1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (36 page)

By the end of the year, Carmichael had decided that whites could no longer occupy leadership positions in the SNCC and began formulating his concept of Black Power. “It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage … We have to do what every group in the country did—we gotta take over the community where we outnumber people so we can have decent jobs.”
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Instead of integration, many Black Power advocates wanted black-controlled institutions; some even called for an independent black state.

The following year, the Lowndes party logo and Carmichael’s call for Black Power inspired Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to found the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. They also drew on the example of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group of black veterans from World War II and Korea who formed twenty-one chapters throughout Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to protect civil rights workers from the Klan with guns. Founded in November 1964, they settled on their name the following January and incorporated as a non-profit in March.

The voter drive finally succeeded, because August 6’s Voting Rights Act outlawed literacy tests and sent federal examiners into the South to monitor elections. The act became one of the most successful pieces of legislation in history, vastly increasing blacks’ presence in elections. Within months, more than two hundred fifty thousand new black voters were enfranchised. In 1964, 6 percent of Mississippi voters were black, but five years later that number was 59 percent.
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The number of black elected officials rose over the next twenty years from a hundred to seventy-two hundred.
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Even Lowndes County had a black sheriff by 1970.

In general, black entertainers were not yet referring to the struggle in their performances. Bill Cosby enjoyed a series of Grammy-winning comedy albums and got some flak for not talking about civil rights issues in his comedy act, but he maintained, “A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s the way I see it, too.’ Okay. He’s white. I’m Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right? So I figure this way I’m doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.”
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That lack of controversy enabled him to become the first black person to star in a TV drama, with Robert Culp in
I Spy
. When it premiered on September 15, four stations in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama wouldn’t run it, but it became one of the year’s biggest hits.

Black artists left the job of making protest songs to whites such as Phil Ochs (“Here’s to the State of Mississippi”) and even the Yardbirds (“You’re a Better Man Than I”). It was easy for whites to rake southern states over the coals from inside a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village, but blacks had to tread lightly—or face the repercussions. Up through the early 1960s, blacks were often allowed to play only black clubs in the South, East, and even Midwest; such venues became known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit.” Even during their most recent summer American tour, the Beatles had to stipulate in their contracts that they would not play segregated venues, to make sure they didn’t find themselves inadvertently supporting racists. Though the ropes that had once blocked off the black sections of dance halls from the white ones had come down, most black artists were hesitant to appear confrontational, because they didn’t want to be closed out of the new venues and record markets that had just opened up to them. In 1968, when James Brown proclaimed, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” he was shut out of white radio.

Nina Simone, however, dared to tackle racial themes head-on in tracks such as her cover of Billie Holiday’s lynching song, “Strange Fruit,” which was why Carmichael called Simone the true singer of the civil rights movement. She wrote in her autobiography, “I realized that what we were really fighting for was the creation of a new society. When I had started out in the movement, all I wanted were my rights under the Constitution. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that no matter what the President or the Supreme Court might say, the only way we could get true equality was if America changed completely, top to bottom. And this change had to start with my own people, with black revolution.”
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The change had to start with her own view of herself. Simone recorded her composition “Four Women” in autumn.

The women in the song are black, but their skin tones range from light to dark, and their ideas of beauty and their own importance are deeply influenced by that. All the song did was to tell what entered the minds of most black women in America when they thought about themselves: their complexions, their hair—straight, kinky, natural, which?—and what other women thought of them. Black women didn’t know what the hell they wanted, because they were defined by things they didn’t control. And until they had the confidence to define themselves, they’d be stuck in the same mess forever. That was the point the song made … The song told a truth that many people in the USA—especially black men—simply weren’t ready to acknowledge at that time.
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The “Black Is Beautiful” cultural movement was gathering steam in its fight against internalized self-hatred. The phrase was perhaps first introduced in 1962, when the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios put on a fashion event in Harlem called the Grandessa Models Naturally
—
“The Original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride & Standards.”
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The movement celebrated dark skin, African facial features, and natural, unstraightened hair. Simone replaced her wig and gown with an Afro, African dresses, turbans, and hoop earrings.

