by Bob Stanley
Continental tendencies were writ large on Scott Walker’s five startling solo albums between 1967 and 1970; intense Jacques Brel interpretations (emotionally bettered by no one) sat alongside towering, Mahler-daubed self-written songs like ‘Big Louise’ and ‘Boy Child’. Here was a willingness to get lost. Walker abandoned himself in hymnal, orchestral pop – hit records wouldn’t reach such levels of red-eyed religiosity again until Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Architecture and Morality in 1981. Given his own TV show, Scott Walker sat on a stool and looked deeply hurt, modern pop’s most existential star. His voice was a Bournville baritone and his lyrics were beautiful and opaque (‘Night starts to empty, that’s when her song begins’), but also urban, surreal and everyday (‘Screaming kids on my knee, and the telly swallowing me’). Somehow, Scott Walker managed all this while playing the industry game; though he quoted Camus in his sleevenotes, he also got Jonathan King to write them. This way, rather astonishingly, he managed to score a UK number-one album in 1968 with Scott 2.5
For a short while he was the biggest pop star in Britain. At one point he escaped to a monastery, but was evicted by the monks when teen screamers tried to break in. Cancelled gigs and heavy drinking began to take their toll. Washed up commercially and artistically by 1975, the Walker Brothers resorted to re-forming. They decided to get a flat together at the Stamford Bridge end of the King’s Road. It only had two bedrooms. Scott wanted the small, dark, back bedroom at the top of the stairs; John had the master bedroom; Gary built a tent in the living room. With their brittle yet strong affection for each other and wildly differing personalities, they couldn’t have been more like real brothers if they tried.
In 1967, as well as being adored by teenagers, Sgt Pepper was feted by the Sunday Times and Scott Walker was the housewives’ choice. There was room for soft-rock innovators who could bridge the generation gap, unite the teenagers and the older sceptics Leonard Bernstein had helped to win around. A handsome twenty-one-year-old Oklahoma boy called Jimmy Webb rose to the challenge. He had started out at eighteen, writing for Motown – ‘it was like shining shoes’, he told the NME in 1969. One song he wrote was called ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, and it was clearly a cut above album filler, but Motown didn’t have a clue what to do with it. What did it represent? Freedom, loss, the whole of America condensed in those quirky names – Phoenix, Albuquerque and Oklahoma – as the protagonist ends up hundreds of miles from his girlfriend’s sour tears. It was romantic, it had no real chorus, and the geography in the narrative was a little out, but it felt like ten years of someone’s adult life inside 150 seconds. It sounded like a whole movie. It was an incredible achievement for a teenager.
Johnny Rivers cut the song in ’66 and was so enamoured of Webb’s work that he bought out his contract with Motown and set him to work with pop-soul harmony group the 5th Dimension. His hunch paid off, and the first Webb-penned 5th Dimension hit was ‘Up, Up and Away’ (US no. 7 ’67), the Charlie Bubbles of pop songs, with a hot-air balloon as the ultimate escape route. It entered the US chart just as Glen Campbell’s version of ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ gained traction; when Frank Sinatra called the latter ‘the greatest torch song ever written’, Jimmy Webb was suddenly hailed as the biggest thing since Lennon and McCartney.
Things peaked very quickly for Webb. He cut an album called The Magic Garden with the 5th Dimension that was a proper song cycle, an event, orchestrated and complex; it seemed Webb had absorbed the American songbook – from Stephen Foster to Burt Bacharach – without being remotely derivative. The Magic Garden was nothing, though, compared to a song he wrote while ensconced in actor Richard Harris’s beach house for a month. ‘MacArthur Park’ was, in 1968, the longest single that had ever reached the American or British Top 10 (it peaked at two and four, respectively). It was an elaborate mansion of a song, with doors opening onto a new room full of unexpected treasures every thirty seconds or so. And, being a Jimmy Webb song, it was deathlessly romantic: ‘I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knee, birds like tender babies in your hand, and the old men playing checkers by the tree.’
