Popular '66

Yeah, I voted for 12 including Chris Farlowe, who hasn’t had much support so far, but it’s early days. Dusty and Beach Boys were my 10s. A great year indeed, and fantastic variety among the Number Ones, even ol’ Blue Eyes getting a look in.

Bloody hell: what a year! Four 10s, four 9s and four 8s from me. The year I was born, too. My stork boy is 1965 hangover Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out, which is another 9 / 10 borderline.

The low score I am surprised about is All Or Nothing: a cracking tune and one of my 8s. Another one used to great effect in Our Friends In The North.

Nice to see Dusty doing so well in the voting (81% rating as I write). As regards the disappointingly low showings for the gutsy “All Or Nothing” and the truly magnificent “Out of Time”, I can only surmise that people didn’t vote for them because they didn’t know them (and in the case of “All Or Nothing”, some were probably influenced by Tom’s harsh review). Both have always been criminally underplayed and underrated.

But just look at that list – it’s a thing of beauty. There’s a dozen stone cold classics there, every one of them as familiar and as well loved almost 50 (!!) years on. Almost certainly the greatest ever year for #1s, and possibly the high watermark for popular music generally. Across all of its sub-genres (or at, least, those which younger people were listening to) it was a year of astonishing creativity, maturation and evolution….and of giant, imperishable pop monuments like those featured in this goosebump-inducing list. (for me: three 10s, three 9s and six 8s.)

A truly stonking year. All but 5 for me; hell I even rate the Overlanders’ Michelle (song’s bulletproof I find and their musicianship’s great) and Tom Jones (great vocal) and Pretty Flamingo (great changes). From this list you’d have to say that 1966 was one flippin’ great party. Mind-blowing year for film too: Blow-Up, Persona, Au Hazard Balthazar, Seconds, The Good The Bad & The Ugly, Virginia Woolf, Alfie just to start.

the righteous brothers is their first post-phil spector single, weil and mann wrote it and medley produced it to sound copycat wall of sound so they weren’t branching out for a new sound, they just couldn’t stand being around phil spector. the lou christie track has it’s defenders but it’s kinda a throwaway frankie valli knockoff for me. klaus nomi did a cover of it that was a big part of his show. “cherish” is probably the best one you mentioned, not the association’s best hit but nice sunshine pop dreaminess. madonna sorta quotes it in her “cherish”. “ballad of the green berets” is worth a lol and useful as a marker of the times (it was the biggest hit of the year period in the us), it probably tells you more about 1966 in america than any of the other hits.

Friday On my Mind would have been a definite 9 for me had it topped the charts here. The B Side, Made My Bed was pretty ace too. I’ll have to check out I’ll make You Happy. Rhythm Guitarist and songwriter George Young is, I believe, the older brother of AC/DC’s Angus and Malcolm.

Christie’s ‘Lightning Strikes’ is a favorite of a cappella groups because of its incredible mock-heroic melody line and backing vox and subtle rhythmic shifts. All of this it’s natural to a cappella image with even more dramatic tempo and key shifts, e.g., I’ve heard the final ‘again and again’ flattened several tones and dragged out for a minute or so as a kind of a cappella locked groove, sometimes slowly descending and getting discordant, ending in laughter. Great silly song.

@17 I had exactly the same reaction to the score for the Four Tops!

@13 I imagine a young Nicholas Cave, aged 8 1/2, being enthralled by The Seekers.

@19 Deep Purple – presumably touring In Rock – supported by Free and Manfred Mann! Sounds like a great gig. I would guess the Young brothers would not have missed the Sydney leg of that tour.

How The Seekers resurfaced for Cave two decades later: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uHEyeLwf5EA&feature=kp

Cheers for this. I would suggest all those are features rather than bugs but then I like it and that was the point of my asking the question.

PI,B strikes me as being more obviously divisive than GV to be honest – I can well imagine my 10 there being someone else’s 4 or 5.

At least it’s reassuring to see that None of Them! is yet to nurdle one round the corner for a cheeky single. I’m not sure I’d even want to meet the person who couldn’t find anything to like out of that lot.

I voted for three.

I honestly feel slightly terrified writing this after all the above comments, but for me there are simply very few songs from this far back in time I have any interest in. It’s a musical era that’s just too far removed from what I consider ‘pop’, ‘rock’, ‘dance’ or indeed any music I listen to, and when I listen to most 1960s songs – or indeed most songs before around 1980, although there’s a gradual yearly increase the closer we get there – very rarely do I feel any sort of thrill from them. I almost feel a bit stupid – even uneducated – saying so, expecting someone to burst through my door with a truckful of vinyl and forcing me to listen to every one of them until I realise their apparent genius. But it’s just my opinion. And even the Beatles tracks for me aren’t up there with their best.

