1970

1.  Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Waters. I feel like half of this blog is me talking about how I prefer subtler, sneakier forms of emotional expression to big, in-your-face ones, but that’s my taste and it’s hard to avoid mentioning it when big, in-your-face songs come along.  Case in point:  I’d take “Scarborough Fair” or “The Sound of Silence” over “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” a thousand times over.  In the context of a ballad, the big string section and reverb-drenched snare drums and soaring vocals totally turn me off and make it impossible for me to feel anything other than “get out of my face!”  I like the earlier parts of the song well enough, particularly Garfunkel’s voice, with his fragile tone and small, fast vibrato, trailing quiet reverb behind it.  But even there, I can tell that melodrama is just around the corner.  I have a feeling I’m going to be saying this a lot in the next few posts.

2.  The Carpenters – Close to You. Oh, so that’s where the line “why do birds suddenly appear every time you’re near” comes from.  I can’t quite figure out if I like this song or not.  It’s also a bit overblown, but it’s got a lot of intriguing and surprising orchestrational details, from the brief, spare, staccato trumpet solo, the occasional blips of harpsichord, and the heavily processed, shiny background vocals that show up from time to time.  I have a feeling Mr. Bungle had this song in mind as a reference point when they wrote “Sweet Charity,” though of course it’s nowhere near that weird.  Karen Carpenter’s voice is very prominent in the mix, giving her a larger-than-life quality that reminds me of the way Miles Davis’s trumpet floats over the other instruments in Bitches Brew.  And then there’s the passage starting “On the day that you were born,” which suddenly brings the song back to the 50s with a rhythm straight out of Tab Hunter’s “Young Love.”

3.  The Guess Who – American Woman. What have these guys got against American women?  The song is incredibly hostile — you can ever hear Chad Allan sing what sounds like “American woman, American shit” just as the song fades out — but the hostility is almost all generic, with lines like “American woman, get away from me” and “Don’t come hanging round my door.”  The only lyrics that give anything like an explanation are “I don’t need your war machines / I don’t need your ghetto scenes,” but I don’t know why they would blame women rather than male politicians for either of those things.  Pretty baffling.  Lyrics aside, it’s a pretty ordinary bluesy rock song.  Its most distinctive feature is the scratchy, droney, psychedelic-ish, mixolydian-inflected guitar riff at the end of the choruses.  Not much to say besides that.

4.  B.J. Thomas – Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. As with several of the other top hits of 1970, I’ve heard people sing bits of this one more often than I’ve actually heard the song.  Now that I’m listening to it more attentively, I keep thinking “oh, that reminds me of such-and-such” without being able to quite place what the such-and-such is.  Randy Newman?  Some later Beatles song?  Some indie-retro-pop song?  I don’t know, but I’m certain that the thing that’s tickling my memory is the combination of lazy close-miked guitar strumming and the tonic going to the tonic major seventh in 6/5 position, which together create an elusive summery nostalgic feeling.  And then there’s the way the piano is recorded:  it sounds like the mics are pretty much making out with the strings, which is one of the most distinctively early-70s-sounding things you can do when producing a song.  But enough about the production and arrangement. What about the composition?  It’s a cute song, with probably the cartooniest lyrics ever written about getting through hard times (“I just did me some talkin’ to the sun / And I said I didn’t like the way he got things done”) and a pleasantly leapy vocal line.  It’s also got a surprise at the end: a repeated faux-bossa riff in alternating 4/4 and 5/4.  Huh?

5.  Edwin Starr – War. More funk!  This one’s a very direct anti-Vietnam-War song, but it’s so damn fun that it’s hard to think about politics and global tragedy while listening to it.  “GOOD GOD Y’ALL!”  That’s almost as good as the “Get-up-a-with-the-get-down” from Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.”  I love the way Starr (always on the border between singing and screaming) and his backing vocalists (aggressive rhythmic chanting) trade parts of sentences:  “WAR!”  “What is it good for?”  “Absolutely…” “Nuthin’!”  Also love the rhyme of “heartbreaker” with “undertaker,” and the juicy clavinet basslines.  Let me officially predict right now:  funk will be the thing that keeps me going as I work my way through the top fives of the 1970s.

 

1969

1. The Archies – Sugar Sugar.  So the #1 hit in 1969 is by a fictional band.  Hyperreality is go!  As you might expect from a group of wholesome teenage comic book characters, the song is cute, catchy, vaguely British-Invasion-y and very lightweight.  And as you might expect from a group of session musicians, it does a really nice job with textures — highlights include the use of what sounds like a marimba doubling the recurring organ riff, the wide variety of backing vocal styles (Motown-ish repeated “honey”s, Beach Boys ba-ba-bas, and single-line interjections from Betty and Veronica), and the crunchy, buzzing organ that underlines the last couple of verses. 

