According to the liner notes of the recent Mothers of the Invention archive release Whisky a Go Go, 1968, the material on this triple CD was recorded on July 23, 1968 “with the event to be secretly recorded for an upcoming record album.” There was no live Mothers album in the 1960s, and there wouldn’t be one until 1971, by which time there was an entirely new lineup, albeit still led by Frank Zappa.

It doesn’t sound like this recording would have made for an especially good 1968 live LP, and not just because the sound, while pretty good for a 1968 concert recording, isn’t quite as sharp as it should have been for an official release. There’s nothing from their then-recent and brilliant album We’re Only in It for the Money. In fact it seems like they were for the most part avoiding their most accessible songs for not-so-brilliant (certainly without the visuals) comedy and avant-garde-ish improvisation. Maybe they deliberately wanted to showcase sides of their repertoire not heard on their first three albums, but it’s not a great loss it didn’t appear at the time.

This post isn’t a review of the Whisky a Go Go CD, which will be reviewed (and not at great length) in my upcoming year-end roundup of noteworthy 2024 reissues. Thinking about it, however, did make me think generally about how relatively few landmark or “signature” rock albums were made in the 1960s – and how many were attempted, and often released. There were more such concert LPs in the 1970s by the likes of the Allman Brothers (Fillmore East), Cheap Trick (Live in Budokan), and if you want to dig down toward lesser known acts, Humble Pie (Fillmore East again). Or live albums that, if not usually cited as one of an artist’s top efforts, were nonetheless often cited as quite significant for their quality and/or broadening their audience, like Lou Reed’s Rock’n’Roll Animal. 

There were good and even great live albums recorded in the 1960s, of course. But even among those, some of them didn’t come out until after the 1960s—sometimes way after the 1960s—and some were only half of a double LP, paired with a studio set. 

This post looks at twenty or so live albums by top 1960s acts and how notable they are in the context of their entire discography. It doesn’t survey every notable act of the time by any means; some great bands, like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Love, Them, and the Pretty Things, didn’t put out live albums in their peak years, and didn’t even leave anything behind in terms of unreleased concert recordings that are truly of release quality. Not too many of the live recordings that did come out would be rated as highlights of their catalog, let alone signature albums, although many contain fine music.

The Beatles: Starting with the usual guys who top such lists, although the Beatles didn’t release live albums while they were active, they made a number of attempts. George Martin seriously considered making their debut LP a live recording at the Cavern in Liverpool before deciding, probably wisely, they could replicate their onstage energy with better acoustics at EMI’s London studios. There were hopes to record a live album at their first US concerts at Carnegie Hall in February 1964, but this was thwarted by the musicians’ union.

Capitol Records famously recorded them at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and 1965, but the sound quality and performances were not considered up to standard, the Beatles having a hard time even hearing themselves above the audience screams. Some tracks came out in 1977 on the official At the Hollywood Bowl album, and a few more are on the CD, which took many years to come out. They’re fun, but virtually everyone would agree, including the Beatles, that the group were much better in the studio. Not that they were bad live – far from it, but the conditions were so haphazard that no one could have played and recorded near their full potential. That’s also true of several Beatleamania-era concert bootlegs that aren’t too dissimilar, like their 1965 Shea Stadium show or, more obscurely, a 1964 Philadelphia performance.

They considered making a live album—unusually, comprised of new material—in early 1969, though like other ideas floated during the Get Back era, it didn’t come close to getting realized. Some of Let It Be could be considered a live album, since some of it was recorded during their famous January 30, 1969 Apple rooftop performance. While that’s very good, it’s not really a live LP, and wouldn’t be even if the whole rooftop performance was issued separately. That performance was too short to make a full album, especially considering there were some multiple versions of the same song.

There’s also the double live LP of material taped live in Hamburg in late December 1962, not issued until about fifteen years later. Historically interesting it undeniably is, but the fidelity really is subpar – much more so than the Hollywood Bowl tapes. And the actual performances, while sometimes exciting, are also often sloppy.

In a way there is a live Beatles album—several, in fact. Because many tracks from their 1962-65 BBC radio sessions survive, though most of them were recorded in a studio, not in front of a live audience. But the performances are often great, and whether you have them on the official CD sets or bootlegs, they do what many live albums aim to do. They show them playing with a somewhat different, more spontaneous energy than they did in the studio, and very often—three dozen times—playing songs (all but one covers) not on their official studio LPs, quite often resulting in great cuts. This could be said of the BBC sessions of many British 1960s rockers, but no one utilized them as often and as well as the Beatles did.

The Rolling Stones: As great as the Rolling Stones were, few live albums by top ‘60s rock acts missed the mark as badly as 1966’s Got Live If You Want It. The sound quality was substandard, and worse, some of the tracks were obviously studio performances overdubbed with audience noise. There’s actually some good energy here if you make your ears fight through the fidelity, but the live versions are sometimes rushed, and no match for the studio counterparts.

A live UK 1965 EP of the same title (most of which came out on different US LPs) also suffered from non-optimum fidelity, though the performances were better than those used for the US Got Live album. Many Stones fans are probably still unaware that you can get a pretty fair facsimile of what that EP would sound like blown up to a full-length LP as one of the discs on the expensive Charlie Is My Darling box, which is built around the 1965 film documentary of them touring Ireland. With songs like “Little Red Rooster,” “Off the Hook,” “Time Is On My Side,” and “The Last Time” that aren’t on the EP, it almost adds up to a bona fide album, all of it recorded around the same time as the EP that did come out. But it was done shortly before they started writing their best original mid-‘60s songs, “The Last Time” excepted. And the sound quality just isn’t good enough to put this in the top rank, seeming more like a very above-average bootleg for a mid-‘60s live concert—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, recorded during their US tour in late 1969, is highly esteemed by many, though it turns out some studio overdubbing was later done to the tapes. Certainly it has some pretty different versions of staples like “Street Fighting Man” and particularly “Sympathy for the Devil,” but those actually aren’t as good as the classic studio counterparts. Only “Midnight Rambler” actually surpasses the studio prototype. And Mick Taylor had replaced Brian Jones, meaning there aren’t live Stones relics that capture them with their best lineup, for all Taylor’s estimable contributions.

The Who: Tommy will always be their most well known album, if not always the one most highly regarded by critics. Many Who fans would say Live at Leeds, from just outside the 1960s (recorded in early 1970), comes close, and/or at least certainly ranks among the best live rock albums. In one of my many unpopular opinions, I don’t feel that way, even though I’m a big Who fan. Live their arrangements had gotten too heavy and sometimes overlong for me, as heard not only on the original Live at Leeds, but also on the much longer superdeluxe box, and some other live recordings from the period, both official and unofficial.

The Who did make a serious effort at recording a live album when they weren’t quite as heavy, though still almost as heavy as any band around, at the Fillmore East in April 1968. Recordings from this finally came out a few years ago, and while they’re pretty good, I wouldn’t say they rate among the all-time best of concert tapes from this era. Bonuses include songs they hadn’t put on their records, like the anti-smoking commercial “Little Billy,” a few Eddie Cochran covers, the early soul classic “Fortune Teller,” and some interesting improvisation on the relatively unheralded “Relax.” A big minus is the 33-minute version of “My Generation,” which is ridiculously overlong.

For all the testaments that the Who were a better band live in the ‘60s than on their records—and such accolades are given to many acts, past to present—as actual listening experiences, as opposed to being there when they’re smashing their equipment and such, their concert tapes are considerably less satisfying. 

Note, by the way, that some of the Fillmore material was bootlegged for decades from an acetate that Who manager/producer Kit Lambert made of performances from the Fillmore East shows. Some April 5, 1968 cuts from that acetate aren’t on the official Live at the Fillmore East 1968 release. You can be forgiven for wondering if there’s going to be a deluxe version of that in the future that requires completists to buy it, even if they already have much of it on the Live at the Fillmore East 1968 that’s already out.

The Yardbirds: The Yardbirds put out two albums of live 1960s material, though one was only officially available briefly, and not until 1971. The more commonly heard one was their first LP, Five Live Yardbirds, recorded in 1964 with the Eric Clapton lineup. It’s one of the few debut albums by a top ‘60s act that was live, other examples being live LPs by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Georgie Fame, and the MC5.

Although the fidelity on Five Live Yardbirds is only fair, it did the job it was supposed to, capturing the Clapton lineup in good form. A crucial advantage being that, unlike the Beatles and Rolling Stones, they weren’t hindered by huge screaming crowds, as this was recorded in a London club before they had a hit record. On “Smokestack Lightning” and “Here ‘Tis” especially they excel—the whole band, not just Clapton—with their signature raveups, instrumental interplay, and hectic improvisation.

But the album isn’t markedly better than the three studio singles they did with Clapton. Actually those singles are arguably on the whole better, with only “Smokestack Lightning” and “Here ‘Tis” equaling them. Even if Clapton hated the last A-side he did with them, their first hit, “For Your Love”—and he is on there, in the middle part.

The story behind the live album they recorded at New York’s Anderson Theatre in March 1968 is different and peculiar. Done with the Jimmy Page lineup a few months before they broke up, it’s okay, but not the Yardbirds or even the Page lineup at their greatest. It’s of most interest for including a pre-Led Zeppelin “Dazed and Confused,” though even that was done better for the BBC and on French TV. As by now is pretty well known, it was exhumed in 1971 as Live Yardbirds Featuring Jimmy Page to capitalize on Led Zeppelin’s success. It was quickly withdrawn due to Page’s objections, and no one was totally satisfied with it even as a souvenir, since it was overdubbed with ridiculous fake audience noise, often termed “bullfight cheers.”

Predictably, this was soon easily available as a bootleg. It was reconstructed without the fake cheers for an authorized 2017 release, Yardbirds ’68. That was naturally better, but not perfect, as most of singer Keith Relf’s between-song comments were taken out. More seriously, some of the musical performances were edited. Five Live Yardbirds was more successful at representing a different lineup, but as usual, the studio recordings were where they were at their best, whether with Clapton, Page, or (especially) Jeff Beck.

John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers: They weren’t among the highest-selling acts of the ‘60s, but they were very important and good. And they put out two live albums. The first, John Mayall Plays John Mayall, isn’t so widely commented upon, likely because it doesn’t feature any of the three guitarists (Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor) who did memorable stints in the Bluesbreakers. Recorded in a London club in late 1964, it was taped even before Clapton joined, with the relatively unknown Roger Dean on guitar.

It’s actually very good R&B rock, and not too dissimilar from what the Rolling Stones were doing very early on when they were primarily a cover band, a difference being that Mayall wrote most of the LP’s material. Although it wasn’t issued in the US at the time, it became pretty easy to get in the early 1970s, when it was the second disc on the American two-LP compilation Down the Line. But it wasn’t as good as Mayall’s best work with Clapton and Green. There are sketchy and fairly lo-fi albums of live material from both of those lineups, none of them coming close to doing the musicians justice, mostly but not wholly because of the sound quality.

Recorded in the Fillmore East in July 1969 shortly after Taylor left, The Turning Point is actually one of the albums discussed in this post that comes closest to being a signature statement. It’s probably Mayall’s most well known album other than the sole LP the Bluesbreakers did with Clapton, simply titled Bluesbreakers. It ends with what is probably Mayall’s most well known individual track, “Room to Move.” 

So why isn’t it a signature statement? Not just because there’s no Clapton, Green, or Mayall. The Bluesbreakers changed lineups so many times that no one album could serve as a signature statement, no matter what one’s individual opinion.

The Doors: Though released in 1970, the double LP Absolutely Live was recorded between July 1969 and May 1970. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the record. On the one hand, it absolutely delivers what many listeners hope to get from live albums, and don’t regularly get: numerous songs, both covers and original, not available (at least in 1970) on studio LPs. Some of the songs that were familiar from studio versions were done significantly differently in concert.

Yet for all that, and decent sound quality to boot, it’s not on par with their studio material. At times—not just here, but on many of the Doors’ numerous posthumous archive concert albums—they don’t seem to be taking the material 100% seriously. It makes for a different angle on the group, certainly, but not as good a one as they had in the studio, where they didn’t joke around.

Absolutely Live is for me something of a neat, quirky footnote to their main body of work. Their March 1967 Matrix recordings, recently assembled in a deluxe box (though some had been previously released, and most had been bootlegged), are easily the best live ones available. They’re quite serious playing this small San Francisco club, a few months before “Light My Fire” became a hit. But the slightly imperfect sound, and performances that, while exciting, can’t equal the magnificence of their early studio discs, and put this out of the top tier of the Doors catalog.

The Beach Boys: I’ve read a rock critic essay, written back in the late 1960s, that slammed the Doors for not being nearly as good live as they were on their records, almost as if they and their producer were cheating. A similar sentiment was expressed in the entry for the Beach Boys in the 1972 book Encyclopedia of Rock’n’Roll, a slim volume that was nonetheless one of the first rock reference books, with the tagline “a concise guide to the young sounds of 1954-1963.” “In person, the Beach Boys were and are nothing short of terrible; but on record, they’re fantastic,” it read. “Brian Wilson turned a mediocre group into one of the best sounds on wax.”

Actually numerous mid-1960s film clips, from when Brian was still performing with the group, are pretty exciting and testify they could play well in concert. You wouldn’t guess it, however, from the one live album they issued in the 1960s, Beach Boys Concert, recorded in 1964. The sound is thin—yes, markedly inferior to the studio versions—the performance sometimes rushed, and the between-song commentary often dated and corny. There are cover versions they hadn’t put on their studio releases, but while their take on “Little Old Lady From Pasadena” is pretty good, no one really needed to hear their version of “Monster Mash.”

The Beach Boys made several attempts at recording live in the 1960s, some of which have come out on archive releases. One batch of recordings from December 1968, Live in London, did come out in 1970, though then only in the UK. Alas, some of the same general problems afflicted other live Beach Boys tapes too. They sounded perfunctory, sometimes even half-hearted, compared to the records. Even more than most top acts who weren’t at their best on live tapes, the Beach Boys didn’t seem to have it in them to make a good concert album, let alone one that would be considered a highlight of their discography.

This didn’t bother listeners in 1964, who sent the Concert album to #1—the only #1 LP the Beach Boys had in the 1960s. Such were the commercial depths to which the group fell within a decade, however, that as an 11-year-old in 1973, I bought a reissue of the album on the budget Pickwick label for a dollar—new, not used. By the following year the group’s live (and general) fortunes revived when the Endless Summer compilation was a #1 hit, though they’d never make a fine live album, or indeed studio records to match the quality of what they’d done in the 1960s.

Bob Dylan: Several attempts were made to tape a live Dylan album in the 1960s, including a couple during his early folk period. Those have come out on official archive releases. So has another concert recording that’s far more famous, of him in Manchester, England in spring 1966. Half of it has him solo acoustic; the other, more renowned and notorious half is loud electric rock with the Hawks (later the Band) backing him. This electric half in particular was bootlegged for almost thirty years before the whole show, which had often been erroneously labeled as recorded in London’s Albert Hall on bootlegs, was officially issued on CD.

