A History Of Music In 100 Singles: 1953-2012

[vastar iner]

Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Loved You)

Mentioned in passing above, as a sort of protegee of Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, unlike Jackson, moved gradually out of the gospel ranks, and into the world of soul.

She signed for Columbia aged 18 and her first releases were in the jazz and blues mould; indeed Columbia promoted her as the next Billie Holiday. Success did not readily follow. Her songs were considered lightweight and old fashioned - her first top forty success was the primitive "Rock A Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody", which had been a hit for Al Jolson, of all people, and none of her 20 other singles reached even the top 50 - and after a few cash-in Motown covers flopped Franklin was dropped, and headed for Atlantic. Who, you may recall, distributed Stax; she was going soul.

Jerry Wexler of Atlantic teamed her with the Muscle Shoals Horns and one of the first songs she recorded was this one, in which Columbia had no interest. Wexler knew instantly he had a hit. It was a question of how big it would be. Top ten on the pop charts, number 1 in the R&B for seven weeks; both of them firsts for Aretha. The follow-up single, written by Otis Redding, did even better, topping the three main national pop charts. Respect.

What's more, the album, of which this single was the title track, also broke through. The album charts were dominated by pop groups at this time. R&B barely got a look in. But the album spent over a year on the Billboard listings and topped out at 2. Unprecedented.

Obviously "Respect" is the single with which Aretha is most associated, and its defiance in the face of racism and sexism in the music industry makes it a standout, but it may never have happened without this single breaking Aretha through. Plus I think it represents the sound of soul a little bit better - how gospel's songs to God had become soul's songs to love. And whereas there are many male soul singers, it needed someone of Aretha's talent and tenacity to show that there were great female soul voices too. Ironic, as having made her name as a soul singer, Aretha moved towards pop and funk in her next releases.

In sum: sisters are doing it for themselves

[vastar iner]

1968



The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat

When I'm feeling unwell, let's
Put on some Velvets
Leave our guitars up against the amps
I get feedback
In my bedroom in Nantwich
Put my foot down on the angst switch
And that's the time to feed back...

Let's look at some bare chart facts first. Two of their sixties albums made the US charts, peaking at 171 (VU & Nico) and 199 (White Light/White Heat); none of the singles from them made the charts at all. In chart terms, they come somewhat behind such luminaries as Shenandoah and Jennifer Pena. So they should easily be forgotten, shouldn't they?

Thing is, it has been estimated that about ten thousand people bought VU's albums in the sixties, and out of that arose ten thousand bands. One might wish to take a look at this graphic for confirmation. Nobody in musical history has ever had such an influence out of proportion of their success as the Velvets.

It was one of those magic alignments. Warhol, pop art, performance art, shock for shock's sake, chemical enhancements, and pushing to the limit of what a guitar could do and what the ear could take. The first album with Nico Paeffgen was almost pop in themselves with their treatment of music; there was the gentle quality to "Sunday Morning", and even in something like "Venus In Furs" there was a tune buried in the distortion. Would have been something of a conventional pop album but for the lyrical subjects - bondage, drugs, transsexuality and so on. Not exactly "Hello Goodbye".

For White Light/White Heat they pushed it right to the limit. Everything was turned to 11. This was less about music, and more about art. WL/WH's nudging of the Billboard 200 made it the most extreme record ever to chart Stateside. Even whalesong sounds normal (and, by reaching no. 176 in 1971, humpback whales near Bermuda were nearly as successful as VU).

In a meteoritic career VU burnt themselves out by 1970, but left a legacy that sparked a million creative ideas. Buzzcocks formed out of an advert requesting people who could play like WL/WH's "Sister Ray"; REM did a load of VU covers as b-sides; shoegaze (and by extension nugaze) owe their existence to the presence of VU; Bowie, Iggy, Television, NY Dolls, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, even The Smiths, all acknowledging the influence of the Velvets.

Main difficulty was choosing which of their four flops to include. Went for this one from the Difficult Second Album, as it seems to have had more of a kickstart to entire genres.

In sum: never in the field of human music has so much been owed by so many to so few purchases

[vastar iner]

Ohio Express - Yummy Yummy Yummy

There was one big problem with The Beatles. And that was their bigness. They were TOO big. Concerts were a problem; they could barely hear themselves over the noise. Besides which, they were a limited hit. Only a few thousand at a time. Whereas if they made a film, they could play it to a few thousand people every day for months, while still making money elsewhere...

Obviously they were not the first to do this; Elvis and Cliff had done likewise, and other bands like the Dave Clark Five would also make movies. But a couple of television entrepreneurs took the Beatle model and adapted it to television. They put together four wacky lads and created a sitcom around them.

The only problem THEY had was that they lost control of their creation. The Monkees were made up of actual musicians, who, being musicians, wanted to play music. Their music. And so the royalty stream, which ordinarily would have gone to the record company churning out pop by numbers, gradually moved towards The Monkees. And they couldn't realistically cut the group out; the television programme had made stars of Nesmith, Jones, Tork and Dolenz. They couldn't be chopped and changed like so many Pete Bests.

