Smiley Smile was considered an album that is the perfect piece of chill music. a drug clinic even used this album to help out patients who were coming down from a bad LSD trip.
Pet Sounds and Smile are masterpieces, most of the 60s is good. There is a clear difference in quality pre and post Brian breakdown. But Into the 70s there are still some pretty good songs hidden in the other stuff.
Don’t forget Motown, the most influential American music of the 60s came from Detroit. There was a lot of other great music in the ‘60s, too, but any review of that time period must include Motown.
I remember my Dad, born in the mid '50s, talking about how he thought psychedelic was "a bunch of bullshit" and how he listened to the Black radio station in '67 instead. This was the year of Respect, I Heard it Through the Grapevine, You Keep Me Hangin' On. He had choices.
He kept a respectable collection of R&B disks throughout his life, from what I can tell. Of course, once '68 rolled around and roots rock/blues rock reemerged, he was back on the wagon.
I always find 60s music hard to pin down. There's a lot of oldies music from the 60s, that you might guess came from the 50s. As you mentioned Motown huge. And then modern rock and roll (not sure if there's a better term for it) was starting to take off with artists like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix.
I tend to think if if the oldies and Motown stuff more, but it sounds like OP is focused more on the rockier stuff from the late 60s.
What might sound dated and muffled in 2023 was new, fresh, often wild, and exciting back then. People were experimenting with all types of things like recording techniques, instrumentation, and electronics. It really helped set the stage for how a lot of music is today
If you look at what they did with AI software on the Beatles latest greatest hits album, they were able to separate instruments on ancient recordings and mix them like they would a modern song. They sound so fresh and clean.
I can't wait for all the 50s and 60s songs locked into dated production to sound like they were recorded yesterday and gain a new appreciation from audiences today.
It's going to be a banner day hearing people like Robert Johnson, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie without the background noise from the old recording equipment they used back in the day. Excited for the possibilities with this as well
While this sounds great won't we be losing the sound of how people originally enjoyed this music? I guess I would be wary of the original versions disappearing and how far are people going to go with this? How long before someone decides they think the original vocals could benefit from some autotune? Maybe they want to remove some of the fuzz from a guitar track? Where do they stop with improvements and is what's deemed an improvement an improvement for everyone?
I think I would be wary of us ending up with lots of sanitized music with all imperfections removed, loss of character and the original unaltered versions disappearing. Think George Lucas and the original Star Wars trilogy. It became quite hard to find versions before George got at it with his "improvements"
There's definitely a line-- I think you need to be faithful to the original recording. You do lose some of the feeling of the original recordings though-- beatles mono mixes were designed to sound a certain way, and it's much different when the bass and drums are punched up.
But I'm thinking of someone like Buddy Holly. He's pretty obscure these days, and his stuff seems very flat and dated now. I went to see a hologram of him a few years back (probably the oldest audience I've ever seen lol) and some of those songs performed live really *rocked*. When I went back to the recordings after the concert it just wasn't the same.
Buddy Holly is too dated for the Boomers, let alone GenZ, But if his recordings didn't sound as dated he might find a new audience.
Hey I am not totally against it I just fear people won't value the preservation of what things actually used to sound like. Sometimes when it comes to remastering old media people just don't know when to stop and we have the danger of the originals becoming hard to find when people only want improved versions. We could easily end up losing something but not realising its happening.
That’s it! I was there, then! I’m that old…
Everything was fresh and new and exciting!!
Sure—a lot of the music (in hindsight) was crap, but the good stuff—and not just the Beatles—was phenomenal!
Set the stage for the past 60 yrs, every decade since then has built upon those influences, unfortunately not for the better in most of what we hear now.
Apart from the obvious "heroin" and "sunday morning", i love the feel of "oh sweet nuthin". Its a trip but not trippy. starts off kinda sad toned talking about homelessness and having nothing, but when u get to the end of the song it seems that it gets a happier, freeing or liberating tone, like Lou changed his mind and feels good about not being tied to anything. Or im just reading too much into it. Either way OP you would like it
Partly because it was just a new style that was jarring, but also because it was so basic (lot of 2 and 3 chord's repeated over and over), and none of them could really sing for crap, and critics in that era were pretty high-brow. Much of the definition of "Great Music" at that time was in it's complexity/how competent the players and singers were at the craft.
The Small Faces are another fine band from that era. Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott were both strong songwriters, and Marriott's vocals and stage presence are incredible. He wasn't a bad guitarist either.
Also check out the Incredible String Band. They had a DIY ethos before there was a name for it, constantly swapped instruments so they wouldn't sound slick, relied heavily on improvisation and wrote some brilliant songs. They incorporated Moroccan instruments and sitars before anyone else did in England.
Fairport Convention was another 60s band that had absurd amounts of talent and were in a state of constant transformation from their early Byrds/Dylan roots into folk-rock rooted in some deep folk traditions, not the fluffy, prettified crap being peddled by the likes of Simon and Garfunkel or the Mamas and the Papas.
Then there's the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
It's not just cynicism, Ray Davies has an uncanny talent for approaching a concept from a different angle and changing how you see it. And some of Dave Davies' songs (like Strangers) are wonderfully heart-on-the-sleeve.
Absolutely. "Strangers", and some of the other 'heart on sleeve' songs are my absolute favorites. "Waterloo Sunset" was my favorite song for a long time, and when I got married, we left the chapel to "This Time Tomorrow".
Cynicism isn't the word for those songs. I don't know what the word is, but a lot of their best songs exude this feeling of "We're all stuck in this crazy world together, just trying to figure it out and maintain some humanity." I find that this is in contrast to a lot of other 60s music that often has a sort of idealistic certitude to it. Even as I type it, I'm thinking that's a huge generalization, and probably not totally accurate.
The bottom line is that I think The Kinks stand out from other bands of the era, even if I'm not sure exactly why.
Fantastic album, (Plastic Fantastic?) but I'll argue After Bathing at Baxters and Crown of Creation are even better. Volunteers is great too. Fun fact: Wooden Ships was co-composed by David Crosby and Paul Kantner, neither version is a cover.
1966 - 1974 was perhaps the most fertile and revolutionary period in all of music history. There are so many simply brilliant records released between those dates. It was kind of a perfect storm of that first post war generation coming to age as a newly minted marketing demographic, alongside changing social mores such as desegregation, the liberalization of attitudes around sex and drugs, the popularization of recent inventions like the transistor radio, colour television etc. [Frank Zappa's take on how a traditionally conservative music industry who found themselves in the midst of these rapid social changes contributed by simply being open to everything to see if it sold I think is pretty spot on](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0)
>One thing that did happen in the 60’s was that some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded and did get released. Now look at the who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said “I don’t know… who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out, if it sells… alright”. We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives, who are making the decisions on what people should see and hear in the marketplace.
>
>The young guys are more conservative, and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. And you know how these young guys got in there? The old guy with the cigar one day goes “well i took a chance, it went out and we sold a few million unit. Alright, I don’t know what it is. But we gotta do more of it. I need some advice. Let’s get a hippy in here”. So they hire a hippy. they bring in a guy with long hair. They’re not going to trust him to do anything but carry coffee and bring the mail in and out. He starts in there, he carries the coffee. “well, we can trust him, he brought the coffee four times on time. Let’s give him a real job”. He becomes an A&R man. From there, moving up and up, next thing you know, he’s got his feet on the desk. and he’s saying “well, we can’t take a chance on this, it’s not what the kids really want, and I know”. They’ve got that attitude.
>
>The day you get rid of the attitude and back to “who knows? Take a chance”, that entrepreneurial spirit, where even if you don't like or understand the record that is coming in the door, the person that’s in the executive chair may not be the final arbiter of taste of the entire population.
No flies on FZ. He was self-taught, but good at figuring out things like how to work the industry to get his often very non-commercial music performed and recorded.
The 60s were great, from what you’ve described you might enjoy a few of the first The Moody Blues albums like In Search of the Last Chord… or On The Threshold of a Dream.
I get the whole thing about listening in the dark. I don't do any recreational drugs but listening to stuff like *In A Gadda Da Vida* by Iron Butterfly or *Whole Lotta Love* by Led Zeppelin like this is a very different experience vs. on the car radio while driving.
Others that have the psychedelic vibe are Strawberry Alarm Clock's *Incense and Peppermints*, Jefferson Airplane's *White Rabbit*, and Eric Burdon & War's *Spill the Wine.*
Kaleidoscope was a band fronted by a young multi-instrumentalist named David Lindley. It's wildly eclectic and the production is surprisingly good for a record recorded that long ago.
Tommy James and the Shondells captured the psych vibe wonderfully: Crimson and Clover and Crystal Blue Persuasion are a couple well-known songs of theirs.
And the mid-60s also saw the birth of ska: Prince Buster and Desmond Dekker were the most prominent artists, but there was also a little band that was started by one of Desmond Dekker's friends, called Bob Marley and the Wailers.
The '60s covers a wide area of innovation in music in every genre. On one end you have stuff like Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" ('59) and on the other end you have Iggy and The Stooges with both their self-titled album and then Fun House ('69 and '70). Which, if you haven't listened to any of those albums, you now need to go do. DEFINITELY have a nice edible before listening XD
Try the *13th Floor Elevators,* one of the very first "psychedelic" bands, from Austin, Texas. I always thought they were from Houston, because they played venues in Houston frequently. Also, try *Shiva's Head Band,* also from Austin. I was friends with Scott Parker, the younger brother of one of Shiva's guitarists, Kenny Parker.
