The Mojo Collection

4th Edition

Various Mojo Magazine, Jim Irvin

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781841959733
• eBook ISBN: 9781847676436
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Organised chronologically and spanning seven decades, The MOJO Collection presents an authoritative and engaging guide to the history of the pop album via hundreds of long-playing masterpieces, from the much-loved to the little known.

From The Beatles to The Verve, from Duke Ellington to King Tubby and from Peggy Lee to Sly Stone, hundreds of albums are covered in detail with chart histories, full track and personnel listings and further listening suggestions. There's also exhaustive coverage of the soundtrack and hit collections that every home should have.

Like all collections, there are records you listen to constantly, albums you've forgotten, albums you hardly play, albums you love guiltily and albums you thought you were alone in treasuring, proving The MOJO Collection to be an essential purchase for those who love and live music

The 1970s

Simon & Garfunkel

Bridge Over Troubled Water

A generation-defining, multi-platinum farewell to the ’60s.

Record label: CBS

Produced: Paul Simon, Arthur Garfunkel and Roy Halee

Recorded: New York and Los Angeles; June 13, 1968–November 19, 1969

Released: January 26, 1970

Chart peaks: 1 (UK) 1 (US)

Personnel: Paul Simon (g, v); Art Garfunkel (v); Larry Knechtel (k); Fred Carter Jr (g); Hal Blaine (d); Joe Osborn (b); Jimmy Haskell, Ernie Freeman (ar)

Track listing: Bridge Over Troubled Water (S); El Condor Pasa (If I Could) (S); Cecilia (S); Keep The Customer Satisfied; So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright; The Boxer; Baby Driver; The Only Living Boy In New York; Why Don’t You Write Me; Bye Bye Love; Song For The Asking

Running time: 37.26

Current CD: Sony 4624882

Further listening: Any hits compilation, or their second greatest album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme (1966)

Further reading: Simon And Garfunkel: The Definitive Biography (Victoria Kingston, 1997); www.simonandgarfunkel.com

Download: iTunes

By the time Simon & Garfunkel came to make Bridge Over Troubled Water, they were drifting apart. Art was preoccupied with his acting career and, consequently, Paul felt he was no longer pulling his weight.

‘It was a tough album to make,’ Garfunkel has admitted, ‘but tough is one of the words that leads to great results.’ That it still stands as their definitive statement is a measure of Simon’s tendency to shine brightest in adversity.

According to Simon, ‘I knew the minute I wrote, “Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down,” that I had a very clear image. The whole verse was set up to hit that melody line. With certain songs you just know it.’ Even so, he remembers the original demo as ‘a much less grandiose thing than the record. In fact, it wasn’t grandiose at all. It was a humble, little gospel hymn song with two verses and a simple guitar behind it.’ Embellished with a Spector-ish production and a staggering arrangement, it has since made its presence felt in virtually every poll of best-ever singles.

The Boxer emerges as another astonishing achievement and, in some ways, a more satisfying song than Bridge, with its rippling guitar soaring into the ‘lie-la-lie’ hook (written because Simon couldn’t think of any words) set against Roy Halee’s brilliantly engineered percussion effects (the signature explosive snare crack was recorded in an echoing CBS stairwell, one night when the building had been vacated), rising towards the haunting, primitive, synthesizer solo, climaxing with celestial strings and synth-bass drones before fading finally into Simon’s lonesome acoustic picking.

Fellow musicians were blown away. ‘It’s a great record,’ declared Sandy Denny, ‘fantastically produced.’ Some critics, however, were less perceptive. ‘Their music has gotten stale,’ opined Rolling Stone’s Gregg Mitchell. ‘Everything they play, someone else has played before.’ Joe Public disagreed. On February 21, 1970, the album entered the UK chart at Number 1, a position it held for a staggering 35 weeks, topping both UK and US charts. Ironically, just as the duo had split before their first hit Sounds Of Silence in 1965, by the time Bridge Over Troubled Water scooped six Grammys, on March 16, 1971, Paul Simon was a solo artist.

The Band

The Band

The definitive Americana classic.

Record label: Capitol

Produced: The Band and John Simon

Recorded: Sammy Davis Jr’s pool house, Sunset Plaza Drive, Los Angeles; February–April 1969; The Hit Factory, New York; April 1969

Released: September 22, 1969 (US) January 1970 (UK)

Chart peaks: 25 (UK) 9 (US)

Personnel: Garth Hudson (k, s, accordion, slide trombone); Richard Manuel (v, k, d, s, mouth harp); Levon Helm (v, d, g, mandolin); Rick Danko (vn, b, v, tb); Jaime Robbie Robertson (g, e); John Simon (tuba, k, high school and peck horns, e); Joe Zagarino (e)

Track listing: Across The Great Divide; Rag Mama Rag (S/UK); The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; When You Awake; Up On Cripple Creek (S); Whispering Pines; Jemima Surrender; Rockin’ Chair; Look Out Cleveland; Jawbone; The Unfaithful Servant; King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

Running time: 43.58

Current CD: CDP 746493 2

Further listening: The Band’s debut Music From Big Pink (1968) remains a classic; of their other albums, Stage Fright (1970), Northern Lights – Southern Cross (1975) and the live triple-album Rock Of Ages (1972) are all worth investigating

