Ten Years After A Space in Time (1971)

From starlingdb.org

Despite all the hype, Ten Years After could never have earned the title of a “prog-rock” band: sometimes they are mistakenly lumped in with the movement, but Alvin and Co.’s ambitions never really amounted that high – for the most part, they were just hardcore blues rockers with a slight experimental edge, to distinguish them from colleagues like early Fleetwood Mac or Free. Still, if there ever was a period in which they were real close to embodying some “progressive” tendencies, it was this fall of 1971, with this extremely strange, un-Ten Years After-like album, and this really great bunch of songs, with hardly a major stinker in among all the melodies. Unarguably the band’s strongest and most consistent effort since the Ssssh days, A Space In Time continues the line of Watt in its heavy use of synthesizers and special effects, but this time the members probably took out some time to make these thingamajigs actually work. Alvin’s guitar is not idle either; and his songwriting reached a peak at this time – never to be surpassed again.

One thing strikes you immediately as you let all the tracks flow through your mind, one by one – where’s the fingerflashing? This sounds nothing like what we’ve grown to expect from the band because the main trademark element of the sound, Alvin’s blazing speedy chops, are completely missing. An intentional move, of course; whereas I wouldn’t want to accuse Alvin of sharing the famous “guitar hero complex” that managed to overtake such six-string greats as Clapton and Jeff Beck in the early Seventies, it’s at least clear that on A Space In Time the man was keen on cutting out the crap and fully concentrating on the melodies and real musical substance.

He wanted to be able to finally make a record that would feature him as a real solid composer, that would not just keep repeating the same lightning-speed licks over and over again. And while it’s rather hard to believe without having heard the record, he did succeed. On here, you’ll find the best batch of melodies ever created by the band – many of them acoustic, showing Alvin’s developing passion for the unplugged atmosphere, but some electric as well. Alvin’s lyrics rarely match the melodies in skillfulness or deepness, but as usual, he manages to walk the thin line between cliches/banality and pretentiousness just fine. And while his take on the ‘we gotta get out of this place’ schtick on ‘I’d Love To Change The World’ is nothing particularly special, it comes along as sincere and never too overblown. Just a guy lamenting over post-Woodstock disillusionment.

The opening track, ‘One Of These Days’ (not to be confounded with the famous Pink Floyd instrumental, or, for that matter, with the ninety thousand other songs by other composers with the same name), kicks in with such a staggering might that it makes you go wow. It’s essentially just a slow blues rocker, but produced like they never tried before – with a deep and elaborate sound, echoey guitars, moody swirling organs, and tremendously atmospheric. My guess is that it probably inspired the Stones for “Ventilator Blues” (which is a weaker song). It does end in a slightly overlong speedy jam that tends to get a wee bit tedious due to Alvin’s self-restriction on the guitar, but never mind – it is all compensated further on.

On no other Ten Years After album will you find, for instance, two tracks as moody and “place-taking” as ‘Here They Come’ and ‘Let The Sky Fall’. Sure, Alvin and the boys did try their hand at ‘mystical acoustic shuffles’ earlier, particularly on Stonedhenge, but there was basically no melody-creating back then. ‘Here They Come’, on the other hand, is based on a slow, entrancing acoustic riff with a slight medieval influence; it’s dark and a little bit creepy. ‘Let The Sky Fall’, on the other hand, features a reworking of the ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ riff, but with an entirely different purpose: the song is supposed not to let you rock your ass, but to contemplate some vivid psychedelic associations, what with all the backwards guitars and special synth effects… I love that mood.

More acoustic shuffles follow, with pretty folkish melodies that are charming in their naivety and amazing in their professional delivery. Isn’t ‘Over The Hill’ gorgeous? The way the steady acoustic riff and the moderate strings section interact with each other certainly is, and on top of that Alvin delivers a pretty catchy vocal melody. ‘Hard Monkeys’ is equally good, with a nice alternation of soft/hard parts and some of Alvin’s most delightful singing ever – the way he chants ‘got no monkey on my back’ almost manages to bring me to tears, so don’t you dare laugh at the song.

All of this stuff is pretty serious, of course, for the boys, and it’s only natural that sometimes they break loose and swap the grim, introspective mood of the songs for a few ‘have-at-it’ fun novelty numbers: ‘Baby Won’t You Let Me Rock’n’Roll You’ is a groovy Fifties sendup that doesn’t sound one second too strained as the band rips it up for two minutes, ‘ Uncle Jam’ is an unnecessary, but short jazz jam, and ‘Once There Was A Time’ is a sharp-edged country-rock number with the traditional ‘da-guitah-z-me-life-boy’ message delivered with vivid imagery: ‘Once there was a time/I robbed my mama/For a good meal and a smoke/Once there was a time/I’d sell my brother/For a dollar when I was broke/But I’d never sell my guitar, etc…’.

And over all of this rules supreme ‘I’d Love To Change The World’ – Alvin’s epoch-defining tune which is still the band’s best known self-penned composition. It’s so well-balanced, in fact, and so immaculately written and performed, that I wouldn’t know where to start to complain. Astute acoustic riff, masterfully created paranoid style on the fast parts, moody echoey vocals in the chorus, adrenaline-raising electric guitar, terrific hard-rocking climax: if you ask me, this song does in three minutes everything that ‘Stairway To Heaven’ was doing in seven and maybe more. Of course, lyrics like ‘I’d love to change the world/But I don’t know what to do/So I’ll leave it up to you’ and most of Alvin’s social commentaries are pretty straightforward, but I’d still take them over Zeppelin’s cheap mysticism any time of day, particularly since there are not any less old-time cliches in the ‘Stairway’ lyrics than there are in ‘I’d Love To Change The World’. This is just to show you how much of an underrated band Ten Years After are, so there.

It’s absolutely incredible that a band as ambitionless and tour-busy as Ten Years After found the time and will to record such an album; but it’s also a shame that the band never preferred to follow this chosen route further, as their last two studio albums show them descending into mediocrity once again, leaving A Space In Time as the band’s undisputed songwriting masterpiece and a true, if minor, rock’n’roll classic that’s been overshadowed by time but will hopefully rise out of the depths of oblivion some day. Maybe with your help, oh ye gentle reader?

Ten Years After Cricklewood Green (1970)

From starlingdb.org

Only a year had passed since Ssssh and they’re already miles away. They’re not being particularly amazing with their new style, but this is still miles away. This is not the raw rip-roaring tone they had on that one. But neither is it a bunch of weak grooves as was Stonedhenge. Instead, this is the first record where they have discovered synthesizers – and synthesizers were to play a vital role for the band during the next few years. Indeed, along with the Who, Ten Years After might be defined as pioneers of the ‘synth-genre’. On most of these songs synths play a modest, but distinctive role (unlike the completely unabashed synthfest on Watt), and this gives the record an obvious prog feel. Plus, production is better than ever – modern techniques, no doubt? This is often regarded as their best album, and indeed it was their best-hitting album in the UK. But me no. Oh no me. These songs are all good, ass-kicking and quite mightee, but they just don’t hook me as much as the ones on Ssssh.

If I might suggest a comparison, this album is to TYA as Who’s Next is to the Who. It marks the arrival of a completely new group that’s only to happy to break up with its past. I mean, Alvin and his guitar are still there, and they still form the centerpiece of the band, but the sound has changed radically. Early Ten Years After were all groovy, hip and funny; late Ten Years After are all sad, melancholy and dark. I mean, you can still encounter a groovy ditty now and then, but mostly it’s just creepy, gloomy tunes, with a deep, rumbling, echoey production, an abundance of the minor key, bitter pissed-off lyrics and a thoroughly angry and smokin’ lead guitar. A lot of ‘cosmic’ overtones, too – in the studio at least, Ten Years After are moving even further away from the listener, distancing themselves and beginning to speak as if from a completely different planet. In all, Cricklewood Green is as deceiving a title as could be – it should bring something folkish to mind, you know, like Songs From The Wood or something like that. Instead, it’s a dark dreary ‘cosmic rock’ album. Bah.