It could have easily come out as a stopgap release in 1967, when Dylan was out of the public eye after his famous summer 1966 motorcycle accident. Maybe it was felt his Greatest Hits compilation, which did come out to fill the gap, was a better bet. Had it come out shortly after it was recorded, it probably would have been enthusiastically received, especially as both the acoustic and electric arrangements often differed notably and interestingly from the studio versions.

But would it have been received as a signature statement? I don’t think so, in part because while Dylan didn’t have a reputation as a focused studio perfectionist, actually the studio versions were more focused, with better fidelity. And, in cases where electric rock studio tracks were done as solo acoustic tunes (like “Just Like a Woman”), the studio rock versions were simply better and fuller. 

It would be interesting to see how this Live at Albert Hall (as it was frequently mistitled) album would have fared back in 1967. Not so much on the charts, where it almost certainly would have done well, but with listeners and critics. I think it would have been viewed as a very good and cool supplement to what Dylan had done in the mid-1960s, but not better or equal. The luster it acquired among many critics and listeners might have been inflated by its very rarity, or at least lack of easy availability for those not aware of how to acquire unauthorized recordings. Those who were perhaps felt like they were being let in on a secret, or given access denied to much of the public.

Jefferson Airplane: More than any other item on this list, the Airplane’s late-‘60s concert album, Bless Its Pointed Little Head, falls in between a disappointment and a signature record. It never seems to have been intended as either a major statement or something to fill out a release schedule. It was just a decent concert recording that gave satisfyingly different, but not radically different, arrangements than what they were doing in the studio. There were good covers they didn’t fit on their studio albums, like “The Other Side of This Life” and “Fat Angel.” It was a worthwhile part of their discography that, to use a cliche, did what it was supposed to do, or what live albums were supposed to do, pretty well.

Pink Floyd: Ummagumma in some ways approached being a signature album, at least in the US in 1969, where (unlike in the UK and some other countries) they were just becoming widely known. So many listeners wouldn’t have heard the original studio versions of the songs that comprised the live half of the LP: “Astronomy Domine” (the original of which actually wouldn’t be issued in the US for many years), “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” “Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun,” and “A Saucerful of Secrets.” The last three of these were pretty similar to the studio versions in some respects, but with four songs occupying two sides of an LP, were more drawn-out. The sound was excellent—indeed, much better than most of the rock concert LP competition. 

And even as a big fan of the Floyd’s Syd Barrett era, “Astronomy Domine” was the definitive version. Doubling the length of the studio track on their first LP, the David Gilmour lineup simply surpasses the prototype here, with superb alternation of tense passages building to creepy crescendos and languid, reflective spaced-out ones. 

Although Ummagumma was successful in expanding the band’s following in the US and internationally, there’s a simple reason it wouldn’t have been received as a signature album. It’s hardly a secret, but the second disc in the two-LP set had studio performances of new material. Except for “Grantchester Meadows,” it wasn’t in the same league as the songs on the live set.

But the group doesn’t seem to have intended this to be solely a studio or solely a concert record; the intent seems very much to have mixed both. Maybe if they’d decided to make a double live LP featuring some of their other best early songs, and adding a live version of “Grantchester Meadows” (which they could do very well live, as some recordings prove), it would have been greeted as a major concert record. But this wasn’t the case, and Pink Floyd wouldn’t issue another live or even partially live album during their prime.

Cream: As long as we’re on half-live/half-studio double albums, Wheels of Fire was not just a lot more popular than Ummagumma, but the most successful such record of the era, and maybe of all time. Commercially, that is; it made #1 in 1968. It had pretty good music, if more on the studio disc, which besides the big hit “White Room” had some of Cream’s better studio tracks, like “Politician” and “Born Under a Bad Sign.” 

At the time, the live part might have been at least as popular, with “Crossroads” and the most famous (or infamous) rock song of the period with a long drum solo, “Toad.” Now, and for some listeners even then, it wasn’t as good as what they did in the studio. Besides “Crossroads,” the four tracks were just too long and indulgent. It did function as a representation of something they wouldn’t put on studio albums, showcasing their lengthy improvisations. But besides this getting disqualified as a signature album because half of it isn’t live, it wouldn’t hold up as a highlight of Cream’s work owing both to its lesser quality than their studio material, and not reflecting all or even most sides of their repertoire and sound.

Jimi Hendrix: Sticking with heavy rock for a bit, Hendrix put out just one live album during his lifetime, though there are many – not just a half dozen – live albums available now, and indeed they continue to get issued posthumously fairly regularly. The one that came out while he was still alive was Band of Gypsys. This is also the only non-posthumous one with the actual Band of Gypsys, Hendrix playing with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. Recorded on New Year’s Day 1970, its release was at least partially motivated by a complicated contractual obligation rooted in a dispute with a former producer.

Quite a few years ago, a review of a reissue of this called it the jewel of the Hendrix catalog. I don’t see it that way at all, and I think a pretty low percentage of Jimi’s fans view it as the jewel, or even one of the best of his records. Certainly it’s interesting, and “Machine Gun” does rate as a highlight of his catalog, if we’re just talking songs. But though some fans and critics feel he should have been playing with more soul/R&B-rooted musicians instead of the original Experience, this isn’t as good or versatile as what Hendrix did with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding. It’s heavier blues-soul-rock, sometimes sluggish and overlong. Just the presence of Buddy Miles as sometime lead vocalist eliminates this from being close to Hendrix’s best, though Miles’s “Changes” was one of the best songs.

Like some other albums in this post, this has been given an expanded CD treatment. In this case, a very expanded one, as there was a five-CD box of his Fillmore East sets from December 31, 1969 and January 1, 1970. It gives you quite a few more songs and the expected multiple versions of songs from the original LP, but doesn’t change my general evaluation.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Although some critics don’t regard this too highly, 4 Way Street comes closer to being a signature album than most of the entries here. Of course that’s helped by CSNY (at first as CSN) only putting out two studio albums during their prime. But 4 Way Street was an extremely successful record, getting to #1 as a double album. Just as importantly, the two-LP format gave the group a chance to present songs not on their studio albums, and in formats that their studio LPs wouldn’t have allowed.

Specifically, there was the chance to hear solo performances, or performances by only part of the group, that were regular features of their concerts. There were extended versions of some of their most popular songs, particularly “Carry On.” There were some of the most popular songs they did outside of CSNY, like Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” extended to thirteen minutes, Stephen Stills’s “Love the One You’re With,” and Graham Nash’s “Chicago.” In these respects, it was more representative of their concerts than their studio work.

Still, these tracks weren’t as good as the studio versions, though they often gave a distinctly different slant to them. The performances themselves weren’t always 100% tight. If there is a signature CSNY album, it’s Déja Vu, another #1 record, and the only one from their brief prime to have Y (Young) as well as CSN.

The Grateful Dead: Speaking of double live albums, what about 1969’s Live/Dead? Certainly it’s the most highly esteemed of their non-archival live records, even if some might vote for Europe ’72. But there’s so much live Grateful Dead—and with so many Deadheads avidly collecting their official and unofficial live tapes, it’s not a peripheral part of their catalog—that nominating any single live show or collection would be difficult. And while both the band and much of their audience don’t consider their studio recordings as important as experiencing the Dead live, their 1970 albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty are both easily their most highly regarded studio LPs and quite different from their live albums/tapes. I think they’re better, too. But their prominence would make it impossible to select any one Dead album, live or not, as the cream of the crop.

Quicksilver Messenger Service: Acts with brief careers, and certainly brief primes, are at an advantage for a live LP getting pegged as definitive, simply because there’s less competition within their discography. Quicksilver’s career actually wasn’t all that short, but almost everyone would agree their peak period was the late 1960s, before their lineup altered when Dino Valente joined. They only put out two LPs in that time, with the live one (and second of the pair), Happy Trails, being the more famous and successful. Most Quicksilver fans—those that are left, as they aren’t among the most well remembered acts of the era—would vote for Happy Trails as their signature album.

I know I’m outvoted, but I’m not a big fan of Happy Trails. Their sheer length of “Who Do You Love,” taking up all of side one at 25 minutes, is chiefly responsible for its popularity, but I find it way too long and not all that interesting. Side two, which got lots less play, doesn’t do too much for me either.

Lest it seem like I just don’t like Quicksilver, actually I do like them during this period—much more than I do the Dead, for instance. But although their self-titled studio debut LP was sometimes criticized as not being that great or reflective of their strengths as a live act, I think it’s pretty good, and certainly superior to Happy Trails. The necessity of working in the studio, as it often does, seemed to focus the arrangements more and orient the song selection toward fairly succinct ones, like their career highlight “Pride of Man.” Even the seven-minute “Gold and Silver” instrumental doesn’t have wasted space.

If fans who were there might maintain Happy Trails doesn’t wholly capture their live glory, by this time there are quite a few official and unofficial live Quicksilver releases from the era. They have their moments, and I would say some are better than Happy Trails. Yet none of them are as good as that underrated studio debut, Quicksilver Messenger Service.

The MC5: More than Happy Trails, and more than any other album here, Kick Out the Jams is the album most people think of first, or even think of only, when it comes to this particular act. While not exactly a hit record, it was easily their most widely heard, and certainly their most notorious—indeed, one of the most notorious from the whole era. Live debut albums are unusual, but this one did make an impact and to some degree define the group, even if it didn’t sell the loads of copies that some might have expected.

To present an unpopular opinion, I’m not a big MC5 fan. Lester Bangs wasn’t a fan of the record when it first came out and he reviewed it. But more to the point, the sound quality isn’t sparkling, and sheer volume and outrage outweigh the quality of the material, which often isn’t that strong. While this gets into revisionist snobbery, their rare pre-LP singles (not so rare now that they’ve been reissued on CD) have sharper playing, and even if the fidelity isn’t top-notch, the energy’s off the charts. The record’s legendary status might have as much to do with their revolutionary reputation and the pure outlandish in-your-faceness of the disc than its inherent merits, and the subsequent controversy it caused when Elektra Records dropped them from the label after the band took out a profane ad with unauthorized use of the Elektra logo.

But although the MC5’s later albums have their champions, not many would favor them above Kick Out the Jams. It overshadows the other records they put out in their original incarnation, and is certainly the first one that comes to mind when the group’s recorded legacy is considered, even among people who aren’t big fans.

The Great Society: Here we have a case where a notable group’s live albums aren’t just their signature statements, but almost their only statements. Most famous for featuring Grace Slick before she joined Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society only managed one barely distributed single (with an early version of “Somebody to Love,” then titled “Someone to Love”) before breaking up in late 1966 when Slick left. To capitalize on Slick’s fame, two albums of live recordings from mid-1966 at San Francisco’s Matrix club were issued in 1968. But they’re not mere historical footnotes. The Great Society were a fine group in their own right, and blended improvisation, jazz, raga, middle eastern music, and folk-rock into innovative and often excellent early San Francisco psychedelia. Early versions of “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” are on the first and better of the two LPs, Conspicuous Only in Its Absence. But the albums have plenty of fine original songs not available elsewhere, and some good covers.

An album’s worth of earlier demos for Autumn Records was issued several decades after these two LPs, so they no longer represent close to 100% of their discography. Those demos show the group in much rougher and less impressive form. So Conspicuous Only in Its Absence and its follow-up How It Was, which have been combined onto one CD, very much overshadow anything else on record by the Great Society. I can’t think of another instance where a significant 1960s rock act is only represented well by live albums.

James Brown: There were plenty of live 1960s soul albums, and though I’m not covering those in this post, I’ll make an exception for one artist. Brown’s Live at the Apollo, recorded in 1962, is sometimes enthused about as if it’s not only one of the greatest live albums, but one of the greatest albums, period. Here’s another instance where I’m probably outvoted, but even as a Brown fan, I don’t share that opinion, and in fact don’t find the record that exciting. It’s less oriented toward his uptempo material than you might expect, and predates his move into his absolute prime in the mid-to-late 1960s when he pioneered funk.

Since Brown (and many soul and rock artists of the time) didn’t pay nearly as much attention to crafting fine full-length albums as making hit singles, there aren’t standalone studio LPs that are nearly as good as his compilations. He did record more live albums, the best of which is the double LP Live at the Apollo Vol. 2, recorded in 1967. If everything on that record was as good as the thrilling near-continuous melody of funk (including “There Was a Time” and “Cold Sweat”) that takes up all of side two, it might just stand as Brown’s best recorded statement, or certainly best album, though his best singles would still be his greatest achievements. But the other three sides of that double LP aren’t nearly as good or cutting-edge, including some of his older ballads, perfunctory covers, and ridiculously short versions of “Out of Sight” and “I Got You (I Feel Good).”

The Velvet Underground: The Velvets didn’t put out a live record when they were active, and that doesn’t seem to have been seriously considered. They weren’t such big record sellers that their labels would be eager to inflate their catalog with a live release. This changed when Lou Reed rose to prominence as a solo artist, and the VU in general started to get more and more deserved accolades for the pioneering quality of their music. Even before “Walk on the Wild Side,” Atlantic had issued, in 1972, a lo-fi recording of them in summer 1970 at Max’s Kansas City (taped on cassette).

The Velvets’ live brilliance is far better represented by the terrific double LP 1969 Velvet Underground Live, recorded at various San Francisco and Dallas gigs in autumn 1969, but not issued until 1974, with Reed’s name in the subtitle. It’s notable not just because of the sky-high quality of the music. It also shows how, much more so than most top bands, they could change around and almost redefine their songs in performance, sometimes with arrangements that were decidedly superior to the studio versions, such as their extended version of “White Light/White Heat.” There were also good songs that hadn’t appeared on their studio albums (or even Reed’s solo albums), like “Over You” and “Sweet Bonnie Brown/It’s Just Too Much.”

But is this the Velvets’ best and/or signature album? Their first LP, 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico aka “The Banana Album,” will always be their most famous album by far. There are good reasons for that: besides the basic classic worth of the music, it has some of their best/most celebrated songs, and is the only LP with Nico, though she sings lead on only three tracks. It’s not a signature album since each of their four studio albums were quite different, and worthy in their own way. But their subsequent records will never be as widely hailed, as good as they were.

And 1969 Velvet Underground Live was very good—almost as good as The Velvet Underground & Nico, I’d say. And in some ways more representative of their range, not only because it encompassed material from all three of their first three albums and then some, but also because it had sweet romantic ballads, pummeling proto-punk, joyous celebratory rockers, and more, testifying to the underrated breadth of their repertoire. Some listeners would automatically fail to consider this their best or nearly their best because of the absence of John Cale, who’d left the group in late 1968. But with his replacement Doug Yule, they did reach their peak as a live act, and while these tapes were not originally intended for an album, they couldn’t have captured them better in concert. If not the signature album of the Velvet Underground as a whole, it could certainly be considered the signature album of their underrated period with the Yule lineup.

An enormous amount of valuable rock music was performed on BBC radio in the decade or so after the Beatles’ first session in March 1962. Fortunately tapes of much (though far from all) of it survive, varying in fidelity from superb to lo-fi tinniness that seems to have resulted from putting a home recorder next to a radio speaker. Also fortunately, many BBC tapes have come out on official releases, and many others have unofficially circulated.

