Music Project 7: 1968

KA-BOOM!!! 

 That is the sound of a musical explosion. No, really, it is.  Listen harder....

KA-BOOM!!! 

Sgt. Pepper really did change things.  All bets were off at this point.  The lines separating musical genres had already been blurring, but at this point you could follow your muse wherever it might lead you.  The Beatles had very clearly taken music from entertainment to art.  Undeniably, rock and roll music was Art (with a big ol' capital "A") now. For good and for bad, rock music had transcended it's roots and experimentation was encouraged, expected and exploding.

To honor this moment of musical divergence, we're going to find some unusual albums and deeper tracks for 1968.  There are some great albums that must be acknowledged, but I also want to start listening to some things you may not have heard before.

But first, the news.  And....ugh.  What a miserable year.  It's ugly, really, really ugly.  The war in Vietnam exposes war for the evil that it is.  The Tet offensive is launched by the North Vietnamese showing the US "victory" was far from imminent.  The massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at Mai Lai occurred in 1968.  While it didn't become public until 1967 it does show how the war had become a morass of monstrosities. This wasn't a "good fight".  Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis.  Clearly race relations in the US were still a mess and getting messier.  Robert "Bobby" Kennedy (brother of John F. Kennedy who you'll remember was killed a few years earlier) was himself assassinated in Los Angeles.  Kennedy, who was campaigning for the Democratic presidential candidacy, was a outspoken supporter of minority rights and opposed the direction of US involvement in Vietnam.  Like I said, it was an ugly period of US history.

Speaking of ugly...Richard Nixon was elected President of the US in 1968.  John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon.  Talk about a shift.  The optimism and liberal excitement of the former and the cynical division and realpolitik of the latter.  Nixon, a Republican, employed what has become known as "The Southern Strategy" to win the presidency.  The Southern Strategy amounted to using the deep-seeded racism of the south (Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, etc.) as a political weapon converting what had been Democratic states into Republican states, purely on the issue of race.  Basically he appealed to the racist whites of those states at the expense of any black votes; a conscious decision to adopt racists as voting bloc.  That division continues to this day and is the main reason 90% of all blacks vote democrat.

Musically, however, 1968 was a high point.

Let's start with some videos.

One of the artists we're going to listen to for 1968 is Van Morrison. He released his phenomenal album Astral Weeks (more below) in 1968.  Van is an interesting guy to track through the 60's.  He is a microcosm of rock music in that period. He started as the lead singer for Them, a bunch of white guys (in this case from Ireland) doing covers of black music.  Sound familiar? Here are two videos of artists doing the same song. First is the great blues man Lightnin' Hopkins doing Baby, Please Don't Go.  Following that is Van Morrison and Them doing the same song in 1965.

Next we have The Band.  The Band released their debut album "Music From Big Pink" in 1968.  We'll talk about that album more later when we get to the playlist, but I really wanted to post the video below.  The vid is from years later when The Band was about to break up.  They decided to do one final concert and Martin Scorcese (one of our greatest movie directors) filmed a documentary chronicling the process and the show. The Last Waltz.  We will likely watch it at some point.  This clip is their great song The Weight performed with The Staples Singers.  Wonderful.

Music:  So if we finished 1967 with The Beatles and started 1968 with how Sgt. Pepper changed things for good, who should we start with in 1968?  The Beatles, of course.  It's getting a little tiresome, but not only did they release the groundbreaking, explosive album that changed music forever, but they then also released the follow-up album that epitomized the "all bets are off" feeling that followed.  As Tangledupinmusic puts it:

What The Beatles have achieved here transcends the idea of what an album should be, just as much as Sgt. Pepper did so the previous year. If there is one particular aspect about 1968 that always fascinates me, it’s how music went into a million directions. But, out of the all the bands we have to thank for that, only one managed to capture that very essence onto their record. To me, The White Album isn’t just the best album of 1968. It is 1968.

The Beatles (White Album) - The Beatles
1) Everybody has Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey - The Beatles
2) Happiness is a Warm Gun

The thing with explosions (remember our Ka-Boom!) is they go in all directions.  The progression from basic rock and roll dance singles (tutti frutti) to the incredibly orchestrated, painstakingly recorded album that is Sgt Pepper seems sort of linear (no less amazing though).  Obviously this is a simplification, and not every band was necessarily attempting to follow that path, but it's a distinct trend nonetheless.  The White Album is The Beatles saying "Ah fuck it.  Let's try anything and everything and see what the hell comes out at the end."  It's brilliant because of it's "over the top"-ness.  "Diverse" doesn't even begin to describe it.

As Psychobabble puts it:

As if The Beatles hadn’t already earned their crown as popular music’s ultimate group, they followed their triumphant Sgt. Pepper with the single greatest encapsulation of popular music ever blasted onto four sides of vinyl. Some have described The Beatles (a.k.a.: “The White Album”)—very accurately— as an encyclopedia of popular music. The Beatles didn’t set out to achieve this self-consciously. They just happened to dig a wide variety of sounds and wrote a titanic wealth of songs during their retreat in India. There was major debate regarding whether or not to put out The Beatles as a double-album. Most of the group favored the double; producer George Martin fought for a single (and, to this day, he still thinks they should have pruned it). Fortunately, the band won out, because The Beatles wouldn’t be The Beatles if it didn’t include all of the zany toss-offs and gimmick songs that make it so fascinatingly sprawling, delightfully indulgent, and deliriously diverse. Nearly every type of existing pop subgenre is present on this 30-track crazy quilt: straight Rock & Roll, surf, psychedelia, hard rock, ska, flamenco, doo-wop, chamber pop, folk, baroque, Country & Western, blues, heavy metal, jazz, soul, musique concrète, and Hollywood schmaltz. If rap was around in 1968, they would have had Ringo beat boxing and Lennon free styling about his smack habit. 

JustPressPlay.net says this about their favorite album of the 1960's:

The White Album is the perfect example of "sum of its parts" mentality. It's just as easy to listen to the whole thing as it is to select a dozen favorites and rearrange them. And while there are a few less-than-stellar cuts along the way, there are more than enough masterful nuggets stuffed inside to keep you spellbound even past the dips. —no matter the leaps and bounds in experimentation, artistry and sonic ambition they took on Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, this is the Beatles truly at their most daring. It's a slideshow of so many different ideas, styles, structures and templates that there were bound to be hiccups, just as there were bound to be stunning winners. It ended up being a double album because none of the members would give up their favorite songs, so they threw in everything but the kitchen sink. That mentality promises disasters, but despite disastrous group relations during the recording, this is a miracle record that anyone with at least a single shred of sense treasures.


3) Sympathy For the Devil - Rolling Stones

It has been a while since we've heard from, or listened to, the Stones.  1966 and 1967 are indisputably The Beatles' years, and The Stones were playing second-rate catchup. They felt they were competing with The Beatles.  And, like Brian Wilson, they found that to be a fool's game.   In 1968 they decided to stop playing that particular game and released Beggars Banquet, a return to their bluesy beginnings.

allmusic.com on the album:

The Stones forsook psychedelic experimentation to return to their blues roots on this celebrated album, which was immediately acclaimed as one of their landmark achievements. A strong acoustic Delta blues flavor colors much of the material. Basic rock & roll was not forgotten, however: "Street Fighting Man," a reflection of the political turbulence of 1968, was one of their most innovative singles, and "Sympathy for the Devil," with its fire-dancing guitar licks, leering Jagger vocals, African rhythms, and explicitly satanic lyrics, was an image-defining epic..and the lyrical bite of most of the material ensured Beggars Banquet's place as one of the top blues-based rock records of all time.

4) Crimson and Clover - Tommy James  and Shondells 

Just a great song.  Covered by many, but the original is pretty tough to beat.


5) Folsom Prison Blues - Johnny Cash

Time for some country music.  But don't think of this as country music.  Think of it as storytelling to music.  Johnny Cash told stories, usually about bad things and bad people.  This is the time when he really became the Man in Black: the personna of an outlaw. Allmusic has a great one line synopsis of Cash, "Part rockabilly rebel, part campfire storyteller, part outlaw in black, his hearty baritone has remained the essence of country music."

This is one of those albums and songs that the setting of the performance MUST influence how you listen to it.  The audience response and Cash's interaction with them is what makes it special.

Allmusic about the album:

Folsom Prison looms large in Johnny Cash's legacy, providing the setting for perhaps his definitive song and the location for his definitive album, At Folsom Prison. The ideal blend of mythmaking and gritty reality, At Folsom Prison is the moment when Cash turned into the towering Man in Black, a haunted troubadour singing songs of crime, conflicted conscience, and jail. Surely, this dark outlaw stance wasn't a contrivance but it was an exaggeration, with Cash creating this image by tailoring his set list to his audience of prisoners, filling up the set with tales of murder and imprisonment -- a bid for common ground with the convicts, but also a sly way to suggest that maybe Cash really did shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Given the cloud of death that hangs over the songs on At Folsom Prison, there's a temptation to think of it as a gothic, gloomy affair or perhaps a repository of rage, but what's striking about Cash's performance is that he never romanticizes either the crime or the criminals: if anything, he underplays the seriousness with his matter-of-fact ballad delivery or how he throws out wry jokes. Cash is relating to the prisoners and he's entertaining them too, singing "Cocaine Blues" like a bastard on the run, turning a death sentence into literal gallows humor on "25 Minutes to Go," playing "I Got Stripes" as if it were a badge of pride. Never before had his music seemed so vigorous as it does here, nor had he tied together his humor, gravity, and spirituality in one record. In every sense, it was a breakthrough, but more than that, At Folsom Prison is the quintessential Johnny Cash album, the place where his legend burns bright and eternal. 



6) Think - Aretha Franklin 




7) A minha menina - Os Mutantes

From rateyourmusic:

Os Mutantes is the founding band of the Brazilian Tropicalismo movement, a group that has attracted fans such as Kurt Cobain and Beck (who named his album Mutations after them).  The A-side starts with cackling and bossa nova acoustic guitar, but then the fuzztone guitar kicks in accompanied Beatlesque harmonies, yet still retaining an authentically South American flavor.  At a time when Brazil was under the control of a socially conservative right-wing junta, the Os Mutantes plugging in an electric guitar could seem like a revolutionary act, yet the A-side still sounds so buoyant and joyous.  David Byrne, who experimented a lot with Brazilian pop in the 1980s, had to have been influenced by the kind of work this represents.  The B-side, which crossbreeds Gregorian chanting with exotica jungle noises, is something so original that Vampire Weekend wishes they could steal it without getting caught.



So let's start with Van Morrison.  We just saw him in the video doing the blues cover of Baby, Please Don't Go.  Gloria (G-L-O-R-I-A) was also a big hit for Them.  But with Astral Weeks, Van goes in a completely different direction.  I think of it as an example of how music was changing through the '60s.  Early rock and roll was blues done by white kids, but by 1967 and 1968 the variety was simply enormous.  Sgt Pepper, of course, heralded the change.  Astral Weeks was a masterpiece.

Allmusic on Astral Weeks:

Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop music history. For all that renown, Astral Weeks is anything but an archetypal rock & roll album: in fact, it isn't a rock & roll album at all. Employing a mixture of folk, blues, jazz, and classical music, Van Morrison spins out a series of extended ruminations on his Belfast upbringing, including the remarkable character "Madame George" and the climactic epiphany experienced on "Cyprus Avenue." Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Morrison sings in his elastic, bluesy voice, accompanied by a jazz rhythm section (Jay Berliner, guitar, Richard Davis, bass, Connie Kay, drums), plus reeds (John Payne) and vibes (Warren Smith, Jr.), with a string quartet overdubbed. An emotional outpouring cast in delicate musical structures, Astral Weeks has a unique musical power. Unlike any record before or since,

Rolling Stone on their 19th greatest album of all time:

Van Morrison never sounded more warm and ecstatic, more sensual and vulnerable, than on his enigmatically beautiful solo debut. Fresh off the success of "Brown Eyed Girl" and newly signed to artist­-friendly Warner Bros., he explored the physical and dramatic range of his voice during extended poetic-scat singing, and set hallucinatory reveries on his native Belfast to wandering Celtic-R&B melodies. The crowning touch was the superior jazz quintet convened by producer Lewis Merenstein to color the mists and shadows. Bassist Richard Davis later said that Morrison never told the musicians what he wanted from them or what the lyrics meant. Maybe he didn't know how to. He was going deep inside himself, without a net or fear.




My White Bicycle - Tomorrow

Oscillation - Silver Apples

Silver Apples live in Los Angeles, 1968. "In this shot you can see I have the oscillators mounted horizontally in plywood along with echo units, wah pedal, and so on. Here I am playing the 'lead' oscillator with my right hand, keying in rhythm oscillators with my elbow on the telegraph keys, changing the volume on an amp with my left hand, and singing. This was typical.”

Small Faces

This Will Be Our Year - The Zombies

From Psychobabble:

The Zombies were responsible for two of the greatest singles of 1964 (“She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No”), but they’d basically been forgotten by 1967. With their commercial prospects at an end, The Zombies decided to make one final album before breaking up. The band may not have realized it, but they were about to record the most enduring work of their brief career. Odessey and Oracle is a masterpiece of baroque British pop, achieving a marvelous spectrum of colors and styles over the course of its slight 35 minutes. Some of the jazzy soulfulness of the group’s early hits is present in the album’s most famous track, “Time of the Season”, which would become a huge posthumous hit in 1969. The prevailing sounds of Odessey and Oracle are dense, soaring harmonies, glistening piano lines, Mellotron, and exotic percussion. The lyrics can be quite imaginative: Rod Argent’s “Care of Cell 44” conveys the euphoria of a man whose sweetheart is finally being released from prison; Chris White’s “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914)” is an intense, haunted portrait of the First World War. Most of the others are love songs, but they are some of pop’s finest. No matter the message, nearly every track on Odessey and Oracle is a miniature work of art. Every band should go out on a note as high as this.





Tears of Rage - The Band
Music From Big Pink - The Band

You all may have to show a little patience on this one.  Understanding, and hearing,


From Psychobabble:

The resulting album introduced The Band as a group far less generic than their name suggests. Garth Hudson’s shimmering, creepy organ fills, Robbie Robertson’s tortured guitar lines, and Levon Helms’s heavy yet funky drum work blend into a totally unique, totally recognizable brew. And there certainly is no equivalent to the group’s ramshackle harmonies—three voices singing together beautifully, yet each one rough and distinct. That seemingly offhand approach runs through every performance on Music from Big Pink, but the songs, though unconventional, are crafted with great care.  Listening to Music from Big Pink is a haunting experience—like strolling through an abandoned frontier-era home inhabited by the ghosts of those who once lived there.

Music Project 6: 1967

Oh good grief. How am I going to leave some of things off the playlist?  The Beatles come out with Sgt. Pepper AND Magical Mystery Tour.  Jimi Hendrix makes his debut.  Supergroup Cream releases their first album.  Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, The Grateful Dead, The Bee Gees, Janis Joplin (Big Brother and the Holding Company), Procol Harum....they all release their debut album in 1967.  We are going to be leaving out some fabulous, historic music.  It hurts. It hurts real bad man.

First, let's check the news, shall we?  I don't want to sound like a broken record, but......the issues are not going away.  Racial tension is boiling. We had the riots in Watts and now it's all over the US;  in Detroit; 7,000 National Guardsmen aid police after a night of rioting. Similar outbreaks occur in New York City's Spanish Harlem, Rochester, N.Y., Birmingham, Ala., and New Britain, Conn. Vietnam is escalating.  The war is being televised and it's ugly.  Really ugly.  Nobody understands why were fighting and they're watching the cost in lives every night on their TV. The Arabs and the Israelis fight the 6 Day War resulting in Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and east bank of Suez Canal.  The world continues to deal with the repercussions of that war.

1967 is the Summer of Love; the apex of hippie culture.  The music of the time is an offshoot of the hippie aesthetic of freedom of thought.  Peace and Love.  Unfortunately, as this is the peak, it's going to be downhill from here. The magic is not going to last.  It's a temporary escape from the ugliness.  Some people are protesting, some are "dropping out", but they are all just trying to get away from the establishment.

The big musical event of 1967 was the Monterey Pop Festival.  We're going to see some videos below (and watch some of a documentary), but this was a wildly successful multi-day concert held in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a large, predominantly white audience.  The Monterey Pop Festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and is generally regarded as one of the beginnings of the "Summer of Love" in 1967.  The Beatles were rumored to be appearing, but since their music was becoming too complex to perform live they declined.  At the instigation of Paul McCartney, the promoters invited Jimi Hendrix and The Who instead from England.

There were two important people from the world of music who died in 1967.  First was Beatles manager Brian Epstein.  I really don't know the full story, but based on reading The Fifth Beatle, it would seem he was a pivotal part in The Beatles' success.  Who's to say how the future of The Beatles would have changed if Brian hadn't passed. Also, sadly, the world lost one of the true musical greats in 1967.  Otis Redding and many of his band members were involved in a fatal plane crash late in the year.  He was 26 at the time.  RIP Otis.

Going a little overboard here on the videos.  Pick and choose a few.  We will eventually be watching the documentary from the Monterey Pop Festival, so there will be some duplication.


Given his tragic death and ongoing influence on music, I've posted three from Otis. All are from the Monterey Pop Festival.  This show vaulted Otis into the white, popular consciousness.  Sitting on the Dock of the Bay came out after his death and was a huge hit.

This first one is a great cover of Satisfaction.  Listen to Duck on the bass. Kills it.

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Next up is just vintage Otis playing the crowd.  He was at an all time high in confidence after the successful Stax tour of Europe where he became convinced his music translated to everyone no matter race or country.  That confidence is mesmerizing.

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Finally, this is his show ender.  I love this video for how it captures the people at the Festival.  Pure Summer of Love.

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The Monkees.  What to say about the Monkees?  First, they were enormously successful.  Along with The Beatles they were the only band to have two songs finish as top 10 sellers for 1967.  When Jimi Hendrix first toured in the US he was the opening act for....The Monkees.  The Monkees were the ones that pushed for Jimi to be on the tour. After seeing him perform at Monterey, they selfishly wanted to watch him every night on tour.  It turned out to be a bit of a disaster as the teeny-boppers that showed up to see the Monkees simply had no idea what to make of Jimi.  As Micky Dolenz of The Monkees said: "Jimi would amble out onto the stage, fire up the amps, and break into "Purple Haze," and the kids in the audience would instantly drown him out with, "We want Daavy!" God, was it embarrassing."  I'll bet that was an interesting show.  The Monkees were built to make money, and were often derided by the music press as the "Pre-Fab Four" for their completely non-organic assembly.  But (as is often the case) they were truly talented performers that ended up recording some truly wonderful pop songs. Early efforts had the likes of Carole King and Neil Diamond writing their songs, but they eventually took over creative control of their songs and instrument playing.  And holy cow were they a likable bunch.

First, for us old folks, the opening credit sequence of the TV show. Horrible quality, but man....


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Next from the Monkees one of their biggest hits, Daydream Believer. MARRY ME DAVY!!!!!

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Jimi Hendrix and The Experience released their debut album in 1966 (as well as the follow-up).

In his brief four-year reign as a superstar, Jimi Hendrix expanded the vocabulary of the electric rock guitar more than anyone before or since. Hendrix was a master at coaxing all manner of unforeseen sonics from his instrument, often with innovative amplification experiments that produced astral-quality feedback and roaring distortion. His frequent hurricane blasts of noise and dazzling showmanship -- he could and would play behind his back and with his teeth and set his guitar on fire -- has sometimes obscured his considerable gifts as a songwriter, singer, and master of a gamut of blues, R&B, and rock styles.

When Hendrix became an international superstar in 1967, it seemed as if he'd dropped out of a Martian spaceship....

So many stories of Jimi I could post, but really they all boil down to that last sentiment "Where on earth, or otherwise, did this guy come from?"  His talent was unprecedented and, at the time, otherworldly.

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If you think about it, up to this point in 1967 women in rock music were limited to Soul or Motown (black artists) or Folk music (white artists).  None of them rocked.  Enter Janis Joplin and Grace Slick (of Jefferson Airplane).  Monterey was the public unveiling of Janis.  You may not like her music (I'm not a huge fan of her early band The Holding Company), but you must acknowledge the groundbreaking performer she was.  At the end of the video notice the amazed Mama Cass from the Mamas and Papas.

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Remember how we learned about the California music scene with the Byrds?  Now we'll see the next great band that continued that evolution, Buffalo Springfield.  A band made up of superstars, it was destined to be short-lived with such supreme talent (and big musical egos).  Stephen Stills, Neil Young, David Crosby, Jim Messina and Richie Furay (the last two went on to form Poco and Messina eventually partnered up with Kenny Loggins)....lots of talent.

That's Peter Tork of the Monkees with the introduction.

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So, because I'm writing this darn thing, you all have to indulge me in my love of horn bands.  This time it's the Electric Flag.  Groovy baby. The brainchild of Michael Bloomfield (guitar player for Paul Butterfield's Blues Band), The Electric Flag was a seminal rock and roll horn band.  Interesting (to me) story....in 1967 Al Kooper had plans for something similar, a fusion of rock, jazz, and blues while featuring a horn section. At the time Kooper was helping to organize the Monterey Festival, he heard about Bloomfield's band and plans for the Electric Flag which had him worried that he'd miss his chance and be labeled an imitator.  After hearing the Flag, he realized that they were after very different sounds.  Kooper's yet unformed band?  Blood Sweat & Tears.

