Born a Ramblin’ Sam: One of the Most Popular Coolpowers Blogs of All Time

Phases and Stages

Following the fine Shotgun Willie, Willie Nelson only continued to build his artistic wealth with 1974’s ambitious concept album Phases and Stages. Referred to by Rolling Stone as a record that was sure to be called ‘the sh*tkicker’s Tommy‘ or ‘Sgt. Pepper’s for C&W’, it tells the story of a disintegrating marriage, from the husband’s viewpoint on side one and the wife’s on side two. This was an especially personal topic to handle for Nelson as it’s partially based on his own divorce around that time, making for a deeply heartfelt, emotionally realistic album that can touch the soul of any ex-husband or ex-wife who’s been through the shared experience of a divorce. While his utterly understated 1975 follow-up and arguable masterpiece Red Headed Stranger was also a well-constructed concept album revolving around a preacher who kills his wife, Phases and Stages is, by way of the fact that what happens in its story has happened to far more real people than what happens in Stranger, is ultimately the more personal and more intimate of the two Nelson concept album classics, not necessarily making it better. Indeed, nonetheless, Phases is Nelson’s deepest, most soul-touching album, one that reaches into real people’s lives and bares Nelson’s own soul.

1. Release Date: 1974
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TRACK PICKS: “Phases and Stages (Theme) Walkin’”; “Pretend I Never Happened”; “Sister’s Coming Home/Down at the Corner Beer Joint”; “Bloody Mary Morning”; “It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way”

Hoodoo Man Blues

Gathering his usual regulars (soon-to-be-legendary guitarist Buddy Guy, drummer Bill Warren and bassist Jack Myers) for a one day session in September 1965, Junior Wells walks & talks with a tough, leather-jacketed rock ‘n’ roll swagger on his electric Chicago blues classic Hoodoo Man Blues. His dynamic partnership with Buddy Guy only enhances the immense quality and grooviness of the music; in essence, Junior talks, Buddy walks (with his percolating, ‘walking’ guitar playing). Although the two would team up again and again until Wells’ death, nowhere is the partnership between Junior Wells & Buddy Guy stronger than on this LP; Wells’ devilish, charismatic vocals bring a sharp, lustful pang to the oft-covered, already-suggestive Sonny Boy Williamson standard “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”, a relentless attitude to Wells’ original composition “Snatch it Back and Hold It”, and a funky flavor to Kenny Burrell’s jazz-blues classic “Chitlin Con Carne”. Any British blues-rock mainstay, whether it be Eric Clapton, Peter Green, John Mayall or Jimmy Page (the list goes on), probably can’t tell you enough about how the rock ‘n’ roll attitude of Hoodoo Man Blues influenced the nascent blues-rock fusion boom that followed its raw, gritty & hard-edged lead, and for those who want classic Junior Wells & Buddy Guy material, this is one-stop shopping.

1. Release Date: 1965
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TRACK PICKS: “Snatch it Back and Hold It”; “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”; “Hey Lawdy Mama”; “Hoodoo Man Blues”; “Chitlin Con Carne”

Histoire de Melody Nelson

Just from looking (and, admittedly in this reviewer’s case, gazing with wide eyes) at the very, very alluring front cover of a Lolita-esque nymphet clutching a rag doll to her bare chest, you can navigate your way throughout immensely talented French rock ‘n’ roller Serge Gainsbourg’s 1971 masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson without knowing a word of French; his lusty, deep and seductive voice indicates perfectly well that this is a very, very sexually charged album, perhaps as much as or even moreso than Marvin Gaye’s classic Let’s Get it On. And it’s even more delightfully dirty due to the fact that it’s a seven-song (or, more accurately, seven-movement) 27-minute concept album revolving around a man colliding his Rolls-Royce into innocent adolescent Melody Nelson’s bicycle, after which a steamy romance ensues. By the end, however, young Melody decides to return to her homeland of England, and as if that isn’t devastating enough for our highly dubious hero, her flight there ends in tragedy as it ends up crashing, killing young Melody. Despite that tragic, startlingly morbid finale, the album’s main charm is its gloriously risque lyrics (you don’t even need to understand the language to tell how dripping-with-lust these lines are), not to mention the titillating segment on “En Melody” where Melody begins a series of howling, erotic tickle-squeals of pleasure, and its finest artistic asset aside from the saucy sex romp nature of the album is its lush, epic orchestral textures that interact with the heavy, purring and crunchy guitars to create a deep kind of avant-garde chamber funk. For a concept album that has such a small amount of material, this is one hell of an achievement that many other artists couldn’t possibly pull off; the despair in Gainsbourg’s voice when the object of his character’s lust is taken from him is, and I cannot tell you enough, so powerful that understanding of what he’s actually saying is not at all necessary. And yes, suffice it to say this is a serious piece of music with serious artistic value, not just a grand porno achievement for the sole purpose of getting off on the erotica aspect of it. A brilliant work that could never be topped by Gainsbourg again.