So the industry took another direction. Yes, they could still machine-press hit singles, with talented staff songwriters composing to order, and stochastic session musicians performing. But instead of creating stars there would be an anti-star movement. Sure, a group would have to be put together for publicity purposes, and if they could play a little to keep the illusion going so much the better, but the emphasis would be on the song and an absence of image.

And what sort of songs? You can see from above that there was a lot of experimentalism going on in music. Not least from The Beatles. But The Beatles were also coming up with ultra-simple pop songs like "Yellow Submarine" and "Hello Goodbye", which kept them accessible to a wide audience that would have been bemused by "Revolution No. 9". The Monkees had a happy-go-lucky image that belied some of the social comment in their songs (and which would be blasted by their bad trip film Head, a two fingers to their own past). So this was the direction. Bouncy, uplifting, singalong pop songs that was termed bubblegum for its saccharine aftertaste.

The Ohio Express were one of the first proponents to break through, YYY going top five transatlantically in 1968. They ended up with a handful of top 40 hits in the States. And yet they never existed. It was a brand name covering an ever-varying set of session musicians - at one point an Ohio Express line-up was 10cc before they permanently got together. But it didn't matter. The name was recognizable enough to get publicity and the song good enough to get played.

But after YYY's breakthrough there was a flood of similar acts. 1910 Fruitgum Co and Blue Mink were on the Ohio Express model; indeed the 1910s covered YYY for their album and the b-side of YYY was an instrumental version of a 1910FC a-side. Not surprising, given that both acts were the creation of the production team of Jeff Katz and Jerry Kasenetz.

Sometimes record companies didn't even bother, just inventing new names for different session combos. Ron Dante was the voice of The Archies (with a transatlantic chart-topper) and The Cuff Links at the same time; Tony Burrows sang with three groups in the UK top ten (Edison Lighthouse, Brotherhood Of Man and White Plains) on the same Top Of The Pops; and a goodly number of other names for non-existent outfits had one-off hits - Pipkins, Flowerpot Men, Whistling Jack Smith...

And the idea proved to be surprisingly durable; it easily morphed into family acts like The Cowsills, The Partridge Family and The Jackson 5, and taking the Archie route cartoon hitmaking bands followed via The Groovie Goolies (which, when shown in Britain in the early eighties, got re-titled Groovy Ghoulies, nevertheless it didn't stop the sniggering at school), The Banana Splits and maybe indirectly The Wombles (who featured such extraordinary talents as Clem Cattini - he of 45 number ones - and Chris Spedding behind the hits).

Plus the sound itself proved just as durable, feeding into a lot of what happened in the early seventies, and never really going away...

The main reason for including this though is to show the power of the industry. It was not only about making and breaking new stars; it was about making and breaking a non-star.

In sum: song from whomever

[vastar iner]

1969



MC5 - Kick Out The Jams

(do NOT listen at work)

Lincoln Park, Detroit, Michigan. A location that gave two bands their name. (And singer Wayne County as well.) But both diametrically opposed. Basically take everything Linkin Park stand for - corporatism, soullessness, self-whoring, derivative, bandwagon-jumping, anaemia - and twist them all to their antithesis. And you have an act that started off as the Motor City Five.

This is one of those seminal, epoch-changing records. In the same way as various elements came together in "Rock Around The Clock", a number of elements - garage rock, surf rock, psychedelic rock, blues, funk, jazz - all coalesced into a raucous live show that took Detroit by storm. And then the States. They supported Big Brother & The Holding Company and blew them off stage; they supported Cream and blew them off stage. Not many acts have as their first charting record a live show; however live was the way to capture MC5, they were never built for a recording career.

As could be shown by the shenanigans around their album. Incendiary obscenity-laden liner notes saw the album pulled from a number of stores; when MC5's label Elektra Records (at the time known mainly for its artrock and psychrock output) put out an advert calling for a boycott, one store responded by boycotting Elektra Records instead, and in the ensuing fallout MC5 were dropped. In the end they only made three albums in their heyday, with this, the first single culled from the first, spending a month in the eighties on the Billboard chart; remarkably the album which shared its title peaked at 30.

But forget chart positions. What Haley was to pop music, this was to...well...almost everything that followed. Metal, heavy rock, and, especially, punk. The Stooges, New York Dolls, Saints, everyone, hung upon the MC5. And even more recently acts like Rage Against The Machine depend on the trail blazed by Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson, who still play with the revived MC5 today, and the late Sonic Smith, Rob Tyner and Michael Davis.

And I bet no more than a dozen people here have ever heard of them.

Let's hope there is a trickle down effect.

In sum: deeper underground

[vastar iner]

1970



Black Sabbath - Paranoid

Mrs Elton in Jane Austen's "Emma" says "one has no great hopes of Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound."

I wonder what she would have made of this lot?

Birmingham has always been a metal place. Back in the 18th century my multiple-great-grandfather made the mammoth trek from Redditch to bash metal in a foundry somewhere near the Jewellery Quarter. Cue a line of Vas-cestors following in his stead. Those that didn't get pressganged into trying to keep Belgium un-German of course.