So that's Michael Bloomfield in the video introducing the Flag for their first live gig.  Also interesting, it was Bloomfield on guitar that scared Al Kooper onto the organ in Dylan's recording session for Like a Rolling Stone.  Also of note, that Buddy Miles on drums and singing. Buddy went on to be Jimi's drummer in the Band of Gypsies, he later played with Santana and then in the 80's he was the voice of the lead California Raisin that commercial where the Raisins sing I heard it Through the Grapevine.

Such a great video.  It really captures that Summer of Love vibe. So, so groooovy.

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On to the music.


Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles

Simply can't start anywhere else.  It is impossible to overstate the impact and importance of this album.  Even before it was released in June 1967 it was changing things. Rumors were flying throughout the music world about what The Beatles were working on in their Abbey Road studio.  Everyone knew that popular music was never going to be same.

I could post an endless number of superlatives and commentary on the album (don't worry Will, I won't).

Allmusic:

It's possible to argue that there are better Beatles albums, yet no album is as historically important as this. After Sgt. Pepper, there were no rules to follow -- rock and pop bands could try anything, for better or worse. Ironically, few tried to achieve the sweeping, all-encompassing embrace of music as the Beatles did here.

Rolling Stone

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song's regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life," the 13 tracks on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles' eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.

Issued in Britain on June 1st, 1967, and a day later in America, Sgt. Pepper is also rock's ultimate declaration of change. For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to matching suits, world tours and assembly-line record-making. "We were fed up with being Beatles," McCartney said decades later, in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles' McCartney biography. "We were not boys, we were men... artists rather than performers.

At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967's Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world's biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition.

1) Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles
2) With A Little Help From My Friends - The Beatles
3) Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds  - The Beatles
4 )Getting Better  - The Beatles
5) A Day In The Life - The Beatles

Being one of the first concept albums, it's difficult to appreciate all of it's genius without listening to it as a whole. Hoping to retain as much of that as possible I've selected the first 4 songs of the album and then the stunning concluding song.  Enjoy. So good.


6) Astronomy Domine - Pink Floyd

At the same time The Beatles were working on Sgt. Pepper, another bunch of young brits were working next door in the studio (Abbey Road studio).  Pink Floyd.  Now, Pink Floyd in 1967 was really the brainchild of Syd Barrett.  While other bands had dabbled in psychedelic music, Pink Floyd were the first specialists, if you will.  Psychedelic, space-rock, prog-rock....trace their roots to/through Pink Floyd.

Pitchfork from their retrospective on Syd Barrett:

The ultimate psych headrush, the structure of “Astronomy Domine” is unlike anything else. It has its verses and its choruses, but the way the music comes together, with Nick Mason’s crashing drums never playing a backbeat, makes the whole thing move along and seem like a series of reactions. Barrett’s guitar will slash out one chord of a pensive rhythm, and then hit it three more times to kick the rest of the band into the groove, almost like starting a pull-chain lawnmower. The lyrics name-checking the moons of Jupiter and the planets are suitably cosmic and abstract, and it’s fair to say that no one, not even Pink Floyd, quite did space rock like this ever again.

Allmusic on Piper At the Gates of Dawn:

 The Piper at the Gates of Dawn successfully captures both sides of psychedelic experimentation -- the pleasures of expanding one's mind and perception, and an underlying threat of mental disorder and even lunacy; this duality makes Piper all the more compelling in light of Barrett's subsequent breakdown, and ranks it as one of the best psychedelic albums of all time.


7) Somebody to Love - Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane embodied the hippie/psychedelic vibe emanating from San Francisco and the Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

Allmusic on the album Surrealistic Pillow:

The second album by Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow was a groundbreaking piece of folk-rock-based psychedelia, and it hit like a shot heard round the world; where the later efforts from bands like the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and especially, the Charlatans, were initially not too much more than cult successes, Surrealistic Pillow rode the pop charts for most of 1967, soaring into that rarefied Top Five region occupied by the likes of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on, to which few American rock acts apart from the Byrds had been able to lay claim since 1964. And decades later the album still comes off as strong as any of those artists' best work. The group never made a better album, and few artists from the era ever did.

8) Little Wing - Jimi Hendrix

We've already talked about Jimi a bit, but it's worth reiterating what a force of nature he was in 1967.  He looked different, he sounded different, he was different.

By all rights, I should have included Purple Haze. It was his first single and it remains the quintessential Jimi song, but we've all heard it.  While Little Wing isn't exactly a "deep cut", it's a great reminder of Jimi's versatility and how tasteful a musician he could be when he wasn't soloing with his tongue... For all his onstage antics and guitar prowess, his songwriting/craft is often overlooked.  Just listen to this song...

9)Alone Again Or - Love

For a long time, Love's album, Forever Changes, was the album people liked to bring up as a forgotten masterpiece.  But you can only do that for so long before it's not really "forgotten" anymore.  It's an album that has gained in power and meaning over time as it reflects the summer in love in hindsight better than almost any other record.  1967 is remembered as the "Summer in Love" because it was the apex of hippie culture, when everyone was still riding the high, so to speak.  Things start to fall apart very soon.  Monterey turns into Altamont (we'll hear about that soon).  Love's album Forever Changes is The Summer of Love mixed with a sense of melancholy.

As allmusic says (infinitely better than I just tried to):

Forever Changes is inarguably Love's masterpiece and an album of enduring beauty, but it's also one of the few major works of its era that saw the dark clouds looming on the cultural horizon, and the result was music that was as prescient as it was compelling.

10) Break on Through to the Other Side - The Doors

I'm going to be honest....The Doors just aren't my thing.  BUT, it is inarguable that they were important for what they epitomized (West Coast psychedelic, L.A. music, Jim Morrison coolness) and what they heralded (pseudo mysticism, faux-Morrison coolness as proxy for artistry).

As allmusic says about their debut in 1967:

it endures as one of the most exciting, groundbreaking recordings of the psychedelic era. Blending blues, classical, Eastern music, and pop into sinister but beguiling melodies, the band sounded like no other. With his rich, chilling vocals and somber poetic visions, Morrison explored the depths of the darkest and most thrilling aspects of the psychedelic experience.

It is impossible to talk about the Doors without talking about Jim Morrison their charismatic lead singer.  The Lizard King.  Didn't play an instrument. He was songwriter, poet, lead singer, mystic, sex symbol. His iconic place in rock history was cemented (as it often is) by his premature death at age 27. Seriously, 27. He died, probably, from an overdoes of heroin. No autopsy has led to continued speculation. He remains a compelling figure.

Allmusic again about their debut:

A tremendous debut album, and indeed one of the best first-time outings in rock history, introducing the band's fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry with a knock-out punch. The lean, spidery guitar and organ riffs interweave with a hypnotic menace, providing a seductive backdrop for Jim Morrison's captivating vocals and probing prose.

rateyourmusic on the single "Break on Through":

The Doors are not only influential as a psychedelic band, but also because just about every new wave, goth, industrial, and "college rock" vocalist in the 1980s from Siouxsie Sioux to Nick Cave to Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen were all trying to sound like Jim Morrison.  Ian Astbury of the Cult is still trying to fill the Lizard Man's shoes, and not very successfully at that.  Now that I've justified a place for the Doors on this list, I can think of no better single to showcase on this list as the Doors' debut, Break On Through.  Sure, Light My Fire is the huge hit, but it's commercial breakthrough is not as difficult to explain, because it's still just a sexy come on delivered by a guy in leather pants, something Tom Jones has built a 40-year career around.  In addition, Manzarek's jazzy keyboard noodling on Light My Fire sounds much more dated when compared to Break on Through, in which Morrison issues a shamanistic invocation to expand your mind until it shatters to smithereens.  Except for perhaps the 13th Floor Elevators, no band made leaping nihilistically into the psychedelic void sound so attractive as the Doors did on this single. 


11) Heroin - The Velvet Underground

Are you sensing a theme?  Simply no way to dodge the influence drugs had on music starting in the mid-60's.  It's an interesting thought experiment to think how music would have changed without drugs.  Certainly some musical geniuses (Morrison, Jimi, Syd, Janis, Sid Vicious, Nick Drake, Keith Moon, Gram Parson, Lowell George, Elvis..) would have lived longer, but how different would the music have been?  Worse?  Who knows.

The Velvet Underground. No band or debut album influenced more people while selling so few albums. I really can't say it better than allmusic does:

Few rock groups can claim to have broken so much new territory, and maintain such consistent brilliance on record, as the Velvet Underground during their brief lifespan. It was the group's lot to be ahead of, or at least out of step with, their time. The mid- to late '60s was an era of explosive growth and experimentation in rock, but the Velvets' innovations -- which blended the energy of rock with the sonic adventurism of the avant-garde, and introduced a new degree of social realism and sexual kinkiness into rock lyrics -- were too abrasive for the mainstream to handle. During their time, the group experienced little commercial success; though they were hugely appreciated by a cult audience and some critics, the larger public treated them with indifference or, occasionally, scorn. The Velvets' music was too important to languish in obscurity, though; their cult only grew larger and larger in the years following their demise, and continued to mushroom through the years. By the 1980s, they were acknowledged not just as one of the most important rock bands of the '60s, but one of the best of all time, and one whose immense significance cannot be measured by their relatively modest sales.

Consequence of Sound picks it as their 5th greatest album of all time:

With Lou Reed’s heroin addiction as the centerpiece, the record is explicit and rough, unflinching and chaotic as it held a mirror to life in New York City during the late sixties. The ode to Reed’s dealer, “I’m Waiting For The Man” and the obvious “Heroin”, use irony to its fullest with catchy guitar licks, the latter building and pounding as Reed exclaims that the drug is the only thing that makes him “feel like a man.” Alcoholism makes an appearance on “Run, Run, Run” as it screeches and drives on skittish bluesy riffs. With tracks like those, Nico inducted into music a style of rock that was so ahead of its time not even its creators knew what would become of it.

As the years go by, this album continues to evolve into even more of a masterpiece. Nico has since become the bible of what we now call “indie” rock with nearly every band emerging as part of that modern scene taking their cues from this record, not to mention a certain music festival taking “All Tomorrow’s Parties” as their namesake, aptly becoming a mecca for the experimental and daring. What the Beatles are to modern pop, The Velvet Underground is to alternative rock. They are the archetypes of that style, their debut so ground breaking that during their existence it only sold a few hundred copies. Yet, here in the 21st century, they are one of the most important bands in the history of rock with this record serving as the unlikeliest of masterpieces.


