THE ROLLING STONES - LET IT BLEED @ 55

 

Celebrating 55 years on the shelves today is the eighth studio LP from The Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed, which was released on November 28th, 1969, in the US, and December 5th in the UK. While the record contains some of the band's most iconic staples, the period of its creation was fraught with turmoil as founding member, Brian Jones, spiralled towards his ultimate demise.

The album continues the group's move back to revitalizing its blues roots after its dalliances with psychedelia and baroque pop on albums like Between the Buttons & Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967). Their previous LP, Beggars Banquet (1968) had adjusted the band's trajectory back to the basics of the blues, though with this album, they were also dabbling in other forms of traditional Americana, including gospel and country influences. And while the majority of the group were on point with their contributions, Brian Jones was on his last leg.

Issues with Jones had come to the fore during the Beggars Banquet sessions, with Brian often showing up to the studio heavily inebriated, and grossly unprepared for the work ahead. He had become disillusioned and disconnected from the group, and by the time of the Let It Bleed sessions, he was nearly incapable of contributing at all. He only ended up participating in two of the LP's nine tracks before he was fired from the group. It was only a month later that he was found dead in the swimming pool of his home. It was a horrifyingly tragic and controversial end to the wildly creative spirit who had been responsible for getting the band off the ground in the first place.

After the dismissal of Jones, Mick Taylor was brought in to fill his slot on 2nd guitar, though his contribution to this album was also limited. As he had done for the previous album, Keith Richards stepped up as the band's workhorse to provide nearly all of the guitar parts. In addition to the rest of the band, who were also involved in nearly every track, guest musicians included percussionist Jimmy Miller (who also produced the album), keyboardists Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart (himself a former member of the band), and Ry Cooder.

As already mentioned, the focus was back to basics, with a heaviness and darkness pervading the overall mood. Journalist Jann Wenner described the lyrics as "disturbing" and the scenery as "ugly". When asked if the Vietnam War played a role in the album's worldview, Jagger said: "I think so. Even though I was living in America only part time, I was influenced. All those images were on television. Plus, they spill out onto campuses". Of the album's songs, the standouts include Gimme Shelter, Midnight Rambler and You Can't Always Get What You Want, all of which became staples in the band's live sets going forward, and though there were no hit singles, those songs received regular rotation on the radio, helping to establish them as mainstays of the band's repertoire.

For the LP's packaging, Mick Jagger originally asked surrealist illustrator, M. C. Escher, to design a cover, but he declined, so Robert Brownjohn was approached instead. His design displays a surreal sculpture with the image consisting of the Let It Bleed record being played by the tone-arm of an antique phonograph, and a record-changer spindle supporting several items stacked on a plate in place of a stack of records: a film canister labelled Stones – Let It Bleed, a clock dial, a pizza, a bicycle tire and a cake with elaborate icing topped by figurines representing the band. The reverse of the LP sleeve shows the same "record-stack" melange in a state of disarray. The artwork was inspired by the scrapped working title of the album, "Automatic Changer". The album cover was among the ten chosen by the Royal Mail for a set of "Classic Album Cover" postage stamps issued in January, 2010.

Upon its release, it was generally well received by critics and shot to the number 1 slot in the UK, and peaked at #3 in the US. In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone magazine, music critic Greil Marcus said that the middle of the album has "great" songs, but Gimme Shelter and You Can't Always Get What You Want "seem to matter most" because they "both reach for reality and end up confronting it, almost mastering what's real, or what reality will feel like as the years fade in." Robert Christgau named it the fourth-best album of 1969 in his ballot for Jazz & Pop magazine's annual critics poll. In later commentaries, he has said the album "still speaks to me with startling fullness and authority", with the quality of the "playing" alone "fantastic", and that despite some "duff moments" on side two, every song "stands up". Contextually, it is at the centre of what many feel is the band's high water mark of classic albums, from its predecessor, Beggars Banquet, through to the two LPs that followed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street.

