Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1968
by Scott Miller

"Revolution" - The Beatles
Here's why you're not John Lennon. If you were going to write "Revolution," you would first identify your target audience and then speak to the passions of those people. John comes up with, "You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world"—talking to the left and challenging the left to come up with a more peaceful alternative. If that's not music to either side's ears, he does not care. You, one way or the other, would care.

"Paralyzed" - The Legendary Stardust Cowboy
The 1968 CD is a little special in that only two songs in, it will lose you some friends. But friends who don't appreciate a cowboy at the outer limits of insane screaming accompanied by a banjo and drums that turn insane during the song are friends who will always come and go. And if I ask you how you bring such music to a climax, and you answer, "bugle solo," come get a hug.

"The Israelites" - Desmond Dekker and the Aces
This is certainly the first reggae song I ever heard, and is probably still my favorite, though Augustus Pablo's Rockers Meets King Tubby Uptown is the record for dub elements. And, you know, I did like "I Can See Clearly Now"; here is a fact that I'm probably the only one on the planet to get excited about: Johnny Nash was the singer on the theme from the cartoon "The Mighty Hercules"! I'm still speechless.

"Good Times, Bad Times" - Led Zeppelin
Yes, this one definitely must be ripped from vinyl; the key to the particular power of 1968-69 rock music (and, I bet, muscle cars) is embedded in the way the first two Zeppelin albums behave at saturation levels. If you're a purist, you should really record it with live mikes in front of the speakers of a Zenith console stereo, turned up loud enough that you just barely pick up a little rattle from the glass top of a coffee table.

"The Garden of Earthly Delights" - United States of America
Experimental music tends naturally to be steered toward being about alienation. For example, synthesizers were brand new in 1968, so you could tell cutting edge projects by echoey bleeping sounds such as you expected when the hostile space alien first appeared on screen; that kind of thing didn't go nearly as well with convivial songs as with lyrics like these, which use botanical imagery to convey the poisonousness of the woman the song has in mind. Yet, this is not another friend-loser; this is a surprisingly well-executed piece of musicianship and vocal interpretation—the right people to catch in an art-house frame of mind.

"Astral Weeks" - Van Morrison
In my book, the album Astral Weeks is a little musically undercomposed to be one of the greatest albums as is its reputation, but the title song is both a breathtaking evocation of how spiritual transformation feels, and the world's most beautiful set of lyrics that include the word "viaduct."

"Dance to the Music" - Sly and the Family Stone
As well as being really good, Sly and the Family Stone records were gigantic hits; if you went back in time, you wouldn't actually hear Astral Weeks anywhere, but Sly was on the radio, being interviewed on the Dick Cavett show, getting covered by high school dance bands.

"Hurdy Gurdy Man" - Donovan
There's some sort of a creepy edge to "the hurdy gurdy man," when he comes singing songs of love amid the "unenlightened shadows" and that well-known snarling electric guitar, which everyone used to say was Jimmy Page, but I just checked on Wikipedia, and it's apparently really Alan Parker. However, John Paul Jones played bass and was "musical director" (as opposed to lighting director?).

"Piece of My Heart" - Big Brother and the Holding Company
This is of course Janis Joplin's first high-profile recording. As much as I love this performance, there is a lot more to like. The hammer-on rhythm guitar in the verses is a hook in itself. And the amazing album art was my first exposure to Robert Crumb.

"Wasn't Born To Follow" - The Byrds
It's a hard choice between this and "Draft Morning," and honestly I think this wins just because of the cachet of being so prominently featured in Easy Rider. Another illustration of how many fantastic Carole King/Jerry Goffin songs there are floating around in various artists' sixties catalogs.

"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" - Marvin Gaye
It's possible I noodle on the riff of this song more than any other when I have a few free moments with a guitar or piano. I've probably been so influenced by Dave Marsh's famous explication of the lyrics that I can no longer call to mind what they did for me personally, although expressing four hundred years of paranoia in order to reclaim the human spirit was not it.

