‘When fact becomes legend, print the legend’ – The Rolling Stones’ pivotal album, Beggar’s Banquet.

Unlike their closest rivals, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones hadn’t served an apprenticeship in a red-light district in Germany before becoming famous, although doing so would have probably suited Keith Richards at least.  It happened for The Stones relatively quickly and painlessly but they had to do their growing up in an unsympathetic spotlight.

Although their manager, the flash and brash Andrew Loog Oldham, was still young, he had learned his trade at the sharp end of the music industry and understood marketing.  He intuited what Brian Epstein was doing for The Beatles by presenting them in a way that would be acceptable to the British media establishment and realised that doing similar was not going to work for The Rolling Stones.  Everybody was trying to copy the Epstein method anyway, and nobody was going to overthrow The Beatles – not on their own turf anyway.  Oldham recognised an opportunity when he saw it:  Why not present The Stones as the anti-Beatles?  This famously worked ended up like a dream, of course, but it also wreaked havoc upon on the psyche of the musicians involved and had other disastrous results.  Although the public thought The Beatles were all sweetness and light, this was of course nonsense, and The Rolling Stones weren’t the uncouth thugs they were made out to be either.

However, when caricatures are what people want they often get them and The Rolling Stones sometimes obliged.  No more so than in the case of Brian Jones, who unfortunately possessed the most fragile psyche of the band and had never been comfortable with the Stones-as-thugs assignation.  Despite not being a songwriter like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Brian Jones was the original driving force of The Stones and the most creative in terms of musicianship.  Many of the band’s most famous early singles were distinguished by Jones’ ability to play virtually any musical instrument he came across.  His insatiable desire to explore different musical styles helped the band to weave its way through the rapidly evolving musical landscape of the 1960s.  By 1968, however, Jones was virtually unrecognisable as the great musician he had been and would never recover.  He died in 1969 shortly after being fired from the band he had not only founded, but named too.

One can only speculate on what Brian Jones’ true problems were.  He was the most middle-class and cultured of The Stones but had a nasty habit of impregnating a succession of girlfriends before abandoning them (he had even done this while still at school) and seemed to delight in testing people’s friendships to the limits.  Nevertheless, people who knew him sometimes describe him as sensitive and ultimately ‘a nice guy’.  It certainly sounds as if there were warring personality traits within him and these could only have been compounded by the fact that Jones – again testing things to their limits – insisted on consuming more alcohol than any other Stone and drinking more too.  Nowadays his addictive personality might be seen as symptomatic of bi-polarity but back then he was left to continue self-medicating in an ultimately self-destructive fashion.

The Stones’ 1967 output had been pretty much Brian Jones’ last hurrah, remarkable considering the events of the year.

‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ was his tour-de-force, featuring more examples of his diverse musicianship than any other Stones album to date, but it had been poorly received by the critics and dismissed as a Pepper rip-off.  Opinions on the album have been revised over the ensuing decades and it has come to be highly regarded and even paid tribute to by later musicians (The Brian Jonestown Massacre regarded it so highly they even recorded a whole album as a homage), but back then the short shrift it was given was yet another blow to Jones’ already battered ego.

Jones had been particularly damaged by 1967’s drug-busts but he wasn’t the only one.  Mick Jagger was presented as Public Enemy Number One and Keith Richards even faced a severe jail-sentence for a short time and the photos of him outside the courts reveal how distraught he really was, despite his celebrated and brave ‘petty morals’ quote.  Let’s not forget how young The Rolling Stones still were and how under siege they must have felt, and for what…  really?  They were only too aware of how hypocritical the establishment were being, since they had often encountered them in less formal and stage-mannered environments.  It was inevitable perhaps then that The Rolling Stones’ music would take on an altogether darker hue and that – what had once been a mostly manufactured image – would start to become more of a reality, even if Brian Jones would eventually disappear completely.