THE RAINCOATS @ 45

Marking its 45th anniversary today is the debut eponymous LP from post-punk's most renown girl group, The Raincoats, which was released on November 21st, 1979. Following hot on the heels of The Slits, The Raincoats took the music of the punk scene and gave it a distinctive stamp that earned them the reputation as one of the UK's most innovative new bands in the late 1970s. While Johnny Rotten was notoriously tight-lipped at the time, when it came to praising other bands, he made a notable exception for these girls, stating, "The Raincoats offered a completely different way of doing things, ...and all the books about punk have failed to realize that these women were involved for no other reason than that they were good and original".

The origin of the group goes back to 1977. Ana Da Silva and Gina Birch were inspired to start a band after they saw the Slits perform live earlier that year. Birch stated in an interview with She Shreds magazine, "It was as if suddenly I was given permission. It never occurred to me that I could be in a band. Girls didn’t do that. But when I saw The Slits doing it, I thought, ‘This is me. This is mine.’” For the band's first concert on 9 November 1977 at The Tabernacle, the line-up included Birch, da Silva, Ross Crighton (guitar) and Nick Turner (drums). Guitarist Kate Korus (from the Slits and later the Mo-dettes) joined briefly but was replaced by Jeremie Frank. Nick Turner left to form the Barracudas, and Richard Dudanski (ex–the 101ers and later Public Image Ltd.) sat in on drums, while filmmaker Patrick Keiller replaced Frank on guitar.

Late in 1978, the Raincoats became an all female band as they were joined by the ex-Slits drummer, Palmolive, and the classically trained violinist Vicky Aspinall, with this line-up making their live debut at Acklam Hall in London on 4 January 1979. Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade Records, recruited Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola to produce the band at this time. They suggested that Aspinall approach her violin in the style of the Velvet Underground. Managed by Shirley O'Loughlin, the band went on their first UK tour with Swiss female band Kleenex, in May 1979 after Rough Trade released their first single, "Fairytale in the Supermarket".

With the release of their debut album, the group were something of a best kept secret, though their impact would be significant in later years, winning cult followers like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. "An all-time great", The Raincoats LP is seen as a landmark in indie pop, new wave, and post-punk music, as well as one of post-punk's best albums. Charles Ubaghs, in articles for The Quietus and Tiny Mix Tapes, lauded the band and their album as exemplars of new musical exploration in the wake of the late-'70s punk movement. He dubbed it "a passionate new sound that screamed of possibility", noting the band's fusion of "oddball rhythms", use of the violin, and more that lead to "forward-thinking" music. Their cover of The Kinks, Lola, took a song that already tied the listener up in gender-defying knots and pulled a double reversal on it, twisting its gender-bending right back around on itself. Kind of a neat trick to play on a song that's already playing a trick on the listener. And this decades before anyone ever mentioned anything about "personal pronouns"!

HUGH CORNWELL & ROBERT WILLIAMS - NOSFERATU @ 45

 

Celebrating the 45th anniversary of its release today is the one-off collaboration between former Stranglers main man, Hugh Cornwell, and then Captain Beefheart drummer, Robert Williams, with Nosferatu being released on November 16th, 1979. Intended as a kind of soundtrack to the classic 1922 silent film of the same name, it's a jagged collection of often atonal tunes that failed to make much of an impact commercially, but lingers with Stranglers fans looking for neglected deep cuts from the band's early history.

This collaboration began when Cornwell, after a North American Stranglers tour, attended three consecutive Beefheart shows in San Francisco, in April 1978. Cornwell and Williams struck up a friendship after the shows and kept in touch. Later the same year, when Cornwell had a break in his Stranglers schedule, he contacted Williams just before Christmas 1978 and invited him to record an album. "As far as the motivation to make the record goes, Nosferatu was pure whimsy," Cornwell said in 2014. "I mean [Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacques] Burnel had just recorded Euroman, so I thought, why not have a go?" As the 1922 film Nosferatu had been a silent movie originally, Cornwell decided that "a good starting place would be to try to approximate a soundtrack for it."

