Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  ‘The Kiss’ - Judee Sill (Heart Food)

  Like ‘Surf’s Up’, this is the sound of utter perfection and full-on spiritual rapture merging together in the pop-song medium. Beyond exquisite, this is holy, healing music that remains to this day criminally underappreciated.

  ‘Bad Girl’ - the New York Dolls

  This careening track from their eponymous debut album contains all the approaching-train-wreck bliss of their best live shows.

  The Harder They Come - various artists

  1973 was the year when reggae reached out beyond its previous UK ‘specialist’ fan base of Jamaican expats and home-grown skinheads and started appealing to the larger white rock and pop demographic. The Wailers’ ‘Catch a Fire’ and ‘Burning’ were crucial in spreading the weed-head gospel throughout the British Isles but this Jimmy Cliff-dominated soundtrack album was the key artefact to detonate a full-blown reggae revolution in the pre-punk UK.

  Fresh - Sly & the Family Stone

  Sly’s last recording of consequence before drugs and ego turned him into one of the biggest losers of the late twentieth century.

  1974

  ‘Trouble Man’ - Marvin Gaye (Live!)

  Alongside the Temptations’ Norman Whitfield-produced ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’, Marvin Gaye’s ’73 hit single ‘Trouble Man’ introduced the world to a new, edgier, gloomier Motown sound for the seventies. A year after the studio version had sat proudly in the UK top ten, Gaye returned to the song for a special in-concert rendition that shredded the original courtesy of some jaw-dropping vocal gymnastics and a backing band - Gaye’s old Snakepit support crew reunited once more - that swings like the proverbial motherfucker.

  ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’ - Ann Peebles

  Peebles never got to duplicate the worldwide success this sultry, lovesick single briefly brought her in 1974 but I will never forget the indelible impact this record had on taste-makers and music-lovers alike during that year.

  Future Days - Can

  This is the record that contained the dreamiest and most mind-scrambling musical explorations Can ever managed to conceive together.

  Grievous Angel - Gram Parsons

  Chrissie Hynde was a big fan of this, Parsons’s posthumous final recording, and played it over and over again throughout the last months we lived together.

  ‘Casanova’ - Roxy Music

  Bryan Ferry’s second all-time masterpiece composition was too dark to be considered a plausible single choice for Roxy Music but nonetheless lit up their Country Life album with its cautionary ode to some drug-dependent early-seventies dandy libertine. I wonder who he was referring to.

  On the Beach - Neil Young

  If you want to know even more about what it felt like to be cast adrift and left to float uncertainly through the spiritual quagmire of the (early) seventies, this album will fill you in.

  ‘I Can Understand It’ - Bobby Womack

  Womack - one of American soul music’s most talented singer/ songwriters - became a bona fide hipster cult item in 1974, with the Stones and Rod Stewart frequently praising his records to the skies and clued-in club DJs playing tracks like this until the grooves had been worn down to a static hiss.

  Veedon Fleece - Van Morrison

  Let us not be forgetting the prickly Belfast cowboy’s mighty contribution to music in the early seventies. Moondance and Tupelo Honey were also particular favourites of mine during this time frame.

  ‘Guilty’ - Randy Newman

  This maudlin drug addict’s confession from Newman’s seventies high point, Good Old Boys, really spoke to my personal condition as the decade headed towards its midway stretch.

  1975

  ‘Kashmir’ - Led Zeppelin

  I first heard Physical Graffiti in its entirety four months or more before its March ’75 release date. Jimmy Page arranged an exclusive listening session at a London recording studio. Afterwards he asked me what I thought. I told him then that the stand-out track was ‘Kashmir’ and that it would probably go down in history as their greatest-ever recording. He seemed disappointed by this information and claimed to prefer ‘Ten Years Gone’. Thirty-five years later though I’ll bet he’s revised his opinion.

  ‘Fame’ - David Bowie

  King David’s celebrity-bashing disco extravaganza was unavoidable in ’75. ‘Fame”s co-author John Lennon is lurking somewhere in the mix but the key contributor here - apart from Bowie himself of course - is Carlos Alomar, the Duke’s most accomplished guitar foil and riff provider.

  Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan

  The Great One’s return to sustained songwriting excellence after eight erratic years was a humongous hit worldwide in early ’75. Obliquely centred on Dylan’s recent marital conflicts, Blood became the perfect record for lovesick fools like me to use as a musical I Ching for the broken-hearted.

  The Hissing of Summer Lawns - Joni Mitchell

  On this sumptuously disturbing record La Mitchell daringly ditched her old LA neighbourhood of winsome Canyon ladies and free-spirited male troubadours to move into the loveless side of town where the pimps and junkies mingled with the rich and the damned. Her singing voice went down an octave in the process but her songwriting gifts flourished like never before in the new noir setting.

  ‘I Love Music’ - the O’Jays

  Disco’s most euphoric-sounding single was also the high-water mark for Gamble and Huff’s prolific production factory out in Philadelphia.

