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1969, part 2
I’m in the middle of looking back forty years at the best albums of 1969. Last week covered the British; now I start on America’s contributions.
On his two 1968 albums, Miles dabbled in electric jazz on Miles in the Sky and devoted half of Filles de Kilimanjaro to a more fully realized idea of it, but it was with this album that he dove all the way in and drastically remade his music. The addition of electric guitarist John McLaughlin and electric keyboardists Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea (while retaining Herbie Hancock) expanded the group’s sonic palette, but Davis’s collaboration with producer Teo Macero also changed the way his music was constructed, with disparate elements welded together into sidelong suites.
Don’t call them a jam band. Blues band is more like it. The group’s debut album unleashed the guitar artistry of Duane Allman on the world and showed brother Gregg to be not just a fine singer but also an evocative organist. After forty years, “Whipping Post” remains iconic.
Just two tracks here, but the truly epic 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” is the masterpiece that (even with its quote from “A Love Supreme”) got Sanders out from under the shadow of his association with John Coltrane and established him to a large audience as a creative artist in his own right. It also gave a big boost to the career of yodeling vocalist Leon Thomas, and if you think that yodeling must be some kind of cheap gimmick, just listen to the passion and musicality in this performance to have your mind changed – and blown.
Young’s eponymous debut had been heavily influenced by producer Jack Nietzche; here Young teamed with Crazy Horse for the first time in music stripped of decorative elements even in the solos, the epitome being Neil’s ultra-basic guitar excursion on “Down by the River,” which for a long time needs only one note, then explosive opens out to two notes.
Few rock bands rejected hippie optimism as vehemently in 1969 as this blunt weapon of an LP. Now that Iggy is reinventing himself as an intellectual, it’s important to remember that what made the Stooges so great was that they pretty much ignored intellect and just blurted out, verbally and musically, their strongest feelings in the simplest terms. If only Steve Albini had been around then to engineer/produce (actual producer John Cale surprisingly didn’t seem to understand their sound), it would have been even better.
As the band became more normal and less cutting-edge (aside from “The Murder Mystery”) with the departure of John Cale, Lou Reed’s personality and songwriting carried them. The naked intimacy here remains utterly compelling.
Recorded a few months after In a Silent Way, on which Williams was the drummer, this double album is a more insistently rocking take on the nascent genre of fusion, and actually this group existed earlier and was recruited for In a Silent Way after Miles heard them. With no horns involved, McLaughlin is front-and-center, and organist Larry Young (who also fulfills the bass role with the instrument’s pedals) favors bold, occasionally abrasive textures. In a way it helps to not even think of it as jazz (it’s paradoxical that it was moved to the Verve label for reissue); certainly most jazzbos rejected it in horror, and rockers used to the jams of the Dead were more appreciative. These guys, however, have instrumental chops the Dead could only enviously dream of, and an understanding of and experience in playing modally that far surpasses any rockers’. The only thing that keeps this from a higher ranking is Williams’s lame poetry and weak singing on a few tracks.
The Dead’s first live album is where their impact is felt most powerfully and their experimental nature worked best, with everything coming together on “Dark Star.”
Their debut, Music from Big Pink, had been a Big Statement; here they scale back their sound and their goals slightly for a more homespun, ramshackle, natural sound that’s just as great and a more apt expression of Robbie Robertson’s lyric concerns.
The AEC moved to Paris in 1969 and recorded prolifically that year. Of their albums actually released in ’69, I’m not sure this is the “best,” but in its theatricality, stylistic variety, and bold deployment of a huge assortment of timbres (the four members between them are credited with playing 27 instruments, and that’s not even counting overlap), it is certainly the most iconic and influential. And in that earnest time, hearing an avant-jazz group display a sense of humor was refreshing; hearing them pay tribute to early jazz on the title track was revelatory.
