On Music

...ON MUSIC For the dedicated young critics of rock and roll, reviewing today's immense output of this music appears to be a little like smoking bananas It's a great experience, but a lot of good fruit gets thrown out Reading Craw daddy', rock's quasi-official magazine, one gets the feeling that musical analysis provides its own intoxication and thus everything becomes significant because it is rock For the less committed the proportion of dross to gold is so overpowering, musical value so inextricably mixed with economic and social considerations, that reason pales at the prospect of analysis These critics get their kicks by ranting Well, to each his own high In the past few months of listening to a quantity of current rock, perhaps for the first time seriously, I am almost persuaded to join the Craw daddy' crowd I would choose four groups, two of them new, two of them established, as fair representatives of the best in the rock and roll style today The Rolling Stones and the Beatles have done much to create a new music, the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane are building upon it Exactly what the style is has been a question of some controversy, mostly in print These four groups, however, are finding their own respective voices, and they refuse to be categorized since they will accept nothing less than a kind of rigorous musical pluralism None of the four needs now to resort to By John Goodman Four Rock Collections effusive banalities to be heard, to protest or to make their musical points Rock pundits either want to lump all pop music together to show the cross-fertihzmg power of the different styles, or they propose a bewildering variety of subspecies, like acid rock, raga rock, shock rock and maybe, if certain trends continue, toilet rock Musicians, promoters and critics encourage this multiplicity in their breathless search for the new, though lately they have begun harking after tradition as well Influences and sources have become terribly important Little Richard, some unknown Chicago blues singer, even old Elvis Presley records The Beatles are tradition in its most ambiguous form While they are, for musical and economic reasons, compulsive experimenters in therr more recent records, their imitators lose no time in adopting the banal along with the subtle, the adolescent with the literate The Beatle imprimatur will surely provide for future excesses in rock music, and this is part of the disappointment I find in their newest disc, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol SMAS2653) It is too cavalier, too much of a blague, though the best songs in it are perhaps more significant as music and statement than anything the Beatles have done Apparently their idea was to expand a "life is an English music hall" metaphor, but the inconsistencies seem quite deliberate The album has achieved its intended result of provoking lots of discussion, and we assume that the boys, a bit surfeited with critical acclaim, are putting us on Some of the lyrics, like those in "A Little Help from My Friends" and "Fixing a Hole," exploit a kind of moral and linguistic ambiguity that is limp and insignificant, if not contemptuous We want to take them seriously because the musical effects are generally fine, and tunes like "A Day in the Life" with its commonplace horrors and "Lucy m the Sky with Diamonds" with its lsd imagery are genuinely beautiful and represent original and meaningful excursions The Beatles' album Rubber Soul (Capitol ST2442) appeared about a year ago and marked the first turn away from their early work Most of the Lennon-McCartney tunes in this set were big hits, all of them are consistently interesting The melodic quality is very high, especially in "Michelle," "Wait," and "Run for Your Life" Revolver (Capitol ST2576) brought another experimental push into the Indian bit with tabla and tambura-likc sounds, electronic distortions and silly surrealism ("Yellow Submarine," which reminds me a little of Spike Jones) This is their best and most ambitious album so far, fully integrating words and music, it includes satire and mature seriousness, "good time" music and lament For instance, the old nund-body dualism, a familiar theme in current rock moves away fiom its hackneyed drug song context to a mood of casual yet urgent need for communication in "I Want to Tell You " Swingy, loping rhythm is played off against a dissonant, rocking piano figure, and the lyric fixes the polarity "But if I seem to act unkind, it's only me, it's not my mind that is confusing things " The Beatles perfected their vocal texture and melodic invention in "Here, There and Everywhere," a very lovely song and they pio-duced the best death-of-love song I have heard in "For No One," which improves on Bob Dylan "And in her eyes you see nothing, no sign of love behind the tears cried for no one A love that should have lasted years " The basic style of the Rolling Stones is hard-rock, yet they too have mastered a full range of expression and tone in their recent albums Much of this is protest music—attacking hypocrisy or sterile and sick conventions—but little of it is angry, none of it is uncontrolled The Stones make brilliant use of cliche language, character and situation Between the Buttons (London PS499) was praised by everybody and Floweis (London PS509), just out, is equally good London Records, m a crude play for the dollar, reprinted the Stones' hit singles, "Ruby Tuesday" and "Let's Spend the Night Together," on both albums, a practice too common in pop music But both tunes are excellent In the latter the simplest kind of 7-note phrase is made interesting through variation and ornamentation, musical strategies in which the Stones excel Mick Jag-ger sings the verses of "Ruby Tuesday" in chamber-rock style over piano, cello, and lecorder At the choruses the whole group joins in and the hard-rock sound comes on m a stirring contrast Incredible instrumental effects are used in both albums vibraphone, string section, accordion, electric harpsichord, dixieland tiombone and tuba, kazoo, electionic whistle and oscillator The engineering of all this is tasteful and unobtrusive, believe it or not As to themes, the Stones like to satnize sex, the everyday, drugs and the cool attitude In Floweis, the red-eyed chick on drugs is put down haid "You may look pietty, but I can't say the same for your mind" ("Ride on...

