The Beatles, The Stones, and pondering how classic the classics really are

No. 1329: The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour

The prevailing critical opinion of The Beatles, dating back to, oh, the 1960s I suppose, is that from A Hard Day’s Night to Let It Be (more or less—at the very least Abbey Road), the group released nothing less than a great-to-masterpiece album every time. And it’s a popular opinion because it’s true. I’ve done enough excavation over the years to know that The Beatles were wildly ahead of their time, and being that they were “tunesmiths” as Paul Rudd put it in the excellent Veronica Mars episode, “Debasement Tapes,” they managed to combine avant garde influences into perfect little pop songs, and people have been trying to follow that up ever since, sometimes successfully, often as carbon copies of what The Beatles already did.

Now, that does overlook a significant caveat, being that with eight or nine perfect albums in a row, each of them has at least one song that grates on people’s nerves. It’s usually “Yellow Submarine” or something like that, or “Revolution No. 9” for those who don’t really care much for John’s experimental indulgences. (I get it, really.) Though my own White Album delete list would include “Bungalow Bill” and “Rocky Raccoon.” (Paul making goofy voices just doesn’t do it for me.) But if you look back at Pitchfork’s coverage of their reissues back in 2009, pretty much everything after 1964 gets a perfect score, except for Let It Be, which is permanently affixed with a 9.1. They’re not wrong about that necessarily, but I mistakenly thought that they didn’t give Magical Mystery Tour a 10 either. I was wrong. They did. 

And look, I can’t really argue with that? For my tastes, it’s maybe more like a 9.3 but who’s counting, really? My favorite Beatles record seems to change all the time, and maybe it’s actually the 90-minute mixtape of Beatles songs I made myself in the winter (This might also be something with larger ramifications down the road, if anyone’s looking for some clues as to what I’ve been up to). But I also know that pretty much everything’s great and if I find a used Beatles record I don’t have, why not scoop it up. Especially if it’s not $40 or something unnecessarily steep.

I picked this up at Records and Relics, and it must have been in the discount bin, because as you can see, the sleeve is frayed to hell and it came with an unexpected extra copy of Abbey Road inside. Surprise! (Which I didn’t need… although mine’s fairly worn, maybe I do?) It’s kind of hilarious the wacky stuff you can find. And yet I still bought it. (Side note: Once a friend gave me a Billy Idol record in a Men at Work sleeve as a gift. So, thrift store digging can turn up some curious gems as well. Also… wonder where that is.)

But is it a 10? You can certainly make that argument! This and Sgt. Pepper’s came out the same year, and they each have some phenomenal songs, though this is more disjoined than that one. It’s essentially a mini-Sgt. Pepper’s with a bunch of singles on the B side. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. And I think part of my objection to giving this a 10 is I don’t really like “All You Need is Love” that much. Which is maybe sacrilege, but it is what it is. And yet, despite having heard Jim Carrey sing it, I still like “I Am the Walrus.” Goo goo ga joob? Rating: 9.3

Listen: “I Am the Walrus”

No. 1330: The Rolling Stones - Through the Past Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2)

Not that long ago I wrote about another Rolling Stones Best Of, and while I generally don’t think of myself as the kind of person to buy many best-of comps, I’m definitely not the kind of person who buys more than one by the same band. But I suppose when you’re the Rolling Stones and you have innumerable singles (I didn’t count, but if you look at the singles portion of their discography page on Wikipedia, you’re going to be scrolling for a long time). Couple that with the fact that a lot of their singles weren’t released on any studio albums (like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which still rips, don’t fight me on this, because you know it does). Likewise, the singles from Their Satanic Majesties Request are outstanding—”She’s A Rainbow” and “2000 Light Years From Home” especially—but the album itself is kind of a dud. So you see how I end up here. But in the process you get gems like “Dandelion,” which wasn’t on Majesties but probably should have been. It’s a little curious that on their creative upswing they had one pretty dramatic miss just before a streak of four great back to back albums. But hey, even the best of us, etc. 