2. The 5th Dimension – Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.  A medley of two songs from Hair.  The band somehow manages to sell the tremendously flaky lyrics of “Aquarius” (“Mystic crystal revelation / And the mind’s true liberation”) through sheer bravado and bombast, complete with rich vocal harmonies, a horn section and a string orchestra.  The complex melodies and chord progressions (does it get any more 1960s than the move from I to flat VII at the beginning of the chorus?) help too.  I’m intrigued by Florence LaRue’s voice, assuming that’s who I’m hearing in the right channel — somehow she sounds like a man singing in a high falsetto.  In “Let the Sunshine In,” the horns take over and the song becomes a hand-clapping, foot-stomping gospel anthem.  I’m not really that into hand-clapping, foot-stomping gospel anthems, but I guess it’s pretty good as far as that kind of thing goes.

The Temptations – I Can’t Get Next To You.  How have I gone so long without getting to know these guys?  I actually thought they were a girl group until I listened to this song.  Turns out they’re actually a funk band, and this song is unbelievably satisfying, from its bluesy piano intro to its ultra-crisp tambourines, from its crunchy muted guitar strumming to the wordless train-whistle crooning in the middle of the song, from Eddie Kendricks’ whooping falsetto vocals (calling the Jackson Five…) to Paul Williams ripping his vocal cords to shreds at the end.  The whole thing is played with an almost violent intensity that puts even other funk songs to shame.  My favorite part is the “uhhhhhNGYAH!!!” right before the drum solo.  

4. The Rolling Stones – Honky-Tonk Women.  There’s still something that bugs me about the Stones.  Maybe I’m being unfair, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m listening to a bunch of people who are proud of being dumb and aggressive, people who would probably call me a fag and beat me up if I ran into them in a bar.  My favorite part of the song by a long shot is the instrumental break after the second chorus, in which country piano, low brass and a couple of layers of distorted guitars all crowd on top of each other;  other than that it’s a little dull.  Don’t tell the band I used a semicolon there.  I also think it’s funny that these four British guys are pretending to be from rural Southern America.  Although maybe it’s not so strange:  pretending to be a member of an ethnic group or nationality other than your own seems to be one of the well-established tradition in pop music.

5.  Sly & the Family Stone – Everyday People.  I’ve heard Sly & the Family Stone described as the creators of funk, but this isn’t nearly as funky as “I Can’t Get Next To You” (aside from the fact that it sits on the tonic chord for the entire song, something Parliament would do many times in years to come).  Actually, it sounds like something that might appear on Sesame Street, with its singsong melodies and wishful-shading-into-preachy lyrics about social harmony expressed through goofy color metaphors (“There is a blue one who can’t accept the green one…”).  And as a matter of fact, Sesame Street was launched just nine months after the song hit number one.  The song also contains the nonsense phrase “scooby dooby doo,” and sure enough, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! debuted just seven months later.  Did “Everyday People” accidentally spawn the entirety of 70s kids’ culture?  Apparently it popularized the phrase “different strokes for different folks,” too.  Honestly, I find the whole thing pretty annoying.  Fighting prejudice is great, but surely it doesn’t need to be done in such a dopey, wide-eyed way.

 

1968

1. The Beatles – Hey Jude. After a few years of listening only to classical music, the Beatles were the first rock band I ever got into. And yet, despite the fact that I’ve been a Beatles fan for over a decade, I’ve never gotten to know “Hey Jude” that well, because I got to know the band mainly through their albums, and “Hey Jude” was only released as a single. I never thought much of it based on the times I heard it in the background of movies and commercials, plus karaoke renditions and people singing bits and pieces of it, but listening to it now, I find that I like it quite a bit. The na-na-na-na ending, which literally takes up more than half the song, is certainly a bit excessive, especially since it doesn’t have the increasing intensity or the addictive chord loop of the similarly repetitive “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” — but the first half builds up a rich, satisfying texture, starting with the piano in the right channel, adding a strumming guitar in the left, and then adding chordal backing vocals in the center. Later the backing vocals add little melodies (e.g. after the line “You have found her, now go and get her”) and a distorted, slightly out-of-tune lead guitar makes an occasional interjection (e.g. after the line “You’re looking for someone to perform with”). And more importantly, the chorus contains one of those little gestures that gets me for reasons I can’t quite understand — a little appoggiatura, mi resolving to re, over a V7/IV chord, like on the word “well” in the line “And well you know that it’s a fool.” Actually, it’s the same relationship between melody and harmony that I commented on in “Ode to Billie Joe,” except that the seventh chord there really is a I7, a tonic with a bluesy added minor seventh, rather than a V7/IV, a chord that leads away from the tonic toward a new key, which means that the Beatles’ version has a foward-moving, directional quality, while the Bobbie Gentry version feels static.

2. Paul Mauriat – Love is Blue. An easy-listening instrumental featuring harpsichord and the occasional oboe against the backrop of a full orchestra and a prominent drum-kit backbeat. Seems like something that might have been a themesong for a Western romance, although Wikipedia tells me that it started out the Luxembourgian entry in the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest (!) before Mauriat did his instrumental version. It’s mostly pretty drippy, and even manages to make my favorite chord, iii, seem schmaltzy rather than genuinely sad. The only good part is when the texture thins out and the harpsichord gets to play some angular figures against a i-IV-i chord progression.

