Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1965
by Scott Miller

"I Ain't Marching Anymore" - Phil Ochs
1965 was an explosive and crucial year—really the first year that felt like the sixties as they would later be remembered. Besides being year two Anno Beatles, it was a big year for R & B, and also the year "protest songs" started to capture mainstream attention—the object of protest being the Vietnam War, for which the U.S. imposed a military draft. Phil Ochs's reminiscinces of the country's wars from the point of view of the young men sent to fight them was focused artfully on an injustice that by the decade's end would bring the country within sight of some sort of generational conflict.

"Yesterday" - The Beatles
"Yesterday" was a huge musical turning point. It achieved widespread over-30 credibility for the Beatles, which in turn elevated them from an oversized fad to a force capable of changing culture in general. It surely put cold steel in Paul McCartney's hand, probably in a way that exaggerated Lennon's counterculture, minority-politics role thereafter. It's a sublime composition—worthiest of standards. It skirts sentimentality as the verse begins, but then corners to the dry and believable. "I believe in yesterday" is one of the most powerful lyric lines ever. It goes well beyond a desire to live in the past (as would be Lennon's accusation); this is the confession of someone so shattered as to be looking for ways that the passage of time isn't all there is.

"Gloria" - Them
When a band needs a song to play and there's no time to learn it, "Gloria" always comes to mind. It's a sturdy little composition and inaugurated a long period of Van Morrison's remarkable ability to command mainstream success.

"Eve Of Destruction" - Barry McGuire
McGuire left the New Christy Minstrels to pursue edgier territory, and got a number one hit immediately with 20-year-old P.F. Sloan's tuneful prophecy of nuclear war. It became a lightning rod for conservative condemnation of trouble-making youth—famous enough for the Beatles to goof on Barry's gruff delivery with "look at all those bodies floatin' in the river Jordan" on their 1965 Christmas fan club disk.

"It Ain't Me Babe" - The Turtles
To some extent, this is a way of cooking my books to get more Dylan numbers in, but the Turtles—whose members included Flo and Eddie, later of Zappa's inner circle—contribute an L.A. snottiness that makes for a respectable hook above and beyond what Dylan supplied.

"Never To Be Forgotten" - The Bobby Fuller Four
This pre-"I Fought the Law" Mustang single sparkles with the energy unique to young sixties guitar bands who feel they have a hit. Winningly Texas DIY with its crappy production, rang-a-dang-dang guitar and Hollyesque harmonies, it's always a joy to listen to. The verse modulates up to a higher-energy B part, then, when it seems like there's no place left to escalate, to an even more climactic chorus.

"Tired Of Waiting For You" - The Kinks
The Kinks would put out stunning toned-down material like this throughout the sixties, inexplicably fading steadily from popular interest. Fortunately "Lola" changed that in 1970.

"My Girl" - The Temptations
This Smokey Robinson gem was written for new singer David Ruffin, rocketing the already ascendant Temptations to lasting stardom. Slightly corny around "I've got so much honey the bees envy me," the chorus of "I guess you say/What could make me feel this way?" is a timeless classic.

"A Love Supreme Pt. II—Resolution" - John Coltrane
McCoy Tyner's mind-blowing piano solo is something for the ages. It's a wonder of both gymnastics and invention—one of those passages that make you realize no one may ever play anything this well again: there just isn't the same incentive to produce such an incredible real-time result. People with this much vision will gravitate to available shortcuts like fudging the hard parts on computer, but it will never have the same heart. Elvin Jones's drumming is marvelously complex, and of course there's Mr. Coltrane on this rambunctious second stop on his musical search for the love supreme that was the Lord's.

"My Generation" - The Who
The combination of blistering talent and cheapo but high octane production yields this one-of-a-kind Who landmark. This is some of the busiest drumming and bass playing ever that still hold it together. Mr. Townshend has been needled for the indelible "Hope I die before I get old," but as I see it, that was to some degree a characterization of even younger kids—teenagers; I mean, the stutter?

"Death Letter" - Son House
From a session following his 1960s rediscovery, "Death Letter" is as real and chilling as a piece of songwriting has ever gotten, yet has an uncharacteristically open humanity to it. When the average idiot rocker decides to write about death, you can look forward to a vigorous workout of Halloweeny alienation; when this gentleman does it, it's to help you to love someone the way you will know you should have when that person is gone.

"What Do You Want From Me" - "Man Of La Mancha" Original Broadway Cast
The operatic vocal style and the project's most maudlin moments, like "The Impossible Dream," shouldn't eclipse the brilliant songwriting that bubbles up throughought this musical re-imagining of Cervantes' Don Quixote, the most beautiful—and that's saying something—being this song. Cervantes played Don Quixote as almost a straight fool, whereas "Man Of La Mancha" focuses on how Sancho Panza and especially Aldonza respond to the nobility of his struggle. "Why don't you know that you're laughed at wherever you go?/But I can't laugh with the rest, and why, I don't know."

