Loaded

Ten songs in about forty minutes, and the record’s pillars are required. Sweet Jane, Rock & Roll, New Age and Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ each hold a person and a condition no other track holds, and the last is the only place the record opens out. Who Loves the Sun must open: the bright, bitter pop song that tells the listener this is a radio record. I Found a Reason earns its place as the one doo-wop devotion, sung low and plain, and Cool It Down belongs to the sound of a working band. Seven of ten stand under the subtractive test. It bites on three: Head Held High has little in it past the riff, Lonesome Cowboy Bill spends its joke in a verse, and Train Round the Bend is a sketch.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the ordinary life the counterculture scorned is where meaning is actually found, and what saves it is the pop song on the radio. Rock & Roll gives it as a case: a girl in a dull suburb finds a New York station at five, and “her life was saved”. Sweet Jane sets a banker and a clerk against the “evil mothers” who say everything is dirt, and takes the couple’s side. New Age turns the claim over on a faded actress; Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ blesses those with “nothing at all”, without pity. Simplicity is the means of the disclosure, not a lack of it. A meaning, not a mood, held from the top because the second side mostly offers manner where the first offers sight.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The record rises on about five of ten tracks, and its heights are warm. Sweet Jane’s two chords and its turn into the chorus are among the great lifts of the rock song: plain, open and exact. Rock & Roll builds by stages, verse to chorus to the long ringing close, until Jenny’s rescue is felt rather than reported. New Age reaches its height at the end, a slow swelling refrain over organ, cut short on this release and still a summit. I Found a Reason rises quietly, by tenderness, and Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ is the largest: its guitars climb, as the refrain returns, into the record’s longest ascent. The rest drives or amuses without lifting, and the first side carries most of the height.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Myth is built once, and built to bear weight. Rock & Roll is a conversion: a child in a dead place hears a voice from far off, and her life is changed. The radio is grace, the structure of lack, call and salvation carries the whole song, and Jenny stays a particular girl in a particular suburb, which is what the axis asks. Elsewhere myth is summoned with a sure hand: New Age evokes the fallen star of the screen, the Sunset Boulevard figure, under a millennial title; Sweet Jane the plain couple as the keepers of the world; Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ a beatitude for the poor in the voice of a street hymn. Held from the top: one song built, three evoked, and the second side mostly outside the question.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the band’s own first three records, which placed the great wager on drone, noise and the city’s underside, and the American pop song of radio, doo-wop and girl-group. The record turns from the first toward the second, and inside the band’s history the turn is large: a group known for viola drone and seventeen-minute feedback made a record of three-minute songs meant for the radio, on a new label, by report at the label’s request for hits. The writing makes it more than an accent: an avant-garde band’s eye turned on the radio song from inside. What holds the axis is the direction of the turn, back toward a proven path, with the risk falling on the band’s identity and not on the form.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The form is the radio record, and in the best songs the form is the claim: a record that says the pop song on the radio saves ordinary lives is made of pop songs fit for the radio. Rock & Roll is a song about a song, whose own build is the rescue it describes; as a ballad or a drone it would know less. Sweet Jane’s two chords are its plainness, and its plainness is its argument for plain lives. The first side has a shape, and the close is placed with intent, the long last song opening the record outward. Held from the top: two lead voices that never become a form, and a second side that runs as a set of borrowed manners, a container more often than an instrument.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over fifty-six years, and deep where it falls. Sweet Jane has been remade more than almost any rock song of its time: by Reed himself, live, again and again in different forms; by Mott the Hoople in 1972; by Cowboy Junkies in 1988, whose slow reading restored the cut bridge and found a different song in it. Each version shows the song giving more on return, and Rock & Roll has had a similar if smaller life. The edits and the restorations of 1995 and 1997 keep the record itself in argument: which Sweet Jane is the work? The plainness repays, its irony and tenderness above all. What holds it: half the record yields little, and attention has gone more to the songs than to the album.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is the rock album of 1970 and 1971, and the American song after the counterculture. Intrinsic force: the record showed that an avant-garde sensibility could write the plain three-chord radio song and make it say something about ordinary life without irony swallowing it, with means the form already had. Much of the band’s pressure on the tradition was the work of its first record, and what turned on this one turned on its songs more than on the album. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sweet Jane and Rock & Roll became standards of the rock repertoire, played by bar bands and recorded by Mott the Hoople and Cowboy Junkies among others, and the record’s plain, literate guitar song is commonly placed behind the Modern Lovers, the New York punk of the mid seventies and later guitar pop.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-six years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole and has been in print since release, though charged a little: two songs on the record as released were cut for release, and longer versions now circulate beside it, so the text is in mild dispute. Presence is continuous and wide for Sweet Jane and Rock & Roll, which live in broadcast, in film and in bars, and narrower for the album played whole, which lives as the band’s accessible record in the shadow of its first. The fabric is little fixed to 1970: the production is plain, dry and unfashionable, and has aged well for that. The charges on text and presence hold it below the usual figure for its span.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The songwriting is exact: Sweet Jane’s riff and chord turn, Rock & Roll’s staged build and the doo-wop voicing of I Found a Reason are made with economy and certainty. Reed and Morrison’s guitars interlock cleanly on Rock & Roll; Yule’s organ on New Age, his piano and organ elsewhere and his bass are tasteful and give the record its warmth. The faults are real. The drums are by several hands and often merely adequate; the production is plain to the point of thinness in places; the edits damage two of the four best songs at their joints; the rockers of the second side are generically arranged. Good, sometimes fine: the songs carry the craft more than the record does.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Who Loves the Sun, a sweet, bitter pop song in Doug Yule’s voice, and Oh! Sweet Nuthin’, a slow street hymn that ends in guitar. They obey one law: every song on the record is about ordinary people in ordinary trouble, set to the forms of the radio, and the record moves from a broken heart to a blessing of those with nothing. The range of idiom is wide (pop, rock, doo-wop, country pastiche, boogie, gospel), and the law reaches across most of it, so that narrowness is not how the record coheres. It loosens on the second side: Lonesome Cowboy Bill obeys only its genre and its joke, Head Held High and Train Round the Bend the radio form without its subject, and two lead voices divide the record’s first person.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held, in an inner life saved by a song; the household in Sweet Jane’s couple and the suburb of Rock & Roll; the medium itself, in the radio that is the record’s subject; show business and its ruin in New Age; poverty and the street in Oh! Sweet Nuthin’; a broken love in Who Loves the Sun and a devotion in I Found a Reason. The radio joins several of them, and in Rock & Roll the suburb, the city and the medium meet in one song. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the orders arrive song by song, labour is touched only in a clerk’s job and the street, the state and history are absent, the sacred is a hymn’s tone, and the second side adds little to the span.

Score: 6.9 / 10