by Bob Stanley
San Francisco was also the birthplace of FM rock radio, playing album-based music for the first time – even the pirate-radio stations in Britain would leaven their more outré 45s with Tom Jones to keep the mums on board. In the States, the fact that few FM radio receivers were owned by the general public left a void for the counterculture to fill with music that was largely ignored by mainstream AM radio. First out of the blocks was Berkeley’s KPFA, which had broadcast Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ in its entirety in 1956; by ’67 it was playing the Grateful Dead’s side-long ‘Dark Star’.
Meanwhile, out in the San Francisco suburbs, sci-fifan and rock ’n’ roll enthusiast Greg Shaw was producing a mimeographed sheet called Mojo Navigator (or, to give it its full title, Mojo-Navigator Rock and Roll News) full of ravings about the music he loved. Until now, reviews of modern pop had rarely been more analytical than ‘solid beaty number’, tucked away as a snippet of news between tour dates and adverts. Mojo Navigator was full of valuable secret info, and the expanding psych scene gave Shaw more meat to sink his teeth into. There were few completists, scholars and connoisseurs around in 1966. Records were simply forgotten as soon as they dropped off the chart. Greg Shaw was the first person to connect an amorphous gaggle of pop fanatics and give them a black-and-white photostat they could look to for inspiration and succour. Soon it was followed by Paul Williams’s Crawdaddy, Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone and, in March ’69, by Creem; high-quality, modern pop journalism was no longer the preserve of Esquire or the Sunday Times.
And there was more. The looseness of San Francisco’s collar allowed the idea of an all-girl band, playing their own instruments, to become part of the scene without being patronised. While others did exist (the British-based Goldie and the Gingerbreads, ragged sister act the Shaggs from Fremont, New Hampshire, and Michigan’s Pleasure Seekers – featuring a young Suzi Quatro – who played at army camps for returning Vietnam vets), the Ace of Cups were possibly the first not to be seen as eye candy or novelties.6 They were more like a counterculture Shangri-Las: ‘Glue’ was an anti-capitalist screed – ‘Hello, ladies, are you feeling unloved, unwanted and miserable? If you had our product, everyone would love you!’ backed by yells of ‘It’s bad for you, but buy it.’7
And more, again – San Francisco also provided the first group looking for direct inspiration from pop’s immediate past. The Flamin’ Groovies had no time for mind expansion but were intent on keeping the no-nonsense recent past – whether it was Lovin’ Spoonful jug-band music or Merseybeat stomps – alive in ’67. Their long career was patchy but they scored at least one genuine tears-on-the-Mecca-dancefloor masterpiece, ‘Shake Some Action’, in 1976.
Then there was Country Joe and the Fish, whose mix of cool jazz, folk and heavy politics made them possibly the ultimate SF band. It seemed as if they came and went in the Summer of Love, with a memorable Monterey set and scrapbook album (Electric Music for the Mind and Body), but they had been in there right at the beginning. The Fish’s major contribution was their DIY approach, self-produced records and tapes that they had stuffed into manila envelopes back in 1965, as if their music was mail art. As the ’67 sun faded, the reality of big business left them drained. ‘We were like this little dreamland,’ sighed Country Joe McDonald. ‘It was a rare moment for those of us who made music, being in this really happy environment full of really intelligent people.’
Beyond this, there was simply a lot more water to swim in. It felt like San Francisco had given modern pop a sixth and a seventh sense, something that even the hep parents who dug Elvis and the Beatles couldn’t really get their heads around.
1 Specifically there was Richard Brautigan, the writer and poet who ended up recording a spoken-word album for the Beatles’ Apple label.
2 They were now called ‘bands’ rather than ‘groups’, a subtle change of terminology that suggested outlaw status, a bunch of people with a single vision who relied on nobody else.
3 Britain loved Forever Changes – considering the group never played outside California, let alone touring in Europe, its number-twenty-four chart placing in early ’68 is miraculous.
4 Naysayers may well have been impressed by the Flies, a tough-sounding act who bridged the gap between tight, soul-flecked beat and trippy Anglo pop. Playfully cynical about the whole event, they chucked flour rather than flowers at the audience, which guaranteed they were never invited to another festival.
5 Hendrix morphed the Coronation Street theme, a melancholy piece of trad jazz which he heard soon after arriving in Britain, on the Experience’s debut album, Are You Experienced: it’s the unlikely root for the liquid jazz-rock of ‘Third Stone from the Sun’.
