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1. What do I mean by the 'worst' reviews?



The reviews generally break down into four categories:



(1) Poorly Written Reviews: Self-explanatory. Most of these were written in the magazine's infancy, when no one knew what the hell they were doing.



(2) Curmudgeonly Reviews: Reviews that are unduly harsh or dismissive, or offer a specious critique of a band. In many cases the artist that is the target of the curmudgeon's wrath is inventing a new genre, which confuses the critic, causing them to lash out with sarcasm and invective. In other instances, the curmudgeon has a personal ax to grind, and is lambasting an album for reasons that are completely tangential to the music itself. Almost all of Dave Marsh's reviews fall under #2. Many of Christian Hoard's do too (when he is not writing anti-reviews). Jon Landau was a curmudgeon until he stopped caring and became a hack.



(3) Hack Reviews: Terrible albums, generally by established artists (and/or personal friends of Jann Wenner), that were reviewed favorably by RS. In many cases I honestly doubt that the critic genuinely holds the opinions articulated in these reviews. Anthony DeCurtis, David Fricke and Rob Sheffield are clearly the biggest and worst hacks. J.D. Considine really straddles both #2 and #3. Chuck Eddy possibly belongs here as well, but some of his reviews are so bizarre and off-base that I'm tempted to put him in a fifth category all his own.



(4) Anti-Reviews: A review that hedges, describing an album without ever really offering an opinion about it, usually in one hundred words or less. Invariably an anti-review awards an album three stars. Most reviews in today's Rolling Stone by new artists or indie bands fall into this category. Christian Hoard, and virtually every other critic currently working for RS, has embraced this flaccid style.

The reviews generally break down into four categories:



(1) Poorly Written Reviews: Self-explanatory. Most of these were written in the magazine's infancy, when no one knew what the hell they were doing.



(2) Curmudgeonly Reviews: Reviews that are unduly harsh or dismissive, or offer a specious critique of a band. In many cases the artist that is the target of the curmudgeon's wrath is inventing a new genre, which confuses the critic, causing them to lash out with sarcasm and invective. In other instances, the curmudgeon has a personal ax to grind, and is lambasting an album for reasons that are completely tangential to the music itself. Almost all of Dave Marsh's reviews fall under #2. Many of Christian Hoard's do too (when he is not writing anti-reviews). Jon Landau was a curmudgeon until he stopped caring and became a hack.



(3) Hack Reviews: Terrible albums, generally by established artists (and/or personal friends of Jann Wenner), that were reviewed favorably by RS. In many cases I honestly doubt that the critic genuinely holds the opinions articulated in these reviews. Anthony DeCurtis, David Fricke and Rob Sheffield are clearly the biggest and worst hacks. J.D. Considine really straddles both #2 and #3. Chuck Eddy possibly belongs here as well, but some of his reviews are so bizarre and off-base that I'm tempted to put him in a fifth category all his own.



(4) Anti-Reviews: A review that hedges, describing an album without ever really offering an opinion about it, usually in one hundred words or less. Invariably an anti-review awards an album three stars. Most reviews in today's Rolling Stone by new artists or indie bands fall into this category. Christian Hoard, and virtually every other critic currently working for RS, has embraced this flaccid style.

2 2. Arlo Guthrie Alice's Restaurant

Rating: Favorable

"It is another one of those coincidences – inexplicably except by belief in them – that Woodie Guthrie's son, whom Arlo is, should be born into his musical career via this, his first album, on the eve of his father's death. There is something happening here and it is obvious." (Jann Wenner, 11/9/67 Review)





Here it is: the first review in the very first issue of Rolling Stone. And one of the 500 worst. I have no idea what the thing is that Jann Wenner, the founder of RS, thinks is so obviously happening. Upon his death, Woody's talent was magically channeled into his son? As evidenced by Arlo penning his epic 'Massacree'?



Jann Wenner was a 21-year-old UC-Berkeley dropout when he started Rolling Stone in 1967. His plan was to establish a publication that would cover rock and roll and the burgeoning counterculture. It was not exactly a novel concept. After all, Paul Williams published the inaugural issue of Crawdaddy!, self-described as "the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously", all the way back in February 1966. RS was not even the first counterculture mag in San Francisco: Greg Shaw's Mojo-Navigator first appeared in August of '66.



That being said, on the surface, at least, Rolling Stone looked far more professional than either of these mimeographed sheets. The lay-out for the magazine was directly lifted from The Sunday Ramparts, where Wenner had been employed before it ceased publication in June of '67. "After Monterey, Wenner hustled up $7,500 — the largest chunk from [his wife] Jane’s father, a Manhattan dentist — and simply recycled the defunct paper, an adjunct of Ramparts magazine, as his own," Joe Hagan wrote in Sticky Fingers, his 2017 biography of Jann Wenner. "The printer didn’t have to change the settings on the Goss Suburban press machine to spit out Rolling Stone, and Wenner even recycled the design and layout, a parody of stuffy British newspapers like The Times of London."



"It was this — the radical conventionality of Rolling Stone — that was Jann Wenner’s most important innovation."

Rating: Favorable

"It is another one of those coincidences – inexplicably except by belief in them – that Woodie Guthrie's son, whom Arlo is, should be born into his musical career via this, his first album, on the eve of his father's death. There is something happening here and it is obvious." (Jann Wenner, 11/9/67 Review)





Here it is: the first review in the very first issue of Rolling Stone. And one of the 500 worst. I have no idea what the thing is that Jann Wenner, the founder of RS, thinks is so obviously happening. Upon his death, Woody's talent was magically channeled into his son? As evidenced by Arlo penning his epic 'Massacree'?



Jann Wenner was a 21-year-old UC-Berkeley dropout when he started Rolling Stone in 1967. His plan was to establish a publication that would cover rock and roll and the burgeoning counterculture. It was not exactly a novel concept. After all, Paul Williams published the inaugural issue of Crawdaddy!, self-described as "the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously", all the way back in February 1966. RS was not even the first counterculture mag in San Francisco: Greg Shaw's Mojo-Navigator first appeared in August of '66.



That being said, on the surface, at least, Rolling Stone looked far more professional than either of these mimeographed sheets. The lay-out for the magazine was directly lifted from The Sunday Ramparts, where Wenner had been employed before it ceased publication in June of '67. "After Monterey, Wenner hustled up $7,500 — the largest chunk from [his wife] Jane’s father, a Manhattan dentist — and simply recycled the defunct paper, an adjunct of Ramparts magazine, as his own," Joe Hagan wrote in Sticky Fingers, his 2017 biography of Jann Wenner. "The printer didn’t have to change the settings on the Goss Suburban press machine to spit out Rolling Stone, and Wenner even recycled the design and layout, a parody of stuffy British newspapers like The Times of London."



"It was this — the radical conventionality of Rolling Stone — that was Jann Wenner’s most important innovation."

3 3. The Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced?

Rating: Mixed

"'Purple Haze' is the perfect beginning for this album because the intro is a perfect expression of Jimi's charismatic style. In words it seems to be saying, 'Now, dig this.'...Only on 'Hey Joe' and 'The Wind Cries Mary' does Jimi play in a more conventional style and on these cuts he gives us a brief taste of his melodic sense – on the solos, which in both cases is perfect. On the latter he uses the eclectic [sic] perfectly...



...Everything else is insane and simply a matter of either you dig it or you don't. Basically I don't for several reasons. Despite Jimi's musical brilliance and the group's total precision, the poor quality of the songs, and the inanity of the lyrics, too often get in the way. Jimi is very much into state-of-mind type lyrics, but even so, lines like 'Manic depression is a frustrating mess', just don't make it. It is one thing for Jimi to talk arrogantly, and without any pretense at artistry; it's another to write lyrics in this fashion." (Jon Landau, 11/9/67 Review)





On October 1, 1966, Jimi Hendrix sent shock waves throughout the British Isles when he joined Cream on stage at London's Polytechnic Center. "He just stole the show," Eric Clapton later confessed. "He did the thing with his teeth, laying the guitar on the floor, playing behind his head, did the splits – it was incredible."



So distraught was Eric by Jimi's magnetic performance that he abruptly fled the stage. "I went backstage and he was trying to get a match to a cigarette," Chas Chandler, Hendrix's manager/producer, recalled. "I said, 'Are you all right?' He replied, 'Is he that fucking good?' He'd heard 10 bars at most."



Clapton was still reeling from this incident two weeks later when he was interviewed by Nick Jones in the 10/15/66 issue of Melody Maker. "I'm no longer trying to play anything but like a white man," Clapton sniffed. "The time is overdue when people should play like they are and what colour they are. I don't believe I've ever played so well in my life. More is expected of me in the Cream — I have to play rhythm guitar as well as lead."



Cream, the much-vaunted "power trio" consisting of guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, had been in existence for less than three months.



Despite Clapton's avowal to play "like a white man" (whatever that means!), there is little question that Jimi Hendrix radically transformed the British rock scene. "Both Clapton and Beck started to play much, much louder and much, much longer, cranking up and stretching out in their psych-blues bands Cream and The Jeff Beck Group," Mat Snow noted in a 2006 Mojo retrospective on Hendrix. "Jimmy Page launched Led Zeppelin in 1968 with a 'heavy' reworking..."



Are You Experienced?, the ferocious debut LP by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, generated a raft of breathless reviews from the English papers. "Hendrix is on soaring guitar form and with the help of producer Chas Chandler they come up with some extremely atmospheric, organic, sounds which have an uncanny knack of circling through the mind and blowing the top of your head off," an uncredited writer wrote in the 5/20/67 issue of Melody Maker. Meanwhile, Keith Altham credited Hendrix with opening up "a new dimension in electrical guitar music, launching what amounts to a one-man assault upon the nerve cells" in an NME review published the same day. "The LP is a brave effort by Hendrix to produce a musical form which is original and exciting," he concluded.



"No exaggeration: The Jimi Hendrix Experience is the most exciting act I have yet seen in pop music," Lorraine Alterman proclaimed in the 8/28/67 Detroit Free Press, upon Hendrix's return to the U.S. "Jimi, his bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, are creating a sensation in England and Europe – but the word hasn't spread here yet."



Jon Landau was only 20 years old when Rolling Stone published its first issue, but already he had been cutting his teeth at Paul Williams' Crawdaddy! for more than a year. Having poached his competitor's star writer, Wenner gave Landau a full-page column in Rolling Stone, where he had free reign to pontificate about various trends in popular music.



