MUSIC THROUGH THE YEARS, 16

40 years ago: December, 1967
I first heard Songs of Leonard Cohen in the summer after I graduated high school, which is to say almost a decade after its release. Not many albums compare to it for the way it dominated my listening; it seemed to create an unshakeable mood. There was a quality to Cohen's debut album that seems not to be assimilable to the pop song, or even into the folk-song consciousness that Dylan and various other "poets" of the '60s song-writing binge had already made familiar to me.

Cohen was already a published poet and a published novelist by the time he turned to song-writing and recording. It always seemed to me that his musical career began because of record execs realizing, in the wake of Dylan et al., that there was money in serious young men composing surreal lyrics. Like Dylan, his songs were recorded by various vocalists looking to add profundity to their repertoire. And like Dylan, the versions he recorded of his own songs were less "musical," less polished, certainly less "commercial" than what others could do with them. This album, maybe more than any other I can think of, with the exception of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, is for me a major marker of the '60s. So much of what passes for "the '60s" in the general conception -- whether acid rock, or Motown, or the British Invasion, or psychedelia, or Hendrix's guitar, or the best era for Top 40 of my lifetime, or whatever -- is set off to one side by this album. It consolidates my sense of the '60s because that seems the only time when an album like this could have been made. Granted, these days, with all the low-key, low-fi, indie alternates, it should be easy to find correlatives. But is it?

For one thing, Cohen was 33 when this album was released, and the maturity of it is striking in that regard. In fact, that may have to do with the quality of it that so arrested me. As if the first album Dylan released was Blood on the Tracks. There's already a long life behind these songs. These aren't songs that tell stories or that simply create feelings to go along with the tune. As performance, the songs are annunciations, statements, composed and delivered by a writer who understands, more than most songwriters, what it means to articulate a position. The task is to deliver, within a five or three minute song, a sense of experience as inner realization, to find images and phrases to enact what seem to be different facets of the same thing: the poet's mind beset by the poet's mind.

Generally the catalyst experience is some kind of relation to a woman, but not entirely or only. And maybe that's what registered so strongly with me at the time (in those uneasy late-teen years inaugurated by getting out of school finally): the attraction of the females that Cohen's songs sketch a relation to is a kind of attraction that is rarely met with in pop songs. It's the attraction of "the muse," that nebulous figure that one finds inside the mind, stitched or knit together, no doubt, from actual girls of one's experience, and of one's reading and of one's film-viewing, but blended with some ineffable quality that is ultimately the quality of the poet's mind, of his regard for how his words can shade that relation most artfully, most meaningfully.

A muse figure that would recur for Cohen is Joan of Arc, mostly because of the French component to the culture of Montreal where Cohen grew up and eventually studied at McGill. But choosing such a figure not only brings in medievalism -- which certainly had its faddishness in the '60s -- but also a Catholic mythology that Cohen -- whose first book of poems was called Let Us Compare Mythologies -- seems to evoke for the sake of two concepts that, perhaps, it takes Catholicism to appreciate: the flesh and the Word. And maybe that's the other thing that registered about Cohen, making him eclipse even Dylan for a time (for me): there is an aesthetic at work, or, more to the point, these are songs written by a man who knows what an aesthetic is, who has experienced it in a literary way, which makes him seem more worldly, more European, more cultivated than Blind Boy Grunt could ever aspire to.

Don't get me wrong: what made me believe in Dylan was the fact that he never became literary, try as many have (and never more so than these latter years) to accomplish that feat of making him so. Cohen is literary, without apology. Or maybe it's just that behind his songs a literary sensibility lurks, smirking at the simplistic stylings of these little ditties. Regardless, his claim to what he calls "stranger music" is unparalleled. It's a claim to the suffering the flesh undergoes because of the Word -- not just that our sin of desiring knowledge more than God's love makes us guilty even in our glory, but that knowledge of the Word means we can never be content with the flesh, no matter how we worship it. Almost every Cohen song meditates on some aspect of this mythology. So the mastery of Cohen is not only the oddity of "pop" songs set irrevocably in a fallen world, it's also the necessary sense that song is the only possible response to such a condition of existence. You must sing to the Lord via the Muse. It's really the best you can do.

And taking from his wallet an old schedule of trains
He says, "I told you when I came, I was a stranger."
--Leonard Cohen, "The Stranger Song" (1967)

MUSIC THROUGH THE YEARS, 15

25 years ago: Sept. 1982

The Dreaming was the first Kate Bush album I heard upon its release. A friend had recently -- winter of '82 -- convinced me to listen to her first three albums, albums which showed a clear growth and development from the airy pixie voice of that first album, The Kick Inside (1978, when Kate was 20), remarkable for its clarity, unusual phrasing, and -- in a tour de force like "Wuthering Heights" -- passionate declamation. The second album, Lionheart (1978) was largely more of the same, though featuring some of my favorites among her early songs -- the mysterious "Kashka from Baghdad," the erotic "In the Warm Room," the Shakespearean fantasy "O England, My Lionheart" (hard to believe this was released while The Clash were up-and-coming and The Sex Pistols were still nominally in existence) -- it also has more forgettable songs than the first album. Never Forever (1980) was clearly a leap ahead. Wherever she was headed, Kate would not find there many to compare her with, nor many followers. The closest analogy to what she was doing with the layered, textured sound she began to develop on the third album is to Peter Gabriel whose third solo album was also released in 1980. Certain songs from that album got a lot of airplay in the U.S., not so Kate's album, lamentably. Why we weren't hearing "Babooshka" as regularly as "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" or the latest hits by Blondie or (yes, here she comes) Madonna is just one of those matters that rock historians can try to make sense of -- Zeitgeist, hype, payola, giving the people what they want, etc. -- but it makes of Kate's career something of an esoteric occurrence in the States (whereas in Britain she's tabloid fare).

That's the pre-history, sorta, but none of that can really prepare your ears for The Dreaming. Everything that was nutty and not-to-be-believed in her harmonies and counter-harmonies before is here -- on drugs, as it were. Kate is self-producing the music in her own studio, I believe. And her music has become masterful mannerism -- New Wave Baroque? -- that plays with the listener's attention in ways that hadn't been attempted since the days of The Beatles big studio breakthroughs and the first Pink Floyd album (David Gilmour, who joined that band in 1968, discovered Kate it's said -- one of his more lasting contributions to music I would think). Just listen to the title song. Then keep listening till you get it all. Yes, kids, there was a time when music was movies for your mind. And that's not even the strangest song.

The sheer diversity of the sounds on offer comes from the fact that Kate's voice seems able to do anything she wants it to -- from little pipings that sound like munchkins on speed, to airy, ethereal murmurs that drift angelically in and out, to guttural bellows that are truly disturbing ("Houdini"), to screeching banshee shrieks, to lounge-singer croon, to her version of the rock goddess vocal, which is never simply down and dirty, but has taste, poise, intelligence, and as for "pop diva" stylings, they've never before been tied to such odd syncopation, to musical arrangements that are so brilliantly NOT what you've been hearing on the radio, but on this album she goes into terrain, via vocals, that just doesn't exist anywhere else.

For awhile there I was a little worried about letting the second side play to the end -- like "here be monsters" on those old maps of the world -- because where Kate goes in "Get Out of My House" is both so uniquely her (the use of the male voice in particular) and so idiosyncratically out of this world that I can't quite begin to suss what it's really all about. The song is harrowing, especially when she changes into the mule ("Eee-yore"), but most of the songs here are, each in its own way; even the likeable, even danceable "Suspended in Gaffa" has odd flights (if only the backroom voices demanding they want it all and the little murmurings voices that wouldn't be out of place in an asylum -- "I'm scared of the changes"), and the final delivery of "it all goes slow-mo" feels at the end of its tether. "All the Love," in its sound evocative of a mind not in our world (dead or mad), rivals anything in the Barrett catalog -- and the use of recorded voices of the answering machine (answering machines were new technology in the early '80s) -- is right out of Roger Waters' bag of tricks, and used just as effectively. There's a theme of heists -- "There Goes a Tenner" and the soaring, passionate "Night of the Swallow" -- of something other-worldly via "Houdini" and the sense, sounded in the first song "Sat in Your Lap" that this is all about some kind of quest, in this world, for intimations of another world. But the reach outward -- "Sat" and "The Dreaming" -- and the resolute turn inward -- "All the Love" and "Get Out of My House" -- both seem parts of the same agony. The end of side one "Leave It Open" seems more positive, but doesn't sound it (if only because of the oddly manic voices saying "Now I've started learning how" and the munchkins from hell at the end).

