(From AN AMERICAN STORY)
In 1967 flew from my home in San Francisco to England and became, quite by chance, the photographer for The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who. In 1977 I was again back in America when I was called by my friend and legendary record producer Glyn Johns to do the photography/packaging for what would turn out to be one of the last formally conceived “concept albums,“ as my generation had come to call them. The album was White Mansions, and it was a musical tale about the American Civil War conceived and written by an Englishman, Paul Kennerley with characters and a storyline that portrayed the rise and fall of the Confederacy. Waylon Jennings sang one of the characters, and Glyn Johns brought in Bernie Leadon from the Eagles and Eric Clapton to play.
We are as I write this (2011) in the evolution of media so far away from where we were then that perhaps one needs to define what an “album” was: a collection of (usually) 12 songs on a doubled sided “LP.” The letters stood for “long playing” to differentiate it from the earlier “45s” – two songs on opposite sides of a single disc. They were the MP3s of my generation,. (An early photograph of mine of John Lennon taken in 1968 shows him sitting amidst a collection of these 45s scattered about the floor of his apartment.)
John Lennon with 45s. London, 1968
Why the need for the definition? The LP was a physical form that supported a particular creative expression – and the output of that expression was, for me and for years, more than music (and much, much more than “entertainment”). Songwriters could – and did – write songs for albums that when played linearly (i.e. track 1 followed by 2, etc) delivered an experience akin to other forms of narrative, i.e. with a beginning, middle and end, like a book, play, or movie. The importance of this seemingly incidental fact cannot be overemphasized. Music was the platform, the glue that held my generation together, that spoke to us, inspired us, and when the promise, whatever it really was, seemed to fall apart, and when some distanced themselves and others mourned the passing – even that was chronicled through the music.
The performers on these LPs were a new and different breed in popular music – the singer/songwriter – unique to my generation:. It had been common for years in American blues and folk that the singer and writer of the song were the same person. In popular music the singer was instead like an actor, given the script (the song) and told to make it fly. Bob Dylan, central to the global change but uniquely American, emerged from the folk tradition, but when he “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the political and artistic thrust of blues and folk fused with rock ‘n’ roll, with its back beat and electrified power. Now popular music took on the power and immediacy and the author model of blues and folk. The world – you can’t argue this – would never be the same.
