Monday 28 October 2013

The Byrds "Byrdmaniax" (1971) (Album Review)




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The Byrds "Byrdmaniax" (1971)

Glory Glory/Pale Blue/I Trust/Tunnel Of Love/Citizen Kane/I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician//Absolute Happiness/Green Apple Quick Step/My Destiny/Kathleen's Song/Jamaica Say You Will


If you were a Byrds fanatic in 1970 you probably couldn't believe your luck. After several long hard years of struggling and line-ups more unstable than the Coalition The Byrds had a top ten single in the charts ('Chestnut Mare'), an album that was selling well and critically acclaimed ('Untitled') and if you were a British Byrds fan then you might have just been lucky enough to have seen the band play one of the best and most worshipped sets of their whole career (the gig the band played at the Albert Hall). Better yet, the band are already back in the studio re-recording another a follow-up, even though 'Untitled' is still so new it's still soaring up the charts - and they're back with Terry Melcher, their producer from the old 'Mr Tambourine Man' and 'Turn! Turn! Turn!' days as well as 'Untitled'. Surely, you think as the Byrds head into a press conference straight after the gig, The Byrds are going to be as big as they ever were and the past five years of fallen record sales, line-up changes virtually every record and the zig-zagging through more genres and styles than an I-pod on shuffle have just been a bad dream.
But this is the Byrds and that run of good luck and great form is already at an end, the very same week 'Untitled' becomes the band's biggest selling record since 1966. 'We hear you're working on a new record, how's it going?' somebody asks (or words to that effect). The band shuffle uncomfortably, talk about the fact that they were so outraged by what producer Terry Melcher did that they're thinking of sacking him and admit that even they don't like the album they're working on much themselves. How on earth could a band as tight a unit as the one that played on 'Untitled' come up with such a lacklustre, lukewarm album mere weeks after the superb 'Untitled'? How could they spend twice the length and about five times the money on the 'Byrdmaniax' single album they did on the double that was 'Untitled'?! (when record label Columbia asked for a working title for the record so they could plan the cover art the band joked it would be called 'Expensive', as they'd already spent more time on it than any other record they'd made). And how the heck did the band come up with an album where even the best songs couldn't match up to the weakest tracks on it's predecessor?

You see, Byrdmaniax is ones of those albums that even committed fans can't bring themselves to love. From the eerie 'death mask' sleeve (more on that story later, as they say) to the off-key vocals to the ridiculously OTT orchestration, there's something about this album that not even a mother - or a Byrdmaniax - can love. This penultimate album of the Byrds career is generally agreed to be the worst collection of Byrds songs, features some of the band's worst performances and it speaks volumes that only the track 'Citizen Kane' ever made it to a mainstream collection of Byrds greatest hits (and even then it sounded quite different to anything else, like a cuckoo nestled amongst the other Byrds). I generally come to the aid of poor unloved albums, using this website as an RSPCA (or in this case an RSPB) for the protection of records that might otherwise become extinct - and I have to say that 'Byrdmaniax' isn't even close to being as bad as the ear-numbingly awful eponymous reunion album The Byrds released in 1973 - but even I can't muster up much enthusiasm for this record except to note that there are further two (sadly the weakest) songs from the best project Roger McGuinn was ever involved in (an abandoned updated musical version of 'Peer Gynt' re-named 'Gene Tryp') and that 'Pale Blue' sports one of McGuinn's better tunes. If this was a Spice Girls record then finding two nice things to say about it wowould be such a novelty it would make my head explode - but this is The Byrds, for crying out loud, and only weeks before the 'Byrdmaniax' sessions started they were delivering one of the greatest LPs of my collection!

History generally ropes producer Terry Melcher into the hangman's noose at this point. The son of Doris Day, it was Melcher's lucky day when he first came into contact with The Byrds and the session tapes of most of the first two Byrds albums that have 'leaked' onto Youtube show him as a very assertive aggressive style of producer, actively cutting off takes in the middle because of small errors when a George Martin or a Ron Richards would have just left the tapes roll, not really endearing him to the rest of the group in the process. The Byrds have long claimed that they left the tapes for 'Byrdmaniax' in a perfectly acceptable condition when they went out on tour, but that Melcher had overdubbed all sorts of unsuitable choirs, strings and horns that made the rough-and-ready sound they'd perfected on 'Untitled' sound lost underneath all that lushness and sounding unreal under all that artificial excess. 'Byrdmaniax' does, after all, sound like a score to a film no one particularly wanted to see, Hollywood's idea of what a rock and roll band should sound like wrapped in so much tinsel the band are barely recognisable. But that doesn't explain both why 'Untitled' happened to get everything so spot on (as it too was a Melcher production), nor why the Byrds obviously had so much trust in their producer that they effectively gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted while they were away (opinions differ as to how much Melcher went 'round the back' of the four Byrds - and whether McGuinn knew about it - but surely all of them at least knew that some overdubbing sessions were taking place and turned a blind eye until they actually heard the results). I'd have loved to have been in the control room the day the Byrds heard back the tapes, probably expecting something similar to Melcher's sensitive handling of strings on 'The Ballad Of Easy Rider' and instead got Mantovani in one of his expansive (and expensive) moods.

In his defence, Melcher claims that he had to something with the material on this album (although quite why he chose to do that is anybody's guess) because the playing was so severely under-par - and he has a point as far as that goes (a lot of these songs are all too clearly overdubbed by the song writer/finder and 'overdubbed' without much input from the others, in contrast to most of 'Untitled'). But surely The Byrds should never have sounded better - they'd played 200 shows together across 1970 and 1971 and according to McGuinn knew each other's playing so well they didn't even have to rehearse except to add the occasional new song into the set, even if they were arguably rather tired and sick of the sight of each other (did no one in the band suggest taking a holiday first before starting this album?) Most AAA bands are at their best when they come off the road, especially straight after a best-selling album; 'Who's Next' may have had a troubled birth but you can tell that The Who know each other inside and out after the string of gigs that culminated in the famous 'Live at Leeds' gig and it's no co-incidence that Pink Floyd just happened to pick the best-selling 'Dark Side Of The Moon' as the album they'd play every night for months on stage before going straight into Abbey Road to record it. But by contrast The Byrds seem to have done their best to avoid each other for the full six months of off-and-on sessions (no mean feat!), had almost no discussion about what should be on the album and left the pieces of the jigsaw up to the producer to fit together, without even letting him in on what they wanted for the picture on the box. It was no surprise to learn in Johnny Rogan's excellent (and much re-issued) tome (the word 'book' hardly does this work justice) 'Timeless Flight' that the band were distracted during the making of this album by bust-ups between the band and between all four band members and their wives. Some groups can handle keeping work and home life separate (for artists like Brian Wilson and Ray Davies, the studio is the only place where life makes sense), but for the Byrds the studio was a useful distraction from a troubled home life and nobody wanted to go home (or get sober). No wonder these sessions dragged on for months and months - nobody wanted them to finish.

However, that doesn't excuse the fact that the songs themselves are, by Byrds standards, a pretty miserable bunch. Actually individually some of these songs aren't bad at all (McGuinn rarely got as many as four songs on an album and three of them are amongst his best post-Notorious Byrd Brothers work, while Skip Battin's 'Absolute Happiness' is a better song than all his detractors generally make out - although even I struggle to make it to the end of 'Tunnel Of Love'). The problem is that none of them belong together and 'Byrdmaniax' is one of those albums where because there's no real 'stand out' classic and so much material you could kindly describe as 'filler' (or unkindly describe as absolute tosh) the whole ends up sounding much less than the sum of it's parts. The traditional Christian hymns that were once such a part of Byrds mythology now sound at odds with the 1950s retro rock of Skip Battin and writing partner Kim Fowley, the out-and-out country of Clarence White's Nashville-style instrumental and sickly, treacly orchestral ballads. The slight gosh-where-is-this-going? excitement of 'Untitled' (which got away with its eclecticism by having the band play everything more or less together) is now a schizophrenia even worse than the one The Byrds suffered on 'Dr Byrds and Mr Hyde' - and frustratingly the band seem to have given up collaborating with each other, knocking off each other's rough edges and extreme tastes (how can the delightful oddball and novelty song writer Skip possibly have spent so long in the same band as straight-as-an-arrow country gent Clarence?)

The trouble is that the four writers in the band are increasingly going in separate directions from each other. While McGuinn has retrospectively stated that he wished he'd kept more control of the band and more of the writing credits for himself, the songs the others were writing were at least as important a part of each Byrds LP as what the 'founding' Byrd came up with himself. Where would 'Dr Byrds and Mr Hyde' be without Clarence White's stinging guitar and country twinges? Would 'Easy Rider' amount to anything like as much without Gene Parson's one song and two vocals? Could 'Untitled' possess as much 'heart' and 'weight' without Skip Battin's Vietnam hymn 'Welcome Back Home' to round it all off? The Byrds as songwriters simply don't belong together anymore - and it's becoming increasingly clear from the things that have been written about this album and this period in Byrds history that the band didn't seem to think they 'belonged' together either (Skip and Gene will be fired in less than a year, Roger claiming to this day that he didn't like the playing of either of them - despite the fact that this quartet is the single most stable line-up in the band's eight year history, lasting a whole three albums together!) Even the original album's inner sleeve seems to pick up on this confusion, 'separating' the four band members into 'columns' each with their own list of 'instruments' and photographs that are strangely cropped, as if the illustrator was under strict instructions not to let the band's photos mingle with each other under pain of death.

Talking of death, 'Byrdmaniax' has also had the mickey taken out of it many times down the years for the 'death masks' on the cover (those really are masks of the band's faces on the cover; clockwise from left Gene Parsons, Roger McGuinn - with beard unusually -,Clarence White and Skip Battin) which do seem to imply that the band, err, didn't have much life to it in 1971. But I've always considered the 'death mask' cover idea to be a great one - just look at the detail captured in all four faces, from Skip's gritted teeth to the tear that seems to be coming out of Clarence's right eye but which was probably as 'mistake' in the casting process - that deserved to get more credit at the time than it did. What other band were brave enough to put their features on display like this? This is also such a simple yet striking cover that it deserved the same iconic status as, say, the Beatles in polo necks for 'With The Beatles' or on that level crossing at 'Abbey Road'. Anyone who has ever owned one of those toys where you put your face through metal bars to create a shape (or one of those 'fuzzy felt' faces where you can add beards and hair through iron filings moved with a magnet) can have great fun re-creating their own 'Byrdmaniax's 'Byrdmaniax' cover. The problem is that, a bit like the record, bad money seems to have spent after good. Far from revealing that the band's faces are 'masks', enticing the listener to look inside for the 'real' Byrds, the cover designer has 'dropped' the four faces into a murky husky blue background that makes the band look as if they're rising up from the water. The back cover even has their faces seemingly 'pressed' through the same murky 'pale blue' surface as if the bands has just been cryogenically frozen. Also, while I can't day I recall any 'death mask' taken of anyone smiling, did the band have to look quite so solemn and severe when the casts were being taken? Also, the cover is quite eerie when you think that two of the Byrds featured with 'death masks' on the cover are no longer with us (and that Clarence died barely two years after his cast was made for this cover). For all that, though, I like this sleeve which is more striking than any Byrds album since 'Notorious Byrd Brothers' (there's certainly more imagination being used here than on the film still used for 'Easy Rider' or the old circus poster re-printed for 'Sweethearts of the Rodeo' - and even as a huge fan I have to admit the 'past and future' concept behind the cover for 'Untitled' doesn't exactly come off).

Still, back to the music. Is 'Byrdmaniax' really as bad as fans always make out? Well, sadly this album does seem to get out of it's way to magnify this latter-day Byrds' worst features. McGuinn sounds as if he's 'playing' at being in a rock and roll band he knows has had it's time and barely plays any guitar on the whole album, Clarence White has two nasally-sung cover songs (both of which were re-recorded to a higher standard, apparently, but Melcher decided to use 'outtakes' either by purpose or accident; sadly none of them have come out as outtakes yet) which show off perhaps the most unusual, un-commercial vocal sound of any AAA band member (no mean feat considering that list includes Neil Young, Roger Waters, Dave Davies, Dennis Wilson, John Enwtistle and Keith Moon); Gene Parsons - so often the star of late-period Byrds albums - is all but silent, with no vocals to his credit and only one co-write on an instrumental, whole his drumming is even more wobbly than normal and finally Skip Battin has never tried so hard to return to his first love of novelty doo-wop records from the 1950s, which are sweet in their way but more anachronistic here than ever. There's no real heart, no real soul and the only songs that the listener might 'connect' with are either written by other people (and played and sung sloppily by The Byrds) or McGuinn's songs 'Pale Blue' 'I Trust' and 'Kathleen's Songs', although even these are slim pickings for those expecting another 'Lover Of The Bayou' or 'Chestnut Mare'. You could add in the fact that this album is also staggeringly, stingingly short (33 minutes) given the era (1971, the year of double albums and excess) and the amount of time and investment that went into it (although some may count the shortness of this album as a blessing). Sadly the CD re-issue for 'Byrdmaniax' in the otherwise excellent Byrds re-issue series is also rather stingy, adding just a couple of ok outtakes and an odd unreleased Gene Clark track (that shouldn't belong here - yes Gene did re-join the band, many times, but in 1968, 1972 and 1973, not 1971!) instead of, say, a remix of the whole album without strings (as The Byrds intended) or the couple of Clarence White outtakes that the few people who've heard them still salivate over.

And yet...for all that, I can't bring myself to completely hate this album the way so many Byrds reviewers and fans do (have a read of some of the reviews on Amazon if you get the chance - they're much crueller about this album than I would ever be, even if a small portion actually out and out love this record). This is a flawed album that knows it's flawed, but is on such a crash-course and so badly needs a driver that the outcome is sadly inevitable. Little bits catch your ear and surprise you, like the opening surge on 'I Trust' that sounds like a genuinely great pop song (until the wordy chorus comes in and you realise the song has nowhere else to go), the delicate fragilility of both 'Pale Blue' and 'Kathleen's Song' (before the orchestra comes in and all hope of subtlety go out the window), the clever national anthem-style plodding beat to McGuinn's satire 'I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician' (before the song's lack of bite and satire really gets to you - imagine this song in the hands, of say, David Crosby or Gene Clark?), the lyrics to 'Absolute Happiness', one of the better Skip Battin parables on buddhism (shame about the music though...) the pounding finale to 'Green Apple Quickstep' (before you curse the fact this instrumental has finally worked out what to do a minute-and-a-half too late) and Clarence's heartfelt renditions of both 'My Destiny' and 'Jamaica Say You Will' (if the rest of 'Bydrmaniax' is flawed because it has no heart, that's certainly not true of Clarence's contributions - sadly, though, neither outpouring is particularly in tune). 'Byrdmaniax' has many small moments of magic, and two slightly longer ones in McGuinn's pair of ballads and no Byrds record could ever be quite the 'excrement of pus' one colurful reviewer described this record as. But it could have been better (hell, it's by The Byrds!) it should have been better (can a band really fall apart this soon after 'Untitled'?) and it's still a mystery why none of the better parts ever add up to one really great moment. It would take a real Byrdmaniax to enjoy this album - and yet even this record can be a joy to listen to once you've lowered your expectations sufficiently and surprise yourself with hoe many songs 'nearly' get to where they should be going. Certainly if this was the worst The Byrds had to offer I'd be very pleased - sadly there's still the 'Reunion' album to come in two record's time and that record doesn't even have these few moments of charm and promise, Gene Clark's contribution aside...

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Hopes are high after the barnstorming opening to 'Glory, Glory', 'Byrdmaniax's token Christian song after several tracks from 'Sweetheart Of The Rodeo' and the mini success of 'Jesus Is Just Alright' in 1969. Larry Knechtel's opening flurry of piano chords (not dissimilar to his gospelly work on Simon and Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', but played at about ten times the speed) is very ear-catching and the sudden rising crescendo of McGuinn and Wgite's twin guitars married together with Gene Parson's whomping drums may well be the single greatest ten seconds on the album. Sadly, though, the song itself is one of those repetitive gospel songs that don't really work in a rock and roll setting that pretty much dictates that each verse has to offer something new. Surprisingly, this traditional sounding song only dates back to 1969 (although it does have it's roots in 'When The Saints Go Marching In'), having been written first performed by the Art Reynolds Singers who also first sang 'Jesus Is Just Alright' (no I haven't heard of them either, but Clarence was a big fan). McGuinn has the same trouble he had on the 'Rodeo' album, made more or less against his will: great as he is at pop, rock and folk he's just not a natural country singer; this song should be all about faith and devotion and instead he sounds as if he's reading the words for the first time and reading the newspaper simultaneously. The rest of the band fare better - Gene Parsons always sounds more at home on these 'joi de vivre' songs where his often unstable drumming sounds more natural and Clarence's fairly rocky guitar solo makes a virtue out of not actually playing many notes - but even they sound like they've been pushed for a few too many takes to get this song right and they'd rather be anywhere than a cold, dark studio trying to artificially create a song about how wonderful life is. 'Jesus' worked - sort of - because The Byrds treated an out and out gospel song as a more or less straightforward rock song that just happened to have Christian lyrics, but 'Glory Glory' is a little too far down the gospel road and while Gram Parsons would have sounded mighty fine singing this song, poor Roger is lost in a world he really doesn't belong in. Melcher's additions work better on this track than most of 'Byrdmaniax' (at least having a gospel choir on a gospel song makes sense), but I reckon most fans would still rather have this song 'unadorned'. Still, I've heard worse cover songs from The Byrds - and at least this song doesn't feature, say, Roger McGuinn's hoover doubling as a lear jet or a sea shanty from space or something.

'Pale Blue' is the one mini-masterpiece on the album, a fragile beauty and devotion of love that's mighty unusual for Roger's writing (this is arguably his only love song 'out of character' as it were - ie not written for 'Gene Tryp' to sing). Lyrically this song is clearly inspired by 'Nights In White Satin' only with the love affair is happening in present time not the past - and the white sheets turn 'pale blue' when the sunlight hits them rather than staying white. he melody for this song is one of McGuinn's loveliest, Paul McCartney-esque in it's roundedness and completeness. The lyrics aren't quite as convincing but even they sound heartfelt and believable and at three short verses they don'ty overstay their welcome. The band at their best on the backing track too, with Gene Parsons abandoning his drumkit for a classy harmonica break that really makes the song. Some fans have issue with Melcher's orchestral backing too (mainly along the lines of 'what is an orchestra doing playing along with a folky harmonica?') but I don't have any problems with it (I really admire the way this song goes from subtle fragile folkyness to sudden epic when the 'sun' comes out during the song and the narrator's declaration of love, turning it from a small one into a big one very cleverly). Indeed, Melcher gets this song spot on, draping the orchestra round the track without covering them up like the bed sheets in the song - and while it's hard to hear dubbed so low in the mix I'm willing to bet the accompaniment would be every bit as lovely as the song if heard on it's own. The one thing that lets this track down is McGuinn's uncomfortable, nasal whine of a lead vocal which makes the song hard to understand and to listen to - could it be that he wrote this song while deep in the thralls of love with his wife Linda - but that the two were already splitting at the time he came to sing the song so he couldn't get himself in the 'mood'? (legend has it McGuinn spent most of these sessions hiding from his wife and refusing to speak to her when she visited or phoned up). Even so, 'Pale Blue' is easily the album highlight and one of the last truly classic Byrds songs, an under-rated love song that's amongst McGuinn's very best.

'I Trust' is another better-than-average McGuinn song that features him singing properly this time - indeed it's one of the best vocals of his career, full of short-term sadness and long-term happiness. The song is ever so nearly there too, cleverly written to go with what was becoming a McGuinn catchphrase whenever the music press would ask him if a latest setback really spelled the end for the Byrds. The opening verse with it's pedal-steel White guitar and trippy drumming is highly ear-catching and the sudden surge of gospel harmonies and dramatic switch to and from a minor key on the line 'It's hard being human when everyone is so uptight'....suggest we're in for a cleverly constructed masterpiece. But somehow there's something missing from this song. McGuinn sticks in a middle eight to distract us, which is always a welcome thing for a songwriter to do, but this song has nowhere else to go - we've already learnt everything we need to about this song in the opening 30 seconds and everything after this is simply delaying the point when the song can safely fade. As many fans and critics have pointed down the years too, there's simply far too many words in the song's chorus that leaves the message of the song sounding garbled ('Some how I know.... Thateverythingisagonnaturnoutalright!' - perhaps 'Somehow I know it will be alright' might have been better?!) The song is also slightly uninvolving and I can't put my finger on why - McGuinn drives the song well, Clarence is as great ever on the guitar and Skip and Gene are fine as a rhythm section too. But the mix has put wide gulfs between all the players so that they sound as if they're jumping around the song trying to get your attention rather than playing as a bona fide band and Melcher's addition of a choir makes the whole thing sound top heavy. I'd love to hear a remix of this song (or maybe even a re-recording as this song would sound great as an acoustic piece) and as a composition it's one of the better ones on the album, but as the album's big hope of a hit single it's sadly another failure. If I didn't know better about the time and money spent on this album I would have said it was rushed. Few fans even remember 'I Trust' today, which seems sad return for a song that had so much hope and effort invested in it.

'Tunnel Of Love' is easily Skip Battin's worst song on a Byrds album. If you're the kind of fan who thinks the better known 'Citizen Kane' or 'America's Great National Past-time' are the nadir of the band's back catalogue then you know what you're in for: no real melody, lyrics only a dictionary could love, a relentless unchanging rhythm and overall such an aura of 'bubblegum' that the song probably has the word 'novelty' written through the middle. Unlike most Byrds fans, it seems, I love Skip's off-beat humour (you only have to have a look for our Alan's Album Archives videos on Youtube...) and love him even more when he's doing a 'serious' song like 'Yesterday's Train' or 'Welcome Back Home'. But there's no reason for a song like 'Tunnel Of Love' to exist: it's a very dated (even - or perhaps especially - for 1971) doo-wop song that takes a painfully long extended metaphor about a marriage being as run down as the 'tunnel of love' where the couple first dated. Like many a Battin/Fowley song, it reads more like an essay than a song - and even by their standards these lyrics are strange (what do you make of a track with lines like 'The water was floating with graves where cotton candy should be'?) with none of the lines actually rhyming with each other at all. The music too seems deliberately made to be as hard to listen to as possible. Skip re-creates 'Blueberry Hill' on both chugging piano chords and a walking bass but the song doesn't move on from this or explode into a chorus as Fats Domino once did: this is all we've got, for the whole of the song's torturous 4:58 length (it seems an extra slap in the face that the longest song on this short album is the one least suited to being long) without even a single chorus line or middle eight or even a guitar solo to brighten the song up. Chances are only Skip and Gene play on this song, which McGuinn like much of Battin's work he apparently refused to play on - at least if you don't count the sea of choirs and overdubs added onto this song that simply a drab and heavy song sound drabber and heavier. I usually defend Skip for at least having the courage to do something different - but 'Tunnel Of Love' isn't different; it's the same old thing done with even less imagination than usual. One of the worst Byrds tracks of all time and easily the nadir of the album.
'Citizen Kane' is a slightly better Battin-Fowley song, but even with a half-decent melody and a catchy chorus you have to ask why on earth this song made it to a Byrds (or why this song seems to have become the only song from 'Byrdmaniax' that the casual Byrds fan might know). When this album came out it was the 30th anniversary of the Orson Welles film, which was some sort of milestone I suppose, but did the film really need a theme tune after all these years? Skip simply re-tells the plot of the film here, rather loosely (I only saw the film after knowing the song and I can't say I recognised the plot much from Skip's words - or understood why this film is quite the classic it's reckoned to be; have these film critics never seen The Monkees' 'Head'?!) and the closest the song comes to injecting any emotion or drama is the line 'Citizen Kane was king - poor Citizen Kane!' Like the film, the hint is that the superstar who seems to have everything and even builds his own mansion where 'diamonds fall like rain' actually has nothing, but he's cut himself off from the real world. The trouble with the song is, it made rather a better point of all this thirty years earlier and I doubt any film buff really needed advice from an obscure Byrds LP from three decades later. The one lyric that stands out is Skip's further development of all of Citizen Kane's famous movie friends coming round, adding in the detail that Frankenstein turned up and 'ate the leading lady ' it speaks volumes that everyone else at the party is too wrapped up in their own little worlds to even notice. Fowley, in particularly, really 'got' the part of the film where all the Hollywood stars attend empty endless parties and get rather too afraid to not be seen going to one in case their fans think they are as lonely and scared as they really are (Fowley came from a film background himself and attended more than a few of these parties). Dare I say it, though, Battin and Fowley seem to have 'missed' the 'true' message of the film - that Citizen Kane's millions couldn't compensate for the loss of 'rosebud', actually the name the millionaire had given to his sledge as a young boy (at the only time in his life when he was really happy) - at least, there's no mention of it in the lyrics, which rather makes you wonder what the pair thought they saw in the film. Producer Melcher apparently hated this song, which was why he tried to drown it out with as many extra horn parts as he could. While not terribly suitable for the Byrds sound, it does at least capture a period flavour and this song is arguably more exciting for them. Even a confident lead from Skip (in stark contrast to most of McGuinn's timid vocal work on this album), a truly great chorus and a stinging Clarence White guitar part can't save this song though. It's worth remembering that, despite it's iconic status, 'Citizen Kane' was a huge flop at first that cost their studio money after the excessive millions that were spent on it - there's a lesson in there somewhere for how these most expensive of all Byrds sessions seemed to be going...

'I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician' sounds like McGuinn trying to cash in on Battin's territory, a novelty song only a smidgeon away from the similar tongue-in-cheek of Skip's own 'America's Great National Past Times' from next record 'Farther Along'. Actually, this song is easily the weakest from the superb musical Roger had written during 1969 with Bob Dylan's writing partner Jacques Levy about 'Gene Tryp', a sort of hippie update of Peer Gynt who founds America rather than Norway (note the anagram; a lot of the better songs from 'Untitled' were from it, including the gorgeous 'Just A Season' and 'All The Things', as well as the hit single 'Chestnut Mare' when Gene tries to catch an American horse rather than a Scandinavian reindeer like he does in the original folk tale). This song comes from the point in the tale when 'Gene' decides he doesn't like the way 'his' America is shaping and runs for congress. The problem is that the song is the only one from 'Gene Tryp' that truly is dictated by plot (all of the other songs work as well out of context, so much so that few fans realise these songs are from another work) and in context it probably works fine - Gene means what he sings and the 'America' he's trying to found is the 'mythical' one of American Dreams and freedom from centuries before. In 1971, though, 'Politician' is released in the context of other anti-Nixon songs from the period (many of the best ones written by McGuinn's former writing partner David Crosby) and there's nothing in the lyrics to suggest this song is set in the past. As a result - and partly too from the tongue-in-cheek way Roger sings it - 'Politician' sounds like a sarcastic attack on the sort of righteous figures who think they're doing good when they're actually doing wrong. The problem is, the song was never written to sound like that - Gene is a 'hero', not a sarcastic wise guy and his ideas are genuinely for the good of all (ion his mind at least) and the fact that the tone has shifted but the lyrics haven't make 'Politician' a rather awkward hybrid. Who are we meant to be laughing at? The earnest but green narrator of the song whose wet behind the ears? The corrupt politicians actually running the country? Us for believing in the American dream? Or are we meant to be cheering along and not actually laughing at all? Putting this song right in the middle of three straight Battin songs rather colours our idea of it too - surely this is just another throwaway novelty song, whatever it meant in the context of 'Gene Tryp's plot? Some of these lyrics are odd to say the least: 'I'll always be tough, but I'll never be scary' - err, which politician has ever managed that? (Most of them just plump straight for 'scary'). At times the narrator sounds like a good guy ('I'll preserve the prairies'), at others like a villain ('I'll give the young the right to vote as soon as they mature') or simply out of touch ('I'll sign the bill to help the poor, to show I'm not a snob'). In the end 'Politician' probably didn't give the likes of Crosby many sleepless nights: it's not funny enough to be a true comedy novelty song and if it is meant as a scathing attack then it's one without teeth in the context of what else was around in 1971. But still, it's nice to hear McGuinn thinking outside the box and delivering something in a style he never touches again before or since and I dare say this song made one hell of a lot more sense in the context of the musical (to be fair to McGuinn, most of the lyrics are Levy's anyway, although his melody line - caught somewhere between a genuine national anthem and an oompah-ing bubblegum song - blurs the line between drama and comedy too).

'Absolute Happiness' is the best of the three Battin songs on the album and unlike the other two songs actually sounds like a proper song, even if it can't match the pathos of 'Welcome Back Home' or the beauty of 'Yesterday's Train'. Following on from those songs, this is a third attempt at trying to get the Byrd fanbase into buddhism and this song is all about trying to achieve a state of inner calm and find an inner nirvana. Many of Battin's songs read like textbooks, but this one is less patronising than some by having the song start off with the narrator himself taking part, 'dressed in country cloth and sitting on the floor', trying to empty his mind of all his worldly worry. Some of the lyrics are quite sweet ('Filling in the vacant spaces with dreams of truth'), others are less inspired ('Greatness and unity shines within the mind'), with the whole song recalling The Moody Blues' 'Ommmmmmm' from 'In Search Of The Lost Chord' in 1968 (although sadly there's no 'mantra' this time as there was on 'Welcome Back Home'). If you were charitable you'd say that this yoga instruction manual does a good job musically of conjuring up that inner calm and serenity. If you were less charitable you'd probably call it dead boring - there's no real development here again, none of the catchy choruses that were on 'Citizen Kane' and the whole recording sounds like the band are trying hard not to fall asleep (which, to be fair, is the point of the song I suppose...) Still, at least there sounds like a 'point' to this song (unlike 'Tunnel Of Love' and 'Citizen Kane' and this song is clearly close to Battin's heart, announcing in the last verse that he promised his conscious that he'd use his small amount of fame and standing to urge everyone listening to him to find inner peace (mission accomplished then). The trouble is that unlike the gorgeous 'Yesterday's Train' (which made re-incarnation sound both plausible and fascinating) 'outsiders' feel left rather cold by this song, which simply drifts away on a cloud without really doing much to encourage the listener to take part.

If you were meditating to that last track then chances are you'll be woken up straight away by 'Green Apple Quickstep', a collaboration between White, Parsons and occasional Byrds fiddle player Byron Berline which is a country-rock instrumental similar in feel to the previous 'Nashville West' (but played even faster) and similar to what the former pair would have been playing when McGuinn heard them play in 1968 (stealing first White then Parsons into The Byrds). The harmonica, overdubbed later, was by Clarence White's dad Eric, showing how much country music was in White's genes. Like many instrumentals, it's hard to know quite what to tell you - the trio are at the height of their instrumental powers and White especially really proves what a fine guitarist he was. However, this is a song that doesn't really suit The Byrds (it speaks volumes that two of them aren't even on it) and personally I'd take 'Nashville West' over this piece - at least that had a full band attack going on. Berline will later end up playing in Stephen Stills' Manassas by the way, although he reportedly hated being made to do this recording(his memory is of the trio being kept apart for technical reasons, which meant they couldn't see each other's faces when they played - and that although the 'first' jam around this song's chords was fun, the trio got asked for so many retakes the joy was quickly sucked out of the song). Had White and Parsons released a spin-off record of a full album like this the results might well have been exciting and adventurous - but as it is, this song sounds like a 90 second cameo from a parallel Byrds most fans are probably quite glad never actually came into being.

'My Destiny' splits fans like no other Byrds song. To many it's an off-key caterwauling on which the Byrds have never sounded so country (not without Gram Parsons on board anyway); to others it's all of those things but is also achingly beautiful. Clarence White may not have been the most together as vocalists go, but he does have the ability of making a song sound heartfelt, even when it's one that was written a long time before. The writer of this song is Helen Carter - you might know her younger sister, June, better (she's the one that married Johnny Cash) - although as far as I can tell she didn't record her own version of this song until as late as 1979 (when she was 52). Like most of Clarence's other choices of cover songs for The Byrds, it's a ballad lament with a distinct religious bent, the sorry tale of a hard done by man asking his maker why he has to go through such sorrow and whether 'this is my destiny'. Janis Joplin would have done a great version of this (this song is a close sister of her masterpiece 'Work Me Lord') and it's arguably the greatest cover song The Byrds do on this album - possibly their whole career (although Clarence's next cover, 'Bugler', from 'Farther Along' is neck and neck) - even if the recording sadly isn't up to the song. Unfortunately, emotional and heartfelt as Clarence's vocal undoubtedly is, it's very hard to follow and the rest of the band singing 'straight' behind him only makes the effect worse. Still, Clarence's guitar work is exceptional on this song and the other Byrds (with Larry Knechtel once again) do at least to be taking this song seriously. The fact that such a wreck of a recording, with such an out of tune vocal, is the second greatest highlight of the album probably doesn't say much for the rest of the album, but does say a lot about Clarence White who does this song almost singlehanded.

'Kathleen's Song' is another McGuinn piece from 'Gene Tryp', this time heard as a simple love song at the beginning of the work before Gene goes off on his journey to 'found' America. Short and sweet, pretty but pretty brief, it's the sort of thing that could have really been a lovely haunting song had the Byrds spent a little more time on it, but sounds woefully undeveloped as it stands. As it happens, the song was first started during the sessions for 'Untitled' and probably had more time spent on it than any other Byrds song of the period but still the band aren't quite sure what to do with it. Personally, I'd have done this song like 'The Ballad Of Easy Rider', understatedly but with a distinctive drum beat; that might well have sounded awful (I'm not in The Byrds after all, which is probably just as well), but this simple song about a pair on love keeping their relationship long distance is crying out for that sort of simplicity. It certainly isn't calling out for the full Mantovani works, with a full orchestra all but drowning the two lovers as they try to go their own simple ways. Of all the 'mistakes' Terry Melcher is meant to have made across this album, this is surely the worst lapse of judgement! That said, even this could have worked had the band done a 'John Riley' and had McGuinn sing properly to just an orchestral backing - unfortunately his vocal is off-mike and sounds like a rehearsal take, something to show everyone how the song goes rather than a vocal invested in meaning (perhaps he saw what Clarence was getting away with and thought he'd try the same?!) His guitar is also in the way, clashing with the strings something awful at times. A real shame, because the kernel of this song - the lovely expressive simple tune and the lyrics aping both John Lennon and David Crosby's 'Almost Cut My Hair' ('I'll be here letting my hair grow long and waiting for you') are pretty special too.

The album ends with 'Jamaica Say You Will', another Clarence White cover choice. Unlike many of Clarence's favourite songs, which often dated back years before he was born, this one was contemporary and written by a 'new' singer-songwriter no one else had heard of yet named Jackson Browne. Clarence doesn't have Browne's effortless optimism and commerciality, so the original's upbeat tale about a white ship's captain finding love unexpectedly on foreign lands ends up sounding more like a hymn for lost youth than the original intention of finding love in the strangest of places. I must admit I'm a bit worried that the girl in the song seems to be named after the country of her birth (there's no way anyone's naming me after my home town or country), although that is a very 70s thing to do (Cat Stevens may well be singing about the same girl in his own 'Sweet Jamaica' from album 'Izitso?') Like much of the album, the band seem to be sleepwalking through the track without really getting to know it, despite a quite lovely beginning when McGuinn's guitar and the orchestra finally sound 'as one' and Clarence's vocal is his wildest yet, wandering everywhere around the notes he should actually be singing. He clearly doesn't have as much emotion invested into this song as, say, 'My Destiny' and it's a shame that this song wasn't given to Roger to sing (not that McGuinn's harmony part is much better, it has to be said). The end result is a pretty damp squib of an end to a pretty wet album. Still, at least The Byrds clearly had their ear to the ground looking out for new songwriters and the fact that the band once voted 'America's answer to The Beatles' were covering his song must have been hugely positive for Jackson Browne.

Overall, then, 'Byrdmaniax' is far from the album fans were expecting after the heights of 'Untitled'. The four of them just don't sound that comfortable playing together (there's no single great band performance here, even if all of them shine at different moments) and none of the time or investment spent on this album (the most expensive record in the Byrds' history) seems to show through in the finished product. The band credits also seem very lopsided - poor Gene Parsons gets left with precious little to do despite providing most of the best moments on the past two Byrds albums, half of Roger McGuinn's work is taken from his already completed musical 'Gene Tryp', Skip Battin gets a full three songs to his name (when at best only one of them was good enough to get in) and Clarence White oinly gets one instrumental and two covers. None of the fire of the electric side of 'Untitled' and none of the intelligence of the studio side of 'Untitled' seems to have been here at work on this album at all and yet 'Byrdmaniax' does have one thing going for it. It is at times a beautiful record - just as parts of 'Untitled' were - and the melodies for both 'Pale Blue' and 'Kathleen's Song' are as good as anything in the Byrds' back catalogue (even if the arrangements and performances of both songs aren't). The Byrds' time is clearly up, with this album for the most part a collection of solo tracks swathed in orchestra - but when the foursome do play together even in pairs (as on the instrumental section of 'Pale Blue' or the boom beat of 'Citizen Kane') they still prove that this is a band worthy of the Byrds name and that even though this line-up isn't quite as inventive as the one that had the likes of David Crosby and Gene Clark in their line-up they are still capable of making great music. It's just a shame that this album followed on so quickly and so badly from one of the greatest albums the band ever made, when we expected so much more from them. Thankfully the next, slightly better album is only slightly farther along the road...


A Now Complete Link Of Byrd Articles Available To Read At Alan’s Album Archives:

'Mr Tambourine Man' (1965)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/news-views-and-music-issue-134-byrds-mr.html
‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-byrds-turn-turn-turn-1965.html

'(5D) Fifth Dimension' (1966)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-49-byrds-5d.html

'Younger Than Yesterday' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/news-views-and-music-issue-108-byrds.html

'The Nototious Byrd Brothers' (1968)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-20-byrds-notorious-byrd-brothers.html

'Sweethearts Of The Rodeo' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-byrds-sweetheart-of-rodeo-1968.html

'Dr Byrds and Mr Hyde' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/news-viedws-and-music-issue-68-byrds-dr.html

‘The Ballad Of Easy Rider’ (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-byrds-ballad-of-easy-rider-1969.html

'Untitled' (1970)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-38-byrds-untitled-1970.html
'Byrdmaniax' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-byrds-byrdmaniax-1971-album-review.html
'The Byrds' (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-byrds-1973.html

Surviving TV Appearances http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-byrds-surviving-tv-appearance-1965.html
Unreleased Songs http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-unreleased-songs-1965-72.html
Non-Album Songs (1964-1990) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-non-album-songs-1964-90.html
A Guide To Pre-Fame Byrds Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-pre-fame-recordings-in.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part One (1964-1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Two (1973-1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums.html

Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Three (1978-1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums_9.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Four (1992-2013) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums_16.html
Essay: Why This Band Were Made For Turn! Turn! Turn!ing https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/byrds-essay-why-this-band-were-made-for.html
Five Landmark Concerts and Three Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-byrds-five-landmark-concerts-and.html

Updates To Our 'Special Editions' on Books/DVDs/Compilations etc (News, Views and Music 217 Top Ten)




Dear all, it's been a while now since you brought you some of our 'special editions' - our lists dedicated to every AAA compilation/live album/solo album/DVD/book we could get our hands on. Inevitably some of them are getting a bit out of date now so here's a quick guide to the ten best 'new' entries to each list, which we're hoping to add to the 'proper' entries soon - some of which are 'new' releases and some of which simply passed us by at the time of writing (we can't see absolutely everything you know - reading Beatles books alone would take at least five years to complete without interruptions!) Hopefully there'll be another 'top ten' update sometime soon as there's a whole host of AAA books and DVDs due out for Christmas this year (including Graham Nash's autobiography at long last - the first by a member of the Hollies!) If you haven't read any of our five 'special' editions of News, Views and Music yet by the way you can find the links here:

Compilation Special: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010_04_25_archive.html

Solo Album Special: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010_08_08_archive.html

Live Album Special: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010_09_19_archive.html

Book Special: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_07_01_archive.html

DVD Special: http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/news-views-and-music-issue-176-aaa-dvds.html

Compilations:

1) "Tenology" (10cc Box Set, 2012)

10cc always get over-looked and their box set was long overdue after so many years of the same tired old tracks doing the rounds. As one of Hipgnosis' last commissions before the death of founder Storm Thorgerson, this set looks every bit as scrumptious as the band deserves and the special 'free' postcards that come with the set are a lot more 'special' than the coasters given away with Punk Floyd sets. The set also sensibly divides the band's career into 'singles' (both hit and flop), comparatively rare 'B sides' and a disc of 'album tracks', giving a much broader sense of what 10cc were than any other set to date. The album tracks feature a pretty spot-on selection of the 'Godley and Creme' years, while the pair of 'singles' CDs feature several songs available on CD for the first time (including the delightful 'Runaway' and the superb '24 Hours' which may well be my favourite 10cc song of all. However, the B-sides are a pretty sorry bunch (none of them are as rare as the box makes out either, as they've all been bonus tracks on one 10cc CD re-issue or another) and the set is terrible at even acknowledging 10cc's career post Godley and Creme. As far as I'm concerned the trio of albums 10cc made later ('Bloody Tourists' 'Ten Out Of Ten' and 'Windows In The Jungle') are the best the band ever made and the not-that-exciting liner notes add insult to injury by claiming the band should have given up in 1976, sticking the rest of 10cc's career into a single sentence (what about Eric Stewart's life-changing car-crash or even a mention of 10cc's biggest hit 'Dreadlock Holiday'?) A bit of a curate's egg of a box set this: parts of it are spot-on, others get things completely wrong; as it is this is an expensive way of getting a handful of rare songs and some gorgeous packaging when, surely, there will be a definitive box set dedicated to this most worthy of bands some day?

2) "Timeless Flight" (Moody Blues Box Set, 2013)

I write this review just after the news has broken that this expensive box set has just won a 're-issue of the year' award at some big music do. All I can say is - the judges got their copy for free or are millionaires because this surely is another case of the Moodies abusing the patience of fans after 30 years of being one of the most caring bands on the planet. The set retails for nearly £200 and while it would be the perfect way of getting hold of a complete set of Moody Blues albums if you didn't know any, surely the newcomer fan isn't going to be interested in a bunch of pretty gormless live recordings exclusive to this set. As for longterm fans, yes the new concert from the Blue Jays at the Royal Albert Hall is a great show that surprisingly escaped the bootlegger's clutches (featuring an especially gorgeous 'Who Are You Now?' and the best live version of 'Question' yet) and the 1983 shows promoting 'The Present' are quite interesting (we've not had the chance to hear many songs from that under-rated album done live before - and they sound pretty good!) But these are collection-filler curios at best and the talk of 'rare' outtakes and BBC radio sessions heard before the set come out turn out to be simply the (admittedly generally excellent) bonus tracks from the set of deluxe re-issues of Moody albums that came out a mere five years ago (and cost a fortune to buy at the time). I also resent the fact that the Moodies put out two separate versions of most of the albums in both CD and super CD format: surely whichever format you own you're only going to need one or the other - and I can't say I noticed any life-0changing improvement in the sound on the better equipment anyway. What a shame, what a waste, what a slap in the face for fans. The best thing about this set was the limited edition 'cassette' that came with it, replicating the copies of the Moodies' 'Greatest Hits' and 'Seventh Sojourn' taken up into space by the astronauts of apollo 15 - although sadly that was only available as a 'limited edition' and made the box set cost even more! Hmm, two expensive box sets now and the band still haven't got things right yet...

3) "Grrrrr!" (Rolling Stones compilation, 2013)

Grrrr indeed! The Rolling Stones finally get round to doing the sensible thing and putting all of their hits (and a couple of choice album cuts) into a three CD set for their 50th birthday - less than a decade after most of us bought the comparatively shoddy '40 Licks'. While this set still doesn't match the brilliant As and B sides comp 'The London Collection', it is one of the better compilations on the market, giving the casual fan everything they probably expect to find on CD - and full marks both for putting them in strict chronological order this time and for finally giving room to both 'We Love You' and 'Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?' (possibly the two greatest Stones singles of the 60s, obscure as both of them are). As for the two new songs 'Doom and Gloom' and 'One More Shot' they continue the good work of last Stones album 'A Bigger Bang' without coming close to matching anything released on this set from before 1979. But why oh why did it take 50 years (or 25 years since the coming of the CD if you prefer) to get this set right? And why oh why oh goodness why is there a cover of an inane grinning ape with teeth on the cover instead of a picture of the band?!? Grrrr!

4) "Made In California" (Beach Boys Box Set, 2013)

The Beach Boys already made one of the very best AAA markets with their superb '30 Years Of Good Vibrations' set in 1993. Twenty years on, their best bet should have been simply to re-issue that set (perhaps with a CD of extras attached), but this time around the band seem to be adamant that this set is going to be as different as it can be. As a result, a new selection of tracks from the Beach Boys' back archives are included, featuring several great choices not part of the 'old' set ('Lonely Sea' 'Busy Doin' Nothin' 'Baby Blue' 'Solar System' and 'Angel Come Home', classics all) but there's nothing here to rival the hits (which were included pretty much complete before and are only here in part) or the excitement of getting half an hour of unheard buts from 'Smile'. The 'new' material is a bit of an odd bunch too, most of which is kept for the 'bonus' sixth CD but strangely not featured in chronological order (so the set actually ends with 'Wendy', one of Brian Wilson's earliest songs). 'Goin' To The Beach' and 'It's a Mystery' are lost classics fully deserving of release and many of the demos heard here for the first time are fascinating too. But why didn't the band go the whole hog and include all the Beach Boys rarities out there and do the thing properly ('We Got Love' is still unavailable on CD after being unceremoniously booted off 'Holland' at the last minute and there's nothing from the unreleased 1977 Christmas album or the aborted get-togethers in the late 1970s and 1980s). The packaging too isn't quite as special as on 'Good Vibrations', even if it does include a nice Brian Wilson essay that's less scatterbrained than his album re-issue essays. Overall, our advice is if you own all the Beach Boys CDs already then you won't miss this - but if you loved the first box set and don't know anything else then this would make a fine companion set. Oh and the new music - from recording in 2012 - is horrible and doesn't deserve the same house space as the band's old classics.


Books:

5) "Keith Moon - Instant Party" (Alan Clayson, Book, 2005)
More a series of essays linked by interview clips by those who knew Keith, this is an intriguing companion to 'Dear Boy' that isn't as comprehensive a work and is clearly meant for those who know their Who chronology in-depth so they can follow the story (this is very much Keith's stories, not theirs) but adds quite a few fascinating titbits of detail. The book starts with a quote from Tony Hancock about not being able to take his 'character' on or off and you sense that our old friend Alan Clayson is more interested in what made Keith tick than in telling all the old stories about cars driven into swimming pools and TV sets being thrown out of windows. Ultimately, though, a list of Keith's faults and biggest mistakes (including running over his own chauffeur after being mobbed by a crowd) is only half the story - the 'darker' side of Keith so apparent here and the fun-loving soul largely sketched in 'Dear Boy' are two parts of the same coin, Keith's mistakes and larger than life personality driving the fun and vice versa before the whole thing got out of hand by the mid-70s. Still, Clayson does get to grasps with at least part of Keith's character and this is a maturer, kinder book than most in the same spirit. There's almost no mention of the actual music Keith made, though, which seems odd - he might not have driven The Who like Townshend but his contribution was key to all the albums he played on.

6) "Searching For The Sound: My Life With The Grateful Dead" (Phil Lesh, Book, 2006)

We Deadheads waited a long time for one of the actual band to tell their story and the fact that it was the no-holds-barred Phil Lesh talking surely meant we were in for a treat. After all, this is the same Lesh who sent engineers and producers alike quaking under their chairs during the band's 60s heyday and who was the only band member to have had a big row, splitting off on his own (albeit long after Jerry Garcia's death when the others were still playing as 'The Other Ones'). However, the years have seen Lesh mellow - this book is more a reflection on several years that seem wonderful in hindsight, working with wonderful people and searching for an elusive sound that was wonderful on the good days - and not on the others. Understandably, Lesh's near-death from hepatitis (he was waiting for a liver transplant the same year as David Crosby) has made him slow down and see the world with more patience than his younger self ever had. Unfortunately that means this book doesn't really have much more to add that you can't get from any other good Dead biography - indeed Lesh's memory is occasionally sketchy, so he doesn't actually remember the music as well as many of the Dead writers. Still, this isn't a bad book and it's nice to hear some of the stories of the band working together that haven't been heard before - it's just not the honest warts-and-all revelation that fans were perhaps hoping for.

7) "The Truth - My Life As Oasis' Drummer" (Tony McCarroll, Book, 2010)

Oasis' first drummer is a likeable chap. Long dismissed as the 'Pete Best' of the band (Noel Gallagher erroneously claimed that he overdubbed a lot of the drums on the band's first album himself), McCarroll was badly treated by one and all - which seems poor return for the effort that all the band put in in the early days (when Noel wasn't even in the group, still travelling the world as the Inspiral Carpet's roadie). McCarroll's claims that he has no axe to grind is clearly wrong (he loves sticking it to Noel - and quiet bassist Paul McArthur to some extend, although he seems fond of both Liam and Bonehead), but you sense that the drummer's view of the band is probably more accurate than either of the Gallagher's (Tony's reports of success going to Noel's head circa 1994-7 as Alan McGee's 'favourite' and talk of a 'masterplan' that revised all Oasis' real history sadly rings very true). In fact Oasis sounds like an even more unhappy band than we fans thought, and not just between the brothers either as all the band quitting at some stage during their first two years of success! The drummer was just unlucky enough to be trapped in the middle. McCaroll is at his best at the beginning of the story, though, before Oasis have even formed, receiving an eerie premonition of things to come when he and his gang are set upon by a group of older teens including Noel Gallagher, teasing him for his Irish ancestry (Noel doesn't take too well to being reminded of his Irish ancestry in front of all his friends, but does at least have the grace to allow the young Tony to 'escape'!) McCarroll remains quite an upbeat character throughout - which is quite a feat in itself given the tough circumstances - but in the end this is a sad and unsettling book, with five people who were at the peak of their powers in 1994 dissolving in a sea of acrimony and bitterness without any real reason for any of it. The appendix list of gigs that the early Oasis played (as taken from his diaries) is especially useful.

8) "Syd Barratt - A Very Irregular Head" (Rob Chapman, Book, 2010)

One of the better Syd books around, Chapman's work is another that tries to work out why Syd had 'an irregular head' by looking at his past and the triggers that set him off into his sudden decline somewhere around the Autumn of 1967 - and on that score it fails. Syd's sorry story seems to be unfathomable and any amount of looking at childhood photographs and old Pink Floyd clips won't give us any more clues. However, the sheer wealth of detail in this book - and the exciting amount of access to unseen things from Syd's childhood and the Floyd's early years - give it a leg-up over other Syd biographies and there's lots here even the biggest Floyd scholar probably hasn't come across. As ever, though, the story goes cold somewhere around 1970 (after Syd's two solo albums) and even for a comparatively short book there's not actually that much 'story' to get to grips with. Syd the artist will always be an enigma - but if you want to know about Syd as a human being, studying the facts rather than conjecture, this is about the best book on Barratt yet.

9) " Sweet Judy Blue Eyes - My Life In Music " (Judy Collins, Book, 2011)

Folk singer Judy Collins isn't an AAA member, so the appearance of her autobiography on the list might be a puzzle to you. The title is a clue though - she's named the book not after one of her songs but after one of Stephen Stills' best known works, inspired for and named after Judy. In fact Judy spends more time talking about Stills' career than she does her own (with cameos for Crosby, Nash and Young) and this book is in many ways a 'love note' written in return for that song (sent through the publishing industry instead of the post, as it were). The pair's love-hate relationship is at the heart of this book, although it was probably with a sigh of relief that Stills read the proof and found out she's actually been very kind about the whole thing (apologising for her behaviour more times than Richard Nixon after Watergate, although to be fair the problems were probably on both sides), regretting that the pair never got it together despite their 'special' relationship (although she doesn't mention the bit about running off with another musician without telling him in 1970, unknowingly contributing to the first CSNY breakup in one stroke). Stills comes across as a sympathetic soul, in fact, always there at the end of a phoneline when Judy needs him - which isn't a view of their hero most CSN books have given!; it's certainly interesting after so many years of hearing just Stills tell his side of his story to know that she, too, felt they had 'connected' on some higher plain than other mere mortals, calling him the only person she really trusted to reveal her 'inner' self. The book was published not long after Stills' 'Just Roll Tape' from 1968 was discovered and released -taped late at night after a session Stephen worked on with Judy - and her take on those mainly unfinished Stills songs are fascinating (as we often suspected, many of them were indeed written about her). Sadly Collins is less interesting talking about her own interesting career (I'd have been very annoyed with this book if I hadn't got such an interest in Stills) and doesn't talk about many of her records at all (or her appearances on The Muppet Show!) The photographs are great though!

DVDs:

10) "The Linda McCartney Story" (Film, 2000)

Like the Beach Boys and Monkees biopics, this film is at alternating moments both a travesty and a heartfelt tribute. While seeing 'other' people play someone we know well is always disconcerting and many liberties have been taken with the story, this isn't quite the sacrilege feared it would be and is indeed quite powerful when it comes to Linda's death in 1998 (even if Linda dies in the wrong venue with the wrong members of her family around her on the wrong date - which kind of sums the film up). The film takes many liberties it really shouldn't, such as giving Wings the same five-man line-up for all of their career (who is the bearded guitarist meant to be - he doesn't look like Henry McCullouch, Jimmy McCullogh or Laurence Juber!) and giving Linda's daughter Heather a 'starring' role (even though she was actually in care for most of the second half of the film). And yet, this film gets so many details right: the painting Lennon whallops his fist through is spot-on in details, the dialogue of Macca thinking up the band name 'Wings' at the same time Linda is having a difficult birth with third daughter Stella and Linda's riposte to Mick Jagger's criticism that 'I would never have my old lady up on stage' ('that was nearly me!') are word-perfect, suggesting somebody somewhere did some research. The film is also extremely good on some characters (Linda and Paul are both 're-created' well, with this McCartney sensitive and vulnerable after both his mother's death and the Beatles break-up - his depression on their Mull OF Kintyre farm rings especially true - rather than the monster he's often painted out to be, although this McCartney is no saint either, seeing Linda behind Jane Asher's back). However John Lennon is painted all wrong (the pair weren't quite that nasty to each other even during the White Album), George and Ringo are mere ciphers, Yoko is painted as a one-dimensional witch yet again, Paul's second longest writing partner gets no lines and is only in one scene at all, whilst McCartney children Stella and James get a very rough deal compared to Heather and Mary. Oddly, too, the film seems to emphasise the McCartneys sending all their children to public school - in actual fact only Heather went and she hated it so much Paul and Linda pulled her out of school and gave all their children private tutoring before sending them to a local 'normal' secondary school, taking all four children on tour with them (whioch would have made for a more interesting sub-plot to the film). Not a disaster, then, but yet again it's odd that so many mistakes were let through that could have been so easily changed - or that some of the 'better' stories of the McCartneys life together was left untold. Half a tribute, half a travesty, this film is ultimately a bit of a mixture.

Right, that's all for now - we'll try and add this little lot to our previously published 'special editions'! See you next week for more New, Views and Music!

A NOW COMPLETE List Of Top Five/Top Ten/TOP TWENTY  Entries 2008-2019
1) Chronic Fatigue songs http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/news-views-and-music-issue-1-top-five.html

2) Songs For The Face Of Bo
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/news-views-and-music-issue-2-top-five.html

3) Credit Crunch Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/news-views-and-music-issue-3-top-five.html

4) Songs For The Autumn
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/news-views-and-music-issue-4-top-five.html

5) National Wombat Week
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/news-views-and-music-top-five-national.html

6) AAA Box Sets
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/news-views-and-music-issue-6-top-five.html

7) Virus Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/news-views-and-music-issue-7-top-five.html

8) Worst AAA-Related DVDs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/news-views-and-music-issu-8-top-five.html

9) Self-Punctuating Superstar Classics
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/news-views-and-music-issue-9-top-five.html

10) Ways To Know You Have Turned Into A Collector
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/news-views-and-music-issue-9-top-five.html

11) Political Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/news-views-and-music-issue-11-top-five.html

12) Totally Bonkers Concept Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/news-views-and-music-top-five-totally.html

13) Celebrating 40 Years Of The Beatles' White Album
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/top-five-issue-13-40-years-of-beatles.html

14) Still Celebrating 40 Years Of The Beatles' White Album
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-14-top-five.html

15) AAA Existential Questions
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-15-top-five.html

16) Releases Of The Year 2008
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-16-top-five.html

17) Top AAA Xmas Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-17-top-five.html

18) Notable AAA Gigs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/news-views-and-music-issue-19-top-five.html

19) All things '20' related for our 20th issue
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/news-views-and-music-issue-20-aaa-songs.html

20) Romantic odes for Valentine's Day
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/news-views-and-music-issue-22-top-five.html

21) Hollies B sides
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/news-views-and-music-issue-23-top-five.html

22) 'Other' BBC Session Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/news-views-and-music-issue-24-top-five.html

23) Beach Boys Rarities Still Not Available On CD
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/news-views-and-music-issue-25-top-five.html

24) Songs John, Paul and George wrote for Ringo's solo albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/news-views-and-music-issue-26-top-five.html

25) 5 of the Best Rock 'n' Roll Tracks From The Pre-Beatles Era
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/news-views-and-music-issue-27-top-five.html

26) AAA Autobiographies
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/news-views-and-music-issue-28-top-five.html

27) Rolling Stones B-sides
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/news-views-and-music-issue-29-top-five.html

28) Beatles B-Sides
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-30-top-five.html

29) The lllloooonnngggeesssttt AAA songs of all time
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-31-top-five.html

30) Kinks B-Sides
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-32-top-five.html

31) Abandoned CSNY projects 'wasted on the way'
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/news-views-and-music-issue-33-top-five.html

32) Best AAA Rarities and Outtakes Sets
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/news-views-and-music-issue-34-top-five.html

33) News We've Missed While We've Been Away
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-35-top-five.html

34) Birthday Songs for our 1st Anniversary
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-37-top-five.html

35) Brightest Album Covers
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-37-top-five.html

36) Biggest Recorded Arguments
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-38-top-five.html

37) Songs About Superheroes
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/news-views-and-music-issue-39-top-five.html

38) AAA TV Networks That Should Exist
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/news-views-and-music-issue-40-top-five.html

39) AAA Woodtsock Moments
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/news-views-and-music-issue-41-top-five.html

40) Top Moments Of The Past Year As Voted For By Readers
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/news-views-and-music-issue-42-top-five.html

41) Music Segues
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/news-views-and-music-issue-43-top-five.html

42) AAA Foreign Language Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/news-views-and-music-issue-44-top-five.html

43) 'Other' Groups In Need Of Re-Mastering
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/news-views-and-music-issue-45-top-five.html

44) The Kinks Preservation Rock Opera - Was It Really About The Forthcoming UK General Election?
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-46-top-five.html

45) Mono and Stereo Mixes - Biggest Differences
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-47-top-five.html

46) Weirdest Things To Do When A Band Member Leaves
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/nerws-views-and-music-issue-48-top-five.html

47) Video Clips Exclusive To Youtube (#1)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/news-views-and-music-issue-49-top-five.html

48) Top AAA Releases Of 2009
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/news-views-and-music-issue-50-top-five.html

49) Songs About Trains
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/news-views-and-music-issue-51-top-five.html

50) Songs about Winter
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/news-views-and-music-issue-52-top-five.html

51) Songs about astrology plus horoscopes for selected AAA members
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/news-views-and-music-issue-53-top-five.html

52) The Worst Five Groups Ever!
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/news-views-and-music-issue-54-top-five.html

53) The Most Over-Rated AAA Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/news-views-and-music-issue-56-top-five.html

54) Top AAA Rarities Exclusive To EPs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/news-views-and-music-issue-57-top-five.html

55) Random Recent Purchases (#1)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/news-views-and-music-issue-58-top-five.html

56) AAA Party Political Slogans
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/news-views-and-music-issue-60-top-five.html

57) Songs To Celebrate 'Rock Sunday'
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/news-views-and-music-issue-61-top-five_21.html

58) Strange But True (?) AAA Ghost Stories
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/news-views-and-music-issue-61-top-five.html

59) AAA Artists In Song
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/news-views-and-music-issue-63-top-five.html

60) Songs About Dogs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/news-views-and-music-issue-65-top-five.html

61) Sunshiney Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/news-views-and-music-issue-67-top-five.html

62) The AAA Staff Play Their Own Version Of Monoploy/Mornington Crescent!
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/news-views-and-music-issue-68-top-forty.html

63) What 'Other' British Invasion DVDs We'd Like To See
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/news-views-and-music-issue-69-top-five.html

64) What We Want To Place In Our AAA Time Capsule
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/news-views-and-music-issue-70-top-five.html

65) AAA Conspiracy Theroies
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/news-views-and-music-issue-72-top-ten.html

66) Weirdest Things To Do Before - And After - Becoming A Star
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/news-views-and-music-top-ten-aaa-stars.html

67) Songs To Tweet To
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/news-views-and-music-issue-74-top-five.html

68) Greatest Ever AAA Solos
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/news-views-and-music-issue-75-top-ten.html

69) John Lennon Musical Tributes
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/news-views-and-music-issue-77-top-five.html

70) Songs For Halloween
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/news-views-and-music-issue-78-top-five.html

71) Earliest Examples Of Psychedelia
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/news-views-and-music-issue-79-top-five.html

72) Purely Instrumental Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/news-views-and-music-issue-81-top-five.html

73) AAA Utopias

74) AAA Imaginary Bands
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/news-views-and-music-issue-82-top-five.html

75) Unexpected AAA Cover Versions
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/news-views-and-music-issue-83-top-five.html

76) Top Releases of 2010
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/news-views-and-music-issue-84-top-five.html

77) Songs About Snow
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/news-views-and-music-issue-85-top-five.html

78) Predictions For 2011
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011_01_02_archive.html

79) AAA Fugitives

80) AAA Home Towns
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/news-views-and-music-issue-88-home.html

81) The Biggest Non-Musical Influences On The 1960s
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/news-views-and-music-issue-89-top-five.html

82) AAA Groups Covering Other AAA Groups
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/news-views-and-music-issue-90-top.html

83) Strange Censorship Decisions
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/news-views-and-music-issue-91-top-ten.html

84) AAA Albums Still Unreleased on CD
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/news-views-and-music-issue-92-top-five.html

85) Random Recent Purchases (#2)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/news-views-and-music-issue-93-top-ten.html

86) Top AAA Music Videos
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-issue-94-top-ten.html

87) 30 Day Facebook Music Challenge
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-issue-95-top.html

88) AAA Documentaries
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-top-five-aaa.html

89) Unfinished and 'Lost' AAA Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/news-views-and-music-issue-97-top-ten.html

90) Strangest AAA Album Covers
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/newsa-views-and-music-issue-98-top-ten.html

91) AAA Performers Live From Mars (!)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/news-views-and-music-issue-99-top-ten.html

92) Songs Including The Number '100' for our 100th Issue
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/news-views-and-music-issue-100-top-five.html

93) Most Songs Recorded In A Single Day
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/news-views-and-music-issue-101-top-five.html

94) Most Revealing AAA Interviews
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/news-views-and-music-issue-102-top-five.html

95) Top 10 Pre-Fame Recordings
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/news-views-and-music-issue-103-top-ten.html

96) The Shortest And Longest AAA Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/news-views-and-music-issue-104-top-ten.html


97) The AAA Allstars Ultimate Band Line-Up
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/news-views-and-music-issue-105-top.html

98) Top Songs About Sports
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/news-views-and-music-issue-106-top-ten.html

99) AAA Conversations With God
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/news-views-and-music-issue-107-top-ten.html

100) AAA Managers: The Good, The Bad and the Financially Ugly
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/news-views-and-music-issue-108-top-ten.html

101) Unexpected AAA Cameos
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/news-views-and-music-issue-109-top-ten.html

102) AAA Words You can Type Into A Caluclator
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/news-views-and-music-issue-110-top-five.html

103) AAA Court Cases
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-111-top-five.html

104) Postmodern Songs About Songwriting
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-112-top-five.html

105) Biggest Stylistic Leaps Between Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-113-top-ten.html

106) 20 Reasons Why Cameron Should Go!
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-114-top.html

107) The AAA Pun-Filled Cookbook
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/news-views-and-music-issue-115-top-five.html

108) Classic Debut Releases
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/news-views-and-music-issue-116-top-five.html

109) Five Uses Of Bird Sound Effects
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/news-views-and-music-issue-118-top-five.html

110) AAA Classic Youtube Clips Part #1
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/news-views-and-music-issue-119-top.html

111) Part #2
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/news-views-and-music-issue-120-top.html

112) Part #3
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/news-views-and-music-issue-121-top.html

113) AAA Facts You Might Not Know
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/news-views-and-music-issue-122-top-ten.html

114) The 20 Rarest AAA Records
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/news-views-and-music-issue-123-top.html

115) AAA Instrumental Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011_12_04_archive.html

116) Musical Tarot
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/news-views-and-music-issue-125-top-23-i.html

117) Christmas Carols
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011_12_18_archive.html

118) Top AAA Releases Of 2011
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011_12_25_archive.html

119) AAA Bands In The Beano/The Dandy
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/news-views-and-music-issue-128-top-five.html

120) Top 20 Guitarists #1
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/news-views-and-music-issue-129-top-ten.html

121) #2
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_01_15_archive.html

122) 'Shorty' Nomination Award Questionairre
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_01_22_archive.html

123) Top Best-Selling AAA Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_01_29_archive.html

124) AAA Songs Featuring Bagpipes

125) A (Hopefully) Complete List Of AAA Musicians On Twitter
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_02_19_archive.html

126) Beatles Albums That Might Have Been 1970-74 and 1980
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_02_26_archive.html