...Baby") "Mother's Little Helper," the yellow pill, "helps her on her way, gets her through hei busy day" with ironic consequences In Between the Buttons yesterday's girls are like "Yesterday's Papers"—who wants them7 But the Stones' finest scorn is reserved for those ladies of affectation who are "Complicated" or "Cool, Calm and Collected" The humor here is very winning, for it is both bitter and warm, reflective and spontaneous The Stones have learned how to make their protest mature, viable and musical The Doors' first album (The Doois, Elektra EKS74007) is filled with vocal and instrumental intensity, perhaps an excess of it Singer Jim Morrison seems to like the hollering, James Brown type of vocal with its appurtenances ot shrieks and soul grunts It works well for him m "Break on Through," partly because of his rousing accompaniment and the rhythmic structuie of the tune (rock superimposed on a bossa nova) But it would be a good thing if more rock singers tried harder to break on through the restrictive, conventional, Negroid linguistic in their music Morrison does so on occasion Two songs of sexual need are very powerful m this album?Soul Kitchen" and "Light My Fire " A fine organ solo by Ray Manzarek in "Light My Fire" shows how consciously and well the Doors have used jazz and rhythm-and-blues effects, Robby Kneger's guitar sounds almost like an alto sax This is one of the two tracks on the record that get beyond the 3-mrnute barrier The othei extended opus, "The End," is a serious attempt to break down musical categories The lyrics provide images of apocalypse, a Waste Land world and suggestions of Le Bateau Ivie, the music is appropriately incantatory The Doors are working out new possibilities that could be exciting for lock At the same time the Jefferson Airplane could have the greatest puiely musical success of any of the new groups They don't use many gimmicks—instrumental, electronic or vocal—and for their lyrics they are content to rely on the typical rock themes of drugs and their effects, our surreal world and the power of love What they have developed brilliantly is a complex set of patterns for orchestration and voicing to give a total ensemble texture unlike that of any rock group now playing Since there are six of them, the sound is necessarily dense, and they exploit this density in several ways One is through the power and richness of Grace Slick's voice She can blend or dominate as the situation demands, twist words, bend notes or sing bel canto Her most impressive piece is "Somebody to Love" from the recent Sunealistic Pillow (RCA Victor LSP3766) The group has a strong lead guitar in Jorma Kaukonen (who plays a beautiful unamphfied solo called "Embryonic Journey"), but in most of their tunes the lead is constantly passed around This makes for patterns of voicing and a strong sense of form within the chaos In "DCBA-25" two voices and two instruments (guitar and bass) exchange the lead while playing a three-part theme and variations in a three-on-two rhythm The result is a virtual double counterpoint and a flavor more textured and Baroque than anything the Beatles or the Stones have come up with And the ironies have deepened Grace says, "Too many days are left unstoned I cannot dance behind your smile...