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Disraeli Gears by Cream (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Disraeli Gears
  • Group name: Cream
  • Year: 1967
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: ATCO
  • Collection: Brenner / Gessner
  • Who owned it: my father
  • Buy it on Amazon: $11.01

Disraeli Gears by Cream

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

Cream was very big on classic rock radio when I used to listen to the radio a lot, in the second half of the 1990s, and I’ve been a fan ever since then.

What I expected

Psychedelic rock, blues rock, hard rock.

What it was actually like

This is another record that’s incredibly difficult to review because I’m already so familiar with it, from listening to it a lot because it’s great, but one thing I didn’t recall was how thin the vocals were across some of these songs, though I did recall the incredible musicianship of all three members of Cream.

It’s not easy to pick a place to highlight that musicianship, but Sunshine of Your Love has one of the most memorable riffs in all of rock music, dark and threatening. How is it even a love song? It’s got to be the coldest sunshine on earth.

On that note, World of Pain feels numbing rather than painful, and Dance the Night Away doesn’t exactly strike me as a dance song, while Tales of Brave Ulysses explicitly mentions “the colors of the sea,” but somehow doesn’t mention that Ulysses’ sea is “wine-dark”? What a missed opportunity.

On that subject, I think We’re Going Wrong is probably a lyrical and vocal low point of the record, and that they should have taken the time to think through the song carefully, or just made it an instrumental. I would have been happy with it as an instrumental, I think, and they could have done like on SWLABR by making the electric guitar sing as a vocalist itself.

I loved the bluesiest songs on Disraeli Gears – Take It Back, which really stands out for its harmonica; Blue Condition; and Outside Woman Blues, which is only good until it gets to the guitar solo that blows it up – but really this record is about psychedelic rock, and starting it with Strange Brew just sends an incredibly powerful message about everything that’s about to arrive. I wouldn’t have objected if they’d named the whole record after Strange Brew.

Mother’s Lament, naturally, is the only track that I’d be happy to skip, and it just reminds me of “Faul’s granny shit” from a 1968-1970 Beatles record.

Grade

5/5: love it

Marrying Maiden by It’s a Beautiful Day (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Marrying Maiden
  • Group name: It’s a Beautiful Day
  • Year: 1970
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Columbia Records
  • Collection: Brenner / Gessner
  • Distinguishing characteristics: “G” written on top left of album, indicating that my father owned it
  • Buy it on Amazon: $10.00

Marrying Maiden by It's a Beautiful Day

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I have no idea what this is, and actually originally had this as a record called “It’s a Beautiful Day” by the band “Marrying Maiden,” until realizing that I’d gotten confused.

What I expected

Maybe folk rock?

What it was actually like

This wasn’t folk rock. What was it? It was a little bit of everything, and a lot of strange combinations of things:

  • Don And Dewey was sort of like psychedelic classical swing, an instrumental song that was jazzy, with electric guitar, organ, violin and harmonica. It definitely was not like anything I’ve ever heard before, and was definitely fun.
  • The Dolphins was more of a conventional country rock or folk rock style song with country style violin solo and lead vocals, and choral style backing vocals.
  • Essence Of Now sounded like a Cream song.
  • Hoedown was… like a hoedown: instrumental and very bluegrassy, with banjo that sounded like Scruggs style, electric guitar instead of Dobro, and harmonica.
  • Soapstone Mountain started out like a Who song, but continued like a Cream song.
  • Waiting For The Song started with an Indian-like drone, but with monotonal chanting like church music. It may just have been a prelude to the next song, Let A Woman Flow, which was more easy listening style, almost elevator music, with some Spanish lyrics.
  • It Comes Right Down To You was old timey, with sort of a swing sound, but also sounded a lot like New Riders of the Purple Sage (I’ve previously reviewed three of their records: Home, Home on the Road, Powerglide and Gypsy Cowboy), which would make sense because I know that Jerry Garcia was involved NRPS and it seems that he participated in It’s A Beautiful Day as well.
  • Good Lovin’ was a blues rock song driven by electric guitar, with harmonica.
  • Galileo started out as a mumbly spoken word song, then turned into a kind of march, and then transformed back into more mumbly spoken word.
  • Do You Remember The Sun? was more orchestral, with an organ and choral style vocals, and could have been a Beatles outtake.

What can I possibly make of all this? Parts of it were great, and other parts of it were weird and interesting. Somehow it all did seem to fit together, even if I can’t entirely figure out why or how.

Grade

4/5: would listen again

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  • Group name: the Beatles
  • Year: 1967
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Capitol Records
  • Collection: Selman
  • Buy it on Amazon: $33.80

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I think Sgt. Pepper is probably the music I’ve heard most in my entire life, because it was a favorite of my parents and then my own favorite. I’ve described it as a desert island album, as the Beatles’ greatest achievement, and sometimes as my top record of all time.