12) I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) - Aretha Franklin

Aretha had put out some nice, but largely nondescript records for Columbia, Jerry Wexler of Atlantic signed her and turned her loose.  The rest is history.

From Allmusic:

 Aretha Franklin's Atlantic label debut is an indisputable masterpiece from start to finish. Much of the credit is due to producer Jerry Wexler, who finally unleashed the soulful intensity so long kept under wraps during her Columbia tenure; assembling a crack Muscle Shoals backing band along with an abundance of impeccable material, Wexler creates the ideal setting to allow Aretha to ascend to the throne of Queen of Soul, and she responds with the strongest performances of her career. While the brilliant title track remains the album's other best-known song, each cut on I Never Loved a Man is touched by greatness; covers of Ray Charles' "Drown in My Own Tears" and Sam Cooke's "Good Times" and "A Change Is Gonna Come" are on par with the original recordings, while Aretha's own contributions -- "Don't Let Me Lose This Dream," "Baby, Baby, Baby," "Save Me," and "Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business)" -- are perfectly at home in such lofty company. A soul landmark.


12) I Can See For Miles - The Who

It's important to remember, once again, that the bands we have talked about previously didn't disappear (for the most part).  The Rolling Stones, Dylan, The Kinks, The Who are all still going strong in 1967.  In fact all of them are, arguably, yet to reach their peak.

For me, "I Can See For Miles" is when The Who really start to find their voice.  It's that anthemic sound of soaring vocals backed by a bottom end that can't be matched. With Pete adding that pop sensibility that makes it so catchy and memorable.  They are a crank it up kind of band, so make sure you are listening to this loud and imagine your driving in that cherry red convertible without a care in the world.

As allmusic says " it's a terrific set of songs that ultimately stands as one of the group's greatest achievements. "I Can See for Miles" (a Top Ten hit) is the Who at their most thunderous"  Agreed.

Magical Mystery Tour - The Beatles

Oh those lads from Liverpool.  Two albums in 1967.  Sgt. Pepper of course only changed music forever.  Magical Mystery Tour is simply one of the greatest collection of songs ever made.  Lacking the cohesive and groundbreaking majesty that is Sgt. Pepper, MMT remains a classic with some of The Beatles finest songs.

13) Penny Lane
14) Strawberry Fields Forever

Originally released as the two sides to the greatest 45 ever released (it is not debatable), the songs were also included on Magical Mystery Tour to help it sell. As rateyourmusic says:

Critical consensus in the 1980s often declared the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper LP as the best album of all time, based on its reputation as a pioneering concept album.  One reason that consensus was unsustainable is that two of the best possible songs that could have been on Sgt. Pepper's were left off the album, because George Martin didn't realize that the old business practice of separate singles from album releases no longer made sense, either in the context of the late 1960s or with a group as huge as the Beatles.  Don't believe me?  Sir George Martin himself called leaving Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever of the Sgt. Pepper LP "the worst decision of my professional life." 

Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, the two sides of the best double A-sided single ever, were originally conceived as components of a Beatles "Northern childhood" concept album about the Fab Four's formative experiences growing up in Liverpool.  After George Martin rush-released the two songs, because he didn't have anything else to fulfill the demands for a new Beatles single, the architecture of the concept album started falling apart, although the Sgt. Pepper's conceit dreamed up by Paul and A Day of the Life at the end of the LP gives the illusion of conceptual coherence in the middle.  Instead, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever only got released on LP after the Beatles needed something to keep Magic Mystery Tour from turning into a bigger critical debacle. 

This is all a shame, because the wonderment of the two songs on the single cannot be denied.  Penny Lane is buoyed by upward harmonies and Bach trumpet filigrees, while the lyrics are a fine-grained set of vignettes about Liverpool life, even though the reference to "finger pie" is probably some schoolboy's idea of a dirty joke.  Strawberry Fields is even more groundbreaking sonically with different sections of the same song played at different speeds then spliced back together, while the lyrics are the most introspective that Lennon ever did with the Beatles. 


PLAYLIST

 http://junkbelly.subsonic.org/share/ahVsD

Music Project 5 - 1966

Big music year.  Some truly landmark albums hit.  Operative word being albums, which is new...

I thought about just asking everyone to listen to The Beatles' "Revolver", The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds", and Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" and calling it good for 1966, but there's too much other stuff we should hear too.  So, here we go...1966.  The world of music has officially moved from being utterly dominated by singles and on to albums being the real mover and shaker in influence.  Pet Sounds may have been the first album that is best appreciated as a whole rather than the sum of it's parts.  That's why it's so difficult to build a playlist, and it's only going to get harder from here on out.

First, what's happening around the world and in the US?  Honestly....it can really be summed up as "US involvement in Vietnam escalates and protests of the war start in earnest (Martin Luther King makes his first speech denouncing the war). Racial tensions continue to simmer with occasional boiling over (Watts again). And the Cold War/Space Race continues."  Basically.....shit just gets worse.  From a musical standpoint the real historical touchpoint centered around the Beatles.  John Lennon in an interview published in the London Evening Standard states the Beatles are "more popular than Jesus now." The statement sparks enormous controversy in the US and John later apologizes.Not entirely coincidently the Beatles hold their last concert in Candlestick Park, San Francisco (this is 1966, only two years after they arrived in the US).  The Beatles are now exclusively a studio band.  Which, oddly, frees them up to experiment as their is no pressure to recreate the music in a live venue.  Bob Dylan gets in a motorcycle accident and is not seen in public for a year after that.  This adds to the mythic nature Bob had by this point.

But, if I had to sum up 1966 music in one word...or an acronym....we're going to have to go with L.S.D.  Drugs are going to change the world of music and it pretty much starts now.  Obviously, it didn't all happen at once, but the mind-altering trips of LSD, shrooms, pot, etc. are going to change music.  Psychedelic music becomes a thing.  "Hey man....that's grooooovy....pass the sitar, I think I've got a song....but first I need to move the pink elephant over there. He's looking at me sorta weird."



On to some vids:

First here's an interview with the Beatles in 1966.  Remember this is only 2 years after they arrived in America all eager and goofy and youthful. Now they are going to put an end to live concerts, are clearly tired of being asked about John's completely off-hand remark, which the US, in typical fashion, blows completely out of proportion.  It's sad really.  You DO NOT need to watch this whole thing.  Just watch from about 45 seconds in to about 3:30.  To get a feel for the kinds of questions they were getting at this time and how their demeanor had changed over 2 years. Video Link

Now I want to show some vids of songs that didn't make the cut into our Playlist for the week, but are worth checking out.


"Love" is a great early psychedelic band that we'll be listening to very soon, but I thought the vid was cool.  Rateyourmusic says this about their release in 1966:

lead singer Arthur Lee vocal's are groundbreaking, as a rare example of a black guy fronting a predominantly white rock band.  If American garage rock was all about American white guys imitating British white guys imitating American black guys, then Arthur Lee was the logical next step in the evolution: a black guy who sounded like a white guy trying to sound like a black guy.  Every black rock 'n' roller from Lenny Kravitz to the guys in TV on the Radio owes a debt to what Arthur Lee accomplished on this single. 

I'll give you one guess why this next video made the cut.....oh and the song is pretty good too. Pitchfork says:

The descending bassline that opens the song feels like a playground taunt, and so does everything else: Sinatra's blithe and flirty delivery, the skeletal tambourines, even the glorious, stomping horn riff that bursts into the song in its final 20 seconds. "Boots" is maybe the finest bitchy kiss-off in pop history. Take notes.  Video Link

Ahhh... The Monks.  One album in 1966 and people are still talking about them.  Punk music, protest music, punk/protest music owe them a debt.  Anybody playing loud simply because it's the best way to express your anger owe them a debt.  rateyourmusic says this:

Over a decade before Malcolm McLaren conceived of the Sex Pistols as the world's greatest rock 'n' roll swindle, Karl Remy and Walther Niemann, two German admen with avant-garde aspirations, approached a quintet of recently discharged American GI's who were playing German nightclubs as The Torquay 5.  Shortly afterward, Remy and Niemann drafted a manifesto in which the group would disavow its former identity as the Torquays, only to be reborn as The Monks.  To publicize their new identity, the ex-Torquays, who at the time still sported their regulation Army buzz cuts, went to the barber and had the top of their scalps shaved off in the style of the medieval tonsure worn by clerics in the Dark Ages.  In this way, the Monks embodied a proto-skinhead aesthetic that was even more of an extreme anti-Beatles statement than either the Rolling Stones or the Sonics. 

Complication is a definitive statement of the Monks' aesthetic, but Complication also contains lyrics like "People kill./People will, for you...People go/To their deaths for you." that reflected that Monks' status as pissed off ex-GI's who weren't exactly thrilled with the Vietnam War.  The Monks might not fit the image of longhaired hippie protesters, but they made a rock 'n' roll antiwar statement in both Complication and the album track Monk Time (What army?/Who cares what army?/Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?) all the way back in 1965, a year before more explicitly countercultural bands like the Fugs were doing so. 

Video Link

One last one just cause I like it.  We already met, briefly, Little Stevie Wonder, now let's meet Little Stevie Winwood.  Just like Stevie Wonder, we're going to see Steve Winwood later on, but in 1966 he was the 16 year old lead singer, keyboard player and sometimes songwriter for the Spencer Davis Group.  The kid has talent.  Listen to that voice...16.  Eeesh. Video Link

Now, on to the music.


Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys
Not sure I really need to say anything when the greats have already said it all:

"All of us, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and I consider Pet Sounds to be one of the greatest pop LPs to ever be released. It encompasses everything that's ever knocked me out and rolled it all into one." - Eric Clapton

"I heard 'Don't Talk (Put Your Head on my Shoulder)' played on the cello. It sounded beautiful and sad, just as it does on Pet Sounds." - Elvis Costello

"For me to say that I was enthralled would be an understatement. I had never heard such magical sounds, so amazingly recorded. It undoubtedly changed the way that I, and countless others, approached recording. It is a timeless and amazing recording of incredible genius and beauty." - Elton John

"Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn't have happened... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds." - George Martin, Beatles producer

"[Pet Sounds] blew me out of the water. I love the album so much. I've just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life…I figure no one is educated musically 'til they've heard that album…it may be going overboard to say it's the classic of the century…but to me, it certainly is a total, classic record that is unbeatable in many ways…I've often played Pet Sounds and cried. I played it to John [Lennon] so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence." - Paul McCartney

"I think I would put [Brian Wilson] up there with any composer – especially Pet Sounds. I don't think there is anything better than that, necessarily. I don't think you'd be out of line comparing him to Beethoven – to any composer." - Tom Petty

"'God Only Knows' is simple and elegant and was stunning when it first appeared; it still sounds perfect" - Pete Townshend (The Who)

"...completely changed everything about records for me." - Roger Waters (Pink Floyd)

"Pet Sounds is an incredibly amazing pop record..." - Thom Yorke (Radiohead)

Rolling Stones Number 2 album of all time:

"Who's gonna hear this shit?" Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band's resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. "The ears of a dog?" But Love's contempt proved oddly useful: "Ironically," Wilson observed, "Mike's barb inspired the album's title." Barking dogs – Wilson's dog Banana among them, in fact – are prominent among the found sounds on the album. The Beatles made a point of echoing them on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – an acknowledgment that Pet Sounds was the inspiration for the Beatles' masterpiece. That gesture actually completed a circle of influence: Wilson initially conceived of Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles' Rubber Soul.