‘Beggar’s Banquet’ was the first album to establish The Rolling Stones formula and where the legend overtook reality.  There is a very real chance that this couldn’t happen with Brian Jones still a functioning member of the band, since his talent was too mercurial.  ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ is very much a Keith Richards album, despite the remarkable tracks Mick Jagger also wrote for it.  This was the first album Richards used his famous open-tunings on and in doing this he revitalised and energised the whole Stones sound.  ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ brought them back to their earthy rhythm and blues roots but with far more oomph and chutzpah.  Despite some occasional forays into the blues, ‘Beggar’s’ is very much a rock album, there is no psychedelia on it, no perceptible nods to hippiedom at all.  This is a band that has finally found its own home turf and is about to settle on it.  In many ways, ‘Beggar’s’ is The Stones’ blueprint for the rest of their career and they have rarely deviated from it; they may have occasionally added funk, disco and reggae but always as a flirtation, never a full-blown affair.

The album kicks off with one of the best-known songs The Stones ever recorded, ‘Sympathy For The Devil’.  The recording of it was documented by Jean Luc Godard in his film, ‘One Plus One’ and this reveals that Jagger presented it to the band as a folk song.  If it had remained as such it might not have had the impact that it did, despite the sinister lyrics.  It’s hard not to read the song as the ultimate Fuck You to the British Establishment, with their ‘petty morals’ and self-righteous hypocrisy.  How Keith Richards came to suggest setting the song to a samba beat has never been fully explained but it was a remarkable idea and gave the song its hypnotic, menacing effect.   The band would never do anything like this again. The lead guitar’s vicious, spit-venom tone is also remarkable and impossible to replicate.  It stand out among Richards’ guitar solos since the phrasing on it seems off kilter and thoroughly nasty.  Rumours have abounded ever since that this was a Jimmy Page guitar-solo (he probably started it) but – at least as I’m concerned – this is a Keith Richards solo through-and-through.  ‘Sympathy’ is the Stones at their most imaginative, it is laden with percussion, doo-wop gone-mad backing vocals, a magnificent Nicky Hopkins piano and one of Jaggers’ best vocal performances.  Nobody could ever sing this song as well as Jagger and make it so believable.

I should point out here that this was the first album with their ideal producer, Jimmy Miller.  Most of the band’s previous albums had been marred by the frankly awful production supplied by Oldham, who for some reason imagined himself as Britain’s answer to Phil Spector (he wasn’t).  A undeniably brilliant publicist but a terrible record producer.

The next track, ‘No Expectations’, features one of the last contributions Brian Jones ever made and, unusually for him by this point, it was on slide-guitar (dobro?).  This is also an unforgettable track, it has a liquidity to the sound that conjures up images of water-lilies.  Nicky Hopkins minimal, tasteful piano is another bonus and Jagger’s vocal is one of his finest.

Dear Doctor is an entertaining example of The Stones’ comical country songs.  Although the band had always had a definite appreciation for the genre (High and Dry on Aftermath for example) they didn’t really start to take it seriously until Gram Parsons began his friendly brainwashing of Keith.  ‘Dear Doctor’ certainly isn’t in the same league as ‘Wild Horses’, for instance – it was more likely to have been inspired by watching an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies’ than George Jones.

I’ve always liked ‘Parachute Woman’ even though it often remains overlooked when discussing ‘Beggar’s’.  Its bluesy stomp is combined with the blurry echo of the vocal is darkly atmospheric and rhythmically it anticipates glam.  It also highlights another one of the features of ‘Beggar’s’; it is largely acoustic guitar driven apart from a pretty minimalistic electric guitar solo, which later in the track shares the spotlight with Jagger’s moaning harmonica.  But never before was an acoustic guitar used to greater rock ‘n’ roll effect than on ‘Beggar’s Banquet’; the power in it is unequalled.  My almost life-long fascination with the guitar sound on this album lead me to purchasing my most expensive guitar; a Gibson Hummingbird, but nobody makes that guitar sound like Keith Richards did on this album.

