Shots from the Canon: 1960-1964
The first in a new series examining a favorite song from each year in pop music
Not to belabor the point (says the writer who's used this newsletter to display a tendency for terminal logorrhea and will do so again): the first few months of this Substack have been something of a mixed bag for me. As much as I've appreciated the opportunity to do more in-depth longform work through my Album of the Year series, and as much as I've held even more appreciation for any evidence that there are people out there who looked forward to reading it, I've had to put it on hold for a few personal reasons. Most of these reasons are related to the stress of putting so much effort into something that it feels like uncompensated work, rather than the more concentrated dose of enthusiastic hey, check this thing out advocacy that I tend to enjoy writing and reading a bit more. (Another one of these reasons, which I'll elaborate on when the time is right, is at least something I would consider unreservedly positive.) Writers write, whether or not we "have fun" doing it. But since I'm still trying to find out who my audience is here, what sort of independent self-assigned writing I feel most comfortable doing, and how to best put that all across in a way that retains something of my own personal voice, I figure it's for the best that I focus on something less strenuous to write (and read) for the time being. Album of the Year may return down the line, but for now I could stand a bit of a reset -- and an opportunity to find a different mode to put my writing out there that doesn't leave me kind of exhausted when all's said and done.
That said, sometimes all it takes is a simple thought exercise to get me back into motion. Last week YouTube's algo spat a video at me from some youngish influencer with over a million views purporting to list his favorite songs from each year since the early '60s, and I don't need to go too much into detail about who this guy was or what his whole deal seemed to be. All I'll say is that it was entirely free of R&B and hip-hop, with "Blue Monday" as its sole nod in the general direction of dance music, and the whole exercise made Jann Wenner's canon look like Chuck Eddy's by comparison. Fortunately, one of the funny side effects of experiencing irritating music criticism -- or the irritating video essays we're supposed to turn to now that criticism has been significantly gutted -- is that it actually still gives me something better to do than dwell too much on how some other guy is wrong. It makes me stop and reflect on why I actually like the music I do, which means engaging on a deeper level with stuff that is widely loved by a lot of people (whether "a lot" means hundreds or millions) and figuring out where I fit amidst all this love. So I spent a couple hours on Thursday evening hashing out my own list, going back to 1960, and seeing what I could divine from the selections that first came to mind and then stuck there.
Canons are tangled things, even when they're personally derived ones that have been built upon decades of curiosity and interrogation and self-questioning and slow-burn appreciation. I'm going to drop a successive half-decade's worth of my list each week, and looking at the list in full from 1960 to 2024, I can tell it's going to be a bit odd. It's a remarkable cross-section of genres and styles and cultures, but also bound by some limitations of Anglophonia and broader-market scope and my general biases towards what I suppose could be called the beathead-centric perspective of pop music. Still, I didn't pick these in an effort to be either populist (there's some idiosyncratic choices) or obscurantist (there's a lot of well-known hits). I didn't overexert myself to show off the iceberg-tip of an eclecticism that just came naturally. And I didn't stop to think "hasn't this song been written about a hundred times before by people who have lived with this music even longer than I have?" I just looked through my collection year-by-year, typed whichever song knocked my head backwards the hardest, and spent some time reflecting on it before getting it all down here for you to read. I've known these songs well. You stand a good chance of knowing them, too. Let's find out what else there is about them that we can know.
1960: The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" (7", Scepter)
The whole poptimism thing is still a sore spot for a lot of people, but it's songs like this that always make me stop and think about what that critical framing set out to do -- what it not only does right in addressing the intrinsic possibility for resonance and meaning in contemporary pop, but how it brings light to the things pop was capable of in the nascent forms we still recognize today. The Shirelles did not write this song and do not play any of the instruments and operated entirely in the mainstream teen-dollar-hunting record biz that more or less kicked them to the curb before their time, and yet this song means every bit as much as anything the Beatles or the Velvet Underground could ever do -- that is poptimism. It's the expression of youth -- by youth, for youth -- expressed through but not exclusive to Black femininity, channeled through the ideas of a white married couple in lyricist Gerry Goffin and composer Carole King who lent their talents to an entire nebula of music after this initial lodestar. All that, and it hit on the crucial idea that a song lead singer Shirley Owens initially considered not urbane enough on first draft -- she thought it was "too country" -- could find an additional dimension with an uptempo boost and the judicious inclusion of a refined yet lively string section. This meant it had both pop drive and orchestral drama, a striking example of the most important developments in popular music's efforts to unite tasteful "high" and youthful "low" elements to the point where people would eventually stop caring about such distinctions.
Now a pop song should instill some sort of familiar sense of emotional connection for it to resonate this long, and this one's still effective because it nails a familiar young sense of intense yearning based in the idea of an open-ended future with someone. This yearning is expressed with a waning naivete that sounds on the cusp of being discarded (especially on the bridge), though since they leave the question unanswered we never know if that naivete will be traded for cynicism or gratitude. It comes from Owens as the figure up front, the others joining in as abstracted but recognizable echoes as though they're empathetic reverberations of not just Owens' own anxious hope but the listener's. It's odd in retrospect that there was some controversy over this song seeming a bit provocative for 1960, even though Owens, who was 19 when this song charted, was definitely old enough to know; by today's standards it sounds more like being knocked for a loop after a first kiss than anything more involved than that. But its composer would reprise it for her 1971 LP Tapestry, and effectively reminded millions of listeners that feeling never goes away when you're on the cusp of 30, especially after a decade that gave rise to the idea of free love wound up just providing an excuse for a lot of people to settle for one-night stands. (The sentiment also saw no gender lines, for that matter.) Fun fact, there are two notable 1961 answer songs to this: "Not Just Tomorrow, But Always" by Bertell Dache (b/k/a Tony Orlando), which King also arranged, and "Tomorrow & Always," an early Motown single from the Satintones that was eventually withdrawn because it wasn't so much an answer record as it was a total knockoff. Still: note how neither says no.
1961: Roland Kirk, "Three for the Festival" (from We Free Kings, Mercury)
This is a bit of a cheat because I'm going by jazzbo tradition and filing this under its 1961 session date rather than the 1962 release date of the LP it appears on. But that's semantics, whatever. I just want an excuse to big-up an artist who was and remains one of my favorite childhood cornerstones of my stepdad's record collection. I first heard Roland Kirk as a little kid through The Inflated Tear, a perfect record that I later got to advocate for as one of Pitchfork's 200 Best Albums of the 1960s. But that '67 session had already built off a long-rising rep of Kirk as a bundle of contradictions. Here was a frontman who could've been and often was pigeonholed as a stunt-music novelty, a blind man who could play multiple horns simultaneously and use circular breathing to belt out stormy woodwind solos that seemed to defy the limits of human effort. (If that's not frivolity enough: that insistently perky flute on Quincy Jones' after-the-fact Austin Powers motif "Soul Bossa Nova"? That's Kirk.) But the ends of all this outwardly outlandish how'd-he-do-that technique were to meaningfully translate some seemingly inscrutable musical concepts he held in his consciousness, and the means relied on a combination of free-ranging technique, experimentally customized instruments, and an anti-snob's ear for every kind of music that could possibly speak to him.
"Three for the Festival" might not be the most revered cut on We Free Kings -- I could've happily highlighted the Christmas-carol-mutating title cut (recorded, amusingly, in August, and released after the holiday season had ended), and the other standards he and his combo take on, Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow's "Moon Song" and Charlie Parker's "Blues for Alice," are joyous things, too. But "Festival" sticks with me for a couple reasons. One, it's because before I heard it, I'd familiarized myself with the update he'd concocted for 1975's The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color, "Freaks for the Festival," which pushes it into the territory of sly, skulking funk. (It also featuries one of his characteristically amusing opening monologues, one which still cracks me up over how endearingly irritated he gets by the end.) And two, it's because Kirk probably had reason to be irritated after all this time that'd passed between the original and "Freaks" because the very thing he was doing on "Three for the Festival" was proving a point that was taking a little too long to stick for some folks. The point was that every element and form of jazz and blues and pop that he could integrate into his vision was worth engaging with, and his point was proven by just how much vigor and power he could play all of it. "Festival" is blues-as-swing-as-R&B-as-rock'n'roll, riffing saxes in self-harmony and exploding into a superhuman flute solo, dancing in the rain through the torrential drums of Charli Persip, bobbing and weaving on the tide of Wendell Marshall's submerged-yet-resonant bass, nudging Hank Jones' key-jabbing punctuation into its own flash of jubilant brilliance -- and with friendly-ghost interjections from Kirk's own voice, wordlessly intoning "huhs" and "ahhs" that all sound like dazed reactions to epiphanies of his own making.
1962: Booker T. & the M.G.'s, "Green Onions"
Where does your music world start? I know the popular narrative I was taught when I was young was that there was Little Richard, and there was Chuck, and there was Bo, and there was Elvis and the Killer and all the other greats who emerged at a flashpoint in time that led a youthful generation or two to realize they were witnessing something coalescing into what would be called rock and roll. I found plenty to love in that music, and it's a spectacular legacy to think about, but there's another point in time and another series of developments that leads me to think of that epochal era as the prehistory of the stuff I treasure the most. And the big bang for my own personal canon is right here. For some reason I still can't entirely comprehend, "Green Onions" had remained in the rotation of the AOR-turned-classic-rock radio behemoth I tuned to as a kid when I was in the mood to explore the rock'n'roll world that existed before me. This was the Get the Led Out '80s, when just about anything pre-British Invasion was shuffled off to "oldies" and anything venturing too far into straight-up R&B was largely written out of the picture entirely, Motown and all. Who knows why this stuck around on the playlist -- maybe someone at the station made a case for "Green Onions" as a direct influence on Pink Floyd's "Money" or something. But it was a revelation, something different and enigmatic and wordless amidst all the arena rock favorites of the Beatles-to-Van Halen continuum. There was a stretch where it was my home-taper holy grail, the one I'd hover my finger over the record button just waiting for it to emerge with that sinuous Hammond B3 slinking over the horizon.
Now it's arguable that "Green Onions" is less a whole-cloth new invention or even a sea change in pop music than it is just an incredibly potent culmination of a lot of things that were going down. It started as an afterthought, a b-side, something a teenage Booker T. Jones had pulled from his back pocket during a casual jam session while they waited for a rockabilly singer who never showed up to the studio: hey, check out this chord progression I came up with, the key changes are kind of startling but I think it works. It both drew from and elaborated on (at least) four distinct contemporary traditions -- a 12-bar blues using R&B riffs, led by an organ groove and some sparse yet deeply expressive vamping worthy of soul jazz, and a Steve Cropper guitar riff with enough surly twang for rock. It sounded like it could fit right alongside John Lee Hooker and James Brown and Jimmy Smith and Link Wray in a way that almost felt like it was a chameleonic litmus test for what you wanted from music circa the early '60s, and it did so with such open-ended breadth that it didn't even matter that there weren't any words to it. Who needs words when you have vibe, a sense of cool that it would share with and also inform great swaths of music throughout the '60s and well into the '70s, an eternal groove with enough cocky insistence to get its hooks into you and enough liberating creativity to push you in any direction you want when it finally lets go. From here, you can see your way to Southern soul and Southern rock, Stevie and CCR, a beacon to an entire globe's worth of restless youth and the spark of a revolution that would soundtrack America through one of its most difficult yet necessary waves of social transformation. This song may not represent everything that is inexhaustably cool and life-affirming about an otherwise intensely complicated postwar 20th Century cultural milieu to me, but it's where I like to start.