For his first essay, entitled 'Hendrix and Clapton', Landau considered the debut albums of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and (The) Cream, two groups that "represent attempts to tighten the music, to eliminate the superfluous, and to get closer to the mythical nitty-gritty." On Fresh Cream, according to Landau, Eric Clapton "fools around with attempts to make the straight three man thing work but dubs a fourth instrument on several tracks." He concluded that "the results are pretty confusing." Landau described Jimi Hendrix as a "great guitarist and brilliant arranger", but thought his songs were of a "poor quality" and "insane".



In a special issue of the magazine published on December 11, 2003, RS unveiled its '500 Greatest Albums of All Time'. Are You Experienced? was #15 on the list; Fresh Cream was #101.

Rating: Mixed

"'Purple Haze' is the perfect beginning for this album because the intro is a perfect expression of Jimi's charismatic style. In words it seems to be saying, 'Now, dig this.'...Only on 'Hey Joe' and 'The Wind Cries Mary' does Jimi play in a more conventional style and on these cuts he gives us a brief taste of his melodic sense – on the solos, which in both cases is perfect. On the latter he uses the eclectic [sic] perfectly...



...Everything else is insane and simply a matter of either you dig it or you don't. Basically I don't for several reasons. Despite Jimi's musical brilliance and the group's total precision, the poor quality of the songs, and the inanity of the lyrics, too often get in the way. Jimi is very much into state-of-mind type lyrics, but even so, lines like 'Manic depression is a frustrating mess', just don't make it. It is one thing for Jimi to talk arrogantly, and without any pretense at artistry; it's another to write lyrics in this fashion." (Jon Landau, 11/9/67 Review)





On October 1, 1966, Jimi Hendrix sent shock waves throughout the British Isles when he joined Cream on stage at London's Polytechnic Center. "He just stole the show," Eric Clapton later confessed. "He did the thing with his teeth, laying the guitar on the floor, playing behind his head, did the splits – it was incredible."



So distraught was Eric by Jimi's magnetic performance that he abruptly fled the stage. "I went backstage and he was trying to get a match to a cigarette," Chas Chandler, Hendrix's manager/producer, recalled. "I said, 'Are you all right?' He replied, 'Is he that fucking good?' He'd heard 10 bars at most."



Clapton was still reeling from this incident two weeks later when he was interviewed by Nick Jones in the 10/15/66 issue of Melody Maker. "I'm no longer trying to play anything but like a white man," Clapton sniffed. "The time is overdue when people should play like they are and what colour they are. I don't believe I've ever played so well in my life. More is expected of me in the Cream — I have to play rhythm guitar as well as lead."



Cream, the much-vaunted "power trio" consisting of guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, had been in existence for less than three months.



Despite Clapton's avowal to play "like a white man" (whatever that means!), there is little question that Jimi Hendrix radically transformed the British rock scene. "Both Clapton and Beck started to play much, much louder and much, much longer, cranking up and stretching out in their psych-blues bands Cream and The Jeff Beck Group," Mat Snow noted in a 2006 Mojo retrospective on Hendrix. "Jimmy Page launched Led Zeppelin in 1968 with a 'heavy' reworking..."



Are You Experienced?, the ferocious debut LP by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, generated a raft of breathless reviews from the English papers. "Hendrix is on soaring guitar form and with the help of producer Chas Chandler they come up with some extremely atmospheric, organic, sounds which have an uncanny knack of circling through the mind and blowing the top of your head off," an uncredited writer wrote in the 5/20/67 issue of Melody Maker. Meanwhile, Keith Altham credited Hendrix with opening up "a new dimension in electrical guitar music, launching what amounts to a one-man assault upon the nerve cells" in an NME review published the same day. "The LP is a brave effort by Hendrix to produce a musical form which is original and exciting," he concluded.



"No exaggeration: The Jimi Hendrix Experience is the most exciting act I have yet seen in pop music," Lorraine Alterman proclaimed in the 8/28/67 Detroit Free Press, upon Hendrix's return to the U.S. "Jimi, his bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, are creating a sensation in England and Europe – but the word hasn't spread here yet."



Jon Landau was only 20 years old when Rolling Stone published its first issue, but already he had been cutting his teeth at Paul Williams' Crawdaddy! for more than a year. Having poached his competitor's star writer, Wenner gave Landau a full-page column in Rolling Stone, where he had free reign to pontificate about various trends in popular music.



For his first essay, entitled 'Hendrix and Clapton', Landau considered the debut albums of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and (The) Cream, two groups that "represent attempts to tighten the music, to eliminate the superfluous, and to get closer to the mythical nitty-gritty." On Fresh Cream, according to Landau, Eric Clapton "fools around with attempts to make the straight three man thing work but dubs a fourth instrument on several tracks." He concluded that "the results are pretty confusing." Landau described Jimi Hendrix as a "great guitarist and brilliant arranger", but thought his songs were of a "poor quality" and "insane".



In a special issue of the magazine published on December 11, 2003, RS unveiled its '500 Greatest Albums of All Time'. Are You Experienced? was #15 on the list; Fresh Cream was #101.

4 4. The Doors Strange Days

Rating: Favorable

"Many people don't care to see Jim Morrison making it with his microphone in the manner of Mick Jagger nor do they especially want to watch him writhing on the floor. If they don't, then they suggest he is selling out to commercialism, has an old-fashioned concept of rock and roll or something. However, what's actually taking place on stage, and what Morrison is doing, is about 3000-years old fashioned and very contemporary in approach." (11/23/67 Review)





No attribution is provided for any of the reviews in issues 2, 3 or 4 of Rolling Stone. So we really don't know who is responsible for this appraisal of the Doors' second album, surely one of the most awesomely inept pieces of writing to ever appear in the magazine.



As it happens, a month before this review came to print, a young James Osterberg (soon to be rechristened Iggy Pop) had the chance to witness first-hand Jim Morrison's '3000-years old fashioned'/'very contemporary' stage theatrics. Osterberg saw the Doors' October 20, 1967 performance at the University of Michigan, which he later recalled in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's 1997 'oral history' of punk rock, Please Kill Me:



"I went to see them at this gymnasium, and the concert was the homecoming dance for all these big, butch American clods and their girls. They were going there to see the band that did 'Light My Fire'.



"The band got out onstage first, without Morrison, and they just sounded like pure shit. It sounded awful...It sounded decrepit and disgusting and unbalanced – they were playing the riff to 'Soul Kitchen' over and over, until the singer was gonna make his entrance.



"Finally, Morrison lurched on the stage, but very sensuously. He looked incredible...And the regular American guys were thinking, 'Who is this pussy?'



"When Morrison opened his mouth to sing, he sang in a pussy voice – a falsetto. He sang like Betty Boop and refused to sing in a normal voice. I think they got near to the end of the song and then just stopped. Morrison looked around, went over to the guitar player, and said, 'Hey, my man, play that one...'



"I think it might have been 'Love Me Two Times', and it was happening. Until Morrison started singing in the Betty Boop voice again.



"Basically the concert proceeded like that. I was very excited. I loved the antagonism; I loved that he was pissing them off. Yes, yes, yes. They were all frat people, football killers, the future leaders of America – the people who today are the rock stars of America – and not only was Morrison pissing them off, but he was mesmerizing them at the same time...



"The gig lasted only fifteen or twenty minutes because they had to pull Morrison offstage and get him out of there fast, because the people were gonna attack him. It made a big impression on me."



Eleven days later, the Psychedelic Stooges played their first show.



Despite this comical description, the Doors were, by most accounts, only slightly past their peak when 20-year-old James Osterberg saw them play. Recorded just four months after the release of their eponymous debut, Strange Days captured the Doors on the top of their ascent. In interviews leading up to the LP's release, the band members were ecstatic about the record. "Our first album was just the skeleton of our material," guitarist Robby Krieger told Greg Shaw in an August '67 interview with Mojo-Navigator. "We'll take more time with the next album and it will be more produced. It should be quite a bit better."



If the subdued, introspective Strange Days didn't quite pack the wallop of The Doors, it was a compelling statement nonetheless, and remains the Doors' most imaginative and cohesive album. The record was rapturously received by the music press. "Strange Days, the Doors' second album, is another cauldron of energy, excitement and improvisation," an unnamed reviewer for Hit Parader magazine raved. "Robby Krieger establishes himself as one of the major guitarists playing today. It's a superb album."



Billy Altman rated Strange Days five stars in the first edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, published in 1979, in what is perhaps the most effusive entry in the entire book. ("Brash, courageous, intelligent, adventurous and exciting. The Doors were all this - and more.")



In an amusing twist, in the second edition of the guide, published only four years later, Dave Marsh completely trashed the Doors, bemoaning "the obnoxious and insipid cult that now surrounds Jim Morrison." Marsh had once described the Doors as "unbeatable" in a 1970 review that appeared in the Detroit-based rock magazine Creem, but by 1983 he was grading every Doors LP two stars except the debut and Morrison Hotel, which he gave three stars.



In the third edition of the album guide, printed in 1992, Paul Evans provided a more sober assessment of Jim Morrison ("he was in the end both tragic and pathetic"), and rated Strange Days (which he described as "twilit, ominous carnival music") three-and-a-half stars. He awarded four stars to The Doors and L.A. Woman and gave Morrison Hotel five stars. This rating & review were repeated in the 2004 album guide.



Few bands, it is fair to say, have been as wildly polarizing as the Doors. "It's almost impossible to have a natural, unforced response to the Doors' music, to hear it clearly through the encrustation of platitudes left by the 20 year criss-cross of mythologisation and debunking," Simon Reynolds wrote in an illuminating essay published in the 4/13/91 issue of Melody Maker. "Jim Morrison was the first pop deity to stage-manage his own self-mythologisation, to have a critical understanding of the mythical dimensions of rock 'n' roll. While that newly born species, the rock critic, was making its first stumbling comparisons between pop and Greek tragedy (Richard Meltzer), and its first paeans to the Dionysian madness of pop (Nik Cohn, Lester Bangs), Morrison was already articulating all that in his songs, in his performance, in his life."



