Category Archives: Songs from 1966

Album: The Monkees, 1966

Justification: I have no problem with the Monkees as a manufactured pop group – hell, I had the Banana Splits on here just under a year ago – and I’ve always been fond of this song. However, the reason that the band’s debut single came to mind was because of an article in, of all things, Cracked which made me aware of something I’d never noticed before. Underneath that shameless ‘Paperback Writer’ rip off riff and cod-classical bridge, writers Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart had snuck in a sly counter-cultural message.

Cheer up, Mike Nesmith: your mum's about to invent Liquid Paper and die a millionaire!

See, this jaunty tune written for a TV show about a made up band is actually a Vietnam War protest song.

It’s so easy to overlook it, though. I hadn’t realised until it was pointed out to me that the protagonist of the song is clearly heading back to Clarksville for one last desperate night of passion before being shipped off to war, “…and I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.” And Boyce and Hart have confirmed that’s exactly what they were getting at, although it’s apparently a coincidence that there is indeed a town called Clarksville conveniently close to Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division (who were instrumental in the battle of Hamburger Hill a couple of years later) – they just liked how the name of the town scanned in the lyric.

So there you go. The Monkees, secret subversives of manufactured pop. Who knew?

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010 & 2011: Wow, nothing? Luckily the 1966 archive is easily the most well-populated one I have for the sixties thus far – it’s just hard to get videos for the period, you understand…

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

472. Timbuk 3: The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades (21 May)

473. Ivy: Lucy Doesn’t Love You (22 May)

474. Operator Please: Logic (23 May)

475. dEUS: Little Arithmetics (24 May)

476. Siouxsie & the Banshees: Kiss Them For Me (4 June)

Album: Sounds of Silence, 1966

Justification: Oh, it’s so easy to forget Simon & Garfunkel. Their wispy two-voice folk was part of the tail end of the US coffeeshop music tradition which spawned a lot of things that were more impressive and important than, you know, good – Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Pete Seegar et al – and while Paul Simon might have bitched at the time about how his old songs were being taken from him and repurposed as potential pop hits, his shadowy producers and record company mavens were absolutely right to do so.

I grew up on this album, not knowing that most of the songs had appeared on a Simon solo disc before he was forced into making it the second S&G effort with a tonne of extra instrumentation, but you know what? It’s a freakin’ amazing album. Listen to ‘The Sound of Silence’ again – like so many sixties pop hits, familiarity has dulled what should be a sledgehammer to your gut.

Anyway, when I was a miserable pre-teenager who hadn’t yet discovered the Smiths, this song spoke to me the same way that My Chemical Romance is currently twisting the heads of impressionable eleven year olds who don’t understand what they’re feeling about girls. You don’t understand me or my music, mum.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME LAST YEAR: An Australian classic with few peers: Paul Kelly & the Coloured Girls’ simple, perfect ‘Before Too Long’.

Album: Pet Sounds, 1966

Justification: I came to the Beach Boys very late in the piece, which is slightly embarrassing since I’m a music journalist and therefore should be all “la la la la Pet Sounds la la Smile“, but the fact remains that when I was a kid I thought all of their songs about surfing and cars seemed horrendously one-dimensional compared with what was happening in the UK (and let’s just avoid that whole argument again by linking to this), and when I was approaching the age where I should have probably discovered them, ‘Kokomo’ was released to great fanfare as The Return Of Brian Wilson To The Beach Boys, and on that basis I decided that they could so, SO fuck off.

There are few songs ever created that I hate more fervently than ‘Kokomo’ – a song written, let’s not forget, for a Tom Cruise film about a bartender – and that was the moment where I understood that there was a certain dignity that the Beatles enjoyed in that they could never get back together and destroy their legacy. And then ‘Free As A Bird’ appeared, and I knew true sorrow.*

Anyway: years later of course I got Pet Sounds and of course I fell in love and of course I thought that the album was amazing and this song stunningly beautiful, and also that it reminded me a lot of the High Llamas – making me the only person on the planet who experiences either band in that manner. Sean O’Hagan is laughing his head off right this second but cannot explain for the life of him why.

Honestly, ‘Kokomo’? Would the Who have a guest spot on Full House? No they fucking would not, they would instead be awesome on The Simpsons. THAT is pop culture dignity, friends.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS DAY IN 2010: It would appear I had an extra day off for some reason. Let’s assume I was being attacked my bears. So, 1966 archive it is.

*How relieved must EMI have felt when Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’ kept ‘Free As A Bird’ from the top of the charts, therefore allowing the 1 compilation to end on a dignified note with ‘The Long and Winding Road’? That fact, incidentally, is also the only good thing about ‘Earth Song’.

Album: single, 1966

Justification: Through my high school years, I harboured a couple of terrible secrets. I was Andrew P Street The Guy With The Cool Music Taste, who used to laugh condescendingly at his classmates with their Doors best-ofs and dubbed cassettes of Whispering Jack, for I was listening to the Smiths and the Church and Lloyd Cole and the Cure and all these other bands whose coolness doesn’t seem quite so much of a slam-dunk at a couple of decades distance. But I was also the product of my father’s record collection, which meant that there were certain things that I heard in the house a lot. Beatles. Kinks. Who. An awful lot of truly ghastly jazz-fusion (and much as I loved my father, Galapagos Duck can fuck right off). And also Jimi Hendrix, whose Smash Hits I used to spin frequently.