I recently watched a camcorder video of my future parents and my (now late) grandparents at a family birthday party in 1987, a year before I was born. The DJ plays mostly music released in the preceeding five years or so – You Keep Me Hanging On, Karma Chameleon etc, going right up to the two newest tracks on his playlist ‘Bad’ and ‘Whenever You Need Somebody’. But it’s when he plays songs from the mid-1960s that *everyone* gets up to dance, young and old – the only point in the video my parents (just out of their teens) and grandparents (early 50s) are dancing together. Two artists seen here – The Kinks and Manfred Mann – were included in said section, both with their 1964 chart-toppers. At my recent 25th birthday I compiled a Spotify playlist which, while featuring completely different songs, mostly considered of tracks from, again, the preceeding five years (David Guetta/Avicii/Gaga etc) and a huge block from the mid to late 1990s, with similar results. And it’s almost a given that the next generation will perhaps be playing modern hits of the 2030s with a few old-skool Katy Perry/Pitbull tracks from their childhood thrown in. I wonder how many of these 1966 toppers will be played then.

The three? You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, Good Vibrations and Reach Out I’ll Be There. All right up there for me with the best the decade has to offer, and glad to see two of those got a 9 on Popular at least.

Good Vibrations is probably the Beach Boys song I skip the most out of the big hits. Probably the stop start bittiness of the verses/chorus switch: the Beach Boys have loads of songs that navigate rhythmic and melodic twists quite seemlessly compared to GV. Still an 8 at least if only for the beautiful final minute. I heard a stereo version once with even more layers of harmonies on the outro, incredible sounding.

Pet Sounds always seems to be the LP music writers reach for as an example of an overrated canonical album these days. Which seems harsh, I can think of far less enjoyable albums far more consistently overrated.

Can we ditch the word “overrated” please? What does it even mean? “Some other people said it was good but I don’t like it”?

The surprise for me here is only 53% for Keep On Running.

Stop-start bitty songs… pop is “considerably more effective” when it doesn’t “faff around”! A lot of my favourite music faffs around, and I equally love direct, repetitive pop, but, still, I’m surprised at this reaction to Good Vibrations. Also, I’d have thought “bitty” songs might have grown in stature now that technology has fucked with our attention spans. I wonder how Macarthur Park would have fared on Popular if it had gone three places higher?

On the other hand, of course Pet Sounds should be considered by over-rated by some people. There’s no set text, and if I came to it cold as a “classic” I don’t know if I’d have the same take on it (it was of similar stature to the Zombies’ Odessy And Oracle when I first bought it). Look at the decline in critical popularity of the once unassailable Sgt Peppers (which I still think, as an album, is better than Revolver or The White Album). These things will always be fluid, and Pet Sounds is probably due a backlash.

Re 26/29: I remember reading an interview with a club character in The Face in the mid 80s who was talking about his love for Booker Newberry’s Love Town, and said he couldn’t listen to anything recorded before the late 70s because “it all sounds like it was recorded in a shed.” I was really worried for a while that this would become a common reaction and tons of music I loved would be discarded by future generations. But I’ve never heard anyone say anything similar until now. Billy H, out of curiosity, what do you think of the mid 80s songs you mention?

MacArthur Park is an 8 I think.

(see also: Oldies stations playing Grunge)

@37, thefatgit. “Stairway”, “Band on the Run”, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” were equally classic gateways to ambitious multi-part stuff on the radio when I was growing up. Maybe ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ (maybe something too from the Flaming Lips) from the last 15 years or so?

I love a good 9 minute wig-out: second to last track on the album, designed to make you earn the throwaway final track that follows it. I rated my favourites on my blog a while ago and my top three were:
– Cornershop – Spectral Mornings (28 wig-out pts)
– Gomez – Rie’s Wagon (27 pts)
– Zwan – Jesus I/Mary Star of the Sea (26 pts)

Cornershop and Gomez are drones, Zwan is a suite with a lot of drone chucked in.

Tom, I thought you were probably waving a red flag. And it worked!

Of the century old songs you mentioned, I just went back to double check and, yes, I think Messing About On The River is of the same vintage as Johnny Remember Me. It was released by Josh Macrae on Pye in 1961 – it just sounds ancient.* But that’s a good point. I think songs like Daisy Daisy will continue to stay in the public consciousness, but their roots will grow ever vaguer.

Not sure about boomers being the smuggest generation – it’s hard to find a book on the ‘American Songbook’ era that doesn’t think things went to shit in roughly 1950. I can understand why people would think Gershwin > Goffin/King but there are no attempts to see links or build bridges, just insults for dolts who enjoy Elvis, the Beatles and other rock’n’roll losers. Books on the subject written by younger authors (eg Elijah Wald’s unfortunately titled How The Beatles Destroyed Rock’n’Roll) are thin on the ground but notably less stick-in-the-mud.

*Here’s one for the chart stattos. Josh Macrae had three Top 20 hits on the Record Mirror chart: Talkin’ Army Blues (no.12 1960), Wild Side of Life (no.13 1960) and Messing About The River (no.15 1961), but none of them registered at all on the Guinness/Record Retailer Top 50. Talkin’ Army Blues spent 13 weeks in the Record Mirror Top 20! What the heck was going on there?

[edit – oops, sorry Rosie. Great minds et cet]

Tom @ 45: I find that list of top artists listened to by 64-year-olds a bit suspect to be honest (yes, I know I’m ‘only’ 59 but all the same…). I know it’s an American list; perhaps a British list would be significantly different? Actually, and I have no idea really how statistically typical I am but I suspect not very, I find I have been influenced by my daughter and much younger friends and I find in a couple of years Popular time something remarkable happens; three out of 5 successive number ones are in my collection. But I also reach back more than I did to the music of my parents and grandparents generations.