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.

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