Jigsaw Puzzle is Jagger at his Dylanesque and like most Stones songs of this period begins at a relative funky crawl but picks up speed as it goes on.  The bass is magnificent on this track, as are the drums but the most prominent feature of it is Keith Richards’ layered guitars; one acoustic strum, a simple but effective slide guitar riff and an overdriven Les Paul feeding back in the distance (or is that Brian Jones doing something odd with a mellotron?).  Mick snarls away throughout the song and the overwhelming feeling one gets is that this is a band who imagine they are fighting for their lives against the world and after 1967’s events it hard not to sympathise.  The song here may be relatively slight, but the performance is beyond reproach.

1968 was a difficult year for everybody though; lots of civil unrest, riots, Robert Kennedy’s assassination coming close of the heels of Martin Luther King’s and the Vietnam war at its hottest.  The Rolling Stones couldn’t let this go without comment and so ‘Street Fighting Man’ enters the fray.  ‘Sympathy’ could also be perceived as contemporary social comment but on this track it is far more literal.  Musically it is an echo of their latest hot single, ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and like that song it is acoustic guitar driven.  This is meanest sounding acoustic guitar ever heard though; it explodes like a Molotov cocktail.  According to legend, Keith achieved this unique sound by placing a microphone in the sound hole of his Gibson Hummingbird overloading a cassette recorder.  Charlie Watt’s drums were recorded at the same time and they are utterly magnificent as usual, his snare drum cracking like a whip.  Both were overdubbed in a more conventional way later, but that raw, fuzzy original cassette version remains in the mix.  Melodically Keith designed the song to sound reminiscent of a police siren but it also owes a huge debt to Martha Reeves & The Vandella’s hit ‘Dancing In The Street’ (which is even quoted in the lyrics).  The effect of this is that it is one the first songs to acknowledge that popular music’s age of innocence was now over, at least as far as The Rolling Stones were concerned.

The Beatles had also recorded a song inspired by what was happening in the world in 1968, ‘Revolution’.  That also featured a guitar that was saturated in tape distortion, but in their case it was the electric variety (John Lennon’s  Epiphone Casino plugged directly into a channel on the mixing-desk).  Both songs chickened out of any form of personal involvement though; John Lennon’s was seemingly critical of those engaged in civil unrest, witheringly addressing people who carry ‘pictures of Chairman Mao’ and ‘have minds that hate’.  Lennon, by this time of course, was advocating peace and love and his chosen method of protest was the arts.  Lennon even recorded the vocal while lying down in the studio – how passive can you get?  The Rolling Stones, however, were far too cynical to ever engage in political debate, although unlike Lennon Jagger had actually attended a rally (with Tariq Ali).  Nevertheless, the only advice ‘Street Fighting Man’ offers is that poor boys should sing for rock ‘n’ roll bands and that rioting ‘can’t provide solutions’.  It’s the music that does the most talking though and ‘Street Fighting Man’ sounds and feels incendiary.  It is also the last Rolling Stones track to feature Brian Jones playing Eastern instruments (the sitar and tamboura) both of which breath fire onto the track.  The shehnai (an Indian double-reeded oboe) at the end of track was played by Traffic’s Dave Mason and here it erupts from the speakers like an air-raid siren.  Nothing is out of place on this track.

The next track on ‘Beggar’s’ is much more low-key and a folk-blues cover.  It’s probably the least remarkable effort on the album but the biblical imagery suits its dark palate.  Jagger’s vocal is quite mannered, however and this is quite off-putting.  The harmonica sounds like it was played by Brian Jones but I’m not sure about that – it might have been performed by Jagger (Jones had after all taught him how to play the instrument).  Once again, this track features a fine Keith Richards performance on acoustic guitar.  On any other album this track would stand out but here it comes across as filler.

‘Stray Cat Blues’ is the Stones at their least politically correct, featuring as it does Jagger’s boastful musings about sex with underage groupies.  On the ‘Beggar’s’ version of the song the girl in question is ‘15 years old’ but he often lowered the age to 13 during live performances to cause as much as much offence as possible – an example of this can be heard on the Stones’ live album released in 1970, ‘Get Yer Ya-Yas Out’.  Musically the Beggars’ is excellent and it features far more electric guitar than any other track on the album – a cranked up, ear-piercing Gibson Les Paul (which actually does sound reminiscent of a spiteful stray cat).  The vocal is again a sterling performance.  Jagger by 1968 was a fully formed and self-assured rock singer – he was more than that, he was archetypal rock star.  Every rock singer who followed him from this point owed him a huge debt, both vocally and stylistically.  This is Jagger at his wildest – even he wouldn’t have been capable of this kind of performance a year earlier.  ‘Stray Cat Blues’ ultimately becomes a jam at the end, but unlike other bands who were recording long-ass guitar solos and so on, The Stones were more about the groove and that is what this track becomes before it draws to a close.  It takes a pretty fascinating route though.

