0 A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

(Uncorrected short version here.)

A Tribute to Jack Johnson is a great example of "electric Miles," a late phase of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis's career begun in 1968 with In a Silent Way. Electric Miles not only wired and amped up his icy attitude and complex sound, but began looking to more contemporary sources as well, such as Sly Stone and James Brown, for the self-conscious explorations of identity that provide so much urgency here, still, for this and for so much of his work from the time, at once operating inside a tradition and yet feverishly innovating and expanding it. This album is well known, much loved, and there's not a lot I can add except to echo the sentiment that it's one of the greatest albums ever made, jazz or rock, and you should probably go listen to it right off.



Around this time Miles Davis declared he wanted to put together "the greatest rock and roll band you ever heard." That project was underway even before Jack Johnson, notably on Bitches Brew, but Jack Johnson leaves behind even more connections to jazz and goes even more deeply into an even more explicitly rock context, putting a pot of a raw stew of sound and rhythm directly onto the fire. I like Bitches Brew and Big Fun too, and many parts of many of the others from this period, but the desert island thought experiment applied narrowly makes Jack Johnson the one I'm going to pick. Guitarist John McLaughlin is much the face of the turn to rock (ironic considering what follows for his career), a serendipitous find on the part of Davis that he used to maximum effect, with McLaughlin's harsh, choppy, rhythmic, and irresistible play so unlike anything ever heard before. Producer Teo Macero is critically important too, the mad Dr. Frankenstein stitching together the parts to make this monster. Consider, for example, the edit at the center of the second side and long track, "Yesternow." Until that point it has built on a reworked and recontextualized bass figure from James Brown's "Say it Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud." It suddenly shifts gears at midpoint to a snippet from the In a Silent Way sessions, which reads almost like a momentary pause for reflection, implicitly demonstrating how far they have traveled in only three years, and then it moves to the "Willie Nelson" section. A whole new cast is on hand now in addition to Davis and McLaughlin: drummer Jack DeJohnette, guitarist Sonny Sharrock, and others, working it, sculpting it, turning it out ultimately into a complex of strange noises circling a guitar figure like strands of DNA, a chilly and beautiful moment, interrupted by musical rampaging. But this album goes to lots of amazing places, and lots of sidemen pull off amazing stunts, such as Herbie Hancock, fitted out for his part on the first side and long track, "Right Off," with an organ that sounds like they found it at a thrift store on the way to the date. Or drummer Billy Cobham who thrashes and splashes tirelessly, the long-haul trucker bringing this one home, in circular fashion. And don't ever forget the playing of Miles Davis here—he could well be the best in this whole remarkable stable, capable as always of bursts of sustained lyrical beauty, such as his first solo a few minutes in to "Right Off." This kind of playing we're already familiar with of course—"Pharoah's Dance" on Bitches Brew was my own memorable first exposure to it. But it extends back and virtually all the way through his career, achieving emotional tones reminiscent of singers, who happen to have the advantage of tender and meaningful words to shore up their effects.

No words are heard on Jack Johnson until near the very end—that's no surprise, given the album's origins as jazz and at the same time its fealty to the kind of rock (not rock 'n' roll) that plays for extended passages and seated audiences. If anything, the surprise is that there are words on this album. But Jack Johnson is obviously inspired by a fictionalized treatment of the boxer in a Broadway production of the time, The Great White Hope (where he is known as Jack Jefferson), which won a Pulitzer and a Tony in 1969. The words are only artifact of the project's origins as a soundtrack for a proposed biopic movie about Johnson. Words were never Miles Davis's forte but these spoken words are deadly serious, speaking to the sources of this remarkable music, uncovering a great source of identity in the boxer from the turn of the 20th century (which Davis discusses in his liner notes: "The rise of Jack Johnson to world heavyweight supremacy in 1908 was a signal for white envy to erupt. Can you get to that?"): "I'm Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world. I'm black. They never let me forget it. I'm black all right. I'll never let them forget it."

(One note of correction: James Earl Jones was in The Great White Hope play as well as the 1970 movie directed by Martin Ritt. But that's Brock Peters on Jack Johnson.)

Detail: A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

0 Tapestry (1971)

(Somewhat addled previous review here. Somewhat more sensible review of the main song here.)

I wrote this piece for a fanzine in the '90s. The topic was something on the order of "first record," which you will see I was at pains to twist to my own ends. For better or worse I still own the album in vinyl, as described, perhaps a bit more aged now (and my turntable still needs replacing too).