Post-Woodstock disillusionment has a lot to do with it, I think: Ten Years After just had to change their music for the post-hippie epoch, much like the Who and other bands changed it as well. But it also has a lot to do with touring excesses: the band was galloping through all the continents, spurred on by the managers without mercy, and in this personal context it’s only natural that Alvin was kinda, er, not quite himself at the time. Of course, one has also to take into account the band’s own evolution – upon discovering synthesizers, they might have thought they fit depressing songs better than jolly ones. Whatever. Alvin’s lyrics are slightly better, though; while at the early stage one could really care less, some of the lyrics on Cricklewood Green are slightly better, with slinky social commentary and charming introspective meditations. (No, I don’t mean ‘Love Like A Man’).’Love Like A Man’, by the way, is the best-known song from here, and well-deserved, too: the main riff is impeccable, belonging to that class people call ‘killer’, and the solos are classic Alvin Lee. The problem with the solos is that by Ten Years After’s fourth studio album, they all begin to sound seriously the same – Alvin’s style is no longer really evolving, and you get more or less the same that you had on Ssssh, only with less freshness. But if you’re a diehard like me (and Alvin’s lead guitar playing is indeed one of my favourite guitar styles), you’re bound to be satisfied.

The opening two tracks, ‘Sugar The Road’ and ‘Working On The Road’, also thrill me each time I hear them, even though I can never reproduce them in my memory – for some mystical reason, no doubt about it. Both are solid, if unspectacular, riff-based blues-rockers with a few synth effects and that deep echoey sound hitting you for the first time. Ambitions hit hard on the phenomenal prog-blues number ‘50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain’ – it’s not exactly multi-part, but the mounting of tension, as the song grows from a slow soft shuffle to an all-out roaring thunderstorm, might as well make it one. It’s not the longest song ever recorded by the band, but it certainly presented them in a different light – ballsy, pretentious arena-rockers that wanted to be artsy. At long last.Other highlights include a beautiful Simon and Garfunkel-tingled ballad (‘Circles’) and the closing moody rocker ‘As The Sun Still Burns Away’ which is even darker and more depressing than anything else on here – dammit, these guys really had their hackles up at the time. With all this grimness, even the ‘lightweight’ numbers sound strange, if not out of place – can anybody tell me what’s that ‘Me And My Baby’ doing here? It’s a hardcore jazz number that could have easily made it onto Undead but here? Damn aplenty. Aplenty. It sounds like a mockery. Same goes for ‘Year 3,000 Blues’ – pretty fine acoustic playing on that one, but the song is supposed to be a groove with a bit of black humour, and I’m not all that inclined to laugh, seeing as it comes after the first three ‘serious’ rockers.

This is just the beginning of Ten Years After’ last creative phase, though, and all the obvious flaws – song length, lack of diversity, inability to come up with classic melodies – are, well, obvious. But the All-Music Guide digs it, though. And who am I to argue with the All-Music Guide? Just a silly reviewer who doesn’t know crap about any music in general and any music in particular. Aww, skip it. Move on.

Ten Years After Ssssh (1969)

From sputnikmusic.com

Tens Years After is not a very well known band, and a lot of people have never even heard of them. They were part of the second British Blues invasion between 1966-1975. They had a very underrated front man, Alvin Lee, who is a very good guitarist. They did play Woodstock, and are in the movie playing their jam of I’m Coming Home, that’s very good. These guys are a very good live band, and they’re probably at their bast when they’re on stage performing. This is a very talented, and very underrated band, so I hope you give them a listen, and I hope you like what you hear.

THE SONGS
1.) Bad Scene
This song starts out with what sounds like a chicken clucking at a really high pitch. Then Lee and Churchill start on the drums and keyboards. When Alvin Lee starts to sing he plays a fuzzy guitar riff. Then, after he’s done singing the song switches to a slower tempo, with Lee hitting some high pitched notes. The fast riff starts up again for Lee to sing. There’s a little bridge after the second verse where churchill plays a way different part that sounds kind of like a piano in an old salloon. Lee then has a pretty good sized solo thats pretty good. He sing two more verses and the songs over. This song is a little nuts, and there’s a lot of different riffs in this song. 4/5

2.) Two Time Mama
This is ties for the shortest
song on the album at 2:02. This song has a more folky riff, and is a lot slower than the last song. Lee sings a lot different in this song, and it makes it really sound like a folk song. He also does a ot of slides on his guitar, and it makes the sound even better. After two verses Lee has a little solo. He sings two more verses at then the song ends abruptly. 4.5/5

3.) Stoned Woman
This song starts out with Lyons playin a little progression on his bass, then the guitar and drums follow. Then, Lee starts the main riff, and starts singing right away. During the chorus Lee has some good fills with his guitar. After the chorus There’s a little keyboard part, then Lee starts a little soling. There’s a pause in the guitar solo, and there’s a little drums, and keyboards solo, and after about ten seconds the guitar joins back in with the soloing. He sings one more verse, and the song ends on the Lee singing the chorus and soloing. 4.5/5

4.) Good Morning Little Schoolgirl
This is the longest song on the album at 7:01. This song starts out on a similar riff to the last one, but this has more keyboards. He sing a few verses while he adds some nice guitars fills to the mix. Then the great solo starts up, It’s very fast with bass playing the riff in the background, and Ric Lee tapping on the symbol. The whole band starts in on the soloing after about 2 minutes of guitar solo. The main riff starts up again, but very softly, and gets steadily louder, till its to its normal volume. Lee starts to sing while the band contributes some great fills. The songs ends when Ric Lee plays a really load, and hard drum solo, and the song ends abruptly. I think this is probably the best song on the album. 5/5

5.) If You Should Love Me
The song starts out with Lee singing right at the start, and when you first hear it, it kind of sounds like a beatles song. He sings really good in this song, and plays a real soft riff. Lee basically sings the whole song through, while he and the rest of the band is soloing the whole time also. The songs fades on the band soloing, and Lee singing.
4.5/5

6.) I Don’t Know That You Don’t Know My Name
This song is the other song that is 2:02. Lee plays a acoustic guitar on this song, and the keyboards play the same thing the guitar does. He also sings to the same beat the guitar and keyboards do. Ric lee plays the same beat throughout the whole song, that kind of pulls the song together. He basically sing three verses, and the songs over, This is the only song with no solos on the album. 4/5

7.) The Stomp
The song starts out with Lee playing the same chord kind of fast. Then, it stops, and a you start to hear a light drum tapping, and the guitar joins in. The bass and keyboards join in shortly after. Chruchill has a little solo when he starts in. Lee sings real soft, and low, the music kind of over powers his voice in some parts. This is another song where Lee pretty much sings the whole time while the rest of band jams. In this song is where churchill has his best solos of the album, and its through out the whole songs. 4.5/5

8.) I Woke Up This Morning
Starts out with Lee playing some nice guitar work with the band joining in shortly after. This is a very bluesy song, and is probably my second favorite on the album. After the first two verses there’s a pretty awesome guitar solo, one of the best on the album. The solo takes up most of the song, which is cool. Lee sing one more verse, then the song ends on a guitar and drum solo. 5/5

Overall this record is superb, and is a must have. I think it’ probably TYA’s best. Their other really good album is their s/t, which I’ll probably review it pretty soon. If you like bluesy rock, and like a whole lotta guitar then this is the album for you. These guys are probably one of the most underrated bands, so if you ever want to start listening to a new band then try these guys out, chances are you’ll love it.

Ten Years After Undead (1968/2002)

From amazon.co.uk

Review by J. Talsma

Although far from bad, Ten Years After was not very satisfied with their first, self titled, album, because is didn’t capture the essence of their live performances so the thought was to record a live album as follow up and thus the second band outing became Undead.

It is not very common to come up with a live album in the beginning of your career but in this case it is an understandable move and it did not harm the band at all.

Originally the album consisted of only 7 tracks, partly due the restriction of vinyl al the time, so only 38 minutes was released in 1968. However, much more music was recorded but to prevent the same songs appearing as on the first album those were shelved.

In 2002 a CD was released with a lot of extras while one track, Standing on the Crossroads, was made available already in 1972 on Alvin Lee and Company, a compilation of recorded but unused material when the band was under contract with Decca on the Deram label. Now in 2015 a new 2-CD is released which restores things somewhat. First it is digitally remastered and has the Original album on one cd. On the second disc are all the remaining songs plus a part of the BBC session for Top Gear. These are divided over the new 2 CD sets Ten Years After and Stonedhenge.

