The Musical Box

neil young and crazy horse: rust never sleeps (released june 1979)

A quintessential Neil Young album split between solo acoustic works that turned his California folkie profile into a warped fantasia (Pocahontas and Ride My Llama) and filthy, filthy, filthy garage rock with even odder storylines (Welfare Mothers and Sedan Delivery). The coarse electric side with Crazy Horse was a jacked up variance of the sublimely scrappy guitar grinds Young had been playing for years. In the end, though, the whole wondrous mess was more psychedelic than anything else with each side producing a classic coming of age fable - the acoustic Thrasher and the electric Powderfinger. But it was the punk anthem Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) that fully re-validated Young with a new rock generation by serving as a glorious kiss-off to the 1970s.

lucinda williams: car wheels on a gravel road (released june 1998)

Tales of life, love and family, how they intertwine and how they crumble - those were the storylines Williams labored over for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Cut in multiple versions with multiple producers (among them, Steve Earle and Roy Bittan) in multiple cities over multiple years, the album was a scrapbook of bittersweet stories told with masterful simplicity, from the remembrances of an uprooted childhood in the title tune to the burning romantic desperation of Joy (”You took my joy. I want it back”). This was country music without sentimentality, restless folk with a fortfied twang and rock with a cinematic reach. Car Wheels wasn’t just the greatest summer album of 1998. It was the best of the entire year - and the year after, for that matter. An alt-country masterwork.

bruce springsteen: darkness on the edge of town (released june 1978)

“Summer’s here and the time is right for racin’ in the street” proclaims Bruce Springsteen at the halfway point of an album that was pure rock ‘n’ roll salvation. Admittedly, he sings the lyric (and the tune it serves as title to) not as a blast of summery cheer but as a requiem. From the anthems (Badlands, Prove It All Night), to the Black & Decker rockers (Streets of Fire, Adam Raised a Cain) to laments that chime with Phil Spector-esque grandeur (the extraordinary title tune), Darkness was the album that made good on the pop promise of 1975’s Born to Run. It had to. Ensnared in managerial lawsuits, Springsteen was unable to record in Born to Run’s immediate aftermath. By 1978, the litigation lifted. Thus, The Boss returned and Darkness became a summer epic.

jeff beck: wired (released may 1976)

Brit rock guitar hero Jeff Beck explored jazz fusion on the brilliant (and, in fact, superior) Blow By Blow in 1975. On Wired, he conquered it wholly by teaming with members of the two primary Mahavishnu Orchestra lineups (keyboardist/drummer Jan Hammer from the first, drummer/keyboardist Narada Michael Walden from the second) and re-enlisting  George Martin to produce. From there, Wired sung with gloriously noisy and anthemic pride, from the wildfire guitar/synth duet with Hammer on Blue Wind to a wondrously bluesy reading of Charles Mingus’ Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. Walden’s Love is Green, one of Beck’s few acoustic excursions, brings the album to an unexpectedly wistful close. But the rest of Wired screams to screamed from open windows on late summer afternoons.

Welcome to a new feature we’re planning for every Saturday here at The Musical Box from now until Labor Day weekend. It’s called simply the Summer Album of the Week - a chance to briefly celebrate a great pop/rock recording released during the summers of yore, be it last year or decades ago.

Our entries each week will reflect an album released during the corresponding month - meaning records issued in May will be written about in May and so on. But after that, we toss chronology out the window. We might feature a 2002 album one week and a gem from 1966 the next. It’s all intended to simply expand the notion of what is commonly viewed as “summer music” and recall (and maybe even re-introduce) sounds that helped fuel the fun in the sun of summers past.

We lead off with a beaut:

roxy music: avalon (released may 1982)

From its cover art work of some Nordic lord surveying an inverted horizon (clouds are the ocean, the ocean is the sky) to the gorgeous dark elegance of its immensely rhythmc tunes, Avalon is where British art rock fave Roxy Music grew up. All of its trademark sounds are still there: Phil Manzanera’s chiming guitar, Andy MacKay’s woodwind punctuations and, of course, the hapless crooning of Bryan Ferry. But add discreet keyboard and percussion orchestration along with a landmark mix by Bob Clearmountain that makes Roxy sound royal and you have a true vanguard record. When faced with the daunting task of a producing followup to Avalon, Ferry and Roxy did what any honestly discerning pop troupe band would do. They broke up.