November 2021 – Richard Watt

14. Parallel Lines, Blondie, 1978

Posted on November 28, 2021 by Richard

Somewhere around 1978 I was co-opted into writing for the first issue of what we fondly imagined was Aberdeen’s first fanzine. I don’t exactly remember how it happened, but suddenly I was spending evenings at the old St Katherine’s Centre – before it reinvented itself as the Lemon Tree – trying to figure out what the youth of Aberdeen wanted to say about anything.

What I wrote has, thankfully, been lost to the mists of time; I’m pretty sure it wasn’t particularly good or even slightly original (I was deep into my ‘terrible poetry’ phase at the time) but I was just happy to have been invited, and to be involved in this as yet unnamed project.

Finding a name for the thing was actually the toughest part of it all. We just couldn’t come up with anything everyone liked, although not for the want of trying – there was, eventually, a list of about thirty potential names, none of which had convinced the majority of us, until someone offered to read them all out and someone suggested doing it from the bottom up.

Therefore, the name of Aberdeen’s first (or not; I’m really not clear on that) fanzine was: In Reverse Order. We were absolutely certain that it was the beginning of a media empire; it actually lasted a whole two editions before everyone went off to do their exams.

However, those weeks of trying to wrestle IRO into shape were huge for my musical education – those meetings were where I first heard so much music - The Ramones were a favourite among the group, for instance – and where I discovered people prepared to discuss music and disagree with each other without falling out about it.

Between the endless discussions about how to secure an interview with Aberdeen’s leading punk frontman, Albie Deedsoon of the Tools, we talked about bands like Wire and whether The Adverts having a hit single (for some definition of ‘hit’, of course) amounted to ‘selling out’. And one evening, someone casually dropped in the astonishing fact that Debbie Harry was 32 years old, and therefore, not exactly part of the youth revolution we fully expected to happen any day now.

(I looked it up, and for once, my memory and timelines are pretty much spot on)

I don't know if we were ever really sure about Blondie. 1978 was the year when everything seemed to be happening at once, and it was getting harder and harder to keep tabs not only on what was going on, but which of the bewildering array of new bands and artists you were supposed to spend time on, and which were probably just another passing phase. Younger readers will have to bear in mind that not only were we doing this at some distance from London, where you at least had the opportunity to go and see some of this stuff for yourself, but realistically the only way you knew anything at all about new music was via the music press. Even hearing singles on the radio didn't always help: were, for example, Yellow Dog just another novelty act, or were they on the brink of a substantial career? It was impossible to tell at times.

In the middle of 1978, we were in the grip of the nebulously-defined 'New Wave'; nobody really seemed to know what that meant - was Ian Dury New Wave despite being basically pub rock with added swearing? How about the Motors? In fact, who the hell were the Motors? If they hadn't had a write-up in your music paper of choice, how were you supposed to know whether you were meant to like them or not? You could pick out the disco stuff; you could pick out the novelty stuff that your parents were buying; you could pick out the MOR / throwback stuff like Mud, Darts and Showaddywaddy, but then you'd get City Boy, and you'd be scratching your head again.

With most New Wave stuff, you could at least identify a sort of British authenticity - The Jam might be channeling The Faces and The Kinks, but you knew where they were coming from. American bands, however, tended to need a bit more study. Blondie were a case in point. The earliest stuff was punk enough to deserve some respect - X Offender and Rip Her To Shreds were particular favourites in that early flurry of female-led bands like the Banshees, X-Ray Spex or The Rezillos (and, yes, the Rezillos were another tricky one - genuine or parody?). Then we got Denis, and it suddenly wasn't as clear - that's not punk; that's not even particularly New Wave; it's just a pop song. But they're from New York - what do they know about our music scene? Are they even trying to fit in to the way we do things here?

Parallel Lines didn't exactly clear things up, but it did change the way everyone looked at Blondie. I don't think there was any inkling just how much better this was going to be than the first two albums; and I definitely know that even if you hadn't given much thought to Blondie before, this made you sit up and take notice. They seduced you; took you in and led you by the hand until you were dancing to a disco song without really knowing how you got there. Of course some of it was image; but a lot of it was sound - this is a real grab-bag of an album, with something for everyone, but in this case, that description is a compliment; they may not themselves have known which direction they were going in, but they gave all of it a fair shot, and most of it they carried off with some style.

If you're coming to this new, you'll be influenced by the fact that there are five songs here which were big enough hit singles to have entered the public consciousness; you aren't likely to be being introduced to Heart of Glass or Sunday Girl, but try to listen to it all the way we did in the summer of 1978 - After we got past the explosive start of Hanging on the Telephone, we were in uncharted territory, and while in retrospect the big singles seem obvious, I'm not sure they were at the time.

So, rather than the start of side one being three familiar songs, try to hear it as the hit single, followed by three songs which offer different views of the way Blondie want you to think of them - the stalkery insistence of One Way or Another; the cheeky familiarity of Picture This (was there ever a song more obviously recorded before the ink was dry on the lyrics? I have no idea how she makes 'and you'd be on the skids / if it weren't for your job at the garage / if you could only...' scan like that; I'm amazed that it didn't get edited again after that, but I can't imagine it any other way, it has a breathless urgency to it which completely sells it). Then it's straight into the weird new sounds of Fade Away and Radiate - it's the most representative of where New Wave was going at the time; moody and sparse, I think it's the high point on the album for Debbie Harry's voice - there's nothing else here which carries the emotion of this.

