50 Years Ago This Week

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Susanne Gilmore
Posts: 76
Joined: Wed Nov 09, 2005 11:27 pm
Location: Long Beach, CA

50 Years Ago This Week

Post by Susanne Gilmore »

United States Top 10 for week ending March 12, 1966

1. Ballad of the Green Berets - Ssgt Barry Sadler
2. These Boots are Made for Walkin' - Nancy Sinatra
3. Listen People - Herman's Hermits
4. California Dreamin' - The Mamas and the Papas
5. Elusive Butterfly - Bob Lind
6. 19th Nervous Breakdown - Rolling Stones
7. Nowhere Man - Beatles
8. Lightnin' Strikes - Lou Christie
9. I Fought the Law - Bobby Fuller Four
10. The Sounds of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel

I'm surprised there were no Sounds of Motown on this list.
bob_32_116
Posts: 395
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 12:51 pm
Location: Perth, Western Australia

Re: 50 Years Ago This Week

Post by bob_32_116 »

Coincidentally, I had the Ballad of the Green Berets on the brain this week, not having heard it for years, and it's not even a song I like all that much.

The best song on either of these charts is of course EB - but boy there are some other gems in there as well: Simon & Garfunkkel, Petula Clarke, Mamas & Papas, The Beatles and the Walker Brothers. And Lou Christie, who I always wanted to like more than I did. He recorded some good songs, but he never seemed able to get through one of them without breaking out into a pre-teen girl sounding squeal.
bob_32_116
Posts: 395
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 12:51 pm
Location: Perth, Western Australia

Re: 50 Years Ago This Week

Post by bob_32_116 »

^^ While I am in broad agreement, I would place the golden era as beginning around 1966 and ending sometime around 1975 or 1976. I didn't take a lot of notice what the bands were wearing, I only knew them via the radio.

Poor old Matt monro. Music was indeed moving on - and the most important aspect of that was not so much the music itself - though that was also evolving fast - but the relationship between the singer and the thing they were singing. Matt was part of the old breed of entertainers. He selected songs, or had them selected for him; he sang them, he did so in front of audiences and in front of studio microphones for people's enjoyment. He belongs in the same categorisation as people like Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, Sandie Shaw, Engelbert Humperdinck, Dionne Warwick, Michael Jackson. He was an entertainer, not an artist.

The new breed of singer/songwriters were artists, i.e. creators. This includes people like Bob Dylan, Donovan, Bob Lind, Love, the Lovin' Spoonful, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin etc. And of course a certain band from Liverpool. Their songs were their own, or if they were written by others they were rendered in such a distinctive style that they made them a totally new product. Best example: Hendrix - All Along the Watchtower.

Carole King perhaps better than anyone else personified this change. For many years she and her husband were the unseen songwriting partnership behind other people's hits. Suddenly, in 1971, her album Tapestry (not her first, but the first one that most people know of) announced her arrival as a singer/songwriter.

This, in my opinion, is the enduring legacy of the late 1960's - the rise of the artist, as opposed to the entertaineer.
bob_32_116
Posts: 395
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 12:51 pm
Location: Perth, Western Australia

Re: 50 Years Ago This Week

Post by bob_32_116 »

I recall being in the same room with my mother and somefriends of hers when the Beatles were in Oz in 1964 and TV was showing some footage of them. My mother said something to the effect that she didn'tg like their music at all and their hair was a bit long, but at least that long hair was neatly combed and the guys were nicely dressed.

(cough)

A couple of years later, the Fabs looked as hippy as any other band, if not more so.
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