Space Oddity

In 1969 David Bowie caught his first big break when the release of Space Oddity coincided with the Apollo 11 space mission and subsequent moon landing. That event was greeted with worldwide celebration and optimism about our impending Utopian technofuture. What Bowie tapped into was …

Something Better

Marianne Faithfull didn’t record much in 1969, for reasons that are readily apparent if you watch her promotional appearance on The Rollins Stones’ Rock’n’Roll Circus. Her dazed look and difficulty moving were the red flags of a person high as a kite on heroin. It’s …

Something

George Harrison’s marriage to Pattie Boyd may have ended in a whirl of drama but damn if it didn’t fuel some of his best writing. The Beatles themselves ended in a whirl of drama, an ugly breakup only hinted at in the idyllic video by …

Some Kinda Love

To call the Velvet Underground ahead of their time has become one of those phrases that have been repeated into meaninglessness. It’s what lazy writers reflexively say when they think they don’t need to unpack or defend their position. But when I approach with focus …

The Soft Parade

This performance of The Soft Parade begs a couple of questions. Why is Jim Morrison so against petitioning the Lord with prayer? And how did they coax an on-key and non-insane performance out of him in the first place? Morrison was looking, in 1969, like …

Sister Morphine

It doesn’t get much bleaker than this. When Marianne Faithfull decided to finally and forever stop being a dollybird and become a real songwriter, she ended up writing one of the great drug epics of rock, an ode to deathly chemicals on par with Lou …

She Was Born to be My Unicorn

Yes, this makes sense and I understand the sentiment. If Marc Bolan sounds like someone trying to sing in English despite not knowing the language, well, he was English and therefore spoke the language and that’s just the way he sang. It took him a …