Sung by Harris in an oak-aged warble, it came out in May 1968, just as the battle lines were drawn in Paris, in Mexico, in pop. Instead of being acclaimed for his daring, Webb was pilloried, particularly for the line ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain’. What did it mean? asked the hippies, as if they had suddenly morphed into their grandparents.6 Webb had more up his sleeve. Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Galveston’ and ‘Where’s the Playground Susie’ all trumped ‘MacArthur Park’ for emotional punch in 1969, and in the same year there was an astonishing divorce album called The Yard Went On Forever, sung again by Richard Harris. But Webb had his pride. He took the post-Monterey route, ditched the orchestration, sang his own songs in his cracked, slightly unpleasant voice, fell in line, and eventually became accepted as a serious rock artist.
1968’s predominant trend was to get hairier, heavier, more long-winded. A lot of writers felt disenfranchised. They had only just got to grips with the über-English trappings of homegrown psychedelia, especially its mournful evocations of Victoriana, its village-green gentility, and its church bells softly chiming: like the Left Banke and the Zombies they wanted to get softer rather than harder, and were not about to fly their freak flag. The majority of English baroque records were made between 1968 and 1973 – while Lennon and McCartney got more raucous and rootsy, and Led Zep ruled the student unions, the harpsichord trickle-down took its time to reach the provinces.
The quintessential English baroque group was Honeybus. Though they only had one hit – ‘I Can’t Let Maggie Go’, a UK number eight in ’68 – its melancholy air (‘she flies like a bird in the sky’) hung in the seventies ether when, for years, it accompanied a woman in a hot-air balloon advertising Nimble, a processed bread for slimming. They hailed from industrial East London, an area full of bone-crushing factories and animal-fat recyclers but not renowned for pop groups, especially ones of such a gentle disposition. ‘We all liked Mozart and all that,’ said guitarist Colin Hare, who had actually been born in baroque-friendly Bath. Their singer and songwriter Pete Dello ‘convinced us to use woodwinds and strings but we didn’t need much persuading. It didn’t bother us that nobody else seemed to be doing it because we wanted to do our own thing. We weren’t easy to pigeonhole.’ Any chance of lasting commercial success seemed to have ended when Dello left while ‘I Can’t Let Maggie Go’ was still on the chart – he abhorred the idea of touring. Though their momentum was lost, Hare and bassist Ray Cane carried on as if nothing had changed and turned out to be pretty good songwriters themselves; they got as far as completing one great album, Story in 1970, a full two years after their sole hit, before folding.
From moment to moment, what it is that constitutes pop shifts and changes; it’s always contradictory. Soft was always likely to be squished by hard, though, and by 1970 a Honeybus album sounded twee and ancient. In 1968 Lennon had started to refer to McCartney’s more whimsical moments as ‘granny music’; George Harrison went even further and drafted Cream’s Eric Clapton in to give the Beatles added rock bathos on The White Album. Seriousness – an element of pop which had periodically surfaced, on Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’, say, or the Shangri-Las’ ‘Past, Present and Future’ – was now seen to trump everything else. ‘They offer THEMSELVES’, ran the Record Mirror review of The White Album, ‘without much show-biz artifice.’
The Association had no time for ‘Yer Blues’. ‘Today we’re exposed and cross-indexed tastewise,’ said their leader Terry Kirkman in ’68. ‘There’s a general potpourri of music. But I think an awful lot of white musicians ought to finally admit to themselves that they aren’t black.’ A seven-piece west-coast group, they were initially produced by Curt Boettcher, a kind of junior Brian Wilson who was behind a string of pop-dreamscape albums (most notably the Millennium’s ‘Begin’), but the Association’s ‘Along Comes Mary’
was his and their starting point, a US number eight in 1966. It’s hard to know why they have fallen off the critical map so completely – ‘Cherish’ and ‘Windy’ were both US number ones, while ‘Never My Love’ is apparently one of the ten most played pop songs on American radio, ever. It could just be because they wore suits and their name was so blank. Kirkman was clearly frustrated by the fact they weren’t taken more seriously: ‘Lots of times you really want to break the amplifier. You want to make it so loud you can’t stand it.’
Pet Sounds and Sgt Pepper and ‘MacArthur Park’ should have been instruction manuals for the early seventies, but largely the lessons were junked. Why was this? It had started to become unfashionable not to write and perform every aspect of your music in the mid-sixties; by the divisive year of 1968 it was seen as a sure sign of insincerity if you didn’t pull all the levers yourself. Also, orchestration was associated with the older generation, the Mantovani lovers: parents, teachers, bosses.