"Idiosyncratic" is a word that comes to mind a lot when describing this record. That root "idios" -- of one's own ... which becomes synonymous with "peculiar," having the meaning of "unique" and also "odd." To be totally unique is to be odd. And this album is as odd as they come. Kate produced some great and worthwhile work on subsequent albums, but this one is the definitive article. Peter Gabriel released Security the same month -- also a step forward in his career, but the album feels dated to me now -- a good album of the early '80s, fine. But The Dreaming, though I associate it with fall 1982 when Scudo came over and insisted we play it at once, doesn't reside in that time, probably because I'm still learning how to listen to it.

Now everybody --
"Bang goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van"

THROUGH THE YEARS, 14

35 years ago: May 26, 1972

This is The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, one of the greatest rock'n'roll albums of all time, for all time. How to express my love for this record? How do I love thee, let me count the ways.

First let's do the historical: The Stones with Mick Taylor started great (Ya Ya's, Let It Bleed), hit their stride with the first new Rolling Stones release I ever bought, back in 1971: Sticky Fingers (I was 12 and didn't really understand why it was a guy's zipper -- what's with that Andy Warhol, anyway?), and then peaked with this double album. The next two albums with Taylor were drop offs but certainly respectable, it's just that in '73 and '74 prog-rock was in its heyday, and of course rampant Ziggyness (à la that zipper). Bowie wore a dress on an album cover in 1970; The Stones kinda went 'drag' on Goat's Head Soup in 1973. Anyway, those were the days.

But what were the days for Exile? The familiar story: The Stones living in the South of France to escape onerous Brit taxation, recording in the basement of Keith Richard's château (O saisons, O châteux!). Letting it all hang out. The album as The Stones' answer to Dylan and The Band's "basement tapes" (not even officially released yet). I like that explanation, actually. If you don't find Dylan and The Band's recordings from 1967 a defining moment in rock, then you might be untouched by Exile too. It's the looseness of it, the drunken camaraderie, but more than anything it's Mick Jagger's vocals. Who sings like that? Nobody that white would dare to sound that black. It's like Mick finally managed to get it on record, that overwhelming desire to be Little Richard or Chuck Berry or even Muddy Waters.

In these days of countless internet lyric sheets, it's hard to believe that once upon a time there was no recourse to the words, unless you frequented sheet music shops. The lyrics on this album have long eluded me. Not surprisingly, some of the words are really good. Even less surprisingly, many of the words aren't what I thought I heard. But the point is that, more maybe than on any rock album I can think of, the words don't matter! And it's not because, as is the case on many albums, and many later albums by The Stones, the words aren't interesting. The words here are involving, if you catch them. But it's the way they're sung that counts. Everything is in how Jagger uses his voice. It dominates every track as the lead instrument and it never flags, it never stops testifying, it never stops embodying rock'n'roll funk. And the backups -- whether reedy Keith (who sings lead on one track -- almost wish he'd done more, he complements Mick so well) or those kicking "colored girls," Clydie King and Vanetta -- seem to push Mick past his own powers.

Then there's the horns . . . and Charlie Watts, my favorite rock drummer of all time, at his relaxed best . . . and Taylor and Richard, the best guitar duo The Stones ever had, and piano handled by Nicky Hopkins, or Ian Stewart, or Billy Preston, all Stones regulars at the time. In the early days, I viewed some of the tracks as "less essential." I guess I could still prune it if I had to, but in thirty-five years the LP has become fixed. I wouldn't change a hair of its head. And I don't care about alternate takes and demos and all that nonsense. Sure, if there are more finished tracks that didn't make the cut, I'd love to have them. Albums this good don't come around very often.

I had a copy of this album in the summer of '72, but on the record player I had at the time it sounded like a muddy mess. Which is what some of its critics claimed it was (I wonder what they listened to it on). My definitive listening was in the summer of '78, by way of comparing it to the current Stones album (by then Exile commanded respect; Some Girls was touted as "the best Stones album since Exile" -- which in fact it was). But Exile... A friend and I listened to it at concert-level volume one afternoon on Belle Klipsch speakers drinking cold Chablis and imbibing other things. Wasn't there a time when hedonism was a political gesture? Let's go back . . . this album takes you there. That summer was the first time I fully appreciated the funkiness of the album, which frankly used to embarrass me in my uptight early teen years. You know how it is. Anyway, this album's in my blood, all the way, and it holds up for me in a vital way whereas some great stuff from the '60s and '70s strike me as artifacts. Whatever historians say the '70s were, to convince me they got it right, they have to include Exile on Main Street.

May the Good Lord
Shine a light on you
Make every song you sing
Your favorite tune
--Jagger/Richard, "Shine a Light" (1972)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 13

Forty years ago: April, 1967

The Indigent Ministers' 1967 release, Camp Scratch, is out of print and hard to find, lamentably. I didn't become familiar with this oddly quirky band until 1978's disco-era return to psychedelia, The Episcopalian Alien Sarcophagal Society, which is probably my favorite if only because it's so completely out-of-step with the timbre of its times. But the first album by Bill Melater and company has to rank as one of the more glaringly overlooked gems of the era.

The arrangements show the influence of The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out from the previous year (notably the noise fest of "Help, I'm a Rock") and now that I've become more familiar with the '60s output of The Beach Boys, it's easier for me to see why some of Melater's songs have been likened to "Brian Wilson meets Syd Barrett": there's something demented about the lyrics and the music is childlike in a kinda sinister way. Note though that this album, released in April 1967, precedes Pink Floyd's debut by several months. Note too that the attribution of "harmonica--a friend" in the liner notes sparked much conjecture that this was possibly an appearance by Dylan during his reclusive period after the motorcycle accident. It's never been completely disproved. More certain is the likelihood that Melater actually penned the lyrics for the album, even though they were initially said to be the work of eight-year-old Matthew Thomas, who earned the nickname "Little Shelley" at the time, for his precocious poetry. Simply put, the album is couched in a certain mystery, maybe even allegory, and should be added to any attempt to sum up psychedelia pre-Sgt. Pepper.

The title song runs for eleven minutes and clearly shows the influence of Dylan's lengthy cut of two years previous, "Desolation Row." Melater's sense of phantasmagoria is campier (pun intended) than Dylan's and that's part of the fun: "Aardvarks eating orange ice cream / down there by the mill stream / keep me contented with the wilds" isn't a line you're likely to find in Dylan's repertoire, though the delivery is reminiscent of the Man from Minnesota -- but not outright parodic as in Zappa's "Trouble Coming Everyday." Note too that The Beatles' "Penny Lane" topped the charts in March, '67 and "Strawberry Fields Forever" hit the Top Ten in April, and hallucinogen-inspired retrospects on childhood seemed to be the order of the day. Fine with me, I was only a kid at the time and associate both those songs with my childhood.

The Ministers' debut strikes me as a kind of nightmare version of a Disney film in which it's not so much that the visuals have changed as that their implications have become somehow unsettling. See for instance "Doom Troop": "we like our work, work, work / we never shirk, shirk, shirk / the tasks we're made to do / oh yes, for me, me, me / it's quite a spree, spree, spree / to have to clean the zoo." For a different feel, there's the obligatory vaguely medieval sound that crops up on so many albums of the era, yes, replete here with harpsichord and mandolin, "She Spins": "Nights of gold thread / pulled from her own head / she spins / a trestle of tresses / she spins / a flaxen ladder / to let him in." Melater was always an imaginative lyricist and the late '60s was the perfect period for the kind of play he's prone to. Musically, the album is dense and layered with lots of overdubs that seem to be deliberately discordant with the basic track. Sounds have a tendency to leap out at odd moments. It's dated, yes, but still fun.