Robert Williams was told that it would just be the two of them recording without a band, and that the songs would be written in the studio. Williams then booked some of the best recording studios in Los Angeles and invited his friend, Joe Chiccarelli, along as their recording engineer. Cornwell flew out to Los Angeles to begin the recording sessions just after Christmas 1978. With such short notice, they had to move around from studio to studio every few days, which made the recording process longer than necessary. Recording from late December into January 1979, they continued the sessions in March and April after a two month break due to Cornwell's touring commitments with the Stranglers. Cornwell has stated that Nosferatu was an "extremely expensive" album to make, and that it has never made any money. His record label, United Artists, was unaware that he was recording the album, until they started getting invoices sent to them from the recording studios. However, they still paid them all.

Various guests from the Los Angeles area were invited in to play: woodwind and keyboard player Ian Underwood from Frank Zappa's the Mothers of Invention, Devo's Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh, and Williams' guitarist friend David Walldroop. "Wrong Way Round" features Ian Dury as a fairground barker (listed as "Duncan Poundcake" on the album credits). Williams said of the writing and recording process: "Hugh and I made the songs up in the studio usually starting with the drum track ... Hugh did not have a demo before starting Nosferatu but he had a few little riffs on guitar for just a few songs that we both fleshed out. Then we would bring home cassettes from the sessions to study and come up with subsequent parts. We spent daylight hours sleeping and worked throughout the night, very much like vampires."

The album was released to little fanfare, with poor sales resulting, and critical response mixed to negative, on the whole. Yet for my own tastes, I have always felt an attraction to the album's idiosyncratic & ugly awkwardness. It has a kind of angular, jagged dissonance to it that is just the right kind of wrong. I love the drumming and the quality of the production. Overall, it's got a sort of quirkiness that makes it entirely distinctive when placed in context with the rest of the Stranglers catalogue from the late '70s and early '80s. It's definitely its own "thing", owing little to anything that preceded its release.

DAVID BOWIE - SPACE ODDITY @ 55

Released on November 14th, 1969, David Bowie's sophomore solo LP, sometimes known by its eponymous title - sometimes known as "Space Oddity", turns 55 years old today. It's the album that gave the world its first proper glimpse of the superstar that would emerge over the next few years.

David Bowie had made his debut on LP in 1967 with an album that was also released with an eponymous title. That album was focused on mostly British music hall inspired pop songs, offering up a kinda of "song & dance" version of Bowie that really had little to do with the kind of artist he'd eventually become. The album sold poorly, which is why it took two years to muster up enough interest to release a second album. This time around, he was going for a kind of psychedelic tinged folk rock that seemed to be far more indicative of what he was truly capable.

The centrepiece of the album was the Space Oddity single, which was rush-released on July 11th of that year, in order to leverage the Apollo 11 moon landing. The song was inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. It received critical praise and was used by the BBC as background music during its coverage of the event. It initially sold poorly but soon reached number five in the UK, becoming Bowie's first and only chart hit until three years later, when Starman hit the top ten in 1972. Though Tony Visconti produced the album, he actually passed on producing the Space Oddity single, claiming at the time it was too much of a "novelty song". Instead, production for that song was handled by engineer, Gus Dudgeon.

Despite the success of the Space Oddity single, the album still failed to make much of an impression, even with Bowie making appearances on Top of the Pops and other shows to promote it. Bowie's label simply didn't put anything behind the album's promotion, so it effectively tanked on the charts. It wasn't until RCA reissued the album in 1972 that it finally charted, reaching #17 and hanging on to the listings for 42 weeks. In terms of the critics, the response was mixed and has remained so throughout the album's lifespan. While it has moments and support from some quarters, it is often seen as unfocused, even by Bowie himself. He was simply still lacking the confidence to take charge of his vision, and that showed in the final product. Ultimately, it stands as the first real indication of the artist to come, showing glimpses of the style and flair that would soon propel him to the stratosphere as one of the most revered respected rock musicians of all time.
 

COCTEAU TWINS - TREASURE @ 40

 

Released on November 12th, 1984, the third studio album by Cocteau Twins, Treasure, turns 40 years old today. While the album is cherished by the band's fans as one of their finest releases, the band themselves were less confident in its qualities.

The album found the group settling into what would be its stable lineup for the remainder of their career, with vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, guitarist Robin Guthrie and bass guitarist Simon Raymonde. 4AD record label executive, Ivo Watts-Russell, originally tried to hire Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois to produce the album, however Eno felt the band did not need him and Guthrie ended up producing.

