Children of the Future -- The Steve Miller Band

WOW -- Moby Grape

Shine On Brightly -- Procol Harum

Renaissance -- The Vinalla Fudge

Magic Bus -- The Who

Dylan's John Wesley Harding made country newly fashionable, and though Nashville's sudden chicness spawned some horrors (Buffy Saint Marie claiming kinship to Minnie Pearl), it also produced three of the year's best albums: The Band's Music from Big Pink, Buffalo Springfield's Last Time Around, and the Byrd's Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The three groups use the material quite differently, the Band raunchily, the Springfield prettily, and the Byrds imitatively, but all three are refreshing and sustaining, sounding unfamiliar in these post-Pepper times. A happy result of rock's move towards country is country's move towards rock. On the charts now is Tammy Wynette's Stand by Your Man, a great country single influenced by the Byrds' Nothing Was Delivered. The song and its treatment have absorbed enough of the rock idiom to be able to reach the sophisticates of Cambridge, and yet have retained enough "countryness" so as not to pander to such sophistication.

Folk music, which started it all way back when, is back too. It is only appropriate that the best group in Boston, one of the centers of the original folk revival, is the folk-oriented Earth Opera. Their lyrics, unusually sensitive and beautiful in a vital way totally unlike those of the "beautiful" BeeGees, are set to intricate yet somehow simple ensemble music relying upon quiet piano and amplified but rarely electric guitar. Their album, and that of the Pentangle, a militantly accoustic and folk-with-a-dash-of-jazz group, area healthy antidote to the fuzz and wah-wah which so dominated 1968. The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, though not quite up to the standard of their 1967 album, is likewise a contradiction of the state of affairs in 1968. Although they have been called acoustic Beatles, the ISB's penny whistles and bowed gimbris, their insistence upon intimate communion with their audiences unobstructed by amplifiers and orchestras, are hardly of the same order as I Am the Walrus, even if the obscure and personal mythologies of many of their lyrics may bear comparison. The ISB's Minotaur Song on their last album, incidently, is far superior to the Beatles' imitation, Bungalow Bill. Finally, also folkish is Balaklava by Pearls Before Swine, the most intriguing, though not the best album of 1968. Consequently, with its elevation of the slaughter of the Light Brigade to a metaphor of the death of God ("All your symbols are shattered;/ All your sacred words are gone.") and its attempt to forge a new transcendent ("Love is the weapon left after the fall./ It may not seem like much but girl that's all there is."), it belongs smack-dab in the Pepper tradition, but its primarily acoustic instrumentation manages to absolve it of much of its pretentiousness and invests it with a simple dignity which escapes almost all other "concept" albums.

Other groups, instead of going outside rock's elastic confines, have found their roots in rock 'n' roll itself and their subject matter in the lower middle class of which rock has traditionally sung. For unknown reasons, this alternative has not appeared to be a viable one for Americans, but English groups take to it joyfully. The best of these groups--the Kinks, the Zombies, the Small Faces--have rejected the "canyons of my mind" school of lyrics which is so omnipresent, and have embraced simple story telling backed by a simple yet compelling beat. The songs are populated by characters from everyday life--friendly whores, nagging mothers-in-law, dissatisfied housewives in curlers, best friends, girlfriends--and they all ring true. The Small Faces sing of baking bread and priggish vicars, dismissing pop mysticism, be it George Harrison's or Rod McKuen's with the spoof, "Life is just a bowl of All-Bran." The Kinks sketch a young mother, at first envious of her unmarried sister, who learns that children are worth more than cocktail parties, despite the drudgery of frying eggs. The Zombies tell us how beautiful it is to see one's close friends in love, and put us in to the soggy shoes of a quaking private in the trenches during the first World War. We can all relate to what they are singing, as we can all relate to what they are playing: rock n' roll. The Small Faces in particular have created a visceral music which doesn't blow your mind a la Lucy in the Sky, but which hits you in the gut. Their flop single, Tin Soldier, was the greatest rocker of 1968. The Zombies, who made Odessey and Oracle as a farewell gesture to a world which never appreciated them (they last made the charts in the winter of 1966) and then went their different ways, produced the best rock n' roll album of the year, highly polished, extremely imaginative, and always real.

Although on a superficial level all these efforts may resemble those on The Beatles, in reality they are at opposite poles. The Beatles do not get into the styles they affect; they remain on the outside, smirking. These other groups have sincerely immersed themselves in these forms. Dylan singing of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest is a far cry from Paul McCartney, aping country and Dylan himself, singing Rocky Raccoon. The Beatles' Desmond and Molly Jones are not the real people the Kinks show us. The Beatles' Mother Nature's Son is not the same as the Springfield's I Am a Child.

The Rolling Stones' Beggars' Banquet was one of 1968's most brilliant returns to simplicity. Having jumped onto the Beatles' Bandwagon with Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Stones had the intelligence to jump off quickly. Stray Cat Blues on their latest album has a power undeniably stronger than any cut on The Beatles. When Jagger screams, "But your mama don't know you can scroow like that," we are hit as the Beatles can never touch us. The socio-political songs, close to those of the Airplane and the Fish in their apprehension of the apocalypse, have an overwhelming emotional validity. On B.B., the Stones confronted 1968, Columbia, Chicago, the assassinations, and the rock industry itself, as no other group did. The country and blues numbers are performed not at the expense of forms, and never do the Stones allow the music to degenerate into the camp overstatement of Big Brother's Cheap Thrills.

Not all of the attempts at simplicity have been as successful as those I have been describing. Donovan's simpering irrelevancies on Hurdy Gurdy Man and the giggling treacle of the Beach Boys' Friends do not make it. Nor do the flaccid blues of A Long Time Comin', Mother Earth, the Insect Trust, and Barry Goldberg's album. No doubt 1969 will see us swamped with fake country and fake folk, just as 1968 saw us in synthetic soul: Motown, the Classics IV, Peaches and Herb, the Foundations, the Equals, and Aretha's more recent efforts.

The editor's top 40 albums

This is a list, chosen by the editors of the SUPPLEMENT, of the 40 top rock records released in U.S. in 1968. We excluded consideration of female folk-singers because of a natural prejudice against competing women. The albums are in order of worth.

1. The Beatles: The Beatles

2. The Rolling Stones: Beggars' Banquet