"Good Vibrations"
Artist - The Beach Boys
The United States of 1966 was in many ways very different from the country of 1960, when the Beach Boys were recording their first songs. The civil rights movement had brought attention to the inequities of American society and its legal codes; free speech movements were promoting widespread political change; and the Beat movement of the '50s had given way to the nascent hippie counterculture. Pop music, too, had changed. Psychedelic art found a musical counterpart in the heavy washes of sound and virtuosic instrumental solos of groups like Cream and the Byrds, and the catchy, three-minute single was losing artistic ground to ambitious, highly produced songs and albums that expressed ideas of some depth.
Brian Wilson, in the studio preparing the Beach Boys' next album, began exploring more and more elaborate production techniques. He was influenced by the Beatles' mid-period albums Revolver and Rubber Soul, which reflected the influence of producer George Martin. The unorthodox instrumentation and production of these albums inspired Wilson to new heights of creativity. The groundbreaking album Pet Sounds (1966)—the first "concept" album in which all tracks were unified thematically—is considered by many to be his masterpiece; scores of studio musicians contributed unusual instrumentation and washes of Hollywood-style orchestration to a more introspective album than the Beach Boys had created previously. Paul McCartney was extremely impressed by Pet Sounds; the album inspired his ideas for the Beatles' next project, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Wilson, sparked by a desire to make better records than the Beatles, undertook an ambitious plan for the next Beach Boys album, Smile. The first completed track was the sprawling masterpiece "Good Vibrations." Wilson spent six months in the studio working on just this track, which required seventeen recording sessions in four different studios at the then astronomical cost of $50,000. Material was recorded for the rest of the album, but Wilson was unable to complete the project due to resistance from the other members of the group and his own increasingly erratic behavior; Wilson had a serious drug problem and was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Several of the tracks would later surface on the compromise album Smiley Smile. The incomplete tracks for Smile were circulated for years among record collectors and fans; in 2004 Brian Wilson assembled and re-orchestrated the material, and the full album finally emerged in 2004 to favorable reviews.
Also see: The Beatles (Revolver and Rubber Soul), Phil Spector, the Byrds, Edgar Varèse
Must Haves:
- Heroes and Villains
- God Only Knows
- Sloop John B
- Cabinessence" (from Brian Wilson, Smile, 2004)
Performers Influenced By This Artist:
"A Day in the Life"
Artist - The Beatles
By 1966 the Beatles had been actively touring, with only short respite, for nearly four years, and they were exhausted and burned out. Therefore, they announced their retirement from the road to focus on making records. The band's increased attention to sophisticated production and complex composition that began on Rubber Soul and Revolver reached its full potential with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sgt. Pepper's is a concept album in which all the songs (save one) are arranged around the conceit of an alter ego for the Beatles. The album begins with a whimsical tune that introduces Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the Beatles roadie Mal Evans came up with the name, which spoofed the long names of psychedelic bands emerging in San Francisco), and ends with its reprise. These songs create a frame that defines the fictional space in which Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band exists.
"A Day in the Life" is the only song to stand outside that frame, which to some has suggested that it has special importance. Many have heard it as the most obvious of a series of clues in the Beatles' later albums that indicated that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash and was replaced by a double after 1966. Actually, much of the song is taken directly from contemporary newspaper stories. One refers to socialite Tara Browne, son of Lord Oranmore and Browne and heir to the Guinness beer fortune, who died when his car ran a red light and smashed into a van. The other told of how a city surveyor in the town of Blackburn, Lancashire, had counted all the holes in city roads. Both are examples of the surrealistic "automatic writing technique" of which Lennon was greatly enamored. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" is another example; its lyrics were taken, verbatim, from an old circus poster.
The avant-garde "apocalyptic" section at the end has garnered much fascination over the years. A forty-one-piece orchestra was hired and the musicians were told to play from the lowest note on their instruments to the highest over the course of twenty-four bars; the climax is a crashing piano chord that ends with a long sustain. That is followed by a sound outside the range of human hearing (but audible to dogs) and a two-second tape loop of spoken gibberish (played backward, one can supposedly hear the phrase "Paul is dead") that on a manual turntable would repeat infinitely until the needle was removed.
