The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
label that decided to release it. Stranger still is how Fly manages to anticipate Radiohead’s OK Computer, a mere 30 years beforehand. What goes around …
The Millennium
Begin
Ambitious, avant-garde but accessible West Coast genius from a legendary cult figure.
Record label: Columbia
Produced: Curt Boettcher and Keith Olsen
Recorded: Columbia Studios, Los Angeles; early 1967 to mid-1968
Released: July 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Curt Boettcher (v, g); Lee Mallory (v, g); Doug Rhodes (b, tuba, p, o, harpsichord, v); Ron Edgar (d, pc, v); Michael Fennelly (v, g); Joey Stec (v, g); Sandy Salisbury (v); Michelle O’Malley (v); Red Rhodes (ps); Mike Deasy (g); Toxie French (d); Jerry Scheff (b); Pat Shanahan (d) Paulinho DaCosta (pc)
Track listing: Prelude; To Claudia On Thursday; I Just Want To Be Your Friend; 5am; I’m With You; The Island; Sing To Me; It’s You; Some Sunny Day; It Won’t Always Be The Same; The Know It All; Karmic Dream Sequence #1; There Is Nothing More To Say; Anthem (Begin)
Running time: 43.15
Current CD: Rev-Ola CREV052 adds: Just About The Same; Blight
Further listening: The album made by Curt Boettcher and various Millennium personnel as Sagittarius, Present Tense (1968)
Further reading: www.geocities.com/Hollywood/ 3218 (fan site)
Download: Not currently legally available
The Millennium were the brainchild of LA-based producer Curt Boettcher (1943–1987), whose work on The Association’s 1966 debut album had yielded the hits Along Comes Mary and Cherish. Seeing himself as an auteur in the Phil Spector mould, Boettcher sought a broad canvas for his outpouring of ideas. His production partner was Keith Olsen, a whiz-kid engineer who quit his gig as bass player in the Music Machine to follow Boettcher’s lead. (Olsen would later become a hit producer himself for Fleetwood Mac, The Grateful Dead and others.)
Armed with a concept and a partner, all Boettcher needed was an angel. He found one in the form of Brian Wilson’s former writing partner, Gary Usher. A staff producer at Columbia, Usher first learned of Boettcher in 1966, when he heard strange sounds wafting down the hall at Studio Three West. As Usher (who died in 1990) later recalled, he was not the only one who was impressed; ‘Brian Wilson said, “What is that?”’ It was Boettcher doing a single with future Millennium member Lee Mallory. ‘That record stunned Brian. He’s doing little surfer music, and here comes this kid who is light years ahead of him. I had never seen Brian turn white. All he could talk about for a week was that song and that kid. Brian sensed that that was where it was at, that’s where it was going.’
Although The Millennium was conceived as a studio group, its line-up was solid. In addition to Mallory, Salisbury and Boettcher, it included former Music Machine members Ron Edgar and Doug Rhodes, newcomer Joey Stec and future Crabby Appleton leader Michael Fennelly.
Begin was recorded on two jerryrigged 8-track machines, making it only the second album to use 16-track technology. (Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends was the first.) The sound is dense; Boettcher’s philosophy could be summed up as,‘16 tracks and every one of them has to be filled!’ At the same time, it escapes being a Wall of Mush; in fact, it sounds strikingly modern, rendering the West Coast vocal-harmony sound of the time with a lush intricacy. The songs are as strong as the production, too: Fennelly-Stec composition It’s You presages ’70s power pop, while Boettcher’s The Island sparkles like beach glass in the sun. It’s no surprise that the album is a favourite of contemporary pop confectioners such as Belle And Sebastian, Saint Etienne and The High Llamas. Even in 1968, when Begin died a commercial death, there were people who knew that it pointed towards the sound of the next millennium. And then, there were also those who didn’t want to know. ‘I sent Brian [Wilson] a copy of The Millennium album,’ Usher recalled. ‘Freaked him out. He never called me back.’
The Band
Music From Big Pink
Astonishing debut from Dylan’s backing band, a soulful throwback completely against the grain of the times.
Record label: Capitol
Produced: John Simon
Recorded: A&R Studios, New York; Capitol Studios, Los Angeles; January–March 1968
Released: July 1, 1968
Chart peaks: 25 (UK) 30 (US)
Personnel: Jaime Robbie Robertson (g, v); Rick Danko (b, v); Richard Manuel (k, v); Garth Hudson (k, s); Levon Helm (d, v); John Simon (horns); Shelly Yakus, Rex Updegraft (e)
Track listing: Tears Of Rage; To Kingdom Come; In A Station; Caledonia Mission; The Weight (S); We Can Talk; Long Black Veil; Chest Fever; Lonesome Suzie; This Wheel’s On Fire; I Shall Be Released
Running time: 42.03
Current CD: EMI 5253902 adds: Yazoo Street Scandal (outtake); Tears Of Rage (alternate take); Katie’s Been Gone (outtake); If I Lose (outtake); Long Distance Operator (outtake); Lonesome Suzie (alternate take); Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast) (outttake – demo); Key To The Highway (outtake); Ferdinand The Imposter (outtake – demo)
Further listening: Follow-up The Band (1969) is, if anything, even better. Stage Fright (1970), Northern Lights – Southern Cross (1975) and live triple Rock Of Ages (1972) are the best of their other albums. Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Levon Helm each subsequently released several solo albums
Further reading: Across The Great Divide (Barney Hoskyns, 1993); This Wheel’s On Fire: Levon Helm And The Story Of The Band (Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, 1993); http://theband. hiof. no/
Download: iTunes; HMV Digital
Following a gruelling period backing Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour, the musicians later christened ‘The Band’ by Capitol Records (in preference to the more controversial ‘Crackers’) regrouped at their Woodstock hideaway Big Pink, where the informal sessions that resulted in Dylan’s Basement Tapes also gave rise to the material that made up their own debut album. Recorded with the imaginative young producer John Simon at sessions in New York and Los Angeles, these songs favoured the wisdom and values of a shared tradition over the transitory upheavals of the youth movement.
‘The songs were more like buried treasure from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists,’ claims John Simon. ‘They were playing out of what I called their “Appalachian scale”, a pentatonic, five-note scale like the black keys on the piano. That was the palette from which those melodies came.’
Lyrically, the band’s main songwriter Robbie Robertson had clearly learnt much from his time with Dylan, whose hand was initially believed by many to be behind the mythopoeic single The Weight. Dylan did, however, collaborate with Rick Danko and Richard Manuel on This Wheel’s On Fire and Tears Of Rage respectively (as well as providing the surreal-naïve cover painting), while The Band’s version of his I Shall Be Released became the definitive version of this modern liberation anthem.
‘The music was the sum of all the experiences we’d shared for the past ten years, distilled through the quieter vibe of our lives in the country,’ believes Levon Helm. Yet for all its traditional virtues, the album featured several innovatory musical strategies, notably from inventive organist Garth Hudson.