3. Bobby Goldsboro – Honey. OK, what the hell is going on with this song? At first I thought it was a sentimental Christmas ballad, with its glockenspiel and theremin and soupy string section, and its lyrics about trees and snow and puppies. Then I thought, geez, this is one hell of a creepy Christmas song, not just cheesy but demonically cheesy, between Goldsboro’s quavery, vulnerable voice and the moment two thirds of the way through where the music shifts up a whole step and a backing choir starts crowding the texture like walls closing in on your head. But then I looked more closely at the lyrics and realized that they’re actually pretty disturbing too, and not in a kitschy way either.  The way Goldsboro describes Honey makes her sound mentally disabled — a volatile child-woman, an object of affectionate ridicule, someone who sits up late crying at radio dramas — and the song climaxes with her unexplained death, the backing choir representing the angels who took her away, and Goldsboro announces that his life is now an empty stage. All this set to music that sounds like it should be sandwiched between “White Christmas” and “Wonderful, Wonderful.” I guess it’s supposed to be a tearjerker, but I hear it mainly as unnerving.

4. Otis Redding – (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay. Here’s another song whose entire meaning changes when you listen more carefully to the lyrics. At first it seems like a pleasant, unassuming ode to laziness, but it’s actually about depression, about leaving your home because there’s nothing left for you there and spending the rest of your life staring out at the San Francisco Bay, with nothing else to look forward to. Once you realize that, Redding’s whistling solo at the end sounds darkly ironic, and the V/vi chords in the chorus sound hollow and lonely. If you ever need an example of emotional ambiguity in music, here it is. There are also a lot of nice textural details that are easy to ignore if you’re focused on the constant elements (the piano, the guitar and Redding’s distinctive voice): recurring samples of waves, rhythmic guitar fret noises, and a brass section that’s always kept in the background.  I approve.

5. The Rascals – People Got To Be Free. This song is boring, and the lyrics are generic hippie fluff. I don’t feel like writing about it.

 

1967

1. Lulu – To Sir, With Love. So in 1966, the #1 song was about how awesome it is to enlist in the Marines and die, and in 1967, we have a tribute to a romance between a high school girl and her teacher.  Throw in a pinch of massively unequal gender relations (see title), an overblown ending, a soupy string section, some seriously awkward prosody (“a friend who taught me RIGHT from wrong / and weak from strong, that’s a LOT to leeeeearn…”), and a handful of clichés about growing up that were at least expressed more vividly, if not less cornily, in Frankie Avalon’s “Bobby Sox to Stockings,” and you’ve got a recipe for inclusion in Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs, which is in fact where I first heard of this song.  There are a couple of nice musical details, like the contrast between the trebley, harsh timbre of the guitar chords and the smooth sound of Lulu’s voice, or the mixolydian inflections in the melody.  But geez.  The 60s has not been treating me well…

2. The Box Tops – The Letter. Alright, this I like!  A slinky melody, a cool-guy chord progression (i-VI-VII-IV), and Alex Chilton’s scrachy, almost Tom-Waits-ish vocals.  I should probably object to a white guy saying things like “said she couldn’t live without me no mo’,” but I like the sound of the song enough that I’m willing to pretend I didn’t notice that.  The ending is bizarre:  instead of moving from A minor to C major like it did for the previous choruses, it moves from A minor to Db major and does an instrumental version, superimposing a string melody that had previously been hidden in the background over some highly processed airplane sounds (the songs opening lyric being “gimme a ticket for an aer-o-plane”).  I guess it’s just that old trick of moving up a half-step, except that because they do it at a point where the song switches keys anyway, it comes across as a jarring modulation up a major third.

3. Bobbie Gentry – Ode to Billie Joe. Country has a reputation as a genre whose lyrics are more narrative-oriented than other forms of popular music, and “Ode to Billie Joe” is no exception.  The story is vivid and mysterious:  we’re told that Billie Joe jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge, and it’s suggested that the protagonist may have had something to do with it — she hears second-hand that a priest saw Billie Joe and “a girl who looked a lot like [her]” throwing something off the Choctaw Ridge — but we never find out what.  In an epilogue, the protagonist’s father has died, her mother is in a deep depression, and she herself seems to be consumed with regret over whatever it was that made Billie Joe kill himself.  It’s a really intriguing story;  the lyrics and a summary of the unanswered questions can be found here.  The song is intriguing on a musical level too, both texturally — the basic texture is Gentry’s smooth, husky voice accompanied by guitar and pizzicato double bass, but lush strings keep cutting in and out — and harmonically — it seems to be based on a blues progression, but it never gets to V7, alternating instead between I7 and IV7 and thus avoiding any sense of resolution.  The melody fixates on the figure la-sol-la-do, whose leap of a third suggests a pentatonic tonality that’s at odds with the te in the I7 chord.  None of these are particularly unusual things to find in a pop song, but the way they’re put together is subtly unnerving, in a way that really suits the lyrics.