When I first heard the album, I was put off by the lackluster production -- it certainly sounds like a shoestring recording -- but there doesn't seem to be any CD version, remastered or otherwise, coming in the future. Find a vinyl copy if you can.

Now we run
Because it's fun
Never caring what comes next
What germs we catch
No postmortem or pretext
Just Camp Scratch
--Melater / Thomas, "Camp Scratch" (1967)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 12

25 years ago: March, 1982

Shoot Out The Lights was the final album by the husband-wife duo Richard and Linda Thompson. At the time it was compared to Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975), another album expressive of the demise of a marriage. The album was my introduction to both of these artists; my interest in Richard Thompson took off from here -- into his solo albums of the '80s, '90s and his three most recent studio albums of original material, Mock Tudor (1999), The Old Kit Bag (2003), and Front Parlour Ballads (2005), which are the best of his career -- and also back to his time with Fairport Convention, 1968-70. Recently I picked up a remastered re-issue of an earlier R & L Thompson album: Pour Down Like Silver (1975), which is dark, moody and comic in the classic Thompson manner. It may be that his guitar playing was more powerful in the '70s and '80s than it is today -- there's nothing on those last three albums to equal the harrowing guitar on "Sloth" from Full House (1970), his final album with Fairport Convention, or the foreboding guitar on "Night Comes In," from Pour Down, or the bristling, aggressive guitar on the title track here -- which puts me in mind of Neil Young on "Danger Bird" from Zuma (1975).

Thompson is a song writer with a range of moods and topics. I think what attracts me to him most is that, like Ray Davies and Elvis Costello, he can be wonderfully sardonic -- see "Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed" (co-written with Linda) and "Wall of Death" -- but also, like them, he can tell the stories of characters not himself, not even temperamentally. "Backstreet Slide" is a cranking, lively number that captures the outlook of the down-and-out denizen of London -- something Thompson returns to again and again ("now slander is a loving tongue / they speak your name to everyone"). And the title track, in its figure of a criminal from the criminal's point of view (a metaphor for the angry husband's mood), presents the kind of use of character that is a staple of Thompson's writing -- and, from the days of "Crazy Man Michael" on Fairport Convention's masterwork Liege and Lief (1969), the point of view songs tend to imbue their subjects with a kind of tragic grandeur. Unless the opposite effect is aimed for, in which case the speaker of the song is given enough rope to hang himself -- in tongue-in-cheek manner.

The songs that earned the Blood on the Tracks comparisons are in the tradition of songs that tell it like it is about the stress of remaining a couple when the reasons for being together are hard to find. "A Man in Need," sung by Richard, gives the man's point of view -- a spritely feeling of being unsatisfied and looking for a way out, but "Walking on the Wire," sung by Linda, could be said to give the woman's point of view (both songs were written by Richard) and is more emotionally wrenching, if only because Linda's singing is more emotional, better able to crystallize the sense of endured pain, and of that agonized waiting for the other shoe to fall. But my favorite track sung by Linda is "Just the Motion," which offers some respite from the battle of words -- melancholy, yes, but in its chorus it looks at what "being together" feels like: "under the ocean at the bottom of the sea / you can't hear the storm, it's as peaceful as can be / it's just the motion." Her "mmm-hmm, it's just the motion" really clinches it.

Finally there's the opening track which I remember my friend Peter, who played this album for me back in '83, singled out for its choice of words: "Don't Renege on our Love" -- he loved the twist of "renege," that language of contracts, deals, negotiations entering the bedroom. It's a good example of Thompson's way with words. If someone you know -- or you yourself -- should be going through a divorce, here's an album you'll want to have around..

Now hunger is hunger
And need is need
Am I just another
Mouth to feed?
When the game is up
Well, don't renege on our love
--Richard Thompson, "Don't Renege on our Love" (1982)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 11

30 years ago: March, 1977

Sleepwalker was the first Kinks' album I bought when it was released. Though not a remarkable album for Ray Davies and company, it was distinctive to me because on it The Kinks finally sounded good. All the previous albums -- and there were some great albums and even more great songs -- used to appall me with their production. Granted, not everyone can have at their disposal the equipment and engineering savvy that The Beatles and The Stones could command, but why did the Kinks' albums of the '60s always sound muddier than the likes of The Who or Pink Floyd, or even early Bowie? The Kinks Kronikles, a double album of stand-out tracks released in '72, was my reference point for the early Kinks ('66-'70 -- which was not the earliest Kinks, because their landmark song "You Really Got Me" dates from August of '64) and it took awhile to warm to it because of those wimpy drums and arrangements that, for all their panache, sound as if all instruments were recorded on one track with the vocals on the other. Possibly so.

The RCA albums of '71-'76 were better, production-value wise, but after Muswell Hillbillies (their best -- and first -- for RCA, just as Arthur was their best, and last, on Reprise), Davies went off into his vaudevillian mode. I got an earful of this in the late '70s because my older brother was one of the few people, it seems, enamoured of Preservation Act II (1974). I'm still partial to it, but it's like Jesus Christ Superstar or Tommy: you're listening to songs that comprise a musical and so, unless you like your songs coming to you in character, it's a bit off to the side of the usual rock album experience.

Sleepwalker ended all the concept stuff and just delivered a batch of songs with, on Arista, recordings that sounded like they belonged in the late '70s. In fact I don't think Dave Davies' guitar ever sounded better: so fucking muscular! "Mr. Big Man", for instance. And brother Ray's vocals are strong and solid. "Stormy Sky" and "Full Moon" are some of his best singing. The latter is my favorite song on the album -- it manages to be kinda creepy and also funny and, well, "if the face in the mirror isn't you at all..."

It was on their tour for this album that I first saw The Kinks play live, at The Tower Theater in Philadelphia -- a reconstituted movie theater, fairly intimate. Indicative, in the sense that the other '60s bands I'd seen perform -- Tull, Floyd, Zappa -- were in larger venues. The Kinks were never big in America, being I think "too British" in some not quite definable way (oh well, maybe somewhat definable -- if you hear a song that hails village greens, billiards, "the St. George Cross and all those who were awarded them," it's pretty clear it's not aimed at the average American six-pack or bong-head Joe). In any case, it was so very good to see rock legends in spitting distance and to have a great time with Davies' hammy stage presence. Songs by The Kinks have been covered by the likes of The Jam, The Pretenders, Yo La Tengo, Elvis Costello, Big Star, Van Halen (!), and their sound is audible to me in some of Blur and in the latest album by The Shins -- so it's clear that Davies' legacy is healthy. He put out his first solo album in 2005 and it's refreshing to hear again his sardonic take on the world we're all stuck with.

We used to always say that Davies could write a song about anything. Check out "Sleepless Nights," about the guy who has to live underneath his ex-girlfriend and hear her get it on with his replacement. If there is "a theme" to the album, it seems to be the things that keep you up at night.

Haven't you noticed a kind of madness in my eyes
It's only me, dear, in my midnight disguise
--Ray Davies, "Full Moon" (1977)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 10

35 years ago: April 1972

Big Star isn't a band I heard of at all in the '70s. I didn't even know who Alex Chilton, the leader of the group, was. Sure, I knew the song by The Box Tops, Chilton's initial band, called "The Letter" but it was made dated, in my middle school years, by Joe Cocker's frenetic version. So it wasn't until Big Star started showing up on lists of all-time favorite music compiled by the likes of Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Paul Westerberg of The Replacements, two front-runners in the mid-80s "bands of my generation" sweepstakes, that I took notice of the previously overlooked Big Star. And, as they say, I'm glad I did!