1. Release Date: 1971
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TRACK PICKS: “Melody (Extrait de Melody Nelson)”; “Ballade de Melody Nelson”; “‘L’ Hotel Particulier (Extrait de BOF Melody Nelson)”;”En Melody”

Physical Graffiti

Following the loud, full-throttle fun & stylistic experiments of the modest Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin’s massive 1975 double-LP opus Physical Graffiti is in essence the stylistic detours of its predecessor blown wide open. Where Houses had eight tracks and had a few well-done tributes to genres like reggae, Graffiti is the booze-drenched, sexually-charged culmination of six years of artistic & commercial growth that wasn’t rivaled or equaled by its two follow-ups, 1976’s Presence and 1979’s In Through the Out Door. Recorded off-and-on between 1970 & 1974 in many different locales, its first disc features the raunchy sexual come-ons of the funky “Trampled Under Foot”, the fan service track “Houses of the Holy” (originally intended for that album of the same name), the hard blues of the eleven-minute epic “In My Time of Dying”, the pure and simple rock of the opener “Custard Pie” and, finally, the desert epic “Kashmir”, an eight-plus-minute track that rivals Zeppelin’s other classic epics “Dazed and Confused” & “Stairway to Heaven”. And that’s just the first disc; some of the material on the second disc could be called filler, true, but it’s undeniable that its combination of ragtimey tunes (”Boogie with Stu”), folk romance epics (”Ten Years Gone”) and electric Chicago-style blues (”Black Country Woman”) make the whole album one of the great messy, oft-incoherent and utterly brilliant double-albums of all time, perhaps even better than that other ragged 70’s double-album opus Exile on Main St. As mentioned above, this was recorded while they were still just putting out several of their earlier classics, over several years and just song-by-song from time-to-time on the road, so it is technically pieced together, but for a pieced-together effort this is a thoroughly consistent, inspired work of mad genius. Physical Graffiti may not be as perfect as their debut or IV, but it stands as the prime accomplishment of perhaps the best rock ‘n’ roll band to emerge from the British blues revival, and a candidate for best purely rock ‘n’ roll band of all time.

1. Release Date: 1975

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TRACK PICKS: “Custard Pie”; “Houses of the Holy”; “Trampled Under Foot”; “Kashmir”; “Ten Years Gone”

The Dark Side of the Moon

As Rick Wright has said, no matter how many great or even classic achievements Pink Floyd had accomplished since 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, everything they did was building up to the grand, sweeping sonic soundscaping of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, a definitive masterpiece that has been seldom-surpassed in the history of rock. A concept album with insanity & greed as key themes, Dark Side has its standout cuts like “Money”, “Us and Them” and “Time”, but perhaps its greatest asset is the little nuances scattered all over the LP: the soul-diva choruses of “The Great Gig in the Sky”, the synth that sounds like its video-game-like beat is running on “On the Run”, the way each song segues into the next and slowly transforms from one to another. Production-wise, it doesn’t get any better than this when it comes to soundscaping and meticulous design, with the band’s self-production perhaps rivaled only by albums like The Beatles’ Abbey Road. The Beatles comparison is fitting, since Dark Side is probably surpassed in two areas by only two albums: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s concept far outstrips that of Dark Side, while Abbey Road has even clearer and fuller production and lusher arrangements than Dark Side. But in both those areas, those two respective albums are the only precedent or superior albums to Dark Side, and although many will tell you that the Floyd’s 1975 follow-up Wish You Were Here is even better, Dark Side of the Moon can easily be claimed as the band’s finest accomplishment and one of the best rock albums ever released. Little compared to it then, and nothing compares to it in today’s musical climate.

