by Bob Stanley
What is striking about the formation of the Byrds is how each member was absorbed by American music, each unique in its own way, and how this bore no relation to the existing pro musician set-up that had carried all modern pop, even rock ’n’ roll, up to this point. They loved music and they wanted to see the rivers of their visions flow into one another. On the sleevenotes of their first album in summer ’65, McGuinn said, ‘Music is life.’ Even Phil Spector and Joe Meek would have been a little more circumspect.
In the press, McGuinn wouldn’t shut up about planes: ‘I think the difference is in the mechanical sounds of our time. Like the sound of the airplane in the forties was a rrrrroooooaaaaahhhhhhh sound and Sinatra and other people sang like that with those sort of overtones. Now we’ve got the krrrrriiiiissssshhhhhhhh jet sound, and the kids are singing up in there now.’ Gene Clark, unfortunately, was terrified of flying, and quit after he wrote the Byrds’ single ‘Eight Miles High’ (US no. 14, UK no. 24 ’66), a woozy, hard, jazz-inflected evocation of jet lag in London, the release of which the group deemed important enough to warrant a press conference. Oddly, the public fell out of love with them right away, as soon as they tried to vary their jangle with jazz on the John Coltrane-influenced 5D album (1966), and then with Moogs (The Notorious Byrd Brothers, early ’68), and then with country (Sweetheart of the Rodeo, late ’68). Beyond their stuttering commercial success, they were restless and fought like cats. Crosby, always looking like the cat that got the cream, was booted out in late ’67. McGuinn still wore the goggles, but the magic then began to dissipate.
No matter. His noonday, church-chiming twelve-string had enabled the Byrds to turn songs about Welsh miners (‘The Bells of Rhymney’), dead presidents (‘He Was a Friend of Mine’) and Hiroshima (‘I Come and Stand at Every Door’) into jet-age hymns. Smudged together with Clarke’s rudimentary drums, Hillman’s melodic, McCartney-esque basslines and their mountaintop harmonies, the Byrds’ sound was a phenomenon, a drone, genuinely hair-raising and totally American. They may have borrowed the twelve-string ring and harmony chops of the Searchers but they took this brand of pop from the boxy, damp cellars of Liverpool into sun-kissed, spiritual, Californian territory.
The Animals and Dylan had left clues but the huge success of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – a US and UK number one in spring ’65 – was the record that launched folk rock. Within weeks, west-coast kids like P. F. Sloan and former Spector sidekicks like Sonny and Cher (‘I Got You Babe’) joined in the fun and also scored number-one hits.2 Over on the east coast, something less clearly indebted was cooking in hell’s kitchen. The Lovin’ Spoonful looked as if they’d turned up stoned at a jumble sale and hastily assembled what they took to be a beatnik Beatles look. All clashing spots and stripes, they were droll, human and a lot of fun. Folk, blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll were all thrown into their mixing bowl: ‘We call it Good Time Music because we have a good time,’ said singer John Sebastian. Even more than Dylan, the Spoonful were Americana, only with barely a hint of pretence or anger. Every song was coloured in with felt tips; they were like cartoons for grown-ups. Something as sad and beautiful as ‘Didn’t Want to Have to Do It’ was like Linus walking away from the other Peanuts characters into the sunset, his blanket draped over his shoulder, while ‘Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind’ (US no. 2 ’66) is one of pop’s best agony-aunt songs, with shades of ‘Summertime Blues’ (‘Better go home, son, and make up your mind’) as well as visions of Droopy.
John Sebastian favoured steel-rim glasses and worn denim. He was born and raised in Greenwich Village, which made sense: his songs all sounded as if they were composed on a New York fire escape, five storeys up. In a coffee house he met and befriended Toronto-born Zally Yanovsky, an outsize spaniel of a man, with Joe Butler (drums and autoharp) and Steve Boone soon making up the band. In early ’65 they debuted at the Night Owl cafe, sang mainly rock ’n’ roll and sank like a stone. So they went away to lick their wounds and work on their sound until it was all Spoonful. They rehearsed in the basement of the Village’s Hotel Albert, taking the freight elevator down with a laundry cart full of their gear. Their playing vibrated tiny flakes of century-old paint down from the ceiling, so they took to wearing hats to avoid looking as if they had chronic dandruff. Two months later, the Night Owl’s owner was so impressed with their new, easy musicality that he gave them a residency. He also let loose a hundred balloons that read ‘I love you, Lovin’ Spoonful’.
