The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
Bob Dylan as a song source meant that their troubles were doubled. The obvious answer lay with McGuinn and Crosby, who were forced to mature as singer-songwriters in order to fill the gap. McGuinn looked back to his folk roots and emerged with some tastefully orchestrated takes on Wild Mountain Thyme and John Riley. Crosby, eager to pursue the jazz direction pioneered on Eight Miles High, included the moody What’s Happening?!?! and spacey I See You. The presence of Eight Miles High ensured that the album secured chart honours but McGuinn’s hopes for a big hit with the title track 5D were scuppered as a result of further drugs allegations.
At the time of the record’s release showbiz bible Variety featured the ominous headline: ‘Pop Music’s Moral Crisis: Dope Tunes Fan DJ’s Ire’. As McGuinn ruefully observed: ‘I was talking about something philosophical and very light and airy with that song, and everyone took it down … they took it down to drugs. They said it was a dope song and that I was on LSD, and it wasn’t any of that, in fact. I was dealing with Einstein’s theory of relativity, the fourth dimension being time and the fifth dimension not being specified so it’s open, channel five, the next step. I saw it to be a timelessness, a sort of void in space where time has no meaning. All I did was perceive something that was there.’
The Kinks
Face To Face
Ray Davies’s satirical gaze – here turned on himself – finds its first full expression in album format.
Record label: Pye (UK) Reprise (US)
Produced: Raymond Douglas Davies and Shel Talmy
Recorded: Pye Studios, London; October 23, 1965 and April 21, 1966
Released: October 28, 1966
Chart peaks: 12 (UK) 135 (US)
Personnel: Ray Davies (g, v); Dave Davies (g, bv), Mick Avory (d); Pete Quaife (b, bv)
Track listing: Party Line; Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home; Dandy (S/US); Too Much On My Mind; Session Man; Rainy Day In June; A House In The Country; Holiday In Waikiki; Most Exclusive Residence For Sale; Fancy; Little Miss Queen Of Darkness; You’re Looking Fine; Sunny Afternoon (S); I’ll Remember
Running time: 59.44
Current CD: Sanctuary Midline SMRCD028 adds: I’m Not Like Everybody Else; Dead End Street (S); Big Black Smoke; Mister Pleasant; This Is Where I Belong; Mr Reporter; Little Women
Further listening: Something Else By The Kinks (1967); Arthur Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire (1969)
Further reading: The Kinks: The Sound And The Fury (Johnny Rogan, 1984); The Kinks: The Official Biography (Jon Savage, 1984); www.thekinks.com
Download: Not currently legally available
Once the more important business of selecting their next hit single had been completed, The Kinks usually booked some studio time and rushed through a threadbare selection of uninspired material. By 1966, the pop aristocracy, inevitably led by The Beatles, was starting to use the album format for artistic expression, Ray Davies decided it was time to grasp the nettle and dazzle with 14 of his own compositions. A full year before Sgt. Pepper he was planning an alluring montage in which tracks would be connected by sound effects. Davies’s musical ambitions coincided with a dramatic turn in his life. Over the previous year, he had split with manager Larry Page and music publisher Eddie Kassner. A debilitating court battle lay ahead and Ray’s nerves were frazzled. In the meantime, The Kinks had been banned in America and were fighting among themselves. Like Brian Wilson across the water, Davies was battling personal demons and simultaneously trying to push his group into fresh musical areas.
‘I was a zombie,’ he admits. ‘I’d been on the go from when we first made it until then, and I was completely out of my mind. I went to sleep and woke up a week later with a moustache. I don’t know what happened to me. I’d run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks, I’d tried to punch my press agent, I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere.’
With Davies succumbing to a nervous breakdown, The Kinks had to complete a short European tour using a ringer. Meanwhile, Ray rested at home and composed this remarkable series of songs, many of which articulated his ambivalent feelings about wealth, fame and class. His pining for his sister, who’d emigrated just before The Kinks’ formation, is behind Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home. By contrast, the singalong Sunny Afternoon seems to centre around the life of a disillusioned young pop star with aristocratic pretentions; a memorable summer Number 1 single, it nestled comfortably here alongside other tales of nouveau riche overreaching – Most Exclusive Residence For Sale and House In The Country, the latter inspiring Blur’s Number 1 single Country House 30 years on.
The Butterfield Blues Band
East-West
US blues rock pioneers. At the crossroads, but headed for the upper stratosphere.
Record label: Elektra
Produced: Paul A Rothchild, Mark Abramson and Barry Friedman
Recorded: New York and LA; spring–summer 1966
Released: December 1966
Chart peaks: None (UK) 65 (US)
Personnel: Paul Butterfield (v, hm); Mike Bloomfield (g); Elvin Bishop (g); Mike Naftalin (p); Jerome Arnold (b); Billy Davenport (d)
Track listing: Walkin’ Blues; Get Out Of My Life, Woman; I Got A Mind To Give Up Living; All These Blues; Work Song; Mary Mary; Two Trains Running; Never Say No; East-West
Running time: 44:21
Current CD: Not currently available
Further listening: The Paul Butterfield Anthology (1998) (2-CD retrospective)
Further reading: The Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield And Al Kooper With Paul Butterfield And David Clayton Thomas (Ken Brooks, 1999)
Download: HMV Digital
In some ways The Butterfield Blues Band’s second album didn’t measure up to their electrifying debut, an unprecedented blues-rock blast from start to finish and as close as we’re likely to get to a hot night in a bar on Chicago’s South Side in 1964. East-West was more stylistically scattered, reflecting in part a piecemeal recording schedule necessitated by the tour demands of a hot underground following. But its enduring strength is its diversity, a reflection of a pop world looking to flex its new-found creative muscles.
East-West is known first and foremost for its two ‘long songs’. The Butterfield crew’s instrumental workouts on Nat Adderly’s Work Song (7:53) and Mike Bloomfield’s titanic title jam (13:10) featured the expanded canvas and solo virtuosity previously associated with jazz. Rock did a lot of growing up with these two songs. ‘East-West was such a radical departure, melodically, structurally and chordally, from the rock’n’roll modes and licks at that time,’ Bloomfield explained to Tom Yates. ‘It was a long, long series of solos using scales that just had not been played by rock’n’roll guitar players. But believe me, I knew that they were not my scales. They were things I’d heard on John Coltrane records. I’d been listening to a lot of Ravi Shankar and guys who played modal music. These two tunes really broke a lot of ground for other guitar players. I think Carlos Santana still plays that way.’
There are a couple of undistinguished blues fillers, almost as if the band were losing interest in the simple structures, but their versions of Robert Johnson’s Walkin’ Blues, Allen Toussaint’s Get Out Of My Life Woman