This is the first album and it's imbued with an "essence of the '70s" that is hard to place, since it wasn't part of my consciousness during that decade. I think that's one reason I'm so fond of this band. When I think back on the '70s I think of the prog-rock I actually listened to; I think of glam, which I grudgingly accepted; I think of heavy metal, which was a passion for a brief time; I think of getting to know the past work of '60s greats now absent or in decline. But it's an album like #1 Record that provides a glimpse of the spirit of a cooler version of the '70s. I know it was there in the '70-'72 period in CCR and The Kinks and The Who and The Stones -- it's rock that has fully come into its own: a pop sound with harder edges, a bit of country twang here and there, a sense of the "happy trails" era giving way to grimmer, more stressed psychic vacations. Chilton and Chris Bell, his collaborator (on this album), give Big Star equal parts of kick and contemplation. Like Badfinger, another band of this period which pinpoints the feel of the times (and I did have a few of their 45s), Big Star has a sense of melody that is crisp and never cloying. But for some reason there aren't any hits here. That has something to do with what I see as Chilton's calculated "underground" persona. Having scored big hits (to become a "big star") with The Box Tops while still a kid, Chilton seems to be highly ambivalent about going down that road again. But that's probably just hindsight. At the time there was no reason why #1 Record shouldn't have hit the way The Eagles' first album did (released the same year).

Big Star fuses Byrds-like harmonies with the kind of power-pop riffs that The Kinks originated. Probably their best known song these days is "In the Street" which I'm told was the theme song for That '70s Show -- "wish we had / a joint so bad," yup -- but songs like "The Ballad of El Goodo" (maybe a bit too existential for AM) and "Thirteen" (which sums up young teen love without condescension or sappy nostalgia) and "Give Me Another Chance" and "Try Again" give us a taste of the introspective Chilton who will eventually create Big Star's Third / Sister Lovers, one of the greatest albums of the '70s. Period. Big Star's gifts are subtle -- it's in the arrangements, of voices especially -- and when #1 Record rocks ("Feel"; "Don't Lie to Me") it doesn't go for the kind of cranking riff-rock that could be found at the time in the likes of The Guess Who or Free or Foghat; it's the kind of music I can imagine the more discerning teen heads listening to, the kind of guys that know a bag of good stuff from run-of-the-mill and would pass on the latter.

It's an image I can't suppress when listening to this album: '70s rec-rooms and multiple sibling bedrooms where, surrounded by the trappings of middle-class suburbia, the kids would get blitzed and float away on serene voices and hard guitars. As one who was only thirteen in '72, this album pre-dates my actual exposure to such scenes, but it registers my sense of things to come, in more ways than one.

Tell your dad, Get off my back
Tell him what we said 'bout 'Paint It, Black'
Rock 'n' roll is here to stay.
Come inside, well it's OK
--Bell and Chilton, "Thirteen" (1972)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 9

40 years ago: March 1967

I didn't hear any of this music until 1970, when my older brother bought this album and introduced it into the household. Fateful. Dylan would subsequently become the most important musical figure in my life. It didn't happen right away, but gradually. On this album, the song that fascinated me was "Like a Rolling Stone": I remember, in sixth grade, playing the song verse by verse, over and over again, until I got all the words right. Not just to understand them, but to memorize them. Then, the following summer, before going on the yearly week visit to the shore in Maryland, I found myself listening to "Mr. Tambourine Man," hypnotized, transported.

This album is the compendium of the various sounds of Dylan up until the motorcycle accident, after which his career went off toward country and what is called these days "roots music." Even in 1970, only four years after the latest stuff on the record, some of this music sounded incredibly dated, from a time and place one couldn't quite identify. At the time I knew nothing about the musical tradition Dylan was drawing on, and more or less reinventing through his participation; eventually I realized that some songs he wrote were sprinkled among all those traditional songs The Brothers Four sang. We had some of their albums around the house. I was never sure where they came from, I suppose my dad, who liked country, folk and "real singers" like Mario Lanza and Barbra Streisand. Dylan he abhorred. And I think my mom hated him even more.

I wasn't too sure I "liked" him either. After all, I was listening to this record at the same time that my brother's venture into heavy metal had brought the first three Black Sabbath albums into the house -- and which made me "cool" briefly in sixth grade when the resident hip kid/street tough was amazed to learn that I knew the song "Hand of Doom," knew that it was about OD'ing on heroin, and could quote it correctly from memory, but that's another story. But maybe not. That quoting from memory talent is probably what drew me to Dylan. So many words! It was clearly an act of considerable memory for him to sing the songs, much less for an adolescent to sing along, matching him word for word (not, I regret to say, note for note).

But what about the Dylan voice anyway? It's what made him the scourge of my parents' ears. Note: they hated him more than they hated heavy metal! I think it's because you could learn to ignore the repetitive riffs and the sledgehammer beat, but you can't ignore Dylan's singing. It bites into your brain, like the bird outside your window that starts screaming at dawn and won't stop. Listening to him now, after decades of familiarity with every instant of these songs, I'm always impressed by how various his voice is, how carefully he crafts the tone of the voice for each song. "Blowin' in the Wind" is meditative, almost defeated. "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" is sing-songy in that way that is most often parodied in Dylan mockers, its tempo somewhere between an anthem and a nursery rhyme. "It Ain't Me, Babe" was a song I found very difficult to listen to back then. It seemed far too naked for professional singing. I felt embarrassed for him. Even though, as I later learned, it was one of the famous Dylan "put-down" songs, it seemed incredibly sad, each "no, no, no" not defiant at all but an admission of inadequacy. I was much more comfortable with the put-downs Dylan sang once he got a rock band behind him.

"Like a Rolling Stone" is a song aimed at us all. Recently, in reviews of the film Factory Girl, about Edie Sedgwick, reviewers trotted out the old chestnut: she was "the subject" of Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." Oh, wow, that explains it! I'm quite willing to believe that every song has a catalyst, some person that makes it "necessary" to write that song (as when Dylan says, in the song "Sara," addressed to his wife: "writing 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you"). "Rolling Stone" -- like The Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" or The Beatles' "She's Leaving Home" -- is a song that encapsulates a state of soul. I won't even say it's just "for the time" because it seems to me that "that time" occurs again and again. That every generation hits it and recognizes themselves in the song. What "Rolling Stone" does that those other examples doesn't is imbue the song's lyrics with scathing commentary rather than wistful melancholy. Sure, it could read as a put-down of Warhol Factory fodder, but, as Dylan remarked about "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "it's a song you can sing to yourself sometimes." "Rolling Stone" is like that. The part about the mystery tramp and alibis and asking to make a deal used to floor me as, emotionally, the crux of the song and in some ways the place to stop (especially since 'the mystery tramp' -- whether I listened to the song as aimed at "me," or with Dylan as the "you" -- was death).

The third verse always seemed to me weaker than the first two and was often dropped from live performances of the song. But the fourth verse is a corker; it could offer solace to "you" in as much as "Napolean in rags," whose language so amuses, is actually the singer. "Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse . . . you're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal." If this is imagined as a loss of self, secrecy, and defensiveness through some all-including love, then fine, a positive assertion. I can imagine this being Dylan's intention, reaching out, as he does in "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," to the bird with a broken wing. But, if Napoleon is a third presence, then that trustfulness is probably naive, and this figure is another emissary from the life of serial delusions "you" is doomed to (if it is "about" Edie then Andy seems a good candidate for Napoleon here). And all the secrets are exposed because the singer, cruelly, lovingly (perhaps) has just exposed them.