Gradually the heavy industry fell away - but not the heavy metal. An entirely new genre of music that was the sonic equivalent of the local manufacture. You will have heard its influences above; Link Wray and MC5 pointing the way forward, Hendrix of course also being an influence, and Led Zeppelin - with a Black Country input - would certainly have made this list had they bothered with singles. Brum's Black Sab took all this in, added a soupcon of Satanism for that extra frisson of danger, and ramping up the amps, dirtying the guitars and quickening the pace. This infernal direction came about by chance; needing to change their name from Earth as it had been taken already, guitarist Tony Iommi noticed a large queue outside a cinema for a Karloff flick called Black Sabbath, so he wrote a horror song to go with. And it was so popular with the other members they changed their name accordingly.

Bit different from the flower-power hits dominating the charts...

Black Sabbath's eponymous debut album featured their eponymous track; the single taken from it ("Evil Woman") was not a hit. Black Sabbath did not exactly enjoy airplay. But the album, which had been released on a Friday the 13th (February 1970 to be precise) to emphasize the diabolical nature of the act, was; it went top ten in the UK and top thirty in the US, an astonishing success that bears testament to the reputation they had developed via touring. So a second album was recorded toute de suite.

Originally meant to be called War Pigs, the album was eventually re-named Paranoid after Sab, desperate for material four months after their best was set down on Black Sabbath, knocked it up in the studio and knew there was a hit in the making. And it was. "Paranoid" went top five. Metal was here to stay; at the same time Deep Purple, who had gone considerably heavier in the wake of Ozzy & the boys' success, were topping the chart with "Black Night".

Heavy metal had arrived, and it probably never received as much prominence again. It could certainly never have that same shock influence again. Pretty soon the movement managed to do two things at once; firstly, it got stuck in a rut ("Paranoid" sounds contemporary, which is a double-edged sword, either it was way ahead of its time or metal is still as it was 40 years ago); secondly, it splintered into probably hundreds of sub-genres, things like doom, Celtic, sludge, death, black, unblack, symphonic, Christian, thrash and so on. Whether that's because they are really that different or it's due to man's love of pigeonholing is another matter; yes, there are differences, but are Morbid Angel that different to Extreme Noise Terror as against The Fieldmice and Talulah Gosh? Probably not, and the latter two would not really be considered subgenres.

Perhaps the best I can do is quote wikipedia on one particular group of subgenres, and you can see whether you can relate this to e.g. indiepop in similar terms:

Goregrind, deathgrind and pornogrind are styles that mix the intensity, speed, and brevity of grindcore with the complexity of death metal. They differ from death metal in that guitar solos are often a rarity, shrieked vocals are more prominent as the main vocal style (though death growls are still utilized and some deathgrind bands make more use of the latter vocal style), and songs are generally shorter in length, usually between one and three minutes that keep with grindcore's tradition of short time lengths in songs. All three of these styles differs from grindcore in the more technical approach and less evident hardcore punk influence and aesthetics. Some notable examples of deathgrind are Brujeria, Cattle Decapitation, Cephalic Carnage, Pig Destroyer, Circle of Dead Children, Rotten Sound, Gut and Cock and Ball Torture.

I will give metal bands credit for one thing though. They generally do what it says on the tin.

In sum: in a metal mood

[vastar iner]

The Last Poets - On The Subway

This is perhaps the most difficult decision so far. I really wanted to stick in "Ride A White Swan" by T. Rex to show where pop music was going. But I felt in the end that this one was too special to leave out.

Why? It's not that good a record. At this remove it sounds particularly dated and unsubtle. But it is just so, so important.

We've seen there were revolutions in music in the late sixties; however the light and frothy hippy movement had a darker side. LSD trips in Cali were one thing, dying in Nam was another. So many figures turned to overtly political messages. Country Joe & The Fish even had a communist name, and their "Fixin' To Die Rag" - immortalized in Joe McDonald's spontaneous space-filling performance at Woodstock - perhaps being the most bitter.

And many of the social messages were passed on in different ways; Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable which featured the Velvets, beat poetry and, eventually, spoken word. Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" would certainly have made the list had it not been an album track...

But the prime movers in the movement were The Last Poets. Formed out of a spontaneous poetry reading in a New York park to commemorate what would have been Malcolm X' 44th birthday, the East Wind Movement managed to grab a spot on public access television, where they were spotted by a label owner who wanted to get their aggressive, streetwise lyrics on vinyl. He had seen three of them on television and two refused to sign up, as commerciality would interfere with the message; the third, Abiodun Oyewole, brought in two other more willing members and they changed their name to a concept in a poem by the South African activist Willie Kgositsile.

"On The Subway" was their debut single, needless to say it did not make the US charts. However the eponymous album from which it came was a rather surprising success. Its sparseness stood out from the crowd and it reached 29 in the Billboard 200, and top tenned in the R&B album chart.

But a quick glance at the tracklisting - "Jones Comin' Down", "Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution" - gives an idea of the overt political nature of their message, and just how in-your-face it was. No sugarcoating or gentle allusions, this was direct, hectoring, castigating, encouraging, blatant. And for the first time spoken word was shown to be a potential medium. Indeed perhaps the best medium for the message.

It took a while for this to sink in, percolate through the audience and be re-cast. And when it did, it would be a very different sort of revolution.