Also see: Karlheinz Stockhausen and other avant-garde classical music composers, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, the Small Faces
Must Haves:
- "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- "Maxwell's Silver Hammer "
- "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"
- "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"
Performers Influenced By This Artist:
- Everyone who made a rock album after 1967, but especially the Who
- Pink Floyd
- the Moody Blues
- and the Small Faces
"White Rabbit"
Artist - Jefferson Airplane
Jefferson Airplane were pioneers of psychedelic rock and were the first of the San Francisco bands to get a record deal with a major label. In fact, they were signed so early —in 1965, that recording sessions and touring obligations kept them out of San Francisco during many of the generation-defining events of late 1966-67 like the Human Be-In and the Acid Tests; as a result, their importance is often understated in histories of the period, in favor of later bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead who seemed more intimately connected to the hippie counter-culture.
The group formed in the summer of 1965 from musicians connected to the San Francisco folk rock scene. Singer Marty Balin recruited a number of people he knew from various folk venues around town, and Jefferson Airplane (a pun on the name of blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson) soon built a local following at the Matrix Club. When Bill Graham opened the legendary Fillmore West he hired the Airplane for the premiere; by that time they had been signed by RCA records and made an album called Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.
After the debut, drummer Skip Spence and singer Signe Tolle Anderson left the group. They were replaced by Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick, the lead singer of another San Francisco group, the Great Society. Slick's powerful contralto was well suited to the group's increasingly psychedelic music; she was also a fine songwriter and brought with her some numbers she had written for the Great Society but not recorded. One was "White Rabbit," a song she wrote after an LSD trip spent listening to Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain album over and over. The lyrics were inspired by Alice in Wonderland, which featured a hookah-smoking caterpillar, magic mushrooms, and pills and vials of liquid that altered the reality of the protagonist, all of which seemed quite appropriate to the San Francisco drug culture of the late 1960s.
The album Surrealistic Pillow became a chart topping hit, and both the song and the album brought psychedelic rock into the mainstream. However, the only number one hits the group would have were in the 1980s with an incarnation called Starship, in which Grace Slick was the only "original" member. "We Built This City," written by Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin, topped the charts for weeks in 1985 but has since been voted the worst single ever made in several magazine and radio polls.
Also see: The Beatles, the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield, the Charlatans
Must Haves:
- "Somebody to Love"
- "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"
- "Feel So Good"
- ""White Rabbit"
Performers Influenced By This Artist:
- Donovan
- Quicksilver Messenger Service
- Spirit
- Heart
- Rotary Connection
""Sunshine of Your Love"
Artist - Cream
Cream (or the Cream) was rock's first power trio—bass, lead guitar, and drums—and one of the earliest supergroups. The band's members were all veterans of London's "rhythm and blues scene"; Eric Clapton was the original lead guitarist of the Yardbirds (replaced successively by Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page) and had risen to fame in John Mayall's Blues Breakers, which was considered the most hard-core and serious of all British blues bands of the 1960s. He became known for his extended guitar solos, which at the time were a novelty in rock and roll. They were more common in the blues, and Clapton modeled his playing after blues musicians like Freddie King, B. B. King, and Albert Collins. His playing was regarded as so amazing that graffiti proclaiming "Clapton is God" began appearing on walls around London. Cream also included Jack Bruce, who had started his career as bass player for Blues, Inc., the first British R&B band, and had also been in Manfred Mann (in its pre-Earth band days), the Graham Bond Organization, and the Blues Breakers. In 1966 Ginger Baker, Bruce's bandmate in Blues Inc., and the Graham Bond Organization, was looking for a new challenge. He proposed the idea of forming a band to Eric Clapton, who was becoming dissatisfied with the Blues Breakers. Clapton agreed to join, but on the condition that Jack Bruce would play bass. Despite significant personal animosity between Baker and Bruce, an agreement was reached, and Cream was born.
