Category: Music

Boxtops, 1967, The Letter

R. B. Greaves,  Take a Letter, Maria

Ketty Lester, 1962, Love Letters, with images from David Lynch's Blue Velvet. If you think the Lynch twist spoils a beautiful song, here it is straight.  Often covered, never surpassed.  E.P.'s version.

Elvis Presley, 1962, Return to Sender

Benny Goodman, Airmail Special

The Marvelettes, 1961, Please, Mr. Postman.  The summer of '69 found me delivering mail out of the Vermont Avenue Station, Hollywood 29.  One day two girls came up to me and started singing this song.  Something this U. S. Male won't forget.

Roosevelt Sykes, Mailbox Blues

Bob Dylan, Take a Message to Mary

Donovan, Epistle to Dippy

Don Gibson, The Last Letter

Jean Shepard and Ferlin Husky, A Dear John Letter

Beatles, P. S. I Love You

Paul McCartney, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter 

Traveling Wilburys, End of the Line

Amos Milburn, One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer

The Showmen, It Will Stand.  If you remember this underplayed oldie, I'll buy you one scotch, one bourbon, one beer.  There was an apologetic sub-genre around this time (1961) of songs celebrating R & R.  

Fleetwood Mac, Mission Bell.  Haunting cover of the upbeat Donnie Brooks hit.

Merle Haggard, The Fugitive

Them, Here Comes the Night.  This YouTuber got it right: "Love this song – still sounds as raw and as fresh as it did nearly 50 years ago!"  Yes, raw, edgy, yet tender.  Unforgettable.

Les Paul at 90, Sleepwalk.  No offense to the great guitar pioneer Paul, but Joe Satriani's version is hard to beat.  The 1959 original by Santo and Johnny. 

A lonely soldier cleans his gun and dreams of Galveston. Marty Robbins messes with the wicked Felina in El Paso and catches a bullet for his trouble. Joan Baez sings of a jilted lover and her counterfactual conditional, "If the ladies was squirrels with high bushy tails, I'd load up my shotgun with rock salt and nails." Gene Pitney sings of the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And from 1943, here is Pistol Packin' Mama by Al Dexter.

I can't speak for my housemates at the time, Ken Bower and Craig Fellin, but these three albums were my favorites among the ones we listened to, and the selections are my favorites from each.

1. Bob Dylan, New Morning (released 19 October 1970).  Sign on a Window.  If any song puts me in mind of Craig, it is this one. That's him to the left.  He is the proprietor of the Big Hole Lodge in Montana.

 

 

 

 

 

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife
Catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me 'Pa'
That must be what it's all about
Thta must be what it's all about.

After his motorcycle accident in 1966, the protean Dylan moved closer to the earth and farther from the mind.  Gone the despair and the absurdist imagery of It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding (from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965) and Desolation Row (unfortunately, this is the 'stoned' version, but it too is oddly beautiful)  and the haunting Visions of Johanna (from Blonde on Blonde, 1966).

2. George Harrison,  All Things Must Pass (released 27 November 1970).  The title song.  "All things must pass/All things must pass away."

3. Derek and the Dominoes, Layla (released November 1970).  The title song.  The best part begins at 3:10.  It still rips me up, 42 years later.

I wouldn't want to relive those early years.  But what I lacked in happiness, I made up for in intensity of experience.  Ken and Craig had no small part in that. 

Ronettes,  Be My Baby (opening sequence).

Rolling Stones, Tell Me (Keitel's entrance).

Rolling Stones, Jumpin' Jack Flash (De Niro's entrance).

Smokey Robinson, Mickey's Monkey

Derek and the Dominoes, I looked Away

Marvelettes, Please Mr. Postman

Little Caesar and the Romans, Those Oldies but Goodies

Johnny Ace, Pledging My Love

Paragons, Florence 

The sound of the sitar played a prominent role in the soundtrack of the '60s.  To George Harrison, student of Ravi Shankar,  goes the credit of having introduced it to Western popular music.  Light a stick of sandalwood incense and enjoy these great Beatle songs that feature its use:

Norwegian Wood 

Love You To

Tomorrow Never Knows.  "Turn your off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying.  Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the Void. It is shining, it is shining.  That you may see the meaning of within.  It is Be-ing, it is Be-ing . . . ."  The depth and creativity of a song like this surpasses anything in popular music since.

Within You, Without You

Across the Universe

Following the Beatles, everybody and the brother of his monkey's uncle got into the sitar act.  The Rolling Stones for example.  No, I'm not going to link to "Paint it Black."  I'll link to something obscure: Richie Havens, Something Else Again.