I Know But I Don't Know sounded then, and still does, like New York punk - a reminder that this isn't like the bands we were hearing every day. It harks back to the punk sound a bit, as does the beginning of 11:59, which is immediately undercut by the melodic joy of the voice. I loved that song then, and it turns out I still do - just listen to Clem Burke's drumming. Will Anything Happen continues down the punk-influenced road, before we make a couple of handbrake turns.

The first time I heard Sunday Girl, I don't know that it jumped out at me; it wasn't until I heard my sister singing along with it that I realised that it was purely and simply a perfect pop song - that, more so even than Heart of Glass turned Blondie into a pop band, and took them away from those of us who hoped to hang on to a cutting edge rock band with a cool girl singer.

Then, as if pop wasn't enough, they keep going right into the heart of disco. Now, this was controversial - while Britain never had the 'Disco Wars', there was a definite dividing line between rock and everything else. I'm almost certain that the original version of Heart of Glass I heard wasn't quite as obviously dancefloor oriented, but of course, all memories have been obliterated by the one everybody knows. I might have bristled at it in 1978, but it's bloody great, isn't it?

As is I'm Gonna Love You Too; the point at which the teenaged me gives up trying to pigeonhole this album, and just goes with the flow. Now, the whole idea of punk and New Wave bands covering songs from before I was born seemed contrary to what this was all supposed to be about - how can there have been a Year Zero if you're going to cover Buddy Holly songs? About thirty seconds in, none of that matters - Holly was obviously a punk like us, and this is just brilliant (whisper it, it's probably my favourite track now). After which, I'm afraid the last song is a bit of a let down - it really, really needs to be as sweary as some of the other songs we'd heard, but I guess if you're on a major label, there are things you cant do in 1978.

So, what do I think now? I have to say, this has been an intensely Proustian experience - listening to this all the way through for the first time in years instantly transported me back to the grubby little office in the St Katherine's Centre and those fumbling attempts to put something in print. We may not have known what we were doing, but we were firm in our convictions. And Parallel Lines was challenging those convictions. Eventually, I think, I came down on the side of it being ‘not New Wave enough’ for us. It would no doubt join all the other albums from 1978 which were about to disappear into a vague, uncategorizeable pile of half-remembered music.

Of course, I was wrong - we all were. 'Parallel Lines' pushed Blondie, and Debbie Harry in particular, out of the bubble of 'New Wave music' into the broader cultural arena. It may have some classic elements of all the great music of its time, but it spoke to the rest of the world - the world outside our little smoke-filled room where we knew everything - and in some ways, began the process whereby pop music started to feature in the mainstream press - I think this album marked the last time that you could only read about bands like Blondie in the NME or Sounds, and I think it was part of the reason that embryonic fanzines like ours foundered – we didn’t really have a clear idea what we wanted to write about, and if bands we liked were going to be putting out albums which you could read about in the Sunday supplements, then what was the point, really?

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The self-titled debut album features the early songs mentioned above, and is still worth a listen, as is Plastic Letters, although it is a bit dwarfed by Denis. After this, both Eat to the Beat and Autoamerican were popular, but I can’t honestly say I heard much more than the singles. After that, splits and reunions produced a few late-period albums, which diodn’t really reach my consciousness beyond the terrific single Maria, which ought to have prompted me to listen to the album it came from, but somehow didn’t.

Compilations to consider?

The Best of Blondie is the classic one, and I doubt that the later repackaged and expanded albums add anything to it; all the big songs (14 of them unless you’re in the US, when you only get 12) and no filler.

Live albums?

Apparently there are a couple – one from 1978 – the parts of it I’ve heard suggest the sound isn’t all that great, but it’s called Picture This if you feel like tracking it down – and one from 1999, which features much better sound, but a few ‘here’s one from our new album’ moments which may not be to everyone’s taste.

Anything else?

There are whole shelves of books dedicated to how Debbie Harry changed the whole world, but I’d stick to the ones she wrote herself for some real perspective – Face It is on my ‘to read’ list; I’ll report back if I manage to get to it. I’d also love to find the tape I made of the New Year’s Eve concert from the Apollo in Glasgow in 1979 – I suspect the audio of it (I think there was video as well) must be kicking around online somewhere; that would be something to see.

13. A Tonic for the Troops, The Boomtown Rats, 1978

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Richard

The first ten tracks only...

If you’re paying particularly close attention, you’re probably wondering where all the albums released in 1977 are. It’s a fair question; it’s not like there are no great albums from that year, but when I was putting this list together, the thing which became clear quite quickly was that 1977 in my life was dominated by singles.

1977 was in some ways something of a Year Zero for music. It felt like everything changed at once; the music we loved fell out of fashion almost overnight; instead of being restricted to the music press, we were suddenly seeing the more notorious members of the more notorious bands on the front pages of the national press. And there was a sudden and almost impossible to manage deluge of new, different music – some of which didn’t even sound like music at all – appearing mainly on singles. A lot of those singles came and went in a week or two, you might hear it once or twice on the radio and never be entirely sure what the name of the band was; some of them stuck around and hung around long enough to poke around the edges of public awareness; and a few of them turned out to be classics of their type.

And hardly any of them led, at the time, to me buying the album they came from.