Lester Bangs, for his part, described his own conflicted feelings about Jim Morrison and the Doors in a lengthy (unpublished) 1975 essay entitled 'The End is Always Near':



"By the second album it became apparent to quick listeners that the Doors were limited, that Morrison's vision, if we ever took it seriously in the first place, was usually morbid in the most obvious possible way, and thus cheap, and that the whole nightmare could translate into the parody it ultimately became so easily that, well. . .but when he shot and hit it straight and deep and full force:



People are strange when you're a stranger

Faces look ugly when you're alone

Women seem wicked when you're unwanted

Streets are uneven when you are down



"...You knew he felt the chill and lived it and that was perhaps the saddest part, that he recognized his own clown within too late to turn the tide, so like a true asshole and ultimate relic of his time he picked up the Lizard King cartoon and wore it like a bib to keep the drunkdrool from rolling down to stain his shirt and burn a hole through to his heart, absurd, absurd, as the tales proliferated and Jim Morrison, who symbolized the ultimate possibilities and terrors seething at the farthest shores of sexual adventure to an entire generation, just got drunker and fat and fatter and pretty soon the word was out all down the line and high school kids were scornful of the Doors."



The Doors was #42 on RS's 500 greatest albums list; L.A. Woman was #362; Strange Days was #407.

Rating: Favorable

"Many people don't care to see Jim Morrison making it with his microphone in the manner of Mick Jagger nor do they especially want to watch him writhing on the floor. If they don't, then they suggest he is selling out to commercialism, has an old-fashioned concept of rock and roll or something. However, what's actually taking place on stage, and what Morrison is doing, is about 3000-years old fashioned and very contemporary in approach." (11/23/67 Review)





No attribution is provided for any of the reviews in issues 2, 3 or 4 of Rolling Stone. So we really don't know who is responsible for this appraisal of the Doors' second album, surely one of the most awesomely inept pieces of writing to ever appear in the magazine.



As it happens, a month before this review came to print, a young James Osterberg (soon to be rechristened Iggy Pop) had the chance to witness first-hand Jim Morrison's '3000-years old fashioned'/'very contemporary' stage theatrics. Osterberg saw the Doors' October 20, 1967 performance at the University of Michigan, which he later recalled in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's 1997 'oral history' of punk rock, Please Kill Me:



"I went to see them at this gymnasium, and the concert was the homecoming dance for all these big, butch American clods and their girls. They were going there to see the band that did 'Light My Fire'.



"The band got out onstage first, without Morrison, and they just sounded like pure shit. It sounded awful...It sounded decrepit and disgusting and unbalanced – they were playing the riff to 'Soul Kitchen' over and over, until the singer was gonna make his entrance.



"Finally, Morrison lurched on the stage, but very sensuously. He looked incredible...And the regular American guys were thinking, 'Who is this pussy?'



"When Morrison opened his mouth to sing, he sang in a pussy voice – a falsetto. He sang like Betty Boop and refused to sing in a normal voice. I think they got near to the end of the song and then just stopped. Morrison looked around, went over to the guitar player, and said, 'Hey, my man, play that one...'



"I think it might have been 'Love Me Two Times', and it was happening. Until Morrison started singing in the Betty Boop voice again.



"Basically the concert proceeded like that. I was very excited. I loved the antagonism; I loved that he was pissing them off. Yes, yes, yes. They were all frat people, football killers, the future leaders of America – the people who today are the rock stars of America – and not only was Morrison pissing them off, but he was mesmerizing them at the same time...



"The gig lasted only fifteen or twenty minutes because they had to pull Morrison offstage and get him out of there fast, because the people were gonna attack him. It made a big impression on me."



Eleven days later, the Psychedelic Stooges played their first show.



Despite this comical description, the Doors were, by most accounts, only slightly past their peak when 20-year-old James Osterberg saw them play. Recorded just four months after the release of their eponymous debut, Strange Days captured the Doors on the top of their ascent. In interviews leading up to the LP's release, the band members were ecstatic about the record. "Our first album was just the skeleton of our material," guitarist Robby Krieger told Greg Shaw in an August '67 interview with Mojo-Navigator. "We'll take more time with the next album and it will be more produced. It should be quite a bit better."



If the subdued, introspective Strange Days didn't quite pack the wallop of The Doors, it was a compelling statement nonetheless, and remains the Doors' most imaginative and cohesive album. The record was rapturously received by the music press. "Strange Days, the Doors' second album, is another cauldron of energy, excitement and improvisation," an unnamed reviewer for Hit Parader magazine raved. "Robby Krieger establishes himself as one of the major guitarists playing today. It's a superb album."



Billy Altman rated Strange Days five stars in the first edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, published in 1979, in what is perhaps the most effusive entry in the entire book. ("Brash, courageous, intelligent, adventurous and exciting. The Doors were all this - and more.")



In an amusing twist, in the second edition of the guide, published only four years later, Dave Marsh completely trashed the Doors, bemoaning "the obnoxious and insipid cult that now surrounds Jim Morrison." Marsh had once described the Doors as "unbeatable" in a 1970 review that appeared in the Detroit-based rock magazine Creem, but by 1983 he was grading every Doors LP two stars except the debut and Morrison Hotel, which he gave three stars.



In the third edition of the album guide, printed in 1992, Paul Evans provided a more sober assessment of Jim Morrison ("he was in the end both tragic and pathetic"), and rated Strange Days (which he described as "twilit, ominous carnival music") three-and-a-half stars. He awarded four stars to The Doors and L.A. Woman and gave Morrison Hotel five stars. This rating & review were repeated in the 2004 album guide.



Few bands, it is fair to say, have been as wildly polarizing as the Doors. "It's almost impossible to have a natural, unforced response to the Doors' music, to hear it clearly through the encrustation of platitudes left by the 20 year criss-cross of mythologisation and debunking," Simon Reynolds wrote in an illuminating essay published in the 4/13/91 issue of Melody Maker. "Jim Morrison was the first pop deity to stage-manage his own self-mythologisation, to have a critical understanding of the mythical dimensions of rock 'n' roll. While that newly born species, the rock critic, was making its first stumbling comparisons between pop and Greek tragedy (Richard Meltzer), and its first paeans to the Dionysian madness of pop (Nik Cohn, Lester Bangs), Morrison was already articulating all that in his songs, in his performance, in his life."



Lester Bangs, for his part, described his own conflicted feelings about Jim Morrison and the Doors in a lengthy (unpublished) 1975 essay entitled 'The End is Always Near':



"By the second album it became apparent to quick listeners that the Doors were limited, that Morrison's vision, if we ever took it seriously in the first place, was usually morbid in the most obvious possible way, and thus cheap, and that the whole nightmare could translate into the parody it ultimately became so easily that, well. . .but when he shot and hit it straight and deep and full force:



People are strange when you're a stranger

Faces look ugly when you're alone

Women seem wicked when you're unwanted

Streets are uneven when you are down



"...You knew he felt the chill and lived it and that was perhaps the saddest part, that he recognized his own clown within too late to turn the tide, so like a true asshole and ultimate relic of his time he picked up the Lizard King cartoon and wore it like a bib to keep the drunkdrool from rolling down to stain his shirt and burn a hole through to his heart, absurd, absurd, as the tales proliferated and Jim Morrison, who symbolized the ultimate possibilities and terrors seething at the farthest shores of sexual adventure to an entire generation, just got drunker and fat and fatter and pretty soon the word was out all down the line and high school kids were scornful of the Doors."



The Doors was #42 on RS's 500 greatest albums list; L.A. Woman was #362; Strange Days was #407.

5 5. Phil Ochs Outside of a Small Circle of Friends / Miranda

Rating: Unfavorable

"This is the single representation of Phil Ochs' 'new thing'. The new thing is, lyrically, a set of statements from the political and apolitical standpoints, which happen to be at odds with each other and which Phil Ochs does not satisfactorily reconcile. The story is of gore, bum wars, misery and bad times happily sung against a ragtimey piano. The spirit is nice, but has yet to evolve into a satisfactory piece of music." (12/14/67 Review)





Reading these early issues of Rolling Stone, I often found myself as befuddled as I imagine many parents back in the Sixties must have felt when they tried to communicate with their hippy children. (What exactly is this confounded "new thing" you keep yammering about?) At the same time, as RS groped for aesthetic criteria with which to judge rock and roll, many of these reviewers fall back on arguments their parents just as easily could have made (e.g. the music of Phil Ochs isn't "evolved" enough).*



Phil Ochs emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early '60s at the height of the revival. With topical compositions such as 'I Ain't Marching Anymore', 'Love Me, I'm a Liberal' and 'Draft Dodger Rag', he established himself as a writer and polemicist second only to Bob Dylan. "I grew up with Dylan," Ochs told Chris Charlesworth in the 1/9/74 issue of Melody Maker. "I met him the first week in New York when I got here. I'd looked around the folk circuit and found a lot of amateurs, so I was thinking it would be easy pickings and I might be THE guy. But it didn't happen. As soon as I saw Dylan I knew he was THE guy."



Unlike Dylan, Ochs was an idealist who genuinely thought that a song could inspire a revolution. Dylan, for his part, mercilessly ridiculed Ochs for his naivete and perceived lack of musical ability. "You ought to find a new line of work, Ochs," he reportedly told Phil. "Why don't you become a stand-up comic?" When Ochs had the gall to describe 'Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?' – Dylan's newest composition – as merely "okay", Dylan was so incensed that he threw Ochs out of his limousine. "You're not a folksinger," Dylan said. "You're a journalist."



Ochs certainly didn't shrink from such characterizations – after all, he named his first album All the News that's Fit to Sing. But he was no rigid purist either. Ochs, in fact, was one of very few people, in the folk community at least, that supported Dylan's transition from folk music to rock and roll. Indeed, he famously defended Dylan following what many people at the time regarded as a disastrous performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. "[Dylan] was quite responsibly doing what any real artist should, that is, performing the music he personally felt closest to and putting his own judgment before that of his audience," Ochs remarked. "The people that thought they were booing Dylan were in reality booing themselves in a most vulgar display of unthinking mob censorship." Phil was still a year away from releasing his third – and almost certainly his best – topical album, In Concert (a "live" LP recorded in a studio with fake applause), but he was already thinking beyond the confines of the folk genre.



Rolling Stone's inception, then, just happened to coincide with a major artistic breakthrough for Phil Ochs. Indeed, the first issue of the magazine came to press within days of the release of Pleasures of the Harbor, Phil Ochs' fourth album. After three records consisting of little more than Ochs and an acoustic guitar, Pleasures of the Harbor was a bold statement indeed: the complex, bitter narratives bore little similarity to the simple, anthemic compositions on his first three LPs. Meanwhile, the album's mournful baroque arrangements – the product of a fecund collaboration with producer Larry Marks and pianist Lincoln Mayorga – were unlike anything else in popular music.



