wasn’t on the original UK version of the album).
Producing the album themselves was a mistake, according to Green. ‘We should have had a producer, then it might have sold better … we weren’t completely aware of what the producer’s job was.’
In hindsight, you can also hear it in the songs. Green has often noted that Show-Biz Blues ‘says it all about why I left Fleetwood Mac’. Musically, it was a homage to Bukka White’s percussive slide guitar, but ‘Now tell me anybody, do you really give a damn for me’ is the cry of a band leader in the spotlight and under pressure. Even now, 30 years after the event, Peter Green complains, ‘They could have helped me more, but they just stayed in the background.’
Then Play On delivered symphonic, elegiac rock, so far removed from the rough-hewn white-blooze of only 18 months previous. Green was rightly proud of the album upon completion and remains so. ‘I love it, every minute of it. There is nothing I feel I could have done better.’
A Californian aesthetic was already looming – the wave-washed beaches and rolling highways suggested by Danny and Peter’s wistful guitar sounds and Mick Fleetwood’s tyres-on-the-road thump. Americans loved it. One can only wonder what Fleetwood Mac might have achieved had Peter stayed and created a fourth album. Oh well …
The Beatles
Abbey Road
Glorious almost-swan-song for the ultimate pop group.
Record label: Apple
Produced: George Martin
Recorded: Abbey Road, Olympic Sound, Trident Studios, London; February 22–August 20, 1969
Released: September, 26 1969 (UK) Ocotober 1, 1969 (US)
Chart peaks: 1 (UK) 1 (US)
Personnel: John Lennon (v, g, p, o); Paul McCartney (v, b, p, g, d); George Harrison (v, g, syn); Ringo Starr (d); Billy Preston (o)
Track Listing: Come Together; Something; Maxwell’s Silver Hammer; Oh! Darling; Octopus’s Garden; I Want You (She’s So Heavy); Here Comes The Sun; Because; You Never Give Me Your Money; Sun King; Mean Mr Mustard; Polythene Pam; She Came In Through The Bathroom Window; Golden Slumbers; Carry That Weight; The End; Her Majesty
Running time: 47.26
Current CD: Parlophone CDP 7 46446 2
Further listening: Let It Be (1970); Anthology 3 (1997)
Further reading: Revolution In The Head (Ian Macdonald, 1998); Many Years From Now (Barry Miles, 1997); The Beatles As Musicians (Walter Everett, 1999); www.beatles.com
Download: Not currently legally available
The Beatles were falling apart in 1969. The January Get Back sessions (temporarily shelved but later Spectorised and released as Let It Be in May 1970) had been even more miserable than those for the White Album, John Lennon appeared more interested in promoting himself and Yoko as avant-garde peacenik performance artists than his old band, and a dispute over who should take control of The Beatles’ finances saw the group that had represented such an explosion of artistic and spiritual possibilities in the ’60s ending the decade as bitter, feuding businessmen. Even their remarkable producer, the normally unruffled George Martin, had stayed away from the Get Back sessions: ‘I thought, oh gosh, I don’t want to be a part of this anymore.’ So, he was surprised to be asked by Paul to produce a Beatles record ‘like we used to’ but agreed on the condition that he be allowed to produce a polished studio album, which is exactly what he did. With excellent group performances, slick programming and high production values (it’s the best sounding Beatles album) giving the impression of a unified whole, in fact the sessions were as disparate as ever, the band personally uncomfortable with each other, rarely attending the overdubbing sessions of each other’s songs.
‘On Come Together I would have liked to sing harmony with John,’ McCartney said later, ‘but I was too embarrassed to ask him.’ Paul wanted the songs linked together while John wanted each song separate, preferably with all of his on one side; the compromise of separate songs on side one and a medley taking up much of side two was reached. Although Lennon would later talk of he and Paul ‘cutting each other down to size to fit into some kind of format’ as the main artistic reason why The Beatles could no longer continue as a group, it’s also the reason why Abbey Road is such a success. Excesses are mostly curbed, strengths are emphasised. This, combined with Harrison’s two offerings – for the first time, comparable to Lennon’s and McCartney’s (Frank Sinatra sang Something throughout the ’70s, famously calling it ‘the greatest love song of the last 50 years’) – make Abbey Road a heartbreakingly fitting epitaph. Get a certain kind of music fan of a certain age in a certain mood and he’ll tell you that pop music was all downhill from here.
Jack Bruce
Songs For A Tailor
Ex-member of the world’s first supergroup boldly follows his muse into the realms of jazz rock.
Record label: Polydor
Produced: Felix Pappalardi
Recorded: De Lane Lea, London; April–June 1969
Released: September 1969
Chart peaks: 6 (UK) 55 (US)
Personnel: Jack Bruce (v, p, b, o, c, g); Harry Beckett (t); Henry Lowther (t); Dick Heckstall-Smith, Art Themen (s); Chris Spedding (g); Jon Hiseman (d); John Marshall (d); Felix Pappalardi (v, pc, g); John Mumford (tb); L’Angelo Misterioso (g); Andrew Johns (e)
Track listing: Never Tell Your Mother She’s Out Of Tune; Theme For An Imaginary Western; Tickets To Water Falls; Weird Of Hermiston; Rope Ladder To The Moon; The Ministry Of Bag; He The Richmond; Boston Ball Game, 1969; To Isengard; The Clearout
Running time: 31.47
Current CD: Polydor 0656032 adds: Ministy Of Bag (demo); Weird Of Hermiston (alternate mix); The Clearout (alternate mix); Ministry Of Bag (alternate mix)
Further listening: Of the three jazz-influenced albums Bruce released after Cream, his own favourite is Harmony Row (1971); ‘I just sat down at the piano, with a joint, and there it was,’ he declared.
Further reading: www.jackbruce.com
Download: iTunes; HMV Digital
Only a rock superstar at the peak of his power, as Bruce was after the success of Cream, could have taken a record like Songs For A Tailor into the charts, for the music on the album is uncompromising, uncommercial, contemporary jazz fusion. Bruce recruited some of Britain’s most creative young jazz musicians, all of whom play scintillatingly, with techniques light years ahead of the average rock musician. The songs were all co-written by Bruce and lyricist Pete Brown.
‘My songs are usually written using the piano and the music tends to come first,’ explains Bruce. ‘It’s a question of getting into Jack’s mind,’ offers Brown. ‘Some of the songs took an awfully long time – The Clearout and Weird Of Hermiston took two and a half years before we got what we wanted.’
One of the album’s most acclaimed songs is the cryptic Theme From An Imaginary Western. ‘The words were about the Graham Bond band,’ clarifies Brown, referring to one of Bruce’s early outfits. ‘I saw them as a mob of cowboys and pioneers. I was always amazed at the camaraderie between the early groups but now and then you’d get explosive situations between them, just like in the Westerns.’
There is no title song, the album