Mick Jagger has since been dismissive about ‘Factory Girl’ but I find the track interesting, although I didn’t used to like it.  It was inspired by Edie Sedgwick according to some critics, but they always say that.  The Stones brought in some outsiders to play on the track again, the most audible being Ric Grech from Family on fiddle and Rocky Dijon on congas.  Charlie Watts played some distinctive table on this while Richards stuck with his acoustic guitar.  The mandolin on ‘Factory Girl’ used to annoy me because it simply follows the vocal melody, the consequence of which makes the Jaggers’ voice sound peculiar and indistinct.  I’ve since got over that, however.  It’s just not one of his best vocals, again it sounds far too mannered.  Regarding the mandolin, most sources indicate that this was not actually one at all – in fact, it was the mandolin setting on a mellotron played by one of three possible people.  Personally though, I think it was a mandolin, mainly because I can hear some notes picked on it at the beginning of the track.  Furthermore, I think Jones played it, because it has his unorthodox stamp all over the performance – but what do I know?  He was in a bad state at the time.  The end result is one of the Stones’ weirdest and rootsiest tracks, but Jagger should have made more effort with the vocal.

Which leads us to the final track, ‘Salt Of The Earth’.  This song’s biggest inspiration seems to have been gospel and it even features The Watts Street Gospel Choir at the end of it.  This track notably features a Keith Richards vocal performance for one of the verses and it is a good example of how well he could sing when on form.  Jagger sings extremely well on this track too and the performance sounds heartfelt even if the lyrics are a trifle odd (more about that later). ‘Salt Of The Earth’ is again dominated by Richards’ acoustic track and he also overdubbed some simple electric slide playing.  Nicky Hopkins contributed some high octane piano (his playing is – to me – one of the key musical elements of Beggar’s, since it all over the album, thus makes up part of its appeal).  All of the band are on form of this track, Charlie Watts’ drums are typically elegant, pushing the dynamics of the song appropriately and Bill Wyman’s bass is tasteful.  The lyrics on ‘Salt Of The Earth’ are odd and need to put into context.

The Rolling Stones always had a strange attitude to what they perceived as the ‘straight’ world.  This is evidenced by their much documented term ‘Ernies’ for the men they encountered in London cafes when they were a struggling band.  ‘Ernies’ were the people who called them long-haired layabouts and worse, while lecturing them about getting a proper job and arguing for the virtues of hard work.  The Stones hated ‘Ernies’; it was a derogatory term.  Brian Jones didn’t even like Bill Wyman, referring to him as ‘a bit of an Ernie’ – he only accepted him into band because he had two amplifiers and transport.    So perhaps the sentiments of ‘Salt Of The Earth’ were designed to put this right, but if that was indeed the case, referring to a ‘faceless crowd’ and ‘they don’t look real to me’ seems a bit at odds with it.  The Stones may have discovered a grudging respect for working people to a fashion, but it didn’t go too far.  The overall feeling I get from the track is how alienated The Rolling Stones felt at this point.  The Stone may have found their authentic musical voice with ‘Beggar’s’ but they still seemed like people who were unsure about where they fitted in the world at large.  Being so notorious at such an early age was obviously difficult for them.

This is why I find ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ such a fascinating album.  It captures The Rolling Stones at a time that they felt most under siege, wounded, but at the height of their powers.

Cultural Vandalism

Some things tend to upset me more than they maybe should.  For example, there is currently an advert on television that uses Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s ‘You’re All I Need To Get By’ to sell… well, something I’m not even going to name here.