In sum: revolution on vinyl

[vastar iner]

1971



The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again

The biggest indictment of the open mouth-breathers who buy records in this country is that The Who have only spent one week on top of a chart that matters. The album chart, for the week ending 18th September 1971, with the album Who's Next. Which featured this as the lead track.

The Who had been the most outstanding act to emerge post-Beatles. The greatest drummer in rock history, the greatest bassist in rock history, one of the greatest guitarists and one of the greatest frontmen; they had anchored their sound in an aggressive rock-blues but used that as a foundation for musical experimentation, telling stories in their singles and, eventually, albums.

Who's Next encapsulates the whole Who ethos. Even the cover. A dark monolith, taken from Clarke and Kubrick. The machine that would kick evolution up a step. And they've p*ssed against it. They've subverted the future.

And the album itself. The Who were in at the start of the concept album; Sell Out parodied the world of advertising, Tommy was that deaf dumb and blind kid and the first rock opera, and then there was Lifehouse. The concept was never fully fleshed out, but basically it was Matrix with Moon the loon. Ergo much better. Unfortunately trying to work it out drove Pete Townshend into a nervous breakdown, so the songs that had been jotted down were re-worked into a non-concept album, plus other unrelated songs.

WGFA was part of the Lifehouse concept, a song rejecting someone trying to get on the bandwagon of a subversive concert, and politically apposite at a time when Edward Heath had just replaced Harold Wilson as Prime Minister but it was hard to tell the difference beyond the accent. It is such an astonishing single, bitter and sardonic, and one of the first using a synth, that it's surprising it was such a comparative flop, only just making the top ten.

The single itself caused a bit of a stir amongst the revolutionaries at the time. As the sixties faded into the seventies, the hopes and dreams were being dashed one by one, as it became harder to tell the pigs from the humans. The Who were amongst the first to see that the change was illusory, which led to criticism and a Townshend-penned article in the International Times. Nevertheless, at this distance, when we have sixties firebrand Dominique Strauss-Kahn intercoursing anything that moves while married to a billionairess and Jack Straw justifying illegal wars, I think The Who had the last laugh.

In sum: we'll never have it so good

[raliverpool]

Here is my third batch of 10 songs from 1965 - 1970:

We've completely agreed on three, and two other acts but used different selections.

1965 Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhNm3WI8myM (The (so called) greatest Rock'n'Roll band of all time, and their most iconic song and first US chart-topper)
1965 Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone
1966 Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
1966 The Monkees - I'm A Believer www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfuBREMXxts (The original manufactured TV Pop act, and a great Neil Diamond song)
1967 Aretha Franklin - Respect www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dev-r9xkZU (The Queen of Soul, most iconic song penned by Otis Redding)
1968 The Band - The Weight www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vou51-755I (The origins of Americana roots/rock music)
1968 Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat
1969 Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQwYpYWflBg (Black Country Rock from the greatest Heavy Blues Rock Band of all time and a US #4 hit single (& Germany #1, Australia #1, France #2, Austria #3, Canada #4, Netherlands #5, Denmark #5, Switzerland #5, etc) so I'm including it.
1970 Sly & The Family Stone - Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTLfHo9QAnQ (Apologies to James Brown whose Sex Machine just misses out, but (in the words of Martin Fry): "Sly's the original originator", way before 1970s Stevie Wonder & 1980s Prince. S&TFS were the ultimate funk/soul act, a truly integrated mixed race multi-gender group, and bassist Larry Graham riff on this US chart topping single was later nicked by Janet Jackson's title track to her Rhythm Nation 1814 album)
1970 Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi www.youtube.com/watch?v=t79hUuE2vuI (The original acoustic/folk female singer/songwriter (WTF at Taylor Swift being cast to play the Canadian chanteuse in an upcoming Hollywood movie www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9564948/Taylor-Swift-to-play-Joni-Mitchell-on-big-screen.html))

[vastar iner]

Sly Stone was under serious consideration, but I couldn't fit him in - plus I can sort of cover his ideas with a later entry.



Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

Marvin Gay was such an obsessive with Sam Cooke that he copied his idol in adding an extra vowel to his surname. And after appearing with various vocal groups was signed up to Motown. Where he became well ensconced in the fabric of the label - indeed he married Berry Gordy's sister Anne.

Perhaps that's why they persevered with him, because it took a long while for him to crack the mainstream audience. It took him fifteen singles to crack the top ten, and he had been tried out in duets with Mary Wells and Kim Weston before the real gold-dust duo with Tammi Terrell was formed. They had four top tens together while Marvin's solo records were flopping; and then tragedy.

After one concert in 1967 Terrell collapsed into Gaye's arms. She had been suffering headaches for a number of years. The quacks had a look and diagnosed a brain tumour. Terrell underwent a number of surgeries, but there was nothing that could be done for her. She died in 1970. Six weeks short of her 25th birthday.

Almost in mock, with an ill Terrell trying to make it through one last, medical bill paying duet album, Fate delivered Gaye his greatest success. He had recorded a version of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" which Berry Gordy decided would be kept back in favour of Gladys Knight's; it was used as album filler and caught on with DJs so much it was rush-released. In the time of his greatest anguish Gaye ended up at number 1.