I won't go on to comment on "Mr. Tambourine Man" which, because of the beach imagery at the end, long stood for that feeling of being on the edge of eternity when in front of the ocean. But a later insight into the song was when I identified Dylan as himself "the ragged clown" in the following lines, which became for me the emotional crux of the song (in a verse often left out of live performances of the song):

And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing
--Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (1965)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 8

25 years ago: March, 1982

Lou Reed founded The Velvet Underground and with some version of that band produced four mercurial albums from 1967-70. Then he faded away, only to be resurrected by David Bowie (in the era of rampant Ziggyness, when glam was queen) who produced Reed's comeback LP (and, for some, finest solo album) Transformer. The album was a hit as was, improbably, "Walk on the Wild Side" (which wryly referred, uncensored on Top 40 radio, to a transvestite "giving head," among other things AM hits tended not to mention in those days). Lou followed that up in 1973 with Berlin, which is for me one of the greatest "concept albums" of the '70s and one of the darkest, most unrelenting albums ever made. It established Lou as a standard unto himself. Even Pete Townshend's excellent and more sprawling Quadrophenia, released that same year, isn't as powerful in giving a sense of a complex story unfolding in brief elliptical glimpses.

The Blue Mask was in some ways Lou's second comeback album (returning to RCA after several years, and uneven albums on Arista). Rather than dwell on what happened to him in the '70s, it's better to look at how unlikely it was that anyone whose career began in the mid-60s would be producing some of their higher quality work in the early '80s. But Lou did it with this album and its follow-up. The strength of the albums is based on some of the more more varied and nuanced song writing of his career combined with a clean-edged sound composed mainly of Fernando Saunders on bass and Robert Quine on lead, with Lou himself working out a harsh but melodic rhythm guitar that gave the songs just the right gritty, poetic edge. Listen to it unaccompanied on "The Heroine," a surreal ditty that neatly plays off the title of Lou's signature tune (and in some ways theme song) "Heroin" to offer a visionary sense of sacrifice and, possibly, redemption.

The album's sense of redemption is significant due to its autobiographical shadings -- "My House," a song in honor of Delmore Schwartz, poses the doomed poet as both a mentor of Lou's for a time at Syracuse University and as a ghost come to visit the mature songwriter Lou has become (sacrificial figure redeemed). Then too there are two songs in honor of Lou's wife Sylvia that suggest the degree to which a beloved in Lou's life has exorcized some of his more self-destructive tendencies. And, lest we assume that a settled life means Lou has become boring, we have "Average Guy" as a joke on the idea of a "normal" Lou ("I'm average in everything I do / my temperature is 98.2 / I'm just an average guy") and songs like "Underneath the Bottle" to record -- quite tongue-in-cheek -- the kind of lifestyle the singer has been known for. Then there are the show-stoppers: "Waves of Fear" with its distinctive, churning, fat-bottomed bass as Lou serves up a catalogue of neuroses; "The Gun," with Lou returning to that cold, razor-like voice heard on Berlin to deliver deadpan the musings of an armed housebreaker; and "The Blue Mask" which kicks ass sonically as Lou -- always willing to flirt with the Freudian myths of what gives birth to our deepest anxieties -- literalizes castration anxiety and unmasks a sado-masochistic thrill in punishment that "Venus in Furs" had only played with for kicks.

Finally, there's "The Day John Kennedy Died" which takes its place with other songs that mused about "the hour of the assassin" that reigned in the '60s and found its later manifestations in attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan and the killing of John Lennon in December 1980: Ray Davies' "Killer's Eyes" (1981) and Peter Gabriel's "Family Snapshot" (1980). Lou's lyrics, when at their most sensitive, sometimes drop the ball into bathos or awkwardness, but something in the earnest assertiveness of "I dreamed I was the president of these United States / I dreamed that I was young and smart and it was not a waste" registers a sadly aware conviction of some deep failure in U.S. society. Lou, in his early 20s when JFK was gunned down, perhaps found in the murder of a musical contemporary an incentive to reconstruct musically a bit of his own journey. The Blue Mask still holds up as the testament of Lou at 40, moving toward middle-age, still an original, but also a survivor.

Take the blue mask from my face / And look me in the eyes
--Lou Reed, "The Blue Mask" (1982)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 7

30 years ago: Feb. 1977

Marquee Moon was Television's first album, and Television was the first band that was "mine." Everyone else I listened to had begun their recording careers in my childhood (some, like The Doors or Hendrix, were already history). A debut album released in the last half of my last year of HS (though I didn't hear it till the following fall) inaugurated Tom Verlaine's band as "of the moment" (and "the moment" was my coming-of-age).

Verlaine's contemporaries, like Springsteen and Waits, began their careers in '73, during the singer-songwriter glut of my adolescence, and were molded by an older sensibility. Verlaine and company were "new wave," which meant they had a post-glam moxie and a rock club-edge that seeped into the music and gave it its non-mainstream bite. Two guitars, bass, drums, and Verlaine's strangled vocals. Lyrics that recalled the minimal lyricism of some of Jim Morrison's best -- a poetic sensibility refined to attitude, expressed in oracular phrases, eschewing the expansive word-pourings of Dylan, Springsteen, Patti Smith.

The latter was the herald of this sound on her debut Horses (1975): call it New York art rock. But what made Television more attractive to me was the lack of "I'm a poet and I know it" posturing that Smith indulged in. Television was leaner, tenser, offering an aesthetic stance that, in 1977, seemed to invoke a future for serious rock. I was induced to buy this album after becoming familiar with some of John Cale's Island recordings on the comp album Guts, released in Fall '77, and the possibilities of this kind of music, dating from '75 to '79, would be taken up to some extent in some early '80s bands of my g-g-generation such as Psychedelic Furs, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Cure, Bauhaus, R.E.M., and Dream Syndicate.

The main thing about Television -- for ears that began to appreciate the satori-through-electricity states induced by hearing Jerry Garcia play live (my first Dead show was in Sept. '77, in Englishtown, NJ, outdoors, enhanced in ways I won't elaborate here but which, contrary to received wisdom about memory impairment risks, were and are quite memorable) -- was that, unlike punk which would shortly be assaulting our shores, Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were guitarists. Verlaine was new wave's answer to the guitar heroes still going strong on the Philly airwaves of my immediate orbit. Like Talking Heads, who debuted later this same year, Television was a band that seemed to know the music I knew and were interested in going somewhere with that knowledge. And that meant finding a way of playing live, not of hiding out in some never-neverland recording studio.

What punk gave to all this was the willingness to make it fast and dirty and ugly, to eschew the sensual professional sound-doctoring that bands like Steely Dan, The Eagles, and The Doobie Brothers had taken as far as it could go. The hedonism of such music (saturated in CA sun) was its own reward, no doubt, but it was a far cry from winter in NYC in the closing years of the '70s, and that difference made all the difference. It meant lighting a candle for the Velvet Underground instead of The Beach Boys as the Creator of "the Sound." Guitars in dialogue, paired down rhythm section, minimal use of keyboards. Chords! Raw playing that could be set beside Neil Young's incarnations with Crazy Horse: fuck-you-in-the-gut guitar work that at times weeps and sings and choirs like bells.

I wasn't part of the CBGB scene, but it seemed important at the time to know about it. And so when I hear this album I hear a kind of call-to-arms. So many parts of it are intrinsic to whatever turning 18 meant, at the time (and, for a bookish nerd, it was refreshing to find poetry cool in a streetwise way, and to see Rimbaud name-dropped in music mag copy): "I understand all destructive urges / It seems so perfect / I see no evil"; "You know it's all like some new kind of drug / My senses are sharp and my hands are like gloves"; "I want a nice little boat / made out of ocean"; "Elevation -- don't go to my head"; "I sleep light / on these shores tonight"; "I remember / how the darkness doubled / I recall / lightning struck itself / I was listening / listening to the rain / I was hearing / hearing something else'; "Tell me who sends these / infamous gifts. / To make such a promise / and make such a slip"; "It's warm and it's calm and it's perfect / It's too 'too too' to put a finger on."