With its vivid orchestration, lyrical ambition, elegant pacing and thematic coherence, Pet Sounds invented – and in some sense perfected – the idea that an album could be more than the sum of its parts. When Wilson sang, "Wouldn't it be nice if we were older?" on the magnificent opener, he wasn't just imagining a love that could evolve past high school; he was suggesting a new grown-up identity for rock & roll music itself.

Wilson essentially made Pet Sounds without the rest of the band, using them only to flesh out the vocal arrangements. (He even considered putting the album out as a solo project, and the first single, "Caroline, No," was released under his own name.) Its luxurious sound conveys a heartbreaking wistfulness, and the deeply personal songs, which Wilson co-wrote primarily with lyricist Tony Asher, bid farewell to the innocent world of the Beach Boys' fun-in-the-sun hits. Unfortunately, Capitol Records proved no more enamored of Pet Sounds than had Love; the label considered not releasing it at all. Not yet vindicated by history, Wilson withdrew further into his inner world. "At the last meeting I attended concerning Pet Sounds," Wilson wrote about his dealings with the label, "I showed up holding a tape player and eight prerecorded, looped responses, including 'No comment,' 'Can you repeat that?' 'No' and 'Yes.' Refusing to utter a word, I played the various tapes when appropriate."

1)Wouldn't it Be Nice - The Beach Boys

Pitchfork:

Love songs in rock and roll can be many things-- lusty, lecherous, pining, resigned, anguished, sweet-- but "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is the rare one that feels genuinely innocent. It kicks in with a music box harp figure that's quickly obliterated by Brian Wilson's Phil Spector-sized drum sound-- it's the sound of reality briefly shattering fantasy. The reality for these lovers is that they're simply too young to be out on their own. But they can imagine, and their fantasy magnifies every child's naïve wish to become an adult-- freedom without the mortgage, cars that need fixing, and lack of adequate health insurance.
"Wouldn't It Be Nice" has everything you love about the Beach Boys in spades: the Wall of Sound Jr., the scarcely believable harmonies, the dreamtime prosody, and the imaginative instrumentation. It's the ultimate starry-eyed teenage symphony to God, and it perfectly captures the earnest devotion we only seem capable of in a small window of years.


2)God Only Knows - The Beach Boys

Pitchfork

I'm sure you've read these: "the world's greatest song," "Brian Wilson's masterpiece," "the most beautiful piece of music ever recorded." Yes, the initiation into the Museum of Western Popular Music is always rough, as credible historians rush to summarize our collective experiences in short phrases. But for better or worse, "God Only Knows" is the kind of song that's almost impossible for me to talk about divorced from the way it makes me feel: sad, in love, honestly grateful, but also a little hopeless. Even in mono, it's like being swept up by a wave of compassion but still getting bruised. 

The first words Carl Wilson sings, "I may not always love you," are already uncertain, so if you need a tie into the legacy of 1960s youth culture, glance no further than the naïve but strained optimism locked inside this song. Yet, Carl made this uncertainty sound gorgeous. The voices that sail behind his might just as well be a quartet of violas and cellos playing counterpoint that'd already been obsessed over a few times before they got it. "God Only Knows" is so ideally conceptualized and realized, critics can't help but support it. Somehow, even that can't turn it into an art exhibit; its humanity resists the attempt. To me, this song is a goodbye to being a kid, and hoping that love actually is the answer. And almost nobody knows if it is. 



3) "You're Going to Miss Me - 13th Floor Elevators

Nobody told me I could have played the effing electric jug.  I think I would have rocked the jug.  Like Jimi level.  Damnit.

rateyourmusic:

Listening to You're Gonna Miss Me is like finding a transitional fossil, where you can witness the exact moment where garage rock turns into psychedelia.  The original version of You're Gonna Miss Me by the Texas garage band, the Spades, showcases the bluesy lead vocal of Roky Erickson accompanied by Dwayne Eddy/Venture-style guitar twang, tight harmonies, harmonica, and tom tom drumming.  After Roky Erickson left the Spades to join forces with the members of a jug band called the Lingsmen, the new group rechristened itself the 13th Floor Elevators with new contributions from Tommy Hall as lyricist, hype man, and jug player.  When the 13th Floor Elevators recorded Roky's You're Gonna Miss Me as their debut single, the song changed slightly, but those slight changes made all the difference in transforming garage rock into acid rock.   

The Elevators version of You're Gonna Miss Me has a less twangy guitar sounds with chords that reverberate with more power on the downstroke.  The simpler drumming of the Spades version has been enhanced by drummer John Ike Walton's snare attack, while still retaining some of the tom tom rhythms of the original.  The instrumental section toward the end includes more frenzied harmonica and guitar playing, while Roky Erickson's vocal incorporates more screams and yelps, which he had adopted from imitating James Brown.  The lyrics from the Spades to 13th Floor Elevators versions have barely changed if at all, but the implications are totally different.  When Roky sings "I'm not comin' home" on the Spades version, the implication is the standard R&B/garage "I'm not comin' home you two-timin' woman so you better be sorry."  When Roky sing "I'm not com in' home" on the Elevators version, the implication is "I'm not comin' home, because I'm literally losing my mind due to my own insanity and massive LSD intake." 

And then there's that insane whirly noise that Tommy Hall makes with his jug that's all over both the A-side and B-side.  You could say it's a nod to the jug band tradition that Tommy Hall came from, but urban legend also has it that the Elevators needed the jug to hide their weed from Texas narcs.



4) "California Dreamin'" - The Mamas & the Papas:

So the Psychedelic music scene in the US in 1966 was really centered in California.  San Francisco especially was the hotbed for the burgeoning hippie scene. The Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco was probably the most famous intersection in the world. The Summer of Love is coming, but in my mind it has always started with this song.  I love this song.

Rolling Stone tells us.

One frigid winter in Manhattan, a song came to John Phillips in the middle of the night. He woke up his young wife, Michelle, who was homesick for the West Coast, to help him finish writing "California Dreamin'," one of the all-time sunniest songs of longing. 


Pitchfork:

Apparently it's so dreadful not to live in California, it drove the Mamas & Papas to create one of the most beautifully eerie harmony-pop songs in rock history. Thanks to the limitations of 1966 production, John and Michelle Phillips' reverb-waterlogged four-part arrangement sounds apocalyptically choral, making the experience of actually suffering through four seasons sound positively ghastly.


5) 8 Mile High - The Byrds

And the psychedelic sounds keep coming. Mix some Indian Sitar music with John Coltrane and some chemical enhancement and what do you get?  Beats the shit out of me, but apparently this song is what The Byrds came up with.

rateyourmusic

In the fall of 1965, the Byrds would ride around in their tour van, high on marijuana and LSD, while listening to cassettes of both Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane.  The combination was especially influential on the Byrds' songwriting, because both Shankar and Coltrane played in a style different than most mainstream pop music of the day, using a modal structure that kept songs in the same chord for extended periods of time.  The Byrds had just come back from an unsuccessful August 1965 tour in England, where they faced a backlash from critics who thought they were presumptuously trying to portray themselves as an American successor to the Beatles.  Gene Clark, who would later leave the Byrds partially because of his fear of flying, wrote a song based on the UK tour experience, using a transatlantic flight to London as the opening metaphor of Eight Miles High. 

McGuinn claimed that Eight Miles High was merely a reference to the airplane's height off the ground with a little poetic license to make the words fit the music, but the Shankar and Coltrane that the group listened to during their drug haze in the fall of 1965 also exerted their influence.  In fact, you could say that the A-side, Eight Miles High, is Roger McGuinn trying to play guitar like John Coltrane plays sax, while the B-side, Why, represents McGuinn's attempt to play guitar like Ravi Shankar plays sitar.  The raga rock the group created represented a radical new direction for the Byrds as well as pop music as a whole, but not all of their fan base was willing to go along with them, and they never hit the Top Twenty in the US again.   


 6)"Hold On, I'm Comin'" - Sam and Dave

Well, I don't think it's quite as simple as Pitchfork alludes (tongue in cheek), but sometimes, when the magic happens, it does seem effortless.

Look, it's not brain surgery. You come up with an absolutely undeniable monster of a six-note horn-riff. You put it over a wound-tight funk vamp that breathes and lunges and builds to a fiery climax. You find a couple of guys to bray and scream and plead and rage over it with a sort of churchy zeal. That's it. You are now Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter, and you've written maybe the greatest southern soul song of all time. You'll start getting burger-commercial royalties in about 30 years.



7) "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" -  James Brown & the Famous Flames

This song would be enough to put James Brown in the history books.  What a song.  The guitar part kills me.

Pitchfork:

For all of its sweat-soaked machismo and fist-pump funk, Brown's most potent 1960s statement was a relatively quiet, distinctly feminine testament to intrinsic dependence. "A man who don't have a woman," squeals the conflicted soul man, "he's lost in the wilderness." It's as if he could foresee his post-70s wasteland, when allegations of domestic abuse outnumbered hit singles, but was utterly helpless to stop the spiral. The ballad's titular emphasis and man-made roll call only serve to underline its loneliness and desperation. Against arch string plucks, lagging piano, and snap rimshots, the man works his demons hard. And this direct feed into his struggle is as stunning as the ensuing wreckage is stunningly pitiful.


8) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Ennio Morricone

Soundtracks are an under-appreciated genre of music.  Some truly great music came from the marriage of music and the film medium.  Ennio Morricone is a legend.

Pitchfork

Film was the most important medium of the 20th century, and Ennio Morricone was among its chief architects. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" didn't simply reinvent soundtracks; it reinvented movies. For even the most uncouth audiences, the titular theme-- hell, just the opening "wah-wah-wah"-- is synonymous with stoicism, murder, and pop-art delirium. Despite the Wagnerian crescendos and theatrical irony, every effect is critical and unforgettable: pacing boots, tribal flutes, flaring surf guitar, Indian warwhoops, field-recording flotsam, meth-mangled trumpet solos. In just under three minutes, Morricone condenses all the greatest elements of music-- from opera, garage, musique concrète, peyote songs, whatever-- and layers it over stampeding horses and shotgun blasts. It's kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, and incontrovertibly badass.



