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Carolyn's plaintive outcry, Ain't No Way. Then there is Chain of Fools, with its heavy rhythm and mesmerizing chant ("Chain, chain, chain") by the harmonious quartet known as The Sweet Inspirations. AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE (Reprise). Soul gone psychedelic? Oldtime Blues Singer Muddy Waters recently sounded the death knell of his own brand of blues: "They ain't no more of our kids comin' up. They been havin' too good a time." Jimi Hendrix, whose recording this is, learned guitar from Muddy Waters records, but Muddy never taught him to pluck the strings with his teeth or elbows. Wild as his act is onstage, Hendrix on this LP sings lyrics that are at times as delicate as Donovan's, and his blues are just one stripe in a rainbow of euphonious effects.
A PORTRAIT OF RAY (ABC). Ray Charles, after more than a dozen years as the soul of soul, presents a rather touched-up portrait today. His once rough edges are smoothed out, but he is still one of the most convincing singers on records. He inflects his lines freshly, and with faultless timing underlines every nuance—whether in warm pop like Yesterdays or pale blues like Never Say Now. As a member of the interracial musical exchange, Charles now borrows the sweetly lyrical Eleanor Rigby from his long-term debtors, the Beatles.
THE DOCK OF THE BAY (Volt). The title song, Otis Redding's first million-selling single, was recorded a few weeks before his death in a plane crash last December. One of his catchiest and most reflective songs, it has none of the torrential outbursts and piston rhythms with which he electrified his audiences from Paris to Monterey during his brief reign as the crown prince of soul. But the album has other cuts of more typical pounding blues (I'm Coming Home and Don't Mess with Cupid), as well as some lighthearted badinage with Carla Thomas (Tramp).
CINEMA
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. This stunning film by Director Stanley Kubrick sets out to define man's past and describe his future with a combination of visual pyrotechnics and subtle metaphysics.
LES CARABINIERS. Jean-Luc Godard's artful discourse on the brutalizing effects of war is quite possibly the director's best film since Breathless.
THE RED MANTLE. This Danish-Swedish film is a beautiful, occasionally bloody saga of the conflict of love and honor in medieval Iceland.
THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS FEAR. A brutal tale of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia is raised to a high level of creative cinema by Writer-Director Zbynek Brynych's stark symbolism.
THE ODD COUPLE. An alimony-poor sportswriter (Walter Matthau) and his divorce-bound buddy (Jack Lemmon) are at each other's throats again in this almost literal translation of Neil Simon's Broadway hit. Actor Matthau's comic genius makes amends for the static mise en scéne. BELLE DE JOUR. Ranging easily from anticlerical broadsides to highly polished pornography, this bizarre tale of the sexual fantasies of a beautiful young wife (Catherine Deneuve) makes a fitting capstone to the 40-year career of Spanish Director Luis Buñuel.
HOUR OF THE WOLF. Sweden's Ingmar Bergman relates another of his parables of the dark night of the soul in this eerily symbolic tale of the deepening madness of a reclusive artist.