One the floodgates for the double platter was open after the Who's 'Tommy', everybody jumped on board, yet few did strictly studio albums. Live recordings benefited from the longer time frame available. Cream were perhaps the first to do a half live/half studio set, 'Wheels of Fire', complete with tin foil cover, now hugely collectable. The Byrds followed the same format in 1970 with '(untitled)', a uniformly excellent collection. That band never had a reputation as being very good live in their earlier incarnations, but by this time were a ferociously tight outfit. It was the last great moment by a great band.
Canned Heat is a group rarely remembered outside the blues community, but they were very popular in their day, part of a largely forgotten Los Angeles blues scene that also included Captain Beefheart. 'Living the Blues' was a double album in 1968, but they cheated by making the entire second album one long jam called 'Refried Boogie'. It's quite a challenge to sit through. Moby Grape, from San Francisco, had done something similar the year before with 'Wow / Grape Jam', but in all honesty the second platter was similarly useless.
In 1970, Canned Heat met John Lee Hooker in an airport longue and decided to record an album with him. The ensuing double platter, 'Hooker With Heat', is a great record, with the California hippies providing sympathetic backing for a then-forgotten blues master. The album didn't do much for Canned Heat, but it did revive Hooker's career. He went on to become one of the grand old masters of the genre. The band deserves an award to rescuing him in the public eye.
Another blues band, at least for the time being, also did a double album with older musician were the original Fleetwood Mac. Visiting Chess Studios when the place was broke, about to be sold to a corporate conglomerate, the British boys did what the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds had already done, setting up and recording, trying to capture the vibe of the place. Peter Green, leader of the Mac, took it one step further, getting Chess regulars Otis Spann and Willie Dixon involved as musicians. Buddy Guy even shows up briefly under a pseudonym. Not yet being a successful record seller in America, Blue Thumb divided it into two separate platters here.
The live double album, to become the standard of the 1970s, breaking bands from Deep Purple to Cheap Trick to Peter Frampton and beyond, also started in 1969 with the Grateful Dead's seminal 'Live Dead', which is really where the cult surrounding that band starts. Many more would follow, but not being a fan, I'll pass them by. Other West Coast bands jumped on the bandwagon the next year, particularly Steppenwolf and the Doors, both huge sellers. It was the last great moment for Steppenwolf, who were sinking into radical politics and internal dissent.
The Doors double album, always revolving around the mercurial Jim Morrison, deserves a special mention. At a low point both financially and in the public eye after the Miami obscenity trial, the band used the double album in a unique way. Instead of putting out a safe collection of greatest hits, like 'Light My Fire', they used the album to showcase the controversial 'Celebration of the Lizard', all twenty minutes of it. In fact, over half the running time was devoted to new songs and rare covers, a typically bold move, while also promising no overdubs or corrections of mistakes. It was a bit of a middle finger to producer Paul Rothschild, who split with the band right about this time.
It was the progressive groups, however, who really took to the studio double album with a vengeance. First out of the gate was the Soft Machine, a band with as tortured a history as any. Originally a four piece with Australian guitarist and all-around eccentric Daevid Allen, they were running buddies with the Pink Floyd. Both were from the Canterbury area, and a sub-set of English Progressive rock is now called the Canterbury school, also including Caravan, National Health, Egg, and other obscure groups.
Allen was refused re-entry into England after a Continental tour in early 1968, reducing the group to
a keyboard dominated trio. After the first album and a grueling US tour supporting Hendrix, only to be bumped from it by the Mafia to make room for Vanilla Fudge, bass player Kevin Ayers jumped ship as soon as he got back to England, the first of a series of personnel and musical changes. In fact, the only group that I can compare to the Soft Machine would be the Byrds, although they are musically as far apart as possible. Neither group ever did the same thing twice and both seemed to lack central leadership while ceaselessly searching for new musical horizons.
