Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  The ingredients of this style were girls barely old enough to understand sex; chirruping background singers; and material that bounced with perky enthusiasm but never throbbed with passion. The effect was often banal, but it appealed to adolescents, and (for less salubrious reasons) rather older males. The princess of yé-yé was Sylvie Vartan, 17 years old when she played the Wendy Richard role to Frankie Jordan’s Mike Sarne on the 1961 hit ‘Panne d’essence’. Her solo debut, ‘Quand le film est triste’, was a classier affair, yet still scented with the same blend of innocence and unwitting sexuality that would make a British star out of Sandie Shaw. One man who understood precisely why yé-yé sold was Serge Gainsbourg, who took the even younger France Gall under his wing with fatherly care – and then gifted her a hit entitled ‘Les sucettes’. Gall imagined she was singing about lollipops; the transparent innuendo of Gainsbourg’s song suggested otherwise. As the decade progressed, the material he crafted for female artists such as Brigitte Bardot grew ever more risqué, and more symbolic, until he became pop’s closest equivalent to Andy Warhol, a mirror for the ambiguous obsessions of a decadent society.

  While yé-yé and Gainsbourg’s sly eroticism (exemplified by ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’) remain the dominant images of 1960s French pop in the English-speaking world, many of France’s most ambitious talents of the decade – the likes of Michel Polnaroff and Jacques Dutronc – went unnoticed outside their homeland. Though they were creating a distinctively nationalist model of pop culture, the remainder of Europe was overcome by the desire to ape the tones of Liverpool and London. The craze for ‘Beatle bands’ even extended beyond the Iron Curtain, where Bulgaria’s Bundaratsite, Czechoslovakia’s Olympic (known locally as the Prague Beatles), Hungary’s Illes and Poland’s Czerwone Gitary (the Red Guitars) all capitalised on the absence of the authentic article. Another Polish rock singer, Czesław Niemen, satirised adult reactions to the bitelsi (Beatle fans), with ‘Nie bąd´z taki bitels’ (‘Don’t Be Such a Beatle’), which mimicked many of the Beatles’ early musical trademarks.

  Meanwhile, Western Europe was overrun by bands who dedicated themselves to providing local translations of contemporary Anglo-American hits, regardless of their genre. Los Mustangs from Spain launched themselves as Barcelona’s version of the Shadows, and moved without hesitation through the Beatles’ early catalogue to songs by the Kinks, Simon & Garfunkel and the Bee Gees. Of their contemporaries, Los Estudiantes waved the flag of surrender after they’d mastered the early Beatles sound; Los Shakers devoted themselves to tackling the entire Beatles catalogue until 1966; Los Brincos mined the summer pop seam with such enthusiasm that they were invited to record in England; and Los Salvajes picked up where Los Estudiantes had abandoned the struggle, turning in valiant Spanish translations of ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ (alias ‘La neurastenia’). The same story could be told in Italian, German and half a dozen other languages.

  Yet the narrative altered in 1965, after which new bands – fired by the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, the Kinks and the Who, rather than the early Beatles – borrowed the techniques of British R&B and psychedelic pop. The most adventurous territory was Holland, home of ‘Nederbeat’, where the Jay Jays, the Golden Earrings, the Outsiders, Cuby & the Blizzards and Q65 crafted their own impressively raw brand of garage rock. While Dutch, Swedish and German bands kept pace with developments in London, their counterparts in Eastern Europe had to rely on singles smuggled across the political borders – with the result that they might be two or even three years late to react to each dazzling metamorphosis in English rock. Olympic in Prague mimicked the look of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album in 1967, but didn’t respond to its aural influence until the end of the decade. Regardless of whether young musicians were in Madrid or Moscow, however, their culture now revolved around Britain and America, their own traditions trampled in the rush to imitate the Beatles or Bob Dylan.

  Just as America had planted cultural flags in Britain and Europe with ragtime, jazz and the Hollywood movie, now the Anglo-American bloc invaded the Continent without the slightest show of resistance. Schools and colleges across Europe reported a dramatic rise in the numbers of students desperate to learn the English language, so that they could understand their new idols. (It helped that the early Beatles songs employed only the most basic vocabulary.) The Continent would never end its quest for local talent, but henceforth Britain and America mapped out the cultural landscape, which only the most courageous of performers would choose to evade.