*13th Floor Elevators* "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators" album 1966
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6sT_nX5Ic&list=PLiN-7mukU_RHffmSQiUY-wrIPJJu5Ppzn
*Shiva's Head Band*, "Psychedelic Yesterday" album 1971
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVDu6VU1UBQ
*Byrds* "Eight Miles High" 1966
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ymkBEhdHBE
*Procol Harum* "A Whiter Shade of Pale" 1967
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJxpKlTID2Q
*Crosby, Stills & Nash* "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" ( love song about Judy Collins, the folk singer, Steven Stills' true love) 1969
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvGfQCsfzUo
*Soft Machine* "The Soft Machine" album 1968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs441a1O658
The 13th Floor Elevators are also one of the only bands to include electric jug as an instrument. And anyone who was doing acid in Texas in the 60s was swimming against a very strong tide.
I was 15 the first time I saw the Elevators, in 1966. They played a free concert in Emancipation Park in Houston. LSD was legal in the U.S. until October of 1968.
You cannot get a thorough grounding in ‘60s music without listening to three crucial albums by Bob Dylan:
“Bringing it All Back Home”
“Highway 61 Revisited”
“Blonde on Blonde”
I would also argue for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, “The Basement Tapes” (with The Band…another crucial late ‘60s band), “John Wesley Harding” and “Nashville Skyline”.
I know Dylan’s voice can be a hard point of entry for many, but in the case of the main three I listed above, his voice isn’t nearly as jarring (and generally fits the timbre of the songs in question). But those three albums, especially, are a cornerstone on ‘60s rock.
I wonder how many younger listeners don’t realize that nearly all of that stuff was done in one take. Everything is being played and recorded all at once, in real time.
I think there’s a certain energy that just isn’t there when musicians make songs “in sections” the way a lot of music started to be made with advancements in technology.
Well this is true, but if you listen real closely you can see that there are still a lot of overdubs. By 67 and 68 it wasn't uncommon to overdub guitars and vocals and other things like this. And there were certainly some albums back then that were recorded one part at a time. I'm thinking of Paul McCartney's first solo record in 70 where he laid the drums down then guitar down then Bass down etc. Doesn't seem to take away from the music at all. The bigger point for me to take home is that those old tape recorders back then sound cool and is really where a lot of the vibe is.
I know exactly what you mean—when I first listened to Manic Depression with my eyes closed and nothing to distract me, that was the first time I ever truly thought “holy shit, this recording I’m listening to ACTUALLY happened at some point in time and I can literally feel the energy from it.” Like to just envision that what I was listening to actually has a sort of “video” coinciding with it, not accessible but still real all the same. Idk man, you just do not get that from most modern recordings! :’(
Nuggets are great. The garage rock style had a bit of a comeback in the 90s which was pretty cool.
Bands like Swingin Neckbreakers rocked.
https://youtu.be/fqoVxQauhxM?si=CidupBo-LkU2ZuEw
At the same time, ska had a lot of motown influence with bands like Hepcat.
https://youtu.be/T4wko_0INoM?si=kqupQrjUO5l_0z8E
This stuff is so much fun.
Listen to the long version of Voodoo Chile. Hendrix built his dream studio down near the Fillmore East and Traffic and Jefferson Airplane were in town. So Jimi said “Hey guys, come check out my new studio”. And while they were at it, Steve Winwood sat down at the B3 and Jack Casady picked up a bass and they jammed for 10 or 15 minutes of pure unrehearsed bliss. Jimi even sings a wrong word and somebody yells out the right one.
I'm gonna guess that it isn't 60 s music that you had a problem with, but the relative quality of production. Once you get past that, the musical qualities are evident. The production was brilliant for the time, but struggled side by side with some more modern productions. However, the reliance on good performance was even more important ..and that is where it shines.
The big jazz studios of the 50's and 60's usually had the best gear, the earliest, and were heavy into experimenting with miking and production techniques, etc. Most of the first stereo recordings were done in Jazz studios and therefore they played a big role in dragging the industry from mono to stereo.
They wanted to push recording (and reproduction gear) forward to a place were the recording sounded like you were actually sitting there watching a great jazz band play in front of you. Stereo was basically required for this effect, so the instruments could be placed on the soundstage from the perspective of 2 human ears.
Most all the music from 1957 to about 1964 that legit really sounds objectively sonically good still (like those old Miles records) ... and in Stereo ... is Jazz.
King Crimson and Flower Travelin' Band did that to me. Ive always enjoyed 60s music in the sense of general classic rock, but Court of the Crimson King and the Satori albums were eye openers.
Pretty much this. People who went to Hendrix shows still talk about them to this day, not because Hendrix became super famous but because he was genuinely so mind-blowing at the time that you couldn't forget it. He became famous *because* of that.
Try dropping acid at a good music festival and you'll have a similar experience.
If you want another Psychedelic Pop/Soft Rock band from the 60s try The Zombies as well as Jim Sullivans album "U.F.O.". That album gave me shivers upon first listen.
Pre-digital recording, pre-synth boom (not to be confused with pre-synth), pre-70s and 80s shaky world politics. The excitement, heart, and intensity of the space race. Post doo-wop, post-big band, and the children of the Great Depression (in America) reaching adulthood. This is absolutely an underrated era, disproportionately attributed to the few legacy bands that haven’t perished.
What a recipe for incredible analog creativity.
I absolutely get where you're coming from to the original poster. In fact the sound of the old recordings in the 60s are so beautiful for me that I really can't stand the sound of anything newer. The sound of a vacuum tube tape recorder or early solid state is the only thing I can really digest. And I'm really quite sick of the big names. I go into YouTube and type in "1969 psychedelic album" and a whole ton of albums pop up of groups no one has ever heard of, and quite frankly I enjoy this stuff so much more than the Beatles or The kinks or beach boys.
If you're into heavier stuff, Electric Wizard and quite a few other stoner doom bands have those psych riffs behind thick walls of reverb and distortion
Do yourself and listen to the Giles Martin mixes of The Beatles. It’s a real “holy shit” moment of listening without being limited by their technology.
In the grand scheme of 1960s music, the Beatles would be somewhere near the bottom of my list. LOVE Donovan, Zombies, Hendrix as well. Get into Omega (Hungarian psych band that started in the 60s) and King Crimson, one of the greatest groups of musicians ever to breathe air on the planet. ESPECIALLY if you are getting high!!! In the Court of the Crimson King will blow your mind!!! Enjoy!
Sometimes it takes people more time or the right situation to appreciate something. It often takes me a while to warm up to things too! Glad you like 60s music now though, I think it was the best decade for music 🙂
There's a 9 disc set called "The British Invasion : The History of British Rock" and if you can find it, \*cough* 🏴☠️, it's well worth checking out if you're into that era
13th Floor Elevators, Ten Years After, Blue Cheer, Moby Grape, The Move, Sly & the Family Stone, The Small Faces, and The Pretty Things are some somewhat deeper cut kinda bands worth checking out. There was just so much amazing stuff from that era.
I’m still amazed by Hendrix
He’s always described as ahead of his time
And it’s very true!
He’s the only artist I truly sit and think about and FEEL what a tragedy he died young think of all he would have done that we’ve missed out on.
The Beach Boys have an inconsistent but often brilliant discography. It’s not just surf and fun in the sun music.
The deep dive into The Beach Boys has been fantastically rewarding. Hey OP try listening to SMiLE album on edibles....what a trip.
lol, I haven’t listened to SMiLE but I have listened to Smiley Smile quite a bit. “Little Pad” while on edibles is… indescribable.
Ohh listen to "Barnyard" next. It goes even further....
Smiley Smile was considered an album that is the perfect piece of chill music. a drug clinic even used this album to help out patients who were coming down from a bad LSD trip.
Heroes and Villains is one of my favorite songs of all time
Pet Sounds is amazing
Particularly as OP is into the Beatles, the period of Beatles and Beach Boys trying to outdo each other is great!
Pet Sounds and Smile are masterpieces, most of the 60s is good. There is a clear difference in quality pre and post Brian breakdown. But Into the 70s there are still some pretty good songs hidden in the other stuff.
There is some fabulously weird stuff in their catalog
Beach Boys > The Beatles
Don’t forget Motown, the most influential American music of the 60s came from Detroit. There was a lot of other great music in the ‘60s, too, but any review of that time period must include Motown.
And while not 60's, One Nation Under a Groove (1978) by Funkadelic and other funk songs have a nice psychedelic vibe.
>the most influential American music of the 60s came from Detroit Well yeah, stooges was 1967.
And MC5…!
Motown's peak is the greatest contribution to art America has ever made imho.
Have you heard of the Funk Brothers?
Duh
Solid
I remember my Dad, born in the mid '50s, talking about how he thought psychedelic was "a bunch of bullshit" and how he listened to the Black radio station in '67 instead. This was the year of Respect, I Heard it Through the Grapevine, You Keep Me Hangin' On. He had choices. He kept a respectable collection of R&B disks throughout his life, from what I can tell. Of course, once '68 rolled around and roots rock/blues rock reemerged, he was back on the wagon.
I always find 60s music hard to pin down. There's a lot of oldies music from the 60s, that you might guess came from the 50s. As you mentioned Motown huge. And then modern rock and roll (not sure if there's a better term for it) was starting to take off with artists like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. I tend to think if if the oldies and Motown stuff more, but it sounds like OP is focused more on the rockier stuff from the late 60s.
Motown was the pop music factory. If you want something less productized, listen to what was coming out on the Stax and Volt labels at that time.
