1968, 6/10 Johnny Cash always had a bullet proof reputation, both a respected elder statesman of country music and an anti-authoritarian hero. His baritone is authoritative, imbuing his music with gravitas, and it’s perfect for these dark tales of crime and punishment that he’s singing to an appreciative prison audience. Cash performs with backing band The Tennessee Three, and it was recorded at a time when he’d cleaned up his personal life.
Cash has the captive audience lapping up these songs, and it’s a compelling performance – songs like the execution countdown of ’25 Minutes To Go’ are riveting. But with Cash’s limited vocal style and these simple country songs, At Folsom Prison is an event more than a record that stands up to repeated listening. There are highlights like Cash’s sensitive vocal performance on ‘Long Black Veil’ and June Carter’s harmony vocals on the lively ‘Jackson’.
At Folsom Prison is a terrific document of a masterful live performer, and it’s something that every music fan should hear. But it’s not an album that I need to have in my collection.
Arlo Guthrie
Alice’s Restaurant
1967, 6.5/10 Arlo Guthrie came to folk music with an incredible pedigree, the son of folk legend Woody Guthrie who met and jammed with other famous musicians such as Pete Seeger and Leadbelly as they visited his home. He rose to prominence at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival at the age of 20 where the lengthy talking song ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ was first performed at a topical songs workshop.
While the song continues the acoustic simplicity of early 1960s protest folk, it’s also laced with a humour that makes its subversive litany on littering and the draft go down surprisingly easily. In fact, the song is much more notable for Guthrie’s comic timing and laconic delivery than it is for its musical content – the almost incessant guitar riff only adds to the humour – he’s as much a stand-up comedian as a musician over the eighteen minutes as he details his adventures trying to dispose of a half-tonne of garbage, in court and with the army psychiatrist, and the catchy chorus is only introduced towards the end of the song. The song’s following was strong enough to spawn a full length feature movie in 1970, starring Guthrie.
The second side of Alice’s Restaurant isn’t as memorable; with pleasant but generic folk like ‘Chilling of the Evening’ and ‘I’m Going Home’ and assorted silliness like ‘The Motorcycle Song’ (“I don’t want a pickle/I just want to ride my motor-sickle”) and ‘Ring-Around-A-Rosy Rag’, which uses a riff that’s too close to the infinite loop of the title track.
Alice’s Restaurant is an album that has been treated precisely right by posterity – it never makes top album of all time lists, and it doesn’t deserve too, but it’s still easily available. The title track enjoys a cult following and still holds up as a transcendent piece of work that’s as interesting as a piece of social history as it is as a song.
Dusty Springfield
Dusty in Memphis
1969, 9.5/10 Dusty Springfield began her career in a folk-pop trio The Springfields with her brother Tom. When The Springfields broke up, she went on to solo success in the early 1960s with ‘I Only Wanna Be With You’ and ‘I Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’, showcasing her sensual voice. But by the late 1960s her star was fading, and she signed with Atlantic Records in an effort to reignite her career. Recording in Memphis, the production team of Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Arif Mardin gave her more direct, stripped down sound than she was accustomed to.
The standard from Dusty in Memphis is ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ – it was originally written for Aretha Franklin, who passed it over but recorded it after Springfield’s version became successful. Randy Newman contributes ‘Just One Smile’, previously a hit for Gene Pitney, and ‘I Don’t Want To Hear About It Anymore’, the ethereal ‘The Land of Make Believe’ is from Burt Bacharach, while the Carole King and Gerry Goffin team contributes four of the songs. Dusty in Memphisboasts a fabulous beginning trio, where each song lifts the ante from its predecessor – the mid-tempo, memorable ‘Just A Little Lovin” leads into the cool drama of ‘So Much Loving’, before delivering the tour de force of ‘Son of a Preacher Man’.
Aphoristic Album Reviews is almost entirely written by one person.
