I think London Calling by the Clash is the greatest rock album ever recorded. But it isn’t perfect. London Calling is a double album and I would suggest that it’s extremely difficult for any album with nineteen songs and over an hour of music to be perfect. There are bound to be some peaks and valleys.
You can define a perfect album any way you want but for me, the simplest explanation I can offer is this: on a perfect album, I never skip a track. I never even think about it. I listen to the album in its entirety, from beginning to end. I don’t feel the need to make any edits.
Notice that doesn’t necessarily mean that the songs are among the greatest of all time. They just have a consistent standard. There is no filler or fodder. No missteps.
Five albums from the 1960s you should be listening to today
London Calling is the greatest album because for three sides it has as fine a collection of rock n roll as I have ever heard. It isn’t perfect because side four doesn’t quite live up to that standard. Back in the old days, when we used to listen on vinyl and had to actually flip records over, I would almost never listen to side four unless I really wanted to hear “Train in Vain,” which was hidden at the end. It’s not that “Lover’s Rock” and “Revolution Rock” are bad songs. They’re pretty good songs. But they are not as good as what precedes them, and, by side four, they are sounding a little bit redundant.
So today we’re going to begin a series on perfect albums. And although I just implied that perfection does not always equate to greatness, these are all great albums as well. We’ll start with five albums from the 1960s, and if it’s at all interesting, we’ll look at subsequent decades in the near future.
CHUCK BERRY: ST. LOUIS TO LIVERPOOL (1964)
If I was beginning in the ‘50s, I could have chosen several of Berry's seminal rock n roll recordings. But more than a half a dozen albums into his career, Berry was fully formed, and it shows more clearly on St. Louis…” than on anything else he ever did. This is the origin of guitar-fueled rock n roll, with piano offering flourishes and bass and drums driving it all relentlessly forward. It all seems so simple today, but in the early ‘60s, it was a cultural revolution.
St. Louis has iconic tracks like “Little Marie,” “No Particular Place to Go,” and “You Never Can Tell.” They have been covered by countless other performers, and used in movies and commercials. They have become a part of the fabric of American culture.
But St. Louis… is perfect because of the consistency Berry maintains throughout. He can romanticize the sound on “You Two,” or rock out with his signature guitar lick on “Promised Land.” He can slow down to the more traditional blues of “The Things I Used to Do,” or speed up to the instrumental “Liverpool Drive.” No matter what flavor he is exploring, that guitar is always there, and it’s always perfect.
BOB DYLAN: HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED (1965)
Though you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would disagree that Highway 61… is a great album, it usually takes a back seat in most Bob Dylan polls to the album that came next, 1966’s Blonde on Blonde. Blonde on Blonde is an extraordinary musical achievement, filled with great songs.
But like the aforementioned London Calling, it is a double album. It ends on the epic “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” written for Dylan’s wife Sarah Lownds. I think “Sad Eyed Lady…” is a very good song, but I’m not sure it was the best way to end Blonde on Blonde. At eleven-and-a-half minutes, it can grow monotonous.
There is not one second of monotony on Highway 61 Revisited. It arrived at a crucial point – not merely in Dylan’s career, but in the evolution of popular music as a whole. Steve Earle has identified 1965 as the year Dylan decided he wanted to be the Beatles (in Highway 61…) and John Lennon decided he wanted to be Dylan (in Rubber Soul). He had begun blending folk protest with electric rock n roll with Bringing It All Back Home earlier in 1965, and it had pissed off Dylan’s core audience. Nonetheless, he double-downed on Highway 61... and won him a whole new world of fans.
From the moment Al Kooper’s organ kicks off “Like a Rolling Stone,” through to the epic Latin-tinged acoustic story told in “Desolation Row,” Dylan is at his absolute best. The title track is boisterous fun with a slide whistle adding to the carnival. “Tombstone Blues” rocks better than ever Dylan had before. And ‘Ballad of a Thin Man” is one of the most, bitter mysterious epics in all pop music. The other four songs lose none of that eclectic energy. “Desolation Row” is as long as “Sad Eyed Lady…” but I have never felt worn out by the time I get to it.
SIMON & GARFUNKEL: SOUNDS OF SILENCE (1966)
If you want to make the case that Sounds of Silence ranks fourth out of five on S and G’s album list, I won’t argue. Paul Simon, as much as any songwriter in pop music, proves that greatness and perfection are not the same thing. Simon is the most eclectic of all great American singer/songwriters.
That eclecticism has led to masterpieces like Graceland, and it has led to missteps. S&G’s albums that came after Sound of Silence (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme – Bookends -- Bridge Over Troubled Waters) each have an extraordinary number of gems. And they are all plagued by minor miscalculations. Bookends remains my favorite S&G album despite the unfathomable inclusion of Art Garfunkel’s “Voices or Old People,” – a track that I have always skipped.
By saying this, I do not mean to suggest that Sounds of Silence is a minor achievement. Every track is first-rate, from the opening title track to the concluding “I Am a Rock.” Simon could write simple, beautiful ballads like “Kathy’s Song” and “April Come She Will,” as well as ironic short stories like “Richard Cory” and “A Most Peculiar Man.” He could be bitter, but he never failed to be engaging. The album even has one of the few acoustic tracks Simon recorded – his cover of Davey Graham’s “Anji.”
In a sense, Sounds of Silence should have been a perfect album because a lot of the songs had previously been released on Simon’s “Songbook” album, or had been reworked from other source material. But I don’t hold that against it. It just resulted in the most cohesive collection of songs the duo ever released.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO (1967)
Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, along with occasional frontwoman Nico, recorded the tracks for their debut album in 1966, then waited around for over a year while their label promoted Frank Zappa’s album ahead of theirs. This kicked off the lifelong hatred Reed had for Zappa’s West Coast hippie music. When the album finally appeared, with Andy Warhol’s iconic banana cover, it didn’t sell very well. It was truly music that was ahead of its time. But as Brian Eno famously observed – the album may have only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one went on to form his own band.
Reed expanded the universe of what a pop song could be. He wrote about addiction (“Heroin”) and sexual perversion (“Venus in Furs”). He wrote about things that no one really understood (“European Son”), though they knew something was going on here. This was Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” come to life in song. Add Cale’s revolutionary sense of instrumentation and you had a collection of songs that was unlike anything heard before.
And then there was Nico – the Teutonic model who could barely sing but had attitude oozing out of every pore. Reed didn’t want her. She was Warhol’s invention. Reed often sang her songs when they performed live. But on the album, her cold, deadpan delivery is perfect for “Femme Fatale.” She also adds a bizarre vibe to rough up the softness of the romantic “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” And no one else could have possibly done the epic “All Tomorrow’s Parties” other than Nico. In short order, Reed would get rid of Nico and Warhol, and even Cale. The band still cranked out some amazing music, but nothing as perfect as that debut.
CREDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL: GREEN RIVER (1969)
1969 was a pretty good year for CCR. Green River was the second of three albums the band released that year. The first – Bayou Country – was excellent. The third – Willie and the Poor Boys – was even better. And Green River was the best of them all. It had some of the band’s best-loved numbers, like “Bad Moon Rising,” “Lodi,” and the title track. But that only scratches the surface.
The pounding swamp rock of “Commotion,” the voodoo blues of “Tombstone Shadow,” and the poignantly acoustic “Wrote a Song for Everyone,” fill out side one. The second side just gets swampier and bluesier. Early in 1970, they would release Cosmo’s Factory, capping off a year-and-a-half that is only matched by Elton John’s run of albums beginning right around the time CCR was backing up a bit.