Sly and the Family Stone

Sly and the Family Stone
Sly and the Family Stone made some of the most buoyant and thoughtful music of the late-'60s and early-'70s, uniting and transforming black and white music at a time of highest hope and deepest betrayal in America. Leader Sly Stone personified both extremes, as the truest of believers and a victim of his own disillusionment.
Stone was a musical child prodigy who recorded a gospel song at age four. In the mid-'60s he produced hit records for the Beau Brummels and Bobby Freeman before his dream blossomed into the colorful, freaky Sly and the Family Stone. Sly wrote the songs, created the arrangements and handled the production, but allowed each member to express his/her individual identity. The Family blended blacks and whites, men and women: Sly’s brother Freddie Stewart on electric guitar, sister Rose on electric piano, Sly’s high school friends Cynthia Robinson on trumpet and Jerry Martini on sax, Martini’s cousin Gregg Errico on drums, and thumping, popping funk bass pioneer Larry Graham.

It was on the band’s second LP, “Dance To The Music” ('68) that they really caught fire. The title song was a perfect representation of the live Family sound, a vibrant amalgam of positivity, fuzz bass, doo-wop, rock guitar and horns, gathered in the context of a traditional R&B revue.

The summer of '69 found Sly and the Family Stone rising to the heights of popularity and critical acclaim on the wings of their phenomenal album “Stand!,” which included the band’s first No. 1 hit, “Everyday People,” a song that defined the band’s social ideals in the way that “Dance” defined its musical thoughts. The charm of the nursery rhyme refrain cuts through centuries of cultural bias and reminds us of the simple truth that “we got to live together” or die separately. Also on the album was the orgasmic “I Want to Take You Higher.”

That same summer, Sly and Family Stone stormed the stage at Woodstock in rainbow get-ups, flashing of sequins and electricity and came away superstars. If the attendees weren’t high enough, when Sly cried out “I Want to Take You Higher” at the end of the band’s set, many feel the festival — and an era — reached their frenzied peak.

Unfortunately, Sly took his obsession with “highness” literally and came to confuse the easy high of drugs with the more difficult highs of music, love and the joy of existence. With the drugs came increasing paranoia and self-absorption that were expressed first and best on 1971’s “There’s A Riot Goin’ On,” where lassitude replaced spunk but Sly’s incredible talent still shined through the murk. Drummer Errico left during the production and Sly further damaged the family feel by playing most of the instruments on the album himself, isolated in a cocaine cocoon. Ironically, “Riot” was the “band’s” only No. 1 album. The dream and the reality then both fell apart, but the music remains.

Bob Marley and the Wailers

The greatest singer, songwriter, and cultural figure in Jamaican history, Bob Marley brought the righteous message and “positive vibrations” of reggae music to the world, and is the only towering figure of the rock era not from America or the U.K.
Marley and his band, the Wailers, created transcendent music around the entrancing, inverted reggae beat and unforgettable melodies that equally decried poverty and injustice and celebrated physical and spiritual ecstasy — all of it grounded in Marley’s abiding Rastafarian faith. Marley’s influence is so pervasive, his music so seductive, and respect for him so great throughout the world that it is easy to forget the beliefs and customs of the Rastas are rather, in a word, odd: reverence of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia as a living god who would lead the oppressed black diaspora back to an African homeland (rather more difficult after he died in 1975), smoking the holy herb of enlightenment, ganja (marijuana), as daily sacrament, growing their hair in dreadlocks.

Marley was born in rural St. Ann’s Parish in 1945 to a middle-aged white father and a teen-aged black mother, and left home for the tough Trench Town slum of Kingston at 14 in order to pursue a life in music. There he became friends, and formed a vocal trio, with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. They called themselves the Wailing Wailers, later shortened to the Wailers. They worked within the prevailing musical styles of the time, first the buoyant up-tempo ska, then the slower sinuous rock steady, which then gave way to reggae.

The Wailers recorded with legendary producers Coxone Dodd and Lee “Scratch” Perry in the '60s, recording great songs like “Simmer Down,” the original version of “One Love,” “Soul Rebel,” “Small Axe” and “Duppy Conqueror,” becoming greatly popular in Jamaica. But it was when the Wailers signed with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records in 1972 that their reach became global.