4. The Association – Windy. THIS IS AWESOME.  It’s got all the juicy vocal harmonies of “Cherish,” but instead of being the Ultimate Emo Anthem, it’s a punchy, staccato tribute to an alarming woman named Windy who’s like “That Girl” crossed with one of the X-Men, “tripping down the streets of the city, smilin’ at everyone she sees,” but with”stormy eyes that flash at the sound of lies.”  There’s a harpsichord, a bouncy “Sugar Shack” flute solo, and an extra bar of nothing but repeated bass+harpsichord quarter notes thrown in before each section, which is particularly effective before the vocal harmonies explode in the first chorus.  All around a delicious, delirious experience.  Makes me want to dance down the streets of Haight-Ashbury, smashing car windows with thistles like in a Pippilotti Rist video installation.

5. The Monkees – I’m a Believer. I’m going to officially destroy my credibility now by admitting that until now I had only heard the Smash Mouth cover of this song, and furthermore, that I like it.  The original doesn’t have the later version’s pop-punk punchiness, but it is a fun little number.  I understand that the Monkees were a record-label construction designed to cash in on Beatlemania — the so-called “prefab four” — and you can hear plenty of references to the Beatles’ sound, from Mike Nesmith’s George-Harrison-ish guitar sound to the shoutier, bluesier version of the chorus during the fadeout, which recalls the ending of “I’m Looking Through You.”  One element that sets them apart is the use of a distorted electric organ — an integral enough part of the song’s sound that Smash Mouth adopted it for their version as well.  It’s certainly not as slavish a copy as “Lies” by the Knickerbockers.

OK, 1967 officially has my seal of approval, submissive schoolgirl anthem notwithstanding.

 

1966

1. SSgt Barry Sadler – The Ballad of the Green Berets. Well, I can’t say I expected to like a song with this title, but at least the lyrics are candid about the fact that one of the main things that happens when you’re a soldier is that you die.  The second line describes the Green Berets as “fearless men who jump and die,” and the last two stanzas are about a young woman finding out that her husband has “died for those oppressed”… and then making her son “one of America’s best,” presumably so that he can die too.  Hey wait — was this song secretly a plot by Valerie Solanas to kill off the entire male population?  Don’t answer that.  ”The Ballad of the Green Berets” is extremely simplistic musically speaking, without the flute-and-drum interludes of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” or the varied vocal styles of “The Battle of New Orleans.”  The closest it gets to interesting is the unexpected brass fanfares that appear between the lines in the final stanzas.  I can’t imagine how the song got so popular, unless it was just a reaction against the growing anti-war movement.

2. The Association – Cherish. If I hadn’t listened to the lyrics, I would think this was a tender love song, with its major seventh chords, sweet vocal harmonies and wistful melodies.  Turns out, though, it’s actually an expression of tremendous desperation: “Perish is the word that more than applies / To the hope in my heart each time I realize / That I am not gonna be the one to share your dreams…”  At one point he even accuses the addressee of “driving me out of my mind,” although I have to say I’m a little more worried about her, having to deal with a guy who seems to be one step away from becoming a stalker.  Most alarmingly, he dismisses the “thousand other guys” who hit on her as liars who tell her that they love her when all they want is to touch her face and hands (creepy fetishization or euphemism to get around record-label censors?)… and then goes on to say “you don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I could hold you.”  I have no idea if The Association were aware of the hipocrisy and mocking the narrator they constructed, or if they actually thought this was a sweet unrequited-love song, but either way, this might be the most culturally distressing song to crack the top five yet, and that’s saying something considering the existence of the Mills Brothers’ “Paper Doll.”

3. The Righteous Brothers – (You’re My) Soul and Inspiration. I don’t like this nearly as much as the Righteous Brothers’ previous hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”  It’s still got the harpsichords and the deep vocals, but for the most part it comes off as overwrought and overblown to me.  I don’t like feeling like a song’s manner of emotional expression consists of shouting in my ear.  The song does have an Ink-Spots-esque spoken interlude, though, which provides a certain continuity with the R&B tradition, and that section is introduced by a beautiful passage in which the texture is reduced to what sounds to me like only pitched percussion, although there could be a quiet guitar in there somewhere.

4. The Four Tops – Reach Out I’ll Be There. When I was visiting grad schools during my senior year of college, I took a number of rides in vans run by a company that picked people up in various parts of Connecticut and took them to airports in New York City.  Because they’ll pick you up pretty much anywhere and try to fill their vans, this often meant excursions into pretty remote places, and I remember one late night coming back from the airport, driving out into some suburban wasteland, in total darkness, with this song on the van’s radio.  I wasn’t familiar with it, but the chorus’s shifts between major and minor — “I’ll (V) be there (I) / with a love (iv) that will shelter you-ou-ou (V)” — seemed incredibly haunting.  Hearing it now at full volume and under less mysterious circumstances, it’s not so haunting, but it’s certainly satisfying.  I like the random extra bar of just drums and bass that the band inserts before each chorus, too.  I have to admit, though, the song does have a shouty quality like that of “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.”  I tend to like my soul a little sneakier — think “Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

5. ? and the Mysterians – 96 Tears. Minimalist garage rock is back!  This one actually feels like something concocted in someone’s garage, with its endlessly oscillating organ riff, harmonically motionless bridge, detached vocals and repetitive, seemingly meaningless lyrics.  The only thing I can think of to compare it to are the Silver Apples, an early synth band who never came anywhere near the singles charts.  Plus it’s written by a guy who legally changed his name to a question mark and whose real identity is still uncertain.  You can see why the punk movement got interested in it fifteen years later (see, for example, X quoting its title in “Johny Hit and Run Pauline”).

