"Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield (May, 1973)

Dad's Take:

I have to admit to being surprised to see this on our list of classic albums. Yes, the title song was a big hit after being used as the theme for The Exorcist, but if every album that spawned a big hit made our list, we'd be reviewing a lot more albums.

When I read that the album stayed on the British charts for a whopping 279 weeks, all became clear. We are, after all, working from a British list. It was not as popular in the U.S., although it did go gold, largely because the unauthorized single edit reached number 7 on the Billboard charts.

So, here I am, listening to an album that I've always considered kind of a novelty record without ever listening to the whole thing, and I realize I haven't given it enough credit. As a pioneering mix of Progressive and New Age music, it has, indeed, been influential. And it's an interesting listen, moving from the music that seems creepy because I associate it with the Exorcist, through some edgy guitar bits, pleasant soft sections, instrumental demonstrations, freaky bits, and so on, the album is kind of all over the map. Some sections are a complete surprise, like the final section of "Tubular Bells (Part Two)," which is like nothing before it on the record.

In short, the album is more enjoyable that I expected.

At times it teeters on the brink of boredom or the threshold of tedium, but then it changes in time (usually) to keep from falling over the edge. At other times, it is cool, mesmerizing, and even exciting.

Although, to a Yank, it hardly seems to qualify in the same class as other albums on our list, I have to give this one credit. Anyone who was paying attention in '73 will recognize the main theme of this suite, and it continues to be used today. More importantly, the record is creative and inventive. This might not become part of my regular rotation, but I do feel better educated than I was before I spun it. It's a more substantial record than I believed going in.

Brad's Take:

Typically, I find myself dreading going into albums with 20+ minute long songs. It's always hard for me to push play. But once I finally gain the courage to begin, I usually know after a few minutes if I was being silly or not. Tubular Bells is 2 instrumental tracks that are each over 20 minutes long. I've been putting off reviewing it because of that. I needed to be in the right mood. Today, I was in that mood, and after about 5 minutes I knew that it was going to be okay.

The tracks are always changing which makes this pretty easy to sit through. There's moments of classical, new age, metal, and typical 70s rock all sprinkled through these 49 minutes. It keeps it interesting and everything flows brilliantly, even when it goes from soft and quiet parts to metal guitar solos and back again. It almost feels like it's a bunch of song ideas that are all just glued seamlessly together.

I'm not really sure why this album is on the list. Would it still be on the list if it wasn't for The Exorcist? Who knows...

"Raw Power" by The Stooges (February, 1973)

Dad's Take:

Iggy Pop and the Stooges take us into the days of proto-punk.

The first two songs on this album remind me of the Velvet Underground and the Doors, respectively, but with a new attitude and swagger that came out of the VU's New York club scene. Equal parts hard rock, late-period psychedelia, Bowie-influenced glam without the glamour, and what we knew later as punk, this album is edgy and--as the title says--raw, a bridge between everything before and everything after.

Like many classics, this is an album that wasn't well received at the time, but in retrospect was highly innovative and influential. Innovation is just weird when it first surfaces, but gains in value an statue over time. It's hard to imagine punk or grunge developing as they did without the Stooges laying the foundation.

Iggy is scary, powerful, odd, and crazy--he's rock and roll. And he had the right band behind him to deliver his unique brand of Iggyness.

Something tells me Brad might see this as a familiar island in the seventies sea, not that different from what he knows better. But the boy surprises me with some of his reviews (and that's kind of the point of our bigenerational assessments), so we'll see,

Brad's Take:

Kicking the album off with "Search and Destroy" sets this album up perfectly. I love how fuzzy and gross the guitar sounds on it. It's like guitarist James Williamson said, "I'm cranking up my amp's distortion to a million and stomping all eighty-two of my distortion pedals!" It sounds so offensive, yet perfect at the same time. I think that sums up Iggy Pop and his band as a whole pretty well, actually.

Raw Power kind of reminds me of the early Black Sabbath stuff, Deep Purple, and albums like theirs where there isn't much else to say other than "this rocks!" There isn't really much else to say about this. You just want to turn it up, clear your mind, and enjoy it because every song is great.

The album is definitely raw and powerful like the title describes. It sounds dated, but that doesn't take away from the overall fun of it. It doesn't take itself too seriously so why should we? But if you're not cranking the volume up while you're listening to it, you're doing it all wrong.

"The Faust Tapes" by Faust (May, 1973)

Brad's Take:

Well, this is awkward... The Faust Tapes consists of two untitled 20+ minute long songs. Actually, nay. I wouldn't call these "songs." Let's just call them "tracks" as they're basically just a bunch of segements of "stuff" glued together. 

