#60 - Joan Baez's "Joan Baez" (1960)

In the liner notes to Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2, there is a Bob Dylan poem in which he talks about how his notion of beauty was formed by singers like Hank Williams and "real" folk music only to be found in the ugly grit of the railroad lines, "in the cracks an' curbs / Clothed in robes a dust an' grime."  As it continues, Dylan's ideas about beauty evolve and the poem ends up being the story of how his youthful rebellion was quelled, his anger cooled, his spirit softened, at least enough to allow him to listen to Baez and her three-octave range.  Though the poem has always been one of my favorites, I had my doubts.  Both of my parents love Joan Baez and so I grew up with an opportunity to get to know her, though I mostly squandered it.  I found her voice a little too formal, a little too piercing, a little too pretty.  So, I avoided her, unless she was singing duets with Dylan at his Philharmonic Hall concert in 1964 or with the Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-70s.  His gruff stuff is the washboard to her water and the songs all come out clean.  On this, her debut album, her sonorous soprano is in peak form and she wields it with expert control.  "El Preso Numero Nueve," the final track, is the most impressive.  Not only is her Spanish gorgeous, but the tempo, too, robs her of the ability to hold those high notes too long, which can grate.  In her defense, talent this rare can make it tempting to show-off even when it would be better to pull things back.  These are, after all, simple songs, many of them sung to traditional airs with lyrics in the public domain.  The same deadpan delivery that allows the singer to sing from another's perspective, regardless of race or gender (as Baez does on "Rake and Rambling Boy," among others), is an approach that allows the material to speak for itself.  On the one hand, Baez's voice lent the heft of a vocal superstar to a music that was making a serious comeback and pushed the revival into overdrive.  But did she outshine the songs she was attempting to introduce to a whole new generation?  Bruce Eder, on AllMusic.com, in his review of the album, seems to confirm this criticism (though he considers it praise), when he refers to her singing as "so pure and beguiling that the mere act of listening to her - forget what she was singing - was a pleasure."  As for me, I can't help but think that on this album, she steals the show, for better and worse.  Grade: B- 

#38 - Guided By Voices' "Bee Thousand" (1994)

Crises in Non-Conformity, a Partial Timeline

1845 - Henry Thoreau, having lived at Walden less than a week, notices he has worn a path from his "door to the pond-side," and reflects, "how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves."

1975 - Writers for Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live, while attempting to create a show that subverts time-honored television standards & practices, come to find that the hardest thing to do when developing a skit that "breaks all the rules" is figuring out a way to end it.

1992 - Bob Dylan, ever the upstart, scorns modern recording technology and creates Good As I Been To You, an entire album of traditional folk song covers, in his garage.  Sometimes to move forward, you have to go back.

1994 - Guided By Voices releases Bee Thousand, a twenty-track album of hissy pop rock fragments, quite likely a necessary foil to the slick, bedizened production currently ruling FM radio.  Most bands who record in lo-fi do so for one of three reasons:

(1) it's all they can afford

(2) they enjoy the tinny, mashed-together sound

(3) they are being deliberately non-commercial

At one point or another in the career of Guided By Voices they subscribed to this scrappy aesthetic for all of these reasons.  The problem is that much of its effect derives from the way in which it purposefully alienates itself from its audience's expectations.  In other words, the novelty of a song that cuts out mid-lyric is entirely contingent on the belief that music should have recognizable structures with firmly delineated boundaries.  Likewise, by cultivating this contrarian perspective, you run the risk of substituting one kind of fundamentalist rigidity for another.  Once you don that rebel apparel, the mainstream garb becomes a bad fit and a worse look.  Ultimately, I think this album is a noble exercise in devil's advocacy, a gadfly to keep the music community honest.  There are funny lines and catchy hooks galore, even if they're embedded in texturally homogeneous songs that don't last long enough to imprint themselves on your memory.  I'm not sure if sticking to your indie principles is a goal worth continually sabotaging such promising ideas for, but GBV didn't ask me.  Grade: B-

#35 - Cream's "Disraeli Gears" (1967)

Sense memory is a powerful thing.  Once you've associated a perfume with an old girlfriend, it's hard not to remember the relationship when you catch the scent of her brand while walking past a stranger in the mall.  Or try drinking ginger ale and seeing how long you can go before your mind conjures up images of staying home from school with a stomach bug, watching The Price Is Right.  Music is subject to the same phenomenon.  Whenever I hear Cream, I think back to being nine years old and seeing the commercial for Freedom Rock, a collection of songs from the '60s and '70s.  In the ad, which my neighborhood friends and I quoted ad infinitum, a couple of pre-fab hippies are lounging next to their VW Minibus.  The familiar opening strains of "Layla" erupt from their stereo prompting one to ask the other, "Hey, man, is that Freedom Rock?"  It's a fun, silly, cheap commercial.  The kind that used to insist on "No CODs."  Cream's contribution to the set was "White Room," which doesn't appear on Disraeli Gears, but "Sunshine of Your Love" does.  That unmistakable opening riff - on par with those that kick off "Satisfaction" or "Smoke on the Water" - links this album inextricably to 1967.  Being able to capture the zeitgeist in just a few bars is impressive, but it's also a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, you've created a monolith for the ages.  Current and future generations yearning to learn about nascent acid rock will find Disraeli Gears to be required listening.  On the other hand, your monument is a tribute to Ozymandias, a statue that began its long, slow, crumbling decline the moment it was erected.  But it's not all doom and gloom and several of these songs hold up very well.  Cream sound great when they're not trying to filter their beloved blues through too many layers of psychedelia.  Or when they're not trying to commune too closely with the muses as they do on "Tales of Brave Ulysses," which sounds like their Homeric homage to Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."  They explore a variety of guitar textures as the songs warble, peal, drone, and jag.  However, some of the other instruments - particularly the keyboards - get buried too deep in the mix and render them irrelevant.  Likewise, many of the vocals suffer from an almost polite formality (read:  British) that sublimates their power and contrasts sharply with the imagination of the lyrics.  You can get away with lines like "Outside my window is a tree / There only for me" from "World of Pain," but only if you loosen it up a little.  And, in general, though it will tip my hand and betray my preferences to say so, they're at their rootsy best at the beginning and the end, with "Strange Brew" and "Take It Back," respectively.  These songs have a loose, earthy quality truly deserving of the name "freedom rock."  "Well, turn it up, man!" Grade: B-