If you look now at the best-selling artists of 1977, you would be hard pressed to see anything had changed at all. I was turning 15, and it felt like there was a revolution going on, but the charts were being dominated by Brotherhood of Man and David Soul; Baccara and the Manhattan Transfer.

Julie Covington gets a pass because of Rock Follies.

And here’s the thing – among the Sex Pistols, Clash and Damned singles; alongside Ian Dury and Tom Robinson, I was still buying music by Yes and ELP; still listening to Frampton Comes Alive!, I was just doing that in secret, because Something Had Changed.

Elvis died, Star Wars came out, and everything I knew about music was turned on its head. When I talk about it now, I think I tend to give the impression that I was in the vanguard of all that was new and sweary, with everything I knew and loved being left behind, but that’s not true at all. What I know most surely about 1977 and 1978 was that I still loved everything – it’s around this time that I discover Prokofiev and Bartok, for example – and I’m not making up the fact that it did matter which musical choices you confessed to, and which you kept quiet, but the truth is that I just loved music, and there was so much of it.

We’re going to be in 1978 for most of the rest of the year, but looking at it now, it’s a surprisingly eclectic list of albums. I’ve also discovered that two of my original 1978 albums were actually released in 1979, but I’ve already warned you about my imprecise memory, so that should come as no surprise.

The first two 1978 albums, however, kind of sum up what had actually happened – something I can only really appreciate with the benefit of hindsight, and that is that I had finally fallen in love with pop music.

Sure, it wasn’t quite as all-encompassing a love as my other musical loves, but for all the talk of revolution and uproar in music, an awful lot of what was happening was that really clever songwriters had found a way to get their smart, catchy pop songs be seen as cool and vaguely iconoclastic. Suddenly, the really great songs had ditched the euphemism and mystery, and were talking about sex, drugs and sausage rolls.

I may have misremembered a bit, there.

You could get your music banned and still be successful – and ‘banned’ was a relative term, of course; you might not hear the Sex Pistols much on daytime radio, but you certainly could later on in the day, alongside weird, apparently tuneless dirges by bands you’d never hear of again, and Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.

All sorts of bands got swept up in what the media called ‘punk rock’; there were dozens of tribal distinctions to be made, and endless arguments about whether this or that band was punk or not; ‘New Wave’ very quickly came to represent everything which came after the immediate throwing over of the traces; music which wouldn’t have been heard a couple of years before was now popping up on a seemingly endless raft of independent labels, or on cassettes which looked only a little more professional than my own mixtapes. This wild, energetic music was everywhere, and it was truly impossible to keep track of it all, never mind which bits of it you were ‘supposed’ to like, and which were by impostors and (one of the favourite terms of disparagement, alongside ‘rockist’ and ‘boring old farts’) ‘poseurs’.

Which, I think, is where we have to introduce the Boomtown Rats.

I don’t know, now, if I was supposed to like the Rats or not. I don’t remember if owning a copy of Tonic for the Troops was cool, or if people were sniggering at me behind their hands. Now, of course, I don’t care. Back then, I suspect it kept me awake at night. I hadn’t rushed out and bought Never Mind the Bollocks (although I’d certainly heard it all, and had a taped copy and a giant Holidays in the Sun poster); I hadn’t bought the first Clash album despite being blown away by White Riot, and later White Man in Hammersmith Palais. Someone I knew had the Damned album, and the first Jam album, but my first foray into this new music was the second album by this bunch of Irish musicians I knew next to nothing about, save that every one of their singles had caused me to grin maniacally.

The big unanswered question I have about owning this album is whether I bought it before or after hearing Rat Trap. I like to think it was before, in a sort of ‘I liked them before they became ludicrously popular’ way, but I can’t be sure. What I find, to my surprise, now, is that looking at the album, the front and back covers are very familiar to me, and I could probably still hum most of the songs (I’ll find out shortly), but I don’t recognise the inner sleeve or the label. To be fair, I have owned hundreds of albums, and am unlikely to remember all of them in detail, but so far, every album I’ve looked at has either brought back memories of holding it in my hand and poring over it, or has caused me to reel back as the Canadian version I now own is so different from the one I remember. This, however, causes me to draw a blank. Could it be that I actually didn’t play it all that often after I bought it?

More likely, was 1978 so full of albums that I just didn’t spend as much time with it as I thought? I don’t know, but I suspect that is nearer the truth – there was just so much going on at this point, as we’ll see, that perhaps it’s not too surprising that I don’t clearly remember the green Ensign label and the inner sleeve with photographs from what I think is the Olympic stadium in Munich.

Anyway, never mind all that, what does it sound like now?

Like Clockwork was one of those singles which had so engaged me, and it comes flooding back – the bassline, the cowbell, the ‘tick tock’ introduction and the middle eight are all present and correct. It’s impossible to hear Bob Geldof’s voice now without all the later associations; impossible to remember that he was pretty much unknown at this point. What is clear is that this, like everything here, is a song in the modern idiom – which is to say, the original pop idiom – three minutes or thereabouts, wrap it up and move on to the next one.

Blind Date banishes my doubts; I know this – I remember singing along to it, and I remember that I didn’t know the lyrics at all. Is my lack of familiarity with the inner sleeve down to the fact that my copy didn’t have one? Someone with more inside knowledge of the workings of the record industry can perhaps fill me in on whether inner sleeves being replaced with generic paper ones was a thing back then – I know that there was at least one other album in my early collection which lacked the inner sleeve it should have sported, but was this a common occurrence?

