KING CRIMSON: "IN THE WAKE OF POSEIDON"

Original Released on LP Island ILPS 9127
(UK, May 1970)

No matter how successful their debut was, King Crimson was a band close to a full break up in 1970. Most of the members from the debut had already left, but Greg Lake stayed long enough to complete the vocal-tracks for most of the songs on "In the Wake of Poseidon" before he went to join Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Among the new members of the band were keyboardist Keith Tippett and the well-known saxophonist/flutist Mel Collins. The album became structurally and musically very similar to the debut, but that album was so good that we surely can take it a second time too! "Pictures of a City" is this album's "21st Century Schizoid Man", but with a funkier sax-riff and more float in the vocal-parts. The title-track is a really beautiful, mellotron-driven symphonic progressive rock track, and sounds like a cross of "Epitaph" and the title-track from the previous record. "Cadence and Cascade" was much in the same vein as "I Talk to the Wind" but the voice of new singer Gordon Haskell made it at least sound a little bit different. The cheerful and jazzy "Cat Food" and the very sinister instrumental "The Devil's Triangle" (based on "Mars" from Gustav Holt's "The Planets") was the only tracks where the band managed to do something that they already hadn't done on the debut. But, unlike many critics, I don't think this second album is inferior to "In The Court Of Crimson King". In fact, after all these years, I return more often to this album than his predecessor.

NOW I'M SIXTY-FOUR!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL!!!

And then came Daddy-O

The album marked Sinatra's return to #1 on the pop album charts in the mid-1960s, and it consolidated the comeback he started in 1965. Combining pop hits with show tunes and standards, the album creates a balance between big band and pop instrumentation. The single "Strangers in the Night" also reached #1 on the pop single charts, while "Summer Wind" would slowly become a classic, used for television commercials and mood-setting entrances by the 2000s.
Sinatra garnered three Grammy Awards for his efforts, including the top ones of Album of the Year and Record of the Year for "Strangers in the Night", as well as Best Male Vocal Performance for the same song.
This is the final album Sinatra performed with long-time arranger/conductor Nelson Riddle and his orchestra.
"Strangers in the Night" has been certified platinum for 1 million copies sold in the U.S. It is the only "regular" Sinatra album to achieve this (the others to do so have been greatest hits/compilation albums, Christmas albums, or the end-of-career "Duets" albums).

ON SINATRA OR HOW TO BE TIMELESS TONIGHT

Back in New York, where he started, where twenty thousand bobby soxers once pressed themselves against the doors of The Paramount Theatre to see him, things are different. The brilliant bronze doors are green with neglect. On one side wall, the chalk legend "The Animals Are Loved Only by Girls Named Josephine".

Animals may come, and they sure do go, but Sinatra stayeth. He stays to sing. Whatever it says at the top of your calendar, that's what Sinatra sings like: 66, 67, 99 ... He isn't with the times. More than any other singer, he is the times.

If the electric guitar were disinvented tonight, a few thousand singers would be out on their amps. But not Sinatra.

He defies fad. He stayeth. He has known more and felt more about the stuff songs are made of, the words of poets. He's been a Stranger in the Night, and you have to be long rid of baby fat to be that Stranger. You can't sing the way he does until you've been belly to belly with Reality a few times.

That's what makes insight, and what's made The Sinatra. What's made him last, and get better. Allowed him to last through The Age of Anxiety and The Age of the Atom and The Age of Acne.

Stan Cornyn (Original LP liner notes)

More British Bluesmen

In this day and age it can sometimes be fully eighteen months to two years between the release of an artists' current CD release and the subsequent follow-up. If the earlier release should chart then the care afforded the new production knows no bounds. Neither the cost factor. But in those heady days of the late 1960s things were a little different. As if to celebrate the release of Mac's debut album during the last week of February 1968, the band headed back into the studio to cut two titles for a new single, "Black Magic Woman" and the coupling "The Sun Is Shinning" would be the result of that visit. Within four weeks they were back in the New Bond Street studio yet again, this time looking to record enough material for their second album and indeed, to attempt to cut a version of Little Willie John's blues ballad "Need Your Love So Bad" for a future single release.

It has been reported that the sessions for the first album ("Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac") and "Mr. Wonderful" was one continuous project. The overall sound of course is quite different. On the first album, the equipment (instruments, mikes, etc.) was plugged directly into the tape deck. For "Mr. Wonderful", a PA, and speakers, were set up in the studio to create a more live sound, reminiscent of a 1940's recording studio. Personally I prefer the warmer sound of the first album but I must agree that this one is more near of the reality. So, maybe the purists will prefer this second release. Well, you can hear both and make your choices.

British Bluesmen at the Top

Fleetwood Mac's debut LP was a highlight of the late '60s British blues boom. Green's always inspired playing, the capable (if erratic) songwriting, and the general panache of the band as a whole placed them leagues above the overcrowded field. Elmore James is a big influence on this set, particularly on the tunes fronted by Jeremy Spencer ("Shake Your Moneymaker," "Got to Move"). Spencer's bluster, however, was outshone by the budding singing and songwriting skills of Green. The guitarist balanced humor and vulnerability on cuts like "Looking for Somebody" and "Long Grey Mare," and with "If I Loved Another Woman," he offered a glimpse of the Latin-blues fusion that he would perfect with "Black Magic Woman." The album was an unexpected smash in Britain, reaching #4 in the UK album charts on 2nd March 1968 and indeed remained on the charts for some thirty-seven weeks. Not bad for an album that took little more than three days to record in two different studios over a five month period and that basically contains nothing but twelve bar blues.