I find this positively irksome.  I know that there are perhaps more important things to get angry at, and trust me I do – all the time – but I think popular music has a great deal of cultural value and I find it insulting when it is cheapened in this way.  Okay, I’m not naïve.  I know this has been going on for decades now.  Advertisers are constantly abusing the cultural capital that popular music has to shift product, it is also done in movies, sports and every form of entertainment.

However, popular music is in some ways different.  Some artists are considered sacrosanct, above being associated with advertisements whereas others are considered fair game.  Those immune to it may have had this written into their contracts or been fortunate enough maintain control over their publishing.  They may even have the respect of the music industry which still regards their catalogue with high cultural regard.  For instance, it will be a long time before we see a Beatles song advertising a fast-food outlet or Led Zeppelin being used to sell spreadable cheese.

So why is some popular music regarded as having value whilst another can be used in this rather cheap and tawdry fashion?  Why is it okay to use a remarkable record like ‘You’re All I Need To Get By’ to hawk stuff on daytime television?  Marvin Gaye was a towering figure in popular music, surely by anybody’s reckoning and his work with Tammi Terrell is among his most beautiful and enduring.  Both were struck down well before their time and left us with a strong cultural legacy.  Shouldn’t their work be treated with more respect?

Some advertisers can be tasteful.  For instance, the Levi’s jeans ads of the 1980s actually helped renew interest in the records they used by placing them in their uniquely American cultural context, thus making them cool and relevant again.  This shows that with a little bit of imagination a kind of synergy can happen which works out for everybody involved.  The adverts resulted in a lot of jeans being sold and those records becoming hits again.  What can be better than that?  A new generation of people listening to Sam Cooke, Ben E. King and Marvin Gaye?  Most of the time this doesn’t happen though and instead the records are used in a lazy and exploitative fashion, henceforth the whole thing comes across as cheap and very cheesy.

Popular music is part of our lives and immensely valuable.  It is no less important than any other art-form and – dare I say it – more relevant than most.  Let’s not advertisers take it away and ruin it for us.

Jimi Hendrix was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.

Jimi Hendrix was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.  Few others have ever been as influential.

Now a lot of people are going to disagree with that statement, particularly since it appears to ignore a many other genres of music like classical and jazz, but in terms of cultural importance and sheer influence Hendrix takes a lot of beating, particularly since he achieved all that he did in the space of four, very turbulent years.

There had been great guitarists before Hendrix but none with the power and imagination to turn the guitar into such a versatile instrument.  Hendrix was able to conjure any kind of sound he wanted from a guitar, could do the work of two guitarists effortlessly and still be the most dynamic frontmen ever to set foot on a stage.  He was also an African American leading a British rock band with two white side-men and there was no doubt about who was in charge.  He even told them what they should play, on their own instruments.   Furthermore, this was not a man who would tone down his act for anybody.  He owned the stage, did whatever he wanted when he pleased and took the whole rock genre into uncharted territory.  Thanks to Hendrix rock became more sexual, more funky and unpredictable; he cross-pollinated rock with soul, jazz, raga, avant garde, country and everything else, without any regard for the established rules.

Hendrix could do this because, unlike most of his contemporaries in rock, he had learnt from some of the best.  The most famous and celebrated guitarist in the UK at the time was of course Eric Clapton but Clapton had picked up all he knew from blues records, copying the guitar licks and acquiring similar equipment to his heroes.  What Clapton lacked was any form of originality.  Jimi Hendrix had toured on the same circuit as Clapton’s heroes, he’d learned directly from them, played on a constant basis, became expert on blues (and other styles of) guitar and had already developed his own individual style.  Eric Clapton longed to be part of the blues tradition, whereas Jimi Hendrix found that same tradition too limiting.  Jimi Hendrix was all about breaking free of any form of confinement; it not only came in the lyrics of his songs, it also came out in his playing.