9) Mercy, Mercy, Mercy - Cannonball Adderly

Live Soul Jazz at its absolute finest.  Not a lot of improv going on here, this hearkens back more to the instrumental R&B songs that we've been listening to.  But add in a little more jazz elements and it's magic.

From Allmusic:

Cannonball Adderley's most popular album, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy wasn't actually recorded "Live at 'The Club'," as its subtitle says. The hoax was meant to publicize a friend's nightclub venture in Chicago, but Adderley actually recorded the album in Los Angeles, where producer David Axelrod set up a club in the Capitol studios and furnished free drinks to an invitation-only audience. Naturally, the crowd is in an extremely good mood, and Adderley's quintet, feeding off the energy in the room, gives them something to shout about. By this point, Adderley had perfected a unique blend of earthy soul-jazz and modern, subtly advanced post-bop; very rarely did some of these harmonies and rhythms pop up in jazz so saturated with blues and gospel feeling. Those latter influences are the main inspiration for acoustic/electric pianist Joe Zawinul's legendary title cut, a genuine Top 40 pop hit



10) Good Vibrations - The Beach Boys

Pitchfork

The pressure to surpass Pet Sounds and keep apace with the ante-upping Beatles set the stage for this obsessive-compulsive, career-derailing masterpiece. Wilson amassed hours upon hours of tape at multiple studios to cobble together his intricately segmented, cut'n'paste "pocket symphony," reportedly spending anywhere between $16-50,000 to produce three-and-a-half minutes of weird yet accessible pop. Besides its haunting organs, shapeshifting riffs, and cubist harmonies, "Good Vibrations" introduced the electro-Theremin (now often known as the Tannerin, its interface involves shifting the pitch of a sine wave by sliding a knob across a dummy keyboard) to the world at large, its bright eeriness audibly echoing Wilson's knack for blending the mundane with the extraterrestrial.




11) The Beatles: "Eleanor Rigby"

Just listen to words on this one. Beautiful stuff.

The words, familiar to countless millions around the world, are among the most poignant in popular music: 'Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name; nobody came.' 
Set to a haunting melody by Lennon and McCartney and backed by a string octet masterfully arranged by George Martin, the song broke new ground with its heartrending refrain: 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from?'
Its funereal orchestration and bleak message of isolation, depression and desolation were a far cry from the upbeat hits the public had come to expect from The Beatles  -  yet it climbed straight to number one and changed the face of pop music in the process.





12)Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles

Consequence of Sound

Going into the recording sessions for the last song off Revolver, John Lennon allegedly told George Martin that he wanted the track to sound “like a hundred chanting Tibetan monks.” The result is undoubtedly his first psychedelic masterpiece, and a benchmark of The Beatles’ mid-career output. George Harrison’s droning tambura in C major mixed with reverse guitar solos, processed vocals, and looped tape effects create an audible LSD trip that would be copied by just about every band from 1966 to 1975. No longer a live act, “Tomorrow Never Knows” hears the group truly use the studio as an instrument for the first time, providing a vital missing link between their early years and the Sgt. Pepper era. While later albums would expand on the song’s trippy instrumentation, never had The Fab Four sounded more adventurous, yet intensely focused.

Pitchfork

Where did this come from? Drugs, you say? Well, sure…Timothy Leary was involved, as he so often was in those days. His book The Psychedelic Experience, itself based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, served as an inspiration. LSD had come to the boys a year earlier and Lennon had imbibed and things were changing fast. In another year, the minds of John's fellow Beatles would begin to look rather small, Yoko was someone smart and hip to talk to, and the end was nigh. But here the Beatles are together-- Paul's the avant-garde one, as he'd later say, bringing in the tape loops-- and the band together is a serious force.


Never had pop swirled quite like this-- the seagulls, the sitar drone, the sped-up orchestral bits. It was music without edges, all porous borders, one sound bleeding into the next. But it wasn't some new age drift, either, what with Ringo compensating for all the space in his part by hitting each stutter-stop beat with double force, and the snarling backward lead zigzagging ribbon-like down the rabbit hole. Disorienting contrast is the power of this song-- a possible bad trip talk-down that happens to be scary as shit-- and explains why it loomed mightily above the nascent psychedelic movement. "Listen to the color of your dreams," Lennon suggested, and an army of baby boomers was ready to give it a try, for good or ill. 

PLAYLIST

 http://junkbelly.subsonic.org/share/pMpoz

Music Project 4 - 1965

"What's he doing?!?"
"He's plugging in!"
"He's gone electric!!!"
"BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
"BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Bob Dylan went and betrayed everyone.  One thing that defines "Folk Music" is the use of traditional instruments.  Dylan was a god in the folk scene and had become the "spokesman of his generation."  So when he went electric, it was seen by many of his fans as a complete betrayal of them and what they thought he believed in.  His first album to be released in 1965, Bringing it All Back Home (believe it or not, he came out with two albums in '65, the second of which was Highway 61 Revisited), contained Dylan backed by a full electric band for the first side.

Before we dive into the music though, what's happening around the world in 1965.  The US commits it's first official combat troops to Vietnam. By the end of the year 190,000 US troops have arrived. Here in the US the racial tensions continue to escalate.  Martin Luther King and more than 2,600 other protesters are arrested in Selma Alabama during demonstrations against voter registration rules (states in the South were passing laws making it more difficult for blacks to register to vote).  Black-nationalist leader Malcolm X was assassinated at a Harlem rally.  The infamous Watts race riots occurred in LA resulting in 34 deaths and over $200 million in property damages. (Watts will later be the site of a famous series of concerts championing Black pride.)  It was an ugly time in the US.  Young people were finding their own voice and rebelling against the establishment.  Music was a catalyst and a rallying point for these new countercultures.

Some truly landmark albums and songs were released in 1965.  The Beatles' Rubber Soul.  Otis Redding's Otis Blue, Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. The Rolling Stones with Satisfaction. The Byrds and The Who release their debut albums, John Coltrane's Love Supreme.  The truly great rock and roll music has started in earnest and it is going to come fast and furious from this point out.  Unfortunately that means I'm going to be leaving out a tremendous number of wonderful songs.  Please forgive me, and if there are some songs you really enjoy, by all means, go back and listen to whole albums, it's worth it.

A couple of vids now.  First one that describes the momentous musical shift exemplified by Bob Dylan's move to an electric sound.  I know it sounds tremendously silly, but it really was a big deal Video Link.

The Beatles 1965 tour was the pinnacle of Beatlemania in the US. It culminated with the largest concert held up until that point. The concert in Shea stadium is famous and infamous at the same time.  It proved that large-scale outdoor events could be enormously profitable, and it also proved that for concert goers it could be a miserable place to listen to music.  As Wikepedia describes:

The deafening level of crowd noise coupled with the distance between the band and the audience meant that nobody in the stadium could hear much of anything. Vox had specially designed 100-watt amplifiers for this tour and it was still not anywhere near loud enough, and so the Beatles used the house amplification system. Lennon described the noise as "wild" and also twice as deafening when the Beatles performed. Not being able to hear each other or even themselves, The Beatles just played through a list of songs nervously, not knowing what kind of sound was being produced. At the end of the show (during "I'm Down"), Lennon saw the whole show as being so ridiculous that he just began playing the keyboard with his elbows while the whole group laughed hysterically. 

Electronic music is coming folks.  Psychedelic music is coming (in fact the first use of it was for 1965 single The Trip by Kim Fowley.  But a hugely influential piece of music from this period was, surprisingly, the theme song for the Dr. Who television show.  The BBC Radiophonic Workshop composed this truly revolutionary piece.  By 1965 the song had been further produced and orchestrated, but it's remarkable for the early 60's. You can't tell me John, Paul, Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Robert Fripp weren't watching.... As Pitchfork says: 

While Ron Grainer's swooping melody and throbbing beat have seen slicker arrangements over the decades, this first version is an incredible piece of primitive electronic music. Delia Derbyshire constructed it in 1963 by manipulating sounds from test tone generators and mixing them together almost note by note, yet the cobbled-together, almost mismatched timbres come together in a lumpy, throbbing-- and definitely futuristic-- whole. 

One more video.  To give just a little taste of the diversity of music making waves in 1965 we have Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Their album Whipped Cream & Other Delights reached number 1, which is pretty amazing given the dominance at the time of the British Invasion and Motown. It must be said that his success was at least partially a result of the music being featured on the TV show The Dating Game.  Here he is with A Taste of Honey.

Let's jump to the music now.  Pains me to leave some of these off.....


1) Sounds of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel

Simon & Garfunkel provide an excellent microcosm for the shift that occurred for many in 1965.  Their accoustic folk music release in 1964 really didn't do much and they had broken up.  I'll let Rolling Stone say what happened next:

Simon wrote this as an acoustic ballad, but  Simon and Garfunkel's first single version died. While Simon was in England, Wilson, who was producing Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," asked members of Dylan's studio band to add electric guitar and drums. Columbia released the amplified "Silence," which became a hit before Simon and Garfunkel had even heard it.

After it became a hit, they rushed Simon back from England, reunited him with Garfunkel and the rest is history.

From Pitchfork:

"Hello darkness, my old friend." Few songs sink their hooks into a listener as instantly as this classic ode to alienation. Paul Simon's tautly crafted lyrics unfold effortlessly as his harmonies with Art Garfunkel grow in emotional intensity. Those elements were already in place when the duo recorded "The Sound of Silence" for its folk-damaged debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. But after that album flopped and Simon and Garfunkel called it quits (for the first time), producer Tom Wilson took the folk frame of the original and added a rock edge. Inspired by the Byrds and Dylan's evolution to electric, Wilson overdubbed electric guitars, bass, and drums. Not only did the new version reach #1, those additions also helped shed the original's choirboy wimpiness. 


The Playlist will have the updated, folk-rock, version.  The video below is the original from 1964. Video Link

2) Mr. Tamborine Man - The Byrds

Hitting Number 1 in both the US and the UK, The Byrds managed to synthesize everything happening in music at the time.  They took a Bob Dylan song and added elements from both the Beatles and The Beach Boys.  As rateyourmusic says:

If the Beatles and Bob Dylan are two of the biggest musical influences on the Sixties, then the Byrds are the band that finally figured out how to "Beatleize" Bob Dylan. Founding members Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark were all veterans of collegiate folk groups, such as the Limeliters, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and the New Christy Minstrels, before they joined forces to record a demo as the Jet Set that married Beatlesque harmonies with folkie guitar strumming.  The original founding trio then acquired mandolin player Chris Hillman as a bassist and Michael Clarke as a drummer, but Clarke was recruited less because of his musical ability than because of his resemblance to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. 

The group failed at cashing in on the British Invasion after recording a relatively imitative Beatlesque single as the Beefeaters, but their luck changed when their manager Jim Dickson acquired an unreleased acetate of Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man.  Now renamed the Byrds, the group thought Dylan's 2/4 meter was unsuitable for a rock 'n' roll arrangement, but gradually came around as they started to rehearse the song in 4/4 time.  When Dickson brought in Bob Dylan to encourage the Byrds to perform their version of Mr. Tambourine Man, Dylan marveled, "Wow, man!  You can dance to that!"   

When it finally came time to record Mr. Tambourine Man, the producer Terry Melcher shoved aside all the members of the Byrds except Roger McGuinn with L.A. session musicians taken from a group known as The Wrecking Crew.  Despite Melcher's reliance on session musicians, the most important musical contribution came from the sole remaining group member, lead guitarist Roger McGuinn.  Inspired by the movie Hard Day's Night, McGuinn played a Rickenbacker guitar, just like the one George Harrison used in that film.  Then, after incorporating the Beatles' instrumental sound into a folk recording, McGuinn decided to use a rhythmic chord pattern partially inspired by the Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby. With a fusion of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Dylan, Roger McGuinn on Mr. Tambourine Man effectively created the first synthesis of American folk rock. 

Allmusic says this about The Byrds debut album:

One of the greatest debuts in the history of rock, Mr. Tambourine Man was nothing less than a significant step in the evolution of rock & roll itself, demonstrating that intelligent lyrical content could be wedded to compelling electric guitar riffs and a solid backbeat. It was also the album that was most responsible for establishing folk-rock as a popular phenomenon


3) Papa's Got a Brand New Bag - James Brown

Up til now we've been listening to soul music from Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and James Brown.  Now we get introduced to the beginnings of Funk.  All hail the Funk. Or as rateyourmusic yells:

All hail the Alpha and Omega of the Funk 1.0!  If James Brown hadn't found a new bag, the man who sang Please Please Please, Try Me, and Prisoner of Love would be better known today as a balladeer instead of a funkateer.  If the Godfather of Soul hadn't popularized "jammin' on the one" on this single, legions of music we know today from hip hop to the Red Hot Chili Peppers wouldn't exist. 

Rolling Stone says this about their 71st Greatest Song of All-Time:

Arguably the first funk record, it's driven by the empty space between beats as much as by Brown's bellow and guitarist Jimmy Nolen's ice-chipper scratch. In a stroke of postproduction genius (you can hear the original recording on the Grammy-winning Star Time box set), Brown sliced off the intro to have the song start with a face-smashing horn blast, and sped it up just enough so it sounded like an urgent bulletin from the future.


The Dylan influence continues with the next couple of songs.  Remember what Dylan did, he made it ok, almost mandatory, for rock and roll to move personal and universal at the same time. "Satisfaction" and "My Generation" are both about being young and the frustrations of youth.

4) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - The Rolling Stones

I thought about not including this since we have all heard the song plenty....but I just couldn't.  It's too important.  It changed Rock & Roll. It epitomizes Rock & Roll.  Just can't.

allmusic says this about the song:

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" is the Ur-Rolling Stones song: a pounding rocker with sneering vocals and lyrics, with a blues and soul base that nonetheless is used for a guitar-based song that is definitely rock, not blues or R&B. It was also one of the defining records of the its era, reaching number one around the globe and establishing the Rolling Stones as the second-biggest band in the world, behind only the Beatles. As with many Rolling Stones songs, the key hook is the guitar riff: a fuzz-toned, insistent series of ascending and descending notes that rates among the most captivating and memorable riffs in rock history. Set against a beat suitable for foot-stomping and hand-clapping, Mick Jagger delivers the verses in a hushed, ambiguous tone that hovers between commentary and sarcastic nastiness. The group approaches the verse with a series of increasingly urgent, tense harmonizations on the words "and I try" before exploding into the chorus: a cathartic release of all the frustration that has been building throughout the song, the opening fuzz riff reappearing in full force as Jagger half-screams the title (or most of it, at any rate) in a manner that compels the listener to sing-shout along. The chorus then turns into a stream-of-consciousness catalog of complaints about the irritations of modern life, touring, the media, and (of course) getting laid.

Rolling Stone calls it the 2nd greatest song of all-time.

5) My Generation - The Who

The Who, like everyone else, were trying to recreate the success of the Beatles.  But that wasn't their destiny.  Their individual talents were taking them in another direction.  While they had the pop sensibilities of Pete Townshend, their extraordinary rhythm section comprised of John Entwhistle and Keith Moon demanded a different approach and sound.  I'm going to link two videos of "live" performances from 1965.  The first is an attempt to capitalize on the Beatles sound. It's a fine pop song.  The second is the iconic My Generation, complete with bass solo from The Ox. I find the contrast of these two videos to be just wonderful.  The first is the happy sounding pop of The Beatles, Herman and the Hermits, Dave Clarke 5, etc.  The second is The fucking Who.  Keith Moon going nuts.  John Entwhistle thumping away.  Fantastic.

You certainly don't need to watch both of these through to the end.   In the first, note the guitar Pete is playing.  George Harrison of the Beatles was responsible for a TON of Rickenbachers being sold in the mid-60's.  The Byrds, The Who, everybody wanted that jangly sound that George had. Pete eventually went with an SG and others, but at the outset, everybody wanted to sound like George. Obviously nobody is playing in this one, but it's still fun and instructive.  Video Link

The second is from an early performance of My Generation.  Note the great bass solo (a relative rarity for the time) from Entwhistle, the manic energy of Keith Moon on drums.....and the open hostility from the band toward Roger Daltry.  The band had kicked him out, but brought him back as they started to become popular.  But during this performance they clearly still had issues.  It's hilarious. At the end Pete clearly just steps in front of Daltry and Roger throws his mic away in disgust.  Rock and Roll baby.

Rolling Stone says this about the 11th Greatest Song of all time:

Townshend opened the song with a two-chord assault that beat punk rock to the punch by more than a decade. Bassist John Entwistle took the solo breaks with crisp, grunting aggression — he had to buy three new basses to finish the recording, since his Danelectro's strings kept breaking and replacement strings weren't available. (He ended up playing the song on a Fender.) Roger Daltrey's stuttering, howling performance, Townshend and Entwistle's R&B-inspired backing vocals, and the upward key changes created a vivid, mounting anxiety that climaxed with a studio re-creation of the Who's live gear-trashing finales, with Townshend spewing feedback all over Keith Moon's avalanche drumming.

6) Out in the Street - The Who

Let's include a slightly deeper cut from The Who's first album.

Allmusic says this about their debut:

An explosive debut, and the hardest mod pop recorded by anyone. At the time of its release, it also had the most ferociously powerful guitars and drums yet captured on a rock record. Pete Townshend's exhilarating chord crunches and guitar distortions threaten to leap off the grooves on "My Generation" and "Out in the Street"; Keith Moon attacks the drums with a lightning, ruthless finesse throughout. Some "Maximum R&B" influence lingered in the two James Brown covers, but much of Townshend's original material fused Beatlesque hooks and power chords with anthemic mod lyrics, with "The Good's Gone," "Much Too Much," "La La La Lies," and especially "The Kids Are Alright" being highlights. "A Legal Matter" hinted at more ambitious lyrical concerns, and "The Ox" was instrumental mayhem that pushed the envelope of 1965 amplification with its guitar feedback and nonstop crashing drum rolls. While the execution was sometimes crude, and the songwriting not as sophisticated as it would shortly become, the Who never surpassed the pure energy level of this record.


7) Strychnine - The Sonics

I could have picked any number of songs from The Sonics debut "Here are the Sonics!!" The White Stripes wish they rocked this hard ;).  Throughout the history of Rock there is always going to be an undercurrent of bands that want to keep the music in it's rawest, purest form. Garage Rock, Punk, grunge...we'll get back to all of them.  They all listened to The Sonics...or should have.

rateyourmusic says this about the 45 with The Witch/Psycho double shot.

This 45 is an all killer, no filler one-two punch of garage rock from Tacoma, Washington that inspired the grunge movement both stylistically and geographically. Lead singer Gerry Roslie has raspy vocals that sound like gargling gravel, while the Parypa Brothers on bass and guitar used to attack their speakers with an ice pick in pursuit of the rawest sounds possible. Steadfastly refusing to acknowledges the changes wrought by the British Invasion, the Sonics had a sound that served as colossal F.U. to the Beatles, sticking to the standard pre-Beatles combo format of bass, guitar, organ, and snarling saxophone.  The saxophone might have made the Sonics sound retro at the time, but now they almost sound like a premonition of how punk rock and new wave made saxophones cool again (e.g., The Stooges, Fun House; X-Ray Spex, Oh Bondage Up Yours!).  Besides, the lyrical content on both the A-side and the B-side are all about how the wimmen are driving ya cray-ay-ay-ay-azy, which means that the Sonics had hipster misogyny down pat at least a year before the Rolling Stones caught on (e.g., Under My Thumb, Stupid Girl). 


8) "I've Been Loving You Too Long" - Otis Redding 

What to say about Otis.  With the passing of Sam Cooke in December of the previous year, fully a quarter of the songs on Redding's third album, Otis Blue were remake's of Cooke's songs. Cooke was Otis's idol and the tragedy of losing both of them at such a young age is one of music history's great injustices.  I could really list every song on this album as it truly is a classic in every sense of the word.  This is also the pinnacle of Stax records.  Otis really solidified the studio as a mover and shaker in the soul music world.  As allmusic says:

Otis Redding's third album, and his first fully realized album, presents his talent unfettered, his direction clear, and his confidence emboldened, with fully half the songs representing a reach that extended his musical grasp. More than a quarter of this album is given over to Redding's versions of songs by Sam Cooke, his idol, who had died the previous December, and all three are worth owning and hearing. Two of them, "A Change Is Gonna Come" and "Shake," are every bit as essential as any soul recordings ever made, and while they (and much of this album) have reappeared on several anthologies, it's useful to hear the songs from those sessions juxtaposed with each other, and with "Wonderful World," which is seldom compiled elsewhere. Also featured are Redding's spellbinding renditions of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (a song epitomizing the fully formed Stax/Volt sound and which Mick Jagger and Keith Richards originally wrote in tribute to and imitation of Redding's style), "My Girl," and "You Don't Miss Your Water." "Respect" and "I've Been Loving You Too Long," two originals that were to loom large in his career, are here as well; the former became vastly popular in the hands of Aretha Franklin and the latter was an instant soul classic. Among the seldom-cited jewels here is a rendition of B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby" that has the singer sharing the spotlight with Steve Cropper, his playing alternately elegant and fiery, with Wayne Jackson and Gene "Bowlegs" Miller's trumpets and Andrew Love's and Floyd Newman's saxes providing the backing. Redding's powerful, remarkable singing throughout makes Otis Blue gritty, rich, and achingly alive, and an essential listening experience.

