Music Project Week 2 : 1963

1963.  Big year in music.  Bob Dylan makes his mark and Beatlemania begins.  Wow.  Before we dive into that, let's make sure everyone understands what it is we're doing here.  I'm basically looking through the years to find important, influential and great music.  I have to leave a lot of things out, for the purpose of keeping things moving at a reasonable pace.  Just because we stopped talking about Elvis in 1956 doesn't mean he disappeared from the music scene. Not true, but for all of Elvis' tremendous popularity and cultural presence (he made a ton of movies), his musical influence really started to wane.  By all means, go back and listen to his music. A tremendous singer.

Similarly, whenever you approach a subject chronologically and you are talking about an evolution (in art or thought or anything really) it's always attractive to try and identify clear transitions.  The "First to xxxxx" or the "Last to ever xxxxx" etc.  Rarely, if ever, is that easily identified or even exist.  Influences are tricky things and it is entirely possible for 2 people to "invent" the same thing.  There is also definitional ambiguity.  First punk band?  I don't know, define punk music for me.  Transitions are gradual.  I will try to stay away from ascribing precedence as much as possible, hoping to convey general trends and the swirling nature of artistic influences.

Having said all that, 1963 is still a bit of a landmark.  Folk music takes off in the US and eventually filters back to the UK and Beatlemania explodes everywhere.  Ok, that's not exactly true.  1963 saw the Beatles conquer their homeland UK, and December 1963 finally saw the release of their first US single "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."  In February 1964 the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and by April they had the top 5 selling singles in the US.  Never before, and never since, has one band dominated popular music in the same way. We'll have plenty of time to talk in depth about the Beatles as we progress through the 60's, but it's remarkable to note at this point that all the great music we'll be listening to from them was created in only 7 years. They broke up in 1969 (officially 1970, but it was over before then).  Remarkable.  We're just getting started with them.

Before we get to the music though, we need some historical context.  In August 1963 there was the landmark "March on Washington" civil rights rally at which Martin Luther King gave his memorable "I have a dream" speech.  Just 3 months later in Dallas President Kennedy was assassinated.  By the end of the year, the US had assigned over 15,000 "military advisors" to South Vietnam.  That "innocence"  of the 50's we talked about last week is definitely is over. The music is just starting to reflect that (see Dylan, Bob).

On to the music.

Motown is really starting to find it's groove.  Here is the vaunted "Wall of Sound" Motown came to be identified with.  Production to the max. Full orchestra, background singers, layers of sound.  Everyone from the Beach Boys to the Beatles were influenced by this new studio production.

1) "Be My Baby" - Ronettes

Pitchfork calls it the 6th greatest song of the 60's:

What makes it soar, punch holes in hearts as well as walls, is the lead vocal by Ronnie Bennett. Bennett's voice was a little raw, unlike Darlene Love or Diana Ross, and her kittenish performance that strains slightly at the chorus transmutes the slightly sappy lyrics into possibly the best pop song of all time.

Rolling Stone has it as the 22nd best song of all-time:

Phil Spector rehearsed this song with Ronnie Bennett (the only Ronette to sing on it) for weeks, but that didn't stop him from doing 42 takes before he was satisfied. Aided by a full orchestra (as well as a young Cher, who sang backup vocals), Spector created a lush, echo-laden sound that was the Rosetta stone for studio pioneers such as the Beatles and Brian Wilson, who calls this his favorite song. "The things Phil was doing were crazy and exhausting," said Larry Levine, Spector's engineer. "But that's not the sign of a nut. That's genius."

Video Link

We're going to be looking at albums for the rest of this year, as the singles are less important than the body of work and what it meant to music.

2) Live at the Apollo - James Brown 

Allmusic says:

The affirmative screams and cries of the audience are something you've never experienced unless you've seen the Brown Revue in a Black theater. If you have, I need not say more; if you haven't, suffice to say that this should be one of the very first records you ever own.

Rolling Stone calls it the 25th greatest album of all time:

Perhaps the greatest live album ever recorded. From the breathless buildup of the spoken intro through terse, sweat-soaked early hits such as "Try Me" and "Think" into 11 minutes of the raw ballad "Lost Someone," climaxing with a frenzied nine-song medley and ending with "Night Train," Live at the Apollo is pure, uncut soul. And it almost didn't happen. James Brown defied King Records label boss Syd Nathan's opposition to a live album by arranging to record a show himself – on October 24th, 1962, the last date in a run at Harlem's historic Apollo Theater. His intuition proved correct: Live at the Apollo – the first of four albums Brown recorded there – charted for 66 weeks.