Oh, “Are you really going out with Adolf?” really brings me back. The American pronunciation of Adolf is, of course, intentionally calling back to the sixties call-and-response girl group records, but this is properly dark subject matter, however light-heartedly presented. This is probably part of the reason the Boomtown Rats were (and probably still are) treated with some ambivalence – we know he doesn’t mean it; it’s designed to shock, to be edgy – singing a song from the perspective of Hitler is either genuinely shocking, or it’s just being done for effect, because that’s the kind of thing bands were supposed to be doing now. I’m still not sure what Geldof had in mind here; punks wandering about with swastika armbands were part of the intention to shock; perhaps this was as well, I’m not entirely sure it’s stood up to the passage of time.

Similarly, Living in an Island is an equally jaunty song about suicide. Nearly 60-year-old me is a bit cynical about this stuff, however well played, but I suspect 15-year-old me was listening open-mouthed to how daring this all was. It’s slightly reggae-inflected, like so many songs of the time were, but I’m not sure how much of the sound is driven by being what you were supposed to sound like.

Side one ends with Don’t Believe What You Read, which is bouncy, punk-inflected (albeit with a slightly more traditional guitar solo) and in exactly the same was as the last two, a little knowingly cynical about everything. It sounds like it was intended to be vitriolic about the press, but quickly becomes a generic ‘don’t believe anything which is written down’ rant, which is just a tad nihilistic…

I should say, despite my misgivings about the lyrical content, I’m having a great time reliving these songs; they’re really well-crafted pop music.

Talking of which, here comes She’s So Modern.

I like to think (see above) that this was the single which prompted me to buy the album, although sitting here in 2021 listening to how ‘modern’ the 1970s are is a little… well, nostalgic, I suppose. I don’t think the 1970s felt particularly modern in the 1970s, to be honest. Although I did have a digital watch around this time, so there’s that.

Nice modulation at the end, guys. Not sure about the lyrics, but I’ll let this one slide, too.

There was a general obsession with Howard Hughes after he died; the autobiography scam and the revelations about his eccentricity – Me and Howard Hughes seems like an inevitable reaction; it’s not about Hughes, but is a reaction to all the stories about him. It’s also a cracking little tune, which I only remembered upon hearing it again. So far, I’m enjoying side two a lot more.

Can’t Stop, however, need not detain us long. It’s pop-punk by numbers; catchy refrain, jagged instrumental interludes, and it’s one of those amphetamine-fuelled songs which was clearly more fun to record than it is to listen to.

I didn’t recognise (Watch out for) The Normal People until it reached the chorus, when it popped back into focus – I remember wondering what a ‘genuine fridge’ was, and whether the repeated use of ‘lucky bugger’ was proper swearing or not. Ah, more innocent times.

Before we deal with the final track, I’m just going to say that I like this album. It’s a little mannered, I think; a little forced – trying to be something it’s not; this is clearly a band of competent musicians dumbing down a little for the fame and fortune, but it’s still a lot of fun, and I’m glad to have revisited it. Not sure how often I’ll come back, but it was nice to be reminded of what it felt like to be in the middle of all this wild pop music for a time.

And then there’s Rat Trap. Now, I’m not going to pretend otherwise; I absolutely loved this song from the first time I heard it. In that typically overblown teenage way, I imagined it was somehow speaking to me, even though it really had nothing to do with my life. It’s also the only track on the album which doesn’t do the dumbing down thing; it’s carefully and cleverly constructed – the bassline alone is worth the price of admission – and of course, it’s a little calculating, designed for chart success.

It’s also very clearly nodding to what Bruce Springsteen was doing. Springsteen was about as not-punk as you could get in 1978, although he mined the same seams. Geldof seems to have recognised this, and Rat Trap is a deliberate attempt to frame the ‘downtrodden teenager’ trope with some of the Springsteen sound without making it sounds like it was all happening in some imagined suburb of Pittsburgh. For me, it works, and although I Don’t Like Mondays is better known, and the whole ‘Bob Geldof saves the world’ thing probably overshadows all that came before Band Aid and all that followed, I don’t think he or his band ever sounded better than they did on Rat Trap; it was a part of my teenagerhood which I’d never want to change, and I think that’s true about this whole album – it’s not perfect by any means, but it was perfect for me at that time and in that place.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I never bought another one; the whole thing left me behind as quickly as it arrived – I have heard both The Fine Art of Surfacing and Mondo Bongo but I can’t honestly recommend them to the casual listener, as I haven’t heard enough of them. Mondays is on the former, though, if you’d like to explore what else they were doing at that point.

Compilations to consider?

Boomtown Rats’ Greatest Hits perhaps underlines the fact that they had fewer hits than you’d think. Loudmouth includes some of Geldof’s solo work, and is definitely better value.

Live albums?

I was about to say ‘not as far as I know’, but there appear to be a few post-reunion live albums of varying degrees of ‘official’ all recorded in the 2010s. nothing, as far as I can see, from 1978, but there must be something out there somewhere…

Anything else?

Bob Geldof’s post-Live Aid autobiography Is That It? is definitely worth a read – I have no idea what happened to my copy, but I remember it quite clearly, including the parts where he appeared to have single-handedly built the M25.