However, when I got to high school I realised that the people who were into Hendrix (and, for that matter, Pink Floyd) were also into the Doors and Deep Purple and would go on to totally dig the Black Crowes. And since high school music tastes were a package deal (you like the Smiths? Then you also like the Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Echo & the Bunnymen and Bauhaus, fucker), I shut the hell up about my love for Hendrix, made sure Axis: Bold as Love was never close to the front of the record rack (artfully hidden by Depeche Mode 12″s) and sneered when the guitarist in my first band suggested we cover ‘Hey Joe’. Although that was probably more because I was very aware of the limitations of our musical abilities at that point, especially his.

Anyway: this was Hendrix’s debut single, it’s often cited as a traditional blues song despite there being pretty clear evidence that it was written in 1962 by Billy Roberts (although that authorship has been disputed) and it was recorded at the suggestion of Chas Chandler, Jimi’s manager and former bassist with the Animals, who also hooked Jimi up with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell (the Experience). It made Jimi a star in the UK though, inexplicably, it failed to chart in the US. And that walking bassline that Redding throws in every so often is one of my favourite pieces of bassery in the world, and I choose to believe that’s what Camper Van Beethoven’s Victor Krummenacher was aping in their cover of ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’.

THIS TIME IN 2010: The Dandy Warhols were setting out their shingle with ‘Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth’.

Album: Face to Face, 1966

Justification: My relationship with the Kinks started with my father, who would tell me how he had lots of Kinks records before the house got burgled either when I was but a baby or sometime before that, endured pretty much only when he’d sing this song to me, and then was fleshed out years after his death when I bought a $5 cassette of the Best Of during a long drive. And that tape it turned out to be a very shrewd purchase since it covered only the 1964-70 singles which, for the most part, are the really essential cuts. While the Beatles, the Stones and the Who were exploring the possibilities of the longer format the Kinks were anything but an album band in the 60s (with the obvious and masterful exception of 1968′s The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society which you should go listen to right after this). But man, what a bunch of singles: ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Days’, ‘Plastic Man’, ‘Lola’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’, ‘Apeman’, ‘See My Friends’ and this superb lament about success: that Ray Davies sure knows how to write a damn tune.

Politically, I just accept it was a different time. I’m as pro-tax as anyone who thinks hospitals and schools and a financial safety net are neat things for societies to have, but the 95% tax rate imposed on the top bracket was a bit much, Wilson Labor government of the sixties, since it appeared only to catch not-terribly-shrewd musicians suddenly (and briefly) making loads of money, most of which was being skimmed by ruthless managers/labels/promoters of the time. That being said, it inspired some great music: this and the Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ are both living testaments to that brightening dawn of rock’n'roll tax exiles, while the entire Exile on Main Street album came about when the Stones realised they couldn’t return to England without bankrupting themselves and were instead forced to endure the painful indignity of living in giant mansions in France with all the heroin and international fashion models they could eat. Suffering, man: that’s the key to quality art.

I interviewed Ray Davies a few weeks ago, which was a dream come true. He was still quite glum about the passing of bassist Pete Quaife, which was sad and nice all at once.

Album: ‘Paperback Writer’ b-side, 1966; Rarities, 1978 (and many compilations since)

Justification: Well, it had to be something special for #150, right?

There’s something wonderful about b-sides, both for artists and listeners, that I fear we’re going to lose in this digital age. B-sides used to prove that you were a fan – if you bought all the singles you knew all knew all these other songs that the Johnny-come-latelys had no idea about. For the band they were win-win: since no-one particularly cared how great they were, people would love a brilliant b-side disproportionally much as their expectations were that much lower. Suede’s b-sides were arguably their best songs during the first few years (‘Killing of a Flash Boy’, ‘My Insatiable One’, ‘The Living Dead’, ‘To The Birds’ etc), while the Smiths banged out half their greatest material on the flipsides (‘Jeane’, ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’, ‘London’, ‘Asleep’ – and the masterpiece ‘How Soon Is Now’ was initially not just a b-side, but a bonus b-side for the 12” – for ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’, to be specific). Radiohead’s b-sides are generally the match of anything on their albums (many fans very reasonably cite ‘Talk Show Host’ as their favourite) and a cursory look at my iTunes reveals that I’ve listened to more mclusky b-sides than album tracks, particularly ‘The Salt Water Solution’. That’s because I’m incredibly cool, I assume.

The Beatles’ b-sides are all must-haves too. Sure, some are slight (Harrison’s ‘Old Brown Shoe’ on the flip of ‘Hey Jude’), some are silly (‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’ on ‘Let it Be’), and most are pretty damn awesome. None, however, are more awesome than ‘Rain’.

The languid vocals, sitar-like lead breaks and backwards effects pre-date psych, while the Starr/McCartney rhythm section put in the performance of their career. Listen to that sinuous bassline twisting around Lennon’s chords: the man could fucking play. Starr’s shuffling beat has been copied by generations of drummers since (although the constant drum breaks owe a debt to the Who’s Keith Moon, the first drummer to go “sure, I can solo in the middle of a verse if I want”). And those harmonies – dear god, those harmonies! Why this was the b-side to the (admittedly great but definitely inferior) ‘Paperback Writer’ baffles me to this day.

Incidentally, Lennon first started playing with the idea on the Beatles’ only Australian tour, when the band landed in Melbourne during a torrential storm. As has happened so very many times before and since, Melbourne’s lousy weather has led to great art.