Other Beatles records I’ve reviewed:

What I expected

Sgt. Pepper.

What it was actually like

It’s incredibly difficult to write reviews of these songs, because I feel like I’ve known every note and every lyric of all of them since before I was even born, like they’re almost a part of me, and because of the way that they’ve always seemed to run together to me as one rather than as distinct tracks, reinforced by the “concept album” structure of Sgt. Pepper.

Long ago, I read about the idea that in the distant future, Beatles songs will be the nursery rhymes of their day, and every time I’ve come back to that idea over the years, it’s always been Sgt. Pepper‘s songs that I imagine five year olds singing as they jump rope.

Listening to it this time, my favorites are With a Little Help from My Friends and Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!. I’m not sure that I’ve ever identified the latter as a favorite before, but I’ve always enjoyed it because of its weirdness and because I think it’s representative of the record overall. I wrote about the former a little bit when I reviewed the Woodstock soundtrack, but I’d add to that how easy it is to listen to this as being totally innocent and quite entirely about friendship of the sort that kids have (before they know what “getting high” means).

If one thing that both of those songs share is their sense of joy, wonder and happiness, She’s Leaving Home has always struck me as the archetypal sad song, sadder than any love song ever could be, because people may fall out of (romantic) love but find it again, while that’s not possible for the love a parent has for a child.

Within You Without You is one that I didn’t even remotely get when I was a child or a teenager, but it’s really endeared itself to me as an adult. It was not only my first exposure to classical Hindustani music, but the first time I was introduced to any Indian culture of any kind, and as a longtime admirer of Indian civilization (and fan of Ravi Shankar), I hear it all the time, even when it’s not playing.

I think it’s only fair to mention the elephant in the room on Sgt. Pepper, which is When I’m Sixty-Four, one of the worst examples of “Faul’s granny shit” that was even lame enough for my third grade teacher to get my class to sing it for her.

Everyone should listen to Sgt. Pepper. Listen to it when you’re five years old and keep listening to it when you’re 50 years old, listen to it when you’re happy and when you’re sad, when you’re stone cold sober and with the assistance of a certain medicinal herb. Listen to covers of it, like this one by Easy Star that I first heard on the beach by Frischman Street, shortly after moving to Tel Aviv, on a Friday afternoon in summer 2006, as the sun was setting and Shabbat was about to begin.

Grade

5/5: love it

Revolver by The Beatles (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: Revolver
  • Group name: The Beatles
  • Year: 1966
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Capitol Records[1]
  • Collection: Selman
  • Distinguishing characteristics: hole punched through top right of album
  • Buy it on Amazon: $69.00

Revolver by The Beatles

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I prefer the “middle” Beatles era, and Revolver is one of my favorite Beatles records. I’ve listened to it more times than I can count.

What I expected

Revolver.

What it was actually like

Taxman

There was a time when I thought that this was the profoundest Beatles song, and that time was when I was a teenaged libertarian, and when I had no idea who “Mister Wilson” and “Mister Heath” were.

Since that time, my impression of Taxman has declined somewhat. I still love it as a pretty cool experimental-sounding rock song, but being innovative isn’t the same as being profound.

Eleanor Rigby

This is another Beatles song that I once counted among my favorites, until I learned that it was also one of Bill Clinton’s favorites, and I had a difficult time reconciling how someone with such a troubled relationship with the truth could share such over-the-top sentimentality with me.

On the other hand, despite not being a rock song at all or really even a Beatles song, I do think it’s one of Paul McCartney’s last great achievements from the period immediately before his tragic demise.

Love You To

Here’s one that I actually used to despise until my appreciation for both Indian music and George Harrison began to wax in the past couple of decades, and now I consider it a sublimely powerful synthesis of Indian instrumentation with western rock.

Here, There and Everywhere

It’s catchy, but it’s “Paul’s granny shit” and I would never listen to it voluntarily if it weren’t in the middle of a record that I love.

Yellow Submarine

On one hand, Ringo Starr is the greatest Beatle and I want to support everything he did as a Beatle. On the other hand, this song and so many of the others written for Ringo by Lennon-McCartney kind of sounds like they were trolling him.

She Said She Said

I love this song. I love that it’s kind of a peak pre-Yoko Lennon love song, but that it maybe isn’t even a love song at all (or at least there’s major plausible deniability in the lyrics), that it’s psychedelic without overdoing it, and that it has one of the best “story of the song” background stories of any Beatles composition.

Good Day Sunshine

So this is the sort of corny stuff that Paul was writing while he was not taking acid with the rest of the group. Noted.

For No One

See above. I do like For No One quite a bit better than Good Day Sunshine, but the best part of it is the French horn part.

I Want to Tell You

This would be a perfectly serviceable filler song for a typical rock group of 1966, but was hardly worth including on a Beatles record, and it’s not lost on me that George Harrison got three songs on Revolver (probably due to an “acidy” lapse in Lennon’s productivity), one more than his usual two allotted songs. Also, Harrison’s songwriting peak came a few years after this.

