Various Artists - Meridian 1970

Another contribution in the occasional series, 'Great Compilations Of Our Time'. This one, by journalist and author Jon Savage ('England's Dreaming', about the punk revolution, is probably his best known book) is based on the belief that the cusp of the 1960s and 1970s was not, as is sometimes suggested, a musical wasteland. This particular set focuses on 1970 but there is an equally good case for 1971 as being the 'annus mirabilis' of the album. Just look at the list of LPs released that year - Hunky Dory, Meddle, Blue, L.A. Woman, Tapestry just a small taster. Anyway, back to 1970 and Meridian 70. It's a great listen and I've pasted Savage's lengthy sleeve notes below.

If there's any interest, I've also got an authorised download-only Volume 2.

1. Free - “Mouthful of Glass” 
2. The Doobie Brothers - “Nobody”
3. Steve Miller Band - “Industrial Military Complex Hex” 
4. Little Feat - “Hamburger Midnight” 
5. Sir Douglas Quintet - “Catch Your Man on the Rise” 
6. Danny O’Keefe - “3:10 Smokey Thursday” 
7. The Move - “Message From the Country” 
8. Dave Mason - “Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave”
9. Nick Drake - “Three Hours” 
10. Meic Stevens - “One Night Wonder” 
11. Rod Stewart - “Man of Constant Sorrow” 
12. Alexandra ‘Skip’ Spence - “Cripple Creek”
13. The Byrds - “Tulsa County”
14. Jesse Winchester - “Biloxi” 
15. Donovan - “The Song of the Wandering Aengus”
16. Jefferson Airplane - “Good Shepherd” 
17. Loudon Wainwright III - “Black Uncle Remus”
18. Leo Kottke - “Hear the Wind Howl”
19. Tommy Flanders - “The Moonstone”
20. The James Gang - “The Ashes The Rain and I”

This record began as one evening’s free-association with four of my peers, retracing the music that we actually liked as real-time mid-teenagers in the late sixties/ early seventies. To recapture the event, I made a few CDR’s, which I distributed during the next few months. One of the people that I handed them to was Jeff Barrett, who immediately wanted to release it as it stood. Several months later, after much hard work, and with a few necessary changes caused by licensing problems (pause and counting up to 10), here is the finished result.

The idea was to celebrate a particularly misunderstood musical moment. Contrary to the received opinion, the cusp of the 60’s/70’s was not a musical wasteland: to be sure, there was a lot of filler and absolute pointlessness as, it seemed, every single member of every single big late 60’s band released a solo album. But, as ever with music – which is a great form of communication – there is always somebody saying something, always somebody making records that help you make sense of the world. Also, there was the law of averages: with so many releases at that point, there were many gems among the dross.

A couple of patterns emerge. First, people were still making tough rock records at a time when – after the unprecedented spring 1970 success of James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James — the music industry was heavily promoting singer-songwriters. Although it seemed then that you were not allowed to rock, these records did so, while delivering some kind of socio-political protest – against the Vietnam war, the military-industrial complex hex – that may now seem naïve but which I find heart-warming. After all, that legendary manifesto ‘The 4 Tenets of Rock’, enshrines the following requirements: ‘Raucousness, Rudeness, Banality and Aimless Protest’. Right on!

The other thing that becomes clear is that even within the soon-to-be-over-marketed singer/songwriter genre, there was an enormous amount of variation. For every introspective bromide or faux-country lament, there were a dozen oddities, life stories, songs of spook and dread. Heard this way, an acoustic guitar did not signal lamentable self-absorption but a direct experiential connection to the American beat/ hobo tradition of the 30’s and its post-Harry Smith take up in the 1950’s – which, as Greil Marcus has thoroughly researched, then passed through Dylan into the sixties mainstream.

The fact that the turn of the 70’s was a time of wasteful overproduction – just before the first great vinyl scare of 1972-3 – doesn’t mean that it was all bad. Far from it. By editing indifferent albums down to their best cut, in finding unfamiliar songs by well-known artists and uncovering a few well-kept secrets, we’ve aimed above all to compile a CD that sounds good in the 21st century. Whether you want breaks, acid-folk or the real Americana, you can find them here, at that very moment when the freedoms of the sixties reached their full splendour – Median 1970, Meridian 1970.

