Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin I (1969)

Wanted a woman

Never bargained for you

John Mendelson somehow managed to get a job at Rolling Stone shortly after that magazine was founded in 1967. 

His most famous – by which I mean infamous – piece of writing for Rolling Stone was his 1969 review of Led Zeppelin’s debut album.

Mendelson began by comparing Led Zeppelin I to the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth album:  

[T]he excesses of the Beck group’s Truth album (most notably its self-indulgence and restrictedness), are fully in evidence on Led Zeppelin‘s debut album.

He then goes on to denigrate Jimmy Page’s songwriting and production skills:

Jimmy Page, around whom the Zeppelin revolves, is, admittedly, an extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist . . . . Unfortunately, he is also a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs, and the Zeppelin album suffers from his having both produced it and written most of it (alone or in combination with his accomplices in the group).

Mendelson damns “Good Times Bad Times” with faint praise – he says it would have been an ideal B-side for Page’s previous group, the Yardbirds – and then just plain damns “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” as “very dull in places, very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it.”

In his discussion of “How Many More Times,” he singles out the “strained and unconvincing shouting” of Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant, who he says “may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he’s nowhere near so exciting.”

Mendelson ends his review thusly:

In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth.  Like the [Jeff] Beck group they are also perfectly willing to make themselves a two- (or, more accurately, one-a-half) man show.  It would seem that, if they’re to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention.

By the way, Led Zeppelin I wasn’t the only classic rock album that Rolling Stone’s reviewers found wanting – they also turned thumbs down on Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album, Led Zeppelin II (Mendelson again), and Exile on Main Street.

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A year after his review of Led Zeppelin I was published, John Mendelson co-founded a pop/glam band called Christopher Milk, which released one truly deplorable album – it was titled Some People Will Drink Anything – and then broke up.  

The less said about that album, the better.  (If you don’t believe me when I say that Mendelson was just as bad as recording artist as he was a music reviewer, click here to listen to Christopher Milk’s cover of the Gerry Goffin-Carole King song, “The Loco-Motion.”)

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Unlike John Mendelson, I realized early on that Led Zeppelin I was a masterpiece.

The three tracks that Mendelson pooh-poohed are great.  “Dazed and Confused” and “Communication Breakdown” are even better.

Click here to listen to Led Zeppelin I.

Click here to buy the album from Amazon.

Original Broadway Cast – Hair (1968)

I want it long, straight,

Curly, fuzzy,

Snaggy, shaggy,

Ratty, matty,

Oily, greasy, 

Fleecy, shining,

Gleaming, streaming, 

Flaxen, waxen,

Knotted, polka-dotted,

Twisted, beaded, braided,

Powdered, flowered, and confettied,

Bangled, tangled, spangled,

And spaghettied!

When I was a high-school junior living in Joplin, Missouri, my parents subscribed to Newsweek.  That’s probably where I read about Hair, the iconic musical that opened on Broadway in 1968.  (Its official name was Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical – which is quite a mouthful.)

I ran right out to the nearest record store, bought the soundtrack album, and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to it with two senior girls who were musicians like me.  (Unfortunately, each of these girls was my “girl friend,” but not my “girlfriend” – would that they had been!)

After returning home with my new record, I wanted to keep listening to it.  I didn’t dare play it on the Magnavox console stereo in our living room – the lyrics were a little racy for my parents' taste.  (E.g., here’s the first line of one of the songs: “S*d*my, f*ll*t**, c*nn*l*ng*s, p*d*r*sty.”)  

So I closed the door to my bedroom and listened to it over and over and over on the little portable record player I had won in the local spelling bee when I was a fourth-grader.  As I listened, I wrote down the lyrics to all the songs, one line at a time – including the parts that made no sense to me.

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When I went back to my hometown for my 40th high-school reunion, I found the three-hole, wide-ruled notebook paper on which I wrote down the lyrics.  My mother (God bless her) never threw away anything of mine  – we’re talking report cards, class photos, piano recital programs, etc. – except all my old baseball cards.  (If she had kept those cards, I could have retired early – but she ditched them, so I had to slave away at my law firm until I was 65.)