 

1965

1. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs – Wooly Bully. This song barely even exists, there’s so little to it — just an endlessly repeated riff that reminds me of the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out,” incomprehensible vocal interjections as sparse as a Count Basie piano solo, clattering pots-and-pans drumming, a blues progression and a generic rock ‘n’ roll sax solo.  It’s OK, but as minimalist garage rock goes, it’s got nothing on “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians.

2. The Four Tops – I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch). Before now, the only Four Tops song I’d heard was “Reach Out (I’ll Be There).”  I like that one a lot — I find the switching between major and minor in the chorus really evocative — but I’m not really feeling this one.  The production and arrangement are claustrophobic and overblown, with piano, jangly guitar, drums, some kind of mallet percussion, strings and backup vocals all competing with the lead vocal and often almost overwhelming it.  When things finally let up, with lead singer Levi Stubbs singing “When I call your name / Girl, it starts the flame” over nothing but a low piano riff and an occasional hi-hat, it’s a big relief.  I guess that makes it an effective dramatic moment, but it’s effective in a “Why are you hitting your head against the wall?” “Because it feels so good when I stop” kind of way.  (Incidentally, this is also how I feel about a lot of John Adams’s orchestration.)

3. The Rolling Stones – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. I never thought of the Rolling Stones as minimalist (in the pop sense, not the John Adams sense) before, but this is really almost as stripped-down and single-minded as “Wooly Bully.”  Honestly, I find it pretty boring, although Mick Jagger’s high register in the chorus has a certain unexpected seductive quality.  I don’t know whether I’m just not in the right mood or what, but I’m not getting a lot out of 1965 so far.  Give me the DEVO cover any day, babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby.

4. We Five – You Were On My Mind. OK, 1965 is officially redeemed.  The opening of “You Were On My Mind” is everything “I Can’t Help Myself” isn’t, texturally speaking:  it opens with just the drums, then adds a bouncy staccato bassline, and when the vocals first enter, that’s all there is underneath them.  When the guitars enter during the first refrain, they appear in isolated bursts, an icon of a guitar part more than an actual guitar part, like the “shoo-bop-shoo-bop” backing vocals in the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You.”  And the whole song is built like this:  rather than cycling through the same materials over and over again, it’s always introducing new elements and moving forward.  When the refrain returns, the guitar bursts are reinvented as sharp, loud, out-of-tune timbral attacks.  When the opening lyrics return, the whole group bursts in with ecstatic vocal harmonies, and suddenly we get an abrupt, startling key change and bluesy guitar riffs in the background.  And at the end, it’s suddenly Attack of the Jangle Guitars — for just two measures, and then the song stops.  The whole thing has a DIY, almost punkish quality, like an early, lo-fi version of Blondie.  And on top of that, it’s crammed with minor mediant chords, which as I’ve mentioned before, I always like.  P.S.  If anyone can figure out who Beverly Bivens sounds exactly like when she sings “whoa-oo-oh,” let me know, because it’s driving me crazy.  

(Edit, nine months later:  she sounds like Russell Mael from Sparks!  WTF?)

5. The Righteous Brothers – You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. What a great, thoroughly 60s opening!  A mixolydian melody that’s one part Jefferson Airplane and one part Marvin Gaye;  Bill Medley’s deep, soulful, eerie vocals;  tambourines and I think a harpsichord.  I also love how distant and muted the backup singers sound when they interrupt Medley and complete his sentence:  ”You’re trying hard not to show it / (baby)…”   Great bridge too, accompanied at first only by bass and vibraphone.  Overall I have to admit that the song is a bit diffuse, and Bobby Hatfield’s wild-and-crazy vocals don’t appeal to me the way Medley’s do, but it foreshadows the end of the decade better than anything to crack the top five so far.

 

1964

1. The Beatles – I Want to Hold Your Hand. It’s hard for me to imagine the Beatles being mega-hits at this point in their career. It’s not that they’re far from greatness, chronologically speaking: even less than a year later, with songs like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “You Can’t Do That,” they’ve totally nailed their sound, and perform with the ease and confidence of a great band. But the musical gulf between those songs and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is so enormous I find it amazing that they managed to bridge it at all. Here their singing is strained, their songwriting awkward. Just listen to the shouty high notes on the word “hand,” or the clumsy melodic and rhythmic break between the syntactically awkward lines “It’s such a feeling that, my love” and “I can’t hide.” If I had never heard the song, I would think it was by a mediocre Beatles knockoff band. Hell, there are Beatles knockoff bands who are considerably better than this: if you’re a Beatles fan and haven’t heard the Knickerbocker’s “Lies,” you’re seriously missing out.

