Shots from the Canon is a weekly feature where I discuss a favorite song of mine from every year from 1960-present. This week: a storied yet discussed-to-death period of music, and what we can still learn from it.
There are a few different critical schools of thought when it comes to talking about pop music of the late 1960s when you come from a generation that wasn't around to experience it. There's the purely iconoclastic approach, which I suspect will only grow more prominent with time, that entirely shrugs off the idea that this period was special -- that it's just boomer propaganda meant to convince younger generations that culture peaked with them. (It didn't, but they started something worth preserving.) There's the less common but equally myopic "wrong generation" perspective, where young people latch onto this music as secondhand nostalgia in an attempt to divert themselves from contemporary aesthetics. (There but for the grace of Sub Pop and Native Tongues go teenage I.) And then there's where I'm at: deeply ambivalent about the idea of the past as either innocent idyll or lead-poisoned hellscape, but also in a frequent state of questioning why so much of its culture still resonates with me in ways a lot of equivalent current media doesn't.
Some old songs like these will still resonate just because they came about at a time when pop music was in a state of intense creative flux -- but then, that was pretty much the default state for pop music for the entirety of the postwar 20th Century, and it's only in the last fifteen years or so that the pace of aesthetic mutation seems to be a bit slack. Maybe there's that additional sense of social upheaval and change that goes with this era's music -- the sound of the Great Society struggling to be born and eventually losing the fight -- but that means listening to this music while trying to weigh the idealism of that moment against the disillusionment of where that moment fell short, and that can dull the thrill in itself. Maybe it's just remnant fondness for the fact that a lot of this music wasn't the be-all-end-all, but the beginning of a foundation of knowledge for me, the stuff that caught my ear and kept it but also pointed me towards further frontiers. I liked this stuff when I first heard it but I didn't want to stop here -- I wanted more, further variations and covers and sample-flips and upheavals and ripostes. I wanted a conversation; this period of music was the greeting. Hey, how're you? Glad you asked.
While I do think it's something of a dead end to romanticize a period that predates one's own existence, it's at least worth engaging with the idea that no generation or time period or youth movement or subculture has a monopoly on an emotional connection to any given golden oldie. Some things just go away, and some things are The Wizard of Oz or Batman or Chuck Jones cartoons: they don't exclusively belong to their moment of origin anymore because they are not just of or about their times, they're part of a cultural continuum. They are not so much old or dated as they are just feeling like they've always been around. I figure it's important to stop every so often and wonder what it is about these artifacts that make them worthy of not being taken for granted.
1965: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (from Highway 61 Revisited)
There is no Bob Dylan song I truly consider definitive of his whole body of work, and picking one out feels like an exercise in doing the kind of thing that traditionally inspired him to write things like this. "Ballad of a Thin Man" has a certain trick to it: it's riddled with aggravated, acidic barbs that sound like they could've been rooted in some specific beef, but whether or not they actually were, just wind up revealing more targets than it initially aims at. Ten years after this song came out (and nine after my favorite rendition of it), a reporter claimed to be the Mr. Jones in question, opening up as the uncomprehending square who failed to connect to Dylan's intent while trying to profile him during the '65 Newport Folk Festival. But Dylan seemed to see Mr. Joneses everywhere in the press and the critical world, so it's not just some act of singling out some poor dope for his scowling opprobrium. I got a bit of a laugh thinking of the possibility that a bunch of stoned young men with that same last name put this album on sound unheard for the first time sometime in the late '60s, and all had some kind of wig-out moment being ambushed by Dylan's taunting voice telling them how out of it they really were. But behind the spite is this sense of vulnerability, of someone who was having some difficulty handling the interrogations that come with fame and trying to channel all these sources of annoyance into one single effigy. Meanwhile the people confusing Mr. Jones are a bunch of apparitions -- "somebody naked," "the geek," "the sword swallower," "a one-eyed midget" -- all these presumed misfits, some of whom conjure up associations with "low" entertainment and sideshows, and all of whom appear to have a better grasp on the situation but express it in ways that are more alienating than illuminating. Are they stand-ins for Dylan? His fans? The burgeoning counterculture? Maybe not knowing what's happening is the whole point for everyone but the person who wrote this.
Or maybe it's a mistake to pay more attention to the words, striking as they are, than their delivery. I can do a pretty good Bob Dylan impression. I've been capable of it since I was pretty young, probably the inevitable side effect of a lot of family road trips where The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was a regular presence on the tape deck. And sometimes I've humored the (as-yet unfulfilled) idea of doing a rendition of this at a karaoke night, in part because it's a hell of a charge to step into that voice and work through all the nuances of his scoffing and exasperation and realize it requires tapping into some real feelings of alienation. Because it's not just that someone's alienating you, it's that you're letting them get to you, and so you spill everything out over this ballad like Ray Charles gone sour, the push-pull of Dylan's trudging piano and Al Kooper's snickering organ reflecting this alternately muttering and chuckling and sighing and barking string of recriminations. (Meanwhile I like to think of Mike Bloomfield's gradually-intruding guitar as a stunned onlooker.) It's not just that he's dealing with some obtuse adversary who doesn't just fail to get him but refuses to. It's that his timbre suggests that he's been dealing with people like that nonstop and he still isn't sure whether he wants to feed off that energy or reject it entirely.
