Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1963
by Scott Miller

"Surfin' Bird" - The Trashmen
1963 led up to a cultural and artistic earthquake, the initial shock of which would occur on November 22nd: JFK was assassinated, and, with no like attention, With the Beatles was released in England—no like attention, that is, for the short time it took to tart it into Meet the Beatles for American release. If these events changed a cultural course, what was that course? No doubt a civil rights push was favored among forward-thinking people anyway. Musical trendwise, jazz could be said to already be flaming out as a leading edge music after free jazz, and R and B was ascending without obvious need for England's help. Really what the Beatles did was keep rock and roll going, and they did it by pulling highbrow and popular culture onto the same plane. They made it possible for civil rights to be a rising, agile star, where in some ways civil rights action was shackled in the hands of even the best of presidents, like Kennedy, to the slow realm of statesmanly gestures such as the Vietnam War as a bulwark against oppressive ideologies. Soon after the Beatles, there could be Dylan going electric, and Tom Wolfe relating to the pump house gang. Extrapolating further, "Surfin' Bird"—although unquestionably noteworthy at the time for being one of the most maniacally entertaining pieces of recorded music ever—could end up being right at home in highbrow salon environments such as the soundtrack to Full Metal Jacket.

"All My Loving" - The Beatles
The early Beatles gave some impression of being mostly John's thing, but for just enough Paul bullseyes to make it a contest; in that view, this was the big Paul moment par excellence in the days of the conquest of America. The lyrics, "Close your eyes and I'll kiss you/Tomorrow I'll miss you/Remember, I'll always be true/And then while I'm away/I'll write home every day/And I'll send all my loving to you" (that's 90% of them), are so sub-Hallmark in their doggerel simplicity that one begins to respect them as a killing machine. That's not any old cheap romance for teenage girls, that's the maximum possible deployment of it in so many rhyming words that could ever be computed using a UNIVAC II—and then decorated with beautiful melodic arcs and magic surprise minor chords. The way I imagine it, John would have had some trouble singing "All My Loving"; what the two principles jointly needed was the reality: John and Paul conspiring for John to be John, the rocker, and Paul to be Paul, the heartthrob. John was a victory for Paul, and Paul was a victory for John.

"Pipeline" - The Chantays
California contributed an interesting hobbyist mythology of reckless thrill-seeking to the sixties, where art served the holy rituals of surfing and hot-rodding, in the form of surf-guitar bands ("Pipeline" was a wonderful little epitome, much covered) and illustrators the likes of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. Considering what a fabulous and pervasive industry this was in its day, it's more than curious, really, that forty years of simmering finally renders it all down to the Brian Wilson of "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times."

"Be My Baby" - The Ronettes
"Be My Baby" wasn't just the perfection of Phil Spector's "wall of sound" (an object of the aforementioned Mr. Wilson's obsession), it was a masterful melding of Tin Pan Alley musical vocabulary, doo-wop atmospheric grandeur, and a canny lyrical ramping up of desire's intensity by focusing on how good it will all look to our peers: "I'll make you so proud of me/We'll make them turn their heads everyplace we go."

"Anji" - Davy Graham
Also known as "Angi" and "Davey Graham," this remarkable English guitarist was an innovative and at times very popular analog to America's John Fahey. This compellingly memorable acoustic guitar instrumental achieved worldwide prominence when Simon and Garfunkel put a version of it on Sounds of Silence.

"Duete Solo Dancers" - Charles Mingus
Jazz was in the throes of something in the early sixties--maybe not death, but a crisis of where the important people wanted to take things. Certainly Ornette Coleman, the Miles culminating in Bitches Brew, and the Mingus of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady are iconoclastic, but in different ways—to the point of starting to operate in different dimensions of communication. Too conventionally precise to be called a monstrosity, Black Saint nevertheless has a grotesque and ironic quality that perhaps leads more significantly to worlds like that of Carla Bley than to, say, A Love Supreme. Ostensibly a ballet, its "Duete Solo Dancers" section begins with luscious Guy-Lombardo-by-way-of-Duke-Ellington amorousness, which takes disturbingly theatrical turns for the dark and sinister, sometimes involving rather amazing muted-trombone approximations of the human voice.

"Louie Louie" - The Kingsmen
A great keyboard hook and chorus battle a vocal that in its ineptitude arrives at the perfect signifier for partying down. There's a temptation to place this higher, but a million Animal House fans can't be right.

"When the Springtime Comes Again" - John Fahey
Here is some of the most amazing solo fingerpicking guitar there has ever been, rooted in an intense and protective love for the American folk blues tradition (Fahey was working on a master's thesis on Charley Patton, as well as a project to play and record Patton's entire catalog).

"Ring Of Fire" - Johnny Cash
As universally infectious as it is peculiar, the mariachi inflected "Ring Of Fire" is a little off the beaten path for Johnny Cash, who was well on the way from "Folsom Prison Blues" to prime time variety show cowboyhood, but it is one of the major milestones. There are those verses which I think are in, what, 11/4?, and then there is the terrifying characterization of falling in love as, "Love is a burning thing/And it makes a fiery ring/Bound by wild desire/I fell into a ring of fire." Then I've got that picture of him flipping the camera off right back in my head.

