Monks – Black Monk Time (1966)

Cuckoo, cuckoo

Who’s got the cuckoo?

So far, this year’s “28 Posts in 28 Days” has been a bit of a yawner.  

It’s hardly surprising that I included records like Pet Sounds and Led Zeppelin I and Tommy and Let It Bleed in my list of ten great “Golden Decade” albums.  No one with a lick of musical taste would question those choices.  But they’re a bit predictable.

So I decided to shake things up with the last of my picks.

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Admit it, you’ve never heard of the Monks and their one and only album, Black Monk Time.  And you would have almost certainly gone the rest of your life without becoming acquainted with the amazing songs on that record were it not for my wildly successful little blog.

The Black Monk Time album cover

But it’s your lucky day!  Bow down before the one you serve – you are not going to get what deserve!  Because 2 or 3 lines is a merciful blogger.  You who have been walking in darkness are about to have that darkness turned into light.

And while I’m at it, I’m also going to make the rough places smooth . . . no charge!

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The five Monks were American soldiers who met in 1964 when they were all stationed in Germany.

The band’s look – they tonsured their hair, and dressed up in robes and rope belts like medieval monks – was weird enough.  But the songs on Black Monk Time are a thousand times weirder than the group’s appearance.  

The Monks getting tonsured

The Monks started out playing covers of American rock-and-roll hits for other GIs at bars near the army base where they were stationed.  

In 1965, they showed up at the door of Polydor Records with an LP’s worth of original songs.  It’s amazing to me that a major label agreed to release an album of such radical music, but that’s exactly what happened.

The band toured West Germany to promote the Black Monk Time, but it did not sell well.  

After a two-week mini-tour of Sweden in early 1967, the Monks learned that Polydor had decided not to release their album in the United States.  Apparently, the antiwar sentiments expressed in some of the songs on Black Monk Time were considered too controversial for American tastes.

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Before you poo-pooh the record company’s decision, you might want to listen to the album’s first track, “Monk Time,” which kicks off with a demented-sounding spoken rant by Monks frontman Gary Burger:  

All right, my name’s Gary!  Let’s go, it’s beat time, it’s hop time, it’s monk time!  

You know we don’t like the army.  What army?  Who cares what army?  Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?  My brother died in Vietnam!  

James Bond, who was he?  Stop it!  Stop it!  I don't like it!  It’s too loud for my ears!  Pussy Galore’s comin’ down and we like it!  We don’t like the atomic bomb!  Stop it!  Stop it!  I don't like it!  Stop it!

Polydor released records by Jimi Hendrix and Cream that year, but the Monks were a little too much for them to handle.

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“Monk Time” is so bizarre that you might assume it’s not representative of Black Monk Time as a whole.

Take my word for it.  The other tracks on the album – which include “Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice,” “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy,” “I Hate You,” “We Do Wie Du,” “Drunken Maria,” and (last but certainly not least) “Cuckoo” – are just as odd.

But in addition to being odd, the music on Black Monk Time is oddly compelling – and (dare I say) delightful.  

Give the entire album a listen.  I’ll bet that by the time you get to the end of it, you’ll think it’s delightful, too. 

Click here to listen to Black Monk Time, which finally released in the U.S. in 1997 – 30 years after it was recorded.

Click here to watch The Transatlantic Feedback, a 2006 documentary about the Monks, on Amazon.

Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed (1969)

Yes, I’m a sack of broken eggs

I always have an unmade bed

Don’t you?

In 2010, the Royal Mail – the British postal service – issued ten stamps that depicted classic album covers.

(NOTE: Did you know that the Royal Mail is owned by a wealthy Czech businessman?  That’s right – the Brits converted their postal service from a government-0wned-and-operated operated into a publicly-traded stock corporation in 2013.  Last year, that corporation was acquired by EP Group, a Czech-based company owned by Daniel Křetínský, for £3.57 billion.)

Not surprisingly, all the recording artists whose albums were chosen for the series are British.  But the music on those albums is quite varied, ranging from classic rock (Let it Bleed by the Stones, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Led Zeppelin IV) to punk (London Calling by the Clash) to post-punk (New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies) to Britpop (Blur’s Parklife).

I was pleased that Primal Scream’s genre-bending Screamadelica was included – it’s an amazing album.