The Wailers' first albums for Island, “Catch a Fire” and “Burnin’” (both '73), became instant classics and introduced “Stir it Up,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” and Tosh’s “Get Up Stand Up” to the world. Tosh and Wailer then both left to pursue solo careers and the Wailers became Marley’s vehicle of expression. Until his tragic death from cancer at the age of 36 in 1981, Marley generated anthem after anthem and brought hope and pride to the Third World, in addition to touching hearts and moving feet across North America and Europe.

His hits collection covering the Island years, “Legend,” with sales of over 10 million copies in the U.S. alone, is the most popular and enduring reggae album of all time. Among its delights are “No Woman No Cry,” “Three Little Birds,” “One Love,” “Buffalo Soldier,” “Waiting In Vain” and “Jamming.”

Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd is the most eccentric and experimental multi-platinum band of the album rock era, creating exceptional cinematic sound sculptures “Meddle,” “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here,” and the band’s popular apex and conceptual death knell, “The Wall.”

Beginning in the mid-'60s as a R&B-based hard rock band, the band (named after Piedmont blues men Pink Anderson and Floyd Council) — Syd Barrett on guitar and vocals, Roger Waters on bass and vocals, Richard Wright on keyboards, and Nick Mason on drums — mutated quickly into a strange combination of twee British psychedelia (“See Emily Play,” “Arnold Layne”) and long-form instrumental space rock (“Astronomy Domine,” “Interstellar Overdrive”), inspired by Barrett’s liberal LSD use: a Cambridge English garden transported to Mars.

Guitarist David Gilmour joined the group as insurance against Barrett’s volatility in '68, but when Barrett was forced out for unreliability his “backup band” became a democratic foursome sharing writing, singing and leadership duties. As Floyd headed more deeply into experimental symphonic explorations in the sonic chill of space — about as far removed from rock ‘n’ roll’s origins in amped-up American teenage hormones as possible — the more popular they became.

“Meddle,” released in 1971, was the band’s transition album from the Barrett-influenced '60s to the Waters-Gilmour Floyd of the 1970s, highlighted by a pillar of space rock greatness “Echoes,” over 23 minutes of confidently creative meandering, ingratiating harmony vocals from Waters and Gilmour, burbling organ from Wright, atmospheric axemanship from the incomparable Gilmour, otherworldly pings and drifting whale noises. You can hear the fertile seeds of “Dark Side of the Moon” here.

“Dark Side,” released in '73, stayed on the album chart for an outrageous 741 weeks, a masterpiece of creative studio craft and a remarkably unified exploration of time, greed and existence — the album is an indispensable rite of passage still. “Wish You Were Here” is an exceptional, ruminative, ambient, long-form look at the disintegration of Barrett intermingled with Roger Waters’ souring view of the world, and in particular, the music industry.

That dim view of life found its ultimate expression in “The Wall,” which used its title to represent literal and metaphoric isolation. In elaborate theatrical presentations of the work, a wall was physically constructed throughout the performance, the collapse of which at the end of each show neatly presaged the group’s fate. Waters went solo in the early-'80s and the group has reunited periodically without him, but neither the group nor he have ever been the same since.

Ramones

Ramones
The Ramones — Dee Dee (bass, vocals), Joey (vocals), Johnny (guitar), Tommy (drums, later replaced by Marky) — were the American punk band, an endless wellspring of noise, energy, attitude, humor and (sometimes forgotten) great songs, who helped reinvent rock ‘n’ roll when it needed it most in the mid-'70s.

Working for indie Sire Records in the mid-'70s, producer/talent scout Craig Leon became involved with the percolating New York underground music scene. One summer night in 1975 he went to CBGB’s and saw two bands, the Talking Heads and the Ramones.

“I went to that show and there were literally four people in the audience besides me, but the bands were phenomenal,” Leon said. “A lot of people didn’t even think the Ramones could make a record. There were weeks of preproduction on a very basic level: like when the songs started and when they ended. Their early sets were one long song until they ran out of steam or fought. You could see it as a performance art-type thing, where you had a 17-minute concise capsule of everything you ever knew about rock ‘n’ roll, or you could see it as 22 little songs,” he said. They went for the songs.