In my previous post, I discussed rock radio sessions in the 1960s on the BBC that differed notably from what groups offered on their official recordings. That post focused on a few specific groups I think took the best advantage of the format, all of them well known. Those were the Beatles, Fairport Convention, and Pink Floyd, with an honorable mention to Fleetwood Mac.

It wasn’t too often that anyone presented a BBC version of an officially released studio track and substantially changed the arrangement. There might have been two opposing viewpoints taken into consideration as to whether to do such things. One, and the one probably preferred by fans decades later looking for something different than the official record, would be that the BBC offered a fairly low-pressure environment for experimenting and offering a version as different from the familiar one as the Beatles’ “Revolution” single was from the “Revolution 1” version of the same song on The White Album.

The more cautious and common one is that it would take a lot of effort to reinvent an arrangement for just one BBC performance that, to the performers’ knowledge, wouldn’t be released and just be broadcast once or twice, before it was realized that BBC sessions had some commercial value on reissues many years later. In addition, a lot of acts probably viewed the sessions as promotion for their records, and wouldn’t have thought it sensible to perform versions that varied notably from what you’d hear on official vinyl.

Once in a great while, an act would conjure a BBC variation quite different from the studio version, and in some cases superior. Here are a few obscure ones:

The most obscure of these, but also the most interesting, was by a group who were themselves obscure, Blossom Toes. Their two late-’60s albums were among the best fairly little known ones of the British psychedelic and early progressive rock era, though they’re more well known, at least among collectors, now than they were then. The first of these, We Are Ever So Clean, was wistful psych-pop with traces of the Beatles and the Kinks, but with its own brand of tuneful whimsy. One of the better tracks was “Love Is,” with its melancholic, bittersweet look at fading love. It was embellished, as much of the album was, by orchestration, including a cello.

The BBC version is as different from the studio one as the White Album version of “Revolution” was from the single. There’s no orchestration from session musicians; the song’s much slower and more somber; the harmonies are more haunting; there’s a prominent flute; and, most notably, a ghostly mellotron. It’s almost like the dark doppelganger of the relatively cheery studio counterpart, as if it’s the reflection of what’s really felt when a love affair ends, and not a glossier lament. It’s true that not many are familiar with the original version to begin with, and not too many have concerned themselves with the differences. They’re about as wide as they are on any BBC rock recordings of interest from the 1960s, however, and the BBC version is now fortunately easily available on CD, after only having done the rounds unofficially for many years.

It might have been effective for Blossom Toes to present both of these different arrangements on one album, as is sometimes done for very different versions by plenty of acts, including the Beatles on Sgt. Pepper (with the reprise of the title song). This would almost have subtly conveyed how the romance in the song could be experienced in very different ways. Or, at the very least, to put the BBC version, or a studio recording following the BBC arrangement, on a B-side; as obscure as they were, Blossom Toes did have non-LP-B-side material. This too was sometimes done by acts—not just the Beatles—who did very different versions of the same song on album vs. single. It’s not known if Blossom Toes even thought of this, but the BBC variation is certainly worth hearing.

Wayne Fontana is not nearly as obscure as Blossom Toes. He fronted the Mindbenders on the 1965 #1 classic hit “Game of Love,” after all. His solo career didn’t go so well, and he never made the US Top 100. But he did have some mild British hits, the biggest of which was “Pamela, Pamela,” which almost made the UK Top Ten. It was written by Graham Gouldman, who’d already penned great songs for the Yardbirds and the Hollies.

I’d hardly make the case that Fontana was a major figure of British rock, or that “Pamela, Pamela” was one of Gouldman’s best songs, though it’s okay and has his characteristic deft use of minor melody. I’d hardly given the track much thought since first hearing it more than thirty years ago. So I was a little astounded when I heard the January 6, 1967 BBC version on a double CD of 1964-68 Fontana BBC sessions (about half with the Mindbenders). It sounded pretty good, whereas I’d never thought much of the hit single.

As recorded in the studio, “Pamela, Pamela” is bloated orchestral pop, and not sung particularly well by Wayne, especially at the end, where he strains to hit a really high note. Its BBC counterpart (one of them; he’d record a less distinguished one on January 26, 1968) isn’t nearly as different as Blossom Toes’ “Love Is” from its studio version, but it’s still of particular note for those who are fanatical enough about the British Invasion to invest in a double CD of Fontana radio sessions in the first place. The term “unplugged” wasn’t around in 1967, and this isn’t acoustic solo, but the 1967 BBC “Pamela, Pamela” greatly improves the song by removing the orchestration. Actually the arrangement is effectively minimal, with weedy Greek-flavored guitar and very light percussion, almost amounting to tapping. Fontana’s vocal sounds far more relaxed, and hits the final high note with dramatic ease. It’s as if he’s doing what he wants with the song instead of what is considered to be the most commercial in an age when orchestral pop by Tom Jones was big.

While the double CD itself (titled Live on Air 1964-1968) is no great shakes, it’s far more enjoyable than I braced myself for. Fontana’s singing, while again not for the ages and no match for the best vocalists of his era, is pretty accomplished, and even the non-Mindbenders stuff is largely pleasant, though he only got a truly excellent song with “The Game of Love.” So, as they’d say in the UK, good on you Wayne.

As a third example of a very different BBC version you’re not likely to read about many or any other places, there’s Duffy Power’s October 10, 1964 performance of “Where Am I?” Power was an excellent British blues-rock singer who never had a hit, despite associations with top British musicians like Graham Bond, Duffy Power, and John McLaughlin. He made quite a few records, including some flop singles, one of which was 1964’s “Where Am I?” This sounds like a transparent attempt to mold him for the pop market, as the soul-pop ballad is given soaring orchestration and rather loud, melodramatic female backup vocals.

As with Fontana’s “Pamela, Pamela,” on the BBC, the logical alternative path was to subtract the over-production. Suddenly what sounds like a misguided fire at the pop market sounds like a superb, ghostly mood piece. Sung just by Power with conventional rock instruments, it’s sparse and eerie. Not commercial, but certainly better, and Duffy’s vocal sounds far more comfortable in this setting. Again, this sounds like Duffy doing what he wants, instead of what is thought might sell. It can be heard on the triple CD compilation Live at the BBC Plus Other Innovations; for all his commercial obscurity, there’s a wealth of Power music on CD, both from reissues of official discs and material that was unreleased when it was recorded in the 1960s and early 1970s.

An enormous amount of valuable rock music was performed on BBC radio in the decade or so after the Beatles’ first session in March 1962. Fortunately tapes of much (though far from all) of it survive, varying in fidelity from superb to lo-fi tinniness that seems to have resulted from putting a home recorder next to a radio speaker. Also fortunately, many BBC tapes have come out on official releases, and many others have unofficially circulated.

While BBC performances were often live renditions that differed little from the studio versions, there were more interesting supplements to an act’s official discography if they were adventurous. Prime among those were opportunities to do songs that weren’t on their studio releases, often cover versions of material by other artists, less often original compositions that somehow didn’t make it onto commercial product. Yet less frequent were arrangements of songs from albums, singles, and EPs that different substantially from their studio counterparts, and in fairly rare instances were actually superior.

This post isn’t a survey of the noteworthy BBC recordings from the time; it would take several books to cover those. Instead I’m citing the three acts that I think took most advantage of the format, along with a few instances that come to mind where radio versions outdistance the studio ones.

There’s heavy competition for judging the best BBC practitioners, especially since almost every British act of note did at least an album’s worth of sessions, and often several albums worth of sessions. For me, there are three clear winners, two of whom were among the biggest acts of all time, and a group who weren’t, although they’re pretty well known.

At the top of the list, as they were for so many things, are the Beatles, even if their sessions were limited to 1962-65, and the bulk of those took place in 1963. Their BBC output’s hardly a secret; there are two official double CDs, a bunch of tracks on an iTunes download comp of previously unissued 1963 material, and plenty of cuts that circulate unofficially, even if those are usually different versions of tunes that are now officially available in different BBC takes. There’s even a big book about their BBC sessions, The Beatles: The BBC Archives, though like many works of its kind, it was disappointingly short on description and background info on the actual performances. It might come as a surprise to some chroniclers, but the music is actually the reason most fans care about this stuff.

The Beatles did more than 50 sessions, 40 in 1963 alone. These included  275 tracks and 88 songs (many done more than once), three dozen of which (all but one covers) are not on their studio releases. At the risk of immodestly, I’ll note I describe all of their sessions in my book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film. Their greatest value are the 35 covers not on their studio records, many of them terrific, and virtually all of them worthwhile. These not only prove their versatility and illustrate their influences. Especially in 1963, they did so many sessions, and put such a varied repertoire into their sets, that I think they might have been an underrated influence in how quickly and constantly they improved as a band.

Here I’ll focus on how they treated their original material. While almost always energetic, they didn’t rearrange or redefine their original compositions (all by John Lennon and Paul McCartney on their radio sessions) to a notable degree. There’s just one I’d contend might be better than the studio version. This is “Thank You Girl,” as done on June 19, 1963. It’s simply appreciably zestier than the familiar track from the B-side of “From Me to You,” Ringo really pounding the drums, and John lets loose with some fierce screams not heard at all on the 45. True, it’s missing the harmonica that’s a prominent part of the original arrangement, as the instrument was on numerous early Beatles releases. 

There are some other instances where the Beatles did something a little different on the BBC renditions of their compositions, though not in ways that made much of a difference. The June 17, 1963 “P.S. I Love You” ends with a nice melancholy chord that’s not part of the single. The January 7, 1964 “I Wanna Be Your Man” has a bit of Bo Diddley in the rhythm and some reverb on the guitar. On their final BBC session on May 26, 1965, Lennon changed the lyrics of “I’m a Loser” to “beneath this wig, I am wearing a tie.”

But the Beatles were not ones to jam or monkey around with what admittedly worked very well to begin with. They did sometimes mildly tinker with cover versions that made it onto their studio records. The sadly incomplete January 16, 1963 performance of “Chains” has some background harmonies on the bridge not heard on the Please Please Me version. The instrumental break on the June 24 “Roll Over Beethoven” is twice as long, with some wild staccato George Harrison riffing and very well recorded McCartney bass. John, and not Ringo, sings “Honey Don’t” on the August 1 session.

Most top British groups didn’t attempt original songs on the BBC that never wound up on their records, and the Beatles weren’t an exception. There was one interesting exception when they did a nice version of “I’ll Be On My Way” on June 24, 1963 that easily surpassed the one that had appeared on the B-side of Billy J. Kramer’s first single. Since there were a good number of Lennon-McCartney songs the Beatles “gave away” to other artists and didn’t attempt in the studio, it begs the question why they didn’t do other leftovers for the BBC. 

It’s not a question so serious to keep even Beatles fanatics up at nights, but I’d think they weren’t too passionate about most of their giveaways, although it would have been nice to hear them try “Bad to Me” or “World Without Love” (sketchy demos of both do circulate, “Bad to Me” as part of the iTunes-only 1963 comp). Also, some of those giveaways were written very early in their career, sometimes before they had a recording contract. Maybe they weren’t interested in revisiting lesser efforts from their publishing catalog. They did try “Hello Little Girl” at their very first BBC session (with Pete Best still on drums) on March 7, 1962, but it wasn’t broadcast and a tape doesn’t survive, although at least the one from their January 1 Decca audition does.

Other than the Beatles, the group that best took opportunities to do covers not on their records might be a surprise to some people, since they didn’t have big hit records. That was Fairport Convention, who in the late 1960s sort of specialized in obscure cover versions, though they were also writing their songs from the beginning of their career on disc. So wide was their repertoire that quite a few weren’t on their three late-’60s LPs. About half of their four-CD Live at the BBC box is from sessions between December 10, 1967 and September 27, 1969, during which they offered more than a dozen covers not found on their albums and singles.

These aren’t only of interest to Fairport Fanatics. Some of the songs are among the best things they ever did. In particular, the Leonard Cohen standard “Suzanne” has some thrilling back-and-forth lead vocal tradeoffs and harmonies between Ian Matthews and Sandy Denny. I’d say “Tried So Hard” outdoes the Gene Clark original, as does their treatment of Eric Andersen’s “Close the Door Lightly When You Go,” due in large but not sole part to their stellar vocal harmonies. Also very fine are Richard & Mimi Fariña’s “Reno Nevada,” the well-harmonized arrangement of Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone,” and their bouncy takes on the Everly Brothers’ “Gone, Gone, Gone” and “Some Sweet Day”—neither of them too well known in their original guises, though “Gone, Gone, Gone” was a medium-sized 1964 US hit for the Everlys. 

Although Fairport did put Bob Dylan’s “Percy’s Song” (an early-’60s Dylan outtake not released by the singer-songwriter himself until the mid-1980s) on their 1969 Unhalfbricking album, the epic BBC version outdistances it, especially in respect to Denny’s spectacular vocal. If there’s not as much to note about the covers of Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” and Jackson C. Frank’s “You Never Wanted Me,” they’re very good too.

Some of the originals Fairport covered were quite obscure, especially in the UK, where some of the albums on which they appeared would have been very hard to find. Some of the material hadn’t even been issued at all in any versions. When I asked Ian (now Iain) Matthews about the wealth of cover versions Fairport did, he commented, “We were quite fortunate really, because in [their producer] Joe [Boyd] and his direct link to Warners at the time, we had a private source to whatever American material we wanted. He was responsible for many of our early influences. Were it not for him, I may not have listened to Moby Grape or Buffalo Springfield for quite some time. Joni Mitchell too, Joe had a direct line to her publishing demos and supplied us with whatever we could handle. I’m sure the Joe pipeline was how Sandy got ‘Who Knows'[Where the Time Goes] to Judy Collins.”

Fairport’s February 9, 1969 session offered one especially noteworthy bonus—an original not included on their studio releases. Not only that, an original by guitarist Simon Nicol, who seldom wrote any compositions whatsoever. The song, “Shattering Live Experience” (the title is not part of the lyrics), was a quite worthy, wistfully bittersweet tune with typically superb male-female harmonies that would have sat well on any of their first three albums. As I was puzzled as to why it wasn’t used on a vinyl record or indeed why Nicol didn’t write more, I asked him about it around the early 2000s. 

“I certainly wasn’t writing, and I never have done,” was his response. “I was kind of  reluctant to be drawn into that field, and ‘Shattering Live  Experience,’ it’s a toe in the water. And I decided that the water was too cold,” he laughed. Dare I say I wish he’d tried to write more, but that wasn’t to be, and after the group dove whole-hog into far more British traditional folk-oriented material, they wouldn’t write or cover much such straightforward folk-rock songs anyway.

Long before BBC tracks were officially released by countless acts to embellish their discography (and some would say to exploit interest by completists determined to get everything once the official catalog was exhausted), a member of Fairport recognized the importance of their BBC output. A cassette with thirteen of the best BBC tracks came out in 1976 and was, according to the Mainly Norfolk site, “privately circulated by (Fairport ’60s bassist) Ashley Hutchings and could be purchased at Fairport gigs.” With nearly identical tracks, an official 1987 LP titled Heyday finally made most of the material from the cassette available. A 2002 CD version of Heyday added eight tracks, though only one of these, “You Never Wanted Me,” was a late-’60s version of a song that didn’t make their official studio releases. 

