The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
‘The day she was killed I got a letter from her which said all the little things she always used to say, like, “Sing some high notes for me,”’ recalls Bruce.
Colosseum drummer Jon Hiseman, who plays on the album, still enthuses about it. ‘It was the best album I ever made. Jack was a genius: he plays the best bass in the world, he’s a magnificent singer and he writes wonderful music. But I think the reason he never was a major star after Cream was Pete Brown’s lyrics are too obscure for a popular audience.’ Bruce seems unconcerned. ‘I’ve never wanted extreme commercial success. Cream was an accidental thing that was such a huge success I don’t have to worry about money, so I’ve been able to concentrate on what I want to do.’
Chicago Transit Authority
Chicago Transit Authority
A benchmark for brass and guitar-fuelled jazz rock.
Record label: Columbia
Produced: James William Guercio
Recorded: CBS studios, New York; January 27–30, 1969
Released: April 28, 1969 (US) September 1969 (UK)
Chart peaks: 9 (UK) 17 (US)
Personnel: Peter Cetera (v); Terry Kath (g, v); Robert Lamm (k, v); James Pankow (tb); Daniel Seraphine (d); Walter Parazaider (woodwind; v) Lee Loughnane (t, v); Fred Catero (e)
Track Listing: Introduction; Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? (S); Beginnings (S); Questions 67 And 68 (S); Listen; Poem 58; Free Form Guitar; South California Purples; I’m A Man; Prologue August 29, 1968; Someday August 29, 1968; Liberation
Running time: 77.43
Current CD: Rhino 8122761712
Further listening: Chicago II (1970)
Further reading: ‘Chicago At Carnegie Hall’, from Psycotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung (Lester Bangs, 1988); www.chicagotheband.com
Download: HMV Digital
At the tail end of the ’60s, rock big-band Chicago Transit Authority were peers and label mates with Santana, Janis Joplin and Sly And The Family Stone. The band had honed their craft playing up to six sets a night on the bar band circuit. Based in Chicago and its suburbs, they had begun as Big Thing, changing their name to Chicago Transit Authority in May 1967. In August they were spotted by manager James William Guercio, who was producing local Top 40 band The Buckinghams and would cut the breakthrough second album by Blood Sweat And Tears. Robert Lamm did most of the writing and Jim Pankow most of the arranging on their debut album, but Guercio played a crucial role, imposing tightness and economy.
For all the indulgence soon to be associated with rock LPs – not least Chicago’s – their first album was recorded in just two weeks. It contains some great musical moments: the Forever Changes-style Latin brass coda at the end of Beginnings, Kath’s guitar sustain as he comes in after the lengthy percussion break in I’m A Man – his guitar runs are exemplary throughout when he’s augmenting, not soloing. Then there’s the ‘The whole world is watching’ chant recorded from the demonstration at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. No band that learned its chops at the same time as Mayor Daly’s law enforcers were cracking heads could have emerged from that bloody environment without comment – a great McLuhanesque soundbite from the days when it really did look like the revolution might be televised.
It hasn’t all worn so well. Kath and Lamm’s mannered rock growls and Cetera’s wavery upper register do, in truth, grate a bit over the four sides. Strange to consider that their harmonies sounded sublime at the time. In essence, that’s Chicago. A greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts outfit who, in their early days at least, soared majestically. Their second album was equally inspired, but dedicating it ‘to the revolution’ whilst being promoted with the big bucks of the CBS rock machine merely aroused the ire of the rock press and the band’s early critical acclaim rapidly wilted. Bludgeoning a fresh and inventive formula to death by issuing three consecutive double albums, and a live quadruple, in the space of two years didn’t help matters either – so remember them this way.
Scott Walker
Scott 4
Former heartthrob sheds last remaining fans with only entirely self-written album.
Record label: Philips
Produced: John Franz
Recorded: Olympic Studios, London; summer 1969
Released: Autumn 1969
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Scott Walker (g, v)
Track listing: The Seventh Seal; On Your Own Again; The World’s Strongest Man; Angels Of Ashes; Boy Child; Hero Of The War; The Old Man’s Back Again; Duchess; Get Behind Me; Rhymes of Goodbye
Running time: 32.36
Current CD: Fontana 5108822
Further listening: Scott 3 (1969);’ Til The Band Comes In (1970)
Further reading: Scott Walker – A Deeper Shade of Blue (Matt Watkinson & Pete Anderson, 1994); Scott Walker: The Rhymes Of Goodbye (Lewis Williams, 2006); www.scottwalker.com
Download: iTunes; HMV Digital
No career trajectory in pop matches Scott Walker’s. As leader of the unrelated Walker Brothers, he was a teen idol with an audience even more hysterical than The Beatles’, but by 1967 he’d grown heartily sick of performing for frenzied girls and recording for a largely unadventurous audience. Upon completing a mismatched and increasingly fraught tour with Jimi Hendrix and Engelbert Humperdinck in April 1967, the reclusive Walker went it alone.
His first solo albums, Scott and Scott 2, combined heavily orchestrated cover versions with a handful of originals that hinted at the complex, cryptic persona that would reach its fullest expression on Scott 4. Songs like Montague Terrace (In Blue) and The Amorous Humphrey Plugg indicated a writer drawn to the darker sides of human nature, more intrigued by psychological detail than was common in chart music. With Scott 2 lodged at Number 1 in the spring of 1968, Walker was free to pursue his own inclinations further on Scott 3, which appeared in early 1968. Alongside his own increasingly wistful and elliptical material, on this classic Walker covered several songs by his hero Jacques Brel, the wry Belgian chronicler of continental low life.
Scott 3 sold less well, but Walker had no intention of surrendering any of his newfound artistic freedom in order to regain chart supremacy. The sessions for Scott 4 took place in Philips’s Stanhope Place studios in mid-1969, produced (like its predecessors) by industry veteran Johnny Franz. The first track, The Seventh Seal, immediately establishes not only the record’s mysterious, enigmatic mood, but also just how far Walker had come since his teen idol days. Over an insistent beat, ominous bells, jaunty castanets, prominent classical guitar, a ghostly choir and spaghetti Western strings, his voice is more resonant than ever as he asks: ‘Anyone seen a knight pass this way? / I saw him playing chess with death yesterday …’
Throughout the album his lyrics tread a fine line between abstruseness and romance, with one notable foray into politics, The Old Man’s Back Again, a funky number which the sleeve tells us is ‘dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist regime’. The arrangements are immaculate throughout, encompassing flourishes from various traditions – morose balalaika on Boy Child, pedal steel on the aching closer Rhymes Of Goodbye or the Hispanic swing of The Seventh Seal – without being as overblown as before.
Walker’s