1. Release Date: 1973
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TRACK PICKS: “Time”; “Money”; “Us and Them”

Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation

Following his landmark 1959 masterpiece The Shape of Jazz to Come was not going to be easy for Ornette Coleman, but the maverick free jazz genius not only equaled it, but took it to a whole nother level with 1960’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. If The Shape of Jazz to Come was capable of shocking people, those who didn’t like that are going to go crazy with annoyance over this: it consists solely of the titular 37 minute composition, which has the stunningly defiant feature of having two different quartets on each audio channel, thus the ‘double-quintet’ mentioned on the front cover, both of which flesh out this dissonant, psychotic mangling of every rule there was in jazz before Coleman came along simulatenously. It could’ve easily been a boring, uninteresting and rambling listen, but instead the intricacy of this one huge piece is just stunning, absolutely stunning in its myriad of nuances, textures, tones, and off-kilter horn blowing that came to characterize free jazz, the genre this album even gave its name. Not only is this brilliant piece as good as The Shape of Jazz to Come, but I also have to ask my readers a question: what album could be more seminal to free jazz than the one that lent the genre its name?

1. Release Date: 1960
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TRACK PICKS: “Free Jazz”

At Last!

Although the young Etta James had had a fair number of soul-blues singles under her belt by 1961, At Last!, her first Chess album, was where she really broke into the legendary status she possesses today. Of course the title track, heard in commercials and on the radio alike, is the centerpiece here, arriving after six previous stellar cuts towards the end of the album, but other songs like “All I Could Do Was Cry” and her cover of Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” are also great venues for her signature mixture of the blues, R&B, gospel, traditional pop and vocal jazz, and even though these three great cuts don’t appear until midway through the record, the rest of the material can hold its own as well. The LP is an all-time classic on par with Bobby Bland’s Two Steps from the Blues as a seminal soul-blues masterpiece, and an essential introduction to Etta James’ whole body of work.

1. Release Date: 1961
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TRACK PICKS: “I Just Want to Make Love to You”; “At Last”; “All I Could Do Was Cry”

Looking Back

Released in the aftermath of his blockbuster success and arguable masterpiece, 1976’s double-LP-plus-EP Songs in the Key of Life, this 1977 anthology of  all of Stevie Wonder’s best work prior to hitting his artistic stride in the early 1970’s is undoubtedly the best way to acquire his best early work from 1962 to 1971. From his first childhood single “Thank You (For Loving Me All the Way)” to the funky 1971 single “Do Yourself a Favor”, this three-LP set (never reissued on CD and out of print, not to mention relatively rare) chronicles Stevie’s progress during his years as a Motown hitmaker, and what it reveals ultimately is that although his early albums are definitely surpassed by the classic run of albums between 1972 & 1976, his 1960’s singles were some of the absolute best to emerge from Motown in their day, and he was already established as a performer by the second or third side out of six in total. One of the most astounding things isn’t even the excellent material collected here; it’s the fact that even with this much classic stuff under his belt, the man was just getting started. He hadn’t recorded “Superstition”, “Living for the City”, or any other of his finest songs or classic albums, but before being an album-oriented artist, he was already one of America’s best singles-oriented acts of all time. Few artists have the privilege, acumen or talent of hitting such an enormous artistic peak as Stevie Wonder’s after ten years of classic singles. Sadly, the set is availible today only on vinyl in used record stores, and it’s relatively hard to find (although, I should note, I bought my copy used for ten dollars rather than an expensive markup), but if you’ve got your hands on this and Stevie’s classic 70’s albums, you have all the Stevie Wonder you could possibly need.

1. Release Date: 1977
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TRACK PICKS: “Thank You (For Loving Me All the Way)”; “Castles in the Sand”; “Blowin’ in the Wind”; “I’d Cry”; “Sylvia”; “For Once in My Life”; “Angie Girl”; “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”; “Heaven Help Us All”; “I Gotta Have a Song”; “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer”; “Do Yourself a Favor”