The Ramones’ first album (1976) is a roaring minimalist icon — the first real American punk record. Layers and layers of accumulated bloat and sheen were stripped away to reveal rock ‘n’ roll at its most basic and vital on songs like “Blitzkreig Bop,” “Beat On the Brat” and “Let’s Dance.” The Ramones’ sound was blazing early-'60s surf music played through the overdriven distortion of Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath. Yet, according to Leon, the Ramones saw themselves as a pop band. “In our naivete, we thought they were going to be bigger than the Beatles. They had even named themselves after Paul McCartney’s early stage name, ‘Paul Ramone,’” Leon said.

While most agree the Ramones’ astonishing first album — which cut through the competition like a 747 in a paper airplane contest — is their most important album, it isn’t my favorite. My favorite is one of the band’s most eccentric, “End of the Century” — produced by the enigmatic pop icon (and now murder suspect) Phil Spector — and the album that explicitly acknowledged such a thing as “pop punk” for the first time.

Recorded in 1979, the album made explicit the connection between early-'60s pop-rock and the punk band’s psyche, and holds up as both a Ramones and a Spector classic — Spector’s idiosyncrasies never overwhelm the roar of “Chinese Rock” or “Rock ‘N’ Roll High School,” and the Spectorish “Do You Remember Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio” rollicks with just the right retro touches. The band’s remake of the Ronette’s “Baby I Love You” is as touching as it is fun, and shed a whole new light on singer Joey Ramone (who died in 2002 after a long bout with cancer — I sure do miss that guy).

The two-CD set “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go” is a spectacular overview of the band, with all of the above songs (except “Baby I Love You”) plus “California Sun,” “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” “Cretin Hop,” “Rockaway Beach,” “Teenage Lobotomy,” “I Wanna Be Sedated,” “She’s the One,” “She’s a Sensation,” “We Want the Airwaves” and many, many more.

Led Zeppelin

Over a 10-year, nine-album career from 1969-79, Led Zeppelin was the most popular rock group in the world, ultimately selling more than 50 million records in the U.S. alone (more than 200 million worldwide), developing the blues-based power trio-plus-lead singer archetype in many directions including mystical English folk-rock, Middle Eastern-influenced exotica, quirky pop and every manner of heaviness. They also came to symbolize the Dionysian excesses of the rock lifestyle.

Their ubiquity on classic rock radio formats and the aforementioned excesses have led many to dismiss the band as overrated and symptomatic of the decline of rock ‘n’ roll in the '70s. The super value collection “Early Days and Latter Days: Best of Vols. 1 and 2” (two discs) prove that, if anything, the band’s musical greatness is still underappreciated, due to the previously mentioned resentments and the fact that the band had no greater cultural impact — they didn’t much stand for anything.

Jimmy Page, who had led the last incarnation of the Yardbirds and had been an extremely successful session guitarist (Who, Kinks, Them, Donovan, Joe Cocker), formed the band in 1968 with veteran session bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, 19-year-old singer Robert Plant and Plant’s friend, drummer John Bonham. Commenting upon Page’s low expectations for the success of the band, Keith Moon suggested the name “Led Zeppelin.”

They were both wrong: “Led Zeppelin 1” (“Good Times Bad Times,” “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Communication Breakdown”), “Led Zeppelin 2” (“Whole Lotta Love,” “The Lemon Song,” “Hearbreaker,” “Living Loving Maid,” “Ramble On”) and “Led Zeppelin 4” (a.k.a. “Zoso,” with “Black Dog,” “Rock and Roll,” “When the Levee Breaks,” “Stairway to Heaven”) are among rock’s greatest albums.

Plant’s vocals reached levels of deranged ecstasy matched perhaps only by Little Richard on lyrics typically either oozing with sexuality or derived from Anglo-Saxon myth and/or the occult. Bonham (whose accidental death in 1980 broke up the band) pounded his drums relentlessly like a nimble elephant dancing through the house. Jones’s bass and strategic keyboards glued the disparate elements together. And Page, who did most of the writing and production, played some of the most fundamental and memorable guitar in rock history — from the heaviest crunch to the most delicate acoustic finger picking.

Proving the band’s vast enduring popularity, the band’s live two-DVD set “Led Zeppelin,” released last May, has sold more than 600,000 copies.