Now we’re up to four CDs with 2007’s Live at the BBC, though about half is from the first half of the 1970s, and of much less interest for me. The songs not on previous versions are generally decent, but not quite up to the level of what was on Heyday in musical quality, and sometimes not in sound quality. The extras still testify to their appetite for eclectic cover versions that wouldn’t fit onto their conventional releases, such as Joni Mitchell’s “Marcie” and “Night in the City:’ Bob Dylan’s “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” Dino Valenti’s “Let’s Get Together,” and Eric Andersen’s “Violets of Dawn.”

The third group I feel made the most of their BBC sessions were Pink Floyd, who recorded a wealth of them in the first five years or so of their recording career. Fortunately many of them were officially issued on the Early Years box, even if that cost a small fortune. 

The Floyd’s extensive BBC catalog would be worthwhile if only for the performance of two Syd Barrett originals, “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream,” that were never on official releases during the original leader’s brief but brilliant stint in the band. Studio versions of both (with Barrett still on board) are on that box too, but it was quite bold of the group to present them for BBC broadcast, especially as they—even at the time, not just in retrospect—are disturbing reflections of Barrett’s alarmingly more disturbed mental state. While the BBC versions aren’t too different than the studio outtakes, and the studio versions have expectedly better fidelity, certainly they are valuable pieces of the Pink Floyd-Barrett canon.

While Pink Floyd often varied from the studio versions in interesting ways on both their BBC sessions and in live performance in general, there weren’t many BBC arrangements that virtually reinvented the song. One glorious exception is their downright explosive nine-and-a-half-minute version of “Interstellar Overdrive” from their December 20, 1968 session.  As I wrote in a review of the box for Flashback, It’s a stupendous arrangement that’s different from the studio version and every other circulating performance, with some wrenched-from-the-bowels-of-the-earth organ swirls by Wright and a dramatic mid-section where the band  suddenly vamps on tense, urgently ascending chords, alternating dramatically with space-piercing guitar pings and yowls. When the band returns to the main motif at the end, it’s with a grandiose finality that’s impossible to follow.” Even though this was done without Syd Barrett, David Gilmour having come into the lineup for good in early 1968, this is simply the best performance of the song. It’s too bad it’s slightly lo-fi and obviously not from the original tape or a vinyl transcription disc, but that’s a pretty minor drawback.

Another BBC cut that varies from, and is arguably superior to, the familiar studio track, is the May 12, 1969 version of “Granchester Meadows.” This benefits from Gilmour’s high harmony vocal on the choruses and “BBC sessions songbirds” sound,but it’s a gorgeous arrangement, and the superb harmonies different from those heard on Ummagumma. Less markedly different, but still arguably superior to the studio counterpart, is a 25-minute version of “Atom Heart Mother” with choir, cello, and brass ensemble that outdoes, at least in my view, the side-long cut that served as the title track to the album of the same name.

You could make the same case for “One of These Days” and a 26-minute “Echoes.” These are at the very least as good as the Meddle versions. Indeed, the best Floyd BBC performances generally are a match for or better than the ones recorded at EMI, with a somewhat looser and less self-consciously polished air. You can also throw in a fifteen-minute “Fat Old Sun” as a less striking yet substantially different BBC offering, and the BBC “If,” overlooked next to the epics that dominated their early-’70s repertoire, has a nice subdued, almost ginger feel.

Incidentally, when I saw Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason talk about his book Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd almost twenty years ago, he said there weren’t any plans to put out previously unreleased material by the band, even implying there wasn’t anything of enough interest to merit vault excavation. About ten years later, obviously the band had changed their tune, whether because of a realization that money was to be made by its official release, a sincere reevaluation of its quality, or both. Whatever the cause, it’s good there was a change of heart, since these aren’t just neat supplements to their core catalog, but in some cases absolutely essential ones.

An honorable mention of sorts can be given to Fleetwood Mac when Peter Green was their main guitarist, singer, and songwriter. They did a wealth of BBC sessions between 1967 and 1970, including many covers, and some originals, not on their studio releases. A lot of them are on the double CD Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac Live at the BBC, but even that set, with 35 tracks, doesn’t contain many of the ones they did for BBC radio. Of the ones that do have studio counterparts, they often varied them pretty markedly. Some of them aren’t easily available even via unofficial means, including quite a few detailed in Richard J. Orlando’s three-volume Love That Burns, which exhaustively details Green’s work in the 1960s and early 1970s, most of it done with Fleetwood Mac.

A few others are on the unofficial compilation The Complete Unreleased BBC Anthology 1967-1968. Even as just a nineteen-song collection of what else is out there, this has some fine music, sometimes of material not found elsewhere. This is detailed in my blogpost on the recordings, but they include good versions of B.B. King’s “Sweet Little Angel,” “Mean Old World,” and Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love” (part of which is the basis of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”). Unexpectedly worthwhile is the Jeremy Spencer-helmed “Psychedelic Send Up Number,” which is exactly what the title says it is, and is quite funny. There are also some ordinary and subpar covers and oldies, but those songs alone would make for worthwhile additions to the group’s official discography.

There were other instances in which a BBC performance clearly outshone or differed from the studio version, some of them quite obscure. I’ll detail some of the most notable ones in my next post.

British jazz from the 1960s and first half of the 1970s isn’t, dare I say, a specialty of too many people, even in the UK, and less so elsewhere. However, Richard Morton Jack’s limited edition hardback book Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75—published earlier this year on Landsdowne—is an exceptionally well produced record guide to many of the British jazz LPs made between 1960 and 1975. Morton Jack has issued a couple other hefty compendiums of reviews/descriptions of both British and North American rock records of the period, Galactic Ramble (covering the British Isles) and Endless Trip (covering North America). Although a few folk and jazz albums are documented in Galactic Ramble, Labyrinth is exclusively devoted to British jazz, allowed for far more coverage of the genre.

Labyrinth isn’t just a discography listing catalog numbers and dates. Each of the several hundred albums gets a fully considered paragraph-long description by the author. Many of the entries also include excerpts from reviews of the albums actually printed around the time of their release, along with full-page reproductions of the front and back covers and inner labels. There’s also a very interesting and lengthy introduction by musician and producer Tony Reeves, who was part of and worked with several acts during this period, most famously Colosseum. Plus there are also a few pages reproducing ads of the time for British jazz releases.

Even within the world of jazz enthusiasts and collectors, British jazz doesn’t get a ton of attention, and many of the names will be unfamiliar to readers as few made an international impact. The ones that did tended to be ones whose impact bled over to the rock audience, like Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, Chris Spedding, Colosseum  (though only their first LP is included), Harold McNair (via his work with Donovan), John Cameron (also as a Donovan associate), Hugh Hopper (with Soft Machine), Elton Dean (part of Soft Machine for a while), Henry Lowther (part of Manfred Mann and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers for a while), and others. Morton Jack covered some British rock with a jazz influence in Galactic Ramble, and rock albums by the many acts with players with jazz experience are usually detailed in there.

This is the place to learn about names known more to jazz aficionados, like Joe Harriott, Mike Westbrook, Norma Winstone, Michael Gibbs, and Nucleus, though one (Dudley Moore) is extremely famous, though not  principally for his accomplished jazz piano. It also offers insight into some styles that were more prevalent in British jazz than elsewhere, like Indo-Jazz. The quality of the writing is extremely high, as is the quality of the writing and graphics—a relative rarity among such specialist guides.

Richard Morton Jack is also the author of the superb and very highly regarded 2023 biography Nick Drake: The Life, which I interviewed him about last year on this blog. I also interviewed him about Galactic Ramble in a previous blogpost. He graciously answered my twenty questions about Labyrinth in June 2024, a few months after its publication.

You’ve edited, published, and written much of your previous guides focusing on rock LPs from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, with different books for the North American and British Isles scenes. Some jazz LPs were covered in your Galactic Ramble book, which mostly focused on British Isles rock LPs from the era, with some folk as well. But Labyrinth focuses exclusively on British jazz LPs from 1960-1975. What made you decide to do an entire book on the subject?

Whilst pop, rock, psychedelia, prog, folk, and other genres of that era been extensively revisited and explored, British jazz has been relatively neglected. Pulling together a detailed, heavily illustrated guide to it struck me as a worthwhile way both to commemorate it and stimulate interest in it. Also, because not much jazz was in fact released in Britain in this period, I was able to include almost all of it (with the notable exception of trad).

Labyrinth‘s format is different from Endless Trip and Galactic Ramble, although there are some similarities. Like your other books, Labyrinth prints excerpts of many reviews of the LPs actually written at the time, alongside recently written reviews composed specifically for the volume. However, where the other books had recently written reviews by several writers, you wrote all of the several hundred or so reviews in Labyrinth, though Tony Reeves wrote a detailed foreword. Every single one of the albums detailed in Labyrinth has a newly written review, though in your other volumes, some entries only had excerpts from period reviews. Also, while the other volumes had many illustrations of record covers and reprints of advertisements, Labyrinth has large full-page reprints of many (though not all) of the LPs’ front and back covers, as well as reproductions of the inner labels. What made you decide to go this route for the format and design?

I hesitate over the word ‘review’ to describe my text in Labyrinth – I intended my entries on each album to be historical or factual rather than critical, and therefore tried to leave my own opinions out of them. 

I felt that reproducing their artwork at near-enough full size was worthwhile on aesthetic grounds, and – more importantly – that the small print on many of their back covers is of great interest, yet because so many of the albums are rare, most people will never get to read them. One example out of my head: virtually the only immediate information regarding Mike Taylor’s music is buried on the back cover of his LPs. Therefore, a large part of the intention of Labyrinth was to reproduce sleevenotes legibly.

While as noted many of the albums get the full design treatment of large repros of the front/back covers and inner labels, as well as quotes from period reviews, some of them only get your paragraph-long review and a much smaller reprint of the front cover. While I thought maybe the less essential LPs were chosen for this briefer treatment, some of them get very good reviews by you. Were the ones given less space chosen because there weren’t good vintage review quotes; because the covers weren’t visually interesting; or for some other reasons?

In some cases I didn’t think the albums were of sufficient interest (whether in terms of music or artwork or both) to merit two-page spreads. In some cases I could find no original reviews, meaning that the text accompanying the artwork would’ve been skimpy. And I tended to relegate the few albums that had gatefolds to shared spreads, because reproducing their artwork in full would have involved shrinking them, thereby defeating the object. 

There’s a wealth of excerpt quotes from reviews of albums when or shortly after they appeared. Some of them are from music publications with wide circulations and/or a jazz focus such as Melody Maker and Down Beat, but many are from far more obscure sources like local British general interest papers in cities like Bristol and Newcastle, and long unavailable little-known publications like Amateur Tape Recording. I know you have a huge collection of periodicals, but was this a matter of going through what you had, searching for additional reviews as part of your specific research for this book, or a combination of the two?

It was a case of combing through as many publications as I possibly could, in search of insightful or revealing information from the time of each album’s release. Although contemporary reviews were often written hastily, and with strong personal bias, I feel strongly that the dual perspective is enlightening: understanding how albums were received upon first release gives a sense of immediacy and perspective that revisionist reviews can’t match, even if we might well feel that their evaluations are wrong-headed. 

Along those lines, were there any unlikely review sources that particularly startled you, a la the Bert Jansch and Nick Drake reviews you’ve previously found in Penthouse?

Funnily enough, Penthouse had decent jazz coverage too – for example, they ran a piece about Neil Ardley and the New Jazz Orchestra in an early 1965 issue, well before they had an album out. Leaving aside pornography, national press coverage of jazz was wider and more earnest than of pop and rock, even though it was clearly of far less popular interest: the notion of taking pop music and musicians seriously was more or less alien to mainstream journalism in that era. And it’s always fun to read Philip Larkin’s ornery Telegraph reviews (by no means all of which have been anthologised). 

What really startles me about all British musical coverage of the 1960s and early 1970s is the sheer volume of it. Every week brought a new issue of Melody Maker, Disc, Record Mirror, Music Echo, Sounds, Top Pops, Music Now, the NMEand others, which had very broad remits. That’s not to mention the underground press and specialist monthly magazines (including jazz titles such as Jazzbeat, Crescendo, Jazz Monthly, Jazz & Blues and so on). A huge amount of valuable information is buried in them all.

Turning more to the content rather than the record guide-like format, British jazz hasn’t often gotten this serious critical approach in book form, written with intelligent perspective, yet also meant to be accessible to the collector and general listener. What do you think were the chief qualities that made British jazz most distinctive in this period, and specifically, distinct from the North American (and sometimes European) jazz that got a much bigger audience and much more attention from the music industry and critics?

I’m hesitant to ascribe musical qualities to British jazz that weren’t present in European or North American jazz, and can’t swear that I could identify a 60s jazz recording as being British rather than (say) Swedish. What I will suggest is that the British scene was more insular, for various reasons. That insularity led the musicians to get to know each other pretty well over the years, and to develop empathy and rapport for each other’s personal styles that creates threads between disparate recordings. 

There was also an extraordinarily enlightened attitude within the British record industry at the time, which permitted these commercially kamikaze records to be written, recorded and released. As I say in my introduction to the book, but for a genuinely small number of executives, virtually none of the music in the book would ever have been recorded.

As a related question, do you feel there were notable sub-genres or styles distinct to British jazz?

Again, I’m hesitant to make great claims for anything unique about British jazz, but I do think that individuals with strong ideas were encouraged to develop them and present them free of commercial considerations in a way that ceased to be possible as of circa 1973. Visionaries like Mike Taylor, Neil Ardley, Graham Collier and others were therefore able to develop their own distinctive approaches free of (much) interference or outside pressure, musically at least. The Arts Council (funded by the government) also made grants to numerous jazz composers in this era, which allowed them to work free of financial pressure – for short periods, anyway.

And as a related question to that, one that seems more prevalent in British jazz than elsewhere was what’s called Indo-jazz. There seems like a specific reason for that, Indian residents and culture being a pretty big part of British life and a much bigger one than in North America, owing to India having been a British colony. Would you agree with this, and what do you think were the most outstanding qualities of this branch of British jazz?

Denis Preston, the remarkable proprietor of Lansdowne Studios and architect of the so-called ‘Lansdowne Series’ – an EMI brand that essentially consisted of whatever he wanted to release – took a strong interest in what we now call ‘world music’. Rather than making ‘field’ recordings, his approach was to get excellent expat or visiting musicians to make studio recordings that typified aspects of the music of their home countries. He admired the Indian composer John Mayer and the Jamaican saxophonist Joe Harriott, and therefore suggested in 1965 that they bring their respective groups together. I personally find the results a little awkward, enjoyable though they are, and think the best venture in that style is the flippantly named Curried Jazz (which came out on a budget label in 1968, credited to the Indo-British Ensemble). 

On a slightly different tack, the first album by the Goan guitarist Amanda D’Silva doesn’t attempt to fuse sitars and other Indian instruments with jazz, but gives him the space to reflect India’s musical heritage through the electric guitar, with standard jazz backing. I think that makes for a more original and striking result.