  Listening to it is like flying2 through the air.

  American Record Guide review of a Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass LP, June 1966

  I almost had my Mom3 and Dad thinking rock performers weren’t so bad, when Cilla Black appeared on Johnny Carson’s show. I must say that even I was shocked at her appearance. Her skirt was so short that really she didn’t even need to have one on!

  Letter from teenage reader to Tiger Beat, August 1966

  The Beatles aside, the world’s most popular singer in 1964–6 was Julie Andrews, star of the movies Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. The soundtrack albums sold in their millions; indeed, The Sound of Music, which was promoted as ‘The happiest sound4 in all the world’, was Britain’s best-selling LP of both 1965 and 1966. Appealing to people of all ages, they were bursting with songs which anyone who was alive in their era (and most born since then) can remember without a moment’s hesitation. They made no attempt to alter the culture, or educate the listener: their sole purpose was entertainment. As such, they have been relegated to a footnote in the history of popular music.

  In February 1967, the Beatles’ coupling of ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was the first of their singles in four years not to top the British chart. It was held at bay – a landmark event, this, in our received knowledge of the 1960s – by Engelbert Humperdinck’s cover of an American country standard, ‘Release Me’. Engelbert was Gerry Dorsey, an unsuccessful pop singer from the pre-Beatles era, reinvented as a romantic icon for listeners of a certain age.

  ‘Release Me’ epitomised the so-called ‘Nashville Sound’ which dominated country music throughout the decade, as lush strings and chorales replaced the rural twang of a fiddle and a steel guitar. Country had been devastated in the 1950s by the onset of rock ’n’ roll. The Nashville Sound was designed by guitarist/producer Chet Atkins as an antidote, ensuring that artists such as Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee would fit smoothly on to either pop or country radio. Reeves, who was killed in a 1964 plane crash, was perhaps the era’s closest equivalent to the young Bing Crosby, and his purring, mellifluous approach to a song ensured him a vast posthumous following. Engelbert Humperdinck didn’t attempt a Southern drawl, but his audience recognised him as a kindred spirit to Reeves, romantic and safe.

  The triumph of ‘Release Me’ over ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ may have been iconic, in a negative sense, for anyone who identified with the counter-culture. But it simply demonstrated that until the end of the 1960s, the singles market was not the sole prerogative of the young or hip. At the height of the beat boom, comedian and crooner Ken Dodd sold enormous quantities of his self-explanatory hits, ‘Happiness’ and ‘Tears’. The Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ were competing against a trio of instrumentals from Europe, ‘Zorba’s Dance’, ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’ and ‘Il silenzio’. In 1966, as teenage pop’s experimentalism started to alarm the unwary, the British charts were awash with ballads by Kenneth McKellar, Ken Dodd, Vince Hill and Val Doonican. The Who’s saga of cross-dressing and emotional disturbance, ‘I’m a Boy’, was outflanked by the mock-1920s revival of the New Vaudeville Band’s ‘Winchester Cathedral’. Throughout 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, odes to hallucinogenic chemicals and alternative lifestyles sat alongside Petula Clark and Harry Secombe’s ‘This is My Song’, Vince Hill’s ‘Edelweiss’, country ballads from Tom Jones, a duet from Frank Sinatra and his daughter,
and a whistling novelty entitled ‘I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman’. There was also pan-generational pop, premature easy listening for the switched-on generation: the Seekers’ ‘Georgy Girl’, Sandie Shaw’s ‘Puppet on a String’, even Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco’.

  Many of these songs became instantaneous ‘good music’ standards: The Mantovani Touch (1968) included both ‘Edelweiss’ and ‘Release Me’, for example. But the act who contributed most heavily to this repertoire during the mid-1960s was the Beatles – or, rather, Paul McCartney, whose almost preternatural talent for melody produced an array of the most covered tunes of this, or any other, era: ‘Yesterday’, ‘Michelle’, ‘And I Love Her’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Fool on the Hill’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’. They enabled light orchestras and crooners to feel au fait with the times, persuaded mature adults that the younger generation was not entirely barren, and ensured that Lennon and McCartney would become the highest-earning composers in history.