6 Jimi Hendrix told Melody Maker in December ’67 about ‘this girl group, Ace of Cups, who write their own songs and the lead guitarist is hell, really great’. It’s too bad they never made any records at the time – their demos were finally released in 2003.
7 San Francisco’s socialist dream was largely wishful thinking, even in its Haight heyday. At the Monterey festival, Big Brother and the Holding Company decided not to allow D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew to film and record them without paying them, and ordered the crew to turn their cameras off. They played two more songs – including ‘Ball and Chain’ – the following night purely for the cameras. The counterculture born in San Francisco, the international utopian movement, was genuinely popular with the masses – popular enough to be co-opted by Coca-Cola as early as 1971. The New Seekers’ ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ was written for the Coke ad by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, and wistfully predicted a future of ‘apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves’. This was how the regular world saw hippies; this was pop’s final distillation of Kerouac, Kesey, Leary and Love. It was a UK number one.
22
POP GETS SOPHISTICATED: SOFT ROCK
Picture yourself in a boat on a river. Close your eyes; what do you hear? There’s the mesmeric sound of a distant harpsichord. Slowly, it is joined by a string quartet, a Spanish guitar, some echoed exotic percussion. And then, like celestial birdsong, four-part harmonies. The sound is light but yearning, delicate but hugely evocative: it could be winter outside but in your ears it’s June.
Pet Sounds and Sgt Pepper were greeted as landmark records on release, not just as albums that were more a suite than a collection of songs, but in their instrumentation and musical complexity. They didn’t rock in the way that Little Richard, the Swinging Blue Jeans or the Kingsmen rocked. They included found sounds and time changes and songs that lasted more than five minutes without degenerating into blues jams. You might well hear fuzz guitar in the mix but you were just as likely to hear piccolos and bass harmonicas and marimbas.
‘Pop Trend: Sophisticated, Serious’ ran a Billboard headline in September ’67. The term ‘progressive rock’ had yet to be coined, but there were clear signs of progress on ‘sophisticated, serious’ records like the Young Rascals’ ‘Groovin’’ (US no. 1, UK no. 8 ’67) and the Association’s ‘Never My Love’ (US no. 2 ’67). Soft rock evolved from a variety of sources, notably surf (the Beach Boys) and folk (the Mamas and Papas), but it also provided an opening for a bunch of mavericks who may have adored the Beatles but were never going to stand behind Marshall stacks and bellow. These writers had a strong sense of the Great American Songbook and, quite often, sharp humour: Randy Newman, Curt Boettcher, Van Dyke Parks. A harmony outfit called Harpers Bizarre mixed Simon and Garfunkel covers (‘Feelin’ Groovy’) with Cole Porter (‘Anything Goes’) and appeared on their album covers behind the wheel of a Ferrari or clasping a glass of brandy by candlelight. ‘I write with a flourish of Hassidic melodies,’ said the Association’s Terry Kirkman. ‘I’m moved by Stravinsky and Copland. I think in those terms when I produce and arrange.’
From Greenwich Village, the Mamas and Papas were torchbearers for soft rock. They surfaced with ‘California Dreaming’ in early ’66 (US no. 4, UK no. 23), a single that summed up a feeling: it wa
s reaching forward for something, someone, somewhere over the rainbow; the sound was pure sunshine but there was more than a hint of sadness in it.1 Visually they were cartoonish, with plus-size Mama Cass Elliot and impossibly pretty Mama Michelle Phillips hogging the camera; sad-eyed Denny Doherty and John Phillips, who looked like a mean cowboy and was married to Michelle, were the Papas. They harmonised like a dream, they were ‘now people’, and quickly scored two more transatlantic hits with ‘Monday Monday’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3) and ‘I Saw Her Again’ (US no. 5, UK no. 11), loaded with ba-ba-bas, celestes, cellos and a perceptible warmth.
Off stage, John Phillips was also responsible for putting the Monterey festival together in ’67, and wrote a heat-hazed anthem-cum-advert for it called ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’, which became a UK number one for his old New York folk buddy Scott McKenzie. For eighteen months the Mamas and Papas were golden. One night, though, Michelle and Denny slept together, John found out, and that was pretty much the end of the group. Their demise came swiftly after Monterey, which, though Phillips could hardly have known it would happen, was the first time the public audience sensed a divide between pop and rock, between soft and hard. Monterey cut modern pop in half, and both halves would eventually be diminished by being unable to interact with the other – this would cause an impasse that pervaded the early seventies. So John Phillips sowed the seeds for the Mamas and Papas’ downfall as surely as Michelle and Denny’s tumble. Still, in just over two years they had managed to record four albums and – with their cover of the Five Royales’ ‘Dedicated to the One I Love’ (US no. 2, UK no. 2 ’67) – created the sexiest lullaby you ever heard.