He had not only learnt from the best, he had also played with some of them too.  Hendrix’s famous showmanship was a product of having played in Little Richard’s band, along with The Isley Brothers, Wilson Pickett and numerous others.  Such performers had their stage act down to a fine art – they had to because the so-called chitlin’ circuit was notoriously tough, everything they did had been tried and tested with audience after audience.  The ‘gimmicks’ Hendrix became famous for; playing his guitar behind his back, with his teeth, etc, had been copped from watching other performers on the circuit and adapted into his own act.  Blues guitarists as early as Charlie Patton had been playing their guitars behind their backs but this was absolutely new to a rock audience.

Hendrix’s first album, ‘Are You Experienced’, was magical.  There was barely any precedent for it.  Previously electric guitars had simply been an amplified version of acoustic ancestors and treated as such, with few exceptions.  Hendrix changed all that.  Not only was his playing incredible, it quickly emerged that he was no slouch as a songwriter either, and despite his own doubts about his singing, the charisma and sensuality in his voice was undeniable.  He looked amazing as well, wearing the biggest afro ever seen (which even his band emulated – along with Clapton), wild cloths and a vintage military jacket.  This was an entirely new and quite different manner of rock star.

Hendrix had definite ideas about how his music should be recorded too.  The studio became another musical instrument with Hendrix, everything would be panned about wildly, tape echo would be manipulated during solos to create strange effects and tracks were faded in and out at odd moments.  Any manner of equipment that he came into contact with was exploited to its full potential and way beyond.

What is left out of discussions about Hendrix is the issue of his race.  Rock until Hendrix had been a practically all-white genre.  Although early rockers, such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley were among the original exponents of rock ‘n’ roll their music was often placed squarely in the genre of Rhythm & Blues, partly as a consequence of racism.  This wasn’t possible with Hendrix and furthermore, his performance style was overtly sexual, even masturbatory at times.  Previous African American performers had been obligated to tone down their performances for white audiences but since Hendrix had established his act in the UK under the tutelage of ex-Animal Chas Chandler, he was relatively free to do what he wanted.  This was enormously liberating to fellow African American performers.

Hendrix was also steeped in the American music tradition and was musical omnivore.  Although he played rock, he drew on pretty much every other form of music he came into contact with.  Therefore, he opened his white audience’s ears to lots of African American music they might never have heard before.  He also demonstrated to other African American musicians that they could play rock too and white audiences would listen.  The Isley Brothers had criticised Hendrix for his rock guitar when he had played with them but would begin featuring ‘Hendrix-style’ guitar solos on their records.

He turned the whole rock scene upside down and would be gone before the seventies even truly got started.  Every rock musician since has been influenced by him and more than a few in every other genre.

A Hard Day’s Night -The Definitive Beatlemania Album

The later Beatles material may be the most fashionable but this is the Fab Four at the moment they conquered the world.

It also captured The Beatles at their most urgent; you still get the impression that this was still a band with something to prove and that they were enjoying the whole process of doing so.  All of the songs on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ were The Beatles’ own compositions – all by Lennon & McCartney – and there isn’t a Ringo vocal to be heard.  By their next album, ‘Beatles For Sale’, they were beginning to sound exhausted – some of the focus had been lost during the relentless touring, filming and recording and they were back to recording cover versions, albeit temporarily.  ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ showed The Beatles at their most unified and – what’s more – there are no songs with the express purpose of pleasing mums and dads.  The phenomenon of Yesterday hadn’t happened yet.

The Beatles at this point were still a young person’s band and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ sounds youthful.  Even today everything about the album has a modern sheen, from its timeless cover design to the songs themselves.  The Beatle’s later work, although undeniably of a high (and sometimes higher) quality, sounds comparatively of its time and place.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if any individual band sums up the 1960s it is The Beatles –  but no other album the band ever released captured the excitement of Beatle mania as well as ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.  The album is shameless pop at its most perfect and much of it is rock n’ roll.

Furthermore, after ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ the popular music industry would never be the same.  The Beatles proved for once and for all that a band could write its own material and perform it as a unit without involving any outsiders.  In 1964 this was unthinkable.  Young people had previously only been allowed to sing what adults had written for them but The Beatles proved that this no longer had to be the case.  Young people could speak for themselves and the music industry could make a huge profit from enabling this to happen.  The Beatles were certainly not the first artists to write their own material but they were certainly the catalysts.