By this point, Ochs' seemingly boundless idealism was quickly turning to despair. Indeed, his disillusionment with a country ravaged by war, institutionalized racism and corruption was manifest in cynical, perverse (and often extremely funny) narratives like 'The Party', 'Miranda', and 'The War is Over'. Yet surely the album's most twisted composition was 'Outside of a Small Circle of Friends', a song ripped from the headlines about a woman in New York who had been repeatedly attacked and stabbed while dozens of people looked on and did nothing. "Lincoln Mayorga's tack piano, along with a banjo and rhythm section, give the song a ragtime sound so incongruous with its lyrics that you could imagine the song being played at a party and going unnoticed by all but a few paying close attention," Michael Schumacher wrote in his 1996 biography of Phil Ochs. "This, of course, was precisely the point of the arrangement, and rarely in modern music has an arrangement so perfectly fit a songwriter's intentions: while Phil slices apart apathy and hypocrisy with surgical precision, the very people he is addressing could be going about their merry ways, oblivious to the attack."



Rolling Stone did not review Pleasures of the Harbor in its pages, but it did include a short – and completely dismissive – blurb about 'Outside of a Small Circle of Friends' in its third issue. In a year where the charts were chock full of songs with thinly veiled drug references, many radio stations refused to play 'Small Circle of Friends' because of the lyric 'smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer'. Predictably, then, the single flopped.



Arthur Schmidt's assessment of Phil's next album, Tape from California, in Rolling Stone largely regurgitated the 'Small Circle of Friends' review. "But Phil's political vision and/or insight is still pubescing, it has not matured,” Schmidt declared in the 9/28/68 issue. "'Joe Hill', a seven-minute ordeal in which Ochs employs a droning melody, is a song about enemies, and Ochs, like most old-style protestors, can simply find nothing vaguely amusing in enmity itself, revealing his (and their) basic lack of wit. Two other directly political songs, 'White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land' and 'The War is Over' are poorly arranged, not one but both using bugles and military drums to make their over-obvious point (points?). The latter song shifts to Ochs' new 'thing',** in which Ochs enters a nightmare world of fleeting, unrelated images."



Though Tape from California was his fifth LP (and he was already 27 years old by this point), in Arthur Schmidt's estimation Phil Ochs still hadn't "pubesced" enough. Possibly in an attempt to nip this interminable "puberty" in the bud, Phil would call his next record Rehearsals for Retirement. Rolling Stone ignored this album, along with what would be Phil's final LP of new material, 1970's ironically-titled Greatest Hits.



"It was always hard to take Phil Ochs seriously," Greil Marcus wrote in a book review published in the 5/3/79 issue of Rolling Stone, three years after Ochs took his own life. "As a Sixties protest singer, he had great heart but only haphazard inspiration and no genius...Ochs fell back on cliches or he coined phrases so one-dimensional they turned into cliches." Bart Testa, too, gave Ochs a surprisingly unsympathetic entry in the first edition of the record guide. "Ochs' Pleasures of the Harbor was an all-too-grand attempt to create his own Blonde on Blonde and become a major songwriter/poet," he wrote. "'Cross My Heart', 'I've Had Her', 'Pleasures of the Harbor' and 'Flower Lady' sink into a slow melodrama with their Mozart-like piano awash in dense strings." He rated that album three stars, and graded Phil's debut LP two stars. He concluded by noting that Greatest Hits (miraculously, the only Phil Ochs album not in print at the time) had evidenced "the rapid decay of Ochs' writing." This review was repeated in the second edition of the album guide.



Paul Evans, on the other hand, gave all seven Phil Ochs studio LPs four stars in the third edition of the album guide. "Tape From California stands as Ochs's most solid set, even if, at the time, it continued to mark his descent into relative obscurity," he wrote. Evans' review was repeated verbatim in the fourth edition, but all of his album ratings, save Greatest Hits, were downgraded to three or three-and-a-half stars. (Of course, I sincerely doubt that Paul Evans was actually responsible for this revision – an editor unfamiliar with Ochs' work that just assumed the 'greatest hits' must be superior almost certainly made the change.)



It has been forty years now since Phil Ochs hanged himself at the age of 35, but his musical legacy endures. Ochs himself reflected on the lasting impact of 'Small Circle of Friends' in an interview with Bruce Pollock in 1975, only a few months before his death:



"If I liked a song I had total confidence in it and it doesn't matter if people said it's a great song or a lousy song. Hysterical praise or hysterical attacks didn't affect me at all. It's always been between me and my songs, not about the critics, not about the public, not about sales or anything else...



"There were two attacks: You can't write folk music, and you can't use folk music for propaganda. Besides, it's topical and it'll be meaningless two years from then. And so to sing 'Small Circle of Friends' seven years later and still get the same response, gives the lie to that attack. Whether the audience is hearing it for the first or the fifteenth time it still holds up. It could be nostalgia for some people, but on the other hand, there's some essential truth locked up in that song, and it's locked up to a 13-year-old kid that hears it today for the first time. He responds to it because the truth is there. In a way it's more there than even when I wrote it."



Indeed, this song simultaneously made me laugh and sent chills down my spine when I first heard it as an adolescent boy, thirty years after its release. And it still affects me, even today.



*-Phil Ochs had been inundated with dumb reviews like this since the beginning of his career. "Phil Ochs has the intellectual capacity to put his ideas forward, but he needs to mature," wrote one critic in a review of Phil's debut album in The Northwest Arkansas Times. Meanwhile, Josh Dunson proclaimed that "Phil Ochs has reached a maturity as a singer and writer that few acquire in a lifetime of work" in another review of the same record published in High Fidelity magazine.



**-There it is again.

Rating: Unfavorable

"This is the single representation of Phil Ochs' 'new thing'. The new thing is, lyrically, a set of statements from the political and apolitical standpoints, which happen to be at odds with each other and which Phil Ochs does not satisfactorily reconcile. The story is of gore, bum wars, misery and bad times happily sung against a ragtimey piano. The spirit is nice, but has yet to evolve into a satisfactory piece of music." (12/14/67 Review)





Reading these early issues of Rolling Stone, I often found myself as befuddled as I imagine many parents back in the Sixties must have felt when they tried to communicate with their hippy children. (What exactly is this confounded "new thing" you keep yammering about?) At the same time, as RS groped for aesthetic criteria with which to judge rock and roll, many of these reviewers fall back on arguments their parents just as easily could have made (e.g. the music of Phil Ochs isn't "evolved" enough).*



Phil Ochs emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early '60s at the height of the revival. With topical compositions such as 'I Ain't Marching Anymore', 'Love Me, I'm a Liberal' and 'Draft Dodger Rag', he established himself as a writer and polemicist second only to Bob Dylan. "I grew up with Dylan," Ochs told Chris Charlesworth in the 1/9/74 issue of Melody Maker. "I met him the first week in New York when I got here. I'd looked around the folk circuit and found a lot of amateurs, so I was thinking it would be easy pickings and I might be THE guy. But it didn't happen. As soon as I saw Dylan I knew he was THE guy."



Unlike Dylan, Ochs was an idealist who genuinely thought that a song could inspire a revolution. Dylan, for his part, mercilessly ridiculed Ochs for his naivete and perceived lack of musical ability. "You ought to find a new line of work, Ochs," he reportedly told Phil. "Why don't you become a stand-up comic?" When Ochs had the gall to describe 'Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?' – Dylan's newest composition – as merely "okay", Dylan was so incensed that he threw Ochs out of his limousine. "You're not a folksinger," Dylan said. "You're a journalist."



Ochs certainly didn't shrink from such characterizations – after all, he named his first album All the News that's Fit to Sing. But he was no rigid purist either. Ochs, in fact, was one of very few people, in the folk community at least, that supported Dylan's transition from folk music to rock and roll. Indeed, he famously defended Dylan following what many people at the time regarded as a disastrous performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. "[Dylan] was quite responsibly doing what any real artist should, that is, performing the music he personally felt closest to and putting his own judgment before that of his audience," Ochs remarked. "The people that thought they were booing Dylan were in reality booing themselves in a most vulgar display of unthinking mob censorship." Phil was still a year away from releasing his third – and almost certainly his best – topical album, In Concert (a "live" LP recorded in a studio with fake applause), but he was already thinking beyond the confines of the folk genre.



Rolling Stone's inception, then, just happened to coincide with a major artistic breakthrough for Phil Ochs. Indeed, the first issue of the magazine came to press within days of the release of Pleasures of the Harbor, Phil Ochs' fourth album. After three records consisting of little more than Ochs and an acoustic guitar, Pleasures of the Harbor was a bold statement indeed: the complex, bitter narratives bore little similarity to the simple, anthemic compositions on his first three LPs. Meanwhile, the album's mournful baroque arrangements – the product of a fecund collaboration with producer Larry Marks and pianist Lincoln Mayorga – were unlike anything else in popular music.



By this point, Ochs' seemingly boundless idealism was quickly turning to despair. Indeed, his disillusionment with a country ravaged by war, institutionalized racism and corruption was manifest in cynical, perverse (and often extremely funny) narratives like 'The Party', 'Miranda', and 'The War is Over'. Yet surely the album's most twisted composition was 'Outside of a Small Circle of Friends', a song ripped from the headlines about a woman in New York who had been repeatedly attacked and stabbed while dozens of people looked on and did nothing. "Lincoln Mayorga's tack piano, along with a banjo and rhythm section, give the song a ragtime sound so incongruous with its lyrics that you could imagine the song being played at a party and going unnoticed by all but a few paying close attention," Michael Schumacher wrote in his 1996 biography of Phil Ochs. "This, of course, was precisely the point of the arrangement, and rarely in modern music has an arrangement so perfectly fit a songwriter's intentions: while Phil slices apart apathy and hypocrisy with surgical precision, the very people he is addressing could be going about their merry ways, oblivious to the attack."



Rolling Stone did not review Pleasures of the Harbor in its pages, but it did include a short – and completely dismissive – blurb about 'Outside of a Small Circle of Friends' in its third issue. In a year where the charts were chock full of songs with thinly veiled drug references, many radio stations refused to play 'Small Circle of Friends' because of the lyric 'smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer'. Predictably, then, the single flopped.



Arthur Schmidt's assessment of Phil's next album, Tape from California, in Rolling Stone largely regurgitated the 'Small Circle of Friends' review. "But Phil's political vision and/or insight is still pubescing, it has not matured,” Schmidt declared in the 9/28/68 issue. "'Joe Hill', a seven-minute ordeal in which Ochs employs a droning melody, is a song about enemies, and Ochs, like most old-style protestors, can simply find nothing vaguely amusing in enmity itself, revealing his (and their) basic lack of wit. Two other directly political songs, 'White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land' and 'The War is Over' are poorly arranged, not one but both using bugles and military drums to make their over-obvious point (points?). The latter song shifts to Ochs' new 'thing',** in which Ochs enters a nightmare world of fleeting, unrelated images."



