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Music Memories + Songs

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

When they were good

Several years ago, I was talking to
another co-worker, Le'ah.

She likes to go to a lot of concerts,
including those put on my rock
stars from the 60s and 70s.

She said, "I wish I'd been around back
then, when they were still good."

European Railroad Passes

The Sinatra I did enjoy watching on TV

I did allow that I'd listened to NANCY
Sinatra (NOT Frank!) on the radio singing
"These Boots Are Made for Walking."

Of course, I'd much more enjoyed
WATCHING Nancy on the TV -- with that
long blonde hair and that mini-skirt
up to her behind and those big boots,
she was hot.

Another co-worker knew the song from
watching the movie FULL METAL JACKET
but didn't know it'd been sung by
Nancy Sinatra.

"Too bad," I told him. "You would've
really enjoyed watching her in those
boots."

He would have, too -- he's the type to
be begging her to walk all over him in
those boots. I'd advised him to look
for a video of Nancy singing and
dancing to it. Hopefully some of that
was recorded.

That was Nancy's only big hit. She did
sing a duet of a haunting song. I don't
remember the name of the man she sang
it with or the song, although some of
the lyrics still play in the back of
my mind.

I'd forgotten that song until I heard
it played by Little Steven on his
Underground Garage Radio Show, which
I listen to every Sunday night.

More about that later.

Travel Brochures

What an insult to me

Talk about the ignorance of youth -- my current manager doesn't
even yet understand how much she insulted me.

I was talking to a young co-worker who's into sports the other day and
he kept talking about "Ozzie," Ozzie" -- I don't even remember why,
but I asked him, "Ozzie Smith or Ozzie Osbourne?"

My current manager exclaimed, "I didn't think you even knew who
Ozzie Osbourne was!"

I said, "Well, I DO remember Black Sabbath."

"Oh, I figured you'd be into Frank Sinatra."

FRANK SINATRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA???????

I haven't forgiven her yet.

Air Couriers

The Beatles were the foundation and beginning

1964 through 1969 was a mighty
flourishing and quantum evolutionary
leap of pop music unequalled before
or since.

While The Beatles are certainly not
personally responsible for the
talent and creativity of those many
musicians, they ARE primarily responsible
for the opening up of the music industry
to that talent and creativity.

It's possible that all those great
musicians and groups would have become
stars without The Beatles, but it's
also possible that most or all would
be selling used cars today, without
the openness in the industry created
by the overwhelming popularity of
The Beatles.

It's indisputable that no matter how
the music industry would have grown
in the absence of The Beatles, it
would have been very different
without them.

European Travel

The great musical creative explosion

By then, most of the rest of the
British Invasion groups had topped
out. I'm sure many were still around,
but they were losing ground.

I don't have all the precise dates, but
I'm sure that the charts from those
dates would prove my basic thesis --
The Beatles and a few other British
Invasion artists kept moving forward
artistically.

Many did not, and fell by the wayside.

The Rolling Stones kept up with great
rock and roll that became more
sophisticated without being artistic.

The Kinks grew but became less well-known,
hitting their high point with "Lola" --
which Greg Shaw thought the greatest
pop song ever recorded.

Nowadays it seems much less cutting edge
than it did back then, with its boy
leaves home, boy falls for boy dressed
as girl theme. Now that's ho hum.

And the well-known ambiguity of the
final lines:

"And I'm glad I'm a man
And so is Lola"

is obviously not ambiguity at all -- but
a deliberate DOUBLE meaning.

Of course, Lola is a man AND Lola is
glad the singer is a man too!

The Hollies fell and Graham Nash remained.

The Animals fell and Eric Burdon remained.

Herman and the Hermits fell.

The Yardbirds fell and Jimmy Page, Jeff
Beck and Eric Clapton remained.

Petula Clark -- gone.

Chad and Jeremy -- gone.

The Zombies -- gone.

The Dave Clark 5 -- gone.

Freddie and the Dreamers -- gone.

And American groups which were close to
the spirit of The British Invasion --

Paul Revere and the Raiders -- gone.

The Monkees -- gone.

With The Beatles growing artistically AND
remaining incredibly popular, the way was
opened up not only for the continued
growth of the most talented members of
the British Invasion, the extraordinary
pool of musical talent waiting in the
wings in AMERICA.

First, Bob Dylan.

Then the psychedelic era.

The Jefferson Airplane.

The Grateful Dead.

The Mothers of Invention.

Moby Grape.

The Byrds.

The Mamas and Papas.

The Lovin Spoonful.

Country Joe and the Fish.

Quicksilver Messenger Service.

The Blues Magoos.

The Doors.

Canned Heat.

The Steve Miller Band.

Traffic.

Chicago Transit Authority.

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Jimi Hendrix.

The Moody Blues.

Santana.

Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The continuing advance of The
Beach Boys with PET SOUNDS.

Even the Ultimate Spinach.

And from Great Britain:

The Who and Pink Floyd.

(Recently my manager, who's about late
20s or early 30s, was playing a tape
which included Jimi Hendrix playing
"Purple Haze" and I joked with him
about playing music about LSD.

He said, "That's not about drugs."

I said, "What the hell else can it
be about? Purple Haze was a famous
kind of acid -- along with Orange
Sunshine, it was one of the first
homemade types of acid created by
hippie entrepreneurs after they
could no longer get it direct from
the Swiss company, Sandoz Laboratories,
when it was made into a controlled
substance in 1965. I'm pretty sure
it was made by Stanley Owsley."

Basically, everybody who played at
The Monterey Pop Festival or
Woodstock -- or could have.

Gay Lesbian Travel

The remainder bins of musical history

I don't know this for sure because I
haven't had time to spend my life researching
this stuff, but I have little doubt that
The Beatles were under tremendous pressure
to keep rewriting "I Want to Hold Your Hand"
with every new record.

If The Beatles had given in to those
pressures, where would they be today?

Just another oldies act in Las Vegas,
is my guess.

Fortunately, they refused to listen. And
because they were making Capitol Records
here in the US and their English record
company HUGE piles of cash, they were in
a strong position to resist this
pressure -- in the mid-60s they were in
strongest position of any recording
artist in history.

Any record company would have paid a
large fortune to sign them away from
Capitol and the English one.

So although Capitol and British record
company executives must have been pretty
frightened by the trend of their music --
they couldn't stop The Beatles from
doing whatever they wanted -- until
their popularity went downhill.

Which it absolutely failed to do.

Although the mania of 1964-1966
Beatlemania did die down -- we kept
buying their records by the millions.
If they'd kept on giving concerts,
we'd have kept on buying tickets
and selling out Shea Stadium.

So The Beatles had clout as no other
musical performers in history had --
before or since.

And to their credit, they used it to
the max.

They grew artistically. George Harrison
met a sitar player who had a bit part
in the filming of the movie HELP! -
and soon was studying under Ravi
Shankar. And all of them were taking up
transcendental meditation.

(I'm not going to say that meditation
had anything to do with their musical
growth, just that their willingness to
do something which in those times was
SO weird . . . and SOOOOO far out,
reflects their willingness to explore
new territory, especially inner
territory.)

(Drugs is another part of that story,
probably much more significant, but
I'm avoiding that subject, at least
for now!)

So by 1966, The Beatles were making
music that was still basically pop, and
was certainly popular, but was way
more sophisticated than "I Want to
Hold Your Hand." (my least favorite
of their early songs anyway.)

Singles Travel

How The Beatles destroyed the British Invasion

Every rock and rock music critic and historian has
written about how the Beatles and the rest of the
British Invasion of 1964 changed rock and roll
music and destroyed the careers of so many
American stars.

I've already gone through that too.

Now, I'd like to write about something which, to
the best of my (admittedly) limited reading in
the field for the past 30 years, nobody else
has pointed out. OK, maybe 50 people have, but
I haven't read rock and rock criticism or
fanzines for over 30 years, so here's my
take on it.

Two to three years after The Beatles led the
British Invasion into the American music
industry and destroyed so much of it -- they
destroyed the British Invasion.

That's the part I don't know of anybody else
writing about. Yes, let me repeat that for
you skimmers.

The Beatles DESTROYED the British Invasion.

How? By continuing to raise the bar.

See, they destroyed the 1963 American music
industry/scene by being BETTER than American
groups.

And of course, not just The Beatles, but
many of the English groups that followed
along with them, from The Yardbirds, The
Kinks, The Zombies (on only a few records),
The Animals and of course The Rolling
Stones.

American stars either rose to the challenge
(most notably, as previously written about,
The Beach Boys), met it for a time (Paul
Revere and the Raiders) or got left behind
in the remainder bins of musical history.

Speciality Travel