Still, soft rock didn’t die completely when the calendar reached January 1st 1970 but, with less and less interaction with the hard-rock, album-orientated world, it significantly lost its cutting edge and was abandoned by the next generation of McCartneys, Boettchers and Brian Wilsons, who instead turned to singer-songwriter stylings. With a generation’s finest minds otherwise occupied, soft rock ceased to provoke and so ceased to progress. Detractors may have laughed at ‘MacArthur Park’, but it was unavoidable. The next wave of soft-rockers were more easily ignored. Take Bread. They were based around songwriter David Gates, who had penned some exceptional girl-group 45s (Maureen Evans’s ‘Never Let Him Go’, the Girlfriends’ ‘Jimmy Boy’, Connie Stevens’s ‘Lost in Wonderland’), as well as ‘Saturday’s Child’ for the Monkees. They had an FM-friendly air to their melodic pop and racked up a long list of hits, starting with ‘Make It with You’ (US no. 1, UK no. 5) in 1970. They were nobody’s favourite group, though – too square, somehow a little unsatisfying, a little too nerdish – but Gates had faith, knew his best songs (‘Guitar Man’, ‘If’, ‘Everything I Own’) came in shades of blue with unexpectedly morose twists,7 and he wasn’t ashamed of his classical nerdiness: ‘I’d say Bread are unique – people doing things that come totally naturally to them musically. As a kid I took in everything – Beethoven, Ravel, the lot, and I guess all that knowledge has to come out in some form every now and again.’ The Best of Bread went five times platinum in 1973, and David Gates didn’t really care if he sounded like the uncoolest kid at school.
Like Bacharach and David, Neil Diamond had emerged from the Brill Building, first charting with Jay and the Americans’ ray of Latin sunlight ‘Sunday and Me’ (US no. 19 ’65), then writing a couple of major Monkees hits (‘I’m a Believer’, ‘A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You’), while simultaneously recording his own Latin-flavoured discotheque pop (‘Cherry Cherry’, US no. 6 ’66). Before any of his contemporaries, he began to write introspective New York songs: ‘Brooklyn Roads’ led him to the west coast, where he scored a brace of all-time karaoke classics (‘Sweet Caroline’, ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’) before ‘I Am I Said’ (US no. 1, UK no. 4 ’71) solidified his unique singer-songwriter/Vegas stylings: ever the New Yorker, Diamond described it as ‘autobiographical and psychoanalytic. There are two stories to the song really. Firstly, it’s a search for roots, and secondly it’s a cry for acceptance, and that’s what it’s all about.’ You can see how he struck a nerve in the me decade.
Diamond was a rare Brill Building survivor, though. With a musical based on the Frank Capra film Lost Horizon, even Bacharach and David lost their commercial grasp in the seventies. The soundtrack, sung by a cast including Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann and Charles Boyer, was roundly destroyed by the press. Newsweek called it ‘excruciating’, and soon Bacharach and David were suing each other over a royalty issue.
The strongest soft survivor of the Monterey split was the A&M label. Herb Alpert had started it in the early sixties with arranger Jerry Moss, and they struck gold in 1962 with Alpert’s ‘The Lonely Bull’ (US no. 6), a daft cod-Mexican instrumental. Implausibly, Alpert and his Tijuana Brass became one of the biggest album acts of the sixties. The records were crisply produced, the girls on the covers looked fine – notably on Whipped Cream and Other Delights, which was a very sweet temptation and sold over six million copies.
A&M formed a link back to pre-rock, to Les Baxter and the travelogues of Jo Stafford and Mantovani, via percussive Latin exotica. Once the Tijuana Brass broke, A&M signed the Baja Marimba Band, the weightless Hispanic harmonies of the Sandpipers, and Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66, whose chic, lush bossa-nova versions of Bacharach’s ‘The Look of Love’ (US no. 4 ’68) and the Beatles’ ‘Fool on the Hill’ (US no. 6 ’68) seemed to absorb the diffuse LA light, their sound always slightly vague and unsettling. But the act that took A&M into the seventies and kept the soft flag flying were a sibling act from Downey, California, called the Carpenters. Karen sang and played the drums, Richard grinned behind a keyboard. They looked like the history of apple pie, but there was a hint of sulkiness in Richard’s demeanour that suggested something wasn’t quite right. Besides, given the right material, Karen had one of the warmest, saddest voices pop had ever produced – and the right material came from Paul Williams (‘Rainy Days and Mondays’, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’, ‘I Won’t Last a Day without You’), Bacharach (‘Close to You’, US no. 1, UK no. 6 ’70) and Leon Russell, whose ‘Superstar’ (US no. 2, UK no. 18 ’71) was a wrist-slashing groupie song that made the fine line between fan and pop singer feel like a chasm. It turned out that Karen wasn’t happy at all as a pop singer, psychologically tortured, forced to admit her solo disco album wasn’t even worthy of release, and in the end she starved herself to death. Is that sadder than a heroin OD? I think it probably is.