2. The Beatles – She Loves You. Well, this one’s a little better. The lyrics are stupid (“She said she loves you / And you know that can’t be bad / Yes, she loves you / And you know you should be glad”) rather than merely simple (“But when I get home to you / I find the things that you do / Can make me feel alright”). But it’s got a nice chunky guitar riff before the verses, and a great falsetto “oo” — you can just picture John and Paul leaning into the same mike as all the teenage girls go wild over the unacknowledged homoerotic tension. And the end of the chorus includes an unexpected shift to minor, which would soon become a staple of the Beatles’ harmonic style in songs like “Another Girl” and “I’ll Be Back.”

3. Louis Armstrong – Hello, Dolly! I definitely wasn’t expecting Louis Armstrong to show up on the charts in 1964 — although now that I think back, I remember that I accidentally downloaded a 1961 version of his 1939 hit “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and it was clear from that recording that he was still going strong in the 60s. As for this specific song, it’s a charming, catchy guitar-based jazz number, the kind of thing I can imagine Django Reinhardt doing an instrumental version of, with a beautifully polyphonic improv break in which a clarinet and two trumpets vie for attention over a rich, lushly recorded bed of acoustic guitar, drums and possibly a buried piano. Interesting tidbit: although the song comes from a musical and wasn’t written for the pop charts, it still makes an explicit lyrical reference, just like Gary and Bing Crosby’s similarly retro “Simple Melody,” to the fact that its musical style is old-fashioned:  “The band’s playin’ / One of my old favorite songs from way back when.” I just checked out a clip from the original 1965 cast recording, and it’s done in a more modern style, with a string section, staid orchestration and a hint of tango — which means that Armstrong specifically chose a number about “songs from way back when” to record in his old-school, bouncy, polyphonic-improv style. The other difference between the cast-recording version and Armstrong’s is that in the original, the song is mostly sung by Dolly herself. Armstrong switches it to a mixture of second and third person, which means changing her flirtatious line “Find me an empty lap, fellas” to “Find her an empty lap, fellas.”  It’s an odd move that comes across a bit preumptuous and creepy, but since gender-bending post-punk covers hadn’t been invented yet in 1964, he didn’t have much of a choice.

4. Roy Orbison – Oh, Pretty Woman. Like “Cryin’”, a song I’d heard but never really listened to. I think I just don’t like Orbison all that much. The opening guitar riff is fantastic — it could be a textbook example of how much you can do with just a ninth chord, and I have the feeling the Beatles were paying close attention — but once the vocals come in I find the song rather blah. Sure, there are some nice touches, like Orbison’s throaty growl after the first chorus, which seems to imply that this seemingly romantic song is actually about raw lust, but when it comes down to it, it’s just not that interesting a tune.

5. The Beach Boys – I Get Around. An old favorite of mine, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint on the millionth listen. It doesn’t have the elegant simplicity of “Surfin’ USA”, but it makes up for it with early hints of the kaleidoscopic orchestration of Pet Sounds, like the squawking bari sax bassline and the fat Hammond organ riff in the verses. And then there’s the chorus, which is just ecstatic; maybe it’s because I first heard the song in a movie about a kid flying over Middle America in a spaceship, but it sounds to me like American youth’s need for speed translated directly into music, with its propulsive backing vocals and unexpected chord changes that are always reaching foward to the next moment.  And there’s also the song’s unexpected shift up a minor second during the bridge — a movie usually decried as cheesy, but to my hears it just contributes to the song’s feeling of irrepressible joy.  Wonderful.

 

1963

1. Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs – Sugar Shack. You know it’s really the 60s when you start getting songs about a guy’s love for a coffee shop girl with a black leotard and bare feet. And you know it’s still the early 60s when they wind up getting married. The music is also caught between eras: Gilmer’s voice is young and quavery in a doo wop kind of way, but his interjected “yeah”s make me think of Jefferson Airplane, and he’s accompanied by surf-rock bari saxes, muted reverb guitars, and Austin Powers piccolos (which at one point play something a lot like the closing guitar riff from the Beatles’ “I’m Looking Through You”). It’s really just a silly novelty song, but I find it exciting to see something new rising to the top. Maybe I was just projecting when I talked about pop music in crisis; maybe what I really meant was that I was getting sick of the dominant styles of the 50s.