Roadie Hugh Hopper simply took over the bass, and the second album was even better, forty minutes of non-stop psychedelic pop jazz unlike anything else before or since. Drummer Robert Wyatt was a powerhouse and also an interesting singer, while keyboardist Mike Ratledge did all the heavy lifting. For the third album, titled 'Third', they decided to add saxophonist Elton Dean. Going in both a more jazz and hypnotic direction while maintaining some psych elements, this is about the purest version of acid jazz out there, along with 'Bitch's Brew' and very early Larry Coryell and John McLaughlin.
'Thirds' was four sides of shrieking acid jazz pushing the limits of musical boundaries. Each song takes up an entire side, and each one is completely different. Robert Wyatt sings a long vocal during one, while the other three are instrumental. This is not music for everybody, never destined to be very popular, but it is the beginning of not only fusion, from the rock/psych side instead of jazz like most of the other fusionaires, but also ambient music.
The Soft Machine were a big band in England and the Continent, but they couldn't get arrested in America. Part of the album was recorded when they tried expanding the band to a seven piece, with three additional horns. The money simply wasn't there; they could scrape by as a four piece and that was it. Wyatt wanted to keep singing, but the rest, especially Dean, wanted to go into free jazz.
They did just that on the next two albums, with Wyatt leaving after 'Fourth', to be replaced by John Marshall, a capable drummer. Elton Dean left after 'Fifth', the popularity of the group suffering under the weight of too much free jazz. Karl Jenkins replaced him, both a saxophonist and a keyboard player. A Welsh with Swedish parents, trained at the Royal Academy of Music, Jenkins brought a much needed sense of structure and leadership to the group.
'Sixth' was yet another double album, one side live and the other in the studio, but much of the live material was the new music Jenkins brought with him. The Soft Machine became a double keyboard group much of the time, increasing the hypnotic aspects at times. 'Sixth' is probably their most listenable and best all-around album, with the last few touches of psychedelia in the studio album. Hugh Hopper left after that one, and despite adding guitarists in an attempt to penetrate the difficult US market, including a very young Alan Holdsworth, the band, which never really made money, gave it up in 1976.
Ironically, Karl Jenkins turned to soundtrack and classic music, making a nice living. It is said that his theme for diamonds, heard forever in television commercials, earned him far more in one year than everything from the Soft Machine combined. There is a version of the group reforming this very year to celebrate with a 50th anniversary tour. I fear it may be the free jazz version. Count me out.
Progressive rock took to the double studio album better than most. An early example is the very interesting Greek group Aphrodite's Child, three (sometimes four) rather stout and hairy guys who fled to Paris when the fourth member was forced into the fascist military that had taken over the country. There were two very good musicians in the band, vocalist Demis Roussos, who in another time would have been an opera singer, and maestro keyboard player Evangelos Papathanassiou, otherwise known as Vangelis.
They were wildly popular as a singles group, producing a string of highly melodramatic, slightly over the top songs that topped the charts in Spain, Italy, and especially France. After two albums mostly cobbled together from singles, both Roussos and Vangelis started doing solo work by 1970. It was surprising, then, that they got together for one last album, the completely unique, frightening and amazing '666 (The Apocalypse of John 13:18)'. Literally, there is nothing to compare this album to that I have ever heard.
Vangelis was a genius, but he could be difficult. He wasn't too keen on playing live, more of a control freak, happier in a studio, where the situation could be manipulated to his liking. The band picked this rather mystical theme, recording only during certain phases of the moon. It took a couple of years to compete, and the fourth member mustered out of the army, joining them, adding some scorching guitar.
Musically, the songs go everywhere, from big pop songs to ambient softness to guitar freak outs to Irene Pappas, a famous Greek actress, having a Yoko One-style orgasm over music for over five minutes. In between, we are treated to some really great and original art, all of it top notch, all of it one-of-a-kind. It is a flat-out masterpiece, part lunacy, part genius inspiration, both lush and harsh in equal measure. Finished, the band broke up, never working together.
