Rules for rocking, 1965 and 66 style: You need a fuzz guitar. You want two chords; maybe three. An organ helps. Long hair is A Statement. Beatle Boots are essential.
The Seeds – Pushin’ Too Hard Music always sounds better when played wearing a lace cuff shirt.
The Troggs – Wild Thing Leader Reg Presley spends his money researching UFOs and crop circles.
Count 5 – Psychotic Reaction Cool bands come from London, NY, LA or Detroit. Totally cool bands come from San Jose.
Lulu – Shout The wee lass with the big voice.
? and the Mysterians – 96 Tears The Velvet Underground were taught repetition by “serious” composers. ? didn’t need no schooling.
The Spencer Davis Group – Gimme Some Lovin’ Introducing Little Stevie Winwood.
The Standells – Dirty Water Everyone was convinced the line ‘lovers, muggers and thieves’ was ‘lovers, fuckers and feels’. Oh you kids.
Shadows of Knight - ‘Oh Yeah’ is an amazing record, but the mp3 uploader is MIA. [boo.] Instead, here's...
Shadows of Knight - Shake Does he really sing, “getting vibed by the beat of a long-haired band”?
Innocent times…but the world was changing. Have you ever been to a blanket party? C’mon – get with it!
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Another great collection of "termite art" you scavenged for us. It's amazing what excitement survives the grainy blurry low-contrast 4-frames-a-second lip-syc cinematography.
A stray thought: the Seeds' approach would have helped The Mothers of Invention's first album _Freak Out_, where Frank Zappa saddled perfectly good Seeds-like melodies with his vocal parody of an hispanic imbecile.
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'termite art' sums it up exactly. Good description.
Interesting view on the Mothers. Sky Saxon wrote Pushin' Too Hard in 10 minutes while he waited in the car for his girlfriend to buy groceries.
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It was punch and counter-punch between the U.S. and U.K., ending in the metaphorical garage where "Nuggets" were born.
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Keep meaning to acknowledge the wonder of this post. It's amazing, isn't it, how much change pop music went through in two or three years? It blew through aobut eight stages of development. A 1966 song sounds so different from a 1865 song, and did even then. Not sure we can say the same about, say, 2005 and 2006.....
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These cultural explosions burst and then reappear elsewhere, seemingly at random. For instance, New Orleans jazz after WWI. Bebop in the late forties. Rock 'n' roll in the mid-fifties. Bossa nova in '59-'60. Reggae in the early 70's. Reggaeton recently from Puerto Rico. Picasso, De Chirico and Duchamp before WWI. Who could have predicted them?
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Nice typing, ivylander. Try 1966 and 1965.....
Indeed, Spike. Indeed.
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What I've frequently wondered at is how much change happened just in one group. Look at The Byrds from 65 - 68 - and we didn't even think it was unusual.
Interesting point on the artists Spike, but don't you think the trends pointed towards them, if not the individuals? Although Duchamp coming up with Readymades is a pretty big leap.
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Jonh, about the artists, you mean the painters, right? Of course the trends from the past pointed toward them; nobody like that works in a vacuum, but Picasso's "_Les Demoiselles d'Avignon_" (1906-7) was a pretty big leap, too, and it's hard to find precursors to De Chirico's early proto-surrealism. The other 20th century artists explored the areas these guys discovered. Sort of.
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True.
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Here's my half-baked, thoroughly obvious theory about music in the Sixties: In the aftermath of the newness of the Beatles, newness itself became the hot currency. It certainly helped that the Beatles themselves seemed to realize the unique power they held to actually change the way people thought about pop music - that it could be an instrument of not only self-expression but exploration as well. Once they managed to sell the idea that "weird is good" to a mass audience, the floodgates opened. Growth and experimentation became de rigeur if you had any ambition to be taken seriously as a pop musician. This virus even affected the Monkees. It resulted in some great music and some tripe, even from wonderful bands. "Pet Sounds" but also "Her Satanic Majesties Request." Of course, all this happened against the backdrop of all the other barriers that were being breached in that decade. (It's probably unwise to either romanticize or decry the Sixties, but it's hard to deny that a lot of certainties got decertified.) On the whole, I think you can;t help but look at it as a net gain. Once you open a pair of ears, it's hard to close them again.
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Thanks for these posts Jonh. They are very enjoyable even if I don't post a comment!
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well put, ivy. I see "the straights" on tv every now and again railing against the 60s as a lot of superficial nonsense that boiled down to drugs, silly clothes and promiscuous sex. They seem ignorant of the serious things that got achieved - socially, politically, musically. As yer basic libertarian anarcho misfit I shudder when I think what things would be like if that mass disruption hadn't happened.