A very long I Can’t Keep From Crying, Sometimes, with a jam in between, and Spoonful from the first album, while Woman Trouble and Untitled are from the the forthcoming album Stonedhenge. Plus an early live take of the by then Woodstock made famous I’m Coming Home, which was never issued as a studio recording.

So a full set, less surprises maybe but a solid historical document, well worth a listen of two or more. Therefore highly recommend. The album has stood its time, some 5 decades, with gusto. It shows the talent of a band on the verge of becoming famous and hue international success.

A great singer/songwriter and guitar player was sang Alvin Lee (sadly passed away in 2013) with Leo Lyons on bass, Ric Lee on drums and Chuck Churchill on keyboards, formed one the most celebrated blues/rock bands of the time, with a string of strong albums to come.

But they were not restricted to one kind of music alone, on the contrary, their output was much more and included jazz, pop, even country, plus ballads. Live was something different, with long improvisations and instrumental jams plus Chuck Berry covers. I can listen to them time and time again.

Ten Years After: The troubled tale of Ten Years After – from Woodstock to the world

From loudersound.com

Woodstock made Ten Years After into world stars, but instead of capitalising on their new-found fame they lost the plot

(Image credit: Gems / Getty Images)

It was getting dark by the time Ten Years After took the stage at Woodstock back in 1969. The rain had come bucketing down mid-way through the afternoon, just as they’d been about to go on, drenching the stage and turning the site into a quagmire. 

The audience – variously estimated at between 350,000 and 500,000 – was wet, chilled and bedraggled; many of them were the worse for wear after three days in the open. The band weren’t in much better shape, having travelled overnight from St Louis, making the last leg by helicopter and then being cooped up on-site in the back of a trailer, waiting for the rain to stop. 

In the movie of Woodstock, the camera picks out the skinny frame of TYA’s Alvin Lee, his boyish face ringed by shoulder-length blond hair. “This is a thing called ‘I’m Going Home’… by helicopter!” he announces, and for a dozen seconds he rattles out notes on his trademark Gibson guitar that sound like a sustained burst of machine-gun fire. 

The band then kick into a breakneck boogie and the song takes off; Alvin spits out the vocals, filling in the spaces with more guitar salvos. The camera remains fixed on him; there are just occasional glimpses of keyboard player Chick Churchill, drummer Ric Lee (no relation) and bassist Leo Lyons, who is headbanging furiously. Alvin leads the song high and low, never letting the pace flag, until nine minutes later he builds to a final warp-speed cacophony. 

The crowd, their central heating now restored, erupts.

When the Woodstock movie came out in late 1970 (more than a year after the festival) it did for Ten Years After what Live Aid did for Queen and U2: transformed them into superstars. Suddenly TYA were the new heroes of British blues rock. Or, as Alvin puts it: “That’s when 14-year-old girls started showing up to our gigs with ice-creams.” 

Ten Years After had been in the vanguard of the second (heavier) invasion of the US by British groups, touring relentlessly and rapidly reaching top-of-the-bill status. “We had this thing – and looking back I’m a bit ashamed of it now – that we had to sting any band that went on after us,” Alvin recalls. “We used to go out of our way to blow them off and make them look bad. 

“It wasn’t so much playing well as going down well; we’d learnt that from our years on the club circuit. And there were a lot of bands in America who wouldn’t go on after us. At Woodstock, Country Joe whipped his equipment on before us because he’d played after us at the Fillmore East and died a death. We used to wear the audiences out. It really was a heads-down-let’s-go-for-it attitude. Leo used to shake his head off. That was fine on stage, but he’d do it in the studio, too. We used to have to gaffer-tape his headphones to his head.” 

Leo’s headbanging style even got him an offer from Frank Zappa to appear in a movie he was planning called The Choreographers Of Rock ‘N’ Roll. And the bassist reveals the secret of TYA’s vigorous live shows: “Ric and I egged each other on when we flagged. I’d yell: ‘Hit ’em, you bastard!’ And he’d shout back: ‘Fuck off.’” Leo would also spur Ric on by spitting at him – anticipating the punk movement by a decade – but the drummer never minded “because he always missed”.

Riding the crest of this high-energy wave, Alvin would sneer and pout outrageously as he tore through solo after solo. Even on the slower songs his bursts of notes seemed faster than mere human fingers could manage. No wonder the American media dubbed him Captain Speedfingers.

But behind the bravado that had propelled Ten Years After into the premier league was another, more insecure Alvin who couldn’t handle the superstar status that the Woodstock movie had bestowed on the group: “We’d been playing for the heads, the growing underground audience,” he recounts. “But then it got bigger, and people had to come to ice hockey arenas and stadiums to see the band. And we lost any contact with the audience.

I often wonder what the rest of our career would have been like if the Woodstock movie had used another songAlvin Lee

“You had police with guns, and cotton wool in their ears, sneering at the band and looking for half a chance to beat up the audience. It was awful. It had all gone wrong and I was thinking, what the fuck am I doing here?” 

And the song that had made Ten Years After famous was becoming an albatross: “You’d walk on stage and people would be shouting for I’m Going Home, which was the last song. I often wonder what the rest of our career would have been like if the Woodstock movie had used another song. As it was, everything became focused on the last song, the high-energy number.” 

To make matters worse, Alvin was also becoming estranged from the rest of the band: “I think they began to resent me because I started to back off then,” he admits. “I couldn’t help it, I hated it. I used to go on stage and go: ‘dong!’ [mimes a big chord] and the audience would go: ‘Yeahhh!’ You could do anything. It was just crazy. It was horrible. 

“My problem was that I couldn’t communicate it to anybody. The band thought I was looney. I went into sulks and things like that. Maybe I should have tried to talk more with them, but it didn’t work for some reason. They started to get jealous because they thought I was being singled out to do all the interviews and the photo sessions. I wasn’t getting singled out. I was the songwriter, singer and lead guitarist, after all, so obviously I was the one they wanted to talk to.”

There was indeed resentment from the rest of the band. But it was born out of frustration rather than jealousy. Around the time of Woodstock, TYA’s management had decided to focus all the attention on Alvin. Fair enough, you might think, as Alvin was the frontman, guitar hero and pin-up. But Ric and Leo believed Alvin was temperamentally unsuited to the role: “I felt it would be too much pressure for Alvin, and told our manager, Chris Wright, that he was creating a monster he couldn’t control,” Leo says. 

Their misgivings were well-founded. At the very moment that Ten Years After should have been seizing the initiative, they were in fact losing the plot. On his own admission, Alvin retreated behind a wall of dope smoke. Whenever Ric and Leo, angry at being marginalised, managed to provoke a reaction out of Alvin it was invariably the wrong one. It created a rift. And the recriminations continuing to this day. 

What added to the bitterness was how close the group members had been up to then. Ric describes Alvin and Leo’s relationship as “a well-oiled marriage”. It dates back to 1960 when Leo started playing with Alvin, already a precocious guitarist, in local Nottingham band The Jaybirds. They even went through the classic 60s rock group apprenticeship together, playing a five-week stint at Hamburg’s Star Club in 1962 – just a week after The Beatles. 

“We stayed in a two-room apartment above a mud-wrestling/sex club,” Ric remembers. “The rooms were filled with bunks, and there were probably 10 or 12 people living there. I was 18, Alvin was 17, and we were exposed to prostitutes, pep pills and music 24 hours a day.” 

Alvin confirms that the Hamburg experience was “a real rite of passage. One day I went into the bathroom and there was one bloke sitting on the toilet, a guy in the bath and another guy washing his socks in the bath water. And all of a sudden another bloke runs in and fires a gas gun into the room. It was madness. There was also a scary side to it with the gangsters. One guy had this big welding glove, and when you used to see him going out with it you’d think: ‘Uh-oh, trouble’.”

When the band returned to England, Alvin bought his first Gibson ES335 – which would become his trademark guitar. Ric, who came from nearby Mansfield, replaced the previous drummer in 1965, and soon afterwards they brought in Chick Churchill on keyboards. The following year they started tapping into the burgeoning blues market in Britain that John Mayall had opened up. 