Further reading: Across The Great Divide (Barney Hoskyns, 1993); This Wheel’s On Fire (Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, 1993); theband. hiof. no

Download: iTunes

A consistently high scorer in polls of the greatest albums of all time – especially amongst fellow musicians – The Band’s second album had the peculiar quality of sounding as if it had existed for decades, the very first time you heard it. This impression was partly due to the richly-textured arrangements, which employed mandolin, fiddle, accordion and various arcane wind instruments alongside the group’s basic instrumentation; partly to the distinctive vocal harmonies, whose soulful bluegrass intervals contravened the smooth West Coast close-harmony style of the times; and partly to the evocative lyrics, which seemed to traverse the entire course of American history in a dozen songs, relating events through the voices of ordinary working-class folk at work, rest, play and war.

Relocating to Los Angeles in February 1969 to record the songs they had been developing since their debut Music From Big Pink, the group rented Sammy Davis Jr’s house in the Hollywood Hills, living in the various suites and converting the pool house into a studio. When Capitol Records were a month late installing the recording equipment, the band used what Richard Manuel called ‘them high-school fat-girl diet pills’ to help them meet the tight schedule, though they still had to finish three songs back in New York. Levon Helm found a set of drums with wooden rims in a Hollywood pawnshop – ‘old-fashioned instruments, but they read well on the microphones’ – which added their own distinctive flavour to the album, and Garth Hudson was as diligent as ever in his search for the appropriate sound, frequently staying late ‘sweetening’ the tracks with extra layers of horns, keyboards, ‘whatever was needed to make that music sing’.

Flashy solos were a rarity, each instrumental part being sublimated to a song’s overall feel. They made an even bigger break with the era’s virtuosic tendencies by swapping instruments around amongst themselves and making a virtue of their limitations. Rag Mama Rag – a Top 20 UK hit in 1970 – featured the drummer playing mandolin, the pianist playing drums, the bassist playing fiddle, the organist playing piano and co-producer John Simon playing tuba (for the first time in his life!). Rarely has an album been greeted with quite as much acclaim as The Band, as critics marvelled at its musical depth and range of styles, with the Village Voice claiming it was ‘beyond anything in rock except some of The Beatles’ best work.’

Syd Barrett

The Madcap Laughs

Pink Floyd’s usurped front-man makes his first solo album. Somehow.

Record label: Harvest (UK) Capitol (US)

Produced: Peter Jenner, David Gilmour, Roger Waters and Malcolm Jones

Recorded: Abbey Road Studios, May 28, 1968–August 5, 1969

Released: January 3, 1970

Chart peaks: 40 (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Syd Barrett (g, v); Willie Wilson (b); Jerry Shirley (d); Hugh Hopper (b); Robert Wyatt (d); Mike Ratledge (k); Jeff Jarratt, Pete Mew, Mike Sheady, Phil Mcdonald (e)

Track listing: Terrapin; No Good Trying; Love You; No Man’s Land; Dark Globe; Here I Go; Octopus (S); Golden Hair; Long Gone; She Took A Long Cold Look; Feel; If It’s In You; Late Night

Running time: 37.47

Current CD: CDGO 2053

Further listening: The even more hard-won follow-up Barrett (1970); the subsequent collection of outtakes and fragments, Opel (1988), both form part of Crazy Diamond boxed set

Further reading: The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings On Rock Music 1972–1993 (Nick Kent, 1995); www.sydbarrett.net

Download: iTunes

Listening to The Madcap Laughs is like watching a man fooling around on a cliff-edge. Evidence of Barrett’s original musical genius and exquisite painterly lyricism (‘Pussy willow that smiled on this leaf’) is shaded by evidence of his impending mental collapse (‘My head touched the ground/I was half the way down’). This makes for some distinctly uneasy, at times voyeuristic, listening.

The album was painstakingly put together in three stages. Floyd manager Peter Jenner produced the first sessions between May and July 1968, which were largely fruitless. Silas Lang, Swan Lee and Lanky weren’t pursued further, Clowns And Jugglers became Octopus, a wonderfully off-kilter attempt to emulate Green Grow The Rushes O. Syd frittered away the next few months, occasionally turning up unannounced backstage at Top Of The Pops, where he liked to hang out. Finally Harvest’s head Malcolm Jones appointed himself producer in April 1969 and drafted in Soft Machine to help out on No Good Trying, but Syd was beginning to lose his grip. ‘Every time he played a tune through, the bars before the chord change were different,’ says Soft Machine’s keyboard player Mike Ratledge. ‘You had to watch his hands. It was the only way you could follow what was going on.’

Exasperated, Jones asked Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters to help out in June 1969. They finished the album in a matter of days. The haste of those sessions is exemplified by the sequence of She Took A Long Cold Look, Feel and If It’s In You which include Syd’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• The Album Is Dead!? Long Live The Album!
• What Have We Here?
• The Beginning
• The 1950s
• The 1960s
• The 1970s
• The 1980s
• The 1990s
• The 2000s
• Mojo Miscellaneous
• The Easy Life
• The Single Life
• 100 Great Soundtracks
• The Best Of The Best Ofs
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright