1966

                1966 is a year that has me thinking a lot about how what I’m doing reflects much more what my record collection looks like in a given year than what it probably was actually like to listen to the radio.  This is especially clear when 1966 most strikes me as the peak for garage rock.  In part this is because of idiosyncrasies in my own collection: I only have a couple of actual albums of 60’s garage rock, and two of them (The Monks’ Black Monk Time and Mitch Ryder’s Take A Ride!), so that skews the listening.  For what it’s worth, the Monks are the more interesting of the two, although I suspect Mitch Ryder put on a better concert.  The Monks are entertainingly ragged and gonzo, but I suspect they sounded pretty sloppy live.  Mitch Ryder, at least in 1966, does white-boy soul covers, but he does them energetically, and sounds like he can probably pull it off live pretty consistently.  The other factor making 1966 my year of garage rock, though, is that the compilers of the Nuggets set think it is, as a full 40% of their songs come from 1966.  So that makes a pretty convincing argument, since those songs are mostly really really good, but I don’t really have the collection of 45s (or enough rival garage-rock comps) to make a counter-argument for any other year.  I will say that, since I’ll get to the Children of Nugges sequel set soon enough, that one of the reasons the original garage rock is more exciting than much of the follow-up stuff is that even by the 1970s, garage rock was about formalism and trying to color within the lines of a classic sound.  But the bands in ’66 are just trying to play what they want as best they can.  So you get all sorts of little bits of weirdness or unexpected polish here and there that would seem out of character if you’re trying to do a formalist recreation later on.  Or maybe it’s just that this stuff isn’t so winking.

                Not a surprise that it’s a good year for garage rock, since it’s also a very good year for more professional rock, esp. of the British Invasion variety.  Although it’s definitely for the most part getting a bit less rocking and a bit more poppy.  The Stones have some of their best pop singles in 1966, but songs like “Paint It Black” and “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby” are definitely more poppy than last year’s crop of singles.  So that’s a takeaway from this project: that the early Stones were frequently not the bluesiest or most rockin’ band in any given year.  In fact, one insight is that Them were always a better British Iles blues bands the years they were both active.  Although by 1966, you can definitely hear the mellower, more experimental sound that would dominate Van’s solo career start to pop up.  A big year also for the Kinks and the Beatles.  The Beatles made their transition from early rock Beatles to mid-period pop Beatles last year, but Revolver and “Paperback Writer”/”Rain” together make this probably the single best year for the Beatles.  They’re more sophisticated than the early stuff, but they’ve both managed to keep the rocking energy up and trim out a lot of the schmaltz that crept into the earlier records (tracing a through-line from “A Taste of Honey” on the debut through “Michelle” on Rubber Soul).  The Kinks’ big leap forward is this year, though, with Face to Face.  It’s always been my least-favorite of their ‘classic’ run (from Face to Face through Muswell Hillbillies), not counting the Percy soundtrack, but coming after their early, fuzzy-singles era, it’s an interesting listen.  The later singles from last year mean this isn’t a jarring shock (probably less of a jump than the Beatles’ from Help! to Rubber Soul, for instance), but they’ve definitely made a shift to foregrounding composition over just rockin’ energy.  Makes me think I need to get The Kinks’ Kontroversy, though. 

                This is also the year that you start to get inklings of psychedelia coming through.  This is most notable from the Yardbirds, which is unsurprising, since their ’65 singles were already pointing in that direction.  That’s another insight of this project; how far the Yardbirds were ahead of the curve.  They were already in ’65 where the other rock bands would get in late ’66 or ’67 in terms of hard psychedelia.  More and more I wonder if the problem isn’t that they didn’t make albums.  I mean, here it’s 1966, and we finally get their debut LP (Roger The Engineer).  And it’s decidedly uneven, besides.  Some of it’s as good as they ever got (“Over Under Sideways Down” especially).  Some of it less so.  Also, the one single released by the Jeff Beck-Jimmy Page lineup is phenomenal (“Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”), although I always thought it sounded like Television.  Maybe that’s just what it sounds like when you throw two virtuoso guitarists together.  On the other hand, the b-side sounds like they wrote the lyrics while they were playing it.  It does offer helpful advice about how prevalent rice is in New Orleans cuisine, at least.

                Also Yardbird-releated is the debut of Cream.  A couple of people have pointed out that I was a bit harsh on old Eric Clapton, but let me just say that I do love Cream (even if they also never put out a start-to-finish all-killer-no-filler album).  First-album Cream sounds like Clapton heard what the Yardbirds did after he left, and decided that he wanted to try his hand at that sound, though.  Also, the stereo version is really poorly-done.  I was listening on headphones and thought one of my buds was broken until the lead guitar came in on “NSU.”  Definitely one where I need to get the mono version.

                Non-Yardbird related, we also see traces of psychedelia dripping through in its more pop form.  Mostly in a couple of singles here and there.  Obviously “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver.  Love’s debut album.  A distinct pop-psych form, only tangentially related to the rock-psych of the Yardbirds.  Not “Eight Miles High,” though.  It gets talked up as such, but apart from the kinda-spacey-but-mostly-Coltrane-derived intro, it mostly sounds like another (excellent) folk-pop song from the Byrds.  Not Dylan either, who’s got more of a full-band sound on his arguable-masterpiece Blonde on Blonde.  More sophisticated arrangements (although not Beach Boys territory or anything), lyrics that seem more meaningful than the off-the-cuff Bringing It All Back Home stuff, but also slightly less energy than that album’s amphetamine rush.  Still, nothing except a couple of Byrds singles really sounds close to Bob.  Also, while it would be interesting to speculate what a proper follow-up to Blonde on Blonde would have sounded like, I’m not-so-secretly pretty happy that Dylan would never try his hand at psychedelia.  He had a just-about-perfect three-album run of electric stuff, and I’m glad he didn’t’ run this sound into the ground.