12. Hejira, Joni Mitchell, 1976

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Richard

We met the school library a little while back; there was another library which played a much more significant part in my life during the seventies, and introduced me to all sorts of music I might not otherwise ever have heard, including – and perhaps especially – Joni Mitchell.

I was brought up with the idea that going to the library on Saturday morning was part of the natural order of things – I remember going when we lived in Essex at the end of the sixties, and I know that joining the library was one of the first orders of business when we moved back to Aberdeen in 1970. At first, I concentrated on working my way steadily through the age-appropriate book section, and gradually moved on into the sections which contained books I probably didn’t entirely understand, but which fired my imagination – I met lots of classic science fiction in that library, but I also developed an enduring love for a great many authors – the first time I read Tin Drum, for example, was a copy from the Airyhall library, and I date my love of John Barth to a copy of Sabbatical I thought I would try one day.

All of which went out of focus a little the day I discovered that you could also borrow albums from the library. If I’m remembering correctly, records could only be borrowed for a week at a time, making the whole exercise somewhat more complicated than it otherwise should have been, but at that point I was perfectly happy to bike or even walk over and swap whatever I’d borrowed last week for something even more obscure and intriguing -looking. The selection must have been refreshed reasonably frequently – perhaps there was a central stock for all the city libraries which got rotated – I do know that new releases didn’t appear immediately; there was definitely a delay before you could get your hands on the very latest thing, but there was enough of a back catalogue that there was always something new to try.

As I recall, the record section was divided roughly into one third classical, one third jazz, and one third ‘popular’, which covered a wide range, naturally – there was a fair bit of “easy listening” among the ‘popular’ – and the selection wasn’t exactly aimed at the spotty teenager looking to hear the latest and most obscure music before it became famous. It did, however, contain enough music which, if it wasn’t already classic, was well on its way. I know I ran through various artists like John Lennon and Jackson Browne; Eric Clapton and Elton John, some of which I taped, and some of which I didn’t. Airyhall library is where I discovered that I preferred Frank Zappa to Captain Beefheart, and where I borrowed a copy of Weather Report’s Heavy Weather for the same reason I would eventually pick up a Joni Mitchell album.

I know my timings are off here, because I remember my first exposure to Joni being at the same time as I first heard Birdland from that Weather Report album, but since it came out in 1977, there may have been some separation between them. Either way, I know I first heard both of those in Mr. Dunbar’s drama classes, where we were occasionally expected to do movement exercises to pieces of music.

There’s a whole section here about my life in drama as a child, but I suspect it’ll have to wait for something which ties more closely to it.

Whatever my memory of it may be, I know for sure that we were required to do something to the accompaniment of Joni Mitchell singing Big Yellow Taxi, and being told that we perhaps weren’t quite ready for Joni Mitchell yet. Maybe some of my classmates weren’t (although I like to think we were a pretty sophisticated bunch), but on being told that I wasn’t ready for her, I had to hear more. The library had a copy of Ladies of the Canyon, and – I think – For the Roses, and I devoured those, but heard nothing else for a long time (as we’ll see, I was trying to cram in a lot of music in those years). It wasn’t until 1980 that I finally came across the album which turned me into a lifelong Joni devotee – the remarkable live album Shadows and Light.

There were songs on Shadows and Light which dumbfounded me in their simple complexity – raw emotions expressed in a line of poetry, and music which shimmered and weaved all over the melodies, so you often couldn’t be entirely sure what you had just heard, and had to go back for more. The fact that the jaw-dropping bass playing on it was by the same Jaco Pastorius who had startled me on Heavy Weather seemed somehow appropriate – it all tied together to a particular time and place in my life.

Further digging revealed that pretty much all of the songs I loved most from Shadows and Light (apart from The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines, which can still render me speechless in its live incarnation) were from the same album, so I went out and bought it, and I’ve never been without a copy since.

Hejira is, on the surface, just another album by a singer-songwriter who has decided to augment her sound by bringing in some jazz musicians to play the music she could hear in her head. It’s just an album about being adrift and restless while travelling across the vast expanses of North America; it’s just an album about the fragility of relationships and what it means to be a woman in what was still very much a man’s world; it’s about how the present ties to the past in music in unexpected and inexplicable ways; it’s about old friendships and how they evolve; it’s about driving past a farmhouse, burning down in the middle of the night and being unable to change anything; about the remorselessness of the journey, the need to travel and keep moving; it’s…

It’s all of those things, and a thousand others, and it’s as much an experience as it is a physical object, and I love it to the point where putting that into words becomes almost impossible, and it’s an album which is part of me in a way which few others are.

It starts with the unmistakeable sound of Pastorius’ “Bass of Doom”, turning Coyote from a simple tale of a one-night stand into something altogether more muscular and with an irresistible momentum. The story could be tawdry, but the combination of Mitchell’s irresistible voice and the sheer poetry of the thing turn it into something ineffably romantic and almost wistful – she knows it’s wrong, but it’s a moment suspended in time, and it’s all the fault of the freeway anyway.

Amelia spoke to me the moment I first heard it – I have always been drawn to the stories of those aviation pioneers, and of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson in particular – doing what they did on the same terms as the men who never did quite understand. Joni’s in the same mental space; doing what she does and demanding to be treated as an equal. The song conjures up the desert, and spaces which were entirely alien to me, but planted a longing in me to see them for myself. It’s also partly a meditation on some of her earlier songs – Both Sides Now and This Flight Tonight both make a subtle appearance as an older Joni takes stock.