1963: The Crystals, "Then He Kissed Me"
Yes, there it is, during one of the most intricate and audacious tracking shots of late 20th Century cinema, in a film about the consequences of giving a troubled young man rapidly accumulating access to power and prestige and notoriety: a song produced by Phil Spector. But all jokes aside, there's a reason it's impossible for me to hear this song without immediately recalling the Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas, and it's not just because Martin Scorsese used it for a one of the most breathtaking scenes in the movie most people will remember him by. It's because this is the exact sort of thing that makes a really good movie soundtrack sync hit different: it takes a song that already existed before the movie and had its own context beforehand, and has it not only comment on the action but shift your perspective on it. More likely than not the audience has been spending the first act or so of Goodfellas identifying with or otherwise contemplating Henry Hill in some way, wondering what it's like to be him or be with him as the narrative puts him through this razor's edge ascent up through a glamorous world that's nonetheless always on the brink of violence and disaster. But Karen's there, too. And this scene helps us understand how she gets to the point where she's hiding guns for him, because a film heavily reliant on both of their narrations has other narrators, too.
"Then He Kissed Me" is what pulls us to view this world through Karen's eyes. The beat's a shivering gallop, perfect for a song about dancing leading to something even more thrilling than dancing. The arrangement has that taut, sharp West Coast sweep of elegaic majesty that Jack Nitzsche was a master of and the Wrecking Crew generated endless energy from. And the vocals -- Dolores Brooks, damn. I keep remembering her tremulous-yet-bold solo lead as double-tracked, even though it's not, it's just the knock-on effects of her own intensity and how the other singers (who, it should be noted, aren't actually the other Crystals) join in on the B verses after she soars through the As, and how even though her performance doesn't (can't?) necessarily get more intense -- she ratchets it up maybe half a notch for the bridge -- the whole drive of it just feels like it picks up momentum the more it goes just because it's such an intensely concentrated dose of falling-in-love storytelling: they meet, they keep wanting to meet, they fall in love, they meet the parents, they get married, just like it goes in the film. By using this song for this scene, Scorsese wanted to make sure that we weren't just wowed by the structure of the filmmaking or the way Henry flashes cash and schmoozes like an insider and cuts to the front of every line he can -- he wants us to hear what's inside Karen's head, and the Crystals get us there.
(For further study: the version by largely-forgotten '70s glam-rock shoulda-beens the Hollywood Brats, which pointedly refuses to swap out any of the pronouns. Also the version by St. Vincent that did.)
1964: John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme, Part 2: Resolution"
Sometimes words fail me. I have this tendency to feel like there are few gulfs between my ability to appreciate something and my ability to articulate exactly what's going on that makes me appreciate it that are bigger than the one I try to traverse when I write about jazz. I have been fascinated by it for more than 40 years and I have more than 800 albums from a wide range of subgenres in all sorts of physical and digital formats and I have reviewed many, many of those albums, and yet I don't even feel close to being an authority on it. (There's other Nates for that, granted.) I'm not even sure what, exactly, compels me to pick this particular movement of John Coltrane's masterpiece over the three others -- what even compels me to park this on a listicle as an example of anything more than its own self. Is it the way those brisk yet ruminative Jimmy Garrison bass notes dart around in search of something at the start, only to be completely bowled over by a declarative-then-searching tenor sax lead that sounds like it was not only touched by God but wants to return the favor? Is it Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner's interplay, how their performances take the idea of burying you in unrelenting fusillades of thundering chords and drumbeats and actually make it feel more like a source of solace than chaos? Is it because sometimes I need a reminder that the search for religious and spiritual enlightment can lead to something other than dead-end insularity and destructive politics? Could be. I'm just grateful to have a text I can be Talmudic about for the rest of my life.