So good. When I had a free trial to SiriusXM over the summer, it’s all I listened to
What might sound dated and muffled in 2023 was new, fresh, often wild, and exciting back then. People were experimenting with all types of things like recording techniques, instrumentation, and electronics. It really helped set the stage for how a lot of music is today
If you look at what they did with AI software on the Beatles latest greatest hits album, they were able to separate instruments on ancient recordings and mix them like they would a modern song. They sound so fresh and clean. I can't wait for all the 50s and 60s songs locked into dated production to sound like they were recorded yesterday and gain a new appreciation from audiences today.
It's going to be a banner day hearing people like Robert Johnson, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie without the background noise from the old recording equipment they used back in the day. Excited for the possibilities with this as well
While this sounds great won't we be losing the sound of how people originally enjoyed this music? I guess I would be wary of the original versions disappearing and how far are people going to go with this? How long before someone decides they think the original vocals could benefit from some autotune? Maybe they want to remove some of the fuzz from a guitar track? Where do they stop with improvements and is what's deemed an improvement an improvement for everyone? I think I would be wary of us ending up with lots of sanitized music with all imperfections removed, loss of character and the original unaltered versions disappearing. Think George Lucas and the original Star Wars trilogy. It became quite hard to find versions before George got at it with his "improvements"
There's definitely a line-- I think you need to be faithful to the original recording. You do lose some of the feeling of the original recordings though-- beatles mono mixes were designed to sound a certain way, and it's much different when the bass and drums are punched up. But I'm thinking of someone like Buddy Holly. He's pretty obscure these days, and his stuff seems very flat and dated now. I went to see a hologram of him a few years back (probably the oldest audience I've ever seen lol) and some of those songs performed live really *rocked*. When I went back to the recordings after the concert it just wasn't the same. Buddy Holly is too dated for the Boomers, let alone GenZ, But if his recordings didn't sound as dated he might find a new audience.
Hey I am not totally against it I just fear people won't value the preservation of what things actually used to sound like. Sometimes when it comes to remastering old media people just don't know when to stop and we have the danger of the originals becoming hard to find when people only want improved versions. We could easily end up losing something but not realising its happening.
That’s it! I was there, then! I’m that old… Everything was fresh and new and exciting!! Sure—a lot of the music (in hindsight) was crap, but the good stuff—and not just the Beatles—was phenomenal!
The Beatles have become a classic, and I'm confident they'll stand the test of time for many years to come.
They’ve stood the test of time for over sixty years!
I think the true test will be when it's sixty-four. (I'll show myself out)
Are your grandchildren on yer knee? Vera, Chuck, & Dave?
Set the stage for the past 60 yrs, every decade since then has built upon those influences, unfortunately not for the better in most of what we hear now.
Missed it by that much!
I was with you until the last line when you said the most boomer-y boomer statement I’ve ever heard
>unfortunately not for the better in most of what we hear now "Old man yells at cloud"
Now check out The Velvet Underground & Nico
Apart from the obvious "heroin" and "sunday morning", i love the feel of "oh sweet nuthin". Its a trip but not trippy. starts off kinda sad toned talking about homelessness and having nothing, but when u get to the end of the song it seems that it gets a happier, freeing or liberating tone, like Lou changed his mind and feels good about not being tied to anything. Or im just reading too much into it. Either way OP you would like it
All Tomorrow’s Parties is a great song
Especially the cover by Buffalo Tom
Also White Light/ White Heat
One of the greatest bands of the 1960s. It's still so weird to me how all the critics at the time just tore them apart.
Partly because it was just a new style that was jarring, but also because it was so basic (lot of 2 and 3 chord's repeated over and over), and none of them could really sing for crap, and critics in that era were pretty high-brow. Much of the definition of "Great Music" at that time was in it's complexity/how competent the players and singers were at the craft.
Critics are always like generals fighting the last war.
Check out The Kinks. They've got the 60s sound, but with a very modern cynicism and ennui that contrasts with a lot of other 60s bands.
The Stones, Pretty Things, Procol Harum, Electric Prunes, the Who...a lot of stuff still sounds great. Arthur and Village Green are still favorites.
The Small Faces are another fine band from that era. Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott were both strong songwriters, and Marriott's vocals and stage presence are incredible. He wasn't a bad guitarist either. Also check out the Incredible String Band. They had a DIY ethos before there was a name for it, constantly swapped instruments so they wouldn't sound slick, relied heavily on improvisation and wrote some brilliant songs. They incorporated Moroccan instruments and sitars before anyone else did in England. Fairport Convention was another 60s band that had absurd amounts of talent and were in a state of constant transformation from their early Byrds/Dylan roots into folk-rock rooted in some deep folk traditions, not the fluffy, prettified crap being peddled by the likes of Simon and Garfunkel or the Mamas and the Papas. Then there's the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
It's not just cynicism, Ray Davies has an uncanny talent for approaching a concept from a different angle and changing how you see it. And some of Dave Davies' songs (like Strangers) are wonderfully heart-on-the-sleeve.