2. The Beach Boys – Surfin’ USA. I’ve liked the Beach Boys ever since I heard “I Get Around” in the movie Flight of the Navigator at the age of six or seven, but I don’t think I quite understood why they were such an enormous hit until just now. Compared to what they were doing a few years later, “Surfin’ USA” is fun but primitive, a cheerful precursor to something more emotionally layered. But heard in the context of the hits of the early 60s, it suddenly stands out for its extraordinary compositional clarity. Like “Rock Around the Clock”, “Surfin’ USA” is a song with no fat on it: no superfluous strings, no rambly coda, nothing that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. In the verses, the main vocal line is accompanied by a simple alternation: a measure of four-on-the-floor bass-drum hits, then a measure with a classic surf-rock guitar lick and a long held chord in the backup vocals. When we get to the chorus, the guitar gets to keep the lick going and the backup vocals burst into activity, repeating the line “inside, outside, USA.” Later there’s a Hammond organ solo and a guitar solo, both simple, short and charming. It’s perfectly efficient songwriting, and it does a fantastic job conveying the image of a bright new youth culture that can be found, sporting “bushy bushy blond hairdos,” wherever there’s sun and sand.

3. Skeeter Davis – The End of the World. Another song I’ve heard before, but I’d always assumed it was from the 50s. It’s clear that, despite my comments above, doo-wop was still going strong in 1963 — and not just any doo-wop, but one of the most affecting songs I’ve ever heard from the genre. As Davis sings about how she can’t understand why the birds and the sun and the sea still exist now that her love has left her, with her slight Southern accent and air of youthful guilelessness, accompanied by plaintive piano arpeggios that slide through secondary keys with an emphasis on the desolate minor mediant (see also my comments on “Cryin’”), I could swear I’ve never heard anyone sound so alone. And because of the lyrics, it’s not just Skeeter Davis who’s alone: it’s the whole planet. We’re getting alarmingly close to “Twin Peaks” territory here.

4. The Cascades – Rhythm of the Rain. Here’s another song about lost love, but it couldn’t be further from “The End of the World,” emotionally speaking. With its folky vocal harmonies and bright, high-register electric piano riffs, it gives the impression of a song written mainly to be pleasant background music, with lyrics about a breakup only because the lyrics have to be about something. But there is one sad little chord change in the chorus, on the words “does that seem fair?” — and guess what? Once again it’s a move to the minor mediant. I guess I’ve discovered an effective little formula here. Maybe I can use it in my own music.

5. The Chiffons – He’s So Fine. A girl group number whose appeal I can’t understand at all. I guess I should give lead singer Judy Craig a bit of credit for being only 17 when the song came out, but I don’t particularly like her singing, which sounds strained to me, with a tight, tense-sounding vibrato. The songwriting is rather boring — the backing vocalists, for example, mostly sing “doo-lang, doo-lang, doo-lang” over and over again — and the lyrics are disturbingly self-effacing, with lines like “I’d do anything that he asked / Anything to make him my own.” Oh well — it seems there’s one every year that I can’t get much out of.

 

1962

1. Mr Acker Bilk – Stranger on the Shore. Unexpected things keep popping up on the charts. This time it’s a throwback to 1930s balladry, with a slow, romantic, rhythmically fluid melody and a book-chik guitar accompaniment buried deep below a lush string section. Instead of Judy Garland, though, we have the bowler-hatted, mustachioed British clarinetist Mr Acker Bilk, whose rich, warm, expressive style reminds me of Coleman Hawkins doing “Body and Soul.” It’s beautiful, but it’s so far from the dominant styles of early 60s pop music that it’s hard to imagine how it became #1 — or so I thought until I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was used as the theme for a BBC TV drama of the same name.

2. Ray Charles – I Can’t Stop Loving You. Obviously something was in the air in 1962, because here’s another retro song, again with boom-chik guitar part and string section, plus a pure-vowelled, high-sopranoed backing choir that wouldn’t feel too out of place in a Bing Crosby song. The retro effect is reinforced by the fact that the choir is recorded in mono — something which I assume was done specifically for that reason, since everyone else seems to have been recorded in stereo. Charles’s vocals and piano playing, by contrast, are modern, one part soul and one part lounge. Unfortunately, stylistic juxtaposition aside, I can’t say I find the song all that interesting.

3. Dee Dee Sharp – Mashed Potato Time. I like self-referential songs, and that includes songs about the dance you’re supposed to do to them. But this one is particularly loopy because it’s about how the Mashed Potato has been popular for a while, and how the kids like to find songs they can dance it to. Every verse ends with the name of another song, and every chorus includes some dopey reference to that song. For example: “They discovered it’s the most, man / The day they did it to ‘Please Mr. Postman’” — followed by “Mashed Potato, deliver the letter, yeah.” Another time it’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “Mashed Potato, a-weema-weh, a weema-weh” (or however you spell that). It’s also got the word “boss” and an early instance of the word “groovy.” Musically, it’s pure doo-wop, with repeated piano chords, nonsensical backing vocals, a I-vi-IV-V progression and a bassline that could practically come from a Casio keyboard preset. Sharp’s got a bit of a Wanda-Jackson-ish country twang, though. Fun stuff.