As you note in a number of the reviews, it’s astonishing what uncommercial and experimental jazz albums found release on some major labels during this period. A good example is one I happen to have (as a CD reissue, not the original LP), Hugh Hopper’s 1984, which you wrote ‘has to be about as uncommercial an album as was ever released by a major label’. How do you account for the presence of these sort of records on majors at the time, other than perhaps the general assumption that they were throwing all kinds of things at the wall to see what stuck?

I think that would be cynical in the case of jazz. The great Hugh Mendl, one of the most senior executives at Decca in the 1960s, told me shortly before his death that he had always passionately believed that major record companies had a cultural duty to preserve for posterity music that was of value, even if it had dismal commercial prospects. In other words, the vast profits being generated by the likes of the Beatles and the Stones should partly be used to underwrite the work of equally valid but less financially rewarding artists. 

Hugh wasn’t alone in this: David Howells, a senior executive at CBS in London in this period, was passionate about avant-garde jazz and produced records by Tony Oxley and other utterly uncommercial musicians, yet had (and still has) genuinely equal respect and enthusiasm for the Love Affair, the Marmalade, the Tremeloes and other pop acts he was involved with. It didn’t seem at all contradictory to him to like and encourage both. That broadminded attitude pervaded the British music industry in that era: if something was good of its sort, it was regarded as worthy of support. I also think that it was a short and wondrous period in which there was a respectable market for challenging music. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica was a hit in the UK! I recently saw the official CBS sales report to the end of 1969: its British release was in mid-November, and in its first six weeks it sold 9296 copies. That’s really remarkable, especially when you consider it was an expensive double LP.

As you explain in your introduction, you drew the line at including much jazz-rock that was at least or more rock than jazz—Soft Machine might be a good example—I think in part because much such product was reviewed in Galactic Ramble. However, you did include Colosseum’s first album in Labyrinth. While personally I’m glad you did since I like that record, it seems like an exception to an informal rule, as it owes a lot to blues-rock, perhaps more than it does to jazz. Was there a specific reason you thought this qualified for inclusion?

I didn’t leave anything out of Labyrinth on the grounds that I’d covered it elsewhere. I approached the book entirely as an entity unto itself. I can’t defend the omission of, say, the Soft Machine other than by saying that they seemed to me to tilt further towards the ‘rock’ than ‘jazz’ part of ‘jazz-rock’, and that by including them I would have been opening the door to other jazzy rock records (by, say, Web, Brainchild, Skin Alley, Heaven and Iguana) that would have bloated the book and blurred its focus.

From my perspective, Colosseum are of specific interest because Jon Hiseman and Tony Reeves had come from a jazz background and were seeking not only to broaden their repertoire but to bring music that had been regarded as fairly obscure into a more mainstream market. That’s why they used the line ‘morituri te salutant’ for their album title: they did feel a sense of jeopardy in bringing jazz to rock audiences in the UK.

Many notable British rock musicians of the period had some background in jazz, and sometimes even made jazz or certainly heavily jazz-influenced records, though they’re mostly known for the rock or jazz-rock they did. As I know you’re aware, the list is long and goes all the way up to Brian Jones and Charlie Watts in the Rolling Stones, also including Graham Bond (though the album he did as part of Don Rendell’s group is covered), Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Robert Wyatt, Manfred Mann (both the leader and some members of his group), Brian Auger, Georgie Fame, members of Pentangle, Duffy Power, some of the Bluesbreakers, John McLaughlin, Van Morrison…the list could go on. Is this branch of British jazz, or at least music that owes a lot to jazz, one that you’re tempted to write about in the future, or think someone could? (I’m aware there were a few items by or associated with some of these names in Labyrinth, including solo LPs by Bruce, McLaughlin, and Hugh Hopper, and the Watts-assisted People Band LP.)

I suspect trying to unpick the incredibly broad range of influences and attitudes that came together in British popular music in the 1960s is a fool’s errand. What’s salutary for me is how versatile and well-schooled so many musicians were, including everyone you’ve named. I’m not convinced that mainstream popular music will ever again be dominated by individuals with such diverse musical backgrounds and skills, and such catholic tastes. 

And another related question: there weren’t anything like the parade of jazz players moving effectively into top ranks of rock in North America as there was in the British Isles. Conversely, there weren’t anything like the parade of folk musicians moving into the top ranks of rock in the British Isles as there was in North America, Donovan being a notable exception. Do you, like me, see a similarity in those movements, in that jazz might have helped bring a more cerebral and sophisticated strain into rock in the British Isles, just as folk did in North America when many folkies went electric? 

I think it’s a perfectly valid line of thought. Perhaps it’s also worth considering whether the relative number of regional clubs made it easier to scratch a living out of jazz in America than in Britain, and easier to scratch a living out of folk in Britain than in America. 

Separately, Miles Davis was able to reach a broad rock audience in America in the late 60s in a way that’s hard to envisage for a British player. I think that’s partly because Britain was a much smaller market, so it was easier to sell Miles’s fusion records into the UK than to focus on breaking, say, Ray Russell (not that I’m comparing their talent or commercial prospects) internationally. It’s perhaps instructive that John McLaughlin felt the need to move to America to communicate his music in the way he thought necessary.

It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of jazz coverage in Britain was for American jazz, reflecting a general sense that British jazz was somehow ersatz. That gradually eased off, but I suspect a lot of British players felt a little aggrieved or defensive as a result.

Getting back to straight British jazz: North American jazz musicians, and some European musicians like Stephane Grappelli and Gabor Szabo, got a much bigger international audience (including in the UK) than British jazz musicians did outside of the British Isles. There are a few here and there that have a few cult followers in North America, like Derek Bailey and Keith Tippett, but not many. Indeed, most British jazz of the time is still unknown or virtually unknown here, even among many jazz aficionados. To what do you attribute this, from both musical and business/promotional perspectives?

To be fair, Decca (for instance) did release a reasonable number of British jazz records in America through its London affiliate, so Mike Westbrook, John Surman, Michael Gibbs and others did at least have some of their records issued there. But clearly records that had barely sold in the UK were never going to be of much interest to foreign licensors, and it was always easier for large international record companies to market major US jazz artists (and I would include Szabo as American in this context) internationally than to attempt to break a large number of new local names in smaller territories. I don’t think there’s any valid musical grounds for it: British jazz has simply taken a very long time to filter through. 

As an aside, it’s intriguing that Japan was the biggest foreign market for British jazz back in the day, with numerous obscure and challenging albums coming out over there, often with revised artwork and detailed insights giving background information that even the British releases lacked. And the market for original pressings of British records has always been livelier in Japan than anywhere else. 

Even collectors who aren’t interested in this kind of music might be interested in this book because of the graphics on the album covers. Many of them are striking, and even the ones that aren’t so good—and you sometimes point out ones with substandard or even laughable covers in your reviews—hold some fascination for their period qualities, making them look either unique to their time or reflective of the general music business values of the era. They’re too diverse to put into one or two categories, but what do you think generally were some of the most interesting qualities of the British jazz LP graphics of the period, and ones that made them distinct not only from other periods, but also from the graphics used on LP covers of other genres in 1960-75?

With reference to the early 60s – in other words, the beginning of the period covered by the book – perhaps there’s an argument that jazz fans tended to be older and more aesthetically sophisticated and discerning than pop fans, and therefore expected more interesting imagery when buying an LP. That said, the covers of Down In The Village by Tubby Hayes and Movement by Joe Harriott (to give two examples) feature close-ups of their faces in the manner of a Cliff Richard or Frank Ifield album. 

As the decade progresses, I’m not sure I can distinguish between graphics on jazz records and pop or rock records. I think the movement away from straightforward photographs and towards more abstract or imaginative concepts happened in parallel for rock and jazz, and that by the turn of the decade a lot of their designs were interchangeable. As an obvious example, Vertigo’s artwork for LPs by Nucleus or Keith Tippett could easily have sat on progressive rock albums.

The same holds true in some respects for the liner notes, which in those days were usually on the back cover, if there were any. This is also true of jazz LPs in North America, and of folk LPs in both the US and UK, but they had a lot more text in those days, especially toward the earlier part of 1960-75. They were also usually pretty serious in tone, sometimes almost academic and scholarly. While it’s easy to make fun of them for a frequent stuffiness that’s rarely if ever in liner notes of contemporary releases any more, they’re also valuable for the sheer wealth of information, often including the sources for the songs and how the performers found and felt about them. In the later part of this period, they’re also sometimes notable for inscrutable attempts at hipness and stream-of-consciousness prose. Again, what do you think generally were some of the most interesting qualities of the British jazz LP liner notes of the period, and ones that made them distinct not only from other periods, but also from the notes used on LP covers of other genres in 1960-75?

Again, without wanting to make mindless comparisons to pop and rock, I think there was a desire on the part of the musicians or producers of jazz records to impart a clear idea of what was being attempted on a given album, which to me can form a vital part of understanding and contextualising the music. 

Most jazz musicians, and certainly leaders / composers, of this era were highly musically literate, and wanted to explain their art in a way that most pop or rock musicians didn’t (Messrs. Townshend and Fripp being notable exceptions), being happy for listeners to form their own relationship with their music without being bogged down by long explanations. I doubt the Beatles gave much consideration to the broader context of their work as they recorded it: they simply moved onto the next thing without pausing to reflect, and found it somehow embarrassing (or ‘soft’) to do so. Either way, earnest sleevenotes ceased to appear on pop or rock LPs as of around 1969, whereas there was plenty of small print on the back of jazz LPs well into the 1970s.

There are few if any others who’ve heard all of the albums you reviewed in Labyrinth, let alone given each of them a considered review. First, a basic question: do you own all of these LPs? I ask because some of them are excruciatingly rare, like those that were produced in editions of 99 copies, or only sold at live performances. Or, in the case of Keith Tippett’s first LP, only pressed as a demo. For the Tony Rushby Sextet’s self-titled 1964 LP, you wrote that only one copy is known to exist, and you can’t get much rarer than that.

Alas, I do not own all the LPs in the book, but I do own most of them, so the photographs you see are almost all of my own copies. I don’t collect privately pressed albums, but that Tony Rushby LP is mine: I bought it cheaply because I recognised one or two of the track titles. It’s not in any way innovative or striking, but it’s a perfectly valid set that gives a vivid sense of a gifted amateur group of the mid-60s, of which there were of course lots. No doubt others made similar recordings that I’m unaware of.

A related question: how long did it take to accumulate and listen to all of these LPs, and what were the hardest ones to find? 

I’ve been collecting albums for 25 years or so now, during which time competition for them has greatly increased. In the early 2000s, British jazz was not especially sought-after, certainly not in comparison to psychedelia or progressive rock. That has completely changed, and because in many cases fewer copies were pressed in the first place, the supply have now more or less dried up. 

In my experience, certain major label British jazz albums are just as hard to find as private pressings. I guess maybe 500 copies were pressed of something like High Spirits by Joe Harriott, of which maybe half survive, scattered to the winds, almost all in the collections of people who prize them.

Although you must have had most of these albums before deciding to write Labyrinth, I’m guessing you heard and collected quite a few others in the process of doing the book. If so, what were the most interesting and surprising finds and discoveries that you hadn’t previously heard?

I was aware of virtually everything in the book before I started writing it, but the process of collating them and putting them in chronological order did yield some interesting observations, not least how extraordinarily busy and productive certain musicians were: Tubby Hayes, Michael Garrett, John Surman, Mike Westbrook, Stan Tracey, John Dankworth, Ian Carr, Don Rendell and others seem to have been ceaselessly writing, recording and gigging. 

There were one or two musical surprises: I hadn’t realized that there was an LP by The Trio (led by John Surman) that had come out only in Japan.

Wearing a tragic collector’s hat, it’s intriguing that certain rare British jazz albums came in both laminated and unlaminated sleeve variants. Examples include Hum Dono by Joe Harriott and Amancio D’Silva, Love Songs by Mike Westbrook, Tales Of The Algonquin by John Surman and John Warren, Phase III by the Rendell-Carr Quintet and Cold Mountain by Michael Garrick. To me that implies that more copies were pressed than one might imagine.

This might be hard to boil down, but can you recommend just a half dozen or so albums to someone who’s interested in getting into British jazz from this period?

British jazz in this period covered a large range of styles, so I think any such list needs to be broken down, and will inevitably be personal. 

That said… For a small group with horns: Tubby Hayes – Down In The Village, Mike Taylor – Pendulum or Don Rendell – Space Walk. For small piano-led groups: Mike Taylor – Trio or Michael Garrick – Cold Mountain. For larger ensembles: Neil Ardley and others – Greek Variations or the Chitinous Ensemble – Chitinous. For one album that spans various styles across short, melodic tracks: Stan Tracey – Jazz Suite. Recommending avant-garde recordings seems inherently pointless to me, as responses to them are so personal, but How Many Clouds Can You See? by John Surman combines free playing with structured parts to stirring effect. I could go on!

Like a good number of readers of your previous work, I’m primarily a rock fan, and especially of rock from this same time period, 1960-1975. The jazz from this period I like tends to be of the more accessible, rocky, riff-driven kind, like guitarist Wes Montgomery in the mid-’60s and soul-jazz organists like Big John Patton. For me and/or such listeners, what are the British jazz albums you’d recommend hearing that we’d be most likely to enjoy? 

I think it’s a very reasonable question, and many of the jazz records I find most enjoyable are ones that are analogous to rock music, even if they don’t feature vocals or the same instrumentation. So, off the top of my head… Don Shinn – Temples With Prophets, Joe Harriott & Amancio D-Silva – Hum Dono, the Don Rendell / Ian Carr Quintet – Change-Is, Graham Collier – Songs For My Father, Michael Gibbs – Michael Gibbs, Ian Carr – Belladonna.

There’s information on Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-1975 and how to purchase copies at https://lansdownebooks.com.

It’s Beach Boys Spring—not the summer, as you might expect—with the appearance of two major projects championing the group’s legacy. The first to get issued was the book The Beach Boys By The Beach Boys, and I wrote about some of the more interesting aspects of that volume in my previous post. The other is the two-hour documentary simply titled The Beach Boys, which is streaming on Disney Plus. 

It doesn’t have much in the way of previously unknown facts and stories, if you’re very familiar with the group’s history. Unlike the two previous full-length documentaries on the band, An American Band (1985) and Endless Harmony (1998), it does not gloss over a few of the darker sides of their story, particularly the role of Murry Wilson (father to three of the Beach Boys and uncle to another) in their career and (far less extensively) Dennis Wilson’s friendship with Charles Manson. Besides recent interviews with surviving Beach Boys Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston, there are also interviews with associates who are less heard from, including David Marks (who was in the group on their first few albums), Brian Wilson’s first wife Marilyn, and Blondie Chaplin, who was in the band for a while in the early 1970s.

Like my post about the book, this one isn’t a review of the film, which I’ll put on my year-end roundup of documentaries. It will focus on the more interesting and less-traveled perspectives heard in the movie.

Murry Wilson. A good amount of space is given to Murry Wilson’s work with the group as their early manager and then publisher. More of the coverage is negative than positive, though different sides of the story are given. He could be rough on his kids when they were growing up, and a more accurate description seems to be that he could be abusive. That’s been documented in some books, as well as some bootlegged chatter from recording sessions, and led to him being fired by the group not long after they’d become superstars.

