Read 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Online
Authors: Andrew Grant Jackson
Elsewhere in American pop/rock, the Four Seasons and the Vogues (“Five o’Clock World”) were still hanging on to their cleanly parted hair, turtlenecks, and sweaters. But in the wake of the British Invasion, many American bands had adopted English-sounding names and costumes. The Beau Brummels took their name from the ultimate British dandy. Paul Revere and the Raiders took the opposite tack, claiming the name of the man who warned the American colonists of the approaching Redcoats, with band members dressing in Revolutionary War–style uniforms. Underneath the goofy garb, they were hardcore Seattle rockers who scored with their November release “Just Like Me.” With “Lies,” the Knickerbockers did the most precise Beatles imitation, as the band had both Lennon and McCartney sound-alikes. Almost as bad as the Byrds’ original name, the Beefeaters, was the Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit the Young Rascals wore: rounded collars, skinny ties, knickers, and knee socks. But their first single, November’s “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” is bluesier than their image would have led one to expect.
The blue-eyed soul dance master of the year was Mitch Ryder, backed by the Detroit Wheels. Their live shows in Michigan were so explosive that black Motown acts opened for
them
. Ryder figured “Jenny Take a Ride” (a medley of Chuck Willis’s “C.C. Rider” and Little Richard’s “Jenny Jenny”) was just a B side, but Keith Richards and Brian Jones visited the studio and predicted it would be a hit. Indeed, it made it to No. 10.
The Sir Douglas Quintet were another group trying to fool people they were British, even though they were from San Antonio, Texas, and had two Hispanic members, which was why their first album cover just showed the group in shadow. The album was also named
The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet
, even though it was their first. But the group would endure for nine years and become one of Dylan’s favorites. Their first hit, “She’s about a Mover,” mixed front man Douglas Sahm’s Ray Charles–like vocals with Augie Meyers’ Farfisa organ in the Tex-Mex style, rock with a Latin influence from south of the border.
Another Tex-Mex band was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Instead of British costumes, Domingo “Sam” Zamudio wore an Arabic turban and tunic and drove a hearse with velvet curtains. In June, he released his three-chord ode to his cat, “Wooly Bully.” Even though it stalled at No. 2,
Billboard
declared it the best-selling song of the year.
Perhaps the most exhilarating Texas band was the Bobby Fuller Four, whose rolling electric guitar and crashing drums sounded like an updated Buddy Holly. (Richie Valens’s producer, Bobby Keane, produced the band, and the Crickets’ lead guitarist, Sonny Curtis, wrote its hit “I Fought the Law.”) “Another Sad and Lonely Night” and “Love’s Made a Fool of You” are rousing tracks, and December’s “I Fought the Law” would go on to be the theme song for many counterculture heroes. (Fourteen members of Ken Kesey’s entourage, the Merry Pranksters, were arrested for pot in April, and Timothy Leary was given thirty years for trying to drive into Mexico with marijuana in the car on December 23. Others who wound up with jail sentences before the decade was over included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, the Black Panthers, and Jim Morrison—not that they all served.)
As with Holly, Fuller’s potential was snuffed out far too soon. He died at age twenty-three the next July, in circumstances still shrouded in mystery. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office’s autopsy stated that he was found facedown in the front seat of his car next to a partially filled gas can. The cause of death is listed as “inhalation of gasoline.” His demise was originally declared a suicide, but rumors that he was drenched in gasoline and that his finger was broken led to speculation that he was murdered, perhaps by the Mob.
The groups most beloved by contemporary hipsters were the most unpolished of the lot, the proto-punk garage rockers. The genre was so named because the borderline-competent bands often practiced in their parents’ garages, sometimes barely making it much farther into the outside world.
Most of the garage bands did not even become one-hit wonders, but they were immortalized in the influential 1972 collection
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era
, compiled by Lenny Kaye, the future guitarist of the Patti Smith Group, and Elektra Records’ Jac Holzman. The liner notes refer to the music as “punk,” apparently unaware that since the nineteenth century, the term referred to a man who is raped in prison. Kaye may have been inspired by influential rock critic Dave Marsh, who in
Creem
magazine in 1971 referred to a Hispanic American band from Michigan called? and the Mysterians as “punk rock.”