1 The Mamas and Papas’ sound was hugely influential, with acts like the 5th Dimension (who added a touch more soul), Millennium (a touch more rock) and Free Design (a touch more jazz) working around their template. The upbeat feel of these groups has earned them the retrospective label ‘sunshine pop’, though, given the deep darkness in John Phillips’s life story, it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate.
2 The Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ was an exception – anti-state individualism wasn’t branded ‘libertarian’ as readily in the late sixties, as it suffused the counterculture. Retrospectively, George Harrison’s song sounds like an anthem for future tax exiles like Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones.
3 Saussy and Gant also wrote and produced Roy Orbison’s 1969 state-of-the-nation single ‘Southbound Jericho Parkway’. Seven minutes long, with no recognisable verse or chorus, it traces the family fallout from a businessman father’s suicide. No sunshine at all, this was a very dark record.
4 The heavily compressed piano intro on ‘My Ship Is Coming In’ seems to start mid-phrase and bears no relation to the rest of the song; in this way it suggests the lyric is wishful thinking, desperation even, as Scott tries to convince his girl that she’ll soon be able to ‘throw away that shabby dress’.
5 Unlike Barry Ryan, Scott Walker’s mystique and reputation have grown exponentially since the seventies, built initially on the dark majesty (and long unavailability) of his first five solo albums but helped by a move away from pop into adventurous, if ugly, avant-garde records. His tracks on the Walker Brothers’ 1978 album Nite Flights heavily influenced Bowie’s Lodger the following year. It has been a fascinating route for a singer first brought into public view on the Eddie Fisher Show, though albums like Tilt and The Drift are weighed down by violent, misanthropic lyrics. Loneliness is the cloak he chooses to wear, but it would be good to hear him, maybe just once more, let the seriousness slip and adapt his avant tendencies to a three-minute single.
6 It was pretty obviously a metaphor for a broken relationship, with no one to blame. There were far stranger lines in ‘MacArthur Park’ – ‘Pressed in love’s hot fevered iron like a stripy pair of pants’ – but the cake took the biscuit, and rockist
s have used it as an example of pop’s meaninglessness ever since.
7 ‘Guitar Man’ (US no. 11, UK no. 16 ’72) is an unlikely counterpoint to Bowie’s ‘Starman’ – it could be the song playing on the radio immediately before Ziggy beams down with his ‘hazy cosmic jive’. You assume it’s about an unreachable rock star until it reaches its climax, where you realise his star is waning, his audience disappearing. ‘If’ (US no. 4 ’71, and a UK number one for Telly Savalas in ’75) was even starker, a tale of creepily devoted love which becomes darker with each verse: ‘If the world should stop revolving, spinning slowly round to die, I’d spend the end with you.’ Savalas’s version positively relishes this notion – no wonder he made such a good Bond villain.
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CRYING IN THE STREETS: DEEP SOUL
In the late sixties white teens wanted to be taken seriously as grown-ups, and so fashioned a new music that showed they now had concerns that were a little more weighty than the ones in ‘Summertime Blues’. But what also shaped politics and pop in the sixties was that black adults were demanding to be respected as grown-ups – to be allowed to vote, to gather in desegregated spaces with everyone else. What was simultaneously so powerful and so strange was that modern pop was often a weapon for both white kids and black adults. If it was unselfconscious fun for a Troggs fan, it was something sharply different for a James Brown fan. ‘I’m a man,’ sang Muddy Waters – but when the Yardbirds covered it (US no. 17 ’65), or when the young David Bowie named his group the Mannish Boys after a Waters song, it had a very different political freighting.