As far as how difficult he was to get along with as the Beach Boys were getting off the ground, Marks remembers Murry even adjusting his guitar amps onstage. It’s also discussed how he’d intrusively signal to the band to adjust their sound during concerts and fine them for minor indiscretions, leading to Marks quitting the Beach Boys in late 1963. They did let him keep handing their publishing, which led to serious problems down the road, Murry selling their publishing for an undervalued $700,000 in 1969. 

Mike Love expressed a lot of displeasure in his memoir for, in his view, not getting enough songwriting credits, or the compensation he deserved as a contributing writer to much Beach Boys material. He criticizes Murry’s work on the publishing end in the documentary, remembering that Murry said he’d sell the publishing back to the Beach Boys, but he didn’t, and that Murry didn’t credit his songwriting contributions on a number of compositions. “I got cheated by my uncle,” he says. “He screwed his own sons, and grandchildren.” Brian’s first wife Marilyn (now Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford) has a more personal angle, noting the sale upset Brian so much that he stayed in bed for three days.

So yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff about Murry. But the documentary does air some more positive perspectives about the father. It was Murry, Love recalls, who got them into the studio, where they cut their debut single “Surfin’,” a big local and small national hit that did kick off their recording career, although it wouldn’t truly take off until they signed to Capitol. Other sources have also acknowledged Murry did a great deal for the group in their early days, including hustling them to labels all over Los Angeles and being instrumental in getting them onto Capitol with his persistence. While Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford detailed the publishing sale’s devastating impact on Brian, she’s also the most vocal in acknowledging Murry’s attributes. If he wasn’t there protecting them, she opines, they wouldn’t have become nearly as big. She also goes as far as to declare, “If there was no Murry, there would be no Beach Boys.” Leading viewers to wonder, if only he could have both helped their career without being such a bully to them personally—but too often, both qualities are found in tough businesspeople.

Birth of the Beach Boys: The story has often been told that the Beach Boys became serious, or at least seriously semi-professional, when Murry and Audree Wilson took a vacation to Mexico in late 1961, leaving their sons money for food in their absence. This story goes that the brothers instead used the money to rent instruments and work up material, incensing Murry when he returned, but cooling him out when he heard the results of their rehearsals, sparking him to help set them on the road to recording and stardom. Screenwriters might consider it a good setup for a biopic, but Al Jardine sets the record straight (as has previously been reported elsewhere) in hs interview. It was Jardine’s mother, he says, who gave them $300 to rent equipment. A big sum, by the way, in 1961; that’s equivalent to about $3000 today,

Denny’s Drums: That’s the name of an instrumental on an early Beach Boys album. Dennis Wilson is not the most highly regarded drummer from a famous rock band. It’s often been reported that many of the Beach Boys’ drum parts were recorded by session musicians, especially Hal Blaine. It’s also sometimes been written that he’d rather spend time having fun, at the beach in particular, than in the studio. Even in this documentary, Al Jardine observes Dennis would rather be in the water than in the studio.

Yet Jardine also says in the doc that Dennis, who’d been included in the band at least partly due to his mother’s insistence, learned the drums quite proficiently. And Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford says that Dennis is actually usually on drums on the Beach Boys’ records. Blaine and Jim Gordon certainly played drums on some Beach Boys discs, including some of their most highly esteemed recordings. But it does seem like Dennis was a more significant contributor as an instrumentalist on Beach Boys sessions than many assume, as is true of the Beach Boys as a whole. Certainly he plays very enthusiastically and serviceably well in the live ’60s footage of the group, if hardly with the finesse of the best drummers of the era.

Nick Venet: Nick Venet is credited as the producer of the first two Beach Boys albums, Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ USA. He isn’t given much credit, in the descriptive rather than official sense of the term, in histories and by the Beach Boys. In the new documentary, Brian Wilson (in an archive interview) says Venet didn’t do much besides announce take numbers. 

In a voiceover interview excerpt, Venet ascribes his ousting from production duties as due to Murry, who as noted in their early days took an aggressive role in the group’s direction, which included musical matters. When Nick told Murry he was wrong, Venet remembers, the band took it as a slander against the whole family.

It might be impossible to determine if Venet did much besides acting as a functionary of sorts, but at least a couple of things might be noted in his defense. If his credit on Beach Boys records might have been symbolic, he wasn’t just some bureaucratic attaching his name to productions. His production resume, much of it compiled after his brief time with the Beach Boys, includes a lot of impressive albums, most notably folk-rock singer-songwriter Fred Neil’s self-titled 1966 Capitol album; the Stone Poneys, Linda Ronstadt’s group prior to her solo career; and early Los Angeles folk-rock group the Leaves. Indeed he was one of the more significant 1960s folk-rock producers, also working with John Stewart in his early solo career, and with cult folkie Karen Dalton.

He deserves ultimate credit, too, for signing the Beach Boys after they—according to this documentary and other accounts—were rejected by quite a few labels, whether or not he did much in the studio afterward. An issue that’s not discussed much is why the Beach Boys had trouble landing a deal after their debut single “Surfin'” had significant success. It’s easy to say in hindsight, of course, but it seems obvious from listening to their pre-Capitol recordings that they both had some appreciable if raw talent, and that they sounded appreciably different from other rock bands of the time.

That’s evident not just from “Surfin’,” but also the numerous other recordings they made with Hite and Dorinda Morgan (best heard on the double CD Becoming the Beach Boys: The Complete Hite and Dorinda Morgan Sessions, even if many of the tracks are multiple versions of a small group of songs). These included early versions of two big Capitol hits, “Surfin’ Safari” and “Surfer Girl.” At a guess, maybe the Beach Boys were considered something of a one-shot novelty group, both because of the lyrics of “Surfin'” capitalizing on the surfing craze, and because of the name the Beach Boys, which might have suggested they were manufactured to suit that specific song.

Al Jardine rejoining: The usual perception of the Beach Boys’ timeline has Al Jardine in the group at the very beginning (including on the “Surfin'” single), then leaving to concentrate on college, being replaced by the Wilsons’ young neighbor, David Marks. Then Jardine rejoining when Marks quit/was fired in late 1963. But as the documentary verifies, it’s not that simple. It has Brian Wilson’s discomfort with touring—often reported to have come to a head at the end of 1964, at which point he left the road to concentrate on writing/recording/producing, replaced for a while by Glen Campbell and then long-term by Bruce Johnston—surfacing in 1963.

That, the film notes, is when Al Jardine rejoined, or at least often filled in for Brian, not Marks. With Marks’s departure, Brian then had to go back on the road until late 1964. For a while Jardine and Marks were in the same group, at least onstage. Ian Rusten and Jon Stebbins’s The Beach Boys in Concert book confirms Jardine filled in for Brian as early as a spring 1963 midwest tour, doing so off and on for a while until Marks left and Al settled in for good.

As I also observed in my previous post, although Jardine is the least colorful and least discussed of the five core Beach Boys, his contributions weren’t entirely peripheral. Part of the reason he stayed for good was that he was considered a better singer, and certainly vocal harmonizer, than Marks. It’s noted in the documentary that Jardine had perfect pitch. When I interviewed Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean about eight years ago, he told me, “his vocals were spot-on. Al was great. So they all contributed. It was an ensemble, and everybody had an important piece to contribute.”

Marks’s contribution to the group is generally underreported, and there’s a lot more about him and that stint in his book The Lost Beach Boy, co-written with Jon Stebbins.

The Beach Boys on the Beatles: The Beach Boys’ admiration for the Beatles is well documented, as is the Beatles’ high regard for the Beach Boys, though it’s usually Paul McCartney who vocalized that. Some comments in the documentary, however, indicate the Beach Boys didn’t know quite what to make of the Beatles when they unexpectedly invaded the US with massive success in early 1964. Recalling the time when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” took over the US airwaves, Jardin describes them as a little crude, and players, whereas the Beach Boys were singers. In an archive interview, Brian Wilson states “I Want to Hold Your Hand” “wasn’t that great a record.” It’s not a big deal considering Jardine, Brian, and the other Beach Boys quickly became big Beatles fans, but it’s peculiar.

Mike Love as co-writer: Love co-wrote a lot of ’60s Beach Boys songs with Brian Wilson, including some big hits, his contributions primarily being on the lyrical end. As previously noted, he has said and written that he should be credited on some others. Brian did write with some others in the ’60s who weren’t in the Beach Boys, including Gary Usher, Roger Christian, Tony Asher (for most of the Pet Sounds album), Van Dyke Parks, and even, on the 1969 single “Break Away,” his father Murry (who used the pseudonym Reggie Dunbar). In the documentary, Love says a reason for this was that when the Beach Boys were on tour without Brian, he wasn’t available to collaborate with his cousin.

Yet Wilson was writing with Usher very early on, before Brian was off the road even some of the time. On their first album, 1962’s Surfin’ Safari, Usher has a co-writing credit on half (six) of the songs, including the hit “409.” A couple of those songs have Wilson-Usher-Love credits, including “409.” On their next LP, Surfin’ USA, Usher co-wrote one of the best non-45 early Beach Boys songs, “Lonely Sea.” Roger Christian co-wrote their 1963 hits “Shut Down” and “Little Deuce Coupe,” and Usher and Christian credits continued to pop up into 1964, including on “Don’t Worry Baby,” co-written by Christian. 

Certainly it seems possible that rather than turning to other writers out of necessity when Love wasn’t available, Brian wrote with some others because of personal preference, or according to what he wanted to create depending on the song. When he retired from the road (occasional appearances and TV spots aside) at the end of 1964, Brian also certainly would have been around Love less, including in the Pet Sounds/Smile period, when the Beach Boys’ touring schedule included visits to Japan and the UK. Asher and Parks, however, certainly struck different lyrical moods than Love did, and according to some accounts, not with Love’s approval (especially on the Smile material Parks co-wrote).

Mike Love is not the most popular ’60s rock star, and has gotten a lot of heat from some writers and fans for not, in their view, supporting Brian’s most ambitious efforts. But he did contribute a lot to the group as singer and sometime lyricist, and according to one comment by Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford in the documentary, Brian did value Love’s place in the band, saying Brian thought Mike was the greatest frontman.

Bruce Johnston: Johnston has his share to say in the documentary, but he just wasn’t as important a part of the story as the other five principal Beach Boys. He has an interesting tale, however, about how he inadvertently negotiated his fee when he started playing with them on tour in 1965. Asked what he wanted for two weeks of touring, he asked for $250. It was thought he was asking for $250 a night, however, not for the whole two weeks. So he got $3000 instead of the $250 he was offering.

The Wrecking Crew: Sometimes the impression’s given that the Wrecking Crew played almost everything on the mid-’60s Beach Boys sessions. They certainly played on a lot of them, and they were certainly important, but their role might have generally been overestimated. In an archive interview in the documentary, drummer Hal Blaine says that Carl Wilson did play with the Wrecking Crew often on sessions, but also that he was the only one in the group who did (possibly Blaine was not counting Brian Wilson in this memory).

It’s all hindsight and quite possibly advice that would have been ignored at the time, but maybe Brian could have offered the other guys in the group at least some more instrumental input in the Pet Sounds/Smile era. Maybe they would have been just as happy to let the Wrecking Crew handle things, but it could have made them feel more involved, rather than being singers for what some consider more Brian Wilson projects than Beach Boys ones. Possibly that could have eased tensions down the road when Smile was taking a long time to complete (and never would get completed). After Smile broke down, the Beach Boys took over most of the instrumentation on the records anyway.

Another guy on the Wrecking Crew, Don Randi, has an interesting comment in the documentary. The influence of Phil Spector on Brian Wilson has been oft-covered, and Spector often used the Wrecking Crew too. Randi remarks that a key difference between Spector and Brian, however, was that Brian was always reinventing himself. They were both perfectionists, Love remembering how Brian had the group do backup vocals for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” thirty times.

Smile: Much has been written about Smile, and how the band and especially Mike Love were not as supportive of Brian Wilson’s vision for the project as they could have been. A comment from an archive interview with Carl Wilson in the documentary serves as evidence that he wasn’t opposed to it. Carl acknowledged that Love didn’t think the lyrics were relatable, but also that he (Carl) loved it, praising how it was “so artistic and abstract.”

Charles Manson: There’s not a whole lot about Manson in the film, but Dennis Wilson’s interaction with the Manson Family isn’t skipped over. Love offers a cutting one-liner about Manson: “I only met the guy once, and that was enough for me.”

The Beach Boys Are a Group, Not Brian Wilson: One point the surviving Beach Boys make in the documentary, and one with which I’m in general agreement, is that while Brian Wilson was the most important member of the group, the Beach Boys were very much a group with individuals who made strong contributions, not Brian Wilson and sidemen. Love sees this as an issue for both the rest of the band and Brian, stating, “The problem was, Brian was being hailed as a genius, but there was no credit for the rest of the band…it might have been a little bit easier for Brian to handle the genius label.”

Adds Bruce Johnston, “I’m president of the Brian Wilson fan club. But the musicality of every Beach Boy is essential. If we didn’t have the ability, we wouldn’t have been able to sing these parts. Brian was lucky to have our voices to sing his dreams.”

Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford has this melancholy note: Brian could do everything, musically. “But the other parts of life were hard for him.”

I’m teaching a seven-week non-credit course on the Beach Boys from June 18-July 30 at the College of Marin in Kentfield, CA. It will meet on Tuesday nights from 7:10pm-9:30pm, and can be taken both in-person and through Zoom. Concentrating on their best work in the 1960s, the course follows their growth from their early surf and hot rod anthems through their lyrical maturation with symphonic masterpieces like “Good Vibrations” and the Pet Sounds album. Besides exploring leader Brian Wilson’s phenomenal skills as a melodic composer and sophisticated studio producer, the group’s glorious vocal harmonies will also be highlighted through a wealth of audiovisual clips and instructor commentary. Registration info at https://marincommunityed.augusoft.net, for course #8221M/6361.

The Beach Boys By the Beach Boys, just issued by Genesis Publications, is sort of like what Anthology was for the Beatles. It’s an oral history where all of the principal Beach Boys (the six that played together on Pet Sounds, for easy reference), some of the others who were members for a while, and some people from outside the band talk about the group’s history. The great majority of the comments are from the six core Beach Boys—Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston—though obviously the late Carl and Dennis didn’t directly participate in the book’s production, with many quotes taken from archival sources.

This isn’t quite up to the level of the Beatles’ Anthology in depth, visuals, and candor, but it’s still pretty interesting, even if you know a lot about the group and some of the stories are inevitably familiar. Fortunately, it cuts off at 1980, eliminating the lengthy later period in which they only sporadically put out music. There are tons of pictures, again running the gamut from familiar to rare, and some non-photo memorabilia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of controversial parts of the story (such as Dennis Wilson’s friendship with the Manson Family) are not mentioned or referred to only briefly.

This post isn’t a review of the book, which I’ll have in my year-end roundup of rock books. Instead, I’ll go over some of the more surprising inclusions and comments. These are all from the pre-1967 era, as I’m not too much of a fan of their post-Smile work, acknowledging there are plenty of Beach Boys fans who hold a different view.