1
In 1965 they recorded “96 Tears,” with its distinctive continental Vox organ sound, for a local label; when the national Cameo-Parkway label rereleased it the following February, it made it all the way to No. 1 on the
Billboard
pop chart.
The
Nuggets
bands, the Velvet Underground, the Motor City 5, and the Stooges (with Iggy Pop)—these were not big sellers in the 1960s, but they inspired punk bands of the 1970s such as the Ramones. As Iggy Pop said of the Velvet Underground’s self-titled first album, “That record became very key for me, not just for what it said and how great it was, but also because I heard other people who could make good music without being any good at music. It gave me hope. It was the same thing the first time I heard Mick Jagger sing. He can only sing one note, there’s no tone, and he just goes, ‘Hey, well baby, baby, I can be oeweoww…’ Every song is the same monotone, and it’s just this kid rapping. It was the same with the Velvets. The sound was so cheap and yet so good.”
2
It was more empowering hearing a band that sounded exciting and cool without being technically good—perhaps even sounding technically incompetent—than hearing a virtuoso band, because it made you believe you could go out and do it yourself.
Garage rockers often emulated the glowering poses of the Rolling Stones on their album covers, along with Jagger’s harsh vocals. Sometimes they tried to cop his accent: American white kids imitating a British white kid imitating an American black guy. There was a lot of sneering, such as in the Lyrics’ “So What!!” in which the vocalist vociferously establishes that he’s unimpressed by the rich girl. Most of the songs expressed bitterness toward the fairer sex, maybe because the writers were still nerds in high school, or had lost the girl to the winner of the local Battle of the Bands.
Tripping on LSD also gained popularity as a theme, in such tracks as “Out of Our Tree” by the Wailers, from Tacoma, Washington (not the identically named Jamaican group or Waylon Jennings’s group) and in “Strychnine” (alluding to the rumor that street LSD was laced with rat poison), by fellow Tacoma band the Sonics.
Musically, the bands might employ the trebly folk-rock guitar of the Byrds, but more frequently they copped the Stones or the Yardbirds copping black blues, complete with wailing harmonica. “Primitive,” by the Groupies (before the word gained currency as a term for party girls), reworked Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” and summed up the whole aesthetic. After the Stones unleashed “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” by the end of the year all the Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone boxes were sold out as countless garage bands integrated distortion into their assault in songs such as Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction.”
The other quality that bound most garage bands together was one they didn’t want: low-budget production values. Ironically, future indie rockers such as the White Stripes and the Strokes deliberately attempted to capture the distorted, two-dimensional sound. Kurt Cobain said, “The Sonics recorded very, very cheaply on a two-track, you know, and they just used one microphone over the drums, and they got the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard. Still to this day, it’s still my favorite drum sound. It sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever known.”
3
The song every garage band had to know was “Gloria,” by Them. In it, Van Morrison yawps like a seriously irate alligator with perhaps the most ripped-up British blues vocals of them all, while über–session guitarist Jimmy Page stings and rings, influencing everybody years before Zeppelin—before anyone even knew it was Page playing. But the song was banned in many parts of the United States because Morrison sings of the titular female coming upstairs to his room. Chicago’s Shadows of Knights changed the words and released their own version in December, scoring the American Top 10 hit.
In November, LA folk-rock band the Leaves released the first version of the “murdered-my-girlfriend” tune “Hey Joe,” which would soon rival “Gloria” as the go-to garage anthem. Everyone from Love to the Byrds covered it, until Jimi Hendrix slowed it down the following year and annihilated all previous comers, backed by the unearthly Breakaways trio moaning like the ghost of the slain girlfriend. Another November release by an LA group, the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” was a favorite due to its lyrics about frustrated college girls who had to be back in their dorms by midnight.