Though Tape from California was his fifth LP (and he was already 27 years old by this point), in Arthur Schmidt's estimation Phil Ochs still hadn't "pubesced" enough. Possibly in an attempt to nip this interminable "puberty" in the bud, Phil would call his next record Rehearsals for Retirement. Rolling Stone ignored this album, along with what would be Phil's final LP of new material, 1970's ironically-titled Greatest Hits.



"It was always hard to take Phil Ochs seriously," Greil Marcus wrote in a book review published in the 5/3/79 issue of Rolling Stone, three years after Ochs took his own life. "As a Sixties protest singer, he had great heart but only haphazard inspiration and no genius...Ochs fell back on cliches or he coined phrases so one-dimensional they turned into cliches." Bart Testa, too, gave Ochs a surprisingly unsympathetic entry in the first edition of the record guide. "Ochs' Pleasures of the Harbor was an all-too-grand attempt to create his own Blonde on Blonde and become a major songwriter/poet," he wrote. "'Cross My Heart', 'I've Had Her', 'Pleasures of the Harbor' and 'Flower Lady' sink into a slow melodrama with their Mozart-like piano awash in dense strings." He rated that album three stars, and graded Phil's debut LP two stars. He concluded by noting that Greatest Hits (miraculously, the only Phil Ochs album not in print at the time) had evidenced "the rapid decay of Ochs' writing." This review was repeated in the second edition of the album guide.



Paul Evans, on the other hand, gave all seven Phil Ochs studio LPs four stars in the third edition of the album guide. "Tape From California stands as Ochs's most solid set, even if, at the time, it continued to mark his descent into relative obscurity," he wrote. Evans' review was repeated verbatim in the fourth edition, but all of his album ratings, save Greatest Hits, were downgraded to three or three-and-a-half stars. (Of course, I sincerely doubt that Paul Evans was actually responsible for this revision – an editor unfamiliar with Ochs' work that just assumed the 'greatest hits' must be superior almost certainly made the change.)



It has been forty years now since Phil Ochs hanged himself at the age of 35, but his musical legacy endures. Ochs himself reflected on the lasting impact of 'Small Circle of Friends' in an interview with Bruce Pollock in 1975, only a few months before his death:



"If I liked a song I had total confidence in it and it doesn't matter if people said it's a great song or a lousy song. Hysterical praise or hysterical attacks didn't affect me at all. It's always been between me and my songs, not about the critics, not about the public, not about sales or anything else...



"There were two attacks: You can't write folk music, and you can't use folk music for propaganda. Besides, it's topical and it'll be meaningless two years from then. And so to sing 'Small Circle of Friends' seven years later and still get the same response, gives the lie to that attack. Whether the audience is hearing it for the first or the fifteenth time it still holds up. It could be nostalgia for some people, but on the other hand, there's some essential truth locked up in that song, and it's locked up to a 13-year-old kid that hears it today for the first time. He responds to it because the truth is there. In a way it's more there than even when I wrote it."



Indeed, this song simultaneously made me laugh and sent chills down my spine when I first heard it as an adolescent boy, thirty years after its release. And it still affects me, even today.



*-Phil Ochs had been inundated with dumb reviews like this since the beginning of his career. "Phil Ochs has the intellectual capacity to put his ideas forward, but he needs to mature," wrote one critic in a review of Phil's debut album in The Northwest Arkansas Times. Meanwhile, Josh Dunson proclaimed that "Phil Ochs has reached a maturity as a singer and writer that few acquire in a lifetime of work" in another review of the same record published in High Fidelity magazine.



**-There it is again.

6 6. Buffalo Springfield Buffalo Springfield Again

Rating: Mixed

"The Buffalo Springfield have once again produced a musically and vocally interesting album. The songs on this album are not always as distinctive as those on their first effort, but they are done well. What Buffalo Springfield Again though obviously lacks is cohesiveness. Diversity is an advantage but some times goes too far and becomes disunity. This album sounds as if every member of the group is satisfying their own musical needs. Each of them have produced songs in their own bag. Together there is no blend, only a rather obvious alienation among the compositions." (12/14/67 Review)





Nine months before this review criticizing the "disunity" of Buffalo Springfield Again, Crawdaddy! was disparaging the "sameness" of Buffalo Springfield, the band's first album. "All of the songs seem to sound alike, and the group sound is quite thin," Paul Williams complained in the March '67 issue. "These are valid criticisms."



Meanwhile, Hit Parader's June '67 profile contained such vital information as each band member's favorite color, along with a detailed description of his 'dream girl'. "Neil plays harmonica, piano, and bass, in addition to guitar," wrote the uncredited writer. (Neil plays bass?) "His colors are black and tan. He likes strawberry and rhubarb pie, being a Scorpio, Dusty Springfield, Jimmy Stewart, and Hayley Mills. His dream girl is a combination of, 'summer, Winnipeg, short blond hair, November 11th, Toronto, Falcon Lake, holidays, trees, wind and rain.'"



RS's peevish assessment of Buffalo Springfield Again, then, was hardly the most vacuous piece of writing about this band. That said, the reviewer's critique – that the album lacks "cohesiveness" – seems, in retrospect, more than a little off the mark. While the author is certainly correct that Buffalo Springfield Again shows each member of the group "satisfying their own musical needs" (in a manner of speaking), this seems less a flaw than the album's greatest strength. (On the other hand, I have to admit that I am sort of curious what an 8-minute, Jack Nitzsche orchestrated version of 'Rock & Roll Woman' would have sounded like!)



Half a century later, this splendid album is widely regarded as one of the greatest recordings of the 1960s, as well as the pinnacle of Stephen Stills' career. Yet in many ways it remains one of Neil Young's most dazzling achievements as well. Young's three contributions – 'Mr. Soul', 'Expecting to Fly', and 'Broken Arrow' – simultaneously present an almost embarrassingly ingenuous yet remarkably versatile songwriter and performer. The singer of 'Expecting to Fly' seems every bit as naive and childlike as the narrator of 'Mr. Soul' is loathsome – a duality Young would spend the rest of his career exploring.



Greil Marcus contrasted Stills' and Young's styles in a percipient essay that appeared in the August '69 issue of Good Times. "Neil Young doesn't know where the limits are – he goes too far, blows it, overdoes it," Marcus wrote. "He takes risks with his music, his lyrics, his voice, his guitar. Because he takes risks he gets a lot farther, sometimes, than those with more talent and better sense. Steve Stills, for example, never makes a mistake important enough to mar anything he does; never goes so far that he can't scramble back real quick to where the ground's a bit firmer...Young isn't like that. He blows it quite often. And his failures are often more impressive and more capable of moving a listener than the successes of many another artist."



Buffalo Springfield Again was #188 on RS's 500 greatest albums list.

Rating: Mixed

"The Buffalo Springfield have once again produced a musically and vocally interesting album. The songs on this album are not always as distinctive as those on their first effort, but they are done well. What Buffalo Springfield Again though obviously lacks is cohesiveness. Diversity is an advantage but some times goes too far and becomes disunity. This album sounds as if every member of the group is satisfying their own musical needs. Each of them have produced songs in their own bag. Together there is no blend, only a rather obvious alienation among the compositions." (12/14/67 Review)





Nine months before this review criticizing the "disunity" of Buffalo Springfield Again, Crawdaddy! was disparaging the "sameness" of Buffalo Springfield, the band's first album. "All of the songs seem to sound alike, and the group sound is quite thin," Paul Williams complained in the March '67 issue. "These are valid criticisms."



Meanwhile, Hit Parader's June '67 profile contained such vital information as each band member's favorite color, along with a detailed description of his 'dream girl'. "Neil plays harmonica, piano, and bass, in addition to guitar," wrote the uncredited writer. (Neil plays bass?) "His colors are black and tan. He likes strawberry and rhubarb pie, being a Scorpio, Dusty Springfield, Jimmy Stewart, and Hayley Mills. His dream girl is a combination of, 'summer, Winnipeg, short blond hair, November 11th, Toronto, Falcon Lake, holidays, trees, wind and rain.'"



RS's peevish assessment of Buffalo Springfield Again, then, was hardly the most vacuous piece of writing about this band. That said, the reviewer's critique – that the album lacks "cohesiveness" – seems, in retrospect, more than a little off the mark. While the author is certainly correct that Buffalo Springfield Again shows each member of the group "satisfying their own musical needs" (in a manner of speaking), this seems less a flaw than the album's greatest strength. (On the other hand, I have to admit that I am sort of curious what an 8-minute, Jack Nitzsche orchestrated version of 'Rock & Roll Woman' would have sounded like!)



Half a century later, this splendid album is widely regarded as one of the greatest recordings of the 1960s, as well as the pinnacle of Stephen Stills' career. Yet in many ways it remains one of Neil Young's most dazzling achievements as well. Young's three contributions – 'Mr. Soul', 'Expecting to Fly', and 'Broken Arrow' – simultaneously present an almost embarrassingly ingenuous yet remarkably versatile songwriter and performer. The singer of 'Expecting to Fly' seems every bit as naive and childlike as the narrator of 'Mr. Soul' is loathsome – a duality Young would spend the rest of his career exploring.



Greil Marcus contrasted Stills' and Young's styles in a percipient essay that appeared in the August '69 issue of Good Times. "Neil Young doesn't know where the limits are – he goes too far, blows it, overdoes it," Marcus wrote. "He takes risks with his music, his lyrics, his voice, his guitar. Because he takes risks he gets a lot farther, sometimes, than those with more talent and better sense. Steve Stills, for example, never makes a mistake important enough to mar anything he does; never goes so far that he can't scramble back real quick to where the ground's a bit firmer...Young isn't like that. He blows it quite often. And his failures are often more impressive and more capable of moving a listener than the successes of many another artist."



Buffalo Springfield Again was #188 on RS's 500 greatest albums list.