  The Beatles’ string-quartet arrangement of ‘Yesterday’ wasn’t allowed to feature in the US Easy Listening chart, but cover versions did slip through the gates, alongside the Rolling Stones’ assault on the same market, ‘As Tears Go By’. The pick of the Beatles’ catalogue and recent easy-listening hits also entered the jazz repertoire. As early as April 1965, a pundit declared that ‘Jazz today is Cannonball5 Adderley playing Fiddler on the Roof, Duke Ellington interpreting Mary Poppins … It’s also Dizzy Goes Hollywood, Stan Kenton playing Richard Wagner and the bossa nova … players have stretched their horizons to the most commercial point to keep active.’fn1 The stretching had barely begun. As the decade continued, jazz artists regularly added rock material to their repertoires, while record company marketing departments begged that each album should include one short number which could be extract-flush-lefted for potential pop airplay. It was much easier for them to promote Michelle, a 1966 album of pop covers by saxophonist Bud Shank, than Miles Davis’s contemporaneous E.S.P. – nobody imagining for a moment that the Miles Davis catalogue might still be selling fifty years later.

  Even at the height of their mid-1960s fame, few would have predicted that the Beatles could enjoy a similar afterlife. It was the lot of teenage idols to flame briefly, and then fade into a distant glow. Sinatra was the exception, against whom all pretenders paled. Presley’s popularity had endured for almost a decade until sales of his records sharply fell away. But there was one immensely popular act of the era whose appeal seemed timeless and irreversible: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. They were the best-selling albums artist in America from 1965 to 1968, surpassing the Beatles’ feats on an almost weekly basis: five simultaneous LPs in the Top 20, six in the Top 40, eight in the Top 100. They were praised on the floor of the California Senate for having ‘contributed immensely6 to international understanding and promoted cordial relations with people around the globe … In a day when discordant sounds and irregular beats seemingly have provocation attraction, it is rewarding that a musical organisation specialises in what may be called joyous music.’

  Alpert’s band did not come from Tijuana, or even Mexico, and played at best a distant pastiche of mariachi music. Their 1962 hit, ‘The Lonely Bull’, was geographical exotica, as authentic as Frank Sinatra singing about the coffee in Brazil – and overdubbed with crowd noise in an attempt to convey the fervid excitement of the bullring. As the Beatles conquered America, Alpert (a songwriter and record company boss when not playing trumpet) temporarily lost his way by trying to court a teen audience. He returned in September 1965 with his sound streamlined and simplified, and his purpose likewise: to remove his adult listeners from the cares of everyday life by making them feel as if they were on vacation, while rooting them in the familiarity of standards and recent hits. He borrowed songs from Latin jazz (‘Work Song’), Broadway (‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Mama’) and Hollywood (‘Zorba the Greek’ and ‘Third Man Theme’), and perfected a style whereby every song sounded subtly different and yet exactly the same. Ironically, the exception – a sensuous vocal performance of Bacharach and David’s ‘This Guy’s in Love With You’ – provided his biggest hit and also broke the spell.

  Alpert’s music would only enjoy nostalgic appeal in subsequent decades, while Bacharach and David’s represented the 1960s equivalent of a Porter or Rodgers and Hart, conferring a touch of class on anyone who approached it. Listening to Bacharach’s daringly tricky melody lines, alongside David’s dextrous lyrics, one could feel oneself becoming more sophisticated. That was why their catalogue was widely mistrusted by late 1960s aficionados of rock ‘authenticity’: too little emotion, too much calculation. Worse still, because she seemed to have betrayed her generation from within, was the Broadway, cabaret and movie success of Barbra Streisand: a year younger than Dylan, two months older than McCartney, and not remotely interested in a career like theirs. She was compared to Gertrude Lawrence and Edith Piaf, the queens of vaudeville, the doyennes of the variety stage. ‘She will be around fifty years7 from now if good songs are still being written to be sung by good singers’, a columnist predicted in 1963, when she was 21. Her entrance was startling: she burst on to the first track of her debut album, ‘Cry Me a River’, like a clown falling through a wall made of paper and paste, arriving (as it seemed) mid-bar in full flow. That single performance demonstrated her command of the microphone, with an awareness of how to act out a song, teasing and living out its implications at the same time, which none of her peers could have rivalled. So she was revered as a throwback to a lost era, proof that not every post-adolescent was a guitar-toting, narcotised imbecile – a sign that the ‘good music’ might survive its bombardment from teenagers and their sulking heroes.