Pull down the future with the one you love
--Tom Verlaine, "See No Evil" (1977)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 6

35 years ago: Feb. 1972

Pink Moon is Nick Drake's third album and the last one he finished. He died in 1974. None of his albums did well in his lifetime and Drake had problems with performing, and with people generally, apparently. Not a viable candidate for show-biz.

I never heard of Nick Drake until somewhere around November 2000. No doubt the reason that I noticed the existence of Fruit Tree, the 4 CD box set of his three albums and a fourth containing the last tracks he recorded plus some other out-take stuff, was that it was placed in prominence in Cutler's in New Haven, and no doubt that was because of the effect the use of "Pink Moon" on a Volkswagen commercial in 2000 had on sales of Drake's albums. So, though I didn't hear the song on the commercial until after I'd become familiar with all his albums (through fairly steady and continuous play in Nov. and Dec. 2000), I probably owe some thanks to that commercial for making Drake a viable commodity.

It's odd that I never got wind of his music in the thirty-plus years from his first album in 1969 till 2000, particularly as the kind of arrangements and vocals he favors are flavored with the lyrical melancholy I associate with British folk music. I also wonder why, when sensitive singer-songwriters were all the rage in the early '70s, Drake wasn't pushed more, or didn't meet with more appreciative reviews or audience response. With Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and female singers such as Phoebe Snow and Janis Ian all over the airwaves, couldn't someone find a way to work Drake into the playlist? Who knows, but it's too late now.

It's hard not to hear these songs as the musings of a loner, something of an outcast, stuck in the parental home, smoking herb and practicing guitar at all hours, while the world of fame and fortune happens elsewhere: "Now I'm darker than the deepest sea / Just hand me down, give me a place to be"; "Please beware of them that stare / They'll only smile to see you while / Your time away / And once you've seen what they have been / To win the earth just won't seem worth / Your night or your day"; "Take a look you may see me on the ground / For I am the parasite of this town"; "And none of you stand so tall / Pink moon gonna get ye all."

There's something significant about not hearing this music until long after Drake's death, if only because at times the persona on these albums is the more poignant for the embattled, possibly at times embittered, neglect the artist had to live with, but which his current fame partly offsets (Drake songs became somewhat ubiquitous in movies for a time -- notably, for me, in Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, and in Lynne Ramsey's The Ratcatcher).

Pink Moon is the sparest, most stripped-down and unadorned of all Drake's records, providing more grounds for the glory of "unplugged" which became all the rage for a time in the '90s. The unvarnished recording also makes the songs sound personal, private, as if recorded at home. This music is even quieter than a Leonard Cohen album, but the guitar playing is nothing short of luminous. Again, because I love Cohen (and I can remember when even he got airplay) and other albums generally referred to as "dark" -- like Lou Reed's Berlin -- or "non-commercial" -- like Neil Young's Tonight's the Night -- it's surprising to me that I didn't pick up on Nick Drake much sooner. Then again, I realize that, without the internet, there was much less opportunity to pick up on obscure stuff (and I wasn't really online till 2000).

It's a singular album. The two previous Drake albums offer much more in the way of lovely arrangements, a factor which makes them sound more like albums of their day, which is to say at least nominally produced for a market. Pink Moon is more "timeless" in a sense, though there's some quality in Drake's voice and in his sense of melody -- in the title song, in "Road," in "Things Behind the Sun," and particularly in the melody of the line "Hear me calling, won't you give me / A free ride" -- that evokes for me the time when these songs were current. So part of the "loss" of Drake is the loss of a time, an era, some quality intrinsic to the music that is less notable in songs one has heard at various times over the years. Drake's sound is a little time capsule, a glance back at a timeless time that is also finally, ironically, current.

Know that I love you
Know I don't care
Know that I see you
Know I'm not there
--Nick Drake, "Know" (1972)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 5

40 years ago: Feb. 1967

The Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons was a kind of coming-of-age for the world's ugliest band. When I was eight I got to know the song "Ruby Tuesday," the first Stones song I ever heard and which has remained one of my favorite songs to this day. Even then the song seemed much older, like it had been around forever -- that quality sometimes referred to as "timeless." And yet, in retrospect, the song -- which is about the changes time brings -- is very much of its time. What I associate with 1967 is an opening of the available musical palette for rock bands. In the typical history, Rubber Soul (1965) begat Pet Sounds (1966) which begat Sgt. Pepper (1967) (and then Brian Wilson's brain french-fried trying to top that with Smile), or something like that. The Stones, of course, were left out of that trajectory because they were the copycats, not the ringleaders, following wherever the Fab Four led.

Maybe so, but Between the Buttons takes chances that lend it an odd double vision of both innocence (maybe because I was only in grade school at the time) and a knowing weariness. Take the lead-off hit, "Let's Spend the Night Together" (the "B side" of "Ruby Tuesday," as I saw it, but actually the A side); I didn't even know why the song was kinda scandalous. Sure, The Beach Boys had already imagined being older "so we could say tonight and stay together" (but didn't say sleep together!). "Spend the night together" is not a euphemism, it's actual parlance not for sleeping together but for having sex! "I will satisfy your every need/ And now I know that you will satisfy me." Outrageous! Surely these must be the Bad Boys of rock!

Many songs on the album (which I didn't hear in its entirety till many years later and which I didn't own until the enhanced CD of the British version of the album came out a few years ago) visit areas not generally broached. If The Beatles' "Dr. Robert" (left off the U.S. version of Revolver) was a coy reference to the man who supplies the drugs (or to Robert Zimmerman), BTB's "Something Happened to Me Yesterday" is an even more coy reference to "something" the singer has been getting into ("something oh so trippy") -- is it drugs, is it sexual kink of some kind, is it "true love," is it all of the above? And if The Beatles had already given us a portrait of the upper-class girl who wants to be a star (in "Drive My Car"), The Stones' acid "Miss Amanda Jones" paints the little high-born minx in even gaudier colors. The Stones had already shown themselves masters of the put-down song ("Under My Thumb," "Get Off My Cloud," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Stupid Girl") in which the singer rags on some chick who's playing him or on some clown who doesn't quite get what's what. On BTB, the put-downs have more charm -- "Who's Been Sleeping Here," "Yesterday's Papers," "All Sold Out," "Cool, Calm, Collected" -- and, the odd thing about them, the surliness seems almost beside the point.

Why? Something to do with the musical arrangements. I always assume that any significant improvement in the sound or dynamics of Stones' songs in this period is the work of Brian Jones. It seems to be the case that Brian was the man with an itch to experiment with different instrumentation -- "something" very much in the air at the time. The sound of pre-Sgt. Pepper albums is not quite psychedelic, but it's on its way. And there is something "timeless" about that too -- it's a kind of head music ("my bags they get a very close inspection") before the heads were everywhere and before there was such a thing as "acid rock." Hell, the first "Human Be-In" in SF (with Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane performing) was in Jan. '67 and Monterey Pop didn't happen till June. Hendrix is charting in the UK, but unknown in the US. The Stones aren't in the vanguard (in fact the album seems to be responding to Revolver, more than pointing to what's to come), but the album gains a lot of its staying power from the way it registers the moment "between" Revolver (August '66) and Sgt. Pepper (June '67) when the Brits were all about doing something interesting to rock'n'roll. And the cover's heavy coats and blurry photography recall Blonde on Blonde (May '66) the way its probably meant to ("everybody must get stoned!").

The Stones, with "Ruby Tuesday," showed that "Paint It, Black" wasn't just a flash in the pan. "Ruby Tuesday" had something of the stately melancholy I associate with "Eleanor Rigby" and so adds greater maturity to the kind of lyrical Stones song that I would later get to know with the release of Hot Rocks in 1972: "Play With Fire," "Heart of Stone," and "As Tears Go By." But I heard "Ruby Tuesday" first and this is the album it's on. And "She Smiled Sweetly" (used effectively in The Royal Tenenbaums when Margot is in the tent after Richie's suicide attempt) is another nice gem -- "I understood for once in my life."