Graham Fyfe is probably the only music blogger to appreciate both Neil Diamond and Ariana Grande. Based in Fleet Street (New Zealand), he's been writing this blog since around 2000. Aphoristic Album Reviews features reviews and blog posts across a growing spectrum of popular music.
Review Pages
Read about the discographies of musical acts from the 1960s to the present day. Browse this site's review archives or enjoy these random selections:
Faith No More’s origins go right back to 1979 when the rhythm section of Mike Bordin and Billy Gould formed a band. By 1982 keyboard player Roddy Bottum joined and they had become Faith No More – a young Courtney Love was among their early members. By 1988 they had […]
Born Myra Ellen Amos, in North Carolina, Tori Amos took her stage name when a friend’s boyfriend told her that she resembled a Torrey pine. Her family moved to Maryland when she was two, where her father was a Methodist minister. She was the youngest student ever admitted to the […]
Ray LaMontagne worked in a shoe factory in Maine. One morning he was woken by his alarm at 4am for work. The alarm clock’s radio served up Stephen Stills’ ‘Treetop Flyer’. At that instant, LaMontagne decided to become a musician. It took him more than a decade from this epiphany […]
Perhaps the most celebrated band to emerge from the 1970s punk movement, The Clash started as a straight-out punk band. But their music soon expanded, incorporating the reggae and dub they heard on London’s streets, as well as venturing into radio-friendly rock, hip-hop, and pretty much everything in between. As […]
Julien Baker grew up in Tennessee, attending Church and learning on her father’s guitar. She played in bands namd Star Killer and Forrister, before she recorded demos that didn’t fit her band. Barely 20, these demos became Sprained Ankle, a remarkably stark debut album. She continued with 2017’s Turn Out […]
San Francisco quartet the Red House Painters (named after the Tennesseean painting crew, The International League Of Revolutionary House Painters) made their debut with 1992’s Down Colorful Hill on the 4AD label. The band fitted into the recently coined slowcore genre, with their stately arrangements and introspective lyrics. The word band […]
Blog Posts
I add new blog posts to this website every week. Browse the archives or enjoy these random selections:
Hertfordshire band The Zombies endured a somewhat erratic career in the 1960s. They enjoyed early hits with ‘She’s Not There’ and ‘Tell Her No’. It took, however, three years to record another album after 1965’s debut Begin Here. Discouraged by a lack of success, the band broke up after recording […]
California’s Tom Waits has enjoyed a remarkable career. Emerging in the early 1970s as a whisky-soaked, piano-playing balladeer, his career was seemingly petering out in the early 1980s. But he reinvented himself with the junkyard clang of 1983’s excellent Swordfishtrombones, and his output from that album through to 1999’s Mule […]
Hüsker Dü are among the embarrassment of riches to emerge from Minnesota in the 1980s – their contemporaries included Prince, The Replacements, and Soul Asylum. The three-piece band played energetic and emotive music – they started playing hardcore punk but blew the genre’s boundaries open with their 1984 masterpiece Zen […]
As I’ve noted on this site before, it’s remarkable how Genesis transformed from a smalltime band to commercial heavyweights. By 1971, they’d found their classic quintet of vocalist Peter Gabriel, drummer Phil Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks, bassist Mike Rutherford, and guitarist Steve Hackett. But their first album together, Nursery Cryme, […]
Formed in 1981, London’s Talk Talk enjoyed an unusual career trajectory. They started their record career as a passable synth-pop band, often compared to Duran Duran. Early hits like 1984’s ‘Such A Shame’ and ‘It’s My Life’ allowed them access to larger recording budgets. Their music became more experimental and […]
Californian folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield were short-lived but signicant. They recorded one of the defining protest songs of the 1960s, ‘For What It’s Worth’, and launched the careers of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay of Poco, and Jim Messina of Loggins and Messina. Buffalo Springfield’s lineup was fluid – the temperamental Young […]
