The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
(g, b); Jerry Handley (b); Herb Bermann (b); John ‘Drumbo’ French (d); Milt Holland (pc); Taj Mahal (pc); Russ Titelman (g); Hank Cicalo and Gary Marker (e)
Track listing: Sure ’Nuff ’N Yes I Do; Zig Zag Wanderer; Call On Me; Dropout Boogie; I’m Glad; Electricity; Yellow Brick Road (S); Abba Zabba (S); Plastic Factory (S); Where There’s Woman (S); Grown So Ugly; Autumn’s Child
Running time: 34.25
Current CD: BMG 82876718792 adds: Mirror Man Sessions album and Safe As Milk (Take 5); On Tomorrow; Big Black Baby Shoes; Flower Pot; Dirty Blue Gene; Trust Us (Take 9); Korn Ring Finger
Further listening: Clear Spot (1972)
Further reading: Captain Beefheart (Mike Barnes, 2000); www.beefheart.com
Download: Some tracks on iTunes as part of The Buddah Years
Perhaps impressed by the way in which Captain Beefheart’s early singles Diddy Wah Diddy (a Bo Diddley cover) and Moonchild had paralleled contemporary blues-boom developments in Britain, A&M co-owner Jerry Moss was sufficiently encouraged to commission an album from the Los Angeles-based band. Upon hearing the demos, however, he refused to release the album on the grounds that it was too negative, and that songs like Electricity were not safe for his daughter to listen to. With their A&M contract finished, the first Magic Band broke up, leaving Beefheart free to sign with Buddah Records, where Bob Krasnow set to work polishing the songs that A&M had refused.
Beefheart reworked seven of the songs with bassist Herb Bermann – chosen because, as a professional songwriter already, he might lend a little more credence to the Captain’s compositions in the eyes of the second Magic Band. This new aggregation retained guitarist Alex St Clair Snouffer and bassist Jerry Handley from the previous line-up, alongside two new players who would add distinctive elements to the band’s sound: idiosyncratic drummer John ‘Drumbo’ French, and 16-year-old slide guitar virtuoso Ry Cooder, whose curling lines set the desert-dry tone of the album’s opener Sure ’Nuff ’N Yes I Do, a modernised take on Muddy Waters’ classic Rollin’ And Tumblin’ riff. This and a cover of Robert Pete Williams’ Grown So Ugly provided the clearest connection with the Captain’s blues roots, though already there were signs of Beefheart’s burgeoning sonic ambitions, notably in the presence of the theremin in Electricity and Autumn’s Child and the addition of Milt Holland’s log-drum and marimba to the grungey Dropout Boogie. Horns and backing vocals, meanwhile, brought an authentic Southern soul feel to Call On Me.
Though later albums would head for much weirder territory, the basic elements of the Magic Band sound were already in place on Safe As Milk: the rumbustious, jerky polyrhythms; the spindly, interlocking guitar lines; the abrupt changes in tempo; Beefheart’s raw blues-harp; and most of all, Beefheart’s voice, a fearsome multi-octave instrument capable of swooping mid-line from a high-pitched squawk to a subterranean bass growl. According to engineer Hank Cicalo, it was Beefheart’s vocals that were responsible for destroying a $1,200 Telefunken microphone – a feat he later repeated on The Woody Woodberry TV show. Though the album caused few ripples on its American release, it became one of the most ubiquitous artefacts of UK hippydom thanks to British DJ John Peel’s assiduous championing.
Leonard Cohen
The Songs Of Leonard Cohen
Definitive harbinger of bedsit melancholia.
Record label: Columbia
Produced: John Simon
Recorded: Columbia Records Studio E, New York; August 1967
Released: December 27, 1967 (limited release); February 1968 (full release)
Chart peaks: 13 (UK) 83 (US)
Personnel: Leonard Cohen (v, g)
Track listing: Suzanne (S); Master Song; Winter Lady; The Stranger Song; Sisters Of Mercy; So Long Marianne (S); Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye; Stories Of The Street; Teachers; One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong
Running time: 41.09
Current CD: Sony 5051362
Further listening: His debut’s immediate successors Songs From A Room (1969) and Songs Of Love And Hate (1971) continued Cohen’s soul-mining in similar manner. Later albums are less reliable, but 1988’s superb I’m Your Man is one of rock’s more notable comeback successes
Further reading: Leonard Cohen – A Life In Art (Ira Nadel, 1994); www.leonardcohenfiles.com
Download: HMV Digital; iTunes
Having made his reputation as a poet and novelist through the late ’50s and ’60s, Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen originally intended to go to Nashville to become a country singer, but had been, as he put it, ‘hijacked’ by New York, where he lived for a while in the mid-’60s at the notorious bohemian domicile The Chelsea Hotel. His plan was to ‘make a record, make some money, and go back to writing books’, although he found the ordeal of performance particularly gruelling to begin with.
Signed by legendary Columbia A&R man John Hammond after Judy Collins had featured his song Suzanne on her In My Life album, Cohen made an immediate impression with this debut album, whose sombre sepia cover hinted at the sometimes unflinching nature of the contents. Already well into his thirties by the time of its release, Cohen’s work boasted a maturity and emotional intensity denied to the more youthful singer-songwriters that had appeared in Bob Dylan’s wake. The album’s songs dealt with personal issues, mostly this legendary ladies’ man’s relationships with women – particularly Norwegian girlfriend Marianne Jensen, whom he met during his time on the Greek island of Hydra, where he had spent much of the preceding decade (she’s in the rear sleeve photo of his second album Songs From A Room). Both So Long Marianne and Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye were responses to their gradually failing relationship, while Suzanne celebrated his subsequent partnership with Suzanne Elrod, who would bear Cohen’s children Adam Nathan and Lorca Sarah.
Sung in his characteristic lugubrious baritone over rippling waves of fingerstyle acoustic guitar, Cohen’s songs possessed a brooding intimacy which proved surprisingly erotic: Songs Of Leonard Cohen remains, along with Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad and Tim Hardin’s first two albums, one of the masterpieces of boudoir-folk-rock. At the time, however, critics like the Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein castigated him for being a ‘Visceral Romantic … who suffers gloriously in every couplet’, crystallising a notion of Cohen as gloomily self-indulgent that would take years of wry drollery to dispel.
Fleetwood Mac
Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac
Young Brit-blues master Green in excelsis. Not much to do with the Californian edition of Fleetwood Mac.
Record label: Blue Horizon
Produced: Mike Vernon
Recorded: CBS and Decca studios, London; November–December 1967
Released: February 24, 1968
Chart peaks: 4 (UK) 198 (US)
Personnel: Peter Green (g, v, hm); Jeremy Spencer (g, v); John McVie (b); Bob Brunning (b); Mick Fleetwood (d); Mike Ross (e)
Track listing: My Heart Beat Like A Hammer; Merry Go Round; Long Grey Mare; Hellhound On My Trail; Shake Your Moneymaker; Looking For Somebody; No Place To Go; My Baby’s Good To Me; I Loved Another Woman; Cold Black Night; The World Keep On Turning; Got To Move
Running time: 34.20