Terrell's death hit Gaye hard. Throw in a success he considered undeserved and Gaye retreated from the industry. He started thinking along spiritual lines; he ditched the sharp suits for more street clothing. When Obie Benson of The Four Tops came with a song he'd worked up in response to unnecessary police brutality, he offered it to Gaye; eventually Gaye took to it, changed it slightly, went into a hemp-suffused Hitsville with a bunch of mates and The Funk Brothers, and recorded two different vocal treatments. He did not know which one to use, so both were mixed together, and the fuzzed result was, he thought, interesting.

Gaye had had a stroke of luck. Berry Gordy was very hands-off now, except when it came to the profits. Gordy's obsession with Diana Ross had taken him to Hollywood; he tried to break her as an actress (with some success - her portrayal of Billie Holiday brought her an Oscar nomination, vanishingly rare for a lack actress back then), which meant Hitsville was able to relax the straitjacket a little more. Presented with a record from his brother-in-law that he hated, Gordy had nevertheless little choice but to release it. The end result? A number 1 hit in Cashbox and a confidence in Gaye that he could produce hits.

So he went back into the studio. Over ten smoky, rather than Smokey, days, he recorded an album based loosely around his hit single, pretty much asking What's Going On. It was one of Motown's first political movements and had come about almost by chance; it also became an album that has become seminal as the years pass.

Although, apparently, only about half as good as those boundary-breaking, mould-destroying, music-reinventing epochal legends that are Roxette.

In sum: heart and soul

[vastar iner]

1972



The Temptations - Papa Was A Rollin' Stone

And when the Gordy's away, the funkers will play. Marvin Gaye had turned Motown towards the political side; The Temptations, much to their chagrin, turned it towards a new, more rootsy direction.

The Temptations were the greatest male vocal group of the sixties and probably all time. Closely linked with The Supremes and Motown in general (David Ruffin walked out with Tammi Terrell and Otis Williams with Florence Ballard for a while), the members themselves preferred - and perfected - the smooth sixties pop style as seen on "My Girl"; however into the seventies their new(ish) producer Norman Whitfield followed the Stax influence and brought a funk element a la Sly Stone into the sound.

It was not popular and after one bust-up Eddie Kendricks left for a solo career. His last song with The Temptations was, ironically, "Just My Imagination", a sixties-sounding ballad that became their third US number one and which had been written pretty much as a sop to their tastes. Having had their hit, their next classic single was this one - and in its original Temptations form it ran to 12 minutes...

The song had originally been a minor hit for The Undisputed Truth, but Whitfield thought it would be better for The Temptations. And pretty much abused Dennis Edwards in the studio until he got angry enough to deliver the opening lines correctly. It sort of worked, as it became The Temptations' fourth US number one, but also their last; as music went more into disco relations between the group and Whitfield deteriorated, other producers could not re-capture the magic, and come 1977 the group left Motown for pastures less successful.

This single perhaps encapsulates the social aspect of funk better than any other single of the era; deep, distressing, able to showcase the talents of The Temptations and The Funk Brothers. It is perhaps Motown's finest few minutes, and done almost behind Berry Gordy's back.

One other reason for its inclusion though was its sheer length, mostly instrumental breaks which Whitfield loved and which The Temptations thought detracted too much from their vocal parts. Split over two sides for release, as with such other classics as "American Pie" and "Rock And Roll", for a commercial release both sides won Grammy awards - one for Best R&B Group Performance, the other for Best R&B Instrumental - but in album form it remained intact. It was one of the first long-player tracks to be played long. Hitherto the pop single had been short and sweet; some groups had experimented with longer efforts, but those were not dance tracks. PWARS was pretty close to being, and was certainly an influence on, the first twelve inch single...

In sum: Detroit glimmers

[Earl Purple]

Sept 23, 2012 19:00:42 GMT 1 vastar iner said:

Thanks - although these were fairly easy, in that they had SUCH an influence on music thenceforth. It was a question of which to choose, and with The Beach Boys at least I don't think I really had an option.

One thing of note before the next one comes along. 1966 was the year of Revolver, Blonde On Blonde, Aftermath and Pet Sounds; so what do you think the Grammy committee chose as the best contemporary rock and roll recording?

The record that best encapsulated the R&R sound of 1966 for future generations?

One of those above? Maybe something by Simon & Garfunkel, whose Sounds Of Silence came out that year? Other epochal works by the likes of The Who, or The Seeds, or Mitch Ryder, or Mamas & Papas, or Donovan?

No. They chose this one.



I doubt belief could ever be so beggared.

Very "contemporary", a song purposely made to sound 40 years older than it was. They must have known what was coming though. Of course this is not the best Geoff Stephens song, and not even the best New Vaudeville Band song. In fact the New Vaudeville Band weren't even a real band for this song, they only become one on the strength of this and had a completely different line-up, albeit Geoff Stephens remained as chief songwriter.

Geoff Stephens would also write many songs for other artists, and had already written a few: The Crying Game and Tell Me When. There's A Kind Of Hush was another of his compositions, which I think the New Vaudeville Band even recorded but was best known as a hit for Herman's Hermits. In the 1970s he would co-write two #1s, both with Tony Macauley: You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me (The New Seekers) and Silver Lady (David Soul).