“I threw myself headlong into that,” says Alvin, who had grown up listening to his dad’s collection of pre-war bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson and Josh White. But the jazzier influences in the group meant they were always, as Ric says, “a bit sideways-on to the blues”. 

That paid off when Chick got them an audition for London’s then legendary Marquee Club early in 1967, and equally legendary club manager John Gee was impressed by their version of Woody Herman’s ‘Woodchopper’s Ball’. To celebrate, they changed their name from the now outdated Jaybirds to Ten Years After – which Leo found while flicking through the pages of the Radio Times. 

Via the Marquee, TYA landed a spot on the 1967 Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival (which later became the Reading Festival), and got a standing ovation there in front of 20,000 people. Among them was noted blues producer Mike Vernon, who was there checking out one of his charges, Fleetwood Mac. Vernon later signed Ten Years After to Decca’s new Deram label (ironically, the band had recently failed an audition for Decca). 

In keeping with the times, TYA slapped down their first album inside five days. “Mike could see we were a bit radical as far as his kind of blues was concerned,” Alvin recalls, “but he basically gave us the freedom and said get on with it.” The album caught TYA’s raw, jazzy approach to the blues, which could be high-velocity, as on the opening I Want To Know, or slow, extended and mood-building, on the closing Help Me.

The record was rough and ready, but it attracted the attention of famed American promoter Bill Graham, who was looking for new bands to play his Fillmore venues in San Francisco and New York and figured there must be more where Cream and Hendrix had come from. 

In June 1968 Ten Years After started a seven-week US tour at the Fillmore West: “That first tour was great,” Alvin recalls. “We had such a good time out there. We lost around $35,000, but we got asked back so we knew we were on the way. The strange thing was that we had gone to what I considered to be the home of the blues but they’d never heard of most of them. I couldn’t believe it – ‘Big Bill who?’ We were recycling American music and they were calling it the English sound. And the American bands all had Fender equipment, which sounded really tinny compared with the juicy sound you get from Marshalls.”

We were recycling American music and they were calling it the English soundAlvin Lee

Then, of course, there were the psychedelic delights of the West Coast. TYA had already been part of the London underground scene during 1967’s Summer Of Love; they had even made a whimsical, trippy single in early 1968 called Portable People, and played at the hip Middle Earth. 

Publicity shots of the time reveal TYA’s garish fashion sense: “Ah, Paisley shirts!” Alvin laughs. “That was my girlfriend, Lorraine. She was the wild one. She had me wearing my mother’s curtains for trousers, with those lampshade frills round the bottom. 

“I loved the underground,” he says. It was so experimental. Everything opened up, you could try anything. And by now the drugs were taking effect. That was all part of it – the opening of consciousness.” 

In America, you had to be careful not to find your consciousness expanded unwittingly. “There was one gig at the Fillmore West,” he remembers, “where somebody gave me this joint as we were going on stage. And I, Mr Bravado, had to have a toke. And it turned out to be angel dust. By the time I got to the stage my left leg felt a mile long. I hit the first note on my guitar, and it struck the back of the hall and I saw it bounce back hitting the heads of the audience and ricochet up into the roof. 

“And I was just standing there going: ‘Wow’. I don’t know how I managed to play, but I noticed at one point the band were looking at me strangely. After we finished the song I said: ‘What’s wrong?’ And they said: ‘We just did the same song twice!’. But the audience were in the same state. It didn’t seem to matter.”

Needing a new album to promote, TYA hastily recorded a live album at a club called Klook’s Kleek in London. Undead caught the sweaty, small-club atmosphere and the band’s free-form approach to Won’t Be Wrong Always and Woodchoppers Ball, the moody blues of Spider In Your Web and a younger but already potent I’m Going Home. 

“Basically, that album put it in a nutshell,” Alvin reckons. “I was so happy with it. When I first heard it I thought, what are we going to do next? After that my attitude was, ‘Let’s go into the studio and experiment, because we’ve already made the ultimate album’.” 

That’ll be the not-so-subtly titled Stonedhenge, then, Ten Years After’s psychedelic blues album. “Pipes and stuff like that all over the place,” is Alvin’s recollection. “But it was very experimental in places. I was into my musique concrete phase. There’s quite a lot of [avant garde industrial composer] Todd Dockstader in there. It was still very underground at that point, and we were making music for that audience – for ourselves, really, because we were that audience too.”

After we finished the song I said: ‘What’s wrong?’ And they said: ‘We just did the same song twice!’Alvin Lee

Stonedhenge could fairly claim to by TYA’s most innovative album: light and trippy on the insistent Going To Try and the bouncy Hear Me Calling, a positively spooky on A Sad Song. And despite the substances the band were tight and confident. 

Released in February 1969, the record set up Ten Years After for a momentous year. In fact Woodstock was just one of half a dozen festivals they played that summer, including Texas, Seattle and the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival – the only year rock bands were allowed in. At Flushing Meadow in New York they played alongside Vanilla Fudge and Jeff Beck. 

Led Zeppelin also turned up to check out the competition. In Richard Cole’s notorious Stairway To Heaven kiss-and-tell, the former Zeppelin tour manager relates how Jimmy Page was awestruck by Alvin’s playing. Much to the annoyance of an inebriated John Bonham, who suddenly lurched forward and threw a glass of orange juice over Alvin’s guitar, slowing up his fingerwork as the strings and fretboard got stickier. 

Alvin doesn’t remember anything being thrown, although Ric confirms the story. He also remembers a more amusing incident at the end of the show when he and Bonzo joined Jeff Beck for the encore: “There was Robert Plant, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and three bassists I think. Bonzo was beating out a riff on the drum kit, so I grabbed a floor tom and started thrumming hell out of it. 

“The crowd were going apeshit as we banged out a blues standard, and Bonham, who was already stripped to the waist, took off his trousers and underpants. He was sitting there naked, playing away. And the police saw him. And then I saw Peter Grant and Richard Cole spotting the police. The number fizzled out, and all I saw was Peter and Richard running on stage, each grabbing one of his arms, and his bare arse disappearing as they carried him off.” 

Alvin tended not to get involved in the rock’n’roll high jinks, however: “The reason I didn’t mix with bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who too much and go in for all that hotel wrecking was that I was a doper; I was always carrying hashish around, and in those days you could get 12 years if you got caught with a joint in somewhere like Texas. 

Even legal drugs such as alcohol could also be hazardous for Alvin, particularly if they were being brandished by someone like Janis Joplin. “She used to chase me around a bit,” he chuckles, “but I wouldn’t have it. She was just too dangerous. 

“There was a show we did with them at the Fillmore East and they were handing her bottles of Southern Comfort on stage and she was drinking them. I thought it must be something like sweet wine. She came off stage and grabbed my ass and gave me a bottle. So I drank it, and promptly collapsed and passed out in a quiet corner. When I woke up it was about five in the morning and there was just some guy sweeping up. I didn’t even know which hotel we were staying at.”

In fact, on the Richter scale of rock groups behaving badly Ten Years After barely registered (“I tried to start a food fight one night, and everyone went: ‘Behave yourself’,” Ric admits). So it’s something of a surprise to find them appearing in the grossly overrated movie Groupie. In a scene that attempts to prove guilt by insinuation, Leo is seen with a young lady in a hotel coffee shop, ordering tea, while the soundtrack plays TYA’s Good Morning Little Schoolgirl. 

“Oh boy, was my friend Iris pissed off when she saw the movie,” Leo laughs. “Someone sent me a copy recently, and I watched it while hiding behind the sofa with one eye closed. But it’s pretty tame stuff now. The musical segments are worth watching, but Spinal Tap would be a better buy for the backstage antics.”

It was TYA’s Ssssh album, recorded just before they embarked on their US summer tour in 1969 – that included Woodstock and the other festivals – that opened up the rift in the band. The album itself wasn’t a problem. After the laidback trip of Stonedhenge, Alvin was up and flying again; his blistering solo on I Woke Up This Morning was a corker, and the reworked riff that anchors Good Morning Little Schoolgirl was tougher than the rest. The problem was the sleeve, which, in Ric’s words, “stuck it to everyone. We’d done a photo session together, and suddenly we were presented with the album cover with just Alvin on the front. And we went: ‘What the fuck is this?’” 