QUEEN MAGGIE

Original Released on LP Atlantic 7293 (April, 1974)

MAGGIE BELL first came to the record buying public's attention via STONE THE CROWS who broke up in 1973 after building a tremendous fan following with her powerful vocals and commanding stage presence. Maggie immediately set to work on her first solo album “Queen Of The Night” produced by the legendary producer Jerry Wexler. The album gave her the chance to choose her favourite material and work with some of the finest musicians of the time, including Steve Gadd on drums and guitarists Cornell Dupree, Reggie Young, Chuck Rainey and Barry Goldberg. Featuring stellar versions of John Prine's "Souvenirs," JJ Cale's "After Midnight" (which many critics think is even better than Eric Clapton's version), a very intimate version of "A Woman Left Lonely," famously covered by Janis Joplin on Pearl, and a beautiful and intense "As The Years Go Passing By."

STAY LUCKY, MAN!

"If you have a friend on whom you think you can rely
you are a lucky man.
If you have a reason to live on and not to die
you are a lucky man.
Preachers and poets and scholars don't know it,
temples and statues and steeples won't show it,
if you've got the secret just try not to blow it,
stay a lucky man, a lucky man."

If you are a fan of the movies, this is an uncommon soundtrack. And if you are a fan of the seventies, well, who knows? Maybe this is the cream of the crop. Both the movie and the soundtrack had a great influence on me back in "73. It is not at all neccessary to have seen Lindsay Anderson's minor masterpiece to appreciate Alan Price's wonderful song stylings. Alan Price had a featured role in the film and many of the songs were performed concert style within the context of the fiim, but they have lost none of their lustre away from the big screen and some 30 years down the line. Ballads, instrumentals, music hall, and good old northern english soul make for an eclectic and thouroughly pleasant listening experience.

"O Lucky Man!" (1973) is the second part of a Lyndsay Anderson / Malcolm McDowell trilogy. "IF..." (1968) was the first and "Britannia Hospital"(1982) the third part of the adventures of Michael Travis through the paths of British society. Being the first two movies much better than the last one, why only this is current available on DVD? Really, there are things that I can't understand at all...

LET THE SUNSHINE IN...

The Age of Aquarius, the 5th Dimension's fourth album, was the group's commercial peak. They had already topped the charts with their medley of two songs from the Broadway musical Hair, "The Age of Aquarius" and "Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)," a platinum single that would earn them Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Group, when they released this album. It turned out that was only the tip of the iceberg: They returned to number one with another platinum single, "Wedding Bell Blues," penned by Laura Nyro, who had given them "Stoned Soul Picnic" the year before. And the album also spawned Top 40 hits in Nyro's "Blowing Away" and Neil Sedaka's "Workin' on a Groovy Thing." The 5th Dimension were the successors to the L.A. vocal group mantle passed on by The Mamas and the Papas (they even inherited the studio band of Hal Blaine, Joe Osborne, and Larry Knechtel). They smoothed out and commercialized everything they sang, and their work had a sheen and a zest that sometimes contrasted with the original tone of the material. On Broadway, the Hair songs seemed full of hippie rebellion; here, they seemed enthusiastic and optimistic. In a conflicted time, the 5th Dimension thrived on their ability to equivocate, and this album was their triumph — just listen to them harmonize on "Sunshine of Your Love"! (William Ruhlmann in AllMusic)

GRAHAM NASH: "SONGS FOR BEGINNERS"

...«I've never been so much in love»...

Yes, I was only eighteen, living strongly my first true love, when this wonderful album came out. And, at the same time, we all were decided to change the world, looking for better days. Suddenly all these songs appeared like magic, giving us all the answers, in those turbulent times of the early 70s.

Everywhere you went, statements were being made against the war in Vietnam both large and small. In Washington DC, over 1000 veterans demonstrated in front of the Capitol, physically throwing their medals over the Capitol fence, marches were staged where over 350,000 veterans rallied, and in no small way, musicians and actors chimed in until finally in November, Nixon and the US Congress began a almost year long pullout of our brothers from Vietnam. After more than five years of antiwar demonstrations and protests, it seems that the antiwar activists and the American public had finally beaten the US government into submission. Little did we know what was to come.
Not everything that happened in 1971 was bad. As a relatively young country, the US was making some progress. This same year, the courts outlawed DDT, the Supreme Court upheld school bussing bringing and end to segregation, the US finally stopped licensing commercial whale hunters and for better or worse, Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver.
Songs for Beginners is one of those albums that reflects the times. Peace, love and introspection are what Graham sings about, only the way that Graham can deliver. Somehow this release doesn't sound dated. The music and lyrics are just as appripo today as they were back then.

...«and in the end remember
It's with you you have to live»