-infused 13 1/2 minute “City Country City” instrumental on side one and the three tracks on side two including the soulfully reflective “Four Cornered Room”, and the beautifully funk-infused, “The World is a Ghetto.” This was not only War’s most commercially successful album, but the best selling album for the year 1973 holding the number one position for two weeks in February 1973 and staying on the Billboard 200 for a total of 68 weeks.

JONI MITCHELL: FOR THE ROSES

Released in November of 1972 between two of her most artistically and commercially successful albums, 1971’s Blue and 1974’s Spark and Court, the excellent For the Roses brims over with wonderful melodic phrases, remarkable piano lines, and beautiful acoustic guitar and an appropriate amount of harmonica, bass, percussion, winds and strings — always at the right places!

CAN: EGE BAMYASI

Can’s highly influential album, Ege Bamyasi, with the name apparently inspired from the label of a container of canned okra of Turkish origin also meant for German consumption of these “okra pods”, takes a detour from the previous no-holds-barred and even more influential Tago Mago, with an often more structured (via editing in some cases) and relatively more contained set of compositions. Not readily available in the US, I purchased this album in a German record store in 1978, and listened to it once before shelving it for several decades. It’s great to come back and revisit it and find there is much more here than I thought — and to discover the influence it has had on music since my original purchase, with Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and the band Spoon all having been much more serious fans of the album and reaping music influences from it. Truly fortunate to revisit the album and able to enjoy it on a much better audio set up than I had in 1978.

Uriah Heep, Moody Blues, Carly Simon, Hawkwind, and Barclay James Harvest

Other notable albums from November 1972 include Uriah Heep’s semi-progressive Magician’s Birthday with a memorable Moog synthesizer solo from Ken Hensley on “Sweet Loraine” (reaching the 91st spot on the Billboard Hot 100) and a more expansive title track concluding the album, Hawkwind’s third studio album, Doremi Fasol Latido, stylistic different than their previous albums but still quality, engaging space-rock, Carly Simon’s No Secrets with two well-known tracks, the number one hit “You’re So Vain”, and less commercially successful but equally appealing “The Right Thing to Do”, the richly arranged, orchestrated Barclay James Harvest, Baby James Harvest, a mix of straight rock (“Thank You”) and more progressive tracks (“Summer Soldier”, “Moonwater”), and Moody Blues’ eighth album (last of the highly regarded string of seven classic album) which had two commercially successful singles, “Isn’t Life Strange” and “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)”, which spurred increased interest in their previous work resulting in the re-release of the beautifully haunting single version of the “The Night”, titled “Nights in White Satin”, which did much better the second time around, getting more attention and airplay than any of the music on the Seventh Sojourn album.

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Album review, Fifty Year Friday, Folk Rock, Fusion Jazz, Hard Rock, Jazz Rock, Music, Progressive Rock, Rock

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Fifty Year Friday, June 1970 Part One

Deep Purple: Deep Purple in Rock

Fifty years ago, June 1970 was heralded in not with trumpets and trombones but with more intense screaming guitars and more repetitive and thunderous bass lines than any prior months of recorded history, whether on 78s, 33s, 45s or on magnetic tape. Yes, music would get louder, more emphatic, blusterous and even over-the-top annoying, but in June 1970, the spigot of the fountain of the music of youth was opened up fully, the genie was released from the bottle mounted on a Harley fully armed with motivations and munitions, and the cat was not just let out of a bag, but fired from a cannon with its hair lit luminescently, waking up every previously recumbent, sleeping, and partly hypnagogic dog in the neighborhood.

The world would only be given a few more months of Jimi Hendrix, and though no single guitarist would ever match his originality and creative capabilities, the sheer volume of those stepping into the electric-music colosseum, both in headcount and decibels, would be enough to more than measurably tip the direction of the hardest and heaviest rock onward and forward.

On the very first track of Deep Purple in Rock (released on June 5th, 1970), “Speed King”, Ritchie Blackmore announces his addition to the up-to-that point comparatively staid Deep Purple, with such pitch-altering pyrotechnics that he effectively shames much of the previous decade’s incarnation of so-called mind-expanding and psychedelic music into permanent hiding with a similar level of effectivenss as computer-aided animation upstaging the assembly-line Hanna Barbara animation of the sixties. With organ, bass and drums added, the texture is as dark and thick as a Wagner full-ensemble scene stuck in an endless feedback tape loop. Quickly this dissolves into an introspective church-like Jon Lord Organ solo with any delicacy hinted at immediately crushed by reentry of guitar, bass, drums and Ian Gillain’s banshee-styled vocals. Amazingly, this landmark instrumental intro was ommitted from the U.S. release of the album, victim of corporate-influenced editing.

And so with the release of this decidedly different hard rock album, Deep Purple had indisputedly arrived. After three fine studio albums of Lord and Blackmore exploring all styles of music within and on the borders of their capabilities, the addition of Ian Pace and Roger Glover focuses their talents to a distinctly, more blues-based, hard rock sound, influenced by Cream, Led Zeppelin and even Chuck Berry and King Crimson at the extreme — but very distinctive and recognizable as what would soon be readily identified as the Deep Purple sound.

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Procol Harum: Home

Procol Harum (now minus Matthew Fisher) also released their fourth studio album on June 5th, 1970. The album is a bit uneven starting off with the bluesy “Whisky Train” before getting to the more substantial, more evocative and more representative “Dead Man’s Dream.” Side two is much better with the first three tracks being commendably representative of that dark, dense Procol Harum sound that makes them so special.

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Uriah Heep: Very ‘Eavy, Very ‘Umble

Uriah Heep’s debut album like so many debut albums seems to be a document of the band searching for their sound. We hear influences of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” and Black Sabbath’s oblique foundational bass lines, as well as the trademark Uriah Heep non-lexical vocables (in other words, without words: wordless vocalizing like “oohs” and “aaahs”) and their love of riff-based repetition. This would be the first of their many albums that the critics loved to hate, but one cannot deny the creativity of the participants. Though the lead guitarist, Mick Box, is rarely mentioned alongside peers like Ritchie Blackmore or Robin Trower, he should be — as I do so right here in this blog post, and most specifically, this sentence.

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