“This” was the new management strategy of putting the focus on Alvin. And Alvin admits the pressure got to him almost immediately: “There’s this story about how I nearly didn’t play Woodstock because I had a bad back. It wasn’t a bad back, it was a bad head. I couldn’t face the tour. I looked at the 13 week list of dates and thought, I’m not going to get through this. 

“I pretty much had a nervous breakdown at the beginning of the tour. I’d done five days of interviews before it started, I’d left my girlfriend back in England, and I really wasn’t feeling very capable. I just collapsed. It was our American manager, Dee Anthony [who went on to manage Peter Frampton], who got me through it. He used to give me all these pep talks – ‘Stay on the bus. It’s your music. Forget all the bullshit. That one and a half hours on stage is all that counts’. But I was still getting upset. I was still going on stage saying: ‘This is horrible’.” 

Nevertheless, the relentless schedule continued – successfully, too. The 28 US tours they notched up between ’68 and ’74 was unequalled by any other British band. And the albums got bigger. Cricklewood Green (not quite as exotic-sounding as Acapulco Gold or Lebanese Black, admittedly, but then the grass is always greener…), in 1970, cracked the American Top 20 and was TYA’s biggest-selling UK album, helped by the hit single Love Like A Man. Alvin remembers writing most of the songs in the taxi on the way to the studio.

Watt, released at the end of the year, failed to capitalise but Alvin finally got the time he wanted to write songs for the next album, A Space In Time and came up with the band’s biggest hit, the deceptively simple, catchy but left-field I’d Love To Change The World. It was a crucial opportunity for the band. 

“But by then I was too confused to take it,” Alvin says. “‘I’d Love To Change The World’ was a hit, and I hated it because it was a hit. By then I was rebelling. I never played it live. To me it was a pop song.” 

Even worse, Alvin vetoed the record company choice for the follow-up single, which annoyed the head of their US label, the redoubtable Clive Davis, who had earlier told the band: “Give me the tools and I’ll do the job”, and promptly made I’d Love To Change The World a Top Ten hit. 

Ric remembers being invited to a Columbia Records marketing meeting chaired by Davis, with all the radio promotions people saying that Tomorrow I’ll Be Out Of Town was a perfect radio cut. When Ric said the band didn’t want that as a single, Davis growled: “So why is that track on the album? If you want me to do the job, don’t give me the tools and then take them away from me.” 

“He’d been on our side up until then,” Ric says. “But after that the albums never sold as well and we never had another hit. If the artists didn’t co-operate, then the record company would simply move on to one that did; they weren’t going to wait around for us to get our act together. It was a lesson in reality.” 

Not that even Clive Davis could have done much with Rock And Roll To The World which was recorded and sold pretty much on auto pilot. And while Recorded Live fared better, it also highlighted the fact that the core of the set had remained unchanged since Woodstock four years earlier. “What’s the point?” was Alvin’s response. He didn’t have the inclination, he was miserable, and communication within the band was generally reduced to “shouting and screaming matches”.

Leo contends that Alvin in turn made the band’s lives a misery: “It stressed me out so much that I stopped trying to reconcile things. I still enjoyed playing live shows, provided there were no tantrums. If there were confrontations, I stupidly rose to the bait every time.” Amid such an atmosphere, the management kept their distance. 

Eventually TYA took a six-month break for the second half of ’73. Alvin recorded a solo album with gospel singer Mylon Lefevre (who had supported them on tour) at his newly finished home studio. “Mylon was great. He arrived and said: ‘Where do all the musicians hang out?’ I told him the Speakeasy. He went straight off, and came back about six hours later and said: ‘I got us a band.’ And in walked George Harrison, Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi! Mylon really had a silver tongue. He captivated everyone.” 

Harrison even goaded Alvin into putting on his own gig. Alvin: “He said: ‘I bet you couldn’t.’ And I did. I rang up and got a booking at the Rainbow Theatre. I had 24 songs that hadn’t worked with Ten Years After, and I rehearsed them with a band that included Boz Burrell, Tim Hinkley and Mel Collins.” 

The titles of the Mylon Lefevre album (On The Road To Freedom) and Alvin Lee & Co’s live In Flight both seemed to offer broad hints about Alvin’s intentions. But, surprisingly, there was a new TYA album in 1974, Positive Vibrations. Except that it wasn’t. 

Alvin didn’t seem to know what he wanted: “I did an American tour with Alvin Lee & Co. It was all new material; I didn’t play ‘I’m Going Home’ or any of that. We were playing little theatres, getting good reviews. But, to tell you the truth, I did miss the oomph of the audience. I’d got used to that. I mean, they enjoyed it and clapped and stuff, but there wasn’t the oomph there. Then I did a Ten Years After tour and got the oomph back.” 

Not for long, though. Another petulant spat resulted in a threat to put the band on wages. They limped through one more US tour before it all disintegrated. Alvin then embarked on a solo career as Alvin Lee & Co, the Alvin Lee Band, Alvin Lee & Ten Years Later and even plain old Alvin Lee. Meanwhile, the others got on with music-related careers – playing, sessions, producing, managing.

In 1983 Ric got a call from the Marquee presuming that Ten Years After would be playing at the club’s 25th anniversary celebrations. “I rang round the others and said: ‘I think we should do this’.” 

Alvin felt “it showed us we could do it. And it was fun, actually. We had one rehearsal in the afternoon, and then we plugged in and played and it was Ten Years After. That amazed me. And we thought that from that gig there would be a reunion. But it didn’t happen. It was a funny time in music. We weren’t legends, we were old farts.” 

Ten Years After petered out when the bickering started up again. It also hampered subsequent reunions at the end of the 80s and the late 90s which included a nostalgic appearance at the Woodstock 29th anniversary festival, billed as A Day In The Garden. Their reactions to that are revealing. 

Alvin: “It was a big disappointment. There I was, standing in a field that they tell me is exactly where it happened. But the people weren’t there, the vibe wasn’t there. It had nothing to do with it.” 

Leo: “It turned out to be a series of flashbacks for me. We were booked into what used to be the Holiday Inn, Liberty – Tranquility Base in 1969. I didn’t realise until I walked into the hotel bar. It stopped me in my tracks. I swear I could see and hear Jimi, Janis, Jerry [Garcia], Bob [Hite], all of them gone now. We were together in that room 29 years ago.” 

Ric: “Disappointing, really. We hadn’t played for a while. I was certainly rusty. The original thing was funky, this was all very clinical. It was like an MOR concert. Still, at least we had dressing rooms, which we never had the first time…”

It was a funny time in music. We weren’t legends, we were old farts.Alvin Lee

For TYA it all came to a head at the last of a series of European festival shows in 1999. A vicious spat between Leo and Alvin buried any reunion hopes under a mound of perceived grievances on all sides. Alvin went back to his own band, while the others remained together, occasionally playing and recording with various American guitarists. 

However, the success of some Ten Years After reissues – plus a fine previously unreleased 1970 show at New York’s Fillmore East – prompted Ric, Leo and Chick to revive the band again in 2002. After Alvin turned them down again, they went looking for a new guitarist and found one via Leo’s son, who told them about a “shit-hot” guitarist he’d known at school, 25-year-old Joe Gooch. 

“Initially I was sceptical because of his age,” Ric admits, “but as soon as I saw him play I had no doubts.” A couple of European dates convinced all of the band that Joe was the man to replace Alvin. “He has his own style but he can still deliver all the Ten Years After hits,” Ric says. 

Alvin found the new Ten Years After situation “very sad. Ten Years After used to be a credible name and I was proud of it,” the guitarist says. “Now it’s just an embarrassment. I asked them to change the name slightly, so as not to confuse the fans, but they refused.” 

Alvin recorded an album with Elvis Presley’s original backing musicians, guitarist Scotty More and drummer DJ Fontana (“my teenage heroes”) in Nashville, titled In Tennessee, also reckons that “it’s a shame the new guitarist, who must be pretty good to play my licks, is copying somebody else’s style instead of playing his own music. If I had taken a job copying somebody else’s music when I was starting out there would never have been a Ten Years After.”