"Shake Your Hips" - Slim Harpo
Wild how exactly this sounds like the Exile On Main Street cover. Except I never realized that the girl in the country town says, "What do you know?/There's Slim Harpo!" (Pardon me sir/There's Mick Jagger?)

"It Was a Very Good Year" - Brown and Dana
Just when I would have been getting ready to proclaim that no one really sounds like this anymore, there have appeared some artists who do, like Shearwater—a quiet, resonant, gypsy quality to the singing. The lyrics manage an ominous vibe, but listen closely, and this is a cheesy equating of an older man's lady loves to wines of different vintage. Dumb! I believe Frank Sinatra had a hit with this slightly later, but this is the version I remember from my dad's record collection, and it has enough genuinely rewarding musical moments to rate—for instance, the vocal harmonies over the chord changes through, "We rode in limousines/Their chauffeurs would drive/When I was 35."

"Let Me Get Close To You" - Skeeter Davis
In 1984, my band had managed to talk Alex Chilton into working up a set of his own material, for which we'd open a show in Memphis on our first tour. I was thrilled at this prospect, and as we walked into the Antenna Club during the sound check of Alex Chilton and the Machiavelles (!), this is the song they were doing. With that recommendation, I had to seek out Skeeter's original, which is a sweet, charmingly plain country pop nugget with a grabber of a one-line chorus, and a mysterious emotional lure to it.

"I Wanna Be Your Man" - The Rolling Stones
Lennon and McCartney were supposedly pleased with themselves for hawking this Ringo-sung number to the Stones, but it's the Stones who come out ahead. They wake this borderline throwaway up to unignorability with the sheer ferociousness of their result. Mick and Keith sound just plain dangerous; this is the Mick who when you heckled him to get a haircut, shot back, "What, and look like you?"

"Da Doo Ron Ron" - The Crystals
This is my personal favorite Phil Spector—especially those stunning Hal Blaine rim-shot snare buildups and the bari sax solo. This is really the Bruce Sprinsteen-begetting Phil, as opposed to the Brian Wilson-begetting Phil.

"In My Room" - The Beach Boys
In the two words "secrets to," you can hear the musical power Brian is going to wield. But there's plenty more; one of the most lyrically forthright and sonically luscious recordings to be found, the Boys leave no doubt they will easily transcend novelty status. The whole passage through, "Lie awake and pray/Do my sighing and my crying/Laugh at yesterday" is packed with brilliant elements.

"Mrs. McGrath" - The Womenfolk
Bona fide folk-boomers, the Womenfolk had their brush with stardom, and were RCA recording artists for some time. This live recording is engaging from the moment the song is cheekily introduced as "an old Irish maiming ballad," and when those five-part harmonies kick in, it's rapturous. There is something inarguably special about singers who have actually developed real-time harmonizing skill—and no doubt something uniquely special about these particular performers—with literally nothing that sounds this good today to take its place.

"Guantanamera" - The Weavers
This is the Weavers' Carnegie Hall reunion concert rendition of this remarkably beautiful melody—Wikipedia credits Joseito Fernandez in 1929—harmonized to perfection, and with a talking part where Pete Seeger translates Cuban poet hero Jose Marti's lyrics, pulled off pretty admirably. Today's listeners would probably rather I didn't mention that "guajira Guantanamera" means "peasant girl from Guantanamo."

"Cast Your Fate to the Wind" - Vince Guaraldi
Apparently something of an afterthought, this enchanting Latin jazz original became a huge hit. Of course you all know this is the person who wrote the sublime "Charlie Brown Christmas" music.

"Blowin' in the Wind" - Bob Dylan
Odd how monumental this is; it's both still experiencing growing pains lyrically, and still in need of a little sprucing up arrangementwise by the Peters, Pauls, and Marys of the world to determine the ideal viewing angle. Yet, "How many deaths does it take till he knows/That too many people have died/The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind" does just exactly what folk music had been striving to do. And for anyone who wants the answer that's blowing in the wind spelled out with a little less polite diffidence, there's "Masters Of War."

"On Broadway" - The Drifters
The eternal perfection of "On Broadway's" melody is evident in how many melodies want to come close; Elvis Costello alone gives the neighborhood respectable foot traffic. "Downtown" owes a debt. I can think of a couple of my own songs that want to do one of its steps. The idea that there is one culture world in a physical city, and, occupying the exact same location, a second culture world deprived of the first's privilege, is extremely incisive, and even rendered somewhat painlessly—we the privileged smile along to a rags-to-riches story that hasn't happened yet; but not before we've been reminded that "When you're walking down that street/And you ain't had enough to eat/The glitter rubs right off and you're nowhere." It is a different space from the one we thought we occupied.

"I Want To Hold Your Hand" - The Beatles
"I Want To Hold Your Hand" was another simplistic romantic sentiment, but somehow more John. Paul saying "I want to hold your hand" would have been cloying, but with John, even in this moment of targeted mass teen appeal, there's an overtone of cutting through to the core of something. That is, you need to be at least kissing to get the attention of the pop audience of the day, right? But there's a higher thrill in the realm of falling in love at the level of holding hands, and they tune a very powerful musical engine for that. The verse chords under "I think you'll understand" are great enough, but "It's such a feeling that, my love, I can't hide" takes off like a rocket. There is kissing and there is making love in songs today, and there will be tomorrow; the Beatles walk away from this encounter owning the very principle of holding hands.