  ‘Roadrunner’/‘Pablo Picasso’ - the Modern Lovers

  Long before these two tracks were available on vinyl, John Cale gave me a cassette tape of studio sessions he’d produced with this oddball Boston outfit, and both ‘Roadrunner’ and ‘Picasso’ instantly stood out as dual portents of ‘things to come’.

  ‘Cortez the Killer’ - Neil Young

  The gaunt Canadian dropped the bomb twice in ’75, first by finally releasing Tonight’s the Night, his prophetic meditation on the role of drugs and death in evolving pop culture, and then by unleashing Zuma at year’s end. ‘Cortez’ was the highlight of the latter, with Young and a freshly reunited Crazy Horse down-pacing their usual prairie lope until it moved more like the sound of war canoes and their paddles slicing through calm waters in order to destroy ancient civilisations.

  ‘Long Distance Love’ - Little Feat

  This once sorely underrated LA band were suddenly a hot ticket in ’75 - particularly in Britain, which received their first live presentations with rapturous acclaim. Doubtless influenced by this stroke of fate, their leader Lowell George went on to deliver his most soulful composition and vocal performance ever during that same year before succumbing to drug-accelerated flame-out and death at decade’s end.

  ‘Any World That I’m Welcome To’ - Steely Dan

  Something about the nakedness of emotion expressed in this beautiful song-a lonely, oversensitive introvert’s simple prayer for acceptance in a more sympathetic universe - really put the spook in me when I first heard it.

  ‘I’m a Hog for You Baby’ - Dr. Feelgood

  This double-fierce, borderline-obscene, amphetamine-sharp rearrangement of an old Coasters novelty track from the fifties was always the pivotal performance in their live shows in the mid-seventies.

  1976

  Station to Station - David Bowie

  The sessions for this album were so drug-sated that Bowie now claims he can’t remember any of the details about recording the six tracks. That’s too bad because in my estimation it’s his most fascinating work. If you really want to unravel the mysteries lurking in this deeply strange record, read Ian MacDonald’s brilliant analysis in the chapter ‘Dark Doings’ from his 2005 book The People’s Music (Serpent’s Tail).

  ‘I Want You’ - Marvin Gaye

  The late seventies found Gaye struggling to match the lofty creative standards he’d set for himself earlier in the decade. But this sublime single was another immaculate conception from Motown’s greatest-ever God-given vocal talent
.

  ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ - the Ramones

  The Stooges had already pushed the door marked ‘punk rock’ ajar at the outset of the seventies, but this track and the group who performed it were the proverbial dynamite stick which blew that door clear off its hinges in ’76, opening wide a space in rock culture for the Sex Pistols and the Clash to rampage through.

  Metallic KO - Iggy and the Stooges

  This hellish live recording is in the list mainly because I was a prime mover in getting it released in the first place. It certainly had a ferocious influence on the emerging punk scene - not all of it good unfortunately. A lot of the violence that took place at London punk shows was directly caused by clueless young people trying to copy the audience mayhem of Metallic KO. More macabre audio vérité than a conventional rock album, this record now sends an uncomfortably cold chill down my spine whenever I even think about it. Bad karma on black vinyl.

  ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ - Blue Oyster Cult

  In recent years this has become a global biker anthem like ‘Free Bird’, as well as the victim of a side-splittingly funny Christopher Walken ‘More Cowbell’ routine on America’s Saturday Night Live. Back in ’76 though this majestically creepy rumination on looming death hit all the right buttons amongst record buyers and rock critics alike, both of whom couldn’t get enough of its ingenious ‘Byrds meet Darth Vader’ ambience.

  ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ - Thin Lizzy

  Full-tilt seventies testosterone rock was what Phil Lynott’s boys served up to the masses, and this breakthrough single proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the toughest and tastiest in their field.

  ‘Love of the Common Man’ - Todd Rundgren

  Rundgren was an oddity throughout the seventies. Early in the decade he looked set to become America’s answer to Bowie but - after experimenting with psychedelic drugs - veered away from his more commercial instincts to clumsily embrace prog rock. Result: his fan base never grew beyond a cult. Still, in ’76 he released some of his best-ever work on the album Faithful, specifically this killer salute to everyman that packed into approximately three minutes everything you needed to hear from his wide-ranging talents.

  Hejira - Joni Mitchell

  For my money, this remains the most intimate and breathtakingly beautiful album released during the seventies bar none.

  The Pretender - Jackson Browne

  The haunting title track - inspired by the suicide of Browne’s girlfriend - was an unforgettable ‘how to survive the seventies’ burst of lyrical self-exegesis.

  ‘Two Headed Dog’ - Roky Erickson and Bleib Alien

  One of the first ‘indie’-distributed 45s I ever heard or saw. Mad as a sack of wild cats. Pure cerebral psychosis with a flaming back-beat and demons for guitar picks.

