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

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