Shaw and Anita Klemke, 1994); www.the-monks.com
Download: Not currently legally available
Intentional squalling feedback rattles the control room windows as Polydor’s genial producer struggles to protect Deutsche Gramophon’s delicate equipment from the uber-beat onslaught of The Monks. The Velvet Underground will be bending VU needles in a couple of years’ time, egos bolstered by their art-world credentials. But now, in 1965, The Monks and their nihilist German mentors are forcing the issue in the rarefied atmosphere of the recording studio.
A year or so before, The Monks were a group of ex-GIs called The 5 Torquays, playing to Hamburg teens and US airbase personnel, until an alchemical reaction of boredom, experiment and a pair of loopy existential visionaries called Walther and Karl brought about their miraculous transformation. Lovin’ Spoonful bowlcuts and Cuban heels gave way to shaved tonsures, black shirts and a bleakly realistic outlook. This was some of the hardest, most minimal and monochromatic rock’n’roll ever heard. Nobody in 1965 sang ferocious songs called things like I Hate You or Shut Up, stripped down to their fuzzed-up, screaming, percussive bones. Nowadays a lot of people do.
As bassist Eddie Shaw observes; ‘The Beastie Boys and Jello Biafra have said that our music had an effect on them. I really believe that music was evolving in this direction and we just stumbled across it early.’
The album was never released by Polydor in the US – ‘They insisted we tone our music down … or lose our contract’ – and The Monks disintegrated in a bitter flurry of impotent anger and disappointment. In retrospect, the album’s unique appeal lies in the collision of naiveté, rawness and the utter pre-punk impossibility of its existence. Even its completely black cover-design, looking more Joy Division than Yellow Submarine, sounded a jarring note at the very dawn of flower-pop. They performed live shows with The Kinks, The Troggs and The Creation, but even these hardened outfits rarely got close to their live sound in the studio. Monk music – primal proto-punk, demented nursery rhymes – is all pounding drums, fuzztone bass, clattering electric banjo, gothic organ and histrionic vocals. As Shaw maintains, ‘Walther and Karl believed in having our music recorded as we played it. Studios, at that time, were not equipped to record our kind of music.’ They wouldn’t be for some years to come.
The Rolling Stones
Aftermath
The Stones take a quantum leap beyond recycled R&B.
Record label: Decca (UK) ABKCO (US)
Produced: Andrew Loog Oldham
Recorded: RCA Studios, Hollywood; December 3–8, 1965, March 6–9, 1966
Released: April 15, 1966 (UK) June 20, 1966 (US)
Chart peaks: 1 (UK) 2 (US)
Personnel: Mick Jagger (v, p); Keith Richards (g, v); Brian Jones (g, k, sitar, dulcimer, marimba); Bill Wyman (b, pc); Charlie Watts (d, pc); Ian Stewart (p); Jack Nitzsche (k, pc); Dave Hassinger (e)
Track listing: Mother’s Little Helper (S/US); Stupid Girl; Lady Jane; Under My Thumb; Doncha Bother Me; Goin’ Home; Flight 505; High And Dry; Out Of Time; It’s Not Easy; I Am Waiting; Take It Or Leave It; Think; What To Do
Running time: 52.48
Current CD: Decca 8823242
Further listening: The next two studio albums, Between The Buttons (1967) and Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), failed to deliver on the promise of Aftermath, as the Stones paddled up a psychedelic backwater before regaining their bearings with Beggar’s Banquet (1968).
Further reading: The Stones (Philip Norman, 1984); True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones (Stanley Booth, 2000); www.rollingstones.com (official); www.godgammeldags.nu/rolling/stones/aftermath/ (fan site)
Download: iTunes
Until Aftermath, the Stones were still largely thought of as Brit-blues recyclers of US R&B modes, although Jagger & Richards had already started to flex their compositional muscles with successes like Satisfaction and 19th Nervous Breakdown, the single which preceded the album’s release. Featuring 14 of their own songs, Aftermath was recorded towards the end of a gruelling American tour, much of the material reflecting the band’s frayed temperament in general and Mick Jagger’s growing hostility towards girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton in particular. Tracks such as Under My Thumb, Stupid Girl and Out Of Time revealed a deep vein of misogyny that dogged the Stones’ reputation for years, while the contemptuous tone of Mother’s Little Helper suggested an attitude towards drugs that was at best ambivalent – OK if you were a rich rock star, but cause for scorn if you were a hapless housewife.
‘It was all a spin-off from our environment,’ Keith Richards explained later. ‘Hotels and too many dumb chicks. Not all dumb, by any means, but that’s how one got. You got really cut off.’
There was widespread speculation, meanwhile, regarding the inspiration for the song Lady Jane: their record label claimed it was about Henry VIII’s wife Jane Seymour, and Jagger apparently allowed both Shrimpton and toff totty Lady Jane Ormsby-Gore to believe it was about them. It turned out to be derived from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, being the gamekeeper’s term for his mistress’s vagina. Though manager Andrew Loog Oldham took the producer’s credit, the album was effectively recorded by Richards with the group’s American engineer Dave Hassinger. His job was not made any easier by Brian Jones’s unreliability, which left Keith having to play most of the guitar parts by himself. Despite his growing drug and personality problems, however, Jones’s contributions were crucial to the album’s success. The band’s most accomplished musician, he had begun seeking out new and unusual instruments to add to their sound: sitar on Mother’s Little Helper, and marimba on Under My Thumb and Out Of Time, while Lady Jane and Waiting featured the sound of a dulcimer that had been given to him by the folk singer Richard Farina.
‘Brian would be down on his back, lying around the studio with his guitar strapped around him,’ Richards told biographer Victor Bockris. ‘Then suddenly, from nine hours of lying there, he’d just walk in and lay some beautiful things down on a track (piano, harpsichord), something that nobody’d even thought of.’ Released as Aftermath after their record company rejected the ‘blasphemous’ original title Could You Walk On The Water?, the LP quickly topped the album charts in Britain.
The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds
In 1995, MOJO contributors voted it the ‘Greatest Album Of All Time’.
Record label: Capitol
Produced: Brian Wilson
Recorded: Western, Sunset Sound, and Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles; July 12, 1965 and November 1, 1965–April 13, 1966
Released: May 16, 1966
Chart peaks: 2 (UK) 10 (US)
Personnel: Brian Wilson (v); Carl Wilson (v); Mike Love (v); Bruce Johnston (v); Al Jardine (v); Dennis Wilson (v); Carol Kaye (b); Hal Blaine (d); Terry Melcher (v); Banana and Louie (dogbarking); Chuck Britz, Larry Levine and Ralph Balantin (e)
Track listing: Wouldn’t It Be Nice; You Still Believe In Me; That’s Not Me; Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder); I’m Waiting For The Day; Let’s Go Away For A While; Sloop John B (S); God Only Knows (S); I Know There’s An Answer; Here Today; I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times; Pet Sounds; Caroline, No (S)
Running time: 36:25
Current CD: EMI 5262662 adds Hang On To Your Ego and features the album in both mono and stereo mixes.