Out Of Time Alert: Monday night I was going to do a quick post relating to the dawning of a new poll but the post just kept getting longer so that I didn't have a chance to complete it. I was even going to include something on Let It Be Naked, which I bought on Monday morning, but that'll have to be another time.
Here's what I started Monday, and completed this morning.
Happy to announce the AGB readers have had the good taste to select Exile on Mains Street as the best Rolling Stones album with 42% of the vote. And rightly so. A Teddy Roosevelt approved authentic bull moose, pizza with the lot - extra everything - rawk n roll masterpiece if ever there was one.
More surprising was that Aftermath came in second because after Exile, this happens to be my next favourite Stones album, but one less talked about in the reverential tones of numbers three, four and five.
Those three were, in order - Sticky, Beggars and Let It Bleed. Stands to reason with huge songs like Dead Flowers, Moonlight Mile, Dear Doctor, No Expectations, Live With Me and Midnight Rambler. I suppose they were bound to come close to each other - I can never separate them - and they would all be in my top thirty albums of all time. Probably.
Never the less, time waits for no one, well done Exile, but it's a new poll we've got.
This one will be somewhat more difficult to pick. Probably because more than five will have strong claims to rank as the best of the ten.
Los Beatles
Look over there on the left and you will see the Rolling Stones poll has been cunningly disguised as a Beatles poll.
Note the selections. Pollhost only allows list of ten so I picked ten of the twelve pure studio albums they released in the UK as The Beatles. Yes, I know Help and Hard Day's Night are soundtracks, but they were recorded in album format.
Those twelve albums were generally the ones released in Australia. They are also the ones most likely to be sitting on the shelf behind me. Actually, they are sitting on the shelf behind me.
Incidentally, that shelf has itself only been sitting there for about two hours. Hence the late posting. I'm buggered. It was thirty something today, but I still managed to do something I've been meaning to do for ages.
After moving my romper room early this year and thus awkwardly stumbling over and around my floor-stored record collection, I decided to tear on down to Ikea in Victoria Gardens to see if they could employ their angular Swedish ingenuity to provide me with something approximating a vertical, rather than horizontal, record storage facility.
Ikea is a crockery filled theme-park game where everyone's a winner. Just as long as you can successfully negotiate the ten minute Walk of Arrows from the display floor to the help-yourself storage department.
There you are met with the onerous twin challenges of Match the Serial Number and the devastating Checkout of Doom. A twenty minute wait in aisle eighteen - 14 others of which were unpersonned - standing behind two Vietnamese twentysomethings locked tonsil to tonsil in a loud and slurpish smooch as they waited to purchase some translucent pink plastic box affair. I couldn't quite work out what it was.
I dismally failed this part and was ignominiously banished back to the serial number stage to retrieve the second part of my package. Who knew shelves came in two?
I completed the final challenge, DIY Aghast, when I got home and satisfactorily assembled the shelves by following the pictorial directions.
My ultimate prize was that the shelves are magnificent. 16 square compartments, each 13 inches by 13 inches. Absolutely perfect for storing my record collection which is now, as I type, evenly distributed between each of the sixteen compartments, with just the right amount of finger room per square for ergonomically approved record extraction and re-insertion.
Anyhoo, enough of shelves, back to Beatles. The two I left out were the two I like least, Beatles for Sale and Yellow Submarine. If you think I should have included them, bite me. Or post a comment. Or shut up and sulk.
Lately due to something Chris Sheil wrote a couple weeks back I've been thinking of the Beatles....
Elsewhere, the wooden spoon in this argument must go to Brian Weatherson, over at Crooked Timber.
Not only did Brian himself fail the threshold Exile question, so too did all but two of his commentators. And for all those Crooked Timber types who are confessed Sgt Pepper's tragics, let me pose the acid test. When exactly did you play it last?
I agree with Chris's summation of Brian's list, to whit, pass the white bread and Kraft cheese slices. What I don't agree with is Chris's dismissal of Sgt Peppers with the question: "When exactly did you last play it?".
Interim Update: I must have got CT's list confused with RS's. My comment addressed the RS list which comprised all the usual suspects. Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Pet Sounds, What's Going On and London Calling.
