As I write this, Aretha Franklin is singing Money Won't Change You on my record player. If the Beatles are not sufficient evidence of the untruth of that statement, the decline of Aretha herself, the mediocrtiy of her last studio album, Aretha Now, and the redundancy of her latest single. Your Love is like a See-Saw, ought to clinch my argument. The Beatles is disappointing and emblamatic of the ills of 1968. Money does change you.

These changes are clearly illustrated by the 1968 offerings of the Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish, Crown of Creation and Together are the most depressing albums of the year, barring those of the Union Gap. The two groups are financially the most successful of all those to emerge from San Francisco, and their worlds have been drastically altered since those early and idyllic days on Haight Street. Country Joe couldn't cope with the business world into which he was plunged. At one point he quit the group, and for eighteen months he was unable to write a single song. Listen to the first side of Together. It begins with a recreation of "rock 'n' soul music," a parody and yet a loving one along the lines of Birthday and Me and My Monkey on The Beatles. There follows an attempt to recapture (wistfully looking back has certainly been the dominant mood of 1968!) the quiet joy of the early Fish. Significantly, Country Joe couldn't write it and lead guitarist Barry Melton couldn't play it. The drummer penned it and the organist played guitar, and Susan is hollow and futile. Another return, this time to stoned blues, comes next, and then two of the most bitter and paranoid songs ever recorded. The first struggles to stay light and satirical, but the second loses all restraint and screams at the world which jerked the Fish out of San Francisco. The Streets of Your Town is howled at the city of New York, where, when you're big time, you gotta go, and where Together was recorded. It's an ugly and terrifying song, and it says more about 1968 than this article could ever hope to convey.

Just as ugly and terrifying is The House at Pooneil Corners by the Airplane. They too have had their hassles: with RCA who wants them to sock it to the teenies as they used to do, and with the patrons of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, who objected to lead singer Grace Slick's profanities during a benefit performance there. The ladies with lavendertinted hair demanded an apology, and they were refused. Were the Airplane still on Haight, they wouldn't have to worry. While The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil on their 1967 album was an exhuberant song of soaring love, the 1968 remake is an apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the earth, of "all the bullshit around us." The imagery is frightening ("The room circles like a vulture") and when all is gone, "All the idiots have left." The lovers can no longer rejoice as they did in 1967, but can only clutch at each other in terror and in vain. As on Together, several cuts on Crown of Creation try to recapture a past stance which can never again be assumed (In Time, for example), and both albums are marred by such attempts, but the honesty of the rest of the music not only touches you, it hits you in a way The Beatles cannot.

In The Streets of Your Town occurs the line, "The subway is not the underground." 1968 bore this out. The Fugs and the MC5 were written up in Time, and record companies scrambled so frantically to sign groups that they were given no time to mature. The Blues Project were together for a year before they recorded their first studio album. When their organist, Al Kooper, started Blood, Sweat and Tears last winter, they were in the studios a month after forming. Miraculously, a good album was produced, but the same cannot be said of the countless Insect Trusts and Comfortable Chairs and Iron Butterflies that litter the Coop's racks. England's Terry Reid, who promises to become one of the great white vocalists and who plays a magnificently percussive guitar, was rushed into the studios long before he was ready. The result was a gawky and amateurish album which isn't selling. The record does have some exciting moments (scat-singing Summertime Blues and several very hard and very driving originals -- listen to Writing on the Wall), but an album recorded six months later would have been twice as powerful.

San Francisco in 1965 and 1966 was a genuine underground scene. Musicians had time to develop, opportunities to exchange ideas, to dig one another and themselves, to establish a rapport with audiences. Now groups are immediately rushed into international tours (Reid was here with Cream almost before he had ever appeared in public) and endless recordings. How could we expect Cream's third album to be anything more than a drag when their talents and energies were so vitiated by the gruel of money-making concert after concert, non-stop for two years? That's why they had to shoot methedrine, why Clapton on White Room could only repeat year-old riffs from Tales of Brave Ulysses, why their blues numbers are so tired, why their live solos are so repetitive, and why there are breaking up. That the business of rock billed, or at least checked the progress of a great guitarist becomes obvious after one listening to Clapton's playing with John Mayall three years ago. He has not equalled those cuts since. Following Clapton's lead, Jim Hendrix has announced that his Experience will disband except for special occasions. The Who, another victim of the touring syndrome, were unable to give us in 1968 anything more on record than Magic Bus, the title track of which was written and first recorded in 1966. The rest of the album is a makeshift and uneven ragbag.