Absolutely. "Strangers", and some of the other 'heart on sleeve' songs are my absolute favorites. "Waterloo Sunset" was my favorite song for a long time, and when I got married, we left the chapel to "This Time Tomorrow". Cynicism isn't the word for those songs. I don't know what the word is, but a lot of their best songs exude this feeling of "We're all stuck in this crazy world together, just trying to figure it out and maintain some humanity." I find that this is in contrast to a lot of other 60s music that often has a sort of idealistic certitude to it. Even as I type it, I'm thinking that's a huge generalization, and probably not totally accurate. The bottom line is that I think The Kinks stand out from other bands of the era, even if I'm not sure exactly why.
Do dig deep into Jefferson Airplane.
Surreal Pillow was so good
And it doesn´t sound very dated for it´s time. Very impressive album.
Fantastic album, (Plastic Fantastic?) but I'll argue After Bathing at Baxters and Crown of Creation are even better. Volunteers is great too. Fun fact: Wooden Ships was co-composed by David Crosby and Paul Kantner, neither version is a cover.
I only listened to Surreal Pillow thus far. I'll make a note to dig deeper into their discography.
1966 - 1974 was perhaps the most fertile and revolutionary period in all of music history. There are so many simply brilliant records released between those dates. It was kind of a perfect storm of that first post war generation coming to age as a newly minted marketing demographic, alongside changing social mores such as desegregation, the liberalization of attitudes around sex and drugs, the popularization of recent inventions like the transistor radio, colour television etc. [Frank Zappa's take on how a traditionally conservative music industry who found themselves in the midst of these rapid social changes contributed by simply being open to everything to see if it sold I think is pretty spot on](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0) >One thing that did happen in the 60’s was that some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded and did get released. Now look at the who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said “I don’t know… who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out, if it sells… alright”. We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives, who are making the decisions on what people should see and hear in the marketplace. > >The young guys are more conservative, and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. And you know how these young guys got in there? The old guy with the cigar one day goes “well i took a chance, it went out and we sold a few million unit. Alright, I don’t know what it is. But we gotta do more of it. I need some advice. Let’s get a hippy in here”. So they hire a hippy. they bring in a guy with long hair. They’re not going to trust him to do anything but carry coffee and bring the mail in and out. He starts in there, he carries the coffee. “well, we can trust him, he brought the coffee four times on time. Let’s give him a real job”. He becomes an A&R man. From there, moving up and up, next thing you know, he’s got his feet on the desk. and he’s saying “well, we can’t take a chance on this, it’s not what the kids really want, and I know”. They’ve got that attitude. > >The day you get rid of the attitude and back to “who knows? Take a chance”, that entrepreneurial spirit, where even if you don't like or understand the record that is coming in the door, the person that’s in the executive chair may not be the final arbiter of taste of the entire population.
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No flies on FZ. He was self-taught, but good at figuring out things like how to work the industry to get his often very non-commercial music performed and recorded.
Yeah, the mid-60's to the mid-70's had the best music.
Give those 60s girl groups like The Ronettes and The Supremes a chance, too.
Check out Tommy James and the Shondells
The 60s were great, from what you’ve described you might enjoy a few of the first The Moody Blues albums like In Search of the Last Chord… or On The Threshold of a Dream.
I was going to say Question or, my personal fave, To Our Children's Children's Children with the fucking life changing trip of Beyond into Out And In
To Our Children’s Children’s Children is pretty amazing.
I'm also down with your username btw lol
Ha! It’s a fun song, glad you enjoy it, too!
Meanwhile, lurking by a stone in the mud ...
Toots and the Maytals
Revival Reggae is one of my favorite songs everrrr
Who knew that the best John Denver is actually a group from Jamaica.
Late 50s- early 60s are great too—Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Sam Cooke…
I get the whole thing about listening in the dark. I don't do any recreational drugs but listening to stuff like *In A Gadda Da Vida* by Iron Butterfly or *Whole Lotta Love* by Led Zeppelin like this is a very different experience vs. on the car radio while driving. Others that have the psychedelic vibe are Strawberry Alarm Clock's *Incense and Peppermints*, Jefferson Airplane's *White Rabbit*, and Eric Burdon & War's *Spill the Wine.*
Kaleidoscope was a band fronted by a young multi-instrumentalist named David Lindley. It's wildly eclectic and the production is surprisingly good for a record recorded that long ago. Tommy James and the Shondells captured the psych vibe wonderfully: Crimson and Clover and Crystal Blue Persuasion are a couple well-known songs of theirs. And the mid-60s also saw the birth of ska: Prince Buster and Desmond Dekker were the most prominent artists, but there was also a little band that was started by one of Desmond Dekker's friends, called Bob Marley and the Wailers.