Probably the most archetypal proto-punk band was LA’s the Seeds. (As with the Leaves, by the end of 1965, band names that referenced drugs were taking over from misspelled animal names; fruits and vegetables would be next.) Their first single, “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” came out in March. As Sky Saxon’s goofy vocals demonstrate, bands still didn’t take themselves seriously, though acid and politics would solemnize them in a year or two. Saxon wrote the seminal “Pushin’ Too Hard” (released in November) after a fight with his girlfriend. Though the singer is yelling at a girl in the song, with the draft now breathing down young men’s necks, many heard the lyrics (lines about just wanting to be free to live his life the way he wants) as antiestablishment. The song had the fuzz tone and the reverb, along with a new trend: minor keys on an electric keyboard. The Turtles’ Mark Volman said that originally the Sunset Strip was dominated by the folk-rock sound of the Byrds and the Turtles, but that it was soon overtaken by darker, minor-key bands such as the Seeds, the Chocolate Watchband, and the Doors.
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Both the Seeds and Love had residencies at the Hollywood club Bito Lito’s; the Doors would open for the Seeds there.
In cape and bad Prince Valiant haircut, Saxon frugged to the electric piano like an uninhibited (if slightly clueless) Mick Jagger, cool because he was so free, influencing the smart-moron ethos of Iggy Pop and the Ramones. Decades later Saxon opined, “Garage music is not bad, because Christ was born in a manger, which was probably like a garage of that time.”
* * *
Probably the most successful
garage band of all time was the Beach Boys. When the Wilson brothers were small, their father, Murry, turned the garage into a music room, where he and his wife, Audree, played the Hammond B-3 organ and piano while singing with the boys. Later, Brian Wilson slept there.
5
One day, Dennis came home from the beach and told Brian he should write a song about surfing because it had gotten really popular. When their folks went on vacation, they used the food money their parents had left them to buy instruments, and came up with their first hit, “Surfin’.”
Now, four years later, thinking July’s
Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)
had temporarily satiated his label, Capitol, Wilson believed himself free to write an album that could make use of all the experimentation he had been doing in the studios with orchestras. To give himself the proper beach-oriented writing space, he had a wooden box built four feet off the ground in his dining room, put a grand piano in it, and then filled it with two feet of sand. But then Capitol started pressuring him to deliver his
third
album of the year, in time for Christmas sales.
Wilson wanted to get back to writing his baroque opus as soon as possible, so he decided the band would bang out a bunch of covers of songs by the likes of the Beatles, Dion, and even Bob Dylan—Jardine leads them through “The Times They Are A-Changin’”—and then overdub sounds as if there were a party going on in the studio, and call it
Beach Boys’ Party!
The resultant album
would
stand today as a nice unplugged-style album if the annoying crowd sounds could be stripped out.
The group was recording in the studio next door to Jan and Dean, LA’s other big surf group. William Jan Berry and Dean Ormsby Torrence started out as the Barons, a group that had rehearsed endlessly in Berry’s garage while they were in high school. On September 23, after the duo had a fight, a drunken Dean stalked over to the Beach Boys and ended up singing lead on their album’s cover of “Barbara Ann.”
With
Party!
in the can, Wilson returned to his ambitious music. The arrangement of November’s “The Little Girl I Once Knew” was groundbreaking in that the song comes to a complete stop at a number of points during the track. Lennon raved to
Melody Maker
, “This is the greatest! Turn it up, turn it right up. It’s
got
to be a hit. It’s the greatest record I’ve heard for weeks. It’s fantastic. I hope it will be a hit. It’s all Brian Wilson. He just uses the voices as instruments. He never tours or does anything. He just sits at home thinking up fantastic arrangements out of his head. Doesn’t even read music. You keep waiting for the fabulous breaks. Great arrangement. It goes on and on with all different things. I hope it’s a hit so I can hear it all the time.”
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But the pauses were too avant-garde for the radio. Programmers feared listeners would change the station if they heard silence, and the song went only to No. 20.
Ironically, the ragged song the Boys tossed off with Dean singing lead, “Barbara Ann,” went to No. 2 on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming the fifth-highest charting hit of their career, and the sing-along for drunken frat boys everywhere.