Category: Sixties
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Bill O’Reilly, Mungo Jerry, and Immanuel Kant
Mr. Bill made a mistake the other night on The O'Reilly Factor when he said that the British skiffle group Mungo Jerry's sole Stateside hit, In the Summertime, is from '67. Not so, as I instantly recalled: it is from the summer of 1970. I remember because that was the summer I first read Kant,…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: J. J. Cale and Some Songs from the Summer of ’63
J. J. Cale has died at the age of 74. Better known to musicians than to the general public, Cale was the writer behind such songs as Eric Clapton's After Midnight and Lynyrd Synyrd's Call Me the Breeze. Here he is on Mama Don't. The summer of 1963 — 50 years ago! — featured an amazing…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Gene Pitney
Gene Pitney was born 17 February 1940 and died 5 April 2006. Biography here. Pitney was something of a melodramatic crooner in such hits as Town Without Pity, but he also penned upbeat chartbusters like Hello Mary Lou for Rick Nelson when he was called Ricky and He's a Rebel for the Crystals. The latter,…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Zero Through Ten
Before getting on to tonight's scheduled presentation, we pause to remember George Jones who died Friday at 81, his longevity proof of the human body's ability to take a sustained licking from John Barleycorn and keep on ticking. I don't believe Jones ever had a crossover hit in the manner of a Don Gibson or…
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Both Sides Now (Clouds)
Joni Mitchell wrote the song and her version is my favorite at the moment. Judy Collins made it famous. I am on a Dave van Ronk kick these days and his rendition, though less 'accessible,' is a haunting contender. According to the Wikipedia entry on van Ronk, "Joni Mitchell often said that his rendition of…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Lawrence Auster on Dylan
I was surprised, but pleased, to see that the late Lawrence Auster, traditionalist conservative, photo to the left, 1973, had a deep appreciation and a wide-ranging knowledge of Dylan's art. Born in 1949, Auster is generationally situated for that appreciation, and as late as '73 was still flying the '60s colors, if we can go…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
This, Dylan's second album, and one of my favorites, was released in May of 1963 by Columbia Records. Here are my favorites from the album. Blowin' in the Wind, with its understated topicality, enjoys an assured place in the Great American Songbook. London Ed uploaded this Alanis Morissette version which is one of the better covers. Thanks, Ed!…
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James Kalb on the ’60s
A tip of the hat to Monterey Tom for hipping me — as we used to say in the 60s — to James Kalb's Out of the Wreckage. Excerpt: So the Sixties led to what it thought it hated most, a consumerist, conformist, careerist, and bureaucratic lifestyle, guided by the heirs of Madison Avenue and…
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Sex and the ‘Sixties
London Ed writes, Another thing from that era [the '60s], now surfacing in England, is the rampant promiscuity disguised as 'alternative' and 'liberation'. Jimmy Savile (I assume you have been following this case) was one of them. But I remember John Peel, who was an icon of English counterculture, boasting of sleeping with girls as…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Scott McKenzie, San Francisco, Summer of Love
Nostalgia time again. Scott McKenzie, famous for the 1967 anthem "San Francisco" penned by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, is dead at 73. Gen-Xer Mick LaSalle gets it right in his commentary: The thing about that song is that . . . however naive and even sanctimonious it might be, it is…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten Psychedelia
How many of these do you remember? If you were too much of the '60s then you probably don't remember anything assuming you still animate the mortal coil; if you were too little of the '60s then you won't remember any of these for a different reason. But among these five are three very beautiful…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Marvelettes
In the calendrical '60s, before the '60s became the cultural '60s,* there was a lot of great music from girl groups like the Marvelettes. I spent the summer of '69 delivering mail out of the Vermont Avenue station, Hollywood 29, California. One day out on the route two black girls approached this U. S. male…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Mimi Fariña
Let's not forget Joan Baez's sister, Mimi (1945-2001). Interestingly, the girls' father is the noted physicist Albert Baez (1912-2007). I remember a physics teacher in high school showing us an instructional film made by one Albert Baez. We were surprised to hear that he was Joan's father. We hadn't heard of him, but we sure…
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John Pepple on the Need for a Cultural Revolution
I drew your attention to John Pepple's weblog, I Want a New Left, a few days ago. Pepple identifies himself as a leftist, but what's in a label? If he were characteristic of leftists, which he isn't, I would have little or no problem with them. I find myself wholly in agreement with his post, We…
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The Monterey Pop Festival, June 1967
It transpired 43 summers ago, this June, the grandaddy of rock festivals, two years before Woodstock, in what is known as the Summer of Love. Your humble correspondent was on the scene. Some high school friends and I drove up from Los Angeles along Pacific Coast Highway. I can still call up olfactory memories of patchouli,…