My handwritten Hair lyrics – which I hadn’t seen for 40 years – were perfectly preserved because my mother had put them in a Rubbermaid storage box, which she had placed on a closet shelf.

Here's one of several pages where I scribbled down fragmentary lyrics to the song “Hair.”  (Some of the songs on the album were easy to decipher, but "Hair" took a lot of work.)  

My handwriting was much better then:

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To say that this record had a major impact on me is an understatement.  (Is the Pope Catholic?  Does a bear . . . etc.?)  I thought it was the greatest thing in the history of Western civilization, and I listened to it until I essentially had memorized the whole thing.

There have been a lot of great Broadway musicals – South Pacific, Damn Yankees, The Music Man, West Side Story, and Les Misérables among them – but none of them are  better than Hair.

Except maybe The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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Click here to buy the original Broadway cast recording of Hair – one of the ten best albums from the first half of pop music’s “Golden Decade” – from Amazon. 

Blood, Sweat & Tears – Child Is Father to the Man (1968)

I know there’s somethin’ goin on

But I don’t know what it is . . .

I better get to the bottom of this!

Let’s get something straight: Child Is Father to the Man was the first album that Blood, Sweat & Tears released.  

But because I only became aware of it after buying the group’s second album, I thought it was BS&T’s second album . . . and vicey-versey.

I assumed the second Blood, Sweat & Tears album – which was titled Blood, Sweat & Tears – was the group’s first album because most eponymous albums are debut albums.  In fact, Blood, Sweat & Tears is the only eponymous second album I can think of.

BS&T’s third album is titled Blood, Sweat & Tears 3.  That confused me even further because there was no Blood, Sweat & Tears 2.

By contrast, Led Zeppelin titled their first three albums – which were roughly contemporaneous with BS&T’s – Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, and Led Zeppelin III. 

Kudos to Led Zeppelin for keeping things simple!

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Blood, Sweat & Tears was the brainchild of the multifaceted musical genius Al Kooper.

Kooper co-wrote “This Diamond Ring,” which was a #1 hit single for Gary Lewis and the Playboys in 1965, when he was only 21.  A few months later, he talked his way into playing the organ when Bob Dylan recorded “Like a Rolling Stone.”  (Kooper also played on records by the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Alice Cooper, and many others.)

Kooper handled keyboards for the Blues Project, was responsible for the legendary Super Session album (which featured legendary guitarist Mike Bloomfield on one side and Stephen Stills on the other side), discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd (producing and performing on that group’s first three albums), and produced the truly fabulous debut album of the Tubes (which included the iconic “White Punks on Dope”). 

But I think Al Kooper’s greatest single musical achievement was Child Is Father to the Man.

Here’s what William Ruhlman of AllMusic had to say about that album:

Al Kooper’s finest work, an album on which he moves the folk-blues-rock amalgamation of the Blues Project into even wider pastures, taking in classical and jazz elements (including strings and horns), all without losing the pop essence that makes the hybrid work.  This is one of the great albums of the eclectic post-Sgt. Pepper era of the late ’60s, a time when you could borrow styles from Greenwich Village contemporary folk to San Francisco acid rock and mix them into what seemed to have the potential to become a new American musical form. . . .

This is the sound of a group of virtuosos enjoying itself in the newly open possibilities of pop music.  Maybe it couldn't have lasted; anyway, it didn't.

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It didn’t last because the band decided they needed a stronger lead singer than Kooper.  So they fired him two months after Child Is Father to the Man was released.

Et tu, BS&T?

What Al Kooper could
have said to his bandmates

The group considered Alex Chilton, Stephen Stills, and Laura Nyro for the job, but eventually went with David Clayton-Thomas.

Columbia Records president Clive Davis thought he was the perfect match for BS&T.  Here’s what he wrote after hearing Clayton-Thomas perform with them:

He was staggering . . . a powerfully built singer who exuded an enormous earthy confidence.  He jumped right out at you. . . . He seemed so genuine, so in command of the lyric . . . a perfect combination of fire and emotion to go with the band’s somewhat cerebral appeal.  I knew he would be a strong, strong figure.