By 1970 or so, the sitar's popularity in Western popular music had subsided.  Its resonance belongs to those far-off and fabulous days of the '60s.

Related articles

Ravi Shankar Dead at 92

Ravi Shankar, sitar master, dies at 92

What would the soundtrack of the '60s have been without Shankar's sitar?  Here is the Shankar I heard at the Monterey Pop Festival in '67.  Here is an extended performance at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.

Here is an obituary.

More on Shankar Saturday night.

Dave Brubeck has passed beyond time signatures and time itself, ending his earthly sojourn last Wednesday a day shy of his 92nd birthday.  My old college buddy  Monterey Tom writes,

I don't think that you have to be either a Jazz aficionado or a musician to note Brubeck's importance in both the music world itself and in the broader culture of the 50's and 60's.  His compositions, and those of his alto sax player Paul Desmond, inspired other musicians to experiment with non-traditional time signatures and tonal structures.  Ironically, by performing often in college auditoria instead of night clubs and by clearly connecting his music to classical music, he put a coat-and-tie respectability to Jazz and thereby made huge numbers of young Americans aware of both the broader worlds of Jazz and modern art in general.  His music was often as charming and soothing as chamber music, as joyous as that of the 1930's swingers, and as intriguing  as that of the supposedly more serious innovators of the 20th Century.

Tom is much more the jazz aficionado than me, but we were both and still are Kerouac aficionados.  Here is a 30 second reading, "Dave Brubeck," from Kerouac's Poetry for the Beat Generation.  That's Steve Allen on piano.

The title of Take Five alludes to its 5/4 time signature.  It was from the 1959 album Time Out.  Wikipedia: "While "Take Five" was not the first jazz composition to use the quintuple meter, it was one of the first in the United States to achieve mainstream significance, reaching #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #5 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart in 1961, two years after its initial release."  I remember hearing it in '61 from my brother-in-law Ken's car radio somewhere in the Mojave desert. Old Ken liked it. Who could not like it?

Also very accessible is Blue Rondo à la Turk in 9/8 and 4/4 time, also from Time Out.  Based on a melody Brubeck heard in the streets of Istanbul.

St. Louis Blues

Legacy of a Legend

Brubeck composed sacred music and became a Roman Catholic in 1980. 

Related articles

Dave Brubeck: Death of a jazz giant

Mickey "Guitar" Baker died this last week at age 87.  He is perhaps best known as one half of the Mickey and Sylvia duo whose Love is Strange was a hit in 1956.  Also from '56:

Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind

Elvis Presley, Love Me Tender

Doris Day, Que Sera Sera.  It was a different world, muchachos.

Big Joe Turner, Corrine, Corrina.  I don't remember hearing this in '56.  Hell, I was only six years old. I remember the tune from the 1960 cover by Ray Peterson.  Youtuber comments, which in general are the worst in the whole of cyberspace,  on this one are good.  There is a lovely version by Bob Dylan on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, under the slightly different name, Corrina, Corrina.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marital Advice

Saturday Night at the Oldies: James Burton, Master of the Telecaster

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

Mickey Baker, Guitarist Whose Riffs Echo Today, Dies at 87

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Halloween

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'Strange' Songs

Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, O Fortuna (With Latin and English).  Better performance without lyrics.

Joan Baez, There But For Fortune.  The best rendition of a song written by Phil Ochs.  Ochs' version.

I agree with this analysis of Ochs:

The short, triumphant, tragic career of Phil Ochs illustrates one of the harder lessons of American popular culture: that audiences are moved far more by mystery than by commitment. Of all the artists of the 1960s folk-music boom, only Bob Dylan understood that in his bones, and only Dylan became a superstar. Ochs, by contrast, was the bright class president of the Greenwich Village scene, reeling off powerful, didactic protest songs in an earnest tenor. He was direct and defiantly uncool, and it doomed him.

Related articles

The Phil Ochs Movie: There But For Fortune

Skeeter Davis, The End of the World

Traveling Wilburys, End of the Line

Floyd Cramer, Last Date. Skeeter Davis' version.

Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.  Dont' like Dylan's voice? Try Joan Baez's angel-throated version.

Roy Orbison, It's Over

Beatles, The End

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet (but It's Getting There). 

The Doors, The End.  "The West is the best."

Bonus tracks:

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.  This'll grow on you if you give it a chance.

This one goes out to General Petraeus:  Bob Seger, The Fire Down Below.  In its grip, they'll throw it all away.