1. For me, the very most surprising illustration shows a couple pages from a Brian Wilson notebook with his handwritten lyrics for “Surfer Girl.” What could be so surprising about lyrics to a familiar hit song, you’re thinking. Well, the lyrics are entirely different from the record. Not just a few words crossed out and substituted here and there; entirely different. What’s more, it’s titled “Surfer Girl (Fast),” and the Beach Boys’ hit “Surfer Girl” is definitely not fast; it’s a slow ballad. The words in this version strike an entirely different mood than the hit single lyrics, too, with a more ebullient scenario about meeting the surfer girl at a party and how she’s a “livin’ doll.” 

So – could Brian have first conceived of a song about a surfer girl that was absolutely different both musically and lyrically, and then junked it and started from scratch, just keeping the title and some general themes about taking her surfing? Frustratingly, the book doesn’t say. It just notes the illustration is of lyrics for “Surfer Girl” from Brian’s notebook, as if the caption writer isn’t at all familiar with the hit version.

2. Al Jardine remembers hearing the Beatles for the first time when the Beach Boys were on tour in New Zealand and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came over the radio. “I thought it sounded raw and live,” he comments. “It sounded like a live recording, which it probably was, because they played live in the studio unlike us.” I found this reaction unusual, because although “I Want to Hold Your Hand” certainly bursts with energy, I’ve never thought of it as especially raw. Not like, say, the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” which became a US hit just a few weeks before “I Want to Hold Your Hand” did.

As for it being a live recording, even back in late 1963, the Beatles were sometimes using multi-tracking, overdubbing, and edits. In his big Rolling Stone interview in the early 1970s, John Lennon said “the first set of tricks was double tracking on the second album…We’d double tracked ourselves off the album on the second album. Not really.” As it happens, the October 17, 1963 session when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was recorded was their first with four-track recording equipment. Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Recording Sessions doesn’t note overdubs for this track, but I’m guessing the handclaps might well have been, and perhaps there was some vocal double tracking.

There’s not a right or wrong in Jardine’s initial perception of the track, and I’m not annoyed by it. It’s just not one I’ve heard others express.

3. Speaking of Al Jardine, there’s a surprising note in the introduction to the 1964 chapter: “It needs to be noted that in the early years Al Jardine was the Beach Boys’ hidden studio bassist, handling four-string duties on such instant classics as ‘Fun Fun Fun,’ ‘Catch a Wave,’ ‘Hawaii,’ ‘Little Saint Nick,’ ‘Don’t Worry Baby,’ “I Go Around,’ ‘All Summer Long,’ ‘Hushabye,’ ‘Little Honda,’ ‘Wendy,’ ‘Girls on the Beach,’ ‘Don’t Back Down,’ ‘She Knows Me Too Well,’ ‘You’re So Good to Me,’ and others.”

Al Jardine is, for most fans, the least colorful of the five primary Beach Boys (Bruce Johnston, who came aboard in 1965, didn’t play on as many records or concerts). He’s mostly known as the rhythm guitarist, a harmony singer, and occasional lead singer (most famously on “Help Me, Rhonda”). That’s a lot of songs on which he is reported in the book to have played bass, and it doesn’t even list all of them. The paragraph also doesn’t mention he played standup acoustic bass on their first single, “Surfin’.”

This isn’t amplified in the book, but if he played bass so often in the studio, he was an underrated contributor, at least to this early work. It also isn’t examined why Brian Wilson, who was publicly known as the band’s bass guitarist through the mid-1960s, would have had Jardine play on so many recordings. Here are just a couple guesses. Maybe Brian wanted to focus on producing as much as possible, and was content to leave the bass duties to Jardine on some songs. Or maybe they both played bass on at least some of the records, fattening the sound with multi-tracking.

4. And while we’re on the subject of bass guitar, for all of Brian Wilson’s multifaceted talents, his bass playing doesn’t get discussed too much in general. He’s most known as a composer, singer, and producer, and not so much as an instrumentalist, especially as he sometimes had non-Beach Boy session musicians play on some of the group’s most notable records. When his instrumental performances are thought of, what he does as a keyboard player comes to mind more than what he plays on bass.

But Brian does have some detailed comments about the bass and its role on Beach Boys records in the book. On “Here Today” from Pet Sounds, “I wanted to present the idea of a bass guitar playing about an octave higher showcased as the principal instrument in the track.” Pet Sounds itself, he notes, “was a great album for its basslines, and I think people picked up on that. It taught bass players a way to be more creative.”

Carl Wilson also has a detailed comment about bass parts from this era. Brian, he says, “was writing basslines that were so far from the norm. ‘God Only Knows’ is the classic example that takes it to a new plateau. The bass was played in a different way from the one in which the song was written. It was inverted. ‘Sloop John B’ also had a brilliant bassline, the kind of line that musicians really loved.”

5. I don’t remember hearing that the instrumental title track to Pet Sounds was intended as a James Bond theme from the time I started reading extensively about the Beach Boys in the late ‘70s. It seems to be more commonly known now, and you can hear how it could have fit into a Bond movie as a theme or a song for certain scenes, though apparently it didn’t get into the running. Here’s a Brian Wilson comment on it from the book:

“It was originally titled ‘Run, James, Run!’ It was supposed to be a James Bond-themed song. We were going to try to get it to the James Bond people, but we thought it would never happen, so we put it on the album.”

6. Dennis Wilson is often, maybe usually, assumed to be a mediocre drummer, and one who’d rather be at the beach than at the studio, leading to the use of session musicians like Hal Blaine on Beach Boys sessions to play drums on their records. Carl Wilson has an interesting comment to the contrary: “Brian liked to use Hal because Hal was more reliable than Dennis, but whenever Dennis got the chance to play, he always did a great job. He played drums on more of our records than most people realize. I think because he didn’t play on Pet Sounds everybody assumes he never played at all, and that’s just not the case.”

Somewhat contradictorily, a quote from Dennis reads: “If you listen closely to the Pet Sounds album, you’ll hear me playing jazz patterns. Not everything was rock and roll.” The contradiction isn’t Wilson saying some of the patterns was jazzy, but that he actually played them. Did he play on Pet Sounds or not? Or maybe just some parts, or some parts that weren’t used? I don’t think the answers will ever be final.

7. Carl Wilson was the most skilled instrumentalist in the Beach Boys, aside perhaps from his older brother Brian. You don’t hear much of his trademark crisp guitar style on Pet Sounds, and I’ve wondered exactly how much he managed to get on, and whether it bugged him that his contribution on guitar was probably less on this album than any other. Here’s how he’s quoted in the book:

“I didn’t play that much guitar on the Pet Sounds sessions, although I do remember playing 12-string direct through the board. My playing wasn’t as consequential as it had been before and would become later, because everything had become more of an orchestra, part of the whole. It wasn’t that simple form, like our early records, with a little song and little lead break and drive home the chorus. It was more symphonic.”

8. Not to pick on Al Jardine too much, but he didn’t seem to have too much input into the group’s overall direction, especially before he started getting some of his compositions on records. An exception was “Sloop John B.” When Jardine’s specific contributions to the Beach Boys are cited, it’s usually noted that he was the folk music fan in the group, and was the main force behind them interpreting some folk material, most famously “Sloop John B.” This folk song had most famously been done by the Kingston Trio, an influence not only on Al, but also on the visual image of the group, who wore similar striped shirts in concert in their early years.

So why didn’t he sing lead on the hit single version of “Sloop John B”? There’s a pretty long and interesting behind-the-scenes account from Al in the book:

“A year before we cut it, I told Brian if it was performed in our style, he might enjoy it. I sat and played these chord progressions, basically three chords done on guitar, banjo and keyboards. I knew I had to have keyboards, otherwise I wouldn’t get his attention. I took a pretty primitive folk song, which I’d learned in high school, and added a chord or two—I heard the Beach Boys harmonies in there and felt very strongly that we could make a great record.

“The very next day, I got a phone call to come down to the studio. Brian played the song for me and I was blown away. From concept to the completed track took less than 24 hours. He then lined us up one at a time to try out for the lead vocal. I had naturally assumed I would sing the lead, since I had brought in the arrangement. It was like interviewing for a job. Pretty funny. He didn’t like any of us. My vocal had a much more mellow approach because I was bringing it from the folk idiom. For the radio, we needed a more rock approach. Brian and Mike ended up singing it. But I had a lot of fun bringing the idea to the band.”

“Sloop John B,” a #3 hit single in the US and #2 in the UK, is sometimes knocked for not fitting into Pet Sounds, or diluting the concept, or being a commercial concession to Capitol Records. Jardine has a different view that’s refreshing, if not to the liking of some purists. “The label said we needed a hit single on Pet Sounds, something with some commercial appeal. ‘Sloop John B’ had proved itself. It may not fit the creative tone of the album, but it certainly gave some relief at the end of side one.”

9. Ever wonder why the cover of Pet Sounds shows the Beach Boys in a zoo (the San Diego Zoo)? Maybe I’ve read this previously and missed it, but Mike Love tells it this way: 

Capitol’s “working title for the album had been Our Freaky Friends. To illustrate that cover, Capitol had sent us to the San Diego petting zoo to photograph us with our new ‘freaky friends’—the animals. When the LP was renamed Pet Sounds, Capitol reviewed the pictures from that same photoshoot and selected an image of us feeding a bunch of hungry goats. Not exactly inspired artwork, but indicative of Capitol’s creative efforts.”

I’m teaching a seven-week non-credit course on the Beach Boys from June 18-July 30 at the College of Marin in Kentfield, CA. It will meet on Tuesday nights from 7:10pm-9:30pm, and can be taken both in-person and through Zoom. Concentrating on their best work in the 1960s, the course follows their growth from their early surf and hot rod anthems through their lyrical maturation with symphonic masterpieces like “Good Vibrations” and the Pet Sounds album. Besides exploring leader Brian Wilson’s phenomenal skills as a melodic composer and sophisticated studio producer, the group’s glorious vocal harmonies will also be highlighted through a wealth of audiovisual clips and instructor commentary. Registration info at https://marincommunityed.augusoft.net, for course #8221M/6361.

I’ve put up a couple previous posts about rock songs from the 1960s that were different in their 45 and LP versions, sometimes drastically so. Here are a few from the early 1970s through the early 1980s that weren’t chronological fits into those posts. The depth of my knowledge of that era isn’t as great as it is from the 1960s, and no doubt I’ve missed a good number of examples, especially in the punk and new wave era, when there were sometimes more basic versions of songs on early singles. But these might of interest, and they range from superstar acts to cult ones.

David Bowie, “The Prettiest Star.” More than most artists of his stature, Bowie put out some different versions of songs on singles than you heard on his albums, especially in the early 1970s. The B-side of “Space Oddity” had a different version of “The Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud” than the one on his 1969 album (titled, confusingly, David Bowie in the UK, where his only previous LP had also been titled David Bowie; Man of Words, Man of Music in the US; and then reissued under the title Space Oddity). He also re-recorded another song from his second album, “Memory of a Free Festival,” for a 1970 single that split it into two parts. I don’t find these variations of tracks from his second album too remarkable, though they’re decent enough. 

A little more interesting is “The Prettiest Star,” first issued as a flop non-LP 1970 single few would have heard at the time. It’s a nice wistful tune that, in retrospect, seems a little like a bridge between the hippie and glam eras. Of historical note, it has a sweetly buzzing guitar solo by Marc Bolan, a little before he’d become a British superstar as T. Rex, and yet more before he and Bowie would vie for top honors, commercially anyway and if only for a bit, in the glam scene.

Bowie might have thought it should get a wider hearing, and/or that the 1970 single didn’t do it justice. Oddly, he waited three years, and until his sixth album—his third wasn’t even out when “The Prettiest Star” was on a single—to issue a remake. In 1973, Aladdin Sane included a new version with his famed backup band the Spiders from Mars. It’s rather smoother and somewhat harder-rocking, with some sax, ‘50s-style rock’n’roll boogie piano, and prominent backing vocals. It’s not terribly different from the earlier arrangement, but I prefer the 1970 single, which has a lighter and less hammy feel.

Bowie was a superstar in the UK and becoming a star in the US when Aladdin Sane came out, so the LP version is far more familiar than the original 45 one. That 1970 single isn’t all that convenient to find on reissues, though it’s been on a few, including the large and expensive box Five Years 1969-1973, which has the original mono single mix; some other reissues have different mixes. The Re: Call 1 disc of rarities on Five Years 1969-1973 also includes two different versions of “Holy Holy,” which was on two different singles (one in 1971 and one in 1974) without getting on his regular LPs. How many other major artists had two different versions of non-LP  songs on singles? I can’t think of one offhand.

The Last, “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here.” The original 1977 single of “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” was easily one of the greatest fusions of early punk/new wave with a retro 1960s garage sensibility. An explosive performance, it has a deserved place on the Children of Nuggets box of 1976-96 neo-psych.

Why it was even felt necessary to record a new version for their 1979 Bomp LP L.A. Explosion, I don’t know. Maybe the original track, issued on the small Backlash label, was unavailable. Maybe the production of the single was felt too raw and fuzzy, though if anything that enhanced its appeal. Whatever the situation, the LP version is far tamer and a big letdown. It sounds almost as though it was thought that by making it more folk-rockish and harmony pop-oriented, the song would be improved. It achieved the opposite result, though owing to its appearance on Children of Nuggets and the We’re Desperate: The L.A. Scene (1976-79) installment of Rhino’s DIY punk/new wave series, the version from the rare original single is the better known one after all.

The Mo-Dettes, “White Mice.” Released on the small (their own?) Mode label in 1979, “White Mice” was the ultimate fusion of earthy new wave and a more classic ‘60s-indebted girl group sound. Catchy and propulsive, though sung in such heavy British accents that the lyrics were hard to understand in the US, the single benefited from Rough Trade distribution to get a fair amount of exposure, and also some airplay on American college/non-commercial radio. It also benefited from one of the best 45 picture sleeves of the era, with a witty multi-panel cartoon satirizing romance comic books. They even managed to produce a video for the single, which you can find online.

As this was their debut single and they featured a guitarist, Kate Korris, who’d been in both the Slits and the Raincoats, this single (backed by the far less impressive “Masochistic Opposite”) exhibited considerable promise. Alas, it seemed like more of an anomalous one-shot than the start of a substantial career. They had a few more singles in the early 1980s, and one album, 1981’s The Story So Far, but no other songs on the level of “White Mice.”

I thought I’d scored when I found a copy of The Story So Far for, as I remember, three dollars a couple of years after its release. Any elation was dimmed by listening to the version of “White Mice” on the LP, for which it was retitled “White Mouse Disco.” It’s actually not a disco rearrangement, but in common with some other remakes—whether by contractual necessity, or generated for other reasons—there’s a bit of a going-through-the-motions feel compared to the dynamic original, especially with the forced-sounding descending “ooh-ooh-ooh” near the end. The single also boasts considerably better production, especially in its use of echoed vocals.

My happy ending was finding the original single, a year later with picture sleeve, for fifty cents. Fifty cents! And, fortunately, the original 45 version was used on Rhino’s Starry Eyes: UK Pop II (1978-79) compilation.