1: Free, Mouthful of Grass

Although best known for their swaggering blues rock (epitomised by the classic All Right Now), Free were also masters of the slow burn. This hypnotic time-stretching is heard at its best on their second album, 1970’s Free – the one with the naked woman on the cover: an excellent marketing strategy for their teenage male audience – from which this meditative 12 string instrumental is taken. Listeners may be more familiar with its appearance on the B side of All Right Nowa few months after its first release. (From Free, Universal/ Island CD)

2: The Doobie Brothers, Nobody

Mainstream, albeit highly entertaining hippie schlock-meisters after the 1972 success of Listen to the Music, the Doobie Brothers began life as a San Jose bar band mentored by the mercurial Skip Spence. Even in his decline, as author William Gibson reveals in Ugly Things magazine (Issue 21, Skip Spence’s Jeans), Spence could still tutor the world in extra-terrestrial cool. The terse, uptempoNobody features the Doobies’ trademark high harmonies and vaguely portentous lyrics, then tops them off with a hot guitar solo that showed just how much Spence had taught them.(from The Doobie Brothers, Warner Archives CD)

3: Steve Miller Band, Industrial Military Complex Hex

One in a prolonged series of pulp protests from this pop/rock journeyman (check out the epic, 16 minute Macho City on David Mancuso presents The Loft–Volume 2), Industrial Military Complex Hex lifts the famous phrase from Eisenhower’s valedictory speech as President, turns it into a riff, then matches it to some spacey, Abbey Road style dynamics. (Not for nothing had Miller recorded My Dark Hour with Paul McCartney in 1969). Like many hippie-era rants, the sentiments (if not the exact form of expression) remain surprisingly relevant. From the last of his great run of sixties’ records. (from Number 5, Capitol CD)

4: Little Feat, Hamburger Midnight

Contemporary critics cited their debt to the Band but a high weirdness quotient rescued Little Feat’s debut album from such a dreary fate. From the high concept ‘snow in LA’ cover on down, this 1970 record mixes proto-Americana with scything side guitars and a skewed sensibility that comes from the time that singer/ guitarist/ writer Lowell George and bassist/ vocalist Roy Estrada spent with the Mothers of Invention. While George’s first outfit, the Factory, strained for affect, Little Feat arrived fully-fledged, with classics like Willing vying with low-life scuzz-scenarios like Hamburger Midnight. (from Little Feat, Warners CD)

5: Sir Douglas Quintet, Catch Your Man on the Rise

Like many groups of the period, the Quintet promoted a down-home aura on their fourth album for Mercury, with a classic inside sleeve shot of Doug Sahm and his colleagues hanging out in San Antonio‘s downtown/ hippie zone. With its embossed, foldout cover, 1+1+1+4 was a high profile release for the group, not the least because it contained this standout rocker. Featuring breaks a-go-go and searing guitar – and a scenario not unlike Moby Grape’s Murder In My Heart For the Judge – it was hot enough to be issued as a single in Europe. (from 1+1+1+4, Acadia CD)

6: Danny O’Keefe, 3:10 Smokey Thursday

Ignored on its first 1970 issue, this album – with its iconic, salmon-tinted Eve Babitz sleeve – has grown in stature in the intervening years, offering proper Americana with its songs about steel guitars, covered wagons, hobos and this perfect, bittersweet ecological protest. Featuring a string arrangement by Arif Mardin and back-up by the cream of the Muscle Shoals mafia, 3:10 Smokey Thursday is another song whose message has not dimmed. O’Keefe got his reward the next year, when a revised version of a song from this album, Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues, made the US top ten. (from Danny O’Keefe, Collectors Choice CD)

7: The Move, Message From the Country

Written by Jeff Lynne, this hymn to the pastoral life is very similar in

mood and sound to the very first (and much imitated) ELO single, 10538 Overture– hardly surprising as they were made by the same group. The title track to the last (1971) Move album, Message From The Country showcases two masters of the harmonic art – Lynne and Roy Wood – raising up their voices to the sky in one of the very last authentic slices of English psychedelia, featuring stereo pans galore, an irresistable riff, and an extended fade that reverberates into the ether. (From Message from the Country; on CD A Message From the Country: Jeff Lynne 1968-1973 EMI 1989)

8: Dave Mason, Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave

Housed in what was then one of the most lavish packages to date – with a triple foldout, cut-out sleeve and swirly marble-coloured vinyl – Dave Mason’s first solo album flattered to deceive. A certain world-weariness and insistence on ‘dues paying’ makes the record hard to listen to all the way through – just as it marked a significant retreat from Mason’s psychedelic heights with Traffic – but this long song justifies its length on feel alone. Having an uncredited Eric Clapton on a prolonged, sinuous wah-wah jag doesn’t harm it, either. (From Alone Together, MCA CD)

9: Nick Drake, Three Hours

Drake posthumous reputation has never been higher in 2004, thanks to a top 30 single and the excellent compilation Made To Love Magic, so his story should need no introduction. From yet another album with an iconic sleeve – this era was the high-water mark for design and inventiveness: now lost on CD and iPod –Three Hours combines a subtle air of modal menace and loss with one of Drake’s more propulsive arrangements, featuring Danny Thompson on bass and Rocky Dzidzornu on congas. It is also that rarity, a great British driving song. (from:“Five Leaves Left, Universal/ Island)

10: Meic Stevens, One Night Wonder

Over the last few years, Meic Stevens has finally begun to get the acclaim he deserves for his extraordinary back catalogue. Whether it be the 1965 demos released by Tenth Planet (as September 1965: the Tony Pike Session), the 57 Welsh language recordings between 1968-1979 and rereleased on Sain (“disgwyl rhywbeth gwell i dod…”), or Rhino Handmade’s expanded version of his English record for Warners, 1970’s Outlander, one of the British Isles’ best kept secrets is out. Influenced by the American folk revival, his friendship with Syd Barrett, and the coast of his native Pembrokeshire, Stevens fused folk blues and psychedelia to stunning effect in the late sixties. This demo from that period illustrates the storytelling passion and modal dread that led Bob Dylan to call him ‘one of Britain’s greatest singer/ songwriters’. (from Ghost Town, Tenth Planet, 1000 copies vinyl only, 1997. First time on CD)

11: Rod Stewart, Man of Constant Sorrow

The turn of the decade was an annus mirabilis for Rod Stewart. In just over a year, he appeared on three great albums: the reformed Faces Long Player, the Jeff Beck Group’s, Beck-Ola and his first solo collection, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down. Its Vertigo swirl housed in a bizarre ‘dirty old man’ sleeve, the record mixed judicious covers (including Handbags and Gladrags) with some fine originals. For sheer human empathy, however, this version of the traditional lament popularised by the first Dylan album takes some beating. Please note Michael Waller’s death-knell bass drum and the acoustic/ electric guitar debate between Ron Wood and Martin Quittenton — one of the great lost talents of the era. (from An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down, Mercury CD)

12: Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence, Cripple Creek

Another cult secret who has finally been brought into the light, Skip Spence did not live to see his one great, unmediated creation, 1969’s Oar album, get the love and respect that is its and his due. The circumstances are now familiar (and if they aren’t, buy the album!) but just to recap: after a psychotic episode that saw him ejected from Moby Grape and incarcerated in New York’s Bellevue mental hospital, Spence travelled down to Nashville and took five days making his one and only solo record before disappearing to San Jose (see Track 2). War In Peacehas justly got most of the attention, but this deceptively low-key deep country shuffle manages to parse Oars themes of life/death, guilt and transformation into just over 2 minutes. (From Oar, Sundazed expanded edition CD 1999)

13: The Byrds, Tulsa County

Contrary to received opinion, the Byrds didn’t plunge totally downhill straight after Sweetheart of the Radio: their next three records all had a few songs which contained flashes of their former brilliance and that justified Roger McGuinn’s continued use of the name. From their would-be big tie-in with the Easy Riderfilm, this sweet, patient version of an old Pamela Pollard tune embodies their updated country concept: McGuinn’s voice could never be anything but pop, and that’s what makes it work. All space and melody, Tulsa Country Blue is the standout of a rather uneven and uncertain collection partially redeemed by a great cover image. (From The Ballad of Easy Rider, Sony expanded edition 1997)

14: Jesse Winchester, Biloxi

Winchester’s story was that he was a draft dodger escaped to Canada, which meant heavy heavy bonus points in 1970. Produced by Robbie Robertson and engineered by Todd Rundgren, his first solo record contains classics like The Brand New Tennessee Waltz among its more routine, post-Band longueurs: you can hear the beards. “Biloxi” scores because of its almost ambient atmosphere, aching melody, and sweet, almost innocent evocation of humid summers by the sea: a secret garden from which Winchester was forcibly excluded by his decision not to fight. (from Jesse Winchester, on CD Stony Plain SPCD 1198)

15: Donovan, The Song of the Wandering Aengus

After an incredible five year run in the second half of the sixties, during which he could do little wrong, Donovan faltered in the new decade. The Open Road album had good ideas and songs but sketchy execution, and H.M.S. Donovan (like the second disc of From a Flower to a Garden, ostensibly aimed at children) was just too cute. Pick up if you can the single from this period, coupling the Don’s peerless protest against seal-culling, Celia of the Seals, with this extraordinary redaction of W.B.Yeats’ Song of the Wandering Aengus, modal Celtic ecstasy that gives Meic Stevens a run for his money and brings tears to the eyes. (from H.M.S. Donovan, BGO CD)

16: Jefferson Airplane, Good Shepherd

Few big name groups from the late 60’s have dated worse than Jefferson Airplane, whose artistic descent from the sublime discipline of Surrealistic Pillowto the bombast of Volunteers took just over two years. With its ugly cover, patronising satire and the local superstar mafia featured on, amongst other things, ‘musical sailboat’, this record illustrates how the San Franciscan boom had lost its soul by the late 60’s. However Jorma Kaukonen’s arrangement of the traditional Good Shepherd is a shining light of restraint and melody among the huffing and puffing, and just so you don’t forget, it contains one of the last great mind-melting, distorto SF guitar breaks. (From: Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers, BMG CD)

17: Loudon Wainwright III, Black Uncle Remus

With its stark, almost punky ‘new depression’ sleeve and tunes about street characters (the great Central Square Song), Loudon Wainwright’s first album plugged straight into the new decade’s downbeat imperative. The author now doesn’t reckon much to this lowlife anthem, but I love its sheer percussive attack, sharp punning lyrics (with references to Huckleberry Finn and sundry blues tropes), and empathetic anger. Juvenilia it might have been, but there’s nothing wrong with that: Wainwright sounds and plays pissed off, and there wasn’t enough of that in 1970. (from Loudun Wainwright III)

18: Leo Kottke, Hear The Wind Howl

With the posthumous – and entirely justified – canonisation of John Fahey, his colleague, friend and sometime rival Leo Kottke has got unjustly lost in the shuffle. Check out the Takoma record (his second), 6&12 String Guitar, then find if you can his second for Capitol, Mudlark – produced by John Fahey, and featuring some of Little Feat and Kaleidoscope as the rhythm section. Kottke famous described his voice as ‘geese farts on a muggy day’, but it drives this breakneck, hellhound-on-my-trail invocation of weather as mood. How to make an acoustic guitar rock, in one easy lesson, with an admonitory lyric: ‘you can’t go back, everything’s changed’. (From Mudlark CD BGO CD101)

19: Tommy Flanders, The Moonstone

Former singer with NYC’s the Blues Project, Flanders decamped to the New England countryside – the same locus that would inspire James Taylor a year later – and made this one solo record in 1969. Like many such artefacts, it is a curate’s egg – sometimes the pastoral odes could get a bit cloying – but at its best it ranks up there with the best in the s/s genre. Amply aided by the Tambourine Man himself, Bruce Langhorne, Flanders really pulled one out of the hat with this slice of deep spook: a combination of driving song and ambient atmosphere that deservedly gave the album its title. (from The Moonstone)

20: The James Gang, The Ashes the Rain and I

Best known for his stint in the Eagles, Cleveland’s Joe Walsh made a couple of sharp, Pete Townshend-endorsed rock records at the turn of the decade. Yer Album and The James Gang Rides Again were chock-full of chunky breaks, mumbled weirdness, and some surprisingly melodic and nimble compositions.The Ashes, The Rain and I featured Walsh’s keening voice and acoustic picking slowly submerged by an astringent, circular string arrangement by none other than Jack Nitzsche, closing a rather short-measure album with a perfect five-minute Mid-Western symphony. (from James Gang Rides Again, BGO CD)