  Why should you put music8 on a great big piece of plastic which gets all fucked up and scratched and dusty, when you can get little tape cartridges which are dust-free all the time, never get scratched, are smaller, more compact, easier to stack – and all you have to do is plug them into a stereophonic set and you get much better reproduction?

  Graham Nash, 1967

  A lot of Madison Avenue type guys9 on their lunch hour are shopping – they’re wearing button-down collars and they’re into rock records, they’re no longer buying Andy Williams, they’re no longer buying Percy Faith records, or buying Frank Sinatra, they’re buying rock records.

  Joe Smith, general manager of Warner Brothers Records, 1971

  Painting, graphics, photography: with the emergence of the rock album as a counter-cultural artefact, its cardboard packaging became more than a simple marketing device. There had long been an art and a science of cover design, a collision of advertising and self-expression. Even a simple portrait photograph could be manipulated to reinforce an image: as with the arty, half-lit faces on the With the Beatles sleeve; the fashionably moody figures on the Rolling Stones’ first LP;fn2 the weary, dustbowl features of Bob Dylan on The Times They Are A-Changin’. Scantily clad young women on mood-music albums conveyed the kind of company that the male purchaser would now be certain to attract. The anonymous white girl posed sensually on Otis Redding’s Otis Blue LP played a dual role: she represented the transcendent power of the music, and obscured the race of its creator. While the Beatles and Rolling Stones continued to test the limits of the portrait, with the distorted faces of Rubber Soul and the heavily tinted shades of Aftermath respectively, Bob Dylan went a step further, amassing a lens-eye’s span of symbolic objects on Bringing It All Back Home. This was a self-portrait by association, a style taken to its logical conclusion by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper sleeve, crowded with icons (and immediately parodied by the Mothers of Invention). By contrast, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds provided a warning of what could happen when music and image parted company: songs of high romanticism, an album cover of stark banality.

  Dylan pioneered another innovation: the use of prose poems as liner notes. Previously most albums had been puffed by a tame publicist or journalis
t. During the mid-1960s, this congratulatory prose was gradually replaced by song lyrics (the album as poetry) or additional photographs (the album as fashion gallery). Gatefold sleeves expanded the horizon, and various pop artists utilised these new landscapes to create collages and montages, in the wake of Peter Blake’s and Jann Haworth’s groundbreaking design for Sgt. Pepper. These artworks could then be studied (like the lyrics) as the music played, providing a multimedia experience that would not be rivalled until the invention of the music video. Perhaps inevitably, it was also the Beatles who perfected the promotional film clip, which not only freed them from touring the world’s TV studios for publicity purposes, but added another facet to the audio-visual delight that was the modern pop record.

  With twelve inches by twelve to fill (more for a fold-out cover), the potential for artistic expression was immense. Record artwork from the 1960s would offer a more representative survey of the decade’s artistic movements than a retrospective of canvases or sculptures. Yet the visual impact and cultural significance of these exercises in creative branding were lost when the music was transferred from vinyl to another medium. Best-selling LPs had been released on reel-to-reel tapes since the mid-1950s, initially providing the only way of securing stereo sound in the home. ‘Tape has unbeatable advantages10 over a disk’, declared Time magazine; ‘it can record sound more faithfully, does not wear out, has no needle scratch.’ Tape sales fell sharply after stereo LPs were introduced, and the industry struggled to find a format that would not require the listener to hand-wind the reel on to the machine before each play.

  In the late 1950s, both RCA and 3M thought that they had invented a tape system that would reverse automatically from one spool to the other. RCA’s cartridges offered acceptable sound but tended to jam; 3M’s didn’t jam, but weren’t listenable. Then two innovations were introduced almost side by side. The first comprised a tape on a continuous loop inside a sealed cartridge: it was marketed for use in automobiles, first as four-track stereo (thirty minutes of music) and then eight-track (one hour). Eight-track players were offered as a luxury item in American saloons from 1966, and soon became standard in family and commercial vehicles. (By the 1990s, US truck stops were virtually the only place where eight-tracks could still be purchased.) Meanwhile, consumers could buy into an invention from the Dutch manufacturer, Philips: the mini-cassette (or compact cassette). Launched in Europe around 1964, it reached Britain in 1966, where it was marketed as ‘so simple that anyone11 can use it … on the beach or in the car, or in stereo in the home’.