Got to Get You into My Life

It’s easy to hate this song, but as another love-song-that’s-not-really-a-love-song, I appreciate it, and I think it’s all right, but that McCartney needed to dial back the brass section by a notch or three.

Tomorrow Never Knows

If I had to pick, I’d say that Tomorrow Never Knows is my favorite Revolver song (on this version of Revolver, at least). The weird backwards-music schtick is obnoxious, but I give them a pass because it was 1966, and the drumming is so powerful at keeping an edgy and almost paranoid mood.

The missing tracks

Huh?

When I first started looking over the copy of Revolver that’s been in my possession for the past few months, something seemed a bit off about it, but I couldn’t figure out what or why. Finally, I noticed the composition of the tracks by Beatle:

  • Paul McCartney: five songs
  • George Harrison: three songs
  • John Lennon: two songs
  • Ringo Starr: one song (written by Lennon-McCartney)

Though it’s widely known that Ringo was given one song per record, and George was allowed two, the balance of the songs were supposed to be split between John’s and Paul’s. In the Revolver sessions, John didn’t have a high volume of material, which is why George got a third, but what’s the deal with John only getting two songs on this record?

The deal is that John didn’t only get two songs on it. In fact, he got five, just like Paul got, and if you happened to buy the LP in the United Kingdom (or probably anywhere in the world outside the United States and Canada), or if you bought the CD when it was eventually released, or if you’ve listened in any digital format over the decades, you would have heard the correct and true version of Revolver, which had all of the above songs plus the following three:

  • I’m Only Sleeping
  • And Your Bird Can Sing
  • Doctor Robert

… and those were all John’s. So what happened to them? Apparently, the Beatles’ record contracts up until Revolver were with different labels in the UK and US, and the US contract gave Capitol Records the right to rearrange and remove tracks. Also, supposedly the US audience was considered to prefer shorter LPs. So Capitol decided to remove those songs and put them on a compilation record that they released around the same time, called Yesterday and Today, with some other songs that they had yanked (heh) from Rubber Soul and Help.

Needless to say, I had never heard of Yesterday and Today until digging into this, as it wasn’t part of my “canonical” Beatles collection from 2009, and I do not approve of this travesty and think whoever made that decision should be fired, if it hadn’t happened more than half a century ago.

At any rate, those three songs are critical to the record’s sound. Without them, it’s deeply lopsided towards Paul’s kind of music, and that’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with Paul, except that he was not the first, second or third best Beatle. And Your Bird Can Sing in particular is one of my very favorite Beatles songs, so not getting to hear it on this copy of Revolver has made me feel deprived. Here, instead, is an outstanding cover.

Grade

5/5: love it

References

References
↑1 Note that the Capitol Records version of “Revolver” is the US version and is incomplete; the UK version, released by EMI, has the missing songs.

The Inner Mounting Flame by The Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin (Vinyl record album review)

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Record basics

  • Album name: The Inner Mounting Flame
  • Group name: The Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin
  • Year: 1971
  • Number of discs: one
  • Label: Columbia Records
  • Collection: Brenner / Gessner
  • Who owned it: almost certainly my father
  • Buy it on Amazon: $64.99

The Inner Mounting Flame by The Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

Issue one! Ok, that’s going to be my first and last John McLaughlin joke. I have never heard of this group and don’t have any idea what it is.

What I expected

There’s no justification whatsoever for me to know even a single word of Sanskrit, but I do happen to know that “maha” is the Sanskrit word for “great” (cognate with the Greek “mega”) and Vishnu is the preserver god in the Hindu trimurti, whose name means “all pervasive” or “he who is everything and within everything.” Could this maybe be Indian-style music? I love some ragas, but I’m going to guess soft rock.

What it was actually like

Wow. This was… maybe acid jazz? I didn’t really hear much Indian influence at all, though what I heard was so unlike what I’m accustomed to hearing that I don’t even know what I might have missed, or what might have been too subtle for me to pick up.

Parts had a very traditional electric blues sound like The Dance Of Maya, and other parts were more progressive rock and even hard rock, with electric guitar solos that I might expect of heavy metal (and recall that this was recorded in 1971), but the dominant sound was psychedelic, jazzy, and heavy. I loved it.

Vital Transformation was fantastic, and the beginning of it especially was incredible.

A Lotus On Irish Streams sounded a bit like my nature sounds playlist, pretty unlike the rest of the record (but ironically more like what I expected the whole record to be), and I’d say it was the worst song.

I really tend to prefer music that’s melodic and rhythmic, but “The Inner Mounting Flame” had a certain unmistakable excellence that really set it apart from… pretty much everything.

Grade

5/5: with absolute metaphysical certitude, you should check out the Mahavishnu Orchestra