But Clayton-Thomas’s singing style wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea.  Here’s what critic Robert Christgau had to say about him: 

Just figured out how David Clayton-Thomas learned vocal projection: by belching.  That’s why when he gets really excited, he sounds as if he’’ about to throw up.  But it’s only part of the reason he gets me so excited [that] I feel like I’m about to throw up. 

The decision certainly paid off in terms of record sales – the first BS&T album featuring Clayton-Thomas went to #1 on the album charts.  So did the group’s next album.

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What would have become of Blood, Sweat & Tears if Al Kooper had stayed around?

We’ll never know.  But what we do know is that Kooper deserves most of the credit for the fact that Child Is Father to the Man consists of impeccable and innovative arrangements of first-rate songs.  (Kooper wrote several of those songs and filled in the rest of the album with numbers written by top-notch songwriters like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and the husband-wife team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King.)

 

Nothing really compares to Pet Sounds.  But Child Is Father to the Man sort of does.  Start at the beginning and play the album straight through to the end – there’s really nothing you need to skip over.  

Click here to listen to Child Is Father to the Man.

Click here to buy that album from Amazon.

 

Love – Forever Changes (1967)

And you’ll do just 

What you choose to do

In 2002, Peter Bradley – a Labour Party member of the House of Commons – proffered the following motion for Parliament’s consideration:

That this House pays tribute to the legendary Arthur Lee, also known as Arthurly, frontman and inspiration of Love, the world's greatest rock band and creators of Forever Changes, the greatest album of all time; notes that following his release from jail he is currently touring Europe; and urges honourable and especially Right honourable Members to consider the potential benefit to their constituents if they were, with the indulgence of their whips, to lighten up and tune in to one of his forthcoming British gigs.

The Forever Changes album cover

A total of nine MPs signed on in support of Bradley’s motion – including not only several other Labour Party members, but also a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat.

Sadly, that motion never reached the floor for vote, despite its obvious merit and its bipartisan – actually, tripartisan – support.  

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The proposition that Forever Changes is the G.O.A.T. of “Golden Decade” has been endorsed not only by those nine members of Parliament but also by the staff of the Brooklyn Vegan – which is a NYC-centric, multi-genre, mostly-music blog founded in 2004.

In 2017, the Brooklyn Vegan marked the 50th anniversary of the “Summer of Love” by picking the 50 best albums of 1967.

Their top choices included classic albums by the Beatles, Byrds, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Kinks, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, Who, and Jimi Hendrix – all of which were very deserving of being so honored.  But they gave the #1 spot in their rankings to Forever Changes.

Click here to see the entire list.

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In his 33 1/3 book about Forever Changes, Andrew Hultkrans said that Arthur Lee – Love’s frontman and primary songwriter – “was one member of the ’60s counterculture who didn’t buy flower-power wholesale, who intuitively understood that letting the sunshine in wouldn’t instantly vaporize the world's (or his own) dark stuff.Lee’s somewhat pessimistic worldview was likely influenced by the fact that Love was falling apart due to its members’ drug use and the increasing personal acrimony that was developing between Lee and Love’s other singer-songwriter, Bryan MacLean.  

So it’s no surprise that Love ended up producing a somewhat schizophrenic album.  (The New Musical Express – the British equivalent of Rolling Stone magazine – described it as “joyous, uplifting and sweet in parts, while at the same time menacing, introverted and paranoid.”)

Maybe that’s why Forever Changes was a flop commercially, peaking – if “peaking” is the appropriate word – at #154 on the Billboard 200 album charts. 

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Despite the dark tone of some of Arthur Lee’s lyrics, most of the music on Forever Changes is as cool as the other side of the pillow.  For me, that album goes down just as easily as Surrealistic Pillow.  

If you’ve never heard it, you need to.

Click here to listen to Forever Changes.

Click here to buy the album from Amazon.