Carole King’s Tapestry was not the first record that I bought—hardly. In fact, I don’t think I actually came to own a copy of it until sometime in the ‘80s, and then only because of a wife who loved her old copy of it to distraction. To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember the circumstances of purchasing it or how this copy I now have actually came into my possession, or even whether it is the first or the second or possibly even the third time that I have acquired it. But I do have it now, it is sitting upright on my desk and I am looking at it as I type. It’s in excellent condition, which is what makes me wonder if I didn’t buy it sometime in the last five to 10 years, when the vinyl market was closing down and I bought so much in a frenzy. A scratch mars the upper part of the binding, evidence of a cat I once had, a dear animal prone to such irksome habits. But otherwise it is in practically flawless shape, still shiny and smooth and supple. The irony is that I can’t even play it as my turntable has needed replacing for several years now.

Even so, I submit Tapestry as a first record under the thinnest tissue of rationalization, namely that it is my first inescapable album, of which I count only three others: Rumours, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and Thriller. I’m sure other examples exist for other people in this admittedly vaporous category, depending entirely on one’s circumstances and orientation (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Born to Run, Murmur, and Nevermind might be possibilities). My own inescapable albums were all mega-sellers that also happened to be perfectly fine records, though it’s unlikely I would have considered them much if they hadn’t been played ALL THE TIME on the radio. What unites them most of all is that, practically against my will, they insinuated themselves deep into my life.

Carole King’s blockbuster was the first of them, and my first taste of that, of course, was "It’s Too Late," a #1 hit for five weeks in the late spring and summer of 1971, when I was 16 and just finishing tenth grade. I hasten to point out, for the sake of that callow boy, that my professed tastes of the time ran toward rock and jazz and some blues, toward the Doors and Miles Davis and Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa and Johnny Winter—heavy, difficult, relatively arcane music, and the fewer who appreciated it the better, since it only afforded me more opportunity to proselytize and affect superiority. Yet in spite of myself I continued listening to AM Top 40 radio far more than underground FM, which typically bored me, unless it was albums I already knew. And in spite of myself I was still continually entangled with the AM fodder of the day, with "It’s Too Late" and "A Horse With No Name" and "Alone Again (Naturally)" and "Me and Mrs. Jones" and "Crocodile Rock" and "Hello It’s Me."

For most of that summer of 1971 you just couldn’t turn on the radio and avoid hearing the strains of "It’s Too Late" for long. And it always caught me up. It made me genuinely sad, even tearful on some occasions. Its details were so right, opening with "Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time," its generalities so provocative ("Something inside has died and I can’t hide"), its overwhelming conclusion so utterly impossible to refute: "And it’s too late, baby, now it’s too late." I tried once to identify the wan break and solo in the middle of the song as some sort of jazz-respectable thing, but even as I blurted that out to my friend I could hear the bullshit larded through it. The truth is that I couldn’t help myself. I just loved it because it was so damn pretty and moving.

The song captures an essence of giving up, which I believe is why it struck so many deep chords with me and, obviously, others. This was the time, the early ‘70s, as head-of-the-class baby boomers approached 30 (the whole thing so laughable now), when it was all basically over, "it" being the ‘60s. The time had come to put up or shut up, you heard a lot of that kind of sentiment, and a surprising number of people were opting to shut up, to stop waving their freak flag, stop rioting in the streets, shrug inward and isolate, retreat to normative values (even hippies headed back to the land, to farm), return to college, get married, get a job, make a decision, stop fooling around, and grow up—and so what if the war was still going on. It’s not surprising that the other song of that time that reliably choked me up was Carly Simon’s "That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be," another song of capitulation and quiet, if beautiful, despair.

But in another way, its most obvious, "It’s Too Late" ran somewhat against convention. More than anything, it’s a song about giving up on a deeply felt connection, a person you have been living with, for no obvious or good reason other than "Now you look so unhappy, and I feel like a fool." This was also a time, the early ‘70s, when separation was coming more and more to be preferred over battling through the difficulties of a relationship, a trend that would not slow for many years. There has since been some backlash to that, ringing statements that divorce is bad for children, and probably in turn there will be a backlash to that. The truth here will likely remain a painful puzzle for generations to come; the fact is that only in the 20th century have marriages for love (as opposed to marriages for social advantage and marriages arranged by parents) been typically accepted. Marrying for love is a theory that is beautiful on paper but has yet to be demonstrated conclusively workable in reality.