But I was puzzled to see Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells on the Royal Mail’s list.

If you had to pick one Pink Floyd album to put on a stamp, would you pick The Division Bell?  (One critic wrote that “avarice is the only conceivable explanation for this glib, vacuous cipher of an album, which is notable primarily for its stomach-turning merger of progressive-rock pomposity and New Age noodling.”)

The Tubular Bells album cover

And Tubular Bells?  If its opening theme hadn’t been featured in The Exorcist, that album would have attracted little notice – it’s interesting, but more of a novelty than anything else.

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Eventually, it dawned on me that the Royal Mail didn’t choose these albums for their music.  They chose them for the visual appeal of their album covers. 

Given that, I suppose we should be thankful that a number of the albums in the series contain first-rate music – including, of course, Let It Bleed.

It wasn’t easy for me to choose just one Rolling Stones album for this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days.  I thought about an out-of-the-box choice like Between the Buttons or Their Satanic Majesties Request.  But in the end I decide to play it safe and go with the ne plus ultra of Rolling Stones albums.

Why Let It Bleed?  Start with “Gimme Shelter” – which is only the G.O.A.T. of classic-rock album tracks, you know. 

Follow that up with “Live With Me” and “Monkey Man,” two little-known cuts that I think are the equals of “Jumping’ Jack Flash.”

“Let it Bleed” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” are classics, of course.  And then there’s “Midnight Rambler” – seven minutes of very scary stuff.  (It’s not quite as scary as “Stray Cat Blues,” but it comes close.)

The album’s cover is pretty cool, too – good choice, Royal Mail!

Click here to listen to Let It Bleed.

Click here to buy that album from Amazon.

Who – Tommy (1969)

From you, I get opinions 

From you, I get the story

Every once in a while, something reminds me that I am very, very old.

For example, I recently came across a comment on Reddit from someone who had just purchased the two-record vinyl version of the Who’s Tommy:

[I] was confused by how the tracks were laid out.  One record contained sides one and four while the second record contained sides two and three.  I was wondering if this was the way it was meant to be laid out or if this was some sort of misprint?

If you’re a member of my generation, you know why that is because you know how record changers work.

But if you’re a member of the current generation, record changers – like pay phones and Polaroid cameras – are like artifacts of an ancient civilization.  You may have heard about such items from the village elders, but it’s unlikely that you’ve ever seen or used one of them.     

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Tommy is generally considered to have been the first “rock opera.”  The Pretty Things’ S. F. Sorrow – which can’t hold a candle to Tommy – is the other primary contender for that honor.  (If you’ve never hear of S. F. Sorrow, you’re not alone – it failed to chart in either the U.S. or the UK.)

The Tommy album cover

The rock opera is a pretty rara avis.  (The Who somehow managed to produce a second one – Quadrophenia – four years after giving birth to Tommy.)    

I think Jesus Christ Superstar deserves to be called a rock opera, and I wouldn’t argue with you if you called Hazards of Love by the Decemberists a rock opera.  

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Don’t confuse the Decemberists and the Decembrists.

The Decemberists are an indie band from Portland, Oregon.  

The Decembrists were the Russian noblemen and military officers who fomented an unsuccessful uprising to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I in December 1825.

My oldest son is named Nicholas, but he wasn’t named for Tsar Nicholas I.  Nor was he named for Tsar Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar.  

My younger son is named Peter, but he wasn’t named for Peter the Great – it’s a coincidence that my two boys share first names with Russian emperors.

My daughters are named Caroline and Sarah.  There have been more Queen Carolines than you can shake a stick at – the two most famous ones were the wives of the English kings George II and George IV, but there were also Queen Carolines of Bavaria, Denmark, Hungary, Naples, and Saxony – but my daughter wasn’t named for any of them. 

Caroline of Ansbach, who married
King George II and became Queen
Caroline of England and Ireland

The only queen named Sarah I’ve been able to find was Sarah of Turnovo, the second wife of Tsar Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria (who ruled from 1331 to 1371).  

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I could go on and on like this, but it’s getting late.  Time to wrap things up!

Click here to listen to Tommy.

Click here to buy that album from Amazon.

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 eponymous debut album.

Mendelson began by comparing Led Zeppelin (a/k/a/ 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 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 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.

Click here to buy the album from Amazon.