Released in December ’65, their debut single was equally warm-hearted. It was a paean, an open love song to modern pop called ‘Do You Believe in Magic’, and it went like this: ‘If you believe in magic, don’t bother to choose if it’s jug band music or rhythm and blues. Just go and listen, it’ll start with a smile you won’t wipe off your face, no matter how hard you try.’ It also included a line that has forever summed up how musicians perceive the music industry: ‘It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock ’n’ roll.’
The chords were pinched from Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heatwave’, which Sebastian thought was the most exciting record he’d ever heard. Play the chords twice as fast, he reckoned, and ‘Do You Believe in Magic’ would be twice as exciting. He was a sly fox, and he understood magic.
Very quickly, the Spoonful racked up a string of hits – all US Top 10: ‘Do You Believe in Magic’, ‘You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice’, ‘Daydream’, ‘Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind’, ‘Summer in the City’, ‘Rain on the Roof’, ‘Nashville Cats’. Then Sebastian wrote ‘Darling Be Home Soon’, a fragile daisy chain of a song: ‘I’ve been waiting since I toddled for the great relief of having you to talk to.’ It was beautiful enough to make you shudder. But it was not goofy in any way and, to Sebastian’s horror, a disapproving Yanovsky gurned and clowned his way through a TV performance of it. Less than two years on from their first single and they were splintering. Worse soon followed: Yanovsky and Boone were caught holding drugs, and Yanovsky was threatened with deportation if he didn’t identify his dealer – which he did. A Rolling Stone magazine-sanctioned boycott of the Spoonful followed. Yanovsky was sacked but the damage was done. In late ’67 Sebastian wrote a sour, tired single called ‘Money’ aimed at the band’s management, and they wisely split before things got cynical and boring.
The antithesis of the Lovin’ Spoonful were Simon and Garfunkel, who, to the naked eye, looked as much fun as their undertaker name suggested. Originally, they were called Tom and Jerry – which made sense, as Art Garfunkel was long and feline, while Paul Simon was tiny. Simon had spent a while in London during the Soho folk boom, where he discovered ‘Scarborough Fair’, courtesy of guitarist Martin Carthy, and wrote ‘Homeward Bound’ while sitting, freezing, on a railway platform in Widnes. Arriving back in New York in 1965 with a sack full of new songs, Simon and Garfunkel quickly hit number one when ‘The Sound of Silence’ was given a ringing, post-Byrds electric backing, allegedly without their knowledge. If either of them minded, it didn’t stop them riding the folk-rock wave: it was followed into the Top 20 in Britain and America by ‘Homeward Bound’ and ‘I Am a Rock’ in ’66, both jingle-jangling for all they were worth.
They came across as horribly aloof and humourless, ostentatiously declaring their literary knowledge and college education in references like ‘You read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost’ (‘The Dangling Conversation’, US no. 25 ’66). Simon was a stickler for grammar; when he wrote the first-day-of-spring anthem ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)’, you knew that the dropped ‘g’ rankled and it was probably a record-company typo. Indeed, they would have been quite unbearable if Garfunkel hadn’t sung like a choirboy Angel Clare, pining for Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and if Simon hadn’t been the finest melody writer to emerge from Greenwich Village. His lyrics sounded smart and cryptic enough that people assumed ‘Mrs Robinson’ (US no. 1, UK no. 4 ’68) was making complex Dylanesque comments about Anne Bancroft’s character in The Graduate – in fact, Simon had no idea wh
at the film was about when he wrote it. Still, ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you’ certainly worked in a year when good men like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were taken out of the American narrative. By 1970, when Simon was introducing Andean pan-pipe music (‘El Condor Pasa’) and Latin jubilation (‘Cecilia’) to their sound, they had become a coffee-table phenomenon. It’s one of pop’s odder coincidences that in two of its most fallow years (1970 and 1986) Paul Simon has produced a multi-million seller. Almost no one would say he’s their favourite songwriter, but ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ and ‘Graceland’, firm family favourites, fun for mum and dad and all the kids, have probably soundtracked more car journeys than any Bob Dylan, Beach Boys or even Beatles album.