"Stuff" includes: 

- Noise

- Static

- People talking

- Actual songs

- Ambient instrumental interludes

- Creepy vocal things that sound like ghosts crying (actually scary)

- Other sounds I can't describe

Needless to say, this is a very strange (yet interesting) album, and even quite enjoyable, actually. I was not expecting to actually be as entertained as I ended up being. There's some really weird stuff on here. I had fun trying to figure out what they were actually using to make these sounds. The way they blended so many different sounds together and wove all of these weird segments into each other takes some real creativity and artistic vision. It's not as easy as just recording random sounds and calling it an album. The Faust Tapes isn't something you'd put in your car stereo and blast with your windows down with your friends. This is a very unique and interesting that begs for your attention. I'd highly suggest listening to it in headphones so you can experience the stereo mixing. I'm actually kind of sad that it's already over...

Dad's Take:

Interesting history on this one. Faust signed with a new label and part of the agreement was to give the label the recordings they'd done since their previous album for nothing so they could release it at a very low price. The result is an album of fragments pieced together to form a whole.

As the boy said, much of this is actually quite good, kind of a jazzy prog-rock, mixed with some studio experimentation. Some of the experiments remind me of some of Brian Wilson's recordings of chants and musical fooling around during the Smile sessions, mixed with some of John Lennon's sound collages from the last couple years of the Beatles catalog. They work pretty well, for the most part. Most of the fragments are short enough that even the "wayest outest" experiments don't get tedious. The whole thing is actually pretty mesmerizing.

Some of my favorite tracks include "Untitled," "Untitled," "Der Baum," and the surprisingly catchy bit of jazz-funk, "Untitled."

Unlike most of the classics on our list, this is one that completely escaped my attention until we started going through the list. It wasn't part of the seventies air I breathed like many of the other albums. In fact, I wasn't even aware it existed back in the day. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it that much in my early teens. But I like it more than I expected now.

This might not be the record to put on during your next dance party, but it makes for an interesting listen, one that will reveal new discoveries in subsequent spins.

"The Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd (March, 1973)

Dad's Take:

March 1, 1973 was a pretty good day in the music world, seeing the release of both John Cale's Paris 1919 and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.

I've learned a lot doing these reviews, but one of the lessons I've learned is that it's very hard to review a record that has been a cultural icon. This one, arguably the best-known album of the rock and roll era, demands much more attention than I'm going to give it on our little review page.

Between the opening heartbeat that segues into insanity (and I do love records that deal with insanity, whatever that may say about me) and the closing heartbeat that fades into oblivion, are the fantastic sounds that make this a special record. It's so deeply dyed into the fabric of my generation that to review it would be like reviewing the human circulatory system. It's such an ordinary part of existence that we forget how extraordinary it really is.

I really don't even know where to start writing. I'd rather just listen. So, yeah, this review is kind of a punt, but I get to hear this classic again, and that's the best part anyway. You should do the same.

Brad's Take:

It's really strange being from a totally different generation. I didn't really start discovering and getting heavily into music until the mid/late 90's so listening to music that came out in the 70's and earlier is sometimes hard for me to want to do because I just don't understand it a lot of the time. The generation gap has been very evident in a lot of my reviews. I don't try to hide it. I don't say "I don't get it" to sound snobby or anything, it's because I just actually don't get it.

With a lot of these albums we've reviewed, I feel like in order to fully understand why it's a classic album, you needed to be there witnessing all the hype happening in real time. You needed to see the affect it had on the world at the time it was released. You needed to witness the controversy it caused. You needed to be there to see how the music that came afterwards was influenced by one particular band or album, etc. For me, I'm working backwards here. So it's sometimes hard to keep an open mind and pretend that there hasn't already been something influenced by a particular classic album that I would describe as being much better than its source material, if that makes sense. For example, production styles and recording quality in general are so much more crisp and clear now compared to everything before the 80's. There's albums right now that sound better than anything The Beatles put out. Hell, even musicians recording in their bedrooms have better sounding recordings than a lot of these ones we've reviewed! Anyway, I'm rambling and going off topic a bit...

Needless to say, this is my first time listening to Dark Side of the Moon. It's an album I've always known about, but I never had an interest in listening to. I pretty much only knew Pink Floyd for their song "Another Brick in the Wall." I remember seeing the music video on VH-1's Pop Up Video every once in awhile when I was in junior high school.

My initial reaction is: It's weird! It's weird, but also very calming and hypnotic. It's no wonder the stoner kids gravitate towards it.