4. Bobby Vinton – Roses Are Red. This is an odd one, especially compared to the other Bobby Vinton song I’m familiar with, “Blue Velvet.” First of all, there’s the arrangement: Vinton’s voice mixed high in the center, with all the accompanying instruments much quieter and panned way to either side: bass and tinkling saloon piano on the right, loping acoustic guitar, backing vocals, and occasional strings on the left. Then there’s the rhythm, which sometimes skips two beats so that the chorus is underway before you quite realize the verse has ended. Then there’s Vinton’s bizarre, Shatneresque pauses: “She looks … a lot like you,” “And when the …. big day came,” etc. And of course there’s Vinton’s voice, which has an Uncanny Valley quality a bit like Frankie Avalon‘s, although I don’t like him nearly as much. And all of this is in support of a love song addressed to an old high school sweetheart who’s now married to someone else and has a kid — a kid who looks a lot like her, so much so in fact that someday a boy will write sweet things in her yearbook too. What are we supposed to be focusing on here: Teen pathos? Adult regret? Both at once? Either way, the music seems pretty much completely unrelated to the feelings the words are trying to convey.

5. David Rose – The Stripper. Here we have yet another song in an older style, namely big band – but a trashy, garish, exaggerated, overintensified version of the big band, as if the music were strutting on its long trombone legs, wiggling its drum-set ass, sticking out its long trumpet tongue at the audience. I’m not just saying that because of the title: the song’s heavy drums, trombone glissandi and timbral density are obviously meant to evoke burlesque. When I look at it in the context of a year when three of the top five songs are in retro styles, and a fourth is about a dance you can do to a bunch of hits from years past, I feel like this is big band reimagined for an era on the edge of a musical crisis, a time when people are looking for a new sound but don’t know about the rock explosion that’s coming up in a few years, so they turn to the past, only to find that it’s become a gaudy parody of itself, drained of its old meaning, reduced to playing a stripper in a dingy low-rent theater. This reading is based on a pretty reductive reading of pop music history — but makes for good listening!

 

1961

Well, it’s definitely been a while since I updated this blog. I can’t say I’ll definitely keep this up with any regularity, but I felt like listening to some early 60s pop songs, so here you go.

1. Bobby Lewis – Tossin’ and Turnin’. Very charming song about being up all night thinking about a girl. I love the perverse literal-mindedness of the lyrics, which mostly consist of naming things people do when they can’t sleep, from getting a midnight snack to turning the pillows upside-down. They’re set in an upbeat R&B style (I know very little about the genre, but it reminds me a little of 60s Marvin Gaye songs like “Pride and Joy” and “Heard It Through the Grapevine”), with a nice punchy sax section, staccato female backing vocals, and a great bridge where the alto sax is accompanied by a whiny, sharp, scratchy instrument that I think is probably an electric organ. And if you’ve ever read this blog before, you know I’m a sucker for nasty-sounding electronics.

2. Patsy Cline – I Fall to Pieces. I don’t really have anything to say about this very middle-of-the-road song. The melody isn’t particularly interesting, the arrangement isn’t particularly creative, the lyrics aren’t particularly moving. It’s just … there.

3. Highwaymen – Michael. A traditional spiritual set in a folk style that’s an obvious precursor to late-60s folk groups like Simon & Garfunkel and Pearls Before Swine: simple acoustic guitar strumming, simple vocal harmonies, a walking bassline. There’s almost nothing to the song, but the singers’ soft, vibratoless style is suffused with melancholy and longing, especially when they get to the lines “The River Jordan is chilly and cold, Hallelujah / Chills the body but not the soul, Hallelujah.” I can imagine a group of gentle bearded men singing this to flickering candelight, late some night on a long trek across the rural parts of America.

4. Roy Orbison – Cryin’. It’s weird to finally hear this song in its original form after hearing Rebekah Del Rio’s haunting unaccompanied rendition in Mulholland Dr. about a hundred times. Weird especially because, hearing just the melody, I actually misinterpreted some of the harmonies. I was right that in the chorus, when Orbison sings “over you,” the music moves from I to iii — a gesture that for some reason gives me the impression of a long-buried ache deep in the narrator’s soul. But in the bridge, when he sings “but the touch of your hand,” even though the melody lands in the same place, it’s harmonized differently: the music moves not from I to desolate iii but from I to hundrum V. Of course, if I’d known Orbison’s version first, that wouldn’t bother me at all — but I didn’t know it first, and Del Rio’s version has worked its way pretty permanently into my head. I’m also not crazy about the overblown ending, especially its clunky repeated bass-drum hits. But I do like the opening: Spanish-sounding percussion (is that why Lynch had the song in Spanish in his film?), a touching augmented chord, a verse melody that rises to 7 and then poignantly falls to 5 rather than moving resolutely up to 1.

5. Del Shannon – Runaway. Big shift in tone from the previous two songs! “Runaway” is half 1950s silliness and half 1960s badassery, with a cool-cat i-VII-VI-V progression in the verses but a doo-woppy I-vi progression in the chorsues, Spaghetti-Western guitar figures but a vocalist who’s willing to get his falsetto on to sing “I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder,” and a rambly organ solo almost as screechy as the one in “Tossin’ and Turnin.” It’s a fun little piece of fluff, and at 2:19, it’s over much too quickly.