The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
Personnel: Steve Winwood (o, g, b, p, harpsichord, pc, v); Dave Mason (g, Mellotron, sitar, tambura, shakkai, b, v); Chris Wood (flute, s, o, v); Jim Capaldi (d, pc, v); Eddie Kramer (e)
Track listing: Heaven Is In Your Mind; Berkshire Poppies; House For Everyone; No Face No Name No Number; Dear Mr Fantasy; Dealer; Utterly Simple; Coloured Rain; Hope I Never Find Me There; Giving To You
Running time: 34.30
Current CD: IMCD 264 includes the full US and UK versions of the album plus adds: Paper Sun (S); Hole In My Shoe (S); Smiling Phases; We’re A Fade You Missed
Further listening: Traffic (1968)
Further reading: Back In the High Life: A Biography of Steve Winwood (Alan Clayson, 1988); www.stevewinwood.com (official) www.winwoodfans.com (fan site)
Download: iTunes; HMV Digital
By autumn 1966 Steve Winwood had outgrown his role as teenage prodigy with the Spencer Davis Group and become a restless 20-year-old keenly aware of the new mood sweeping through pop. That summer the Davis band had scored major hits with Keep On Running and Gimme Some Loving, but Winwood was tired of being the star of a group bearing another’s name. Even as their Autumn 66 album appeared, Winwood was jamming around his home town of Birmingham with younger, more adventurous spirits, among them the three future members of Traffic.
In February 1967 Winwood officially quit the Spencer Davis Group and swapped Birmingham for the Berkshire village of Aston Tirrold, where Island supremo Chris Blackwell had found him a cottage to rent. Blackwell, with whom Winwood had managerial ties, saw Winwood as a future mainstay of his label as it grew a rock roster from its reggae roots.
Winwood occupied the cottage alone, but there were numerous visitations from the band, and the blend of bucolic Berkshire and the intoxications of the Summer Of Love proved creatively invigorating. So began the myth of ‘getting it together in the country’, a notion that has trapped numerous bands into stoned, fruitless escapism (The Stone Roses’ Second Coming is but one case in point). The cover of Mr Fantasy shows the group gathered in the candlelit cottage. Rural tranquillity does pervade a portion of the record, though Berkshire Poppies is little more than an update of cockney music hall (various Small Faces are present on it).
Produced with striking clarity by Jimmy Miller, the record soared on Winwood’s soulful voice and inventive keyboard and guitar playing. Behind the balmy moods of Coloured Rain and Heaven Is In Your Mind lay much bickering over whether the pastel psychedelia of Dave Mason’s Utterly Simple was fit to sit alongside mournful Winwood creations like No Face No Name No Number. The schism between Mason and the others was there in the pair of singles that preceded the album’s release at the close of ’67, Paper Sun and Hole In My Shoe (both included on the US edition), the latter a sitar and patchouli confection from Mason which Winwood recorded only under pressure. Time has certainly been kinder to the questing spirit of the title track than Mason’s surrealist escapades, yet Mr Fantasy would be a less endearing encapsulation of its era without them.
The Appletree Theatre
Playback
Saturday Night Live meets Sgt. Pepper in an innovative – and irreverent – theatrical concept album.
Record label: MGM/Verve Forecast
Produced: John and Terence Boylan
Recorded: Mirasound Studios, NYC; 1967
Released: January 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: J Boylan (v, g, p); T Boylan (v, g, b); C Israels (b); L Coryell (g); M Equine (d); P Griffin (p, o); C Rainey (b); H Lovelle (d); E Gale (g); B Saltzman (d); Z Yanovsky (g); M Brown (cello); The NY Philharmonic Orchestra; Pete Spargo (executive producer)
Track listing: The Altogether Overture: In The Beginning; Hightower Square (S); Act 1: Lullaby; Saturday Morning; Nevertheless It Was Italy; Act 2: I Wonder If Louise Is Home; Chez Louise; E-Train; Meanwhile; Brother Speed; You’re The Biggest Thing In My Life; Act 3: Don’t Blame It On Your Wife; The Sorry State Of Staying Awake; Epilogue: Barefoot Boy; Lotus Flower (S); What A Way To Go (S)
Running time: 33.28
Current CD: Not currently available
Further listening: Terence Boylan – Alias Boona (1969)
Further reading: www.geocities.com/badcatrecords/APPLETREEtheatre.htm; www.terenceboylan.com/biography.html (both fan sites)
Download: Not currently legally available
After spending their early teens in England absorbing the influences of the Goon Show and Beyond The Fringe, brothers John and Terence Boylan returned to America to study drama at Bard College, near Woodstock. There they formed a band with fellow students Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, performed comedy skits with Chevy Chase and even got to hang out with their hero Bob Dylan. Vacations were spent playing the coffee house circuit in New York. One evening, confined to their apartment by illness, the brothers composed Hightower Square. If the song’s staccato rhythm owed a conscious debt to The Beatles’ Penny Lane, the bridge, which incorporates a spoken-word skit about smoking banana peel, pointed in a rather more light-hearted direction.
Having persuaded MGM to finance an album, the Boylans enlisted the services of the hottest session musicians they could find, while the presence of innovative engineers like Bill Szymczyk ensured that musical quality was never sacrificed to comic effect. As John recalls: ‘Because we were in the business we knew what these players could do – we felt like painters with an expensive new paint box.’ Structured like a play, the album intersperses musical burlesques with comedy sketches. A series of vignettes of Greenwich Village life send up weekend hippies (E-Train), druggies (Brother Speed) and squares (I Wonder If Louise Is Home) with equal relish. By contrast, side two has a rural focus, its ambitious centrepiece The Sorry State Of Staying Awake, in which a bored truck driver lazily turning his radio dial encounters fragments of hilariously over-blown soul and country music, spoof news bulletins and adverts. What A Way To Go, featuring a woodwind quintet and the late, great Zal Yanovsky on guitar, provides a beautiful, mournful coda to the preceding levity.
In a contemporary interview John Lennon cited Playback as one of his favourite albums, Time magazine lauded the Boylans’ sense of humour and satirical groups like the Firesign Theatre acknowledged them as an influence. Unfortunately, with MGM unsure how to promote the album and the material almost impossible to replicate live, the project remained a critical rather than commercial success. John became a highly-respected producer, notably with Rick Nelson and Boston, while Terence went on to release a number of solo albums, the first of which reworked many of the songs from Playback with the help of the future members of Steely Dan. Yet as The Appletree Theatre the Boylan brothers had struck a balance between music and comedy which has seldom been equalled on record – and proved that rock musicians don’t always have to take themselves too seriously.
Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band
Safe As Milk
Howlin’ Wolf projected into the future. Extraordinary debut from one of rock’s premier league eccentrics.
Record label: Buddah
Produced: Bob Krasnow and Richard Perry
Recorded: RCA Studios and Sunset Studios, Hollywood, Los Angeles; April 1967
Released: February 1968 (UK) September 1967 (US)
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: