#56 - Elvis Presley's "Elvis Presley" (1956)

The following is an excerpt from an early draft of Cameron Crowe's screenplay for Almost Famous:

Ext. Downtown San Diego Radio Station - Day

A slovenly, hyperkinetic man is darting from shelf to shelf, dishing out quick and gutting reviews of the station's record library.  This is the legendary critic, Lester Bangs.  Expounding on the greatness of The Guess Who and Iggy Pop, he delivers a brief, erratic soliloquy on the mystical origins of rock 'n' roll.

"Here's a theory for you to disregard...completely.  Music, you know - true music - not just rock 'n' roll - it chooses you.  It lives in your car, or alone, listening to your headphones - you know, with the vast, scenic bridges and angelic choirs in your brain.  It's a place apart...from the vast, benign...lap of America.  Take Elvis.  Elvis Presley!  You think that man ripped off Little Richard?  No!  He was an emissary, the go-between, a numbers runner.  You know, here he is, this young, truck-driving whelp, out of Tupelo-thank-you-ma'am-backwater-Mississippi - young and hungry, mind you - and he's living, I mean living, at these black clubs in Memphis, man.  Soaking it up... and on the radio, too.  Hell, the south was so segregated you weren't supposed to listen to a black station.  And that's what nobody gets - people think it was T.V. - that T.V. made the music.  Well, T.V. might have been the midwife, but it was radio knocked the country up.  Got everyone nice and cozy at the petting party.  All those waves in the night, just towers knocking down walls...Elvis was a Branch Rickey.  And Jackie, yeah, Jackie in that Brooklyn blue, he had the talent, but Branch Rickey saw the window and jumped.  Just listen - listen to that first album, those Sun sides, man, and it's there...no more Amos 'n' Andy, they were gone with the wind, because the kids were on board and the PTA couldn't say 'no' - not for long - not to a clean-cut army boy no matter which way his hips flipped..."

 Grade: A 

#53 - Beck's "Sea Change" (2002)

Like fellow genre-hoppers David Bowie and Prince, it isn't always clear where Beck's soul calls home.  Is he a mad dabbler, the jack of all trades and master of none?  Or is he a genuine polymath with no clear allegiances to any specific style or substance?  Such questions make it easy to commit one of two errors when listening to Sea Change.  The first would be to consider it a one-off, with no more of the man himself in it than he put into the tongue-in-cheek lounge sleaze of Midnite Vultures' "Debra."  But, if this album only means to send up or approximate sadness rather than convey the real thing, then Beck needs to quit his day job and start acting full-time.  The second misstep would be to think of Sea Change as a skeleton key to the one true Beck, a portal offering a fleeting glimpse into his psyche.  The latter path is probably the more perilous considering how many critics who thought Blood on the Tracks was the best breakup album of all time were stunned when Bob Dylan claimed the songs were instead based on the short stories of Anton Chekhov.  To me, more compelling than debates about the album's literal truth is the question of how its sound came to be.  Nigel Godrich's production is lush and soft, almost like it belongs on 70s AM radio.  Beck's voice is forlorn, even on tracks like "Sunday Sun" that hint at memories (or premonitions) of a life less hard.  To sustain this type of minor-chord melancholy without becoming morose requires a whole lot of talent and even more discretion.  Most remarkable, perhaps, is the extent to which the music is unclassifiable yet wholly "Beck," while still employing familiar structures and hinting at clear influences.  Just as there's something very punk rock about the three-chord strum and in-your-face morality of Woody Guthrie, so too is Sea Change a country album in spirit, if not sound.  One obvious historical touchstone for this type of full commitment would be The Velvet Underground's Loaded, which found Lou Reed creating polished pop rock mostly just to prove he could be commercially appealing if he really wanted to be.  With songs as strong as "The Golden Age," "Lost Cause," and "Lonesome Tears," the burden of proof has to be on this album's detractors.  If "country-tinged balladeer" is just one of the many hats Beck can wear, then it's an awfully good fit.  Grade: A

#48 - Ike & Tina Turner's "River Deep ~ Mountain High" (1966)

If half the stories about Phil Spector are true, then he is a mad genius on the order of Drs. Frankenstein and Jekyll.  But whereas most people focus on the monstrosity of their creations, we shouldn't forget that all three, as scientists, were also visionaries.  Whether you're dallying in corpse reanimation, striving to unleash the human beast, or toiling away at a towering Wall of Sound, you will meet your fair share of naysayers.  By 1966, the public's fickle tastes had veered far away from the early- to mid-60s smashes of "Be My Baby" and  "Then He Kissed Me."  Suddenly there seemed to be no room at the inn for the meticulous, orchestral pop Spector had made so famous, no room unless your album was called Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  By any reasonable artistic standard, River Deep - Mountain High is amazing.  Tina Turner's singing throughout is a thing of raggedly majestic beauty.  On the title track, you can actually hear the toll that Spector's fastidious obsession has taken on her voice and it still manages to transcend his dense, overwhelming production.  Stylistically, Turner is unstoppable.  She goes blow for blow with the blues on "I Idolize You," matches the sound of a late-night soul throw-down on "A Fool in Love," and injects some R&B power into the pop of "A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)" and "Save the Last Dance."  If Ike Tuner was integral as a sessions musician or as the bandleader for their stage show, you couldn't tell that from this.  He does kick in some nice bass vocals on "Make 'Em Wait," but his contributions to "It's Gonna Work Out Fine," the album's closer - and only clunker - are embarrassingly bad.  It's an artless, egotistical intrusion - like when Diddy used to do that pointless cheerleading over a Biggie Smalls track.  This is a nearly perfect album, showcasing Turner in her prime and Spector at the height of his game.  It's...aliiiive!  Grade: A 

#42 - Muddy Waters' "At Newport" (1960)

'Twas the daytime in Newport, the afternoon show
when a Delta-born bluesman stood rarin' to go.
The folkies had flocked from far and from near
in hopes he'd play blues they'd all come to hear.

The buttoned-down crowd nestled snug in their seats
(no visions of dancing to those big Chi-town beats)
and Muddy at the mic-stand, his band at his back,
broke full-throttle through with a sonic attack. 

They jived just like butterflies, they stung hard like bees,
"I Got My Brand On You" had 'em all weak in the knees.
But then "Hoochie Coochie Man" started up soon
and the crowd - to a man - could not help but swoon.

The sun and the heat likely both took their toll,
but neither deprived the poor crowd of its soul.
No, that was Muddy's, his prize fair and square.
He scalped 'em with sweetness, with grit, and with flare.

With his band, he was lethal, so poised and so tight,
having logged all those hours in the juke joints each night.
In rope-a-dope fashion, he reeled in the fish,
called out their songs like he was granting a wish:
"Now, 'Tiger,'
Now, 'Mojo,'
and now, 'Soon Forgotten.'"
Their "I Feel So Good" made "O.K." look rotten.
To the end of the song!
To the end of the set!
With "Mojo" once more
(as if you could forget!)

His harp, how it zig-zagged! His keyboards, how jazzy!
His drums brought out big guns, so thund'rous and spazzy!
His speech between songs was humble, polite,
bringing black southern charm to the young northern white.
The lyrics he slurred and motorboat-barked,
and the axe in his hands - so electric it sparked -
sent currents through him, from his brain to his belly.
Ladies shook when he sang, like a roll full of jelly.

With "Goodbye Newport Blues," he got up and went.
Believe it or not, a half hour was spent
on just nine little songs, of which none was a dud...
...and that is how Newport got baptized in Mud.

Grade: A 

#34 - The Stone Roses' "The Stone Roses" (1989)

When it comes to certain forms of pop music, orthodoxy has a way of setting in so gradually, so agreeably that almost no one questions it until an artist comes along and pulls the curtains down all at once.  More often than not said artist will be vilified as much as she is celebrated depending, of course, on just how desperately the masses cling to their cherished expectations of what a particular music should be.  The obvious historical example is Bob Dylan in the mid-60s turning the folk world on its ear by knocking the golden calves of American music off their pedestals and reassembling them in his own image.  But pop music has had to weather similar storms on other occasions as well.  If I'm allowed to paint in broad strokes, then in my opinion, by 1989, the conventional approach to popular pop music had become so ossified, so staid, that it no longer had any danger or aspiration to greatness.  Furthermore, it was excruciatingly uncool.  The revolutionaries had abandoned ship for hip hop, new wave, punk rock and all the other proto-indie movements that arose during the 70s and 80s.  Pop music was in a bad way.  Rock 'n' roll was even worse.  Rock, for most of its tenure as a popular art form, had been dance music.  It had strong beats and addictive melodies that had people out of their seats before they knew what they were doing.  But as music fractured into genres and subgenres, "dance music" came to mean a lot of different things (house, techno, club, rave, disco, trip-hop, trance) and none of them even remotely resembled rock.  Rock 'n' roll wasn't dead, but - when it came to dancing - it had been locked up in a home for convalescents.  Within this climate, The Stone Roses' debut was a breath of fresh air to an audience that hadn't realized it was oxygen-deprived.  This is brazen, tough, unimpeachably cool pop.  There's jangle and hooks for days, but there's also a good deal of swagger from a band who knows just how good they are.  To some extent their messianic fervor - the rock-band-as-savior motif they half play for laughs - can be off-putting.  But, then, any band willing to name an 8-minute freak-out "I Am the Resurrection" and their sophomore album "Second Coming" can't be taking their own hype all that seriously.  Besides, rock music has always been in love with its own mythology, with guitar players cutting their teeth down at the crossroads.  But why hone your chops when you're good from the get-go?  As lead singer Ian Brown sings on the opener, "I don't need to sell my soul / he's already in me."  Now all they want is to be adored.  With music this expertly played, this consistently catchy, this well-supported by such a danceable backbeat, that has held up this well over the past twenty years, adoration shouldn't be a problem.  Grade: A

#33 - Brian Eno's "Another Green World" (1975)

It is conventional wisdom not to go grocery shopping when you're hungry.  Well, you probably shouldn't listen to ambient pop either because you might wind up thinking about everything in terms of food.  Brian Eno's Another Green World reminds me of nothing more than a multi-course meal served up by a seasoned cook.  Years of watching Top Chef have taught me the important distinction between mastering a culinary technique and cooking intuitively.  Those who concentrate on the former - like Hung with his sous-vide or Marcel with his molecular gastronomy - are essentially scientists who work methodically, with precision.  Those who concentrate on the latter - the Carlas and Caseys who "cook with love" - refine their natural instincts for food and how it will be received by its audience.  Last weekend, I used a gift certificate to check out Hattie's in Saratoga Springs.  Now, I've been to the south.  I've eaten boudin in Lafayette, crawfish étouffée in New Orleans, pulled pork in Memphis, catfish in Georgia, pit-fired sausage in Texas, and brisket in Kansas City.  But I've never had fried chicken better than Hattie's.  Now it may be a passed-down technique that helps her restaurant continue to satisfy its customers, but her original recipe?  That was intuition all the way.  Brian Eno is an intuitive cook.  He didn't go all in on ambient composition until Discreet Music, which came out later in the same year as Another Green World, but this album is nonetheless a powerful document of the direction in which he was moving.  In many ways, this is a painless, accessible introduction to experimental rock.  First, there are vocal tracks - gorgeous synth-pop songs like "St. Elmo's Fire," "I'll Come Running," and "Golden Hours" - so fans of Roxy Music won't feel too far from home.  But there are also wonderful instrumental pieces ("The Big Ship") built around very simple melodies that, like comfort food, contain tremendous stores of emotional resonance.  Like any cook, Eno pays a great deal of attention to textures and pairings.  Some of the shorter pieces ("In Dark Trees," "Sombre Reptiles") seem to perform the function of sonic palate cleansers, muting the haunting notes of the most recent flavor and preparing the way for the next.  It is a satisfying album from start to finish.  Only, maybe don't listen to it on an empty stomach.  I'm going to get something to eat.  Grade: A

#27 - Willie Nelson's "Phases & Stages" (1974)

A theme album is an inherently venturesome exercise.  Those who attempt them are kindred spirits with those authors who wonder, "why stop at a short story when I could write a whole novel"?  Yes, the payoff might be greater, but likewise the heartache should the enterprise come up short of its mark.  Given the ambitious temperaments from which these albums arise, it should come as no shock that - as artistic endeavors - their concepts or executions (or both) often get muddled somewhere along the way.  On paper, a country music theme album about a broken relationship begs the question, "Isn't that what all country music albums are about?"  In practice, however, Willie Nelson's Phases & Stages is so much more than the sum of its parts.  For one, he provides a rich context for his songs.  Think of all those great LPs with their honky-tonk hymns to horseplay and lover's laments sitting side by side.  The same man crying into his whiskey breakfast this morning was bird-dogging through his beer goggles last night, without the dimmest understanding of how the two situations are related.  Phases starts out with a tableau of sad domesticity:  the woman scorned is washing the dishes and doing the laundry.  But all of it, all those little chores that go into making a house a home feel hollow in the calm before that home is broken.  Nelson's voice is tender on these tracks - the soft and sensitive croon he would use to great effect years later when interpreting American pop standards on his 1978 album Stardust.  As he recounts the story of the woman finally fed up enough to leave, something subtle happens as the track sequencing unfolds.  Each song is just a little bit faster than the one that preceded it.  The color is returning to her cheeks as she heads on home to her mother and little sister, who wryly notes, "Mama's gonna let her sleep the whole day long / The mirror's gonna tell her how long she's been gone."  This rejuvenation picks up more speed still as she heads on down to the "corner beer joint" to dance, even though "her jeans fit a little bit tighter than they did before."  Then, presumably after meeting a fella out on the town, things slow back down as she contemplates falling in love again.  It's not that she's jaded and afraid to trust another man so much as she's upside-down, distrustful of her own feelings, like the workings of her own heart have become a mystery to her.  Then, "Bloody Mary Morning" comes crashing through the gates of dawn and the album switches gears.  It leads with a rollicking banjo that - like the French horns announcing the arrival of the lupine threat in Sergey Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" - can only mean we're about to hear from the man she left behind.  This is followed by the rapid-fire 1-2 combo of a pedal steel guitar and rowdy roadhouse piano.  Not only is it the best song on the album, but it serves as a much-needed PR boost for the cheating husband, the tune's roguish, outlaw charm helping the listener to understand what she saw in him in the first place.  Just as her suite is characterized by a steady increase in tempo, his progressively slows to a crawl, as the reality of his situation sobers him up.  Again, context is everything.  His denials of the situation ("I Still Can't Believe You're Gone," "It's Not Supposed To Be That Way") are all the more affective when the listener knows the back story.  In this way, ordinary songs are anchored by an emotional heft that might have otherwise gotten lost in translation.  If you haven't heard it yet, I won't spoil the ending except to say that the pedal steel and piano show up again on "Heaven and Hell," perhaps signifying that our male protagonist's attempt at reform has met with something rather less than success.  In the end, I'm not sure if he ever gets it.  But, thanks to Willie's masterful storytelling, I do.  Grade: A

#13 - Otis Redding's "Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul" (1966)

I don't know what it means that as years go by I find myself increasingly enamored by classic soul music.  Just as the malnourished crave the very food their bodies need, maybe my burgeoning interest in soul is my spirit's not-so-subtle way of telling me what it's been missing.  At any rate, I've been thrilled in recent years by James Brown, Percy Sledge, Etta James, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Solomon Burke, Candi Staton, and their very worthy white counterpart, Van Morrison.  But when I really need a fix, no stars sit as high in my sky as Sam Cooke and Otis Redding.  Rightly or wrongly I see in them the fundamental elements that make soul what it is.  From the former, we get that injection of gospel he honed with the Soul Stirrers.  From the latter, we get that gruff sound, that deep southern sensibility marinated in the blues.  Listen to their live work and you'll know that both could tear the roof off a club.  Both could pen lyrics fit to break your heart.  With this album, Redding shows off not only his songwriting and vocal virtuosity, but his comfort with diverse styles.  At turns he is plaintive, gritty, thrilling and always, always charismatic.  Unsurprisingly, "Try a Little Tenderness" is the standout track.  His patient restraint as the song builds and builds towards its crescendo suggests an artist in full control of his craft, someone whom Yeats might say has "come into his force."  But there are other equally amazing moments: his back and forth with the horn section on "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)"; the way he summons such believable emotion on "My Lover's Prayer"; the effortless cover of "Day Tripper," which, along with his amazing take on "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" elsewhere, shows he could have just as easily done some moonlighting as a rock singer if his day job hadn't panned out.  Lastly, I have to mention how much I love "She Put the Hurt on Me."  Rarely has such pain sounded like such fun.  Also, Peter Gabriel fans will laugh when they hear the opening of "I'm Sick, Y'all" and find out where that iconic "Sledgehammer" horn intro likely came from.  There is one more connection between Cooke & Redding, too.  One died on Decembert 10th and one on December 11th, though four years apart.  Both went far too early.  Who knows what they might have had in store?  Grade: A

#1 - Vampire Weekend's "Contra" (2010)

 

Contra was released less than two weeks into 2010.  Week after week I waited for someone to top it.  Here I am, December 31^st, still waiting.  Nearly twelve months on, the songs sound as fresh and as expertly-produced as they did at first blush.  To borrow a Sarah Palin-ism, this album may be the best refudiation of the sophomore slump since the curse was first diagnosed.  The whole band – and lead singer Ezra Koenig in particular – sounds more assured than on the debut, which is something, considering they weren’t really the shrinking, shoegazer type to begin with.  As Koenig sings on “Holiday,” “I got…a healthy sense of worth.”  Indeed.  Lately, this band’s high self-esteem is just good common sense.  Grade:  A