Among the notable aspects here...nearly all of these allow, if one pops out the links to watch/listen to them at YT, track selection.
Also notable, perhaps, is that these key albums of the Byrds' and Beatles' careers are also their jazziest albums...for the Byrds, not solely "Eight Miles High" and "I See You" but even "Hey, Joe" feature heavily jazz (most obviously John Coltrane)-influenced guitar riffs on McGuinn's part, and McCartney reaches toward pop jazz in "Good Day Sunshine," "For No One" and particularly "Got to Get You into My Life," and while the tape loops and other experimentation running through "Tomorrow Never Knows" owes more to post-serial electronic music innovators in the classical world, that and some of the other Lennon songs (and Harrison's playing around with Indian classical influence) all have a certain free jazz flavor to them (not quite the MC5, but along the path). Perhaps some of my fondness for these stems from the Wailers being essentially still a ska band, moving toward the creation of reggae, and that the Animals, the Stones, and of course the Yardbirds, while growing more adventurous, were still not quite ready to shed their partial identities as blues bands...
The Wailers: The Wailing Wailers (issued at the end of 1965 in Jamaica, but of uncertain date and availability in the US and elsewhere...leading off with special pleading)
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (released May 1966)
The Rolling Stones: Aftermath (released in the US June 1966; UK April 1966)
The Animals: Animalisms (released June 1966)
The Yardbirds: Roger the Engineer (aka Over Under Sideways Down) (released July 1966)
The Byrds: Fifth Dimension (released July 1966)
The Beatles: Revolver (released August 1966)
Jefferson Airplane: Jefferson Airplane Takes Off (released August 1966)
The Mothers of Invention: Freak Out (official release July 1966; this an alternately sequenced and produced album released as bootleg)
6 comments:
I had every single one of them. I now have most of them on CD (not the Wailers album, though).
That first Wailers album is the closest thing to an obscurity, though the alternate FREAK OUT might be close...ANIMALISM is probably the least important album of these in the career of its band...and still kind of important...
Soundtrack of my misspent youth. Thanks, I guess.
Well, I suspect it could've been worse. At least musically.
I have listened to a few songs by Jefferson Starship (though not Jefferson Airplane as far as I can remember). Songs like "We Built This City" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" that I first came to know of via the film "Mannequin" and which I'm sure aren't the band's best numbers. I also discovered Grace Slick's paintings of famous musicians a couple of years ago, while I was reading up on the Starship's history.
Yes, Jefferson Starship has occasional high points (apogees), but such slick (koff) later recordings as "We Built This City" are not among them. Jefferson Airplane, with Signe Anderson as the female voice/composing member as on the first album, and with Slick from the second album onward, were far more interesting.
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