I remember an older friend telling me that the title "between the buttons" was really dirty. It took me a long time to get it. Oh, those Bad Boys!

You need teaching, you're a girl.
There are things in this world
That need teaching with discretion, my profession
--Jagger/Richard, "My Obsession" (1967)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 4

25 years ago: Feb. 1982
By 1982, musical artists born in the '50s were coming into their own, creating what I referred to as the second Golden Age (or Silver Age?) of New Wave. Some of those who were a bit older than me I took to right away: David Byrne, Elvis Costello, Joe Strummer. Others took awhile to overwhelm my resistence; eventually I would accept them in their own rights, but at the time there was still -- to my mind at least -- a lingering feel of "wanna-be" status to those who came too late to be part of the real Golden Age. Belated in more ways than one.

XTC is a good case in point. English Settlement was their fifth album; in those days when four albums in four years was not uncommon, fourth albums had a way of being the end of the initial impetus or the transition to the fully empowered status of veterans. English Settlement indicates full empowerment (and was a double album). But I didn't get around to listening seriously to Andy Partridge and company until their seventh album in 1984. Maybe I was finally convinced by the fact that they had staying power that some of their contemporaries -- like The Jam and The Clash and others who crapped out before mid-decade -- didn't have. But my early avoidance stemmed from my sense that, unlike the Heads, The Clash and Costello, XTC seemed predicated too readily on "the aesthetic regime" that had come to be passé. Partridge still strikes me as a combination of Lennon and McCartney in one person: his lyrics tend to the acerbic, at times preachy, bent of John Ono, while his musical imagination is as delightfully irrepressible as Sir Paul at his most inventive. In other words, Partridge was so hepped to be the Second Coming that it struck my early 20s self as too willful, too mannered. It took me awhile to overcome this prejudice.

But it's also a fact that XTC never achieved much stature in the US of A, and, given the band's status, musically, as a New Wave Beatles (they even stopped touring the way the Fab Four did after Revolver) it's somewhat curious. One way to explain it is that the effects of disco and punk and their aftershocks had dissipated any mainstream rock/pop consensus such as the bands of the initial British invasion and the subsequent era of arena rock had commanded. By the early '80s arena rock was for the dinosaurs and for head-banger balls. Bands with New Wave savvy were aimed at a smaller, more ironic coterie. And the underground begat alternative.

XTC, with songs like "Melt the Guns," which singled out the US as the main brokers of the arms race, and "Nearly Africa," which gave a boost to non-white superiority, and "Down in the Cockpit," which waved the flag for female autonomy, and "No Thugs in Our House," which satirized bourgeois complacency and youthful Nazi-wanna-bes, was always ready to comment on the inequities and chicanery of the day in ways that the up-and-coming young conservatives couldn't dance to, and which the old-time hippies turned yuppies found naive or irrelevant. And the songs were way too tuneful for the punks' scorn of musicianship and professional standards.

Thus XTC, like much of New Wave, remains barely a blip on the big radar screen of what was happening in this era of music. These days when I listen to English Settlement I can't help thinking of the friends from that era who were hipper than I was and who sussed that Partridge was God's gift to English pop. The songs have all the crisp, sonic newness of the Heads at their best, but also feature the kinds of melodies British popsters are rightly famous for. And Partridge and the much less prolific Colin Moulding are nothing if not clever -- not quite with the sneering aggression of Elvis Costello's amazing wordplay, nor with the storytelling pathos of someone like Ray Davies; songs like "Senses Working Overtime" (which saw a smidgen of airplay in the first year of MTV), "Jason and the Argonauts," "Snowman," "Fly on the Wall," "Leisure," and "(All of a Sudden) It's too Late" are idiosyncratic, musically complex, observant and emotionally candid in ways that few others could be so exuberantly. Partridge and Moulding are simply brilliant and this is probably their best album -- at least until, ten years later, 1992's glorious Nonsuch.

Life's like a jig-saw,
You get the straight bits,
But there's something missing in the middle.
--Andy Partridge, "(All of a Sudden) It's Too Late" (1982)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 3

30 years ago: Jan. 1977
In the suburban wastelands I hail from, the affront of punk was slow to light a spark, but late in 1977 came the export (and exploitation) of The Sex Pistols. At this point in the story, though, the dinosaurs of Rock were unshakeable in their stature.

I graduated from high school in 1977 and at that time there were three veteran bands that dominated what the kids were listening to: Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, and, of course, Led Zeppelin. The other mainstay was The Beatles but they were no longer a going concern, so to speak. Pink Floyd was generally regarded as the band from that "Golden Age" era that remained true to its dominant ethos -- which had something to do with grass, psychedelics, inner visions, and a vaguely anti-establishment program that translated into not becoming your parents. But Pink Floyd's reach, after the grand cash cow that was Dark Side of the Moon (1973), expanded beyond almost everyone's grasp: they simply were Rock, and if you cared about that, however dimly, you found the Floyd acceptable.

One way of saying it is that the "aesthetic regime" of Rock was the one fostered by the greats of the Golden Age, that what we had come to expect from the Floyd -- lyrical guitar solos, ambient keyboards, trenchant lyrics and vocals strident or eerily sedate -- could be supplied indefinitely. But what started with Dark Side was Roger Waters' emergence as a man with an ax (careful, eugene) to grind, and that had something to do with the true ahrtist being appalled by the commercialization of music and the egregious "gravy-train riding" of its sycophants and PR men (a tune going back to The Kinks' "Mr Reporter" and The Stones' "Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man").

On Animals, Waters returned with a vengeance, letting everyone have it. The album is notable for the glee of Waters' delivery, the harder edge to the music, and the acerbic clichés of its mini-portraits, recalling George Harrison's "Piggies" and some of Lennon's more pointed barbs, of all the Dogs, Pigs, and Sheep out there, "house-proud," censorious, smug, climbing the ladder no matter what, or piously not getting ahead so as to show their moral superiority, "fucked up" in one way or another, a rogue's gallery of the self-satisfied Seventies culture of "making it." The cover shot -- a beautiful photo of a "dark satanic mill" hovered over by a flying pig, the mascot of every enterprise -- told the story: Big Business is our culture's salvation and curse. Serving the machines that serve us is the best humanity can hope for in the 20th century. Sandwiching the vitriol of the three long songs on the album (still maintaining allegiance to the standards of prog-rock's epic sweep) were matching little acoustic ditties on which Waters, heart on his sleeve, claims that he cares and that genuine friends are the only hope against those sinister Pigs on the Wing.

A baleful album in a lot of ways, but a nice kick in the ass after the more elegiac tone of Wish You Were Here. Only occasionally did Rock ever register with the intelligentsia; more often than not, it's the happy stomping-ground of working-class heroes, and Animals tips its hat in that direction. The legions of jobless or stuck in dead-end jobs can't say enough, negatively, about The System that robs their dignity. What are the chances the Sheep will rise up "and make the bastards eyes water," Waters wonders, leaving it to the up-and-coming Clash to agitate for "revolution rock." Such a drag, too many snags...

Bleating and babbling, we fell on his neck with a scream
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
--Roger Waters, "Sheep" (1977)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 2

35 years ago: Feb. 1972

Harvest was a milestone for Neil Young because it marked his entry into mainstream radio play, which was what brought him to the attention of my Top-40-listening ears at that time. In 1972 I was 13 and as yet knew only AM radio. Harvest boasted two Top 40 hits: "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man," both of which marked a confluence of two strains of pop music then prevalent. One was rock's turn toward a country sound that had begun under the influence of Gram Parsons (reaching its apogee in two songs on The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers of the year before); the other was the sensitive singer-songwriter sensibility that hit its Grammy-winning stride the previous year as well with James Taylor's Sweet Baby James. Young joined those trends after time spent with Crosby, Stills and Nash -- a supergroup that had played its part in both of those trends already. Indeed, Young's contribution to CSNY's Déjà Vu, "Helpless," was one of my favorite songs in 1970, and his topical "Ohio" (written immediately after the Kent State killings) had cemented my admiration for the moody dude of the foursome.