Distributors were frightened of the album, unsure if there would be an outcry from the religious right. It sold respectably for years, the kind of music that escaped rather than was released. Roussos went on to a long career as a pop singer in Europe while Vangelis hit the jackpot doing soundtracks, especially 'Chariots of Fire'. Asked to join Yes by Jon Anderson, he turned them down, but did strike up a working relationship with the singer.
Speaking of Yes, 'Tales From a Topographic Ocean' is the one progressive rock double album that has become a cliché'. Yes were a band that, once switching guitarist from the excellent Peter Banks to the technically phenomenal Steve Howe, seemed to go from strength to strength. Even when drummer Bill Bruford left to join King Crimson, they still found an excellent replacement in Alan White. Always trying to create even more audacious pieces of music, it culminated with the side long suite 'Close to the Edge', a monster hit in 1972.
The only thing to do after that was make a double album that was one long song, split into four side long movements. 'Tales' is an album that divides not only fans and critics, but the band members as well. Rick Wakeman hated it despite being featured all over the place, quitting before they went out on tour. Crazy stories are told of the band making the studio into a barn, complete with bales of hay and cardboard cut out cows. It still sold well, but Yes never really recovered their popularity after that. After a couple of commercial failures, they broke up in 1981, only to reform and break up with sickening regularity to this day.
The album itself is wildly ambitious, trying to be structured like a classical suite of music, with recurring themes and motifs. It is a bit of a slog, but I like it, especially when I have a long drive ahead. The music does flow, almost too well, and trying to keep focused on it for 80 minutes straight is simply asking too much from a rock audience. The four individual sections, especially the last one with a nice bass and drum solo, were very popular live.
The last progressive group to do a successful double album was Focus. Prog was uniquely European, putting roots in places like Italy and Germany that still persist to this day. Pulling as much from the European classical tradition as from the Blues, both the fan base and players on the continent always responded well to the music. Germany developed Krautrock, a self-contained offshoot, combining classical and ambient/experimental in equal measure.
Holland was a little different. There had been successful rock groups from there, from Golden Earing and Cubby & the Blizzards during the beat boom, to Shocking Blue with the smash 'Venus', still regularly played on juke boxes. Focus were different, stellar instrumentalists who got together out of mutual admiration to do something radically underground and progressive. Lead by Thijs Van Leer and Jan Akkerman, augmented later by jazz drummer Pierre Van Der Linden, these guys could really play. Problem was, they could barely speak English.
Focusing (sic) on instrumental music mostly, they managed to have a few hits with 'House of the King', which everybody thought was Jethro Tull because of the flute, and 'Hocus Pocus', featuring Akkerman's blistering fret work. These guys managed to rise to the ranks of world's greatest musicians through sheer virtuosity, when it was still something to admire. There best collected work, ironically was a double album called 'Focus III".
No fools, they were going to England, using the best studios and engineers to get the best sound. Still, maintaining interest in almost entirely instrumental music for two albums meant that the group had to combine the improvisational skills of jazz masters with the compositional skills of classical musicians. That's exactly what they did, and it was a huge hit world wide. Brimming with great songs, rocking out hard for twenty minutes at a clip, using lutes and flutes on other pieces, it's one of my favorite albums of all time.
Unfortunately, it was also a high water mark for the band. Jan Akkerman was falling prey to the heroin epidemic that was sweeping Amsterdam, loosing interest in the group. He quit, eventually cleaning up and going back to jazz, his first love. Thijs Van Leer, the most prolific writer in the group as well as the keyboard player, flautist and occasional singer, tried to keep it going, but as interest in prog rock flagged, the band terminated.
There was a one-off reunion between Van Leer and Akkerman around 1990, but it was marred by drum machines. Thijs did resurrect the band for the road around 2000, eventually producing new albums, always managing to find another new guitar prodigy to replace Akkerman. With the reunion of Van Der Linden, the group really recaptured the essence of the old band. Focus still records and tours regularly, a giant hit on the festival circuit world wide. It's nice to know that every story in rock doesn't have to end in tragedy.
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