CT's is actually rather interesting. Mind you, I wouldn't consider many for my top ten, perhaps including only Blonde on Blonde. I like the Gobies but I'd have Liberty Belle. The Stone Roses is a terrific album. Pity they stuffed it all up. Sgt Peppers speaks for itself, come to think of it, read the rest of this.
On the down side, I've never liked the Smiths. Paul Kelly's music annoys me. Dunno why, it just does. I missed my turn up the Hi Fi Way. Perhaps when I listen to it now I'm too aware of Tim Roger's later pap. B & S are too twee for me. Blur are too calculatingly Britpop. And This Is It seems to be highly rated because people WANT to highly rate it. It's a little empty for me. I prefer The White Stripes. In fact when it comes to latter day rawk n roll I prefer The Dirtbombs, The Now Time Delegation and even The Moldy Peaches for the New York/Velvets influences, and who also have a wicked sense of humour.
Never the less, CT's is a better list than many. No Exile though. Tsk Tsk.
Update, out.
Chris didn't elaborate - I may be mistaken, he may actually like it - however, what upset me much more was an article I read in the Weekend Australian on August 9 which asked the same question. For your delectation, and reading, I've copied it into the Extended Entry section.
The article is called Rock Monuments and is a listing of big selling albums that are no longer played in polite company. Or - "Classic albums we once loved but now never play."
Certainly most are shockers. Close To The Edge, Bat Out Of Hell, Purple Rain and the execrable Face Value are just some of a very, very bad bunch that were big in their day. I don't know why Daddy Who's there, it's never been thought of as anything other than crap. Same goes for Duran Duran. Their Satanic Majesties shouldn't be there either. It's always been ridiculed - wrongly, in my opinion, because it's got some fine tracks.
Out of the list, the ones I have are Their Satanic Majesties, Tubular Bells, Deja Vu, Living in the 70's, Frampton Comes Alive, A New World Record and Sgt Peppers. I plead mitigating circs, I was only 14 Your Honour.
Here's what David Brearley wrote about it....
Pound for pound, meaning song for song, this is the weakest album the Beatles ever cut. That's no heresy, just fact. Yes, yes, yes, it's a concept album - but a very poor concept is that it takes a handful of Lennon masterpieces, the first jewels from his most creative period, and splices them with a bunch of McCartney stinkers. When I'm 64 deserves special mention as the first of McCartney's cornball music hall ditties, the song tat convinced him of his own cleverness, the precursor to O-Bla-Di O-Bla-Da, Maxwells Silver Hammer and pretty much all of Wings. Awful. Unlistenable.
First, I admit it. I don't play it much these days. I don't play Exile as much now as I used to. But low rotation doesn't mean it's a shocker. It's just an indication you've moved on to other music. After all, there's plenty of it around and it wasn't ALL released before 1973.
Sgt Peppers is not a shocker. There is about ten feet of high quality Australian Standards Association certified XLPE insulation between it and any shockingness. For Brearley to imply so requires a quantum leap from "this is the weakest album the Beatles ever cut" to "Awful. Unlistenable". It's simply a ridiculous assessment. The former IS NOT reason for censure, the latter just ludicrous hyperbole.
It tends to confirm my opinion of the recent trend to diss the big selling Peppers and cite as super, Rubber Soul and Revolver. Not that I've got anything against the latter two.
Brearley specifically bags When I'm 64. Yeah. Probably the worst song on the album. Although I've never cottoned to Within You Without You, but it's still the kind of song 90 per cent of songwriters would be proud to pen.
And look at the other good songs. Sgt Peppers, A Little Help From My Friends, Getting Better, Fixing A Hole, She's Leaving Home, Lovely Rita, Good Morning Squared and A Day In The Life. Stunning.
OK, Peppers is not the best Beatles album - I'm not trying to push the poll - and it's not played by me today as much as it was when I got it way back when, Sherman. Probably because of the many times the songs are heard on the rayjo. There's nothing really new to it. But if the songs are mostly good, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And I haven't even strayed into the realm of it's influence on other bands.
To have Sgt Peppers included in this daft list, with the other rancid offerings, that were all popular, and all stink (bar TSMR), is just plain stupid and smacks of critical grandstanding.
Get real!
Call it the opposite of schadenfreude. But as a sports fan in a country disproportionately used to winning, I bloody well bloody hate it when bloody someone else bloody well wins.
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