Albums The Critics Got Wrong?

 

The long cuts from 1970 to 1972 and 1973 got pasted by the press regularly, and it was considered by many to be over done and not musical, because it did not follow the top ten blues/song format that the corporate kissing magazines were supporting!

 

As such Yes, got a terrible licking for Tales from Topographic Oceans, and it was one of the best thigns ever written in rock music! Jethro Tull took just as much abuse for "A Passion Play" which is a prophetic work in terms of its analogies to the history of music and rock specially. And many others fell into the same thing to the point that everything had to be 4 minutes long, specially when the FM radio in America got bought out by the corporations that alread owned the music distribution circles.

 

A lot of the European scene got terribly pasted in the American press. England had a more interesting attitude about European music, but the hippocrisy never stopped. But Melody Maker one day even said that Tangerine Dream sounded like Washing machine music, and of course, that told you that they were stoned senseless, to the point that they did not even know what a washing machine sounded like! But we didn't give a sh*t, enough, to put those morons in their place! But the joke is on them ... their favorite kissypoo rock bands are not remembered and a lot of the other stuff they hated ... there it is!

 

It's one of the saddest and hippocritical things about life ... we never appreciate things HERE AND NOW ... we always love something else, and ignore our own children, and thus the arts for their day, never arrives! We're too damn selfish to even spend time understanding that and seeing things in a more historical vein. The 70's became the greed is good generation, and their kids, are the ones that picked up the progressive music where their parents left it off!

 

 

 

 

"Strange Days" is easily the best album The Doors made. "Waiting For The Sun" would have surpassed it had not the suits in studio interfered with it and wrecked it. The Doors were never the same band afterwards. LA Woman contains a good collection of songs but no thought went into working the songs into a cohesive whole.

Yes, so very much this.

What about the once great Lester Bangs, who in this review of Captain Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/the-spotlight-kid-clear-spot-19720330 "foresees" future promise for the band.  Imagine Beefy making it big! I know folks back then perhaps were more susceptible to prog rock and experimental music, but I can't picture this album being played over the radio. Then again, I'm 31, I have no idea what it was like at the time - apart from what other folks relegate and what I happen to read.

Morrison's tone poem "The End" from the debut album seems to get all the attention because it features in the film "Apocalypse Now", but really the first album is just a collection of songs from the band's live performances, without much thought to the way the songs should fit together on the album (other than it should finish with the epic). Still a great album, but not as great as some people make out. Strange Days works so much better as a whole and "When The Music's Over" is a better epic song than "The End". Then Morrison ups the ante and composes his epic masterpiece, "Celebration Of The Lizard". Only problem is that we never get to hear it on the next album. He also writes the best short song he ever wrote, "Universal Soldier" which does appear on Waiting For The Sun so why not the epic? And the actual song "Waiting For The Sun" doesn't appear on this album, but appears on the next one, Morrison Hotel. And the opener for the Waiting For The Sun album is Hello, I Love You, which was a singles hit for The Doors, but it's one of the earliest songs The Doors wrote and a rip off of a Kinks song. Hello, I Love You has no connection with the quality of songs that The Doors were writing at this time, namely "Universal Soldier", Spanish Caravan", "Waiting For The Sun" and Morrison's epic masterpiece, "Celebration Of The Lizard".