"The Hardest Working Man in Show-busines", Mr. James Brown.  James Brown was funk, soul and theater wrapped up into a powerhouse performer.  The Apollo theater is/was the premier music hall for black performers in the Harlem neighborhood of New York.

I'm going to link two videos both from the same performance in 1964. This was famous TAMI show which included James Brown, Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, and the Rolling Stones (among others).  The Stones followed James Brown and Keith Richards called that one of the biggest mistakes in the bands history.  You never follow JB.  For lazy people you can just watch the first video as it shows the closing song of his act that night.  The second video is longer and shows his full performance.  The man sells it. If you only watch the short one, keep in mind that he's already killed 'em for about 15 minutes before his finale. The frenzy is full on .

"Night Train" Only - Video Link

Full Performance - Video Link

So let's talk just a second about popular music in 1963 and what Bob Dylan did.  Almost all the songs we've listened to up to this point have been about boy meets girl or boy wants girl or girl wants boy back or some variation on that theme. While Bob wrote some songs about relationships, what Dylan brought was something different.  Rolling Stone says this about his Freewheelin' album of 1963: On Dylan's second album, the poetry and articulate fury of his lyrics and the simple, compelling melodies in songs like "Masters of War" and "Blowin' in the Wind" transformed American songwriting. Not bad for a guy who had just turned 22. 

Dylan was an angry poet.  The beauty of his songs is the timelessness of the message.  There is just enough ambiguity for the song to mean something to everyone at every time.  But you really do have to try and listen to the lyrics....which is not something I always do.  Dylan is an artist I'm still learning to appreciate. I'm trying to think of it more as musical poetry.


3) The Freewheelin Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan

According to Wikipedia:

Whereas his debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, Freewheelin' represented the beginning of Dylan's writing contemporary words to traditional melodies. Eleven of the thirteen songs on the album are Dylan's original compositions. The album opens with "Blowin' in the Wind", which became an anthem of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary soon after the release of Freewheelin'. The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as amongst Dylan's best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".

Dylan's lyrics embraced stories taken from the headlines about civil rights and he articulated anxieties about the fear of nuclear warfare. Balancing this political material were love songs, sometimes bitter and accusatory, and material that features surreal humor. Freewheelin' showcased Dylan's songwriting talent for the first time, propelling him to national and international fame. The success of the album and Dylan's subsequent recognition led to his being named as "Spokesman of a Generation", a label Dylan repudiated.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan reached number 22 in the United States (eventually going platinum), and became a number-one hit in the United Kingdom in 1964. In 2003, the album was ranked number 97 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2002, Freewheelin' was one of the first 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

Going into detail about the powerful "Masters of War" Allmusic says:

This blistering, acerbic protest song against war profiteers exposed Dylan's heightened moral sensibility and established him as the most venomous folksinger around. It was a scary time: the cold war was in full swing and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union to the verge of nuclear disaster. President Eisenhower had warned of the dangers of the military industrial complex, and desperate times called for desperate songs. Here Dylan took off the gloves to deliver a most extreme anti-militarist protest. Through a timeless modal folk melody (borrowed from the English folk song "Nottamun Town") grafted onto a minimalist acoustic guitar strum, Dylan exuded a raw primal howl of moral violation against those who "build the big bombs." The singer can "see through" their masks of propriety and moral superiority, and shows them up for the cowardly, power-mongering, money-grabbing hypocrites they are. The righteous anger is about as extreme as it can get: the masters are equated to Judas Iscariot; they make people afraid of bringing children into the world. In one verse Dylan deals with the counterarguments likely to be heard from the enemy: that he's too young and ignorant and has no right to speak out of turn. He dispels the criticisms with a swift stroke: "there's one thing I know/even Jesus would never/forgive what you do." The final verse concludes with a wicked curse, "I hope that you'll die/and your death'll come soon," and ends with the singer standing over their grave 'til he's sure that they're dead. Dylan had, even at this early stage, mastered the art of the "finger pointing" song. This was not folk music for mamby-pambies.

Here's Pearl Jam performing the song on the Letterman Show. Video Link

The next song we're going to hear is Blowin' in the Wind.  From a youtube intro:

Although it has been described as a protest song, it poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war and freedom. The refrain "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind" has been described[by whom?] as "impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind".

In 1999, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2004, it was ranked #14 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time".

The is for the song as performed by Peter, Paul and Mary.  Dylan was an upstart in the folk scene at this point, and he gained his "street cred" if you will by established folk stars like Peter, Paul and Mary covering his songs.  Their version is just wonderful; the three part harmonies are beautiful.   Jeff, Mike and Sheila Frantz sang this song a lot on our car trips and our move across the US in 1976.  Looking back, my mom was probably a folkie, hippie, beatnik at heart.  The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind..... Video Link

And here we go.  Time to Meet the Beatles.  The Beatles are going to dominate this Music Project for about the next 7 years.  They were and are the most important band in popular music.  In 1963 their second release "Please, Please, Me" became a hit.  They rushed into the studio to make a full album and banged out their first album in one day.

4) "Please, Please Me" - The Beatles

As Allmusic says:

Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins. As the songs rush past, it's easy to get wrapped up in the sound of the record itself without realizing how the album effectively summarizes the band's eclectic influences. Naturally, the influences shine through their covers, all of which are unconventional and illustrate the group's superior taste. There's a love of girl groups, vocal harmonies, sophisticated popcraft, schmaltz, R&B, and hard-driving rock & roll, which is enough to make Please Please Me impressive, but what makes it astonishing is how these elements converge in the originals. "I Saw Here Standing There" is one of their best rockers, yet it has surprising harmonies and melodic progressions. "Misery" and "There's a Place" grow out of the girl group tradition without being tied to it. A few of their originals, such as "Do You Want to Know a Secret" and the pleasantly light "P.S. I Love You," have dated slightly, but endearingly so, since they're infused with cheerful innocence and enthusiasm. And there is an innocence to Please Please Me. the Beatles may have played notoriously rough dives in Hamburg, but the only way you could tell that on their first album was how the constant gigging turned the group into a tight, professional band that could run through their set list at the drop of a hat with boundless energy. It's no surprise that Lennon had shouted himself hoarse by the end of the session, barely getting through "Twist and Shout," the most famous single take in rock history. He simply got caught up in the music, just like generations of listeners did.


5) "With the Beatles" - The Beatles

Here's the thing, after that first album was such a success and they exploded in the UK, they were right back in the studio to record a follow up album, With the Beatles and it was released in November of the same year. Amazing.  Both releases were UK only though.  Later, material from both albums were combined on Meet the Beatles for US release....but that's not until 1964. Two great albums in the same year. The second one a clear progression from the first. Amazing.

Here's what Rolling Stone has to say about With the Beatles, number 6 on their greatest albums of all time:

 The Beatles' debut, Please Please Me, was famously cut in a single day. It's tougher follow-up, however, came together in seven sessions over four months amid the group's cyclonic British success. While fashion photographer Robert Freeman's iconic cover shot captured four sober young men in chic black turtlenecks, the music inside couldn't be any more bracing, jubilant, or sexy. References to home and happy reunions pepper "It Won't Be Long," "All My Loving," and five other Lennon-McCartney originals in addition to George Harrison's admonitory debut, "Don't Bother Me." And once the Beatles covered Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" and Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me," they stayed covered.


Watch some videos from the first year of Beatlemania in the UK.   The first is from a performance at the Royal Variety Show (in front of the Queen) on Nov 4, 1963 (3 weeks before Kennedy's assassination).  It's not too long, but if you want to skip ahead, go to the 4:30 mark to see John's introduction to Twist and Shout...classic. Video Link

Second video is the first real taste of the frenzy that is "Beatlemania!!"  This is still in the UK, but the freakish response has already begun. Video Link

So the Playlist for the week is up on Subsonic.  Look in the Playlists for  "Music Project 2: 1963" Or follow the link below. Not quite as much variety this time, but I thought it was important to get a feel for early Beatles and Dylan as they both are going to play prominent parts in the next few years.

The playlist has James Brown, Bob Dylan and the Beatles as talked about above.  I've also included a song by the Impressions that charted.  We'll be seeing more of them and their lead singer Curtis Mayfield becomes a prime mover in the early 70's soul scene.  I've also added our first song by the Beach Boys.  Surf music was a huge craze at this time in the US and the Beach Boys were the most popular act.  We're going to be seeing a lot more of them over the next few years.  Also, Little Stevie Wonder makes his first appearance.  He hits the charts for the first time with Fingerprints.  12 years old at the time.

LISTEN TO PLAYLIST HERE

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