Harvest was later complained of by Young for its mainstream accessibility, but that's hindsight speaking. At the time, the album simply fulfilled expectations that albums like Déjà Vu and Young's solo LP After the Gold Rush had raised: that someone could make mature, grown-up countryfied rock without becoming sappy or hokey. What kept the latter two epithets from rearing their head on this venture were songs like "Alabama," a revisit of the scathing "Southern Man" that registered again -- in the year when Wallace, pre-assassination attempt, was making noises that would again worry the ailing Democrats -- how backward was the South (in other words this was "country" without the reactionary conservative BS), and "Words (Between the Lines of Age)" in which Young gives his guitar an elegant and tasty workout while the lyrics provide a sense of creative ups and downs that is more positive than despairing (Young had already demonstrated his penchant for darkly neurotic narratives in "Last Trip to Tulsa" and "Don't Let It Bring You Down").

The hits on the album still deliver after all these years as eminently hummable ditties about facing the aging (Young was 26 when the album was released) that signals a hiatus in the rock troubadour lifestyle. Dylan's retreat for country's gentler rhythms had also occurred in his late '20s, so the precedent had been set. Young, unlike Dylan, didn't go for the settled family man version of things in his songs: "A Man Needs a Maid" and "Out on the Weekend" both signal, with bittersweet lyricism, a resolute singleness in search of some way of maintaining solitary allegiances without simply becoming an old child. Tales of lost innocence can be found in the title track -- which seems to promise a lover "a man," not only as a promise of sex but also in the sense of mature companion -- and in "The Needle and the Damage Done" which states emphatically that, in Dylan's words, "too many people have died" due to the depredations of the demon poppy. It's time to grow up on many fronts -- and as "Are You Ready for the Country" (which was a country hit for Waylon Jennings, one of the original Nashville rebels) proclaims: "you've got to tell your story, boy, before it's time to go."

The centrality of this album in the Young canon was signaled by his very successful revisiting of its terrain twenty years later with Harvest Moon in 1992. Telling his story is what Young does best -- that and play the guitar. Neither "harvest" album is predominatly guitar-driven (those occasions were left to outings with Crazy Horse), but both are warm, homey, comfortable albums easy to live with and in. Easy listening? Yes, and in 1972 that easiness had not a little to do with rock's ascension to major market with its heroes all getting along quite comfortably, posing no threat whatsoever to the Silent Majority's man of the hour -- Tricky Dick Nixon whose landslide re-election was only nine months away. There are worse places to sit out the shitstorm than a ranch in Topanga Canyon. As Keats says, "the squirrel's granary is full, and the harvest's done."

Will I see you give more than I can take?/ Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp/ or fuse it in the sun?
--Neil Young, "Harvest" (1972)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 1

Spread at five year intervals from 40 years ago to 25 (the era of my childhood and youth), I've selected albums for each month to cover the years that, for me, trace the Golden Age of Rock (not rock'n'roll per se -- whose Golden Age was arguably the '50s, early '60s) to the debut of my age group. The Golden Age of Rock is essentially the era in which The Beatles and The Stones (aka, The British Invasion) came to maturity. The Beatles broke up and The Stones -- like all the great bands of that era -- went into decline, but that decline was in some ways delayed by the second Golden Age: the era of punk and New Wave that surfaced in the late '70s and played itself out in the early '80s. By the mid to late '80s the decline of that initial rock impetus was complete and the New Wave had, in most instances, been subsumed into the slick digital processed rock of the era. Grunge and lo-fi and a few notable mavericks kept the game alive into the '90s at which time many of papa's heroes enjoyed a resurgence. But that tale is best left to those who were college age at the time.

40 years ago: Jan. 1967
This is a landmark year for several reasons, not least of which is the appearance of this record: Andy Warhol presents The Velvet Underground with Nico (aka Peel Slowly and See). I was eight in 1967 so I can't claim that I experienced this album in its own time. Ten years later, toward the end of high school, this album offered itself to me as a discovery of where two mavericks, Lou Reed and John Cale, got their start in collaboration.

It took me ages to warm to Nico's vocals -- and I use the word "warm" for its appositeness to the feeling her voice creates in its resolute unwillingness to register any emotion. These days I can get as misty as anyone when I hear her icy Teutonic tones on the soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums because in the interim the woman died (but not before I saw her live in New Jersey opening for Cale), but also because, more importantly, the sound of the songs on which she sings ("Femme Fatale," "All Tomorrow's Parties," "I'll Be Your Mirror" -- the latter two trademark Lou meditations on "the girl" with nothing to wear and nothing to say and so no identity, who, as mirror, can only reflect what the others want her to be, but which is also a kind of ars poetica for the singer who will reflect only what he sees: what Cohen called "beautiful losers" losing the best way they can) define the late '60s ambiance of this album for me. It's all about trying to warm cold water flats in Chelsea with a colorful parade of personalities poised to be famous in the Underground . . . or in Warhol's Factory. How can you not feel nostalgic for a time, place and style you never got to experience but which left its aura on virtually everything hip bohemia would pine for ever after?

The Underground, that amorphous concept of the '60s, could breed so many self-styled creations that would later be called "alternatives" and yet maintain a kind of checklist of what's de rigueur, at least in NYC. And Lou checks 'em off: alienation, promiscuity, decadence for its own sake, hard drug use (definitely NOT psychedelic!), cross-dressing, homosexuality, S/M, a cult of beauty, a cult of death ("death is the mother of beauty"), intellectual and creative pretensions -- at a time when, as he says in a later song, "poets studied rules of verse and the ladies roll their eyes," his lyrics for "Black Angel's Death Song" retain a touch of Dada, while Cale's sonic contribution -- like the smashed glass in "European Son" -- adds elements of the actual avant-garde, rubbing shoulders for the first time with rock'n'roll.

Lou began his songwriting career as a doo-wopper and those roots are audible here, especially in the tracks Nico sings on, so that the album at times showcases a kind of Brill building apocalypse: like theater pieces that end-up off Off-Broadway, these songs would never make it with the masses and can only find their place in the Underground, where they gain immeasurably by maintaining allegiance to a brittle innocence on the edge.

My two favorites are "Sunday Morning" and "Waiting for My Man" -- one of the greatest A/B pairings imaginable -- think of it as the underground version of "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane": "Sunday Morning" gives us the angst (a big buzz-word après le guerre) of "the wasted year so close behind" while "all those streets you crossed not so long ago" signal not only the changes of the identity parade but also the Heraclitean flux of time's stream. Like Sisyphus' stone (in Camus' account), Sunday morning always comes 'round again and the crushing weight of the past resurfaces. The feeling is not so much "it's nothing to get hung about" as: what a bittersweet and wonderfully melancholic feel it is to get hung about it: "we must imagine Sisyphus happy" though "I got a feeling I don't want to know": a feeling that hangs over the day, precipitating the hard drug use that will recommence the cycle.

"Waiting" is much more upbeat because, like "Penny Lane," it's a story of the street, but in this case it isn't the whimsy of how surreal psychedelics make the quotidian as in McCartney's tune, but rather how anxiously the addict waits for his fix, while still presenting the danger ("hey white boy, what you doin' up town?") and the distress ("the first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait") as a kind of adrenalin rush that precedes the heroin rush ("he's got the works/gives you sweet taste") and then "you're feelin' fine/until tomorrow, but that's just some other time" -- the "tomorrow" that will surface sooner or later as "Sunday morning."

And of course there's "Heroin," one of the best songs Lou ever wrote, implying that drug addiction is expressive -- in part ego-assertion, in part escapist fantasy, in part social protest, in part an inner quest -- and, on this album, accompanied by Cale's electric viola pyrotechnics. As they say, "a must!"

When I'm rushing on my run/ and I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know/ oh, and I guess I just don't know
--Lou Reed, "Heroin" (1967)