7 7. Country Joe and The Fish I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die

Rating: Favorable

"Country Joe and the Fish, hereinafter referred to as CJ&TF, is another group which, between first and second records, has gone through a number of changes. The first thing that strikes you is the record cover, far more professional and, thank God, tasteful in execution than the first one. Similarly the production of the music and the songs are also done with more experience and taste. Their first record was done far too early in their development and reflected a great deal of amateurish on all sides. For example, the organ on the first LP, which many people found so appealing as a sound because it was so familiar and so easy to understand, has by comparison matured tremendously in approach and content. Similarly the guitar work is much more sophisticated...CJ&TF are into their thing." (12/14/67 Review)





It is a surprise, to say the least, to see the magazine now purported to be the voice of the Sixties counterculture evaluating records based on the tastefulness and professionalism of their album covers. Yet many of this unnamed critic's observations about 'CJ&TF''s music are equally fallacious. Contrary to the writer's vague assertion that Country Joe & the Fish completed their first album "far too early in their development", the band had actually been in existence for nearly two years before they finally got around to recording their ground-breaking debut, Electric Music for the Mind and Body. At the same time, 'Who Am I' and the 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag', two of the most memorable songs on the second album (a quantum leap forward in terms of maturity and sophistication, according this review), were actually among the group's oldest compositions, having previously appeared on the band's very first EP, issued in 1965.



Despite this writer's characterization of it as "amateurish", at the time Electric Music for the Mind and Body was actually widely embraced by underground and mainstream publications alike as a vital representation of the 'San Francisco Sound'. Mike Jahn, for example, described it as "[o]ne of the best rock albums yet created...a winding, shimmery relic of this would-be-magic subculture" in the 12/9/68 edition of The New York Times. Paul Williams gave a typically frenzied assessment of the album in the August '67 issue of Crawdaddy. "When the Country Joe album arrived at the Crawdaddy! office, it was immediately inscribed 'This record is to be played on special occasions only,' and certain factions suggested that it would be in poor taste to even review such a sacred work," he wrote. "Sacred or not, this album does seem distantly removed from anything that has been previously associated with rock 'n' roll."



"For many people this album is so exactly where we are, it's frightening," he continued. "'Section 43' [is] simply the most satisfying, evocative piece of music I know; I could wander its paths forever."*



As it happens, the first half of 1967 would prove to be the high point for Country Joe & the Fish. By the time Rolling Stone reviewed the band's second album, the line-up that had recorded Electric Music and Fixin' to Die was already coming apart. Indeed, Together, recorded in November of '67, seems an especially inapt title for the band's third LP: the aimless genre experiments that comprise the album depicted a group clearly in the process of disintegration. By the time Joe gave his infamous 'Gimme an F-U-C-K' solo performance at Woodstock, 'CTF&J' was a band in name only. The group's fourth and fifth LPs – 1969's Here We Are Again and 1970's CJ Fish – were slick, lifeless affairs that utilized session musicians and captured none of the wit or intensity of the earlier recordings.



After Woodstock, Country Joe was regarded by many as little more than a jester and a buffoon. "Country Joe McDonald is a roughneck with a bashed-in face, and, at times, he's comical," Nik Cohn wrote in his classic 1969 tome Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. "The only trouble is, Country Joe isn't all laughs, he has his poetical side as well and that's not so hot, that's downright dire. With all of these groups, it's the same endless hang-up: when they stomp they're fine and, when they turn profound, they're a pain in the arse." This amusing appraisal is actually belied by the meditative and often lovely music on the first two albums, but Joe was a cartoon by this point.



In subsequent years, though, Country Joe & the Fish would be remembered fondly by critics nostalgic for those halcyon days of '66-'67. Billy Altman, for example, gave the first two Country Joe & the Fish LPs four stars in the first edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide. "In many ways, Electric Music for the Mind and Body captured the essence of a mind-expanded counterculture lifestyle," he wrote. He rated Together, Here We Are Again and CJ Fish two stars apiece. This entry was repeated in the second edition of the guide, but I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die, was downgraded from four to three stars.



Paul Evans also gave Fixin' to Die three stars in the third edition of the guide. He graded Electric Music two stars and all of the other studio LPs one star ("the haphazard mixture of styles – folk, rock, jug band – that may once have seemed eclectic now comes off as confused").



Mark Cooper offered a more sympathetic appraisal in a retrospective review published in the February '96 issue of Mojo. "What makes the first two Fish albums indispensable are the band's journeys into inner musical space," he wrote. "Despite the political gloss, the first two Fish albums essentially draw the blueprint for that circus-flavoured, courtly-romantic and Eastern-influenced genre known as Acid Rock."



Country Joe & the Fish were omitted from the 2004 album guide.



*-Country Joe himself later mocked this review in a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone: "I remember that Crawdaddy reviewed Electric Music for the Mind and Body and said, 'This record is a holy sacred record and should only be played on sacred occasions.' What the hell does that mean?"

Rating: Favorable

"Country Joe and the Fish, hereinafter referred to as CJ&TF, is another group which, between first and second records, has gone through a number of changes. The first thing that strikes you is the record cover, far more professional and, thank God, tasteful in execution than the first one. Similarly the production of the music and the songs are also done with more experience and taste. Their first record was done far too early in their development and reflected a great deal of amateurish on all sides. For example, the organ on the first LP, which many people found so appealing as a sound because it was so familiar and so easy to understand, has by comparison matured tremendously in approach and content. Similarly the guitar work is much more sophisticated...CJ&TF are into their thing." (12/14/67 Review)





It is a surprise, to say the least, to see the magazine now purported to be the voice of the Sixties counterculture evaluating records based on the tastefulness and professionalism of their album covers. Yet many of this unnamed critic's observations about 'CJ&TF''s music are equally fallacious. Contrary to the writer's vague assertion that Country Joe & the Fish completed their first album "far too early in their development", the band had actually been in existence for nearly two years before they finally got around to recording their ground-breaking debut, Electric Music for the Mind and Body. At the same time, 'Who Am I' and the 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag', two of the most memorable songs on the second album (a quantum leap forward in terms of maturity and sophistication, according this review), were actually among the group's oldest compositions, having previously appeared on the band's very first EP, issued in 1965.



Despite this writer's characterization of it as "amateurish", at the time Electric Music for the Mind and Body was actually widely embraced by underground and mainstream publications alike as a vital representation of the 'San Francisco Sound'. Mike Jahn, for example, described it as "[o]ne of the best rock albums yet created...a winding, shimmery relic of this would-be-magic subculture" in the 12/9/68 edition of The New York Times. Paul Williams gave a typically frenzied assessment of the album in the August '67 issue of Crawdaddy. "When the Country Joe album arrived at the Crawdaddy! office, it was immediately inscribed 'This record is to be played on special occasions only,' and certain factions suggested that it would be in poor taste to even review such a sacred work," he wrote. "Sacred or not, this album does seem distantly removed from anything that has been previously associated with rock 'n' roll."



"For many people this album is so exactly where we are, it's frightening," he continued. "'Section 43' [is] simply the most satisfying, evocative piece of music I know; I could wander its paths forever."*



As it happens, the first half of 1967 would prove to be the high point for Country Joe & the Fish. By the time Rolling Stone reviewed the band's second album, the line-up that had recorded Electric Music and Fixin' to Die was already coming apart. Indeed, Together, recorded in November of '67, seems an especially inapt title for the band's third LP: the aimless genre experiments that comprise the album depicted a group clearly in the process of disintegration. By the time Joe gave his infamous 'Gimme an F-U-C-K' solo performance at Woodstock, 'CTF&J' was a band in name only. The group's fourth and fifth LPs – 1969's Here We Are Again and 1970's CJ Fish – were slick, lifeless affairs that utilized session musicians and captured none of the wit or intensity of the earlier recordings.



After Woodstock, Country Joe was regarded by many as little more than a jester and a buffoon. "Country Joe McDonald is a roughneck with a bashed-in face, and, at times, he's comical," Nik Cohn wrote in his classic 1969 tome Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. "The only trouble is, Country Joe isn't all laughs, he has his poetical side as well and that's not so hot, that's downright dire. With all of these groups, it's the same endless hang-up: when they stomp they're fine and, when they turn profound, they're a pain in the arse." This amusing appraisal is actually belied by the meditative and often lovely music on the first two albums, but Joe was a cartoon by this point.



In subsequent years, though, Country Joe & the Fish would be remembered fondly by critics nostalgic for those halcyon days of '66-'67. Billy Altman, for example, gave the first two Country Joe & the Fish LPs four stars in the first edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide. "In many ways, Electric Music for the Mind and Body captured the essence of a mind-expanded counterculture lifestyle," he wrote. He rated Together, Here We Are Again and CJ Fish two stars apiece. This entry was repeated in the second edition of the guide, but I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die, was downgraded from four to three stars.



Paul Evans also gave Fixin' to Die three stars in the third edition of the guide. He graded Electric Music two stars and all of the other studio LPs one star ("the haphazard mixture of styles – folk, rock, jug band – that may once have seemed eclectic now comes off as confused").



Mark Cooper offered a more sympathetic appraisal in a retrospective review published in the February '96 issue of Mojo. "What makes the first two Fish albums indispensable are the band's journeys into inner musical space," he wrote. "Despite the political gloss, the first two Fish albums essentially draw the blueprint for that circus-flavoured, courtly-romantic and Eastern-influenced genre known as Acid Rock."



Country Joe & the Fish were omitted from the 2004 album guide.



*-Country Joe himself later mocked this review in a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone: "I remember that Crawdaddy reviewed Electric Music for the Mind and Body and said, 'This record is a holy sacred record and should only be played on sacred occasions.' What the hell does that mean?"

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8 8. Jefferson Airplane After Bathing at Baxter's

Rating: Favorable

"Jefferson Airplane could be the best rock and roll band in America today. The criteria, to list a few, are that a group be able to provide from within itself enough good original material to sustain a prolonged effort both in performances and on recordings; that a group prove its ability as a professional and capable unit in live performance (not necessarily be able to reproduce a recorded work, but to bring off to general satisfaction a live performance if the group is involved in live performance;) and that a group contain members who are able to sing and play like professional musicians.



You have Grace Slick, surely one of the two or three best non-operatic female voices in the world; Jack Cassady, perhaps the strongest bassist around outside of a blues band; Marty Balin and Paul Kantner whose words and melodies are among the best currently available, outside of the obvious exceptions; and Jorma Kaukonen and Spencer Dryden who, while not outstanding instrumental virtuousos [sic], are certainly original and inventive within the context of rock and roll, a wide context indeed. Got it?



It isn't very surprising that the Airplane is so good and that they have come up with probably the best, considering all the criteria and the exceptions, rock and roll album so far produced by an American group.