Musically, the band created a brand-new kind of rock music. Much of their early repertoire was blues, but added to it the idea of jazz-like extended improvisation. The blues jam was introduced to rock Yardbirds, who called these sections "rave-ups," as they generally included a gradual increase in speed and intensity (ironically, in the blues this is called a breakdown). Cream took the sounds of Chicago blues, British pop, and the psychedelic rock that was just beginning to emerge and fused them into a new approach to the blues. As Clapton, Bruce, and Baker were arguably three of the finest musicians in London at the time, Cream focused on instrumental virtuosity: Clapton contributed long, liquid blues-based solos colored by wah-wah pedal, feedback, and distortion; Bruce added incredibly active bass lines, usually in counterpoint to Clapton's. While common in American soul music, such lines were rare in British rock, and the innovation made Bruce the most prominent bassist of his day. When added to Baker's polyrhythmic jazz drumming style, the results were explosive! Cream was at its best live, sometimes working through 10-, 15-, even 20-minute improvisatory explorations of each song's possibilities.
Unfortunately Cream was doomed from the beginning; Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce complement each other's styles as musicians and work well together, but the two have never gotten along. It's actually quite amazing that the band lasted for eighteen months!
Also see: Jimi Hendrix, Yardbirds, Freddie King, B. B. King, Stax soul
Must Haves:
- "White Room"
- "Strange Brew"
- "Tales of Brave Ulysses"
- "Crossroads"
Performers Influenced By This Artist:
"Purple Haze "
Artist - The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Contrary to popular belief, Jimi Hendrix did not pioneer the possibilities of the electric guitar; in fact his idiosyncratic style, which combined pedal effects, feedback, and distortion, was derived from the experiments of bluesmen Earl Hooker (cousin of John Lee Hooker) and Buddy Guy. However, Hendrix brought their experiments with electricity and tone color, along with the flamboyant performing styles of Charlie Patton, Howlin' Wolf, and T-Bone Walker, boldly into the arena of rock and roll, and amplified their effects with studio wizardry and extremes of volume.
Hendrix grew up in Seattle and was raised on a steady diet of Chicago blues and R&B. When rock and roll emerged he took a fervent interest in the music and played along with the radio by strumming a broom. In 1958 his father bought him a secondhand guitar, and shortly thereafter Hendrix formed his own band, the Velvetones. In 1961 he joined the army and served as a paratrooper until he was injured in a jump. By then he had developed a solid guitar technique and began working as a session guitarist under the name Jimmy James. By the end of 1965 he had played with Ike and Tina Turner, Sam Cooke, the Isley Brothers, and Little Richard, and formed his own band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. While working in New York Hendrix met Chas Chandler, the bassist for the Animals, who convinced him that his blues-drenched style would be well-received in London, where a psychedelic blues scene was beginning to emerge.
In London, Hendrix reputedly caused a sensation. Word of the amazing young guitarist spread quickly, and the emerging blues rock guitar gods all flocked to see if the rumors were true. When he was playing one of his gigs at the Marquee, the premiere jazz and blues club of mid '60s London, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones warned people at the intermission to be careful up front, as the floor was wet "from all the guitarists crying." Hendrix pulled together a group with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding (who had actually never played bass, but was a fine rhythm guitarist) and began making the rounds. Chandler convinced him to record "Hey Joe," a song that was popular among folk players in San Francisco; the song raced up the UK charts and established Hendrix as a hit-maker in Britain. However, it wasn't until Hendrix returned to the United States to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival in California that he became an international rock star.
Also see: Earl Hooker, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, T-Bone Walker
Must Haves:
- "Hey Joe"
- "Foxy Lady"
- "Little Wing"
- "Castles Made of Sand"
Performers Influenced By This Artist:
- Joe Satriani
- Stevie Ray Vaughan
- Steve Vai
- Robin Trower
- Lenny Kravitz