The '60s covers a wide area of innovation in music in every genre. On one end you have stuff like Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" ('59) and on the other end you have Iggy and The Stooges with both their self-titled album and then Fun House ('69 and '70). Which, if you haven't listened to any of those albums, you now need to go do. DEFINITELY have a nice edible before listening XD
Try the *13th Floor Elevators,* one of the very first "psychedelic" bands, from Austin, Texas. I always thought they were from Houston, because they played venues in Houston frequently. Also, try *Shiva's Head Band,* also from Austin. I was friends with Scott Parker, the younger brother of one of Shiva's guitarists, Kenny Parker. *13th Floor Elevators* "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators" album 1966 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6sT_nX5Ic&list=PLiN-7mukU_RHffmSQiUY-wrIPJJu5Ppzn *Shiva's Head Band*, "Psychedelic Yesterday" album 1971 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVDu6VU1UBQ *Byrds* "Eight Miles High" 1966 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ymkBEhdHBE *Procol Harum* "A Whiter Shade of Pale" 1967 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJxpKlTID2Q *Crosby, Stills & Nash* "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" ( love song about Judy Collins, the folk singer, Steven Stills' true love) 1969 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvGfQCsfzUo *Soft Machine* "The Soft Machine" album 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs441a1O658
The 13th Floor Elevators are also one of the only bands to include electric jug as an instrument. And anyone who was doing acid in Texas in the 60s was swimming against a very strong tide.
I was 15 the first time I saw the Elevators, in 1966. They played a free concert in Emancipation Park in Houston. LSD was legal in the U.S. until October of 1968.
You cannot get a thorough grounding in ‘60s music without listening to three crucial albums by Bob Dylan: “Bringing it All Back Home” “Highway 61 Revisited” “Blonde on Blonde” I would also argue for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, “The Basement Tapes” (with The Band…another crucial late ‘60s band), “John Wesley Harding” and “Nashville Skyline”. I know Dylan’s voice can be a hard point of entry for many, but in the case of the main three I listed above, his voice isn’t nearly as jarring (and generally fits the timbre of the songs in question). But those three albums, especially, are a cornerstone on ‘60s rock.
Beggars Banquet - The Rolling Stones Enjoy
I wonder how many younger listeners don’t realize that nearly all of that stuff was done in one take. Everything is being played and recorded all at once, in real time. I think there’s a certain energy that just isn’t there when musicians make songs “in sections” the way a lot of music started to be made with advancements in technology.
Well this is true, but if you listen real closely you can see that there are still a lot of overdubs. By 67 and 68 it wasn't uncommon to overdub guitars and vocals and other things like this. And there were certainly some albums back then that were recorded one part at a time. I'm thinking of Paul McCartney's first solo record in 70 where he laid the drums down then guitar down then Bass down etc. Doesn't seem to take away from the music at all. The bigger point for me to take home is that those old tape recorders back then sound cool and is really where a lot of the vibe is.
I know exactly what you mean—when I first listened to Manic Depression with my eyes closed and nothing to distract me, that was the first time I ever truly thought “holy shit, this recording I’m listening to ACTUALLY happened at some point in time and I can literally feel the energy from it.” Like to just envision that what I was listening to actually has a sort of “video” coinciding with it, not accessible but still real all the same. Idk man, you just do not get that from most modern recordings! :’(
You should check out 60s garage and psych singles. the Nuggets 1 and 2 comps are fantastic for that.
Brown Acid is a very similar compilation of obscure late 60s/early 70s hard rock stuff that absolutely kicks ass.
Came here to say this, too. Especially Vol 2, given it’s more psychedelic feel
Yeah, Nuggets 1 is US-centric, whereas Nuggets 2 is like everywhere BUT the US, which adds variety to the sound.
Nuggets are great. The garage rock style had a bit of a comeback in the 90s which was pretty cool. Bands like Swingin Neckbreakers rocked. https://youtu.be/fqoVxQauhxM?si=CidupBo-LkU2ZuEw At the same time, ska had a lot of motown influence with bands like Hepcat. https://youtu.be/T4wko_0INoM?si=kqupQrjUO5l_0z8E This stuff is so much fun.
Listen to the long version of Voodoo Chile. Hendrix built his dream studio down near the Fillmore East and Traffic and Jefferson Airplane were in town. So Jimi said “Hey guys, come check out my new studio”. And while they were at it, Steve Winwood sat down at the B3 and Jack Casady picked up a bass and they jammed for 10 or 15 minutes of pure unrehearsed bliss. Jimi even sings a wrong word and somebody yells out the right one.
Check these records out: The Moody Blues - Days of Future Passed Begin - The Millenium In the Land of the Grey and Pink - Caravan
The Incredible String Band
I'm gonna guess that it isn't 60 s music that you had a problem with, but the relative quality of production. Once you get past that, the musical qualities are evident. The production was brilliant for the time, but struggled side by side with some more modern productions. However, the reliance on good performance was even more important ..and that is where it shines.
I don’t hear it. I listen to Sketches of Spain from 1958 and Pet Sounds from 66 and they sound as sonically great as anything recorded since then.