This feature was originally published in 2003, in Classic Rock 56. Alvin Lee died in 2013. Joe Gooch left Ten Years After in 2014. 

Ten Years After: Live At The Fillmore East (1970)

From starling.rinet.ru

None too soon – although I guess the Fillmore was too busy capitalizing on shows by better respected “biggies” of the era like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane for the entire duration of the Nineties to pay attention to “lesser” acts.

Honestly, though, in 1970 Ten Years After were anything but a lesser act: put into stardom through the Woodstock performance, they were one of the hottest things in town. This 2-CD release is, right now, the best live Ten Years After that money can buy, although it does have its problems as well. Unlike the regular Recorded Live (reviewed below), it doesn’t fit on one CD, and is therefore overpriced; worse, it wastes space on stuff like ‘The Hobbit’ – the obligatory contemporary bane of a ten minute drum solo, and Ric Lee isn’t even a Ginger Baker, although he is competent (‘Hobbit’ also made part of the original Recorded Live, but they had the good taste to cut it out when transferring the album onto CD).

Yet on the other hand, it is a faithful document, capturing an entire Ten Years After show (the tracks are from three of their sets in February 1970, but they’re put together seamlessly and never overlap), and boasting awesome sound quality – much better than Recorded Live. In addition, the band was in magnificent form, giddy from their sudden success but not yet fed up with their superstardom, with Alvin pulling out every single trick of his for all to see. And then, heck, it’s the Fillmore East! Billy Graham introducing! You don’t wanna miss it!

By 1970, the band had dropped all of its jazzy material of the club epoch and was concentrating on pure rock’n’roll onstage, with extended flashy workouts from Mr Lee. This particular setlist includes all the regular chestnuts: ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’, the lengthy mammoth-suite-treatment of ‘I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes’, the soulful blues workout on ‘Help Me’, and, of course, ‘I’m Going Home’ (this particular version is easily the best I’ve heard, maybe even beating out the immortal Woodstock one – and nicely features a tiny Chick Churchill organ solo, too). All of these will be mentioned and probably discussed below in the Recorded Live review.

Since this was 1970, they also do a few tracks from the upcoming Cricklewood Green (starting the show with the hit single ‘Love Like A Man’), and a particular highlight in the encore is ‘I Woke Up This Morning’, with an unbelievable guitar solo that manages to beat out the already unbelievable studio version. I guess the number of notes played in that solo alone more or less equals the number of notes that, say, J. J. Cale played in his life. Not that it’s good per se, but I’ve always said Alvin Lee is one of those few guitarists that can make a perfect balance between technical flashiness and true passion. This stuff actually rocks, it’s not destined to make you just scratch your head and say, ‘wow, how cute’. And when Alvin launches into a mini-Chuck Berry set (‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ paired with ‘Roll Over Beethoven’), he doesn’t do it in an “artsy” way – he goes for the guts, with a thunderstorm of trademark Berry-licks that he obviously wasn’t above. If you think that in 1970 only the underground proto-punk scene could really remember what rock’n’roll was all about, think again. Besides, Alvin’s just such a swell guy. He doesn’t treat this stuff reverentially – he trashes it, raising some genuine hell. If there’s a big spiritual distance between him and all those sleazy, dirty barroom bands, I’d like to hear it. He just plays longer (and better) solos, ‘sall.

If anything, the major blemish of this performance is that, when you have all these lengthy tracks and one tremendous guitar workout after another and so on for about two hours, sooner or later you’re bound to notice how all the solos are similar. That’s Alvin’s big flaw: his speed and technicality are unquestionable, but sometimes you find yourself saying ‘oh, well, I hope on this song he won’t do that high-pitched fifteen-billion-notes jazzy arpeggio’ and then he goes ahead and does it anyway. And considering that few of his solos are actually improvised, that makes the entire thing even more predictable. On the positive side, even knowing all that, I can’t help but enjoy hearing what I hear, and I totally love the way Alvin “develops” his solos – slowly building up the climax, going from slower, more standard soloing to heights that nobody in 1970 could scale.

To be fair, one mustn’t necessarily forget about the others: in the liner notes, Ric Lee makes some subtle remarks about the rhythm section’s playing, obviously trying to attract the listener’s attention, and in the unlikely case when you actually get fed up with Alvin’s flashing, try and hear what these guys are doing – I mean, Ric Lee does have all this nifty “drum-adjusting” around the guitar solos, just as the superior (but still only a drummer) Ginger Baker did with Eric Clapton. Hey, why not spare a couple of moments for the underdog?

Ten Years After A Space In Time (1971)

From starling.rinet.ru

Despite all the hype, Ten Years After could never have earned the title of a “prog-rock” band: sometimes they are mistakenly lumped in with the movement, but Alvin and Co.’s ambitions never really amounted that high – for the most part, they were just hardcore blues rockers with a slight experimental edge, to distinguish them from colleagues like early Fleetwood Mac or Free. Still, if there ever was a period in which they were real close to embodying some “progressive” tendencies, it was this fall of 1971, with this extremely strange, un-Ten Years After-like album, and this really great bunch of songs, with hardly a major stinker in among all the melodies. Unarguably the band’s strongest and most consistent effort since the Ssssh days, A Space In Time continues the line of Watt in its heavy use of synthesizers and special effects, but this time the members probably took out some time to make these thingamajigs actually work. Alvin’s guitar is not idle either; and his songwriting reached a peak at this time – never to be surpassed again.

One thing strikes you immediately as you let all the tracks flow through your mind, one by one – where’s the fingerflashing? This sounds nothing like what we’ve grown to expect from the band because the main trademark element of the sound, Alvin’s blazing speedy chops, are completely missing. An intentional move, of course; whereas I wouldn’t want to accuse Alvin of sharing the famous “guitar hero complex” that managed to overtake such six-string greats as Clapton and Jeff Beck in the early Seventies, it’s at least clear that on A Space In Time the man was keen on cutting out the crap and fully concentrating on the melodies and real musical substance. He wanted to be able to finally make a record that would feature him as a real solid composer, that would not just keep repeating the same lightning-speed licks over and over again. And while it’s rather hard to believe without having heard the record, he did succeed. On here, you’ll find the best batch of melodies ever created by the band – many of them acoustic, showing Alvin’s developing passion for the unplugged atmosphere, but some electric as well. Alvin’s lyrics rarely match the melodies in skillfulness or deepness, but as usual, he manages to walk the thin line between cliches/banality and pretentiousness just fine. And while his take on the ‘we gotta get out of this place’ schtick on ‘I’d Love To Change The World’ is nothing particularly special, it comes along as sincere and never too overblown. Just a guy lamenting over post-Woodstock disillusionment.

The opening track, ‘One Of These Days’ (not to be confounded with the famous Pink Floyd instrumental, or, for that matter, with the ninety thousand other songs by other composers with the same name), kicks in with such a staggering might that it makes you go wow. It’s essentially just a slow blues rocker, but produced like they never tried before – with a deep and elaborate sound, echoey guitars, moody swirling organs, and tremendously atmospheric. My guess is that it probably inspired the Stones for “Ventilator Blues” (which is a weaker song). It does end in a slightly overlong speedy jam that tends to get a wee bit tedious due to Alvin’s self-restriction on the guitar, but never mind – it is all compensated further on.

On no other Ten Years After album will you find, for instance, two tracks as moody and “place-taking” as ‘Here They Come’ and ‘Let The Sky Fall’. Sure, Alvin and the boys did try their hand at ‘mystical acoustic shuffles’ earlier, particularly on Stonedhenge, but there was basically no melody-creating back then. ‘Here They Come’, on the other hand, is based on a slow, entrancing acoustic riff with a slight medieval influence; it’s dark and a little bit creepy. ‘Let The Sky Fall’, on the other hand, features a reworking of the ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ riff, but with an entirely different purpose: the song is supposed not to let you rock your ass, but to contemplate some vivid psychedelic associations, what with all the backwards guitars and special synth effects… I love that mood.