127) DVD/Computer Games We've Just Invented
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_03_11_archive.html

128) The AAA Albums With The Most Weeks At #1 in the UK
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_03_18_archive.html

129) The AAA Singles With The Most Weeks At #1 in the UK
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_03_25_archive.html

130) Lyric Competition (Questions)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_04_15_archive.html

131) Top Crooning Classics
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012_04_22_archive.html

132) Funeral Songs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/news-views-and-music-issue-142-top-five.html

133) AAA Songs For When Your Phone Is On Hold
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-143-top-five.html

134) Random Recent Purchases (#3)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-144-top-five.html

135) Lyric Competition (Answers)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-146-top.html http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-145-top-five.html

136) Bee Gees Songs/AAA Goes Disco!
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/news-views-and-music-issue-147-top-five.html

137) The Best AAA Sleevenotes (And Worst)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/news-views-and-music-issue-148-top-ten.html

138) A Short Precise Of The Years 1962-70
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/news-views-and-music-149-top-eight.html

139) More Wacky AAA-Related Films And Their Soundtracks
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/top-five-for-news-views-and-music-150.html

140) AAA Appearances On Desert Island Discs
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/top-eight-aaa-desert-island-discs.html

141) Songs Exclusive To Live Albums
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/news-views-and-music-issue-153-top-10.html

142) More AAA Songs About Armageddon
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/aaa-armageddon-songsalbums-top-5-for.html

What difference does a name make? Arguably not much if you’re already a collector of a certain group, for whom the names on the album sleeves just...

This week’s top ten honours the humble motor car. The death trap on wheels, the metaphor for freedom, the put-down of capitalism, a source of...

This week we’re going to have a look at the 10 AAA singles that spent the most weeks at number on the American chart ‘Billboard’ – and it makes for...

Following on from last issue’s study of the American Billboard charts, here’s a look at which AAA albums spent the most weeks on the chart. The...

There are many dying arts in our modern world: incorruptible politicians, faith that things are going to get better and the ability to make decent...

This week we’ve decided to dedicate our top ten to those unsung heroes of music, the session musicians, whose playing often brings AAA artists (and...

Naturally we hold our AAA bands in high esteem in these articles: after all, without their good taste, intelligence and humanity we’d have nothing to...

What do you do when you’ve left a multi-million selling band and yet you still feel the pull of the road and the tours and the playing to audiences...

‘The ATOS Song’ (You’re Not Fit To Live)’ (Mini-Review) Dear readers, we don’t often feature reviews of singles over albums or musicians who aren’t...

In honour of this week’s review of an album released to cash in on a movie soundtrack (only one of these songs actually appears in ‘Easy Rider’...and...

Hic! Everyone raise a glass to the rock stars of the past and to this week’s feature...songs about alcolholic beverages! Yes that’s right, everything...

154) The human singing voice carries with it a vast array of emotions, thoughts that cannot be expressed in any other way except opening the lungs and...

Everyone has a spiritual home, even if they don’t actually live there. Mine is in a windy, rainy city where the weather is always awful but the...

Having a family does funny things to some musicians, as we’ve already seen in this week’s review (surely the only AAA album actually written around...

Some artists just have no idea what their best work really is. One thing that amazes me as a collector is how consistently excellent many of the...

159) A (Not That) Short Guide To The 15 Best Non-AAA Bands http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/a-not-that-short-guide-to-15-of-best.html%20%0d160

160) The Greatest AAA Drum Solos (Or Near Solos!) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-greatest-aaa-drum-solos-or-near.html%20%0d161

161) AAA Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame Acceptance Speeches http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/aaa-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame.html%20%0d162

162) AAA Re-Recordings Of Past Songs http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/aaa-re-recordings-of-past-songs-news.html%20%0d163

163) A Coalition Christmas (A Fairy Tale) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/a-coalition-christmas-news-views-and.html%20%0d164

164) AAA Songs About Islands http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/aaa-songs-about-islands-news-views-and.html%20%0d165

165) The AAA Review Of The Year 2012 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-aaa-review-of-year-2012-news-views.html



166) The Best AAA Concerts I Attended
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-best-aaa-concerts-i-attended-news.html

167) Tributes To The 10 AAA Stars Who Died The Youngest http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/tributes-to-10-aaa-stars-who-died.html



168) The First 10 AAA Songs Listed Alphabetically
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-first-10-aaa-songs-if-listed.html


171) The 10 Best Songs From The Psychedelia Box-Sets ‘Nuggets’ and ‘Nuggets Two’ http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-best-of-two-nuggets-psychedelia.html%20%0d172

172) The 20 Most Common Girl’s Names In AAA Song Titles (With Definitions) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/girls-names-in-aaa-song-titles-from.html 








180) First Recordings By Future AAA Stars http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/first-





185) A Tribute To Storm Thorgerson Via The Five AAA Bands He Worked With http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/a-tribute-to-hipgnosis-via-five-aaa.html



188) Surprise! Celebrating 300 Album Reviews With The Biggest 'Surprises' Of The Past Five Years Of Alan's Album Archives! http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/celebrating-300-album-reviews-10.html


190) Comparatively Obscure First Compositions By AAA Stars http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/comparatively-obscure-debut.html



193) Evolution Of A Band: Comparing First Lyric With Last Lyric: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/evolution-of-band-comparing-1st-lyric.html







200) The Monkees In Relation To Postmodernism (University Dissertation) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/university-dissertation-monkees-in.html


202) Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain': Was It About One Of The AAA Crew? http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/carly-simons-youre-so-vain-was-it-about.html















217) AAA 'Christmas Presents' we'd most like to have next year http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/aaa-christmas-presents-wed-most-like-to.html




221) Dr Who and the AAA (Five Musical Links) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/01/dr-who-and-five-musical-links-to-alans.html

222) Five Random Recent Purchases http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/01/five-random-recent-purchases-news-views.html

223) AAA Grammy Nominees http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/aaa-grammy-nominees-top-twelve-news.html

224) Ten AAA songs that are better heard unedited and in full http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/ten-aaa-songs-that-are-better-unedited.html

225) The shortest gaps between AAA albums http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-shortest-gaps-between-aaa-albums.html

226) The longest gaps between AAA albums http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-longest-gaps-between-aaa-albums.html

227) Top ten AAA drummers http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/03/top-ten-aaa-drummers-news-views-and.html

228) Top Ten AAA Singles (In Terms of 'A' and 'B' Sides) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/top-ten-aaa-singles-and-b-sides-news.html

229) The Stories Behind Six AAA Logos http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-stories-behind-six-aaa-logos.html

230) AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!! The Best Ten AAA Screams http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-best-aaa-screams-top-ten-news-views.html

231) An AAA Pack Of Horses http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/aaa-songs-about-horses-top-ten-news.html

232) AAA Granamas - Sorry, Anagrams! http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/aaa-anagrams-news-views-and-music-issue.html

233) AAA Surnames and Their Meanings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/aaa-surnames-and-their-meanings-news.html

234) 20 Erroneous AAA Album Titles http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/twenty-erroneous-aaa-album-titles-news.html

235) The Best AAA Orchestral Arrangements http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/fifteen-great-aaa-string-parts-news.html

236) Top 30 Hilariously Misheard Album Titles/Lyrics http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/top-thirty-hilariously-misheard-aaa.html

237) Ten controversial AAA sackings - and whether they were right http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/ten-controversial-aaa-sackings-news.html

238) A Critique On Critiquing - In Response To Brian Wilson http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/a-critique-on-critiquing-in-response-to.html

239) The Ten MusicianS Who've Played On The Most AAA Albums http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-ten-musicians-whove-played-on-most.html

240) Thoughts on #CameronMustGo http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/thoughts-on-cameronmustgo.html

241) Random Recent Purchases (Kinks/Grateful Dead/Nils Lofgren/Rolling Stones/Hollies) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/six-random-recent-purchases-kinksg.html 

242) AAA Christmas Number Ones http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/aaa-christmas-number-ones.html 

243) AAA Review Of The Year 2014 (Top Releases/Re-issues/Documentaries/DVDs/Books/Songs/ Articles  plus worst releases of the year) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/aaa-review-of-year-2014.html

244) Me/CFS Awareness Week 2015 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/mecfs-awareness-week-at-alans-album.html

245) Why The Tory 2015 Victory Seems A Little...Suspicious http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/why-tory-victory-seems-deeply.html

246) A Plea For Peace and Tolerance After The Attacks on Paris - and Syria http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-plea-for-peace-and-toleration.html

247) AAA Review Of The Year 2015 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-aaa-review-of-year-2015.html

248) The Fifty Most Read AAA Articles (as of December 31st 2015) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-fifty-most-read-aaa-posts-2008-2015.html

249) The Revised AAA Crossword! http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016_07_10_archive.html


251) Half-A-Dozen Berries Plus One (An AAA Tribute To Chuck Berry) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/an-aaa-covers-tribute-to-chuck-berry.html

252) Guest Post: ‘The Skids – Joy’ (1981) by Kenny Brown  https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/guest-post-skids-joy-1981.html


254) Guest Post: ‘Supertramp – Some Things Never Change’ by Kenny Brown https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/guest-review-supertramp-some-things.html

255) AAA Review Of The Year 2018 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-aaa-review-of-year-2018.html

256) AAA Review Of The Year 2019 plus Review Of The Decade 2010-2019 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-alans-album-archives-review-of-year.html



257) Tiermaker https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2019/06/alans-album-archives-on-tiermaker.html

258) #Coronastock https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronastock.html

259) #Coronadocstock https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2020/05/coronadocstock.html