Furry Sings the Blues is another masterful photograph of a time and place; the old man is clearly visible, propped up on his pillows in the corner of the room while Joni tries to figure out her place in all this musical history, while Neil Young blows his almost but not quite random harmonica over it all. The song is much more of a poem than the others here – it teeters on the edge of not scanning as the words assert themselves; not one of them wasted, or extra – just enough to paint the picture and no more.

Strange Boy has the same feel as Coyote in some ways, but is more personal, more of a rage at the situation; Joni having grown up and tried to move on, the strange boy steadfastly refusing to, with his skateboard and his obsession with his schooldays. He has always seemed to me a Vietnam victim, but I don’t know if he’s entirely fictional or not.

The title track is in many ways the peak and pivot of the album; the return of that bass, this time restrained and fluid, underpinning the song as it reviews all of what has gone before; the travel, the vague longings for some kind of change in her life, and the uncertainty of what that might be. All through the song, the bass grows and pushes out into the far corners of the soundscape, until, just before the fade, there is almost nothing else going on but Jaco’s experimenting. It sums up what’s been going on so far – there’s no chorus, no hummable hook, just a songwriter putting her soul on the page, and creating a soundscape to give the words room to breathe and explore.

For a long time, I had a theory that the first track on the second side of an album was the key to the whole thing. If that’s true in this case, this album is about being adrift in New York, which isn’t quite the case, but if you read New York as a symbol for the whole of the US, it works more. It’s a long meditation on the nature of love and ambition – Sharon, who had wanted to be a singer, ended up with the domestic life which Joni had wanted until she discovered she was a singer. Joni wonders about love and the nature of marriage (“the ceremony of bells and lace”) while wandering around New York; taking us with her on the ferries and showing us the skaters on the rink in Wollman Park. There are no answers, because this album is not about answers.

The Pastorius bass returns to propel Black Crow through all the various modes of transport and out the other side, to a place where we understand that thinking like the crow and being the crow are entirely different things; with a sigh, Joni turns back to the road, looking for a place to stay for the night…

The Blue Motel finally allows her to confess what she’s been skirting around all this time; for all the pain and loss, the inevitable heartbreak of the end of the affair, she’s lonely, and ready to try again just to see if it will numb the pain for a while. It’s a relaxed blues, played by musicians who just feel like hanging out in the groove and seeing where it takes them. Joni tells us she’s ready to give up the travelling, ready to settle down and put an end to all this.

And we don’t believe a word of it. The one song which musically breaks the otherwise fluid, restless feel of the album stands out because it’s not true – it doesn’t have the honesty of the others here; it’s whistling in the dark, and we know that because it’s not the final track.

Hejira ends the only way it possibly can; with a look back at the themes and motifs of the whole thing, and the return of the magical bass, which has underpinned everything important about the album, and acted like a musical highlighter to help us see what’s most important. Hejira is a journey of time, space and mind, and it was always coming to this – after considering all the options, Joni’s going to bow to the inevitable, get back in the car, and seek the Refuge of the Roads.

I’ve had to stop myself here; I could write a book about this album, and how it makes me feel; about how it was the only possible accompaniment to my own road trip across the US a couple of years ago; about how I only really understood it after having heard it on an actual road trip where the highway stretched out ahead of me, and there might well have been a farmhouse burning down, or a highway service station next to a blue motel. It’s at once timeless, and a snapshot of how things were in the mid 1970s; a story we can all relate to, and a story which only Joni Mitchell could have told; a songwriter’s plea to be understood and her desire to be cryptic.

And it couldn’t have been written by anyone else, or played by anyone else. It stands aside from the mass of confessional singer-songwriter albums which came along in the wake of Dylan; it stands aside from the wave of female singer-songwriter albums which followed Carole King and Tapestry; and I think it stands alone in the Mitchell catalogue, because it seems that it’s the one album where she put everything she knew into her work, and it came out exactly how she wanted it to. The fusion of these songs with these specific musicians created something untouchable.

I’m not making a list of my 60 favourite albums here, or the 60 best albums, but if I was, this would be pretty near the top of both those lists.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

That’s a hugely difficult question to answer. If you love this, the albums either side: The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter operate in a similar soundscape, although I think both are flawed in different ways. Blue is an essential album whatever else you may think of Joni, and Court and Spark isn’t far behind. All the early albums are in a similar idiom – Joni, her guitar and her songs – and if you like Blue, you’ll get something from almost all of them. All the later ones have things to recommend them – I love Wild Things Run Fast, for example – but you should be aware that the very Eighties production values haven’t aged as well as you might have hoped.

Compilations to consider?

Both Hits and Misses have much to recommend them as ways in if you don’t know her work at all. She also curated three compilations in 2004; The Beginning of Survival focuses entirely on her later work; Songs of a Prairie Girl is themed around her upbringing and her life, and Dreamland is a much more straightforward collection of her own favourite songs.

Live albums?

Well, yes – Shadows and Light (in its original LP form) is peerless, but so is the earlier Miles of Aisles. Both are highly recommended.

Anything else?