Oh, and as you can see, the record sleeve is an OCTAGON. When you’re the Rolling Stones they let you do what you want, I guess. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “2000 Light Years from Home”

No. 1331: Bob Dylan - Another Side of Bob Dylan

The spectrum of Bob Dylan fandom is a broad one. There are casual fans, diehards, those who start podcasts about the man and those who just know a handful of songs, like “Mr. Tambourine Man” or “Like a Rolling Stone.” I’m not a boomer or a condescending rock guy, so I’m going to go ahead and say whatever level of Dylan fandom you have is just fine. Over the years, mine has grown from casual to more invested but by no means intense about it. I don’t listen to his Christian records from the ‘80s because they’re “fascinating,” for instance—they’re just kinda bad. And I think it’s healthy that we all admit he had some bad records. Kind of a lot, actually. But he also released so much music that the overall average balances out more toward great than terrible.

My long-term goal at the moment is just to have the good ones in my collection, but not in any particular hurry. That includes most of his 1960s records, some of his ‘70s albums, one or two from the ‘80s and ‘90s (the Daniel Lanois ones, obviously). Back of the napkin math says that’s maybe a dozen records? And while Time Out of Mind takes some seeking out, for instance (which I did, and in fact just purchased), typically you can find his earlier records in the used bin at some point. Usually tons of copies of Self Portrait and New Morning and Empire Burlesque. But more often than not, ones you actually want to hear.

Another Side of Bob Dylan, his fourth album, is obviously one of the good ones. This was shortly before he started playing with a full band and made some folk guys mad, I guess? So still folk guy mode. And while it’s true that there are underrated Dylan records (gonna talk about Oh Mercy in…maybe a year?) this isn’t necessarily one of them, featuring a handful of his best known songs, like “My Back Pages” and “It Ain’t Me Babe,” which are both essentials. It also has the piano-driven “Black Crow Blues” and the lengthy, sad “Ballad in Plain D.” Great Dylan album! Rating: 9.3

Listen: “It Ain’t Me, Babe”

No. 1332: Antonio Carlos Jobim - Wave

OK, look, I’ll level with you. I write a lot about how I got into bossa nova and other Brazilian jazz and popular music when I was a teenager and how that’s shaped a lot of my taste since then. I’ve already written about how that led to me buying a Jobim record as one of my first-ever pieces of vinyl. (Though that was back in the early days of this blog/newsletter and I didn’t go as in-depth about things in the nascent stages of this project, but I also probably made more progress faster, so make of that what you will.)

All that said, I’m not sure how much left I have to say about Jobim. He’s a genius, made some of the greatest bossa nova records of all time. Not just great songwriting, but lushly arranged, etc. Wave is one of his most famous, a 1967 record that’s all instrumental, with string arrangements and an overall sense of mid-century cool that adds to the appeal. I found it used at Records and Relics, a shop in my neighborhood that only sells used records, but where I invariably find something cool. And if there’s one such shop in your neighborhood, you should definitely show them some love as well. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Wave”

No. 1333: Tangerine Dream - Rubycon

It’s hard for me to write about bands like Tangerine Dream because generally I just kind of want to get lost in their cosmic waves. My friend and colleague Langdon is and has, however, having put together a Beginner’s Guide for Treble that offers a great, concise way to get into the group, even though I, myself, would have included a few other albums, but the thing about a group like this is that there are just so many that you kind of need to pick your strategy, and Langdon’s is about as strong an introduction as you’re going to get.

Rubycon is one of the group’s most acclaimed records, not the first one I’d recommend for listeners, definitely not the first one I heard, and a bit of a commitment when you get to it. It’s basically one long synth composition split into two sides. At the time this probably sounded like the future and it still kind of does, even though technology has advanced quite a bit since then. But what Tangerine Dream did so well was to make synthesized music feel organic, to give it a kind of living, breathing sensibility. Possibly even supernatural. But while Zeit, my favorite TD record, feels like the darkness of vast space, this feels a little bit closer to the ground, if still looking skyward. That’s the thing about Tangerine Dream—nothing they do ever feels grounded per se. They’re beyond that. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Rubycon” (Part 1)

No. 1334: Baroness - First & Second

No matter how hard I try, I always manage to allow a record to slip through the cracks—and this time from one of my favorite bands! Inexcusable. I picked up this double-EP compilation at the merch table at a Baroness show, one of my first shows after arriving in Richmond (the others were Lucy Dacus/Julien Baker and Parquet Courts—good batch of shows!) in the fall of 2021, and after having not seen any live music in over a year, I felt nothing less than pure joy to be able to go back to venues and hear music played loud, with other people, probably with a beer in my hand. Among the things I love most in life, that ranks pretty high. 