Outside of folk rock there were a few other breakthrough American acts in ’65 and they, too, used an Anglo-beat template. Why was this? Beach Boys companion Van Dyke Parks has suggested it was the only way for musicians to ‘wrest the trophy’ back from the British invaders, as their girlfriends were all Beatle-crazy.
Gary Lewis and the Playboys were the lightest of the lightweight. They were discovered by Liberty Records’ producer Snuff Garrett playing the annual Disneyland summer dance in 1964. He put them in his pocket, took them home, worked on a few Brill Building songs with them, and ended up with the biggest-selling American group of 1965.
Gary himself looked timid, even more like a mouse than Paul Simon, and was dwarfed by his drum kit – if you closed your eyes you could imagine him skittering across the skins, his tiny claws making a light, rhythmic sound not unlike Herman’s Hermits. Their first hit, a US number one called ‘This Diamond Ring’ part written by Al Kooper, wore a lyric that bared the tortured soul of a cuckold. Billy Fury, flanked by fuzz guitar and wailing waifs, had cut it in late ’64 as something that would run through your mind as you drove your car at speed towards Beachy Head; the Playboys’ cover sounded like it was recorded on Fisher-Price toy instruments, with Lewis’s pubescent rodent voice quadruple-tracked before it was even audible on AM radio. But he was cute, had Jerry Lewis for a dad, and – with ‘Count Me In’ (US no. 2 ’65), ‘Save Your Heart for Me’ (US no. 2 ’65) and ‘She’s Just My Style’ (US no. 3 ’65) – wasn’t off American TV for three years. When things got lighter and sunnier in ’67, Gary Lewis seemed positively prescient, and one single, ‘Jill’, was quite beautiful, a teenage love song on which it sounds as if his broken heart has literally claimed his life; by the end of the song, he can barely whisper the title.
Paul Revere and the Raiders were more like a pack of wolves. They hailed from the Pacific North West, an isolated area where classic rock ’n’ roll had lived on longer than anywhere else in the US and spawned groups made of girders: the Sonics (‘Psycho’) and the Wailers (‘Tall Cool One’) were the most popular locally, while the Kingsmen (‘Louie Louie’) made the loudest noise nationally. Snare drums were broken on a daily basis, sore throats were a constant problem. These groups didn’t want to take you on a trip aboard a magic swirling ship. They just wanted to dance and drink and screw.
The Raiders only broke bigger than their local rivals because they were pro, and unafraid to look dumb in order to make money, so they dressed like American revolutionary soldiers with tricorn hats, became favourites of post-Beatles teen mag Tiger Beat and got regular TV spots on ABC’s Where the Action Is. ‘Kids will be watching more than they’ll be listening,’ reasoned keyboard player Revere; Marshall McLuhan would have approved. Starting with ‘Steppin’ Out’ (US no. 46 ’65), they turned out a string of strutting hits with swollen-balls titles – ‘Just Like Me’ (US no. 11 ’65), the Mann/Weil-penned ‘Kicks’ (US no. 4 ’66) and ‘Hungry’ (US no. 6 ’66), ‘Him or Me – What’s It Gonna Be’ (US no. 5 ’67) – that John Peel reckoned was as good as the Rolling Stones’ sixties run. Singer Mark Lindsay, a Jagger soundalike, described his group as a ‘bunch of white-bread kids doing their best to sound black’. So they were just doing a job, but they did it awfully well, and had racked up sixteen US Top 50 hits by the end of the sixties.
The Raiders’ noise was the most commercially successful variant of garage punk. Unlike cramped and chilly mid-sixties Britain, America had a thriving economy and wide-open spaces, to be filled with highways dotted with Lincoln Continentals, tailfin-shaped diners that sold hamburgers the size of a house, and garages that had room for more than just a Vauxhall Viva. Middle-class high-school kids who had bugged their parents for a musical instrument after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan could get together, practise in the garage and – with a rudimentary knowledge of three chords – become the local Stones or Kinks. The drummer probably played in a military band at school. The bassist, most likely, wanted to be the guitarist but wasn’t assertive enough. Across the States, a whole generation of unprofessional kids picked up guitars and made the loudest noise they could. According to garage-punk historian Greg Shaw, in 1966 sixty-three per cent of American boys under twenty were in a group.
The garage-punk wave was driven by the British beat-boom invasion, and yet a record which pre-dated the Beatles’ arrival and remains the urgarage single was ‘Louie Louie’. Richard Berry’s three-chord R&B composition from 1956 is the tune which defines the sound: the Raiders cut it in ’63, the Beach Boys, Otis Redding, the Kinks, the Sandpipers, Led Zeppelin, Motörhead, the Grateful Dead, the Fat Boys and Black Flag did it years later, but Oregon’s Kingsmen, whose organ-led, bumbling bear-in-a-china-shop rendition hit number two in the US in December ’63, led the charge. It’s an anthem of noise, confusion and attitude over proficiency, the triumph of the amateur. Within weeks of the Kingsmen’s hit came the British Invasion, stateside sales of musical instruments went through the roof, and every spare garage had the next Kingsmen learning to tune their guitars. ‘Louie Louie’ remained the blueprint. Its vocals were so slurred that the FBI ordered the song to be investigated, an honour only previously given to Elvis Presley’s pelvic thrusts.
The garage-punk look was easy – straight hair in a fringe or a side parting, leather waistcoats and tight pants. The Beatles, after all, wore tight pants and had long hair, and even if their music was kinda cissy, the girls went nuts. So that was the look. If the drummer looked a bit like Brian Jones, so much the better.
The sound, though, was highly localised: Chicago had soul-influenced bands like the Outsiders and the Buckinghams; Californians like the Daily Flash and the Charlatans seemed to draw on the Old West; while in Texas there was nothing to explain the weird noises made by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators beyond spiked cactus juice. On ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ (US no. 55 ’66) singer Roky Erickson shrieked like a jungle primate in heat, while Tommy Hall played a mysterious instrument of his own devising which he called the ‘electric jug’. This turned out to be a jug that he mumbled into – that was it. Their first album, with the telltale title The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, came out in late ’66.
By this time, literally thousands of American bands had swamped the local gig circuit and started recording their own 45s, some for majors, others for parent-funded labels. It was crude, lewd and wildly exciting: the lustiest teenage fuzzbombs, like We the People’s ‘You Burn Me Up and Down’, usually sold nothing, but once in a while something raw broke through – the Standells’ ‘Dirty Water’ (‘lovers, muggers and thieves – they’re cool people!’) reached number eleven in ’66; Count Five rebuilt and supercharged the Yardbirds’ ‘I’m a Man’ as ‘Psychotic Reaction’ (US no. 5 ’66); and the Farfisa-driven squeaky sexual frustration of? and the Mysterians’ ‘96 Tears’, entirely lovable because it was so basic, went all the way to number one.3 Unprocessed, undomesticated and weird, this bastardised take on the beat boom became pop as surely as Simon and Garfunkel’s abreactive poetry quotes.
Possibly the best of all the new post-Beatles American bands, though, were the Turtles. Their first hit was a folk-rock cover of Dylan’s ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ (US no. 8 ’65), but before this they had been
a surf group (the Crossfires) and a coffee-house folk group (the Crosswind Singers). You could call them bandwagon jumpers, or you could say they were so enamoured of modern pop that they decided to embrace pretty much all of its many-faced, polydirectional moves from 1963 to 1969. They were a microcosm of the sixties, the archetypal pop group, and they outlived every trend they rode.