Incidentally we're talking about a USA here where "River Deep Mountain High", possibly the best song to come out of that country in 1966, was a total flop.

[fiesta]

I maybe would have included Telstar by the Tornado's, I think this record was ahead of its time and Joe Meeks contribution to production of pop records cant be under estimated.

[vastar iner]

Oct 3, 2012 15:29:19 GMT 1 fiesta said:

I maybe would have included Telstar by the Tornado's, I think this record was ahead of its time and Joe Meeks contribution to production of pop records cant be under estimated.

Agree on that - but which one would it replace? A ska pioneer or an electro pioneer? Such is the agony...

1973



The Sweet - Blockbuster!

There was a lot of protest and discontent in the early seventies. Much of this was expressed through music, as you will have seen. But sometimes all you can do is face the music and dance. Hence the counter-reformation. Instead of drab, dull, worthy, wordy angstists, some people decided to rock the hell out. Glam.

Biologists have a term; paraphyletic. Where animals that seem to be closely related actually reach their state of development from different routes. This is what happened with glam. Its prime movers came to the outrageous from various backgrounds. Slade were mob-rockers, in the ska mould; they grew out their hair, dyed their dungarees and painted their Doc Martins. T. Rex came to it by putting pop-rock into psychedelia. Mud through rockabilly. Gary Glitter through calculating that a pop superhero might make it through on sheer chutzpah. Bowie by inventing a whole new persona to jazz up his folky material. Roy Wood took the Spector sound and applied it to Wizzard; his former ELO mates took glam into an orchestral direction.

And then there was The Sweet. The name will show you that their background was bubblegum; they became the house band for the songwriting duo of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chin - Chinnichap - and the amalgamation worked for both.

1973 was the absolute peak year for glam. Slade, Wizzard, Suzi Quatro, Sweet and Glitter between them took 31 of the 52 weeks' worth of number ones. The difficulty was picking a representative. I nearly went with Slade's "Cum On Feel The Noize", perhaps the greatest explanation of what it means to be in a band, but in the end I tipped the wink to The Sweet.

Close-run thing, but Slade were perhaps more a straight-up rock band who happened to have glam elements. Sweet bassist Steve Priest pretended to be a gay Hitler. Could anything be more outrageous? Plus The Sweet could adapt to almost anything. Pure pop like "Co-Co", double (single?) entendre like "Little Willy", something almost indistinguishable from metal like "Hell Raiser", and even brought in synth experimentation in "Fox On The Run". One wonders if Sweet could have done a Bowie and kept on through the punk revolution had it not been for Brian Connolly's tragedy.

Plus Sweet's influence is more profound. Many glamsters found it difficult to crack outside Britain; the US was just entering into a slough of despond where people like Debby Boone would be the biggest stars around. Slade had to wait for Quiet Riot to cover their songs anaemically to get a hit; T. Rex only had one top tenner, which was a lot more than Mud et al managed. But The Sweet had three top fives. Plus eight number ones in Germany. And the number one single of 1975 in Australia. They were massive internationally.

And, what's more, their glam take on a harder pop caught on as a movement in the States. Bands like Twisted Sister had their takes on the look and sound and had some success; poodleperm bands like Poison and Cinderella had huge success, which in turn paved the route for more regular acts like Guns & Roses...

In sum: glam slam

[vastar iner]

Manu Dibango - Soul Makossa

We've seen a development in black music from gospel through soul and funk to rap. But there is one more movement. One that became the most successful, despite being the least musically inventive.

Disco.

The irony is that it started off as an exciting crossbreed of exotica. Makossa is a dance music from Cameroon, reliant heavily on a brass section, and when sax player Manu Dibango melded it with elements of soul for a 1972 album it was discovered by a New York DJ and subsequently exploded over the Empire State City.

It exploded in such a way that, because an obscure album track on a French imprint was not readily available, groups piled on to record soundalike cover versions. Overnight a dancier form of funk took off - and a bunch of musicians had worked out how to play its secrets.

Cannily, Atlantic, always a bit more hip to the R&B groove, licensed the track from the French Fiesta label, and threw it out as a single in 1973. It was not a big hit, peaking down at 35 in the States and not charting at all in Britain, but then again how many Cameroonian instrumentalists have made the US chart? Clue: fewer than 2.

Thing is, the New York DJ who discovered "Soul Makossa" wasn't any ordinary DJ; he was David Mancuso, who had invented a new form of nightclub - small, select, exclusive, invitation only and able to dodge all the licensing requirements. His parties, called The Loft, were THE place to be seen, and were considered to be a step ahead of the game. So if he gave his imprimatur to a record it was bound to take off; further, with everyone aping his movement, the nascent disco form became a New York style that bled into the world. By the end of the year, acts like George McCrae and Hues Corporation, with a gentler, more mainstream soul sound over an anodyne and charisma-vacuum semi-computerized backing - typified by the Philly sound, a cascade of lush orchestral strings that resembled that forward-looking sound experimentalist Mantovani - had taken over the US charts, and disco kept its deathless grip on popular music Stateside for half a decade.