If you wanted to pick one person who summed up the new school of soft rock, there was Harry Nilsson – scholarly, engaging, super-melodic, as fond of Broadway and booze as he was of the Beach Boys and the Beatles, and smart without being a show-off. The singer with the looks of a Swedish businessman had been quietly writing (‘Cuddly Toy’ for the Monkees, ‘Paradise’ for the Shangri-Las) and occasionally recording for nearly a decade when he burst onto the scene at an Apple press conference in 1968. When asked who their favourite American artist was, the Beatles replied in unison, ‘Nilsson!’ And their favourite American group? ‘Nilsson!’
It turned out that their press officer, Derek Taylor, had given them each a copy of an album he’d picked up in the States, Nilsson’s debut, Pandemonium Shadow Show; it was a mix of vaudeville, classy orchestrated pop, cockeyed humour and the odd Beatles cover, delivered with Harry’s sweet three-octave treatment. The Beatles were enamoured. The press were caught on the hop and hurriedly tried to get some info on this mysterious figure – to their horror they discovered Nilsson had never even played live. He told callers, ‘My amateur status is still intact, thank you.’
The following Monday morning, Nilsson received a phone call at seven o’clock: ‘Is that Harry? This is John.’ ‘John who?’ ‘John Lennon.’ ‘Huh?’ ‘Your record is fucking fantastic, man. I just wanted to say you’re great.’ The next Monday at seven, Paul McCartney also phoned to rave about the album. Nilsson later recalled, ‘I got up early the following Monday and waited for Ringo to call. He didn’t.’
Beatle patronage built an instant profile for Nilsson. In ’72 he peaked commercially with the Grammy-nominated Nilsson Schmilsson album, and invented the power ballad by covering Badfinger’s ‘Without You’ (US and UK no. 1) in an opulent Italianate style, with a delicate pianoled verse and an earthquake of a chorus, testing his high notes and showing off his range. Fame and fortune battered him, though, alcohol wrecking his health and his angelic voice, which was little more than a croak by the late seventies. Soft-rockers were no less vulnerable than hard-rockers.
A little further out were the Neon Philharmonic. In the seventies Paul Weller would contrarily tell fans to vote Tory, and Eric Clapton intrigued us with his views on immigration, but in the late sixties it was safe to assume most politically involved musicians were left-leaning – pop was anti-war and the draft threatened its audience, let alone its musicians.2 From their two bizarre albums, it would be hard to gauge where the Neon Philharmonic stood. They were the brainchild of Tupper Saussy, a jazz pianist who had studied with Oscar Peterson in the early sixties, made money from ad jingles and had a pet monkey called Thelonious Monk. In 1968, fascinated by the new orchestral direction pop was taking, he hooked up with singer Don Gant and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra to create the Neon Philharmonic. Straight away they had a Top 20 hit with ‘Morning Girl’; spooky titles like ‘Are You Old Enough to Remember Dresden’ and ‘A National Anthem for Rent to Emerging Nations’ didn’t stop three Grammy nominations.3
There was no ‘Without You’ up Saussy’s sleeve, however. By the early seventies he was back working on jingles for Purity Dairy and writing kids’ books. He also wrote The Miracle on Main Street, a book that claimed income tax was unconstitutional; after refusing to pay it, he was sentenced in 1985 to a year in prison. Then he vanished. Saussy was on the run for ten years. By now a hero to the libertarian right, he would leave cryptic messages on the internet from his Washington State hideout. Occasionally, disguised in a wig, he played the piano in a Seattle shopping mall. Finally captured in 1997, Saussy served fourteen months – just enough time to finish his next book, Rulers of Evil: Useful Knowledge about Governing Bodies. ‘I was gifted with the abilities to do what three persons do,’ he claimed.