The album was recorded from August to September 1984 at Palladium Studios in Edinburgh and at Rooster in West London. Raymonde alluded to Treasure being rushed and unfinished, while Guthrie referred to it as "an abortion", "our worst album by a mile", and to the period in which it was made as "arty-farty pre-Raphaelite". Additionally, Guthrie noted the record's 'dated' quality "because of the early digital stuff and the technology we used on that record. It’s got good things on it, but it’s certainly not got that timeless quality.'" Nonetheless, as Raymonde observed, "It seems to be the one that people like the best and it's probably sold the best".

So despite the band's reservations, the album has become well established with fans of the group as one of their most revered recordings. It was certainly the album that sold me on the group, though as someone who has produced music for nearly 45 years, I can appreciate when Guthrie says it sounds "dated". It's something that's common with a lot of music from that era, where the brittle quality of the 1st gen digital reverb devices and other electronics can add a harshness to the sound. Still, the quality of the music surmounts most production shortcomings.

PINK FLOYD - UMMAGUMMA @ 55

 

Released 55 years ago today, on November 7th, 1969, it's Pink Floyd's fourth album, Ummagumma, perhaps the strangest release in their entire catalogue. The album was one of their more unusual conceptual concoctions, being composed of a live album, and a studio LP that was split four ways for solo works by each band member.

The original idea behind the live album was to feature fan favourites that would subsequently be dropped from the set. Although the sleeve notes say that the live material was recorded in June 1969, the live album of Ummagumma was recorded at Mothers Club in Birmingham on April 27, 1969, and the following week at Manchester College of Commerce on May 2 as part of The Man and The Journey Tour. Keyboardist, Richard Wright, later said the recording of "A Saucerful of Secrets" was a composite from both gigs. A show at Bromley Technical College on April 26 was also recorded but not used.

The studio album was something of an experiment to allow each member to explore their own musical muse, unfettered by any collaborative concerns. Each member was given half a side of the LP to do whatever they wanted. While the initial concept was met with enthusiasm by the band, once they got into the recording process, their focus became considerably less assured, resulting in a fair bit of studio noodling, with little sense of intent or direction behind it all. The results were some of the most experimental compositions of the group's career, although it all felt a bit too self-indulgent, and even pretentiously contrived in its avant-garde awkwardness.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the album was the cover design by Hipgnosis, who were responsible for most of the band's LP covers over their career. The cover artwork shows a Droste effect, the effect of a picture recursively appearing within itself, featuring the group, with a picture hanging on the wall showing the same scene, except that the band members have switched positions, and this is then repeated two more times. The British version has the Gigi soundtrack album leaning against the wall immediately above the "Pink Floyd" letters. Storm Thorgerson explained that the LP was included as a red herring to provoke debate, and that it has no intended meaning. On the rear cover, roadies Alan Styles (who also appears in "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast") and Peter Watts are shown with the band's equipment laid out on a taxiway at London Biggin Hill Airport. This concept was proposed by Nick Mason, with the intention of replicating the "exploded" drawings of military aircraft and their payloads, which were popular at the time. The album's title supposedly comes from Cambridge slang for sex, commonly used by Pink Floyd friend and occasional roadie Iain "Emo" Moore, who would say, "I'm going back to the house for some ummagumma". According to Moore, he made up the term himself.

When the album was released, it performed well commercially, breaking into the lower reaches of the top 100 in the US and Canada, while peaking at #5 in the UK. Its critical response was also, initially, quite positive, though as time has passed and it has been contextualized by the group's subsequent output, it is now generally considered one of their lesser releases. Even the band themselves dismiss it as a failed experiment. Yet, personally, it was the album that got me interested in the band. As a teen who came of age during the dawn of "punk", I had disparaged Pink Floyd as one of the "dinosaurs" of '70s excess, a perspective that lingered until the late 1980s, when a friend played me the studio LP from Ummagumma. At the time, I was very much into the more abstract music of the day, so I was rather pleasantly surprised by the strangeness of the album. After that point, my attitude changed towards the band and I began to warm to their music in a much bigger way than was possible for me beforehand. In that sense, I will always have a certain fascination with the album.