9) Love Supreme - John Coltrane

This is going to be a challenging listen for many of you.  This is Jazz with a capital "J".  Just let it flow over you.  You've already heard Coltrane on Miles Davis' cut So What in 1959.

Rolling Stone calls Love Supreme the 47th greatest album of all-time.

Two important things happened to John Coltrane in 1957: The saxophonist left Miles Davis' employ to join Thelonious Monk's band and hit new heights in extended, ecstatic soloing. Coltrane also kicked heroin addiction, a vital step in a spiritual awakening that climaxed with this legendary album-long hymn of praise – transcendent music perfect for the high point of the civil rights movement. The indelible four-note theme of the first piece, "Acknowledgment," is the humble foundation of the suite. But Coltrane's majestic, often violent blowing (famously described as "sheets of sound") is never self-aggrandizing. His playing soars with nothing but gratitude and joy. You can't help but go with him.

allmusic says:

Easily one of the most important records ever made, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his pinnacle studio outing that at once compiled all of his innovations from his past, spoke of his current deep spirituality, and also gave a glimpse into the next two and a half years (sadly, those would be his last). Recorded at the end of 1964, Trane's classic quartet of Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison stepped into the studio and created one of the most thought-provoking, concise, and technically pleasing albums of their bountiful relationship (not to mention his best-selling to date). From the undulatory (and classic) bassline at the intro to the last breathy notes, Trane is at the peak of his logical yet emotionally varied soloing while the rest of the group is remarkably in tune with Coltrane's spiritual vibe. Composed of four parts, each has a thematic progression leading to an understanding of spirituality through meditation. From the beginning, "Acknowledgement" is the awakening of sorts that trails off to the famous chanting of the theme at the end, which yields to the second act, "Resolution," an amazingly beautiful piece about the fury of dedication to a new path of understanding. "Persuance" is a search for that understanding, and "Psalm" is the enlightenment. Although he is at times aggressive and atonal, this isn't Trane at his most adventurous (pretty much everything recorded from here on out progressively becomes much more free, and live recordings from this period are extremely spirited), but it certainly is his best attempt at the realization of concept -- as the spiritual journey is made amazingly clear. A Love Supreme clocks in at just over 30 minutes, but if it had been any longer it could have turned into a laborious listen. As it stands, just enough is conveyed. It is almost impossible to imagine a world without A Love Supreme having been made, and it is equally impossible to imagine any jazz collection without it.

Rubber Soul - The Beatles

10) Norwegian Wood - The Beatles
11) In My Life - The Beatles


With any other band we'd be talking about Rubber Soul as their pinnacle and still consider them one of the greatest bands of all-time.  With The Beatles, however, we're simply run out of superlatives.   As Consequence of Sound says of their 70th greatest album of all time:

It’s difficult to make one of the greatest albums of all time (understatement of this and the previous century). The Beatles made several, and Rubber Soul is undoubtedly amongst them. That tremendous bass and guitar to open up “Drive My Car”, courtesy of legends (again, an understatement) Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The only Lennon/McCartney/Starkey credit in the band’s discography, “What Goes On” is one of Ringo’s finest moments. “I’m Looking Through You” is one of McCartney’s finest offerings, with the scream of “You’re not the same!” providing one of the highlights of an album chock-full of them. However, this is John Lennon’s album. Picture Rubber Soul without the sitar-infused “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”, the somber “Nowhere Man”, the sensual “Girl”, the dark “Run for Your Life”, and arguably the greatest love song of them all, “In My Life”. It’s hard to imagine that later Beatles records actually managed to top it. 

Again, the crime is what I am leaving off. Rubber Soul demands a complete listen at some point.


11) Subterraneon Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan

Sometimes labeled the first rap song,

It seems fair to say that, when it was released in March 1965, Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was totally unexpected by most people, that it sounded like nothing anybody had ever heard before, and that it utterly transformed Bob Dylan's career and the history of popular music along with it. In January 1965, however, Dylan went into the studio with a five-piece electric band -- two guitars, piano, bass, and drums -- the same instrumentation he had used on "Mixed Up Confusion" a little more than two years earlier -- and cut some more rock & roll. The first product of this effort was "Subterranean Homesick Blues," released as a single and as the leadoff track of the album Bringing It All Back Home. In four lengthy verses, with no real chorus (though the line "Look out, kid" appeared in the second part of every verse) and no mention of the title, Dylan delved into a free association of rhymes and catch phrases. The song contained depictions of a variety of characters including Johnny, "the man in the trench coat," "the man in the coon-skin cap in the big pen," Maggie, "girl by the whirlpool," and others, and, in the second parts of each verse, various pieces of cautionary advice for the kid, including everything from "Don't try No Doz" to "try to avoid the scandals." It wasn't a protest song in the way that some of Dylan's earlier songs had been, but the lyrics clearly expressed social discontent, with lines like "Twenty years of schoolin'/And they put you on the day shift." Dylan spat out the words in a staccato rhythm while the band rollicked along in a ramshackle manner. The whole thing was oddly exhilarating, but "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was easily the strangest single Columbia Records had ever released. It was also a hit, at least a modest one, peaking just inside the Top 40, Dylan's first single to reach the charts. With the push of a hit single, Bringing It All Back Home became Dylan's first Top Ten album; two years later it would become one of his first LPs to go gold. This commercial success introduced the style of folk-rock, which became massively popular in 1965, as the likes of the Byrds, Cher, and the Turtles scored hits with Dylan songs, Dylan himself had more hits, and many other people copied the style. Dylan had combined the lyrical quality of folk music with the kinetic power of rock & roll, and things were never the same after that. Beyond the music business, the song's air of iconoclasm and paranoia turned out to be an accurate forecast of the rest of the 1960s. Its references to undercover law enforcement ("The phone' s tapped anyway," "Watch the plain clothes") were only too relevant to political activists, who were inspired by lines like "Don't follow leaders" and, particularly, "You don't need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows," which inspired a radical offshoot of the SDS to call itself the Weathermen. There have been only a handful of covers of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" over the years, among them a version by Nilsson on his 1974 Pussy Cats album and one by Red Hot Chili Peppers on their The Uplift Mofo Party Plan album in 1987. But the song remains a striking example of Dylan's work, which has turned out to be enormously influential.




12) Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan

While the song came out in the middle of the year, it would be remiss to have anything else as the closer for 1965.  Like a Rolling Stone changed the world. Musically and culturally.

I like what Consequence of Sound says about the album Highway 61 Revisited:

The sneering put-down “Like a Rolling Stone” is arguably rock and roll’s greatest revelation, but Highway 61 Revisited is perhaps best described by a lyric from the album’s own “Ballad of a Thin Man” on which Dylan sings, “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.” This record is nearly an hour of mostly electrified blues that places the listener in a room with no less than Jack the Ripper, Lady Jane Grey, and Einstein disguised as Robin Hood. From the surreal romp of the title track to the delicate strumming of the record’s epic closer, “Desolation Row”, precise meaning always seems just out of reach, and yet a nerve is always touched somehow. The language, both musically and lyrically, of Highway 61 Revisited is poetic, sarcastic, and ironic—tongues that have always spoken to some essential part in the human makeup. And while listeners may never quite get Dylan, everyone comes away with something worthwhile.

rateyourmusic on the song:

Like a Rolling Stone represented Dylan's version of the raucous organ-fueled rock that he heard in the Animals version of House of the Rising Sun, a remake that forced Dylan to drop the song from his concert repertoire.  The song had its genesis in a 10-page poem that Dylan had written while fueled on amphetamines, but he successfully distilled the word salad down to its essence.  Even so, the song still had a running time of 6 minutes, which made Columbia understandably reluctant to release it as a single, but the song proved so popular on Top 40 radio that it opened up radio station formats to longer songs in a way that made everything else from Macarthur Park to Hey Jude to the album version of Light My Fire possible. 

When Bruce Springsteen was asked about the first time he heard the song, he said it sounded as if "somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind."  When Paul McCartney recalled the first time he heard it, he said, "It seemed to go on and on forever.  It was just beautiful...  He showed it was possible to go a little further." Frank Zappa said that, when he heard it, "I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else.'... But it didn't do anything, it sold but nobody responded to it the way that they should have." 


Rolling Stone on their Greatest Song of All-Time.  Number 1.

The most stunning thing about "Like a Rolling Stone" is how unprecedented it was: the impressionist voltage of Dylan's language, the intensely personal accusation in his voice ("Ho-o-o-ow does it fe-e-e-el?"), the apocalyptic charge of Kooper's garage-gospel organ and Mike Bloomfield's stiletto-sharp spirals of Telecaster guitar, the defiant six-minute length of the June 16th master take. No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.

Yet Dylan obsessed over the forward march in "Like a Rolling Stone." Before going into Columbia Records' New York studios to cut it, he summoned Bloomfield, the guitarist in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, to Woodstock to learn the song. "He said, 'I don't want you to play any of that B.B. King shit, none of that fucking blues,' " recalled Bloomfield (who died in 1981). " 'I want you to play something else.' " Dylan later said much the same thing to the rest of the studio band, which included pianist Paul Griffin, bassist Russ Savakus and drummer Bobby Gregg: "I told them how to play on it, and if they didn't want to play it like that, well, they couldn't play with me."

Just as Dylan bent folk music's roots and forms to his own will, he transformed popular song with the content and ambition of "Like a Rolling Stone." And in his electrifying vocal performance, his best on record, Dylan proved that everything he did was, first and always, rock & roll. " 'Rolling Stone' 's the best song I wrote," he said flatly at the end of 1965. It still is.

Pitchfork might say it best, IMO:

"Like a Rolling Stone" is one of Dylan's strangest and most enthralling moments, a big, shambling statement that hovers on the verge of total dissolution, threatening to shimmy your record player (and, potentially, your entire life) off the shelf and onto the floor. One minute in, when Dylan finally hits the chorus, glibly hollering "How does it feeeel ?" to an unnamed subject (or possibly himself), his sneer is so convincing it's difficult not to feel deeply ashamed of everything you've ever done, but still desperate for five more minutes of lashings.

It's hard to overstate the cultural heft of "Like a Rolling Stone", which puttered to #2 on the pop chart (the first song of its length to do so) and hovered there for nearly three months. In 2005's Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus exhausts 200 pages dissecting the socio-political context and lyrical nuances of "Like a Rolling Stone", ultimately christening the track "a triumph of craft, inspiration, will, and intent," and, more importantly, "a rewrite of the world itself." Certainly, the song transforms every time it's played, expertly adapting to new generations and new vices, just wobbly and amorphous and dangerous enough to knock us over again and again.


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