Hey all you out there with personal favorites which blow your heads off, listen very closely. Marty and Grace may not make love on stage, either with each other or their respective microphone stands, but 'Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil' happens to be a fine song." (1/20/68 Review)





Rolling Stone, everyone knows, was originally based in San Francisco. So it is hardly surprising that many of its writers displayed an overt bias towards the city's flourishing psychedelic scene.



And yet, the degree to which RS favored these bands – generally to the exclusion of groups outside the Bay Area (the magazine was especially punitive towards musicians from L.A.) – was astounding. Here, for example, we find an unnamed critic pronouncing Jefferson Airplane's third LP, After Bathing at Baxter's, to be the greatest American rock album ever made.



Still, it would be wrong to suggest that hometown bias was solely responsible for Rolling Stone's exaggerated praise for this band. Indeed, their third record was broadly touted by the American underground press. Paul Williams, for example, wrote his own wildly hyperbolic review of Baxter's in the February '68 issue of Crawdaddy!:



"After Bathing At Baxter's is the best Jefferson Airplane album, in terms of both overall quality and the extent to which it reflects the life style of the group. Had it been released in January 1967, I think it would have been generally recognized as the crowning achievement of the dawn of American rock, 1965-66, just as The Rolling Stones Now! is the summation and peak of the young rock scene in Britain, '63-'64. The mere fact that Baxter's arrived inappropriately in December '67 does not take away the real importance."



At least part of this critical hype may also have stemmed from the fact that members of the Jefferson Airplane apparently socialized with rock writers, and even genuinely seemed to like some of them. Richard Meltzer recalled the good ol' days in a 1985 Spin piece entitled 'Rock-Crit Blood 'n' Guts (Part 1)':



"Besides, and don't laugh, this is true, once upon a time rock-writers were rock-rollers; there was no distinction. Well, distinctions yeah like between high and low – I wasn't James Brown and neither was Pigpen – but not between them and us. Not per se, not so's you could notice in any way they insisted on pushing, certainly not at the dawn of things, Summer of Love and thereabouts...



"Heck, these guys welcomed us, or at rock-bottom least the novelty of our parallel mission, the mere fact (dig it) of rock-generated Prose. Imagine, WRITING about rock! They dug it, really, so like first night at Monterey Marty Balin says to me and Sandy Pearlman, Crawdaddy jerkjoes who have ventured West solely for IT, that universe-manifesting festival (Pop) which they fucked the film up of royally, he says, 'What, guys, you have no place to crash? Well by all means cop your z's on the carpeted floor of J. Airplane's motor lodge suite, availing yourselves of our righteous soft drinks and reefer, and please of course rap with us long into the a.m. re all things hip, hep, karmic, and cosmic,' or equivalent co-conspiratorial twaddle. Or like '68, after signing and partying with Columbia – marinated octopus and mushroom caps – Big Brother & the Holding Co. bass person Peter Albin, a name lost in the ooze so gosh but you're not as impressed as you should be, invited several Crawdads to catch The Graduate with him – in lieu of MEMBERS of his v. own BAND."



All things, they say, must pass. The Airplane Charles Shaar Murray encountered only a few years later were not nearly so gregarious as the one Richard Meltzer rapped and got fucked up with in the thick of the Summer o' Love. In fact, CSM's 6/23/73 NME profile depicts a band that were no fun at all:



"She re-addresses her attention to her plates of lasagna and pizza. Kantner toys with his mixed ice cream, and points out different brands of cars across the street. 'Hey, that's older than your model.' I ask Grace a question about the song 'Silver Spoon' on the Sunfighter album. She doesn't answer. 'Hey,' says Kantner gently. 'You're giving an interview, remember?'...



"With sinking heart I begin to realise that there is absolutely nothing further that I want to discuss with these people...The conversation proceeds aimlessly...I get the impression that Slick and Kantner regard the interview as something of an imposition. The conversation lasts exactly as long as the food. No sooner has the last gulp vanished than Kantner disappears into the restaurant to pay the bill. I am unable to pluck up the courage to ask what I really want to know, which is: 'Howcum nobody gives a damn about the Airplane these days?'"



The group that only a few years earlier had been trumpeted as rock's most highly-evolved ensemble was now regarded with not-a-little embarrassment by the most influential critics of the day. "There’s really nothing quite as dead as the recent past – for further proof just dig out those old Jefferson Airplane albums currently collecting dust up in the attic," Nick Kent wrote in the 6/2/73 issue of NME. "Y'know, stuff like After Bathing At Baxter's or Volunteers with its 'we-are-all-outlaws-in-the-eyes–of-America-and-we-are-very-proud-of-ourselves' unctuousness. I mean, can you take it at all seriously?"



Jefferson Airplane's second LP, Surrealistic Pillow, which featured two top ten singles (including 'White Rabbit' and its explicit reference to the drug culture), proved the 'San Francisco Sound' was commercially viable. But the success of this record went straight to their heads. By all accounts, the sessions for After Bathing at Baxter's, the follow up to Surrealistic Pillow, were total pandemonium. Here was a very early example of hippy indulgence run amok. "By the third album we were doing acid in the studio, and bringing in motorcycles and nitrous oxide tanks," guitarist Paul Kantner told Jeff Tamarkin in a April 2003 Mojo retrospective. "I got disgusted with all the ego trips and the band was so stoned out I couldn't even talk to them," founding member Marty Balin recalled. "Everybody was in their little shell."



John Swenson rated Baxter's three stars in the first and second editions of the record guide. "The density of the album's production was truly staggering, but it was an attempt doomed to ultimate, even if heroic, failure," he wrote. "You can't record an LSD trip, so the album ends up sounding like a bizarre indulgence." He gave Surrealistic Pillow four stars.



Time has not been kind to the Jefferson Airplane oeuvre. "Symbols of a moment and a movement, the Airplane mirrored the foolish, magnificent ideals of their time so closely that much of their repertoire now sounds dated, even slightly ridiculous," Jon Savage wrote in the March '98 issue of Mojo. Ian MacDonald offered an even more withering appraisal in the April '98 issue of Uncut:



"The tinny shriek of treble-boosted Gibson guitars squeezed through a heap of small speakers and cheap fuzz boxes, the fret-squeaking rumble of overdriven Fender basses, the hectoring voices of earnest white college kids raring to change the world — it was all a bit of a pain, man...It's a perfectly horrible noise. What happened musically in San Francisco during the late Sixties was more the sonic colouration of a social scene than anything to do with the commercial business of recording and gigging familiar to pop/rock musicians elsewhere...on Surrealistic Pillow and its successor, After Bathing At Baxter's, they were obviously scraping about for material. Their hit, 'Somebody To Love', was imported from Slick's previous band, The Great Society, as was her psychedelic bolero, 'White Rabbit'...For the most part excruciatingly dated, these issues are now of historical interest only."



Surrealistic Pillow was #146 on RS's 500 greatest albums list.

Rating: Favorable

"Jefferson Airplane could be the best rock and roll band in America today. The criteria, to list a few, are that a group be able to provide from within itself enough good original material to sustain a prolonged effort both in performances and on recordings; that a group prove its ability as a professional and capable unit in live performance (not necessarily be able to reproduce a recorded work, but to bring off to general satisfaction a live performance if the group is involved in live performance;) and that a group contain members who are able to sing and play like professional musicians.



You have Grace Slick, surely one of the two or three best non-operatic female voices in the world; Jack Cassady, perhaps the strongest bassist around outside of a blues band; Marty Balin and Paul Kantner whose words and melodies are among the best currently available, outside of the obvious exceptions; and Jorma Kaukonen and Spencer Dryden who, while not outstanding instrumental virtuousos [sic], are certainly original and inventive within the context of rock and roll, a wide context indeed. Got it?



It isn't very surprising that the Airplane is so good and that they have come up with probably the best, considering all the criteria and the exceptions, rock and roll album so far produced by an American group.



Hey all you out there with personal favorites which blow your heads off, listen very closely. Marty and Grace may not make love on stage, either with each other or their respective microphone stands, but 'Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil' happens to be a fine song." (1/20/68 Review)





Rolling Stone, everyone knows, was originally based in San Francisco. So it is hardly surprising that many of its writers displayed an overt bias towards the city's flourishing psychedelic scene.



And yet, the degree to which RS favored these bands – generally to the exclusion of groups outside the Bay Area (the magazine was especially punitive towards musicians from L.A.) – was astounding. Here, for example, we find an unnamed critic pronouncing Jefferson Airplane's third LP, After Bathing at Baxter's, to be the greatest American rock album ever made.



Still, it would be wrong to suggest that hometown bias was solely responsible for Rolling Stone's exaggerated praise for this band. Indeed, their third record was broadly touted by the American underground press. Paul Williams, for example, wrote his own wildly hyperbolic review of Baxter's in the February '68 issue of Crawdaddy!:



"After Bathing At Baxter's is the best Jefferson Airplane album, in terms of both overall quality and the extent to which it reflects the life style of the group. Had it been released in January 1967, I think it would have been generally recognized as the crowning achievement of the dawn of American rock, 1965-66, just as The Rolling Stones Now! is the summation and peak of the young rock scene in Britain, '63-'64. The mere fact that Baxter's arrived inappropriately in December '67 does not take away the real importance."



At least part of this critical hype may also have stemmed from the fact that members of the Jefferson Airplane apparently socialized with rock writers, and even genuinely seemed to like some of them. Richard Meltzer recalled the good ol' days in a 1985 Spin piece entitled 'Rock-Crit Blood 'n' Guts (Part 1)':



"Besides, and don't laugh, this is true, once upon a time rock-writers were rock-rollers; there was no distinction. Well, distinctions yeah like between high and low – I wasn't James Brown and neither was Pigpen – but not between them and us. Not per se, not so's you could notice in any way they insisted on pushing, certainly not at the dawn of things, Summer of Love and thereabouts...



"Heck, these guys welcomed us, or at rock-bottom least the novelty of our parallel mission, the mere fact (dig it) of rock-generated Prose. Imagine, WRITING about rock! They dug it, really, so like first night at Monterey Marty Balin says to me and Sandy Pearlman, Crawdaddy jerkjoes who have ventured West solely for IT, that universe-manifesting festival (Pop) which they fucked the film up of royally, he says, 'What, guys, you have no place to crash? Well by all means cop your z's on the carpeted floor of J. Airplane's motor lodge suite, availing yourselves of our righteous soft drinks and reefer, and please of course rap with us long into the a.m. re all things hip, hep, karmic, and cosmic,' or equivalent co-conspiratorial twaddle. Or like '68, after signing and partying with Columbia – marinated octopus and mushroom caps – Big Brother & the Holding Co. bass person Peter Albin, a name lost in the ooze so gosh but you're not as impressed as you should be, invited several Crawdads to catch The Graduate with him – in lieu of MEMBERS of his v. own BAND."