More acoustic shuffles follow, with pretty folkish melodies that are charming in their naivety and amazing in their professional delivery. Isn’t ‘Over The Hill’ gorgeous? The way the steady acoustic riff and the moderate strings section interact with each other certainly is, and on top of that Alvin delivers a pretty catchy vocal melody. ‘Hard Monkeys’ is equally good, with a nice alternation of soft/hard parts and some of Alvin’s most delightful singing ever – the way he chants ‘got no monkey on my back’ almost manages to bring me to tears, so don’t you dare laugh at the song.

All of this stuff is pretty serious, of course, for the boys, and it’s only natural that sometimes they break loose and swap the grim, introspective mood of the songs for a few ‘have-at-it’ fun novelty numbers: ‘Baby Won’t You Let Me Rock’n’Roll You’ is a groovy Fifties sendup that doesn’t sound one second too strained as the band rips it up for two minutes, ‘ Uncle Jam’ is an unnecessary, but short jazz jam, and ‘Once There Was A Time’ is a sharp-edged country-rock number with the traditional ‘da-guitah-z-me-life-boy’ message delivered with vivid imagery: ‘Once there was a time/I robbed my mama/For a good meal and a smoke/Once there was a time/I’d sell my brother/For a dollar when I was broke/But I’d never sell my guitar, etc…’.

And over all of this rules supreme ‘I’d Love To Change The World’ – Alvin’s epoch-defining tune which is still the band’s best known self-penned composition. It’s so well-balanced, in fact, and so immaculately written and performed, that I wouldn’t know where to start to complain. Astute acoustic riff, masterfully created paranoid style on the fast parts, moody echoey vocals in the chorus, adrenaline-raising electric guitar, terrific hard-rocking climax: if you ask me, this song does in three minutes everything that ‘Stairway To Heaven’ was doing in seven and maybe more. Of course, lyrics like ‘I’d love to change the world/But I don’t know what to do/So I’ll leave it up to you’ and most of Alvin’s social commentaries are pretty straightforward, but I’d still take them over Zeppelin’s cheap mysticism any time of day, particularly since there are not any less old-time cliches in the ‘Stairway’ lyrics than there are in ‘I’d Love To Change The World’. This is just to show you how much of an underrated band Ten Years After are, so there.

It’s absolutely incredible that a band as ambitionless and tour-busy as Ten Years After found the time and will to record such an album; but it’s also a shame that the band never preferred to follow this chosen route further, as their last two studio albums show them descending into mediocrity once again, leaving A Space In Time as the band’s undisputed songwriting masterpiece and a true, if minor, rock’n’roll classic that’s been overshadowed by time but will hopefully rise out of the depths of oblivion some day. Maybe with your help, oh ye gentle reader?

Ten Years After Ssssh (1969)

From starling.rinet.ru

And at last, this time around there was no doubt these guys were gonna be a major act. Good lads, they seem to have realized all of the mistakes they made on Stonedhenge, and this time you’re in for a listen of your lifetime! No more stupid grooves or Leo Lyons solo spots. No more trippy quiet guitar sounds and no more muddy, ear-destructive production. What you are presented with is a gruff, rip-roaring, tearing-at-the-walls progressive blues album which boasts brilliant production – at last!

I may be a little biased towards this album, but really, you must realise it was a grandiose effort for the boys. Ten Years After was a homemade album of four guys getting together to play a couple of covers; Undead was a live album made by the same boys; Stonedhenge was a first try, but a failure; and this, this is absolutely fantastic. Well, not absolutely. Ten Years After never made an album that was ‘absolutely’ fantastic. Forget about ‘absolutely’. But this is definitely fantastic in the fantastic Ten Years After way.

Where was I? Ah yes, Ssssh. The only real trouble with that album is an ungly cover and the fact that you never can remember how many ‘s’ you have to write between the capital one and the ‘h’. Apart from that, there are some great blues numbers, some great ballads and some great heavy rockers the likes of which were not to be found previously. The very album opener (‘Bad Scene’) is not just heavy – it’s practically hardcore punk: a breathtaking speed and a gruff guitar tone that predicts the Ramones but also kinda outdates them. But there are also tricky changes in signature, a special jazzy middle-eight, Alvin’s trademark solos, strange electronically encoded vocals and… well, you get my drift. There’s everything that Stonedhenge sorely lacked.

The blues covers are all done wisely – generic, mayhaps (which blues cover ain’t?), but catchy, and every one has something special to boast about. ‘Two Time Mama’ has a wonderfully sweet slide guitar tone resulting from several masterful overdubs so that ultimately you seem to be surrounded by a sea of slippery guitar waves gently falling onto one another; and there’s also Alvin singing in unison with the main guitar melody, which is always a pleasure. The harder antidote ‘Stoned Woman’ is built around a mean mean highly distorted bass riff and features complicated time signature changes again. And the closing ‘I Woke Up This Morning’, with the most blatantly obvious title in the world, features an especially ferocious rapid-fire solo by Alvin. Put it next to anything on Ten Years After and you’ll see how high the mighty hath risen: he’s now able to play so fluently, without a single break for more than a minute, that the 1967 style by now seems naive and outdated. Notes just keep falling out of nowhere, with such diabolic precision and craftsmanship that I don’t have much choice but to tip my hat. For some reason, speedy and technically proficient as other guitarists might be, I have never even once heard anybody play like that.

The album’s highest point, however, is the cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ with lyrics revised and melody re-written: the lyrics suck in any case, but the riff is now breathtaking, one of the two or three mightiest that the band had ever in its credit. And you really don’t know how fond I am of these little riffs that repeat themselves over and over; it’s mean and strong, just like Alvin’s accompanying singing. Yeah, I know all they’re trying to do is imitating ol’ bluesmen, but they’re a great bunch of Brit guys imitating ol’ bluesmen! Kinda like a British analog of CCR! Youpee! I don’t quite dig ‘The Stomp’ because that one’s a bit too repetitive for me; with its creepy, quiet atmosphere it sounds like a Stonedhenge outtake, too, and that’s never quite good news. But that’s my one and only complaint about the track listing, and at least you can perfectly ‘do the stomp’ while listening to that one.

Oh, and if you’re anti-blues or something, then I can offer you the somewhat naive but charming ballad ‘If You Should Love Me’ which some might dismiss as flower power hip crap, but I DIG generic flower power hip crap, so I don’t give a damn. I love this ballad, as Alvin once again makes a complete clown out of himself, overemoting on this pseudo-Motown number and thereby transforming it into a ridiculous love declaration by a young naive charming idiot who keeps repeating the same cliches over and over because he really doesn’t know any other words to say but he really feels something with his poor little heart and does his best to go ahead and articulate it. Okay, this is just how I feel about the song, and this is also how I feel about much of the flower power movement. Now where have I put that Country Joe And The Fish record?..

Nah, just pulling your leg once again. I don’t have no Country Joe records. I do have a lot of Ten Years After records, though. And what you are doing now is reading my reviews of them, particularly the review of what I consider to be one of their two best albums. So don’t let me bore you with my second-rate crappy digressions. Let’s just reiterate: this record is a must for anybody with even a passable interest in Sixties’ blues-rock and should forever remain one of the crucial landmarks in that genre. That’s how obstinate I am, and now let’s move on to the next album.

Ten Years After Undead (1968)

From starling.rinet.ru

I originally gave it a lower rating because I was so completely under the spell of their second live album (I still think it’s superior, but not as highly superior as before), but I’ve changed my mind. This live album’s great and groovy! Its only flaw is that there are too few songs, plus ‘Summertime’ (which really has little to do with Gershwin’s original) features a completely unnecessary drum solo (Ric Lee is a good drummer, but not a best choice for a soloist). On the other hand, perhaps extending such records would result in them losing a lot of their ‘primal’ charm. Recorded in a small club (Marquee?), it really captures the great, compact, groovy atmosphere of the evening, and you won’t have no screaming little girlies; hey, you can actually listen to the music all the way through. Ain’t it great? I’ve just finished reviewing the Kinks’ Live At Kelvin Hall which came out the same year and it’s so different in that respect…

If anything, this record shows the band as mostly cool jazz players, playing with due respect to their ‘elders’ but in their own self-taught and prejudice-free way; there’s not really too much ‘rock’ on here, and Alvin demonstrates a clear tendency towards playing everything in a funny bebop style. Besides the already mentioned ‘Summertime’, there are two more hardcore jazz tracks which totally constitute Side A: the ‘original’ ‘I May Be Wrong, But I Won’t Be Wrong Always’ and Bishop/Herman’s ‘At The Woodchoppers’ Ball’. The first one is a nine-minute generic jazz tune, the second one – a seven-minute extravaganza. Alvin is the hero everywhere: he sometimes shows enough generosity to let Chick and Leo have a couple of organ or bass solos, but they’re nothing but ordinary professional jazz solos. Good, but definitely unspectacular.