If you wanted to find the source of soft rock’s love of recherché arrangements and improbable instrumentation, you only had to peek into one of the Brill Building cubicles. Burt Bacharach and Hal David were the Powell and Pressburger of pop, causing a quiet revolution that would only be fully appreciated after their heyday. Bacharach had been writing out of the Brill Building since the late fifties, when he had two consecutive UK number ones with Perry Como’s ‘Magic Moments’ and Michael Holliday’s ‘The Story of My Life’. Both featured cute, whistled hooks and were cosy as a Swiss wood cabin at Christmas, but neither gave any real suggestion of what was to come. Bacharach slowly began to add askew flute trills, trumpet stabs and bass-note pushes; the sound became more New York but decidedly upmarket at the same time – he was especially fond of the baion beat pioneered by Leiber and Stoller. Inside the Brill, with ‘a closed window, no view, no air, and Hal smoking all over the place’, Bacharach wrote and arranged the mordantly sensual ‘Baby It’s You’, a US Top 10 hit for the Shirelles in 1961. Other heartbreakers from this period that didn’t chart included Adam Wade’s ‘Rain from the Skies’, Chuck Jackson’s ‘I Wake Up Crying’ and Dee Clark’s ‘You’re Telling Our Secrets’, the sounds of strong men in purgatory, wronged, battered by tympani and teased by pizzicato.
When Bacharach and David began working with backing singer Dionne Warwick in 1962, she kept bugging them to write her a solo single. After the third or fourth broken Bacharach promise, she snapped, ‘Don’t make me over!’ and they had the title of her first hit. Warwick was an improbable-looking woman with a jutting jaw, Martian hair and wide, oval eyes that conveyed no emotion whatsoever. In this, she was the perfect foil for Bacharach’s ever more oddly constructed songs, with their staccato trills and cool, clipped, offbeat rhythms. ‘One-level records always made me a little bit uncomfortable after a while,’ said Bacharach. ‘They stayed at one intensity. It kind of beats you up, you know? It’s like a smile. If you have a great smile, you use it quick, not all the time.’
Dionne Warwick realised she didn’t have to stay intense and shout all the time to make an impact. ‘Walk On By’ (UK no. 8, US no. 6 ’64) had chords that dived and plucked and ate away at you, but it never got over-excited – which was quite impressive for a song whose dialogue ran ‘Each time I see you I break down and cry.’ It was exquisite, modern and minimal, like a piece of white plastic furniture. Bacharach-produced Dionne Warwick albums were an essential component of any sixties apartment.
As Bacharach’s awkward, orchestrated influence percolated under t
he more acclaimed Beatles/Stones noise, a bunch of pop pin-ups took their cue and became similarly more intriguing and more baroque. The son of fifties singer Marion Ryan, Barry Ryan emerged with twin brother Paul in ’66, and as a duo they cut a bunch of unremarkable minor UK hits; things got interesting in ’68, when Paul decided to concentrate on the writing and Barry on the singing. Clearly, Barry Ryan was a meat-eater. He arrived like a Brontëan hero on horseback, whip in hand, with the heavily orchestrated five-minute potboiler ‘Eloise’ (UK no. 2) in late ’68. Everything he sang was an imminent apocalypse, and when he reached a chorus the veins stuck out on his neck like knotted rope. His songs were post-Bacharach and ‘Hey Jude’ sophistico-pop with enigmatic titles like ‘Magical Spiel’, ‘The Hunt’ (‘Go! Tally ho!’) and ‘Kitsch’ (‘It’s a beautiful word, it’s a beautiful lullaby’). Working on his stall in Kensington Market, it’s a safe bet Freddie Bulsara was paying close attention. In a row, they sounded ludicrous but, taken one at a time, Barry Ryan 45s were like a bareback gallop through a forest. Their grandiloquence soon wore down listeners, which was a great shame, and he’d switched to bubblegum like ‘Can’t Let You Go’ by ’72. They still love him in Germany.
Scott Walker’s combination of florid woe and arthouse angst was more piquant still. In 1965 John Maus and Scott Engel were playing the Hollywood club scene when their friend, Standells drummer Gary Leeds, had the idea for them to try and crack Britain: he’d recently played there with P. J. Proby and knew how, as if they were latter-day GIs, British girls freaked out at the sight of boys with a Californian sun tan. The unrelated trio became the Walker Brothers and Walkermania ensued, incredible adulation over a twelve-month period from late ’65 that saw them cut melodramatic smashes like ‘Make It Easy on Yourself’ (no. 1 September ’65), ‘My Ship Is Coming In’ (no. 3 January ’66)4 and ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ (no. 1 March ’66), heavily influenced by Spector’s Righteous Brothers productions but somehow more heartfelt, certainly more European. The Walker Brothers had arrived as equals (John Walker had taken lead vocal on the first UK 45, ‘Pretty Girls Everywhere’) in 1965, but split just two years later with Scott the undoubted star and John feeling sidelined and unloved.
