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Top Ten 1968 Rock LPs
Music had quite a year 40 years ago; these are not just the best LPs of 1968, they are mostly among the top hundred LPs of the whole rock.
Is this really a rock album? Nobody playing on it except Morrison is a rock musician. What it is, is one of the most intense LPs in history, regardless of genre. Better men than me have rhapsodized over this album; I suggest you read what Lester Bangs wrote about it for the desert-island albums book Stranded.
Originally a two-LP set, this was an unusually ambitious album even by the heady standards of 1968, with Hendrix unfettered, finally able to fully unleash his imagination and expand the sonic vocabulary not only of the guitar, but of the recording studio and of rock songwriting. Few of the Hendrix-penned tracks are in straightforward rock/pop song structures: “Crosstown Traffic,” obviously; less plainly “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” and “Long Hot Summer Night,” both featuring more disjunct chord progressions than most rock to that point in time. Everything else seems organically evolved, through jams or through studio experimentation (soon many would try to emulate Jimi in these ways and fail miserably, instead sounding unfocused or arbitrary). “Voodoo Chile” is blues, but so epic as to transcend the category. And of course there’s “All Along the Watchtower,” arguably the best cover version ever of any rock song, which moves Dylan’s song from the realm of the arcane into the visceral. Taken whole, it was the ultimate trip (even more so now that it can be listened to in one sitting, without having to turn over LPs).
I wrote about this album recently in the second half of a large article celebrating the 60th anniversary of Columbia’ issue of the first LP, where I state, “The ragged, husky, sensual glory of Janis Joplin’s voice was unleashed on the mainstream when this San Francisco psych-blues-rock band leaped onto Columbia’s artist roster thanks to a stunning performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. The band originals drew on primal blues and psych tropes, and Joplin’s hoarse intensity transmuted Gershwin’s ‘Summertime,’ Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Ball and Chain,’ and the Burt Berns/Jerry Ragovoy gem ‘Piece of My Heart’ into a new sound, abetted by the coruscating guitar solos of Sam Andrews and James Gurley.”
Their debut, and it hit with an impact unimaginable nowadays. In the wake of psychedelia, it was seen as a return to something more basic and rural, yet it was plenty electric. The feeling of the music is loose and communal, yet there’s nothing sloppy or rambling about it. The vocals, well, maybe they’re a little sloppy and a lot strained, but deliberately and magnificently. My favorite track (a minority opinion, I know) is “Chest Fever,” because Garth Hudson’s organ sound is so great and the cracked singing is so perfectly imperfect – when Levon Helm sings “I don’t think I can last very much longer” (right at the end of an inspired breakdown section for sax, baritone horn, and fiddle) he does sound like he’s on his last legs. The LP is bookended by a pair of Dylan songs, “Tears of Rage” (co-written by Richard Manuel) and “I Shall Be Released,” both sung with heartrending falsetto fervor by Manuel. But singling out individual tracks is deceptive, because this album is truly greater than the sum of its parts. It proved hugely influential on the rock of the following decade.
Dave Mason returned to the fold for Traffic’s sophomore album and starred on half the LP, notably contributing the first version of the immortal “Feelin’ Alright?”, virtuoso singing on “Don’t Be Sad,” and the accusatory “Cryin’ to Be Heard.” Steve Winwood’s soulful vocals and keyboards move to the fore on “Pearly Queen” and “40,000 Headmen,” both with surreal Jim Capaldi lyrics, and the more straightforward “Who Knows What Tomorrow May Bring” (worthy of Ray Charles), the haunting “No Time to Live,” and the accusatory “Means to an End” (were Mason and Winwood singing to each other on the accusatory numbers?). As Winwood and Mason alternate, the album achieves a quirky balance such that neither wears out his welcome.
Arguably the most musically influential of VU’s LPs, full of feedback and distortion. The title track and the iconic “Sister Ray” – all 17:27 of it – are the highlights. On the other hand, “The Gift,” with John Cale reading a Lou Reed short story in one channel and the band playing unrelated music in the other, isn’t something one necessarily listens to each time the album is played. The rest is the usual brilliant depravity. Cale left after this LP and the band was never as hard-hitting after that.
By the time “Time of the Season” became a hit single in 1969, the band had fallen apart. But this album is much more than that song (which was practically an afterthought). The line “his sadness makes him smile” (from “Brief Candles”) nicely sums up the mood, conveyed by the ethereal voice of Colin Blunstone. The arrangements are absolutely beautiful, as ornate as the Beatles’ (or should I say George Martin’s?) most intricate creations, with some of the greatest vocal harmonies in the history of rock. The most beautifully bittersweet LP of the British Invasion.
Their flirtation with psychedelia having passed, the Stones returned to their twin missions: Mick Jagger seeing how many personas he could inhabit, the band seeing how many ways they could reconfigure their beloved blues/R&B roots into rock. The hits were “Street Fighting Man” and “Sympathy for the Devil”; the real highlights are “No Expectations,” “Prodigal Son” (an at first uncredited cover of Robert Wilkins’s “That Ain’t No Way to Get Along”), “Stray Cat Blues,” and “Salt of the Earth.”
The king of snark’s response to Sgt. Pepper, come-lately hippies, Flower Power, etc. “What’s the ugliest part of your body? … I think it’s your mind.”
Gram Parsons joined the band for one album that transformed it stylistically. Though it came to be seen as the great touchstone of country rock, Sweetheart was largely rejected by Byrds fans and the general music audience at the time.