The guitar rules, however – especially on ‘Woodchoppers’ Ball’ where he dazzles you with thunderflashing waves of snappy licks coming at lightning speed. Play this at full volume and you’ll find yourself gasping for breath in no time. Gimmickry? P’raps. But I’ve never seen any single guitarist reproduce these attacks. At least, no rock guitarist. These are great solos! They’re exciting, driving and technically perfect: one of the rare cases where finger-flashing isn’t just meant for the listener to be taking his hat off and bowing down in silent respect, but is also meant for the listener to be grooving to and finding full delight in. It’s dance music, after all, not Yngwie Malmsteem. The final two or three minutes of ‘Woodchoppers’ Ball’ are especially climactic, when Alvin just sticks to a simple chord and keeps on blowing it through at an incredible speed for what is actually just about thirty seconds but seems like an eternity. That’s the climax of this sweaty record. Why evidence like this always keeps escaping guitar-raters who always miss Alvin in the best guitarists lists is way beyond me. For once, a really swell guy demonstrated that outstanding guitar technique and ‘simple’ audience-pleasing can be easily combined, and nobody gives a damn. Beats me.

But, so as not to give the not thoroughly true impression of being hardcore jazz musicians, they add a generic blues number (‘Spider In My Web’) which isn’t just as entertaining mainly because it’s so slow; slowness is this band’s main enemy – when they play a moody slow number, they sound just like every other generic blues band in the business. Even here, though, Alvin actually saves the day by adding a bit more distortion to his guitar and playing a menacing and – gasp – fast solo. So the only place where he doesn’t save the day is ‘Summertime’, completely given to Ric Lee. What a waste of vinyl.

But then again, this is also where you’ll find an early version of their bestseller – ‘I’m Goin’ Home’. This early version would be a letdown to all you fans of the Woodstock version, though: it’s only six minutes long, slower and not as rip-roaring as the Woodstock one (or the one on Recorded Live). But it still kicks ass, and its unpolished character really comes as a pleasant surprise for me. It’s always fascinating to see a good stage number grow, you know; and at least at this period there’s still enough improvisation, and the song hasn’t yet metamorphosed into a frigid eleven-minute monster with every millionth note well thought out in advance and all the solos and interludes being completely predictable. So I don’t exclude that hardcore fans of Alvin might even prefer this early version because the later one can finally get to them – especially if you realise that the way Alvin played these chords in Woodstock in 1969 and in Germany in 1973 (as captured on Recorded Live) had no differences at all. He sure played them differently in 1968. He sure ‘grew up’ since then, be it in the positive or negative sense.

And oh how they grew. This sounds totally unlike their later concert sound captured on Recorded Live. That one would be hard-rockin’, technically excellent and politically conscious. This one is just four guys having fun with their instruments and trying to lighten up the audience. Plain fun. Nothin’ more. Put this on whenever you’re in a bad mood – it can show you there’s always a good side to life.

Ten Years After Recorded Live (1973)

From starling.rinet.ru

It may not be the best live album in the world, but it’s certainly in the race for one, together with a couple dozen other notorious records – although as of now, it’s been somewhat overshadowed by the even superior Fillmore East. However, if you can’t locate that archive release or are upset with the price of the double CD, I’d strongly recommend any TYA novice to start here (that is, if you’re able to tolerate speedy, but lengthy guitar jams; otherwise, you’d be much better off with either Ssssh or Space In Time, although I actually doubt that otherwise you’d be interested in TYA at all), especially because not only does this record stand as a ‘great live’ record, it also stands for a ‘greatest hits live’ record. Just look at the track listing!

It’s interesting, too, to compare this record with Undead. You’ll see how ‘huge’ they have grown – almost in every sense. From a secluded club scene to large arenas in major European capitals; from a homemade lousy equipment to the Rolling Stones mobile; from half-hour gigs to extended concerts; from half-obscure jazz covers to international hits; finally, from the raw, unpolished, even though mighty energetic tones to a well-polished, professional, intoxicating ‘wall-of-sound’. Just compare the two versions of ‘I’m Going Home’ on both records and you’ll see the difference. Some may regret the loss of that original ‘raw’ sound, but I say I don’t mind.

I like both albums, but Recorded Live is longer, has more songs and doesn’t have any embarrassments like the lengthy slow uninteresting blues of ‘Spider In My Web’ and the stupid drum solo on ‘Summertime’. Sure, it was recorded at a rather late period in the band’s career, when they were already almost spent creatively and on the brink of dissolution, but it is a well-known fact that live playing and “general creative state” are two absolutely different things. Live playing and its quality depend on quite a few factors, including, simply speaking, the particular mood of the band’s members on the day of the gig, which, in turn, may depend on the weather or the expression on that guy in the front row’s face. Luckily, most of the performances on this album were drawn from moments when the band seemed to be in relatively high spirits.

For the record, the album does feature a lengthy run-through of their most driving and famous numbers. Practically none of them are superior to the studio recordings, but none are inferior, either. On the other side, the live performance does give them a ‘spontaneous’ edge which might make them more suitable for some listeners. They kick off with ‘One Of These Days’ (wow! but somebody cut down that ending jam, please!), only to continue with the unforgettable riff of ‘You Give Me Loving’: what a wise choice from their worst record so far, and I don’t even mind that Alvin messes up the lyrics because they were so convoluted in the first place.

Later on, the band, as usual, breaks in some of the oldies, like ‘Help Me’ and ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’. On the way, Alvin displays some cute little tricks, like showing his prowess at classical guitar (‘Classical Thing’), resurrecting the ‘Skoobly-oobly-dooboob’ ditty (‘Scat Thing’) and just playing the fool (‘Silly Thing’). The two highlights of the show are, of course, a terrific fifteen-minute version of ‘I Can’t Keep From Crying’, which is again transformed into tons of different things on the way, including even a few lines from ‘Cat’s Squirrel’ and even ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ – sic!, and ‘I’m Going Home’. The former also was the central point for showing Alvin as a ‘guitar experimentator’ – in particular, he liked to tune his guitar and play it at the same time, which sometimes resulted in a truly awful, ear-destructive sound which I kinda like nevertheless.

And the latter (‘I’m Goin’ Home’, that is) is predictably close to the Woodstock version, except that the various sections are interspersed in a different way and the drums are much more prominent. And damn the stupid audience that mars the opening chords with its silly applause! Otherwise, though, it’s simply a superb version: with all the ‘boo-boo-babys’ in place, and the old rockabilly classics medley in the middle. It does seem a bit worn off as compared to the Woodstock version, but you can excuse the guys: after all, the piece was like a stone around their neck, and it’s a wonder they were still able to do it with enough authenticity and patience.

For me, the only letdown on the album is the seven-minute ‘Slow Blues In C’. They should have left things like that to the Allman Brothers. But then again, it’s just a minor flaw in an almost flawless seventy-minute record! Be forgiving! This doesn’t sound like the Allmans at all! And I don’t have anything against the Allmans, I just don’t have a lot in favour of them doing similar things. They put me off to sleep. Berk. Ever heard ‘Mountain Jam’? How many times do you have to sit through these thirty minutes to dig it? Ah, if only everything these guys played were akin to their version of ‘You Don’t Love Me’… This record, on the other hand, is instantly amiable and friendly – and it features lots of guitar jams, too. But these kids are so frantic, so full of energy and they love the stuff they’re playing so much you’ll be sure to be caught in the fun. This is no Yessongs, either – just your basic love for dat electro guitar sound. And no ‘supergroup’ hype, either – they just play and they don’t give a damn.

I like it when a record doesn’t have balls.