1966: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (from Pet Sounds)
Sometimes you've just got to feel sorry for yourself. It's self-indulgent and embarrassing, but so are a lot of intense emotions that come around when interpersonal connections seem fraught. And if you're the kind of person who carries what initially felt like teen angst into a long and confusing adulthood that hasn't offered much respite from it, you might also be the kind of person who sticks with youth-culture-oriented pop music for similar reasons. Brian Wilson's existential crises wound up haunting him and affecting him in some ways that still feel tragic, even though they also resulted in some of the most brutally sincere and upfront confrontations with depression and alienation in all of pop music. It's all so simple in Tony Asher's words and so relatable in Wilson's pained, worn-down grace, in a way that could be deeply felt by a lot of Former Gifted Kids my age (they say I got brains but they ain't doing me no good), as well as the generations that surround mine. There's the ones who first bought this album in the process of figuring out if there was more to life than hot rods and surfing (I've been looking for a place to fit in where I can speak my mind), the ones who resuscitated it as a cult-turned-canonical classic decades after it underperformed on the charts (no one wants to help me look for places where new things might be found), the ones who still marvel at how something that seems to come from such a supposedly more innocent time can nail how fucked up it can feel to be young at a time of omnipresent anxiety (each time things start to happen again I think I got something good goin' for myself but what goes wrong). The only real dividing point probably depends on whether your dissatisfaction with These Times means pining for times you were too late for, or hoping the future will be more accommodating. Wilson, from what I've read, was in the latter camp. He was pretty much dead-on there where this song was concerned.
As pop music? I actually keep forgetting that's what it's supposed to be. Whatever definition you might have of "rock'n'roll" seems kind of insufficient to cover this territory: it expresses its youthful ennui more as melancholy wistfulness than surly rebellion, and its elaborate orchestration is a Wall of Sound turned monolith that (thanks in part to that Theremin) has more to do with Bebe and Louis Barron than Bo Diddley. It's cinematic and theatrical, as much Broadway as jukebox, released at a time when the idea of the Great American Standard had not yet entirely been afforded to youth pop music -- but of course now it clearly sounds and feels like one of those Teenage Symphonies to God that Wilson was yearning to master on Smile shortly afterwards. So its place feels less like an aesthetic precedent -- one that few others could really meet in the same way -- and more like the forerunner of a sort of lineage of cross-genre confrontations with alienation and depression that tend to stick with me. From here I can go to Todd Rundgren's "Sometimes I Don't Know What to Feel" or Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' "Where Are All My Friends" or Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" or Beta Band's "Round the Bend" -- I don't even really fuck with emo that much and there's still a whole tradition of guys going through it and trying to put that to music that speaks to their internal turmoil. But "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" is still the one that makes it all feel the most like being alone in a crowd.
1967: Aretha Franklin, "Respect" (from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You)
How many of you have heard Aretha's Columbia recordings? They've been kind of pushed to the background as early-career efforts to find her footing after transitioning from gospel to secular music. And while her time with the label wasn't as commercially lucrative or artistically revolutionary compared to what followed, it's still worthwhile going through that stretch of early-mid '60s work to hear her as a versatile interpreter of well-known standards. Her voice is already there with her earliest charting single "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody," which shares vinyl space on 1962's The Electrifying Aretha Franklin with a fine rendition of "That Lucky Old Sun." She followed Etta James' lead with a lively piano-led take on "Don't Cry Baby" that same year; a year later she cut the more vocal jazz-oriented Laughing on the Outside and recorded some stunning takes on "Skylark" and "Solitude" and "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" that put her in the vicinity of a Dinah Washington-caliber repertoire, even before she cut a whole album's worth stepping into her shoes. And though I heard it long after both Isaac Hayes' and Neko Case's own from-the-gut versions, her performance of "Runnin' Out of Fools" was an excellent display of how well she could display vulnerability, frustration, sympathy, and bemusement all in the same performance.Â
Anyways, it takes a lot to make people overlook that kind of early portfolio, doesn't it? Jerry Wexler brought Aretha to Atlantic and encouraged her to bring her gospel chops back to the forefront, and she not only found her place her in the growing Southern soul movement but did so with a transformative impact on both herself and the genre she was about to take the reins of. She took a decent-sized Otis Redding hit from his already damn-near peerless catalogue and reinvented it and herself at the same time, and found the voice people would remember her for just shy of her 25th birthday. I don't really need to overelaborate on what followed -- you know the song, right? I bet it just snapped into focus inside your head the moment you saw the word "Respect" itself. At the risk of leaving all these scattered loose thoughts sprawled all over the place, I'm going to cut myself off here and let slip that I am going to have a lot more to say about this song down the road for a larger project I have in the works. But in the meantime, consider this both a placeholder for further elaborations and an acknowledgement that one of the 20th Century's greatest singers built her legacy on a well-honed skill and an emotional knack for making other peoples' words sound like they were written specifically for her voice.