Yet it had all started so well...

In sum: he was to be the disco king

[vastar iner]

1974



Mike Oldfield - Mike Oldfield's Single (Theme From Tubular Bells)

Not many artists manage to have two debut singles with the same title. Mike Oldfield managed it; one version, made without his knowledge, went top ten in the States after it was used in The Exorcist; this one, his UK debut, didn't.

The reason is because Mike Oldfield never intended to make a single. He was not a singles artist. He was one of a new wave of musicians; he was a prog rocker.

It was a logical extension of what was going on. The folk scene had continued under the radar, mostly though with big-selling albums from the likes of Lindisfarne and Steeleye Span, and singles from them being incidental to their main aims. Then you had Led Zeppelin, resolutely refusing to release singles, and instead bringing out longer and longer jams on their albums. Deep Purple had recorded an album with a concert orchestra, and rock acts like King Crimson were turning more to the sort of alternative side of things.

And then you had Jethro Tull. They had managed to make an album of pretty much one song, divided into two. Very much in the folk mode, but artistes like these were turning the album into a single coherent artwork. So the album had developed into a separate genre of itself.

It was perhaps a matter of time until someone basically made a pop equivalent of a symphony. That someone was Mike Oldfield, who had worked away at his idea for a couple of years before he was given the chance to have a go at recording it. A young chap called Branson let him use his new studio for a week and once it was finished the young chap released it on his brand-new label. First release, in fact; and as the young chap was a neophyte in business, unsullied by such matters as backhanders and payola (and VAT, oh what a giveaway), he called his label Virgin.

Talk about a slow burner. With no easy outlet for an album of one movement, it sold by word of mouth; my mum told me she was invited around for tea at a friend's who then said "I've discovered the most astounding record", and then played her Tubular Bells, my mum's review of which was "most boring thing I've ever heard". Marmite. It took eight weeks of bouncing around to get into the top ten, and then hid amongst the reissues and budget compilos for another six months; then it flew. Its use in The Exorcist brought it to a much wider audience, it returned to the top ten in February 1974, and then didn't leave it for good until September 1975. Even this year it returned to the top 75.

In fact it was such a slow burner that it did not reach the top of the charts until 15 months after its release, and in so doing it replaced its own follow-up Hergest Ridge, which had beaten it to the summit. Virgin Records was set up for success, albeit in a sort of hippyish way with other similar acts signed up. And once Tubular Bells made its own way up the charts, loads of other acts with lengthy solos or musical arabesques followed suit; Tangerine Dream, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, all near-permanent inhabitants of the album charts, all almost without any singles success at all. Even Oldfield's single was really forced upon him. The American cut had been prepared by Atlantic without his involvement and was a bit of a hack job, artlessly cut together, so Oldfield decided to do something a little more coherent for his UK release. It was nowhere near as successful, so he turned to folk songs rendered contemporaneously to grab a couple of top fives.

The movement was called progressive rock, as it was seen to be a step forward for rock music, an intellectual, introspective, calculated move into something a bit different from blasting out three chords for two and a bit minutes.

Which caused something of a reaction.

In sum: got Branson out of a pickle

[paulgilb]

Listening to that Manu Dibago record, it seems as though Michael Jackson was somewhat inspired by it!

[vastar iner]

Yes, he copied the chorus...

Meanwhile, for those who think I've got a downer on Roxette...



Dr Feelgood - Roxette

If glam was a reaction against glum, then glam in turn generated its own counter-reaction. Instead of the haute couture, fake identity, dressing-up over-the-top image, this was down and dirty. Instead of prog's arenas, this was down the pub. Literally. Pub rock.

In one respect though pub rock was similar to prog rock. Acts were more known for their albums than their singles. But coming from a different direction. Pub rock bands played intimately with their audiences in small venues. They had to play constantly to earn a crust. One advantage of playing small venues is that touring could be quite narrowly defined - a band could make a living without ever going outside the North Circular. And with their constant playing before a knowledgeable audience, a band had to get good quickly. Live shows were frantic, energetic, asphyxiating; not something easy to capture on a 45. Better with an album.

Demonstrated by the first of the pub rock bands to make a splash was Dr Feelgood. From Canvey Island, a refinery at the end of the world. Their dark hometown lent them towards the blues and R&B genres; they made it their own thanks to Wilko Johnson's unique guitar style that enabled him to play backbeat and melody almost simultaneously. But they first made their name with a couple of live albums. Their debut Down By The Jetty was recorded as live, their third, Stupidity, taken from gigs in Sheffield and Southend, surprised everyone by topping the charts.

That was in October 1976, by which time they had already released three singles, none of which charted. In fact by the time they did hit the singles chart Johnson had left, replaced by the more direct guitar style of Gypie Mayo, and the Feelgoods never had such success again.

But in their wake a number of other pub rock bands emerged. Many, like Ducks Deluxe and Roogalator, never made the national breakthrough and remained underground legends; others, such as Elvis Costello and Kilburn & The High Roads, did go nuclear. The latter of course under the name Ian Dury & The Blockheads. Much of the national exposure was from the first really successful independent label, Stiff, which took a number of pub rock acts on tour to spread the gospel, and generated a cult following for the label itself. To the extent that many bought Stiff's LP The Wit & Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan - which was merely a blank disc...