"Beechwood Park" - The Zombies
All serious enough rock musicians love Odessey and Oracle. When Mitch Easter first played it for me, I told him it was a very good record for always sounding quite a bit like "Double-Back Alley" by the Rutles. I was mostly kidding. "Time of the Season" is also fabulous, but my favorite is "Beechwood Park," with the perfect and unexpected lines, "And the breeze will touch your hair, kiss your face/And make you care about your world."

"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" - Otis Redding
Otis Redding had already died by the time this came out, so it always felt ominous. It's probably the best expression of that feeling that San Francisco and California are the end of the line for going west in search of success, and for many people are just places to be out of luck. "I can't do what ten people tell me to do/So I guess I'll remain the same" always gets me.

"Sympathy For the Devil" - The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones' devil is close to Goethe's Mephistopheles—he wants to make a deal with you by offering worldly advantage to obtain your service in hell—but in some ways he is, as far as I can tell, a real innovation. The Stones devil gets your soul when you deny your responsibility for evil in the world: when Pilate "washed his hands and sealed his fate," or when someone shouts out, "Who killed the Kennedys?/When after all, it was you and me." I'm mightily impressed.

Lather - Jefferson Airplane
I have similar strong affections for "Lather" and for the movie Harold and Maude that I couldn't easily explain or defend. Both are about young men whose resistance of adulthood is expected to be cheered by the audience, and I'm not in favor of that, but in both cases the project is executed with such flair that I'm swept up. This could be the greatest of many great Grace Slick melodic lines; the turn on what I guess you'd call the chorus—e.g. "sometimes he's so nameless..."—is astounding.

"Chest Fever" - The Band
The singing is a sort of not unappealing drunken shout. I don't follow what the words are saying other than a girl is inaccessible, and I'm completely stumped as to why it's called "chest fever." But how that organ slays me. It would be impossible for me to hear this song start in any situation on earth and not go, "Ooh! Ooh! It's 'Chest Fever'!"

"White Room" - Cream
This is some of my favorite Eric Clapton guitar playing, but it's more the Jack Bruce content I'm responding to. And mostly intangibles at that. He has a way with cadence and repetition in building up a concrete feeling of desperation out of Pete Brown's abstractions. There's "the station," and "no strings could secure you," and "the shadows run from themselves." You just know that someone here had better decide to face the facts about something.

"America" - Simon and Garfunkel
There are times when Paul Simon shouldn't do the beatnik outsider, or should turn the timeless romantic poetry down about two clicks, but here he gets everything right and then some. The melody rises and falls like waves, and the depictions of easygoing exchange between a couple go by with arresting vividness ("toss me a cigarette"). The shift to greater gravity at "Cathy, I'm lost" is brilliant, swelling the final wave until you have Mr. Garfunkel joining on the harmonies of "all come to look for America." It absolutely gives me goose bumps every time.

"Hey Jude" - The Beatles
This could be the simplest of the obvious candidates for best pop song of all time. There's a bit of a relaxed Mexican cantina feel, no mighty striving toward beauty or depth, nothing too remarkable about "remember to let her into your heart." There's an extroardinary solidity—unperturbability—to the barely perceptible buildup, though, and exactly two momentous artistic decisions. One is "the movement you need is on your shoulder." Apparently it was a scratch line that John talked Paul into keeping as-is. Wow. It somehow solidifies the idea that this is advice to a younger man—which would have been at risk to be obscured in a rewrite scenario—and suddenly brings confidence and physicality into the message ("you're waiting for someone to perform with" is certainly winningly forthright, too). Then there's that what-the-hell dive off the cliff into five minutes of na-na-nas. What were they thinking? But, so good. The acoustic guitar has an unlikely, trebly production that I'd have to describe as a clank that's somehow crucial to what I'm convinced is a delicate balance of the fadeout's success. There's also an earlier outtake where Paul goes up an extra bluesy step on the high "na" of each "na-na-na-na," and, you know what? It just wasn't quite magic anymore. In the final, he backed it down to just the whole step. That seems to me to epitomize a kind of rare, hard decision made by people very, very tuned into how music works.