In that way, "It’s Too Late" provides one of the clearest and most straightforward statements of giving up that may exist in popular culture, a realm where, for example, Little Peggy March’s sentiments of a decade earlier are more common ("I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM/And where he goes I’LL FOLLOW I’LL FOLLOW I’LL FOLLOW/I will follow him"). In her tear-jerker hit, King argues gently and persuasively in favor of simply leaving behind a relationship, that it’s really for the good of all, and she delivers it with a healthy and untortured sadness that makes it convincing. Separate, cry and feel your pain, and then move on, she seems to be saying—"get on with your life," as well-meaning friends urge friends in the throes of break-ups of any magnitude. Break-ups never make any sense anyway, when people try to explain them, but everyone knows the feelings, and the feelings are all over this song.

I should say that I was prompted to this essay by a discussion of Tapestry I read by Rob Sheffield somewhere. "The songs were everywhere but so was the album cover," he wrote. "It was the first album cover I ever spent lots of time staring at. Carole’s in her apartment, sitting barefoot and frizzy-haired on her windowsill, one foot propped up, wearing a fuzzy sweater and jeans and holding some cloth in her hands. It’s a sad rainy day, but lots of sun is streaming through the ‘70s curtains. Carole’s cat sits at her feet. They’re both daydreaming, staring out the window. They’ve glanced at the camera for a minute, still lost in thought, and when the photographer leaves they’ll go back to staring out the window, alone together. You have no idea what they’re musing about. When I look at this photo now, I see things I didn’t see before. Carole’s wearing a wedding ring."

I had been driven to my own stacks to dig out my copy and look for myself. The first thing I noticed about the cover, with an almost paralyzing sort of shock, examining it closely for perhaps the first time in my life, was how young King looks (later I looked up the numbers and did the math, and I figure she's 28 in that picture). At the time of the hit I had thought of her as an "older" woman, which she would be to a 16-year-old, imparting hard-won wisdom. Then I went back to the piece and picked up where I had left off and I found him talking about how much older she looked in that picture than he had thought.

Something about the discrepancy of our perceptions—is Carole King older or younger than you thought?—struck me as terribly poignant. It made me sad the way "It’s Too Late" itself once made me sad, and for some time now I have kept the album cover out to look at, though of course I can't play the record because my turntable doesn't work. Perhaps it’s as cheaply provocative a question as Greil Marcus’s familiar Elvis formulation—did Elvis go to heaven or to hell? But I think it’s worth considering: Is Carole King younger or older than you thought? Did you think she was some ancient hippie and were surprised to find the girl who wrote the Little Eva and Shirelles hits? Or did you think she was a waify Janis Ian / Lisa Loeb prototype and were surprised to find a woman?

And if you were surprised, does it mean you lost something?

It’s an imponderable, this feeble zen koan—yet for me, tonight, it somehow only deepens the mystery of the effect that Tapestry has had and still seems to have on me, in spite of myself. I don’t think I’ve ever singled it out as anything particularly special, yet I’ve always been glad to have it, and happy to hear the songs on oldies stations. Still, if I actually played the album I would probably soon lose interest because it’s all so overly familiar now. I have been hearing the music for more than 25 years. Perhaps that’s why the object itself seems to be weaving such a spell on me. I am fascinated by it, picking it up to look at it closely, feeling its textures, even smelling it. Actually, it smells just like most of my albums.

The other hits and the rest of the album always struck me as only faint and distant echoes of "It’s Too Late." But because "It’s Too Late" had such a powerful effect on me for so many years, even its pale imitations held some interest... "I Feel the Earth Move" (the flip of the single, a "two-sided" hit), "So Far Away," "Home Again," "You’ve Got a Friend," "Where You Lead," and the genius stroke of re-covering "Will You Love Me Tomorrow"—each contained an unmistakable piece of what made "It’s Too Late" burrow so deeply into me. The sound of the album is all of a piece, slightly abashed pop, light tinkly jazz-rock arrangements put to the service of a painfully sincere folk feel, buttressed by a perfect sense of melody and the knack for the phrase that works, and King’s voice itself, all homely and achy and plaintive. Sometimes I feel like I could listen to it in great gulps, for hours at a time.