"Girl Don't Tell Me" - The Beach Boys
One of the few Beach Boys moments that sound like reactions to the Beatles, "Girl Don't Tell Me" foreshadows, more than anything, the Beach Boys ability to rise to the Beatles' challenge of eclecticism as well as anyone. Carl does a nice job with the lead vocal; "Those shorts, mm, they sure fit you fine" always makes me laugh.

"Think For Yourself" - The Beatles
The rule here is that John, George, and Paul are all eligible for one song for a single year in the Beatles era if they each have one of the best of the year. Jim Shapiro had a theory that the Beatles' peculiar style of adventurousness with chord changes begins here, and he has a point. Just the line "The ruins of the life that you had in mind" contains tightly-packed genius; the T.S. Eliot casual of the lyric, the fuzz guitar mirror of the bass line, the groundbreaking changes on both the first downbeat and at "you," and the little run-on to get to the accented syllable of "had in mind"—it seems like a lot of artists subtly picked up on any number of those details.

"In the Midnight Hour" - Wilson Pickett
When you think about it, there's an intriguing poetry to "I'm going to wait till the midnight hour/That's when my love comes tumbling down." At any rate, a great song that I'm sure everyone reading this knows backwards and forwards; my favorite part is the positively delicious sax solo—is that baritone?

"King of the Road" - Roger Miller
The easy country blues melody is just dynamic enough to arrive at some otherworldly perfection. I'm sure after the very first time I heard it, I would remember it note for note for the rest of my life even if I never heard it again. I've never heard anything quite like the lyric either; there have been vaudeville numbers about funny bums, but this is something else—a jovial enough but much more frank and detailed a portrait of a homeless person with a system of rides, flops, and no-questions-asked employment.

"Tracks Of My Tears" - Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
The best vocal performance of the year is one of the great Smokey Robinson's best compositions—a precursor to "Tears of a Clown," but even better.

"Mr. Tambourine Man" - The Byrds
More bonus Dylan! Bob apparently never cared for this kind of sweetened treatment—the meaning seems subtly changed to erase the cautionary tone associated with following the tambourine man—but the dreamy harmonies and Rickenbacher 12-string constituted the first full-blown sixties sound, too important an event to brook quibbling.

"Linus and Lucy" - Vince Guaraldi
Now going from milestone to milestone, we arrive at a recording that may well have backed into the position of the world's most famous jazz recording. The origin of course was the incandescent Schulz/Mendelson/Melendez "Charlie Brown Christmas," in which the piece represented the shallow diversion of the kids Charlie wants to buckle down for a serious Christmas play. From the pop perfection of the theme to the two jazzy digressions, it's a triumph, beating Guaraldi's own "Cast Your Fate To the Wind" at its own game.

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" - The Rolling Stones
The relatively dark libido of "Satisfaction" had a bruising impact on American radio, starting the silly but pervasive casting of the Stones as the "Dionysian" counterpart to the Beatles' "Appollonian" archetype. I couldn't be bothered with any of that, but way the unlikely bass, drum, and tambourine parts combine to a particularly low and lean rhythm is something I'd accept as a schooling.

"Like A Rolling Stone" - Bob Dylan
Backed by the musicianly Americana of the Band, Dylan scorches the earth with the last member of the bourgeois who will ever be allowed a modest degree of self-satisfaction. Although I don't understand the details, I've always been knocked out by, "You used to be so amused/By Napoleon in Rags and the language that he used/Go to him now, he calls you, and you can't refuse." There is a fine line of economic security separating bemusement from practical enslavement. The subtext is that until the lives of the underprivileged are righted, the lives of the privileged have false meaning—a very heavy gauntlet to throw down.

"Help!" - The Beatles
A fantastic sounding recording from the first note, "Help!" is the first important step toward the realism of the mature John Lennon. He was writing a song about John the person needing the help he really needed. Like a lot of the album Help!, it's got nice little allocations of fancy drumming, guitar playing, and singing. The way the chorus winds up through "And I do appreciate you being 'round," etc., to the final "won't you please" is spine-tingling. What a treat to hear those men sing together.

"The Sounds of Silence" - Simon and Garfunkel
"The Sounds of Silence" is the culmination of the folk movement; after it, nothing more really needed to be done. Successfully electrified after initially existing as an acoustic duet, it stands with the most magical melodies of the most magical era for melodies, and with perhaps not the very best lyrics, Art and Paul, especially Art, harmonize their way to the loftiest place. I'm tempted to rule Paul Simon underqualified to deal in big pronouncements, until I actually check his work. "The sign said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls" is about as overblown as any lyric can get, except that the words of the prophets really are the lost cries of the marginalized, and the whole civil rights movement of the sixties depended on putting that fact across.