What is remarkable about ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is how consistently good it is.  Only half of the tracks were used in the soundtrack and the others were of equal quality.  There are some weaker songs; ‘When I Get Home’ is a bit of a plodder even if it is executed well and benefits from a great Lennon vocal and ‘Tell Me Why’ is similar, but all the rest of the songs are nothing short of brilliant.  By doing this The Beatles were breaking the rules were albums were concerned in 1964.  Previously albums had strictly been cash-in on the single affairs, laden with filler and recycled previous successes.  The Beatles upped the ante and as a consequence ‘the album’ as we now know it was born.  Since ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was soundtrack album, it was the first that the band released singles from (they would also do this on ‘Help!’.  However, it is would easy to imagine that ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and ‘You Can’t Do That’ could have easily topped the charts.

One particular band, The Rolling Stones, already on the scene in 1964, started to write their own songs as a direct consequence of The Beatles’ success.  In the 1960s it became expected and would become impossible to maintain any level of success without doing so, the music scene was evolving so rapidly.  The Beatles were the most successful at seeming to stay ahead because of their superior ability to write songs in practically any genre.

Furthermore, since The Beatles’ line-up consisted of not one, not two, but three songwriters (and latterly even Ringo had a go), the competition even within the band was fierce.  The tensions this created would eventually cause the band to implode in 1970, but in 1964 it was still early days and it was merely helping to maintain a very high quality of songs. John Lennon and Paul McCartney still wrote some of their songs together but were hugely competitive. The song ‘Hard Day’s Night’ was written by Lennon in response to McCartney’s obvious hit-single-in-waiting ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and both would go onto be massive Number One transatlantic hit singles.  Furthermore they are still both among the most loved and memorable songs in The Beatles’ superlative catalogue.

This is very much a Lennon album though and as such features some of best songs and vocal performances.  In 1964 he was still the de facto leader of the band and he was carrying most of the song writing weight (even McCartney has admitted this in his more honest moments).  Ten of the thirteen songs on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ are Lennon compositions, which is why he does most of the lead vocals.  However, McCartney’s contributions are all outstanding, even if there are only three of them.  Why was Lennon doing the bulk of the writing at this period?  Perhaps it was down to the style of the music the band was performing at this juncture.  Lennon excelled at writing and performing immediate fully-formed pop/rock songs whereas McCartney was more at home spending some time crafting his material.  For example, McCartney has begun writing Yesterday on the set of ‘Hard Day’s Night’ and even his ‘Michelle’ dates from this period.  In this light, it is small wonder that Lennon was coming up with the finished material; he was the most impatient about getting things done.  They were both very different songwriters with talents to match their temperaments, but they both needed each other to bring out the best in their work.

For all of these reasons and simply because I enjoy it, I think ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is my favourite album by The Beatles.  It may not be their most musically sophisticated but it is the definitive Beatle mania album and it not only allowed them to go on to change popular music forever but enabled others to do so too.

Let’s not forget that Bob Dylan had been inspired by Elvis before he had even heard of Woody Guthrie.

This is why I think ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ is one of Bob Dylan’s most inspirational albums.  This is Dylan finally doing what he wants, bursting free from the expectations of the folk contingent and plugging in for the first time.

The fact that Dylan had already been labelled as a prophet and the ‘voice’ of his generation must have been a heavy mantle for such a young man to bear and it had brought with it a profound amount of jealousy from his contemporaries.  The prophet tag was not accidental; Dylan’s songs early songs were chock-full of biblical imagery and this combined with his declamatory vocal style almost invited it.  On BIABH those biblical references are still present but they are not so overbearing and joined with flashes of psychedelic lyricism.  This is a Bob Dylan who has added the Beats, French symbolist poetry and the newspapers to his library.