Although a lot of it is just super long instrumental music and jamming, there are some tracks that stood out to me:

"Time" has a nice funky groove to it which I enjoyed. "Money" is a song I forgot that I knew already, so that was cool to listen to. My favorite track was "Us and Them" though. I loved the choruses. Sounds so big and loud! And the chord changes during the choruses feel reeeeally good. That song was almost 8 minutes long, but it could have been longer and I'd be pleased.

I like how all the songs flow into each other. There's no fadeouts or long pauses. It's all pretty seamless from one song to the next. It makes it a lot easier to sit and listen to the entire album because it feels like you're supposed to. Like it was intended to be that way, which I'm sure was the intention.

While I don't see myself going back to this anytime soon, or feeling the need to dive into Pink Floyd's entire catalog now, it was cool finally giving this album a proper listen. I enjoyed the whole album. This is one of the rare ones we've reviewed where I agree that it should be classified as a classic.

"Paris 1919" by John Cale (March, 1973)

Dad's Take:

Funny how reviewing an album makes me notice something that has always kind of been there, as if it's the first time. Paying attention will do that.

When Paris 1919 opens, I detect an immediate Brian Wilson influence, a melodious baroque pop rock that was really not at all what I expected. The opener, "Child's Christmas in Wales," is poetic, as you'd expect from its titular reference to Dylan Thomas who is also referenced in the second verse. But it has poppy light-rock feel that makes it accessible despite its complicated lyrics. It's only the first of several literary references in an album that also includes songs named for Graham Greene and Macbeth.

It's a great introduction to an excellent album.

This record immediately grabbed me and didn't let go. It's smart without being self-obsessed, poetic without being obscure and, more than anything else, it's musical, with great melodies and incredible songs. A good example of this musicality is "The Endless Plain of Fortune," with its Wilson-like dark chords and heavy orchestration that create a somewhat frightening mood that grabs me by the throat and doesn't let go.

Song after song blows me away. "Andalucia" takes me to another world. "Macbeth" has a rock sound you wouldn't expect, with a bouncy Beach Boys-like rhythm and melody, but a harder feel. "Graham Greene" is another fun song. Every song on the album is enjoyable, and every song is substantial enough to require multiple listening to take it all in.

This is a great album, start to finish. Definitely one I need to know better.

The version I have includes a number of bonus outtakes, alternate takes, and rehearsals, which help to illuminate the album, but which I won't review in detail.

Brad's Take:

I can't say I ever heard of John Cale before his album Paris 1919 popped up on our list. I've started listening to it maybe three or four different times so we could carry on with our reviews, but each time ended pretty quickly after it started. I either got distracted, got bored, or it didn't fit the mood I was in at the time. I wanted to give it a fair shot so I waited. But when I decided to try and give it another go, it hit me. Right from the opening chords of the first track, "Child's Christmas in Wales" I knew that this was the right time to finally write about it.

Like my old man said, the Beach Boys/Brian Wilson influence is definitely apparent. But it's not a copy-cat situation, like Billy Fury trying to be Elvis and Buddy Holly. Instead, you just hear a guy creating beautiful music that is inspired yet unique.

To me, this doesn't feel like an album that was recorded in an actual recording studio. It feels more like something he created in his house at his own leisure, and then eventually released to the outside world when he thought it was finally right. The reason I feel that way, I think, is because it sounds so warm and laid back. "Andalucia" is a good example of what I mean.

But then "Macbeth" comes in... This song changes everything. Just when you start feeling comfortable and at home, all of a sudden, John throws a curve ball and hits you in the face with a loud, energetic, rocker. Squeal-y guitar solos and relentless drumming throughout the whole song really makes this one stand out.

Paris 1919 really is a masterpiece. It packs so much into just 30 minutes. There isn't anything missing here. You've got fantastic pop hooks, gorgeous instrumentation, big rockin' curve balls, and stripped down mellow songs. The lyrics are unique, the melodies are great... The whole album is just awesome.

I'm glad I waited so long to review this. Today was the perfect day to listen to this one.

"Blackboard Jungle Dub" by Lee Perry and the Upsetters (1973)

Dad's Take:

Lee Perry was pioneer of dub music, taking sounds he and dubbing them into innovative reggae music. This album originally had a very limited release, 300 copies, and sold only in Jamaica. That it has managed to build a cult following worthy of a classic albums list is pretty amazing.

OK, I have to admit it. Everything in that previous sentence led me to dread this review. This really isn't my kind of thing. But I didn't need to be afraid. It's actually a pleasant listen, although it's also very long and quickly starts to all sound the same.

It's really not so bad. It reminds me of some of those tropical sounds albums we did early in our attempt to review everything in this list. It makes for some interesting listening, and sometimes the sounds capture my imagination.