Diana Ross’s favorite wig, on the other hand, was modeled on Annette Funicello’s coif. Motown’s mogul Gordy even secured a deal with a Lansing, Michigan, company to produce the Supremes Special Formula White Bread, with the group’s image on the package.
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After the trio’s previous single, “Nothing but Heartaches,” missed the Top 10, Holland-Dozier-Holland regrouped, came up with lyrics about tears of joy and a thousand violins, gave Ross a more challenging vocal, and made the orchestra bigger—and for two weeks, starting November 20, the Supremes were back on top with “I Hear a Symphony.” They followed it up with their most ambitious single yet, “My World Is Empty without You,” in a foreboding minor key with harpsichord and organ. It made only No. 5, but when the Stones retooled it for “Paint It Black” they’d take it all the way to No. 1 the following year.

Aside from the Supremes, the only other female to top the R&B charts that year was Fontella Bass of Chess Studios, for almost the entire month of November. “Rescue Me” was often misattributed to Aretha Franklin, because the two artists sounded similar—Bass’s mother toured in a gospel group with Franklin’s dad, who was a preacher—but at the time, Franklin’s label, Columbia, was pushing her to focus on jazz and standards. It would be two more years before she found her full strength by tapping into her gospel background with Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler’s help at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Wexler had left Stax for FAME because Stax’s musicians didn’t get along with Wilson Pickett. For its part, Stax was starting to feel that Wexler was bringing his artists down to Stax to dip into its special soul recipe, but not giving the studio a fair piece of the long-term big-picture money. One of the songs that sold Wexler on FAME came about because construction worker Percy Sledge was laid off in Muscle Shoals at the end of the year, prompting Sledge’s girlfriend to dump him just as she was becoming a model. Sledge poured his heartbreak into “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
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Joe Tex also recorded at FAME. He was the man James Brown considered his main rival, and for three weeks in October he had the R&B No. 1 with “I Want to Do (Everything For You).” Other hits from Tex included “Don’t Make Your Children Pay (for Your Mistakes).” Between Sledge and Tex, Wexler figured FAME in Muscle Shoals could be his new Stax.

Motown’s assembly line was humming along, though Smokey Robinson was having trouble matching the success of last spring’s “My Girl” for the Temptations. The next four singles he cowrote and produced for them—“It’s Growing,” “Since I Lost My Baby,” “Don’t Look Back,” “My Baby”—were gems, but none cracked the pop Top 10, and Gordy warned that if the next single didn’t, he’d give an up-and-coming producer named Norman Whitfield a shot at the Temps.

In December, Robinson decided to make the next one a dance record and switched up the lead singers, giving “Get Ready” back to Eddie Kendricks to sing. The track was a euphoric dynamo (and probably the only song to use “fee-fi-fo-fum” in its lyrics), but it inexplicably stalled in the Top 30, so the Temps were given to Whitfield, who brought Ruffin back up front to rip into “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” the first week of the new year.

Robinson’s own group, the Miracles, was doing well; one of their most enduring classics made the Top 20 in August, “The Tracks of My Tears.” Echoing the lyrics of Lennon’s “I’m a Loser,” the singer laughs in public and wears the mask of a clown, but inside, his tears are falling. In turn, the Beatles took inspiration from the song’s twelve-string guitar intro by Marv Tarplin for Lennon’s “In My Life” on
Rubber Soul
. Robinson would revisit the theme in “Tears of a Clown” the next year.