The title of the album alone sums up what this album is really about.  Bob Dylan had seen the British invade his country with their reheated version of rock ‘n’ roll and he was not about to let that stand.  Much as Dylan admired The Beatles’ world-beating formula he also resented the hell out of it.  Rock ‘n’ roll was a product of the USA but all the home-grown talent had now been supplanted by the Brits with their jangly electric guitars and mop-tops.  Dylan realised that it was time to get with the programme or end up side-lined, and knew that he had the chops to do it.  Bob Dylan wanted to instrumental in proving that rock ‘n’ roll belonged to America.

By doing this Bob Dylan accidentally released his most subversive album to date.  BIABH straddles genres in a way that no previous album ever had.  This is not rock ‘n’ roll, pop or folk, this is something different.  In many respects this is the album that would lead to popular music being divided into separate entities; pop and rock, the latter being made by serious, ‘authentic’ artists.  Whether this is a good or bad thing is a different debate.

He was still hedging his bets at this point though.  This is one of his first transitional albums and an extreme example at that.  As everybody knows one side of the album is electric while the other is predominantly acoustic.  The acoustic side provides us with one of Dylan’s most celebrated songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (which had been written and performed in 1964) and although it is dressed up in relatively conservative arrangement and would prove to be very commercial, it has little in common with his ‘Freewheelin’’output.  The lyrics are druggy and shamelessly self-indulgent, the verses are uneven and delight in beguiling the listener’s expectations.  Bob Dylan has stopped being literal and has begun using words for the way they sound.  There is no political message here unless it is one of free expression.

Side One opens with the album’s other most famous song, the electric ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.  A very real argument can be made that this is the first punk song.  In some ways it’s a very logical progression from the ‘talking blues’ he’d been doing album-on-album, but this is different.  This is rock ‘n’ roll at its most primitive; minimal chord changes, little harmonic variation, just a snarling, droning complaint made against practically everything modern urban existence has to offer, pitted against a pounding band.  One of the earliest musical inspirations Dylan ever had was Little Richard and here it shows.  Nothing this raw would be seen again until The Velvet Underground, who – let’s face it – were far more self-consciously arty than Dylan.  That is, unless you count garage bands (I always do).

BIABH is rare in Bob Dylan’s catalogue for a number of ways, not least because it shows him in one of his more romantic moods.  His misogyny has been well documented but on this album there is less of it.  Judging by books I’ve read about Dylan this album was written during the time he was living with Joan Baez and it shows.  The love songs (for want of a better description) on BIABH are among the most beautiful he’s ever written; Love Minus Zero (No Limit) being a classic example.  The song has a poise and elegance that stands up against anything written in the 1960s, its musical simplicity compliments the lyrics perfectly.  She Belongs To Me is wonderful too, if a little less profound.

The ‘heaviest’ song on the album is ‘Don’t Worry Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, which is an incredibly courageous song to record in 1965.  The song, although obviously inspired by the blues, doesn’t seem to have any real contemporary parallel – Phil Ochs’ ‘Crucifixion’ springs to mind, but that didn’t come out until 1966.  It is slow, deliberately repetitive and chilling.  For all the criticism directed at Bob Dylan as a vocalist, it is difficult to imagine anybody else being able to perform this song as effectively as him.  This is alienation put to music, solitary harmonica notes are played like moans of despair against a stark solo acoustic guitar.  This song is an accurate portrayal of human-kind in the second half of the twentieth century, overshadowed by nuclear annihilation, religious hypocrisy, political betrayal and relentless consumerism.  Faith revealed as little but delusion.

The album finishes with ‘It’s All Over No, Baby Blue’, a song that like Mr Tambourine Man has been covered many times, but like MTM, here you have all the verses.  This is one of his classic ‘kiss off’ songs.  Since this is Dylan loads of people have their own theories about who this one was directed at but personally I think that it is no accident that this song closes the album’s acoustic side (Side Two).  This serves to inform his fans that his acoustic ‘folkie’ phase was now over for good and that they could either like it or lump it.  Typically for this style of Dylan song, sentiment is not only absent here but treated with contempt.  His next album, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, would be wholly electric as would the one that followed it.  All of them would be recorded within 1965 and appear in Best Album lists for decades to follow.

Isn’t that a staggering achievement and also inspirational?