Her long-promised autobiography has never materialised; I hope it does, because hers is an extraordinary story. There are various books of paintings and poetry, all of which are worth your time and money; several more or less official biographies – the ones I’ve read all seem to miss the point somehow; I do think hers is a story only she can tell, but maybe the music has done that already.

Oh, and Shadows and Light is (or was) available on DVD. It’s as remarkable as the audio version, and you can see Jaco Pastorius at work alongside one of the few musicians who really gave him space to do his thing.

11. Frampton Comes Alive!, Peter Frampton, 1976

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Richard

At the beginning of 1976, pretty much every album being carried around school was by Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, or Black Sabbath. I’m not sure if we had actually moved on from the Prog obsessed days, or if I was moving in slightly different circles, or what exactly, had happened, but loud riffs and high-pitched voices were the order of the day. Following my not entirely successful first album purchase, my second album was Deep Purple’s Burn; I was clearly hovering between following the herd and trying to figure out what I actually liked.

While I was concerning myself with whether I should save up for the double live Made in Japan album, something shifted in the musical landscape – without warning, every third album in the Year Area was a completely different double live album, by a musician we were only vaguely familiar with, and who had suddenly taken over our musical consciousness. There had been a single the previous autumn which I might have heard a couple of times, but which surely wouldn’t have detained me, then another – Show Me the Way – which was unusual in two ways; the fact that it was a live single, and the weird guitar effect which those in the know incorrectly identified as a Vocoder. That one got my attention, and apparently everyone else’s, and suddenly, Frampton Comes Alive! Was the record to be seen with.

There was no obvious reason why it should suddenly dominate our musical landscape, but looking at it now, there are some key reasons, only some of which we might have recognised at the time.

Firstly, it was cheap. Yes, go ahead and insert Aberdonian jokes here. A double album for only slightly more than the price of a single – if I remember correctly (and I might not) it was priced at £3.49 when most albums were £2.99, and most double albums were £4.49 or £4.99. The numbers may be off, but the price difference was noticeable, and represented significant value for money. Then there was the Vocoder – strictly speaking, it was a TalkBox – which appeared to be allowing the guitar to sing the lyrics, and definitely needed to be explored more, and thirdly…

Well, thirdly, it was a window into another world. Pretty much everything I’d experienced up to that point had been either loud and raucous or wildly fantastical. This was – I don’t know – grown up. Frampton seemed to be singing and playing in an idiom I hadn’t really considered before; an older musician, with insights into the world of the adult and even sophisticated. The music wasn’t hammering on your skull for attention, or screaming at you; it wasn’t doing tricks or showing off – it was just doing its thing, smoothly and tunefully, and inviting you to sing along if you felt like it. It was probably inviting us to breathe in some mind-altering substances and float along with it, but I think I was a little too young to pick up on that.

And it was doing that while still being recognisably rock and roll. The elements of rock were all still there, it just sounded different. It sounded a lot different from the world I was peering out at through the drizzle, and while I can’t imagine I was daydreaming of California, I can definitively report that this album makes a lot more sense if you’re listening to it while driving up the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica to Malibu. Some of that feeling, that sense of place, definitely came through into my chilly, grey Aberdeen bedroom and turned my head.

It was also unusual in a couple of practical ways which meant that, without being able to put my finger on it exactly, I just liked this album. It was oriented oddly, with the title next to the open side, meaning that if you opened the gatefold up (and I will get to raving about gatefold sleeves; I will…), you were effectively holding it sideways and running the risk of the actual discs falling on the floor.

The other odd thing about this record is something I keep reading about, but for the life of me, cannot remember if my copy featured or not.

The first record player I remember in the household (pause for a moment to nod to David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, whose Word in Your Attic series made me think about this) was a large, heavy black standalone record player with a speaker (or speakers) at the front which played my parents’ records. It had an autochanger arm and the long spindle required to make it work, and you could stack several singles on the spindle and have them automatically drop down each time the previous one was done. I don’t think I had ever considered the possibility of doing that with an album, but some pressings of this album were designed to do exactly that, with sides one and four paired, so side two could drop down automatically and save you getting up every 20 minutes or so.

The whole thing was academic for me and my little red plastic player of course – I definitely didn’t have autochanger capability on it, and I doubt I’d have been happy having my precious LPs slam down on top of each other in any case. The practical upshot of it was that I would have had to change discs every time a side ended, exactly the opposite of the intended effect. I don’t remember having to do this, but I do remember that there was something weird about the way it worked, so perhaps that was it.

So, what do I make now of this flood of Californian sunshine into my beige 1970s life? Well, I can clearly see that loving this might lead you into all sorts of areas which didn’t directly relate to the music I’d been listening to – people my age who were carrying around Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Doobie Brothers albums may well have got there from here; I dabbled a little, but the British music of the following eighteen months turned out to have a much greater pull on my tastes.

What I do feel clearly now, as I’m sure I did then, is the thrill of being dropped in to a live performance – the audience sounds vast and enthusiastic, especially to someone who hadn’t ever been exposed to anything more raucous than a piano recital in the Cowdray Hall. I am a fervent defender of the idea of the live album (spoiler: this won’t be the only one on this list), and I am absolutely certain that this album is one of the key reasons why.

Side one - almost all of the album, to be honest – flows effortlessly, from the cool groove of Something’s Happening through the “funky” Doobie Wah, to the first appearance of the TalkBox, on the recent single Show me the Way, and I can picture myself nodding along, and possibly even singing along with the one I recognised from the radio.