But it wasn’t until I was involved with the woman who became my wife, and later my ex-wife (oh yes, we crapped out like that too, "It’s Too Late" indeed), that I finally had that kind of exposure to it. She loved Tapestry, and played it over and over, practically every day for months and years, so that now it carries the added baggage of tiny moments precious to me and doubtless banal to all others—the way she let herself sink into the opening strains of "I Feel the Earth Move," parading the living room or the kitchen in her jeans and barefoot, or the way she sought out and found the notes of "Home Again" as she sang with it, or the annoying (and gratifying) way she smirked and carried on over her favorite, "A Natural Woman." As often as I explained to her that, in this case, the songwriter had been unfortunately exceeded by the chanteuse, she never showed much interest in Aretha Franklin’s version, and in fact often set the needle down directly to this track, playing it over and over, unself-consciously, maybe lighting a joint or taking a drink of white wine and going back to her work on whatever project she had to hand, humming and yelping happily with it. Is that why I’m just as happy I can’t play it, you wonder? No way. I wish I could play it right now, and get a hit myself off that baggage (though chances remain good, I insist, that I would stifle a yawn and find myself looking at the newspaper before even a side had played out).

Tapestry finally also played a minor role in the first assignment I ever had as a rock journalist, which was to review a Fleetwood Mac concert in 1982. In my lead for that piece I made a small joke, talking about how Carole King and Fleetwood Mac bracketed the ‘70s with super-popular soft-rock classics, and likening them to the famous hamburger franchise competitors that their names resemble. My editor laughed at that, looking over it with me right there, and I think that’s when he decided that in spite of my repressed, somewhat taciturn manner, I might actually have a sense of humor and be worth giving a dependable schedule of assignments. So when I look into Carole King’s face on the cover of this album, and note the details of lighting and the unfocused cat perched on its pillow and the wedding ring and the curtains and everything that Rob Sheffield saw and pointed out, I see that too, I see all of it, everything: my career, my marriage, my deceased pet, the transition from the late ‘60s to the ‘70s, the wrecks and the glories of my life, my place in history and beside it and without it. I feel the sky tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down; I’ve got a friend, etc. And I’m glad my turntable is broken because I don’t think the music could possibly support all of this, and likely never did, but against all odds or expectations and perhaps only for tonight the album cover itself somehow seems able to.

Detail: Tapestry (1971)

0 A Clockwork Orange (1971)

UK / USA, 136 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven
Editor: Bill Butler
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, James Marcus, Michael Tarn, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri, Michael Bates, Sheila Raynor, Philip Stone, Anthony Sharp, Carl Duering, Michael Gover, Aubrey Morris, David Prowse, Clive Francis

There's nothing subtle about A Clockwork Orange. Its famous violence is obvious and programmatic: assault, robbery, rape, murder, the usual. In fairness, the picture does a reasonably good job of anticipating how ongoing societal breakdowns play out. And the solutions to the violence, arguably the point of this near-future fantasy, are also obvious and programmatic (see title metaphor, which belongs to the author of the original novel, Anthony Burgess). In the end, in an example of classic Stanley Kubrick cynicism, it appears that attempting to solve problems only makes them worse, and in unimaginable ways. We are left to try to live with the consequences. I suspect all the heavy-handed, clonking points are as much as anything the reason why I loved it so much as a teen. I do appreciate better now the horrors of the violence in the first 15 minutes alone—"the old ultra-violence," as voiceover narrator and main dude Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) insists on calling it. But I also still appreciate the energy, concision, and choreography that went into those early scenes, especially the gang fight, which is a case of pure infectious dynamics. And the Beethoven soundtrack only propels it.

In fact, much like the case with some Woody Allen movies, I now experience A Clockwork Orange at least partly as formative and already internalized, operating in a kind of twilight haze of nostalgia. Some of the language formations—the moronic "well well well well well well well" of one of the thugs, the use of "appy polly loggies" as a sarcastic way to apologize, "eggiwegs" and such for food, and Alex's occasional elaborately Shakespearian turns of phrase, such as "what didst thou in thy mind have?"—I still use, and am often surprised on revisits to this movie to find them waiting for me there. A Clockwork Orange is less than convincing in its ideas, bogged down in outdated Cold War gestures such as a youth slang pervaded by Russian (that was Burgess more than director / screenwriter Kubrick), or just simply smug about its ability to shock. But some of its individual elements nonetheless remain outstanding—a hallmark of Kubrick films, as we can see better all the time.



In A Clockwork Orange, the single most important element is the performance by Malcolm McDowell, which it's fair to call a tour de force. Scrape away the smirking façade of McDowell's Alex and you are left with only another smirking façade, a taunting, jeering face of cruelty and youth, impatient for what he wants and taking it as he will, laughing at the gyrations of a society claiming to believe in things like fair play. Interestingly, a good deal of what makes McDowell's performance so effective is how much punishment he takes—not just his character Alex, but McDowell himself, playing him. He is spat on, forced to strip naked, knocked about frequently, his eyes pried open with clamps—and a lot of times it looks like it hurts. In one scene his head is held underwater for a very long time—time it yourself. He plays a horrible person but no one can say he doesn't receive his come-uppance.