Go-go discotheques were growing in popularity. Never ones to miss out on a dance craze, the Miracles captured the thrill of hitting the clubs with the booming tom-toms of “Going to a Go-Go.” These singles, along with “Ooo Baby Baby,” “Choosey Beggar,” and “My Girl Has Gone” (the latter a reworking of “The Tracks of My Tears”), were compiled on one of the year’s most hit-packed albums, November’s
Going to a Go-Go.
(It was their first to be credited to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles instead of just the Miracles, which was the precedent that made Diana Ross and David Ruffin want to do the same with their own groups.) All the tracks were originals except “My Baby Changes Like the Weather,” and seven of the twelve were cowritten by Pete Moore. It would be their only album to make the pop Top 10—strange, considering what seminal artists they were.

Also that November, Marvin Gaye made it to No. 8 on the pop charts with “Ain’t That Peculiar,” written by Robinson, Moore, Tarplin, and White. The lyrics are dark—Gaye’s woman continually does things designed to hurt him, and his tears won’t sway her—but the music is ebullient. Gaye’s “ah ah ah!”s with Motown’s session backup singers the Andantes picks up where his hero Ray Charles and the Raelettes left off, as Gaye swings effortlessly through the instrumental break before swerving back out with an agile “Ooooooo!”

Gaye was one artist who was troubled by the lack of social commentary in his music.

I remember I was listening to a tune of mine playing on the radio, “Pretty Little Baby,” when the announcer interrupted with news about the Watts riots. My stomach got real tight, and my heart started beating like crazy. I wanted to throw the radio down and burn all the bullshit songs I’d been singing and get out there and kick ass with the rest of the brothers. I knew they were going about it wrong, I knew they weren’t thinking, but I understood anger that builds up over years—shit, over centuries—and I felt myself exploding. Why didn’t our music have anything to do with this? Wasn’t music supposed to express feelings? No, according to BG [Berry Gordy], music’s supposed to sell. That’s his trip. And it was mine.
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Thus the year’s most militant call to arms would come not from a musician but from Beat poet LeRoi Jones (who later renamed himself Amiri Baraka). He’d already crossed the line in last year’s spoken-word piece “Black Dada Nihilism,” backed by the jazz of the New York Art Quartet, in which he calmly exhorts the listener to rape white girls and their fathers, and cut their mothers’ throats.

“When Malcolm was murdered,” Jones said, “I began to hold all white people responsible, even though in some part of my mind I knew better. But it was this heinous act … that made me pack up and move to Harlem and sever all ties with most of the white people I knew, many of whom were my close friends.”
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That included Jones’s Jewish wife and two daughters.

He opened the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in April with federal funding from Project Uplift. Apparently, the government wasn’t scrutinizing his poetry. In his manifesto “Black Art” he roars that poems are bullshit unless they have teeth, can shoot guns, assassinate. He wanted poems like fists and daggers that beat “niggers,” stabbed “owner-jews,” pulled out the tongues of cops and killed them in the alleys, and set fire to “Whities ass.” He wanted a black poem and a black world, he concluded.

The Black Arts movement pushed for black studies in universities and celebrated soul food and African-style clothes. Jazz composer Sun Ra’s Arkestra performed at Black Arts events that summer, and Baraka called Sun Ra the resident philosopher.

It was Sun Ra, along with fellow avant-garde musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp, whom John Coltrane followed into the LSD-inspired reaches of free jazz. Coltrane chose to get inaccessible to the masses on the eve of his greatest mainstream success with last winter’s
A Love Supreme.
The musicians investigated dissonance, overblowing, and screeching at the highest registers of their instruments. Bebop had once been incomprehensibly insane to an older generation, but now had become the new status quo, so the vanguard had to keep pushing farther out.

The albums of Sun Ra (born Herman Poule Blount in 1914) seemed ready-made for the acid enthusiasts who loved to gaze at the psychedelic dreamscapes of Marvel comics such as
The Fantastic Four
and
Dr. Strange. The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One
holds cuts such as “The Cosmos,” “Other Worlds,” “Nebulae,” and “Dancing in the Sun.” His next album,
The Magic City
, was recorded live in the loft of famed Nigerian drummer Olatunji. Sun Ra’s concerts would last five to six hours, and eventually the Sun Ra Arkestra formed its own commune.