The incredible mortality rate of rock groups in 1968 shows that something in the system is unhealthy. The Buffalo Springfield, the Zombies, the Electric Flag, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Experience are no longer, nor are the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Big Brother, Moby Grape, the Byrds, Paul Butterfield, and the Nice recognizable as the groups they used to be.

What has been the positive musical response to all this wretchedness? Primarily a return to simplicity, a search for roots, for a reality to ground one's self upon and with which to protect one's self against the unreality of the business of rock. This created a curious tension in 1968, for many musicians were still working in the tradition of the sophisticated complexities of Sergeant Pepper and Surrealistic Pillow, the two albums which put the $ in rock 'n' $oul. This tradition gave us some excellent records. The first Traffic album is the foremost of these, and a little known offshoot of that record, Family's Music in a Doll's House (produced by the occasional fourth member of Traffic, Dave Mason), is also quite good. But Traffic too came to realize that the artificial fades, the children's voices, and the garbled conversations detracted more from the music than it added, and in their second album, a much better one, they settled down to straighter and more powerful playing. Other groups were not so perceptive, and hence the Beatles inflicted upon us Helter Skelter with its coming and going end, and the Fudge bored us with their bassist's opinions of ice cream. Other good albums in the Pepper-Pillow vein include Electric Ladyland (though Hendrix's approach to music is so idiosyncratic that to classify it borders on sacrilege), the baroque Ars Nova (despite its moments of preciousness), and the only truly electronic album yet made, The United States of America, on which the lead instrument is electric violin and there is no guitar.

This tradition also deluged us with gimmickry. Moby Grape's second album, WOW, could have been a good, hard album, but the group felt compelled to jazz it up with superfluous and cluttering electronic intrusions and sound effects which were no advance beyond what the Buckinghams, a Top Forty teen group (Kind of a Drag, Susan), had done six months earlier for the training bra set. Similarly extraneous gimmicks (a discourse with the Dalai Lama, ethereal choirs, etc.) destroyed the effectiveness of the brilliant music which comprised much of Procol Harum's second album, reducing it to little more than a skillfully executed variation upon the Moody Blues' In Search of the Lost Chord, an album second only to those of the Fudge in rank commercialism and pretentiousness. Another who fell prey to Art Rock was John Mayall, who tried to sophisticate the blues by wedging them into a symphonic form like that of Sergeant Pepper; the result, Bare Wires: A Suite, was ludicrous, as were Steve Miller's related attempts. Parts of the first Electric Flag album could well be mentioned here as part and parcel of the same misguided trend. The music suffered, the honesty was lost, and communication perished, as rock and blues were self-consciously intellectualized.

While John Mayall was becoming lamentably more complex, his former lead guitarist, Peter Green, who had left to form the Fleetwood Mac, was reducing the blues to its ultimate sparsities. His album is by no means note-worthy (simplicity taken to an extreme can be pretty dull), but he and John neatly illustrate 1968's contrary tendencies. The entire blues revival (Canned Heat in the top ten -- my God!), the new prominence of B.B. and Albert King, the success of Buddy Guy, clearly betray this yearning for roots. Such a yearning has also manifested itself elsewhere, in the return to country music, to folk, and to plain old rock 'n' roll.

The author's '68 album list

This is a summary of last year's major rock albums. The albums listed within each category heading are in alphabetical order.

ALBUMS OF GENIUS

Anthem of the Sun -- The Grateful Dead

Eli and the Thirteenth Confession--Laura Nyro

ALBUMS OF GREATNESS