Pitching a Fit (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Welcome back to Pitching a Fit, a series of posts for which I’m going through Pitchfork’s 100 Best Albums lists decade by decade. For this installment, we’ve reached numbers 95 - 91 on the Best of the ‘70s list…

I’m still recuperating from my recent stay at McLean Hospital, where I spent a week wrestling down a manic episode, so this is another listening session colored by my own psychological struggles. Last installment we found multiple albums covering themes of bottoming out and recovering; will this installment provide any more overlaps with my own life? Or do I get to just kick back and enjoy five classic albums? Time will tell…

First off, we’ve collided with one of my first really embarrassing blind spots: Led Zeppelin has made a lot of songs I adore, but I’ve rarely listened to one of their albums front-to-back. And so we begin this installment by making that right with 1975’s Physical Graffiti. I have no particular distaste for Zeppelin, but their sound is just one hair too heavy for me. It’s the oddball tracks, like “Tangerine” off III, that really get me. Physical Graffiti is a double album, apparently consisting of three-quarters new material plus one side’s worth of outtakes from previous records. It’s an eclectic album in tone and style, so if I don’t like one song, I can easily hop, skip, or jump over to another. But no matter which track I’m spinning, I continually bump up against Robert Plant’s vocals, which I do find fairly unpleasant. There’s always a place for a good scream in rock (my favorite vocalist is Roger Daltrey, so take that for what it’s worth) but…not every line needs to be screamed, y’know?

The first side of Physical Graffiti offers pretty straight-down-the-middle Led Zeppelin hard rock—adrenalized, streaked with darkness, and screamed over by Mr. Plant. It’s good, but from a retrospective angle it’s more impressive than engrossing. Led Zeppelin invented and perfected Led Zeppelin music; it just feels like by this point they were already playing the hits, and by the end of Side Two I was feeling fatigue. Only the last track of the disc, “Kashmir”, made me sit up and take notice, and that’s largely because of the orchestral textures layered on top of the hard rock base.

Things pick up a bit with Side Three, as the tones become a little more off-the-wall; “Bron-Yr-Aur” is the one track for which I walked into this listen with a preexisting affection, and that affection has stayed steady and strong. The track is warm and inviting in a Leo Kottke sort of way, a breath of fresh acoustic air after the oppressively heavy previous disc. The remainder of the disc is amusingly odd (apparently “Down by the Seaside” was inspired by Neil Young and you can tell, even if the pastiche can’t help sounding like Zeppelin), and I feel a lot more affection for something like “Boogie with Stu” than I have for anything on the first disc. This album is a beast, and it’s one I can see rewarding revisits, opening up its sonic landscape in a way that just overwhelms me on a first listen. But I can’t say I feel compelled to come back any time soon.

From Zeppelin, we move back a year to King Crimson’s 1974 effort Starless and Bible Black. Unlike the album discussed above, this is a band I have absolutely no familiarity with, and they immediately strike me as a close sonic cousin to Zeppelin. But where Physical Graffiti was generally tight and controlled, here we have an album influenced by jazz as much as rock, and one that’s at times fully improvised. This album is a wild journey, and one I’m glad to have taken; the overlap with Physical Graffiti is significant enough for me to appreciate what makes this one strange and powerful, with odd and halfway-meaningless lyrics on some tracks, and the rest devoid of anything so pedestrian as words in favor of loose improv. “Trio,” a soft and lovely exercise, may be one of the most rewarding tracks I’ve encountered in my brief time on this listening journey. Every album is a documentary of its own making, but here the seams are particularly visible, a warts-and-all record that paints its own self-portrait. Does that make any sense? If not, that’s appropriate enough for this very strange and halfway nonsensical record.

Ranked just above the baggy and rangy King Crimson record is the 1970 Jimi Hendrix live album Band of Gypsys. A pure, stripped back blast of electric R&B, this album represents everything I ever respected but didn’t love about Jimi Hendrix. The man could make a guitar say the most outrageous things, but as his solos and vamps stretch minutes into the double digits, I find myself less enchanted than respectfully appreciative. This is a massively influential record, and you can see why; it’s pure and powerful. It’s also a pretty loose hangout of an album, one without a lot of shifts in dynamic. If you like what Jimi Hendrix can do to a guitar, then have I got the record for you. If you aren’t thrilled by the man’s style, there isn’t much else to find here. It’s hard not to feel a little churlish taking this music for granted—I understand, for example, that “Machine Gun” is a massive statement, one of the most impactful tracks recorded that decade. But as I say, I can respect it without wholeheartedly embracing it, and I do think this whole exercise would be a lot less interesting if I were just rubber-stamping every selection.

From the classic guitar work of Hendrix, we move on to something altogether stranger with Kraftwerk's 1978 project The Man-Machine. Built entirely out of synths, this is an album you could dance to, but just as easily get lost in. It’s a deadpan collection, with the opening track announcing “We are the robots” repeatedly, and ensuring tracks suggesting exactly that—arch, angular instrumentation that never tips its hand to reveal the human beings behind the scenes. This is music by and for mechanical people, and I can’t say I find it altogether pleasant, but I do have to admire the commitment to the bit. There’s an absolute lack of emotionality here, all the better for an album by and for robots.

Perhaps it’s time for a bit of honesty: I’m listening to this morning’s albums through a medicated haze. I’ve been struggling to stay asleep past about 3:30, so yesterday my new prescriber put me on a pill intended to keep you asleep. Unsurprisingly this is leaving me with a bit of a haze to fight through in the AM, and Throbbing Gristle’s 1979 album 20 Jazz Funk Greats has proved an ideal soundtrack to a fuzzy morning. I’m writing these words from bed, and my eyes are occasionally drifting shut for a moment or two, with the band’s lax and dreamy chords cradling me as I drift around the stream of consciousness. This is bizarre music, the kind that tells King Crimson to hold its beer ("Persuasion" and "What a Day" aren't so much songs as sonic horrors), and I appreciate it as a melodic accompaniment to my exhaustion. I won’t be spinning this one while I drive around, but it’s a prank of an album—the title is intentionally misleading, with the band hoping innocent record buyers would be lured in by false promises—and I tend to appreciate a good musical prank. "Walkabout" is a buoyant synth track that delivers pure pleasure, but it's buried in a morass of music that ranges from a little eerie to deeply creepy. This feels like an album the band made to amuse themselves (the cover photo was taken at what's apparently the suicide capital of England, a significance nobody would ever recognize but one that apparently meant a great deal to Throbbing Gristle), and if it's occasionally punishing on the listener, all the better.

And that’s about it for today’s installment! An eclectic bunch of albums without a lot of conventional pleasures to be found. Maybe next time…

Up next time: Fela Kutie, Devo, Giorgio Moroder, Roxy Music, and Joni Mitchell