This particular show was branded as a kind of “An Evening With Baroness” show, which was a tour but not in support of an album or anything. They set up an online poll in every city so that fans could vote on the 10 songs they wanted to hear most, and then the band would play them, along with a dozen or so other songs from their catalog. Richmond chose wisely, because we got a bunch of bangers in the first 10 songs (setlist here, for those curious). More than anything, I wanted to hear them play “Rays on Pinion,” the epic opener from their debut Red Album, an album that had mostly been phased out of their sets by that point, other than “Isak.” But they played “Rays” and it absolutely ruled, a reminder of the band at their sludgiest and most sprawling. Just phenomenal. As was the rest of the show. 

As for this release? It’s their two first EPs, which feature almost an entirely different lineup than they have now, other than John Baizley. It’s rawer, nastier, gnarlier. They occasionally play “Tower Falls” live, but for the most part this is an entirely different band than what they evolved into. Not that the connection isn’t there, or that these songs don’t kick ass (or that they needed to stay in this lane, by any means). But the great thing about sticking with a band for so long is that you get to hear how they evolve, how they grow, what they pick up and what they leave behind. First and Second are still part of them, but they’re a lot more than that now, and that’s why I continue to follow wherever they’re headed. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “Tower Falls”

No. 1335: Uniform & The Body - Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back

Metal changed a lot in the 21st century. We can probably thank Neurosis and The Melvins for changing the shape of heavy music as well as perceptions of it, and both bands also helped usher in an era of metal collaborations, Neurosis with Jarboe in 2003 and Melvins with Lustmord in 2004 (and a bunch of other artists since) and it’s become fairly common practice for underground metal bands to make collaborative records. And a lot of them are great: Boris and Merzbow, The Body and Thou, Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle, Mizmor and Hell, Mizmor and Thou … you see how often Thou shows up here? 

Well, they might be beat by The Body, who have something on the order of a dozen collaborative albums, which is actually considerably more than those that are just The Body. In fact, I have more physical copies of the former than the latter, and it would appear that’s by design. And here’s the amazing part: Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back is — in my humble opinion! — the best album by either Uniform or The Body. That probably sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true. For some reason, everything just works better together. (Uniform’s American Standard is currently challenging my assessment of this, but not quite.) 

Part of it is the vocals: Michael Berdan and Chip King each have kind of a monochromatic scream, but it’s not the same hue, so in combining their two vocal frequencies, you get a wider spectrum. The same goes for the overall musical palette; Uniform’s is more relentless and piercing, The Body’s is more guttural and low-end. Taken together, it’s just really, really heavy and awesome. This is exactly what I want from an industrial metal album, and I’m actually a little annoyed with myself that I slept on it when it first came out. But in my defense, The Body releases so much music, well, I’m still getting caught up. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Vacancy”

No. 1336: Daniel Villarreal - Panama 77

Back in 2021 I got into a band called Dos Santos, which I’ve written about here. They’re a Chicago group of musicians, many of them with jazz backgrounds, though they don’t play jazz in that group per se. It’s more like art-rock mixed with Latin folk and pop, and, sure, a little jazz around the edges, though the fact that they released their last album on International Anthem by and large meant that it was covered as if it were a jazz album. 

Panama 77, the debut album by that group’s drummer Daniel Villarreal, is definitely a jazz album. He pays tribute to the sounds of his home country as well as delving into fusion textures and arrangements and grooves, and it’s phenomenal. While a track like “Uncanny” blends Latin jazz with dub, “18th & Morgan” carries a hot summertime groove reminiscent of ‘70s or late ‘60s Quincy Jones, and “I Didn’t Expect That” more or less is just Villarreal having a jam with Jeff Parker, guitarist extraordinaire and one of the artists who’s in large part responsible for shaping what’s essentially a very old form of music into something new and exciting. 

In fact, Villarreal released a companion album that’s just him, Parker and bassist Anna Butterss playing as a trio, and though it’s more stripped down, it still slaps. I’d love more music from Villarreal in the near future, in the form of another jazz album, Dos Santos album, you name it. If he releases it, I’ll be listening. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Uncanny”