                Also expanding in interesting ways is the world of soul.  Partly you see more sophisticated pop arrangements sneaking into the classic Motown sound, with flutes and other unexpected instrumentation, which sounds more up-tempo but not dissimilar otherwise from the similar experiments that Van Morrison is starting at the same time.   But the other two developments are I think more interesting.  The first is a move by a couple of big artists in the genre toward sounding more like peers of Frank Sinatra and the crooners than of the British Invasion.  They’re still keeping the backbeat of soul/rock, but at the same time there’s a foregrounding of the singer and song over the performers that recalls the crooners.  James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World,” for instance, you could hear Sinatra doing a version of.  And Otis Redding’s big song from 1966 (and my personal favorite of all of his singles), “Try A Little Tenderness,” was made famous first by Bing Crosby.  Not the only Redding Crosby cover, for what it’s worth.  Every Christmas, Liz & I argue over whether Otis’s version of “White Christmas” tops Bing’s.  It does.  Also, for what it’s worth, Sinatra seems to be returning the affection.  His album this year with Count Basie is arranged by Quincy Jones (of ‘wrote Thriller’ fame).

                The other move, at both Stax and Motown, is toward what I like to think of as a shift to a more “widescreen” sound.  Songs like the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and Sam & Dave’s “Hold On I’m Coming” have an epic sound that’s pretty much my favorite kind of soul.  And man, I didn’t realize how great “I Know I’m Losing You” is.  I can’t wait until I get to the point where I have actual Temptations albums…

                Finally, while last year I talked about how Ernest Tubb sounded radically out of place, this year Merle Haggard’s “Last Night The Bottle Let Me Down” does not, for whatever reason.  It’s much more stripped in sound than what the rock bands are doing, but doesn’t sound bad mixed in especially with the Texas garage bands.  Can’t really say why.  Maybe because they both have good use of space.

Song of the Year:  A tough year, with many contenders.  I’ve argued in the past that “Paperback Writer”/”Rain” is, minute-for-minute, the Beatles’ finest record – my favorite Paul song, plus John’s first psychedelic song.  I’ve mentioned how much I love both “Try A Little Tenderness” and “(I Know) I’m Losing You.”  “Paint It Black” is maybe the Stones’ best psych song, and the Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” for that matter, would be a contender most years.  Still, it has to be “Good Vibrations.”  It’s just the Beach Boys’ finest hour; so complex & intricate, yet a great pop song the whole time.  And the sort of thing that absolutely no one but them could do, either at the time or anytime since.

Album of the Year:  Another tough call.  Really on any given day it could go to Blonde On Blonde (maybe Dylan’s best), Revolver (probably the Beatles’ best), or Pet Sounds (without question the Beach Boys’ best).  Today I say Revolver, because I’m feeling more upbeat than Pet Sounds and I’m still feeling like I’d been overlooking Bringing It All Back Home in recent years.  But tomorrow, it could easily be either of the other two…

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Probably either the Temptations (I didn’t realize they got this good this early) or the Monks (who I didn’t appreciate how delightfully deranged they sounded in context.  Only Captain Beefheart (also on the basis of a lone single, “Diddy-Wah-Diddy”) really sounds as deliberately deranged.  Some of the other garage bands sound accidentally as deranged though.  Esp. the 13^th Floor Elevators). 

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  Maybe Bob Marley.  He’s still sounding more interestingly old-fashioned than good at this point.  And oddly tame for someone who would be such an important and musically innovative figure so soon. 

Albums From 1966

B.B. King - B.B. King

Bob Dylan - Blonde On Blonde

Bob Dylan - Live 1961-2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances

Bob Dylan - Vol. 2 : Rare And Unreleased, 1963-1974

Bob Dylan - Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack

Bob Marley & The Wailers - Trenchtown Days: Birth Of A Legend

Cream - The Very Best Of Cream

Frank Sinatra - Sinatra at the Sands (with the Count Basie Orchestra)

Frank Sinatra - Sinatra Reprise: The Very Good Years

Hank Williams - Alone & Forsaken

Hank Williams - Settin' The Woods On Fire

Herman's Hermits - Their Greatest Hits

James Brown - 20 All Time Greatest Hits!

John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990

Love - Love

Merle Haggard - HAG: The Best Of Merle Haggard

Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels - Take A Ride!

Neil Young - Decade

Phil Spector - Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound Retrospective

Stevie Wonder - At The Close Of A Century

The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds

The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions

The Beatles - Mono Masters

The Beatles - Revolver [Mono]

The Byrds - Byrds Box Set

The Ethiopians - Everything Crash: The Best of The Ethiopians

The Kinks - Face To Face

The Kinks - Greatest Hits

The Kinks - Kinks-Size / Kinks Kinkdom

The Kinks - The Kink Kronikles

The Monks - Black Monk Time

The Rolling Stones - Aftermath

The Rolling Stones - Singles Collection: The London Years

The Standells - Russ's Punk Mix

The Sunrays - The Best Of 60s Surf

The Who - The Ultimate Collection

The Yardbirds - Having A Rave-Up

The Yardbirds - Roger The Engineer / Over Under Sideways Down

Them - The Story Of Them

V/A - Hitsville U.S.A.

V/A - Kill Bill, Vol. 1

V/A - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era

V/A - Psychedelic Pop

V/A - Rushmore

V/A - Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968