It’s a Plain Shame is the first song which wakes 2021 me from the pleasant fog of nostalgia to wonder at a couple of things – first of all, Frampton introduces it as an ‘oldie but a goodie’, which is an expression which has somehow stuck with me, and it’s slightly startling to hear that it comes from this album, and – wait a minute, how old is it? A quick check reveals that it’s about three years old at time of recording; time moved differently in the seventies, kids. The other thing which stands out is that this song could – just about – have featured on some of the other albums I’d been listening to at the time; it rocks along solidly, and features flashy guitar solos, but it simply lacks the distortion and overdrive I’d been used to. It’s clean and neat and a little bit inoffensive, and I wonder what I was thinking about when comparing this to the other stuff.

Side two starts off acoustically, and All I Want to Be isn’t exactly a change of pace, but does feature sone enthusiastic audience participation. It, and its companion piece Wind of Change comes back to me to the point where I anticipate the firecracker which someone lets off during the second song. I know I’ve listened to this a handful of times in recent years, but it’s clear that I must have played it to death in 1976 – nothing which happens surprises me, except the extent to which I remember the words, and the way the simplicity of the songs still works.

Baby, I Love Your Way was the other song I had likely heard before hearing this whole album, and it will either enthrall you or have you looking for something with a bit more bite to listen to. I’m locked in to this by the force of nostalgia, but I can understand the other point of view. The memory it provokes, however, is unlike the majority of the memories I’ll be provoking during this exercise – when I hear it now, I think of the sun setting over the Pacific, which I’d definitely never seen in 1976, and which I don’t think I can definitively tie to listening to this specific song anywhere – it just that, having seen the sunset off the California coast, it must have been where this all came from. Is there a word for nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced?

I Wanna Go to the Sun, at a full seven minutes, promises much to the Prog fan, but doesn’t deliver any of that – not to say that I don’t enjoy it; it’s just that I think I was used to longer songs having some development, and this just trucks along via an extended instrumental wig-out (I believe that’s the appropriate Seventies term) or two in the middle. It’s fun, but maybe not quite seven minutes of fun.

Penny for Your Thoughts is a delightful palate cleanser - a quick acoustic instrumental to kick off a side which I remember less well than the other three. There’s a song called Money, but none of the ones you were thinking of, which does rock a little harder than anything we’ve seen so far, then Shine On, which is the only hint here that Frampton used to be in Humble Pie.

There then follows a nearly eight-minute-long version of Jumpin’ Jack Flash which is treated to sound pretty much exactly like everything else on here, and which I clearly remember skipping at the time. Giving it a more mature critical ear now, I tend to agree with teenage me, that it lacks everything dynamic and thrilling about the original, and should only be listened to out of a sense of duty.

Side four, however, is worth persevering with. OK, that may not hold true for everyone, but it’s the strongest memory of this album for me, mainly because of the way it ends.

The stage announcement at the end of side three is designed to have us believe that side four represents the encore – I checked, and it wasn’t, but it feels like it, so let’s go with the flow. Lines on My Face is laid-back and in a very Californian groove; unlike the other two longer songs so far, it doesn’t overstay its welcome mainly by being so relaxed under its very seventies guitar solos.

And then it all wraps up with Do You Feel Like We Do? By any measure, it’s ridiculously over-extended and full of pointless twiddling, especially with the famous TalkBox, yet I can’t help feeling a thrill of recognition at the opening lick, and I can clearly put myself back in the mindset of that somewhat naïve teenager, hearing this for the first time, and feeling like he had been given a glimpse of sum fascinating, complex, and adult world he didn’t really grasp, but wanted to know more about.

It’s surely the least anguished hangover song ever recorded, and just flows into an extended and most likely improvised jam session, which will only work if you’ve allowed yourself to be swept along by the feel of the whole thing.

I fully appreciate that the majority of people of my age who bought this in 1976 have neither listened to, or thought about, it since about August of 1976, but there are a couple of reasons it’s here. First of all, it’s a terrific double live album, and perhaps the only one here which never prompted me to go and explore the rest of the artist’s catalogue. If I’m going to properly cover the range of albums I’ve loved over the years, then there have to be several live albums in the list, and this is the one which perhaps got me hooked in the first place.

The other reason it’s here is, of course, that it doesn’t cleanly fit with popular taste. If the music of 1977 was rebelling against anything, it was surely the last ten minutes or so of the last track on this. But I loved it then, and it still makes me smile now, and that is worth recording. I definitely went through entire decades after I bought this without hearing it or even thinking about it, but the familiarity of it all the way through reminds me clearly just how much I loved those few albums I owned back then, and how listening with an uncritical ear is sometimes the best way to hear something.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Honestly? I have no idea. As far as I’m concerned, this album is the whole of Peter Frampton’s career. Tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll have a listen, but I think there’s a reason this is his biggest selling album by far.

Compilations to consider?

The beauty of a great live album is that it functions as an introductory compilation, and – if the musicians are good enough – serves to steer you to other things. There are compilations out there, but why would you need anything more than this one?

Live albums?

Well, yes. There’s a Frampton Comes Alive II apparently. No, haven’t been tempted.

Anything else?

I’m not aware of a biography (maybe he’s working on one), so I’m going to point you at a video of Rick Beato interviewing Frampton in 2018.