1968: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)" (from Electric Ladyland)
There are a number of notable Nam-era heavy rock songs about escaping the nightmare of a dying Earth; Black Sabbath's "Into the Void" is one of the more potent mixtures of disillusioned bleakness and futurist hope, something that Montrose tried updating into a thrilling adventure in "Space Station #5" a couple years later. But they were all playing catch-up to Jimi Hendrix's most elaborate and experimental work. "1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" is a thing of agonized sorrow and outlandish transformation, a protest song as Jules Verne fantasy and William Blake mysticism, doom and solace reverberating against each other as though it's giving light to a realization that the welcomeness and joy of what that escape has brought can somehow outweigh the horror that precipitated it. It's a structural marvel in a lot of ways -- proto-metal blues-psych where the riffs alternately sear to the core and drift around the periphery, straining against a martial beat that explodes into Bolero intensity before the tide recedes and takes our guide with it into the depths. One cathartic guitar solo later and we're submerged; as a feat of sound engineering and psychedelic experimentation it is remarkably immersive even without the presumption that there's something psychotropic in your system helping your vision along.
Hendrix is also leaning deep into his idiosyncrasies as a songwriter -- grown and raised on the Pacific Coast, a star after he crossed the Atlantic, there's something about the vastness of the ocean and what it does when it meets the land that tends to linger in his sand-meets-sea imagery. His references to armaments as "giant pencil and lipstick tube-shaped things" reads kind of quasi-naive, but in a way that underscores their manufactured state and their resemblance to the ordinary mundane household object that has a bit of Vonnegut's dark yet humanistic absurdity to it. He does a dry run in words what his guitar would do the following year for "The Star-Spangled Banner," from the plainspoken headshake "oh say can you see it's really such a mess" to the vivid rendition of the flag's colors as "Arctic stains from silver blue to bloody red," entrenched in a vision of an omnidirectional empire so out of control that fifteen years from the song's recording there is no place left it hasn't rained death upon. Jimi and his partner are alone in the world -- the bridge where he declares it's too bad that our friends can't be with us today is where the sorrow starts to really escalate into defiant mad-scientist shit, where an inability to save them is tempered by the frustration over their disbelief they can be saved. And so down they go, this couple that sets out to be a new undersea Adam and Eve only to discover that there's another, better world waiting for them. A decade after this song's recording and five years before the song's titular date, Hendrix's closest musical heirs inverted the narrative -- Atlantis will someday rejoin the rest of the world once it gets all its own bullshit sorted out -- so maybe utopia's a lot more complicated than everyone hopes.Â
1969: Isaac Hayes, "Walk on By" (from Hot Buttered Soul)
It was one thing for an acid rock pioneer like Jimi Hendrix to combine free-form exploration and symphonic sweep in a song four times longer than your typical hit single. But it was a different feat entirely for a man who co-wrote many of Stax's foundational '60s hits to do the same -- and not only greatly elaborate on the structures of Southern soul, but push it into the forefront as a vehicle for opulent, unbridled ultramelodrama that filled every space it could like it was oxygen itself. Where late '60s R&B was concerned, Thom Bell popularized the orchestral and Norman Whitfield streamlined in the psychedelic, but Isaac Hayes had emerged, somewhat surprisingly, as the kind of voice that could get away with being immersed in both at once. It was a Hail Mary after Stax had to build an entirely new discography when Atlantic got their back catalogue in their business split, and since Hayes felt like pulling his auteur card, we got this. I'll just reiterate what I wrote about it for Pitchfork 15 years ago:
"Walk on By" throws almost everything it has at you right away, nailing you to the floor with those first two drumbeats. Hayes takes the restrained sorrow of Bacharach and David's composition as made famous by Dionne Warwick and chucks it out the window, replacing it with an arrangement that is the absolute antithesis of hiding the tears and sadness and grieving in private. And it's goddamned devastating at every turn: its go-for-broke opening, with those weeping strings and that stinging guitar building to their gigantic crescendo; that moment when it collapses and sinks into Michael Toles' famous slinky guitar riff, which then warps its way into psychedelic keening more Hendrix than [Steve] Cropper; every hitch and moan and heart-wracked ad-lib from Hayes' deep bass voice ("you put the hurt on me, you socked it to me, mama"). The entire last half of the song's twelve minutes is an exercise in seeing just how long you can not only maintain but build on a frenzied finale, where Toles' guitar sounds like it's ripping itself apart and Hayes' Hammond organ trembles and growls and stammers like a panicking tiger. It might be the most intense six minutes of soul recorded in the confines of a studio the entire decade.
I'm not sure what else to add to that, except that a decade and a half later it still sounds this intense to me, a musical high I keep chasing but never bettering.
Really great, Nate.