The problem is, this is so long, and that rhythm starts to sound monotonous very quickly. So, I'm listening to the whole album, and enjoying parts of it, but I have to admit, I'm really kind of bored. Nothing really stands out. It's just one long groove, kind of cool at times, but mostly it just grows old fast. I know there are probably devotees who would jump all over me for this review, but, you know, people like what they like, and this just does very little for me. It doesn't affect me emotionally or interest me intellectually.

I don't know what else to say. This just isn't the kind of music that holds my attention for 14 songs (18 on our expanded edition). I'm not saying it's bad. It might even be great. If it weren't so goldern long I might even actually like it, kind of. But, sorry dub fans, this just isn't for me.

Brad's Take:

The purpose of my dad and I starting this blog was to the show how generation gaps might affect reviews of a particular album. There's been a lot of albums so far where my old man loves an album, but I have a total opposite opinion, and that's what makes this blog the most interesting, usually.

This will not be one of those interesting reviews.

Dub music (or reggae, or whatever you're supposed to call this) is so far out of my comfort zone and personal taste. I just can't get into this at all. I can't even pretend to be optimistic about it. I have absolutely no interest in this style of music.

I think it's safe to say that you won't be seeing me or my dad at any reggae/dub festivals anytime soon.

"Talking Book" by Stevie Wonder (October, 1972)

Dad's Take:

The 1970s turned out to be a great decade for Stevie Wonder, and really started with this record, his 15th album.

Fueled by two monster hits "Superstition" and "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life," Stevie left Little Stevie Wonder behind and showed that he was a grown-up musical force to be reckoned with. This is where he became a superstar. This was hist first album to reach #1 on the R&B charts, and it made #3 on the Pop charts. It also took home three Grammys at the 1974 awards (the same year his next album, Innervisions, won album of the year). Obviously, Stevie Wonder dominated 1973, and it all started with this release in October, 1972.

Any album that starts with a classic megahit love song like "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life," has a lot to live up to. Sometimes it's hard to get beyond the kind of sappy lyrics and notice the jazzy rhythm section that drives the song. It's just a good one, all the way around.

But once Wonder gets passed the obvious radio hit that naturally starts the album, he hits a funky groove that shows he is more than a hit machine, that he's an innovative master of R&B. Today's R&B artists owe a huge debt to Stevie Wonder. While many of the songs seem locked very much in their time period, mainly because of the very-seventies electronic keyboards, others transcend the calendar and could have been laid down any time from the late sixties to today. "Maybe Your Baby" could have been sent back in time from now, especially vocally. But it's really the backing track that makes it for me, with the big Moog bass sound and the funk guitar, and interesting rhythms. I dare you to try to do something else while this song is playing.

The album goes on like this, combining gentle jazzy love songs with big R&B numbers, showing both sides of Stevie Wonder, and never getting boring because of the sameness that dominated some other albums of the period. There are also plenty of the social messages that have always been found in soul records. "Big Brother" is the obvious example here. Wonder is versatile, and his talents as a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist drive this record.

Of course, for me, the album is dominated by the monster sounds of "Superstition." What a song that is! Even after all these years, it's timely and modern and just plain Funky with a capital F. The kind of song that, if you do nothing else in your career, you'll be known as a legend because of this one record.

This is a great album. Sure, today parts of it sound dated, but certain sounds become associated with a specific time period because they dominated that time, and dominant albums are usually classics. It's hard, though, to imagine where modern R&B would be without the influence of this and other Wonder albums. And, as good as this is, it's hard to believe how much bigger Little Stevie was going to get over the next few years.

Brad's Take:

First off: It's crazy to think that in the early 70's Stevie Wonder was already releasing his 15th album. Was this guy releasing music since the beginning of time? What a machine!

The album opens with the super popular (and super dated) "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life." It's a cute song, but a great classic song? I dunno. The dated-ness of a few of these songs (mostly the slower ones) really took a toll on my patience and willingness to get through this. Blame it on the generation gaps before you strike me! Fortunately though, the great songs are actually really, really great!

"Maybe Your Baby" is definitely a highlight on Talking Book. Ray Parker Jr. (the Ghostbusters song guy!) plays some mean electric guitar on this heavy funk jam. If this song was peanut butter, it'd be extra chunky. "Tuesday Heartbreak" is another one of the great up-beat tunes on here that I really enjoyed.

But let's get real... "Superstition" takes the top highlight spot. That song still rocks! Totally timeless, Everything about that song is perfect,

Even on the very few doozies on Talking Book, Stevie's voice is what really carries the album. His voice and the emotion he packs behind it really makes his music shine. That voice is just "wonder-ful", even still.