  1977

  ‘Watching the Detectives’ - Elvis Costello and the Attractions

  I remember spending an evening with Nick Lowe and Jake Riviera at their Kensington flat listening to a rough mix of this track - which Lowe had just produced - over and over again. I’d already heard Costello’s My Aim Is True record and thought it was good. But this was monumental. Still one of the only examples of white blokes playing reggae that hits all the right spots for me.

  The Idiot/Lust for Life - Iggy Pop

  I’ve already praised these two Iggy/Bowie sonic groundbreakers sufficiently in the 1977 chapter.

  Marquee Moon - Television

  Several London punk notables took me to task for raving about this record so extensively in the NME that year. They said it was just ‘music for old hippies’ and that it would never last the test of time. Thirty-two years later though I see Marquee Moon routinely perched in the highest branches of all those ‘greatest-ever albums’ polls instigated by the media whilst the recorded output of those who castigated them barely gets a mention.

  ‘Joe the Lion’ - David Bowie

  The album Heroes could well have been the creative blueprint for the late-seventies ‘new wave’ musical hybrid. Everyone from the Human League to Simple Minds drew their core musical cues from its sulphurous contents. But no one ever merged US funk with European avant-pop drama more artfully than the Bromley Alien, and the album’s second selection-a skewed homage to performance artist Chris Burden - was uncommonly inspired even by Bowie’s exacting standards.

  ‘Bodies’ - the Sex Pistols

  ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’ were all brilliant blockbuster singles but the uproariously venomous ‘Bodies’ best captured the full foul-mouthed, flint-hearted essence of who and what the Sex Pistols really were from my vantage point.

  Aja - Steely Dan

  It’s amazing to think the Sex Pistols’ debut album and this sublime collection were released during the same year. The Dan’s creative high point was the sonic antithesis of punk and took Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s noble quest to merge penetrating pop songcraft with sophisticated jazz-drenched chords and arrangements and five-star musicianship to a level of accomplishment no one has since come close to matching.

  Little Criminals - Randy Newman

  Greil Marcus really laid into this record via a long Rolling Stone review but I actually preferred its sleeker sound to most of Newman’s early-seventies output.

  The Belle Album - Al Green

  In the mid-seventies, Green’s mighty run of hits was interrupted by the singer’s sudden urge to become an ordained preacher. The Belle Album was his first self-produced effort and first post-religious-conversion musical statement. Rarely has music promoting the ‘I’ve found God and you should too’ message sounded as compelling and persuasive to non-believing ears.

  ‘The Book I Read’ - Talking Heads

  I stopped listening to David Byrne and his pals in the eighties when they opted to concentrate on manufacturing yuppified funk pastiches for white people with no sense of natural rhythm but this overlooked song from their debut album was still one of my favourites from 1977.

  New Boots and Panties!! - Ian Dury and the Blockheads Dury truly found his form once he’d disbanded the Kilburns at mid-decade and thrown in his lot with the more musically accomplished Blockheads. This seminal celebration of English eccentricity was one of the decade’s stand-out musical statements.

  1978-1979

  Darkness on the Edge of Town - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

  For most Europeans, Darkness was the place where Springsteen finally rose above all the formative musical influences that had previously defined his recorded output and became an unstoppable rock superpower strictly on his own terms. These eloquent anthems for blue-collar Americans struggling to keep their faith in uncertain times sounded even better on the various live bootlegs that started appearing hot on the heels of this studio album’s ’78 release date.

  Blue Valentine - Tom Waits

  Predecessors Small Change and Foreign Affairs both had their share of stellar moments but Valentine was Waits’s real ‘coming of age’ artistic triumph during a decade that never quite knew what to make of his music.

  ‘Too Much Heaven’ - the Bee Gees

  Considering we almost came to blows back in 1973, you could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve always felt only contempt for the Bee Gees but - like virtually everyone else in the late seventies - I fell under the spell of their Saturday Night Fever contributions such as ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and ‘How Deep Is Your Love’. Even more irresistible was this lilting soul ballad from their Spirits Having Flown album.

  ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’ - Captain Beefheart

  This infectiously demented samba was all the proof I needed to show me that Beefheart had bounced back from his mid-seventies wilderness years to re-establish his rightful place on the throne as rock’s very own King of Weird.

  Excitable Boy - Warren Zevon

  Zevon started out hell-bent on portraying himself as West Coast rock’s very own Hunter S. Thompson and this - his second solo album - still ranks as his m
ost successful and imaginative attempt at spicing up LA-centric, radio-friendly tunesmithery with an authentic ‘gonzo’ edge.

  ‘Señor’ - Bob Dylan

  The highlight from ’78’s otherwise lacklustre Street-Legal, ‘Señor’ is the gloomily compelling sound of Dylan staring down the black hole of despair and betrayal just prior to being touched by the hand of God.

  ‘Domino’ - the Cramps

  LA’s rockabilly renegades outstripped even Roy Orbison’s original version of this song by investing it with just the right hint of authentically psychotic swagger.