QUEEN - SHEER HEART ATTACK @ 50

 

Celebrating its golden jubilee, with half a century on the shelves, it's the third LP from Queen, Sheer Heart Attack, which was released on November 8th, 1974. It's the album that would break the band internationally, giving them their first view from the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the release of Queen II in March 1974, the band struck up a partnership with Mott the Hoople, with whom they toured throughout the UK. The pairing proved to be such a success that Queen were asked to accompany them on their US tour, a situation that afforded the group the opportunity to perform at much larger venues, with more sophisticated sound and lighting systems, while also giving them the freedom to try out different songs onstage. Even though the situation solidified a friendship between the two bands that would endure throughout their respective careers, Freddie Mercury remarked that having to be an opening act was still "traumatic" for him, as he bristled with the desire to take the headlining slot, but his frustration was nothing compared to what poor Brian May was about to suffer as a result of Queen's first visit to the US.

At the climax of the tour in Boston, Brian May was discovered to have contracted hepatitis, likely from the use of a contaminated needle during vaccinations the group received before travelling. The remainder of the tour was subsequently cancelled and Queen flew back home, where May was immediately hospitalized. This wasn't the only medical emergency to befall the unfortunate guitarist that year either. After having begun to recover by the start of August, the band were in Wessex Sound Studios. Work there would not last long, however, as May, who was starting to feel uneasy, went to a specialist clinic on August 2nd. He collapsed at the clinic due to a duodenal ulcer, and would be operated on the following day. He was discharged from the hospital soon after so he could recover at home. The upshot of these bouts of illness meant that the rest of the band had to function as a trio through much of the initial recording sessions for their new album. It was a situation that put the other members on the spot to pick up the slack.

Recording of the album was somewhat fragmented due to Brian's medical situation, with recording split between four different studios: Trident and Air studios in London, Rockfield in Monmouthshire, and Wessex Sound in Highbury New Park. As the album developed, the music was moving away from the grandiose mythological subject matter of their previous albums, and into more grounded themes and subjects. Brighton Rock dealt with a love affair during a seaside vacation, Killer Queen was about a high-end prostitute, Now I'm Here was about the band's experiences touring with Mott the Hoople. All rather less fantastical than battling ogres or other such mythical fairy-tale fodder.

The band were still delivering some blistering hard rock, but there was also a lightness and playful dalliance with more diverse styles. Bring Back That Leroy Brown was a tribute to the recently deceased Jim Croce, featuring a jazzy, honky-tonk musical style, with Brian playing ukulele-banjo, and Deacon on the double bass. She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettoes) offered up a dreamy acoustic guitar driven dirge, with Brian and John doubling up on the guitars. On the other end of the spectrum, Stone Cold Crazy can only be described as photo-thrash-metal, what with its scorching tempo being enough to one day inspire Metallica to cover the song. It was one of the group's oldest compositions, dating back to their early days and being of enough antiquity that they'd forgotten who actually wrote it, thus necessitating its credit to the entire band, their first song to do so. The album also includes the first original song composition from John Deacon, Misfire.

For the cover of the album, legendary photographer, Mick Rock, was brought in again after delivering his iconic images for Queen II. Once more he managed to capture the band in a unique state. However, rather than presenting them as austere and remote god-heads, like on the previous LP, Sheer Heart Attack showed them all crumpled up on the floor like so much dishevelled dirty laundry, all sweaty and spent looking. It was as though he'd caught them just as they collapsed after a particularly rousing live gig.

The release of the album, bolstered by the single Killer Queen, sent both records roaring up the UK charts, with both the LP and single hitting #2, while in the US, they both peaked at #12. Critics were mostly favourable in their reviews as well, with the album's hard rock & glam aesthetics finding favour with the zeitgeist of the times. If there was any question that Queen had arrived, Sheer Heart Attack put those doubts to rest.

The success of the album should have put the band in a sweet spot for their career, but there was something amiss. They were somehow piss-poor and strapped for cash, thanks to mismanagement from their agents, a situation that would have to be sorted and would put them in a make-or-break position for their next album, but that's a story for another day.