Pub rock might have made it much, much bigger had not a snotty younger sibling, taking the swagger and energy and adding a dash of confrontationalism, come along and push it aside. Indeed one or two of the pub rockers themselves decided to tag along with the new gang. But more of that anon.

In sum: pub with no fear

[fiesta]

Oct 3, 2012 22:01:57 GMT 1 vastar iner said:

Oct 3, 2012 15:29:19 GMT 1 fiesta said:

I maybe would have included Telstar by the Tornado's, I think this record was ahead of its time and Joe Meeks contribution to production of pop records cant be under estimated.

Agree on that - but which one would it replace? A ska pioneer or an electro pioneer? Such is the agony...

Dont replace anything, just change the title to 101 singles

[vastar iner]

Afraid there are other better candidates for the 101st single...there are some very big names that won't make the list at all.

1975



Kraftwerk - Autobahn

Dammit, I thought synth was futuristic in 1980. God knows what I would have thought had I been seven in 1975. Good God, they're still post-modernist today, with their Man Machine concept of humans playing robots.

It's almost stereotypical to think of them as such and assume it's because they're German, but then again that might be because they themselves are parodying the stereotype to some extent. But whatever. Their use of synthesizers burst onto British consciousness when they toured in 1975 and perhaps it was because they seemed to be uber-German that they managed to become successful - one only needs to glance at the Mirror whenever England plays Germany to see how much the war still casts a shadow over relations - but maybe it was more because the prog side of things had opened minds to more progressive music.

Anyway, whichever way one looks at it, there was a bunch of German bands that took on the synthesizer and turned it into an instrument in its own right, rather than a keyboard replacement. Like glam, the paradigm was paraphyletic, as it was approached from different directions; Can from jazz and Stockhausen, Faust from performance art, Tangerine Dream from prog, Kraftwerk from experimental art and Neu! from Kraftwerk, and the British media, with their love for labelling, derogatorily lumped them all together as part of a supposed movement called Krautrock. Kraftwerk - the name meaning "powerplant" - were the most pop-oriented, even sneaking a UK chart-topper in 1982. More than they've ever managed back home.

And as such were the big influence in the UK; practically every synthesizer sold in Britain in the later seventies seems to have gone to someone who wanted to start up a pop music act; OMD, Tubeway Army, Heaven 17/Human League/BEF, Cabaret Voltaire, Soft Cell, indeed many of the acts who topped the charts in 1981 and 1982 can be traced back to Kraftwerk.

But for 1975 it's just outrageous. They're not the first electro act, by any means; I've hinted at Ray Cathode before, and Jean-Jacques Perrey in France was also experimenting with electro back in the 1960s. But many of these were art for art's sake. It took this by-now-quartet to marry it with a pop sensibility and create a total alternative source of making music. To a weird extent it also democratized music. You previously needed a band if you wanted guitars, drums and bass. Now you could program them all in and you were away. At least, once the price of a synth came within easier reach...

In sum: crafty work

[vastar iner]

Bob Marley & The Wailers - No Woman No Cry

Ska had had its measure of success in the UK charts, with Desmond Dekker and Dave & Ansil Collins even topping them, but reggae had bumbled along as something of an undertone. A slower, often more political version, its sound was a little too deep for the British audience.

Then came a freak. Eric Clapton covered a quirky song by one of the leading lights and took it to the top of the US charts and the top ten of the UK. The success of "I Shot The Sheriff" seemed to spur people's interest in the mind behind the song, and Bob Marley, who had released a number of singles to market indifference, took on a triumphant tour of the UK. A rush-release live album gave him his chart debut, and started a Legend.

Marley and his Wailers had been around for a number of years without much success; after Jimmy Cliff left Island Records, Chris Blackwell signed Marley up as his thematic replacement, hoping Marley's Rastafarianism would be the difference-maker to set him apart. The original Wailers, including Pete Tosh and Bunny Wailer, had already left and the act was more or less Marley and others, including wife Rita, and that line-up scored a number of hits consistently over the next few years, as reggae music became more and more popular in their wake.

The Wailers though generally ended tragically. Marley himself dying of cancer stemming from a broken toe, Tosh and Carly Barrett both being murdered (Marley himself survived a shooting in 1976); another indicator of the future. And it was only after Marley's death that he gained his greatest success. The album Legend was surely one of the most unexpected successes, and even now still makes the album chart periodically. Surely there cannot be any association between man and genre as tight as Marley and reggae. You might note that NWNC was written by a chap called Vincent Ford. At least according to the credit. In fact Ford ran a soup kitchen in Jamaica; Marley gave him the copyright to the song in a gesture that became more generous as the years went on.

Marley's influence though goes beyond music. As a Rastafarian he preached the gospel of a positive Africa; he was an emblem, indeed an icon, for the downtrod and depressed. He was someone who could be seen as being on the side of those in need. And his deep rootsy sound showed that one need not compromise; you can succeed with your sound, the world might listen. To some extent the message has become anodyne, in that Marley himself idolized the likes of Che Guevara; but then again is the man the same as the music?

In sum: legend