Another important element: Beethoven stands in as a rich, complex symbol of culture and privilege. I like it better than Wagner, because it doesn't have the overt linkages to Nazism, yet Beethoven and more broadly the romantic style of symphony are Germanic (and 19th-century) enough that there is some unmistakable overripe hint of its poisoning the action with pulpy decadence. If at first Alex's appreciation for "the lovely Ludwig van" seems like a cheap affectation, it comes to work very well, as the pervasive ubiquity of Beethoven resembles the youth culture Alex wallows in. Beethoven's image is on every wall Alex calls home, and during the crime for which he is ultimately sent to prison he is attacked with a bust of the composer (defending himself with a giant statue of a cock and balls). The Beethoven element reaches its climax when the music is used to deliberately torture Alex—in one indelible image, his torturers are gathered around a pool table while the music plays, one of them idly rolling a ball back and forth across the table.

It's all a bit strained in the idea area, as I said—these are all-too 20th-century views of paranoia, totalitarianism, and manipulation of human will via techniques derived from Pavlov, Skinner, etc., which felt remarkably stale even at the time, one reason I suspect Kubrick omitted even reference to the title, let alone explication. And the story goes approximately the only direction it can go. But Kubrick (well, Burgess) even salvages that with a mechanized action / reaction narrative structure, in which many of Alex's victims get their turns as victimizers, and Alex, as he himself mentions late in the film, suffers his own tortures of the damned.

Perhaps most interesting, and to its vast credit, A Clockwork Orange is virtually drained of hackneyed emotional connections. In most vengeance-driven narratives we tend to be manipulated to be on one side or the other, often finding ourselves willy-nilly taking great vicarious satisfaction in the violence (cf., for just one obvious example, the 24 franchise). Perhaps Kubrick's greatest achievement is to keep us fairly neutral. What Alex does is horrible. But what is done to him is equally horrible and there's very little satisfaction in it—much less so when the injustice is only compounded and it begins to occur to us that there may actually be no just resolution available here at all, let alone a satisfying one.

In that case, maybe it's better to laugh, and so the movie goes out perhaps the only way it could: on one last vision of violence, Alex's declaration, "I was cured, all right," and the death-rattle chuckle of Gene Kelly's version of "Singin' in the Rain" playing over the credits.

Top 10 of 1971
1. A Clockwork Orange
2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
3. Walkabout
4. The French Connection
5. Carnal Knowledge
6. The Last Picture Show
7. Macbeth
8. Two Lane Blacktop
9. And Now for Something Completely Different
10. Duel

Detail: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

0 Doors, "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)" (1971)

(listen)

I'm not sure I would call the very last album by the Doors, L.A. Woman, their best—for one thing, I'm nearly as tired of "Riders on the Storm" as I am of its peers "Stairway to Heaven" and "Maggie May." But I rank it pretty high. I liked this blues direction they were falling all over. It is also home to this strange and wonderful song, which raves and thunders, looking directly into the future (if not the sun) at psychobilly, the Burning Man festival, and other human impulses. A methodical pounding rhythm section provides the foundation for Jim Morrison's heavily reverbed vocal, as he sing-tells tales of goings-on in the wilderness at night. Or the evolution of the blues. Or something. The mood is stark and dramatic and effective. The song has hold of a mighty current. Catharsis, purgation, revelry, ecstasy—all these things quiver behind and within it, underscored by the vivid lyrical scenes, the back beats cool and slow with plenty of precision, the Negroes in the forest brightly feathered, the friends we have gathered together on a thin raft. Yes, it veers dangerously close to sing-songy nursery rhyme children's music at points (it's not much of a melody for sure, and "the loss of God" is pure cheese as phrased), but it's fantastical and alive. Music for visions. Note: Texas radio and big beats are touched on here but there is nothing specifically about any white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that I can detect, except by implication insofar as they populate regions under discussion (Texas and Virginia). Inspirational line: "Out here on the perimeter there are no stars / Out here we is stoned—immaculate."