The Go-Go’s, “We Got the Beat.” In one of the more famous instances of a song first appearing on an indie single that got remade into a big hit, the first version of “We Got the Beat” came out on Stiff Records in 1980 as the Go-Go’s’ first release. As you’d kind of expect, it’s more basic than, and not as fully produced as, the famous hit remake that appeared on their debut LP, though it’s hardly lo-fi. It’s somewhat closer to their roots in the L.A. punk/new wave scene, though these were largely submerged by the time they became new wave pop stars.

While the original Stiff 45 isn’t that easy to get, it did make an impact upon its release, Stiff being one of the higher-profile British new wave labels. The original version was reissued in 1994 on the CD single The Whole World Lost Its Head.

Berlin, “Tell Me Why.” Not nearly as hip as David Bowie, or even the Mo-Dettes and the Go-Go’s, Berlin did sound better in their early indie days than they did during their brief period of Top Forty pop success in the early-to-mid-1980s. The 1981 45 version of “Tell My Why” was about as good and rocking as synth-pop got, though that might seem like faint praise if the style’s not your thing. A DJ at the college radio station where I did programs in the early 1980s wrote something along the lines of “like you wished Blondie sounded like” on the 45 picture sleeve. That might be underestimating Blondie, but it does have a good wistful vocal, a jackhammer-rapid beat, and effective washes of percussive sound.

Berlin put a longer version on their 1982 Top Thirty album Pleasure Victim, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it was limper, more slickly produced, and far more obviously geared toward mainstream radio play, especially in the hovering synth lines. I don’t know if the original 45 version of “Tell Me Why” has ever been reissued, and I’m not going to buy Berlin compilations to find out.

In a previous post, I detailed some of the most interesting instances in which the LP version of a song by a major 1960s rock act differed from the one on the 45. Even without paying much attention to the ones where the single’s a few seconds longer, the LP has a different guitar part, the drums aren’t double-tracked, etc., there were a surprising number of these. So much so that I didn’t have room for all of the ones I could have written about. This post goes through some of the others, by acts who weren’t exactly minor, but weren’t as major as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Who, and others upon which I focused on my earlier post.

Phil Ochs, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” There are few instances in which the single is so different from the album version, and also in my view few instances in which one of the versions is so markedly superior. This anti-war protest anthem might be Ochs’s most famous song, with the possible exception of “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.” It was the title track of his second LP, where it, like virtually everything Ochs did at Elektra Records in the mid-’60s, had an acoustic folk arrangement.

I say virtually everything because in February 1966, Ochs put out an electric version of the song on a UK-only single, with backing by the Blues Project. (It did come out in the US as a flexidisc with Sing Out magazine, although the flexidisc format was rarely employed in those days.) Although Ochs liked rock and was an early and vocal supporter of his rival Bob Dylan’s move from folk to rock, he didn’t seem to feel the need to make such a move himself, at least over the course of his first three albums, all of which were on Elektra Records. This electric version was simply far more musically dynamic and appealing than the plain folk one, with rollicking piano and what sound like bagpipes at the track’s beginning and end.

Why didn’t it get a general release in Ochs’s native US? “It was basically to test the waters,” Michael Ochs, Phil’s brother and (starting in 1967) manager, told me. “He wanted to expand his music, and so he thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be great, to do a rock version.’ I’m not sure that was his decision to be careful and only put it out in England. Phil was very tight with Murray the K, and Murray the K was on [New York’s] WOR-FM at that point, doing a very hip show. Every week he’d play like three new releases for major artists, and people would call in and pick their favorite. I know he played Phil’s electric ‘I Ain’t Marching Anymore’ against the latest Stones record and one other major one, and the calls that came in all said they loved Phil’s record the best.”

One shot-in-the-dark guess as to why it wasn’t released in the US is that Ochs wouldn’t be with Elektra Records that much longer. This single came out around the same time as his third and final (and best) Elektra LP, In Concert. If it was known at that time that Ochs was planning to leave for another label, Elektra might not have wanted to put too much into promoting a single that represented a departure from his folk sound, at a time when there was still some controversy about folkies going electric, though Dylan got the brunt of that flak. Ochs would indeed go into recordings with full backings by other musicians starting in 1967 with A&M Records, though these tended to be more eclectic, sometimes orchestral folk-with-pop-and-art song than straightahead rock.

One celebrity who did get to hear the UK single was not pleased. Asked for his reaction to the single in Melody Maker’s “Blind Date” column, Who singer Roger Daltrey snarled, “It sounds like a punished protest song. Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off! It’s not even good for my grandmother.” 

For a record that was so hard to find in its initial incarnation, fortunately it hasn’t been hard to find on reissues. It’s been on the Rhino various-artists compilation Songs of Protest and the Phil Ochs box Farewells & Fantasies, and came out way back in 1976 on the double-LP Ochs anthology Chords of Fame.

Bob Seger, “2 + 2 = ?” There’s a bit of overlap between singles-only versions and some tracks I cited a few years ago in a post about prime ’60s rarities that have yet to be reissued. This is one of them, although it did get a low-profile reissue. To quote from the entry in that previous post: 

“The original version of this oddly titled tune, as heard on a 1968 Capitol single, is not only Seger’s greatest recording, but also one of the rawest, most powerful anti-war rockers of all. But wasn’t that on his Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man LP, you’re asking — an album that’s pretty easy to find used and cheap? Yes, but the seven-inch version simply destroys the tamer LP counterpart. And that’s not just collector talk that builds up cuts for their sheer rarity. The single has a searing intensity that couldn’t be matched, making the rationale behind a fairly limp album variation a mystery of its own.

Seger, as many of you likely know, seems to take an inordinate lack of pride in his earliest sides, though these are precisely the ones that will appeal most to garage rock enthusiasts. It was enough of a surprise that approval was finally granted for a CD compilation of his 1966-67 singles on ABKCO last year (the heartily recommended Heavy Music). What’s blocking the appearance of the original 45 take of “2+2=?” on CD is uncertain, not to mention unfathomable.

The Capitol 45 version was reissued as a vinyl seven-inch by Third Man Records. Backed by “Ivory,” it’s sold out. Yet it might not be the exact same version as you hear on the original single. As one reader wrote, “The 45cat.com site says this this Third Man reissue is in stereo and not the original mono 45 mix.”

The “2 + 2 = ?” single—the title, incidentally, is never vocalized in the song—was one of the relatively few rare records to gain a place in Dave Marsh’s book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. Marsh called it “a thunderous crash of a record, with phased cymbals, pounding toms and snares, and a honking guitar. Seger’s finest achievement, though, was his lyric, which spelled out the inequity of what was going on in terms stark and terrorized first describing his own hatred of war and the men who might make him fight it, then telling about a high school friend, ‘just an average friendly guy’ who is sent to fight and winds up ‘bured in the mud of a foreign jungle land.’ And then he turns on the full fury of his Wilson Pickett voice and his overamped band.”

Judy Collins, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” Collins was a pretty big star, and “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” was the title track of one of her most popular albums, a 1968 LP that made the Top Thirty and eventually was awarded gold status. To this day, it’s the most widely heard composition by Sandy Denny, who was virtually unknown in the US when Collins covered this song. But it’s not well known that the LP version wasn’t the only version. 

On the album, there was a full-band production and a key change. A far sparser, drumless arrangement sans dramatic upward key change was only on the B-side of “Both Sides Now” and the film soundtrack of The Subject Was Roses,though it later showed up on the greatest hits collection Colors of the Day. That anthology is pretty easy to pick up cheap used, and I don’t know whether the B-side version was ever issued on CD.

Judy Collins, “Chelsea Morning.” It’s also not so well known that Collins put a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” on a 1969 single, two years before a different version was on her 1971 LP Living. The 45 version has a far more ornate, orchestral-informed arrangement; the LP is dominated by piano. The LP version is also a live recording, not a studio one, to judge from the bits of applause heard near the beginning and end of the track. The 45 track seems to be the one on the CD The Very Best of Judy Collins, though I don’t have the physical disc to check. Unlike her cover of another Joni Mitchell composition, “Both Sides Now,” Collins’s rendition of “Chelsea Morning” wasn’t a big hit, only reaching #78.

Tom Rush, “Urge for Going.” Also in the Elektra catalog, Tom Rush issued a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going” as a single in 1966, well before Mitchell issued her debut album in 1968. The 45 version of “Urge for Going” got airplay on Boston’s influential station WBZ, but didn’t catch on nationally. It’s more than two minutes shorter than the LP version, on the 1968 album The Circle Game. It’s also distinguished from its counterpart by a higher key, though it’s not enormously different in approach, other than the longer version allowing for some added ghostly keyboards (at least I believe it’s an organ or keyboard) near the end. The 45 version, perhaps unknown even to the kind of people who care about this kind of thing, appeared as a bonus track on a 2008 CD reissue of The Circle Game.

The Leaves, “Too Many People.” The Leaves might only be remembered for their hit “Hey Joe,” in part because it was selected for the Nuggets compilation. But they were a decent folk-rock-oriented group, if one with a short life. Their first LP, though uneven, is far better than their second and final one, which is of virtually no interest. The first LP also included, oddly, a different version of their debut 45 “Too Many People.” It’s half a minute longer than the single, but it’s decisively less impressive, with a more even tempo that’s far less effective than the one on the 45, which followed the rhythm of the Rolling Stones’ “Empty Heart.” It also just seems less energetic overall than the single, as if they were reluctantly forcing themselves to go through a song they’d already played many times in the studio again.

It’s a little puzzling why this bluesy, vaguely folk-rockish protest number was redone. The original single had reached #11 on the charts—I assume a local radio chart—in their native Los Angeles. It was also on the same small label, Mira, that issued the LP, titled Hey Joe. Maybe it was re-recorded because the Leaves’ lineup changed between the single and the LP, with guitarist Bill Rinehart getting replaced by Bobby Arlin. The original 45 version, fortunately, was a bonus track on the 2000 expanded CD reissue of Hey Joe, and even way before that, had been on the 1982 compilation The Leaves 1966, on the enigmatic Panda label.

Savage Rose, “A Girl I Knew.” Savage Rose are not a big name in English-speaking countries, but they’re a big name in my house, as they were one of the best groups from a non-English speaking nation (Denmark) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I devoted a chapter to them in my book Unknown Legends of Rock’n’Roll. They were a big name in their native Denmark, where they at some points sold a lot of records, and made some impressions, if more on an underground/cult level, in some other European countries. Even in the US, they got some LPs released, did some shows (including the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival), and got complimentary reviews in Rolling Stone. They put out a lot of records, so this non-LP version of one of their best album tracks might have been overlooked even by dedicated collectors.

“A Girl I Knew” was a highlight of their 1968 self-titled debut LP, with a light yet slightly ominous psychedelic feel, interesting piano-organ interplay, and Annisette’s distinctive throaty, pinched vocals. It’s a little mystifying as to why they’d bother cutting an inferior slower, heavier rock version on a single that, to my knowledge, is extremely difficult to find on CD. It did show up on a huge eleven-CD various-artists box set Dansk Rock Historie 1965-1978, and I’m not sure any copies of that made it overseas; I’ve certainly never seen one. Making matters more confusing, it seems like there are three volumes in a box set series titled Dansk Rock Historie 1965-1978, of which this is just one, each bearing that identical title, though at least they’re in different colors. The one with the 45 version of “The Only Girl I Knew” is green.

As to why there was a remake for the 45 market, that might have had to do with a famed producer with whom they briefly worked. Polydor Records, perhaps sensing it could break the group into the international market, arranged some sessions in London with manager/producer Giorgio Gomelsky, a British impresario who’d worked with the Yardbirds, Soft Machine, Julie Driscoll & Brian Auger & the Trinity, and numerous other innovative UK artists. “He was a pretty wild guy,” Savage Rose guitaris Nils Tuxen told me. “It was known that he consumed a bottle of whisky every day, which is not a little.”

Obviously some effort went into this enterprise, as Gomelsky came over to Denmark beforehand to see the band play at Tivoli, Copenhagen’s famous amusement park. And going to Britain to record was not something a Danish band could do with casual ease in the late 1960s. “It was an interesting situation, because at that point, you were not allowed to go into England and record,” noted Tuxen. “It was strictly prohibited. The Musicians Union would not [allow] such a thing. So what the record company did…we went there and didn’t carry any instruments at all with us. They hired instruments for us. They even hired a session bass player who sat around for the entire time, just in order that our bass player could use his bass. Can you imagine that?”

But the collaboration was not a success, resulting only in an obscure single—the slower remake of “A Girl That I Knew” on one side, and the bluesy “Birthday Day” on the other. “In the studio, we just didn’t get to the place where our kind of creativity started,” Savage Rose keyboardist Thomas Koppel told me about the sessions. “We felt like the road was blocked somehow. It didn’t work out. In situations like that, we became anarchists.”

“That’s BS,” retorted Gomelsky when asked to give his side of the story. “The drummer [Alex Riel] was a professional musician, he knew a lot about music. You could talk to him. He saw very clearly what the ideas were. Annisette—great singer. We had no problems. With one of the [Koppel] brothers, I had terrible problems. One of them thought of himself as some kind of Viking god. Big-headed, big chip on his shoulder and knew zilch. It was very difficult to get anything out “of them and by consequence out of the session. He opposed everything, he stopped everything, he stopped work from flowing. We were getting nowhere.

“In London at the time, remember, we were flowing. We were in a groove. The engineers were hot, everybody was hot, we worked and went out and we celebrated. It was such an ‘up’ kind of situation. And there came this guy with this sort of negative kind of resistance. It just didn’t make for any agreeable environment. So I said, ‘I can’t do anything.’ But on the way there, we had some really good ideas, because Alex Riel—a pleasure to work with—was open to anything that made sense to him. Annisette, she was waiting, ready to wail away at the least opportunity. One of the brothers was cool. But then there was the other one. So it was not a happy experience. Truth to be known, you can pinpoint why.”

Whatever the reasons for this impasse, the resulting single did not succeed at raising the group’s international commercial profile, if that was the intention. It wasn’t the last time they hooked up with a big-name producer—they recorded Refugee with Jimmy Miller, who was also handling the Rolling Stones at the time, in 1971. But as Thomas admitted, “We were never really the typical kind of artists that wanted a producer at all.”

The few English-speaking collectors who are interested in finding Savage Rose rarities might want to know that Dansk Rock Historie 1965-1978—the volume that features their 1972 album Dodens Triumf as disc one, if you’re determined to track it down–also includes this single’s B-side, “Birthday Day,” and another non-LP single from 1969, “The Schoolteacher Said So,” which like “Birthday Day” isn’t so memorable. It also has…

Savage Rose, “Ride My Mountain.” Used on the B-side of the Danish single “Evening’s Child,” the 45 version is about two minutes shorter than the one on their second album, 1968’s In the Plain. It’s faster and more intense, and though it’s not definitively superior to the LP counterpart, it’s worth hearing for Savage Rose completists. Although I’d guess fairly few of them will go to the effort of finding and buying the green-colored Dansk Rock Historie 1965-1978 box. It seems like it will cost at least $50 including shipping, going from the listings of copies for sale on discogs.com.

A smaller selection of post-1960s LP vs. single variations will be coming up in a future post.