All things, they say, must pass. The Airplane Charles Shaar Murray encountered only a few years later were not nearly so gregarious as the one Richard Meltzer rapped and got fucked up with in the thick of the Summer o' Love. In fact, CSM's 6/23/73 NME profile depicts a band that were no fun at all:



"She re-addresses her attention to her plates of lasagna and pizza. Kantner toys with his mixed ice cream, and points out different brands of cars across the street. 'Hey, that's older than your model.' I ask Grace a question about the song 'Silver Spoon' on the Sunfighter album. She doesn't answer. 'Hey,' says Kantner gently. 'You're giving an interview, remember?'...



"With sinking heart I begin to realise that there is absolutely nothing further that I want to discuss with these people...The conversation proceeds aimlessly...I get the impression that Slick and Kantner regard the interview as something of an imposition. The conversation lasts exactly as long as the food. No sooner has the last gulp vanished than Kantner disappears into the restaurant to pay the bill. I am unable to pluck up the courage to ask what I really want to know, which is: 'Howcum nobody gives a damn about the Airplane these days?'"



The group that only a few years earlier had been trumpeted as rock's most highly-evolved ensemble was now regarded with not-a-little embarrassment by the most influential critics of the day. "There’s really nothing quite as dead as the recent past – for further proof just dig out those old Jefferson Airplane albums currently collecting dust up in the attic," Nick Kent wrote in the 6/2/73 issue of NME. "Y'know, stuff like After Bathing At Baxter's or Volunteers with its 'we-are-all-outlaws-in-the-eyes–of-America-and-we-are-very-proud-of-ourselves' unctuousness. I mean, can you take it at all seriously?"



Jefferson Airplane's second LP, Surrealistic Pillow, which featured two top ten singles (including 'White Rabbit' and its explicit reference to the drug culture), proved the 'San Francisco Sound' was commercially viable. But the success of this record went straight to their heads. By all accounts, the sessions for After Bathing at Baxter's, the follow up to Surrealistic Pillow, were total pandemonium. Here was a very early example of hippy indulgence run amok. "By the third album we were doing acid in the studio, and bringing in motorcycles and nitrous oxide tanks," guitarist Paul Kantner told Jeff Tamarkin in a April 2003 Mojo retrospective. "I got disgusted with all the ego trips and the band was so stoned out I couldn't even talk to them," founding member Marty Balin recalled. "Everybody was in their little shell."



John Swenson rated Baxter's three stars in the first and second editions of the record guide. "The density of the album's production was truly staggering, but it was an attempt doomed to ultimate, even if heroic, failure," he wrote. "You can't record an LSD trip, so the album ends up sounding like a bizarre indulgence." He gave Surrealistic Pillow four stars.



Time has not been kind to the Jefferson Airplane oeuvre. "Symbols of a moment and a movement, the Airplane mirrored the foolish, magnificent ideals of their time so closely that much of their repertoire now sounds dated, even slightly ridiculous," Jon Savage wrote in the March '98 issue of Mojo. Ian MacDonald offered an even more withering appraisal in the April '98 issue of Uncut:



"The tinny shriek of treble-boosted Gibson guitars squeezed through a heap of small speakers and cheap fuzz boxes, the fret-squeaking rumble of overdriven Fender basses, the hectoring voices of earnest white college kids raring to change the world — it was all a bit of a pain, man...It's a perfectly horrible noise. What happened musically in San Francisco during the late Sixties was more the sonic colouration of a social scene than anything to do with the commercial business of recording and gigging familiar to pop/rock musicians elsewhere...on Surrealistic Pillow and its successor, After Bathing At Baxter's, they were obviously scraping about for material. Their hit, 'Somebody To Love', was imported from Slick's previous band, The Great Society, as was her psychedelic bolero, 'White Rabbit'...For the most part excruciatingly dated, these issues are now of historical interest only."



Surrealistic Pillow was #146 on RS's 500 greatest albums list.

9 9. Grateful Dead Anthem of the Sun

Rating: Favorable

"On the Grateful Dead's Anthem of the Sun the studio with its production work dissolves into live performance, the carefully crafted is thrown together with the casually tossed off, and the results are spliced together. The end product is one of the finest albums to come out of San Francisco, a personal statement of the rock aesthetic on a level with the Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxters. To be sure, the album has its weak points, but as a total work it is remarkably successful...The first side of Anthem of the Sun is a masterpiece of rock...



...The main theme of 'Other One' is an eminently memorable quasi-county [sic] melody that starts right off with the tasteful guitar of Garcia that dominates the record; a second movement starts the confusion between live and studio (nice stereo production work here), fading into a restatement of the main theme; then there is some beautiful musique concrete leading into 'Caboose'. Already there is evident carefully arranged vocal work, a departure from the Dead's previous release...



...Hart and Kreutzmann work together to form one of the most powerful (and inventive) percussion units in rock. With 'Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)' we are confronted with the album's most curious track, which ranges from a white-imitation blues riff vamp-until-ready to 60-cycle hum and microphone feedback. The vocal sounds like Danny Kalb (poor in other words), but this in fact is the main consistent problem with the album: the vocals." (Jim Miller, 9/28/68 Review)





The Grateful Dead are the iconic San Francisco band, an embodiment of everything that was good and true about the 1960s. And yet, the fact is that back in '67, when the SF scene was at the height of its influence, the Dead were not particularly well-respected or even liked outside the confines of Haight-Ashbury. "The Jefferson Airplane were the darlings of the movement," Nick Kent wrote in a 4/27/74 NME retrospective. "The Grateful Dead were the black-sheep." Indeed, their March '67 eponymous debut was widely perceived as a dud – especially, I imagine, when heard alongside the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, which came out a few weeks earlier. And Pete Townshend reportedly dismissed the Dead as "a load of old rope" after the band's shambling June 18, 1967 performance at the Monterey Pop Festival.



It was only following the release of their second LP, Anthem of the Sun, in July of '68 – a whole year after the Summer of Love – that the Grateful Dead myth began to take shape.



At a time when live recordings by a rock band (especially one with only a single studio LP to their credit) were still verboten, Anthem of the Sun was an overt attempt by the Dead to capture the enthusiasm of their live show on a studio album. In contrast to their debut, which was recorded in four days, the Anthem of the Sun sessions stretched on for more than half a year, with their producer David Hassinger leaving in disgust after two months. The resulting five-song album stitched together the studio tracks with portions of no fewer than eighteen live performances.



Anthem of the Sun was a curious record indeed – a jumbled collage, a bit of mess. Yet it was ecstatically received by the hippie community at the time, which regarded this album and After Bathing at Baxter's as quintessential documents of the psychedelic experience. Indeed, in the months following the LP's release, new subscribers to Rolling Stone could choose to receive either a free roach clip or a copy of Anthem of the Sun.



"Way back then, if you wanted to believe desperately enough or maybe had the right inner chemical balance, Anthem Of The Sun was the album to save the world," Nick Kent wrote in 1974. "Now it amounts at least to the ears of this once-believer, to the sum of its individual parts and no more – like the Airplane's similarly experimental After Bathing at Baxter's, a muddled, but quaintly grandiose, acid curio."



The Dead themselves seemed equally ambivalent about the album in the years following its release. "There's parts of it that sound dated, but parts of it are far out, even too far out...It's definitely weird," Jerry Garcia remarked in a sprawling 1972 interview with Jann Wenner and Charles Reich that ran in Rolling Stone issues 100 and 101. "On one level it's successful, in terms of the form and structure of it. It's something which you can dig. But in terms of the way the individual things are performed, it's a drag."



Bassist Phil Lesh was more blunt in a 1970 interview with Melody Maker's Richard Williams: "I know we could have done it better, but we simply didn't know how."



RS's subsequent criticism of this album is arguably even more befuddling than Jim Miller's goofy original review.



This "masterpiece of rock" was rated three stars in the first edition of the record guide, where John Milward wrote that it "captured the Dead in its acid-gobbling element."



Dave Marsh excoriated the Dead in the second edition of the guide (describing them as "a pox upon the face of pop"). He rated Anthem of the Sun two stars.



Paul Evans wrote that Anthem of the Sun is characterized by a "puzzling experimentalism" in the third edition of the record guide, but restored the three-star rating.



Greg Kot once again rated the album two stars in the fourth edition, calling it "ambitious but awkward".



Anthem of the Sun was #287 on RS's 500 greatest albums list.

Rating: Favorable

"On the Grateful Dead's Anthem of the Sun the studio with its production work dissolves into live performance, the carefully crafted is thrown together with the casually tossed off, and the results are spliced together. The end product is one of the finest albums to come out of San Francisco, a personal statement of the rock aesthetic on a level with the Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxters. To be sure, the album has its weak points, but as a total work it is remarkably successful...The first side of Anthem of the Sun is a masterpiece of rock...



...The main theme of 'Other One' is an eminently memorable quasi-county [sic] melody that starts right off with the tasteful guitar of Garcia that dominates the record; a second movement starts the confusion between live and studio (nice stereo production work here), fading into a restatement of the main theme; then there is some beautiful musique concrete leading into 'Caboose'. Already there is evident carefully arranged vocal work, a departure from the Dead's previous release...



...Hart and Kreutzmann work together to form one of the most powerful (and inventive) percussion units in rock. With 'Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)' we are confronted with the album's most curious track, which ranges from a white-imitation blues riff vamp-until-ready to 60-cycle hum and microphone feedback. The vocal sounds like Danny Kalb (poor in other words), but this in fact is the main consistent problem with the album: the vocals." (Jim Miller, 9/28/68 Review)





The Grateful Dead are the iconic San Francisco band, an embodiment of everything that was good and true about the 1960s. And yet, the fact is that back in '67, when the SF scene was at the height of its influence, the Dead were not particularly well-respected or even liked outside the confines of Haight-Ashbury. "The Jefferson Airplane were the darlings of the movement," Nick Kent wrote in a 4/27/74 NME retrospective. "The Grateful Dead were the black-sheep." Indeed, their March '67 eponymous debut was widely perceived as a dud – especially, I imagine, when heard alongside the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, which came out a few weeks earlier. And Pete Townshend reportedly dismissed the Dead as "a load of old rope" after the band's shambling June 18, 1967 performance at the Monterey Pop Festival.