Detail: Doors, "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)" (1971)

0 Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here (1971)

The basic conceit of this volume in the 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which was not his real name either) may feel just slightly belabored, but I like the gimmick a lot anyway: a 24-hour ticktock from midnight to midnight following along with pretty much all the detectives of the 87th Precinct (hence the title, one presumes) as they go about their daily business. It's a short novel that basically breaks into two longish stories: "Nightshade" and "Daywatch" by names. It's a real jumble of police business, one of my favorite flavors of the procedural, perhaps best exemplified by the Jack Webb TV series Adam-12, which was less often one big case and more often three to five small threads of case work, some left unresolved. I have to say there's also some welcome relief for me that insane people with or without knife fetishes are missing from this one—they can be overworked in the series. I think these somewhat more low-key efforts are where McBain really did his best work in this series. I wonder if part of that isn't the constraints of the gimmick, reminiscent of those great and strange crime novels of the '30s and '40s such as They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The Big Clock, or Night of the Jabberwock, which among other things chipped in to an intensely creative time in the genre. In fact, Hail, Hail includes a ghost story in the nightshift section. There's a detective here, Kapek, who's not familiar to me. I realized, after I finished a burst of McBains toward the end of the year, that I didn't even get to very many of the titles from the '50s and '60s. I would think there are plenty of McBain partisans who might swear on either or both of those decades as his best, and I may yet include myself among them. Certainly the '90s and later seemed weaker, and there are some continuing problems with the '80s. It's a lot of books, after all—some 54 novels plus miscellaneous. That reminds me, I need to catch up on Dragnet again. Look, I'm just nutty for police procedurals. My favorite TV show of all time is Law & Order. McBain is plain one of the masters.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here (1971)

0 Brian Auger's Oblivion Express, "Dragon Song" (1971)

(listen)

Staying with John McLaughlin and things fusion one more week, British keyboardist Brian Auger's first album with his Oblivion Express band offers some slight pop sweetening and really makes the instrumental by McLaughlin gleam. Auger's take on "Dragon Song" (also on the Devotion album) is not so much dreamy and textured as streamlined and propulsive, not so much intuitive as professional, like the engine of transport the name bears. Among other things, the Oblivion Express included drummer Robbie McIntosh, later of the Average White Band, who in turn would later bring in Oblivion Express guitarist Jim Mullen to that project. I might like the McLaughlin original a little better now, but in high school daze the whole Brian Auger album this song is found on became an obsessive favorite. "Dragon Song" stays well within the bounds of what it intends to be, a straightforward blast, with a churning, catalyzing bass figure that sends it hurtling down those tracks. Mullen steps in and peals off a solo I seem to know still note for note. Then Auger has his turn on a Hammond organ (or similar keyboard). Hey, didn't we have a time doing it this way. A bewitching riff, a tight band, solos, music for chair-sitting and head-bobbing at home. With Brian Auger's discography running now into the dozens of albums (none of which I know after the mid-'70s) it's fair enough to call him a professional in the business. But if there is formula and calculation to this, that doesn't make it any less effective. Although it may account for why I lost interest in him relatively early.

Detail: Brian Auger's Oblivion Express, "Dragon Song" (1971)

0 Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (1971)

(listen)

I'm not about to attempt sorting out better from best among the Rolling Stones albums from the late '60s and early '70s. It's arguably their best period, when they seemed to effortlessly achieve status as world's greatest rock 'n' roll band. For sentimental reasons, I still tend to prefer the 1964 to 1967 period personally. But if forced to make a choice, 1971's Sticky Fingers is usually the one I want to name from the great run. It's no knock on Let it Bleed or Exile on Main St.—it's just that the album with the zipper cover designed by Andy Warhol was the one I owned and thus tends to remain the most familiar. But there's also the matter of this amazing song, which truly closes the deal. It starts as classic crunching Stones electric guitar blues riff, up there with "Brown Sugar" and "Tumbling Dice" and all those. Then, at about the halfway point of a 7:16 length, it wanders off into "Layla" territory with another song entirely, one obviously built out of an impromptu jam led by Mick Taylor's lyrical guitar play, Bobby Keys's barrelhouse saxophone, and a band capable of locking into solid grooves at will, as second nature. There's little else like it across the Stones' entire catalog, and even as it strays a bit into the prog-inflected territory of the times (a feature I like about it as much as any other, as the Stones have always been slaves to fashion, which often plays out comically) it remains unmistakably a product of a greatest rock 'n' roll band: raunchy, swinging, funny, hairy, evocative, and beautiful. Look for it at the movies in Blow, Casino (in its entirety), and The Fighter, among others.

Detail: Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (1971)