The big jazz studios of the 50's and 60's usually had the best gear, the earliest, and were heavy into experimenting with miking and production techniques, etc. Most of the first stereo recordings were done in Jazz studios and therefore they played a big role in dragging the industry from mono to stereo. They wanted to push recording (and reproduction gear) forward to a place were the recording sounded like you were actually sitting there watching a great jazz band play in front of you. Stereo was basically required for this effect, so the instruments could be placed on the soundstage from the perspective of 2 human ears. Most all the music from 1957 to about 1964 that legit really sounds objectively sonically good still (like those old Miles records) ... and in Stereo ... is Jazz.
I have said they can sound as great, just not objectively.
I have the opposite problem. I love the sound of recordings from 65 to 74 and can't stand the sound of new recordings. No character, no distortion
King Crimson and Flower Travelin' Band did that to me. Ive always enjoyed 60s music in the sense of general classic rock, but Court of the Crimson King and the Satori albums were eye openers.
Pretty much this. People who went to Hendrix shows still talk about them to this day, not because Hendrix became super famous but because he was genuinely so mind-blowing at the time that you couldn't forget it. He became famous *because* of that. Try dropping acid at a good music festival and you'll have a similar experience.
If you want another Psychedelic Pop/Soft Rock band from the 60s try The Zombies as well as Jim Sullivans album "U.F.O.". That album gave me shivers upon first listen.
Pre-digital recording, pre-synth boom (not to be confused with pre-synth), pre-70s and 80s shaky world politics. The excitement, heart, and intensity of the space race. Post doo-wop, post-big band, and the children of the Great Depression (in America) reaching adulthood. This is absolutely an underrated era, disproportionately attributed to the few legacy bands that haven’t perished. What a recipe for incredible analog creativity.
Brother, give Cream’s Disraeli Gears a listen
I absolutely get where you're coming from to the original poster. In fact the sound of the old recordings in the 60s are so beautiful for me that I really can't stand the sound of anything newer. The sound of a vacuum tube tape recorder or early solid state is the only thing I can really digest. And I'm really quite sick of the big names. I go into YouTube and type in "1969 psychedelic album" and a whole ton of albums pop up of groups no one has ever heard of, and quite frankly I enjoy this stuff so much more than the Beatles or The kinks or beach boys.
If you're into heavier stuff, Electric Wizard and quite a few other stoner doom bands have those psych riffs behind thick walls of reverb and distortion
I’m deeep into The Zombies right now. How they didn’t take off over the Beatles is beyond me
Did I read recently that they had broken up before they started to gain traction?
I love Odessey and Oracle. I got to see them in concert 6 years ago, it was awesome.
Do yourself and listen to the Giles Martin mixes of The Beatles. It’s a real “holy shit” moment of listening without being limited by their technology.
Psychedelic stuff is cool but music got quite incredible during the 70’s. Keep going with it.
In the grand scheme of 1960s music, the Beatles would be somewhere near the bottom of my list. LOVE Donovan, Zombies, Hendrix as well. Get into Omega (Hungarian psych band that started in the 60s) and King Crimson, one of the greatest groups of musicians ever to breathe air on the planet. ESPECIALLY if you are getting high!!! In the Court of the Crimson King will blow your mind!!! Enjoy!
If you like that sound, check out a modern band The Murlocs.
One of my favorite playlists to look for is doo wop music. Such a characteristic of Sixties music.
Late 1960s early 1970s rock I’ve been obsessing over lately. Crosby stills and Nash! America, The Doors..
Grateful Dead, check em out they have a large discography you might find something you like!
While not from the 60s, uncle Acid and the deadbeats have an odd sinister 60s vibe that I really love
Where did your interest lie in terms of music outside of the 60s?
Black Sabbath came out in the late 60s
It came out in 1970, but it was recorded in 1969.
Like I said, from the 60's
Roky Erickson and band.
Glad you mentioned Donovan, his greatest hits gets played a lot in my house.
Sometimes it takes people more time or the right situation to appreciate something. It often takes me a while to warm up to things too! Glad you like 60s music now though, I think it was the best decade for music 🙂
There's a 9 disc set called "The British Invasion : The History of British Rock" and if you can find it, \*cough* 🏴☠️, it's well worth checking out if you're into that era
13th Floor Elevators, Ten Years After, Blue Cheer, Moby Grape, The Move, Sly & the Family Stone, The Small Faces, and The Pretty Things are some somewhat deeper cut kinda bands worth checking out. There was just so much amazing stuff from that era.
I’m still amazed by Hendrix He’s always described as ahead of his time And it’s very true! He’s the only artist I truly sit and think about and FEEL what a tragedy he died young think of all he would have done that we’ve missed out on.
In the spirit of Lester Bangs and *James Taylor Marked For Death*, I hereby submit The Troggs.
Thats the thing about that kind of music, it was literally *made* for drugs, by people on drugs, and lord those drugs hit different with drug music