Read 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Online
Authors: Andrew Grant Jackson
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The group finished
their American tour in late September and flew back to England. On October 8, on the way to Abbey Road Studios, McCartney came up with the Little Richard/Ray Charles–inspired “She’s a Woman,” and they recorded it for the B side of their next single. They stuck in a message for their new friend Dylan, a line about how McCartney’s woman turned him on when he got lonely. “Turn on” was slang for getting high, and Lennon recalled, “We were so excited to say ‘turn me on,’ you know, about marijuana and all that, using it as an expression.”
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The record’s A side, “I Feel Fine,” was another of Lennon’s ebullient thank-yous to the fans, with a euphoric riff borrowed from Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step.” Between the band’s resplendent harmonies and Starr’s drumming in the style of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” the song was a guaranteed hit.
But for an extra twist, Lennon added a yowl of feedback to the intro, generating it by leaning his guitar against the amp. Critical consensus says that it was the first use of intentional feedback on a record. Maybe it was the marijuana that made him appreciate the beauty in sonic distortion, though he’d heard two other London bands use feedback before he started smoking pot.
Back on August 2, the Kinks had opened for the Beatles in Bournemouth, England. Kinks leader Ray Davies later recalled, “John Lennon made a remark that we were only there to warm up for them, but we got a great reaction to ‘You Really Got Me.’” The London band tore the house down with the song, which featured the most distorted guitar sound to date, thanks to guitarist Dave Davies’s slashed speaker cone. “It was an early validation that we had something that stood up for us, like being bullied in school and having something that was bigger than the bully, it was that sort of feeling.”
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Two weeks later, on August 16, the Who, going by the name the High Numbers, joined the Beatles and the Kinks on the bill in Blackpool. Onstage, Pete Townshend shook his guitar in front of the amps to conjure a feedback maelstrom. But the High Numbers’ first single had flopped, and Townshend didn’t feel he had enough clout to ask the band’s producer to put anything avant-garde on their records. The Beatles’ producer George Martin, however, would prove extremely receptive to his group’s increasingly unusual ideas.
“I Feel Fine” shot to No. 1 on December 26, and stayed there for three weeks. Its brief five seconds of feedback reverberated like the jarring Emergency Broadcast System signal—then in use in the United States to verify that the airwaves were working properly—thus announcing that a new era of experimentation was about to begin.
Dylan was writing his next album in his studio apartment above Café Espresso in Woodstock, New York. Usually he’d smoke marijuana while drinking red wine or coffee at the typewriter. Café owner Bernard Paturel, who later worked as Dylan’s chauffeur, saw that Dylan would tear pictures out of magazines and newspapers, spread dozens of them on the floor, and sit in the middle of them with his guitar. As David Hadju writes in his biography of Dylan,
Positively 4th Street
, “Bob would start with a simple musical framework, a blues pattern he could repeat indefinitely, and he would close his eyes—he would not draw from the pictures literally but would use the impression the faces left as a visual model for kaleidoscopic language. He appeared to sing whatever came to him: disconnected phrases with a poetic feeling. When something came out that he liked, he scrawled it down hurriedly so as to stay in the moment, and he would do this until there were enough words written for a song.”
Dylan’s producer Wilson, an African American, had been saying for years that if they matched Dylan with a band, they “might have a white Ray Charles with a message.”
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Now, after the success of the Animals, Wilson had his regular session musicians overdub Fats Domino–style rock and roll onto some old acoustic Dylan tracks, including “House of the Risin’ Sun,” to demonstrate what the combination could sound like.
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Also, Dylan had recently jammed with a group of folkies in Los Angeles called the Byrds, who were working up an electric version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” that you could dance to. He decided it was finally time to pull the trigger.
The Rolling Stones record their version of gospel and chamber pop on January 11–12. Dylan records
Bringing It All Back Home
on January 13–15, fusing psychedelic folk lyrics with rock and roll and turning the album into high art. The Byrds record “Mr. Tambourine Man” on January 20.
The Rolling Stones’
twenty-one-year-old manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, saw how much money Lennon-McCartney were making through their songwriting royalties and pushed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to develop their own partnership. The two Stones had written pop songs for other artists, but for their own band’s records they stuck mostly to Chess blues classics. With a handful of atmospheric exceptions such as “Tell Me” and “Good Times, Bad Times,” their originals were dominated by puppy love clichés that made them unsuitable for the Stones’ tough image. Richards said that gooey love ballads were much easier to write than good rock-and-roll songs.
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Even the best of the originals, “So Much in Love,” covered by the Mighty Avengers, sounded only slightly more bitter than the Brit pop of Herman’s Hermits.
Their breakthrough came when Jagger gave up the phony role of good guy and took for himself the persona of the rake, in “Heart of Stone.” Set to country blues à la Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart,” the song warns little girls to stay away because the singer enjoys making them sad. The eerie backing vocals mirror the group’s sullen album covers.
The song made it to No. 19, so the Stones went back into the studio on January 11 with two more Jagger/Richards compositions. At the suggestion of Phil Spector’s arranger and conductor, Jack Nitzsche, whom they had met at the
Teen Awards Music International (T.A.M.I.) Show
the previous October, they recorded at RCA Studios in Hollywood.
In light of the Stones’ nefarious image, it’s ironic that their first quasi-self-penned U.K. No. 1 was derived from a gospel song. During one of the band’s U.S. tours, Richards had picked up a Staple Singers album, and when he was home in the United Kingdom, he played along with the record to learn the chords. One of the tracks was the traditional spiritual “This May Be the Last Time,” recorded in 1955 and distinguished by the spectral blues guitar of Pops Staples. (Though they performed under the name the Staple Singers, their surname was Staples.) James Brown had adapted the song for his B side to “Out of Sight” the previous July. Though bloggers have grumbled that Jagger/Richards should have credited Pops Staples for their version, Brown did not credit him, either. With traditional (that is, pre-copyright) songs, you didn’t need to share the cash as you did with covers. Jagger/Richards sped up the song and changed the lyrics to make it a love song—or, rather, a “threat song”: if his woman didn’t shape up and try to please him, he was going to take off.
Their earlier A side “It’s All Over Now” has a massive, echoing intro thanks to Chess Studio’s engineer Ron Malo, but after nine seconds the lead guitar recedes to let Jagger sing. In “The Last Time,” however, guitarist Brian Jones’s riff keeps droning throughout the entire tune, a move unusual in pop at the time. Soon after the song’s release on February 26, hypnotic riff-based hooks came to predominate in British rock, from the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” to the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul.”
Richards played acoustic and then performed the solo. On many tunes, he’d play rhythm and sing harmony until the instrumental, at which point he would switch to the lead.
Perhaps the highlight of the song is the climax in which Jagger screams into the sonic vortex like a wild primate while the backing vocals and beat endlessly repeat—the epitome of Oldham’s “wall of noise,” his attempt to emulate his hero Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production technique. Spector himself was on hand to give the song a listen, and predicted it would reach No. 10. It went to No. 9 in the United States.
Jagger later commented, “I suppose we’d been writing for almost nine months to a year by then, just learning how to put songs together. And with ‘The Last Time,’ it became fun. After that, we were confident that we were on our way, that we’d just got started.”
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For the B side, “Play with Fire,” Jagger returned to the “Heart of Stone” theme, warning a girl not to get involved with him. But he fleshed in her character by making her a socialite with diamonds and a chauffeur, and added a decadent storyline.
Like the Beatles, the Stones had become sought-after party guests of the aristocracy. At a dance hosted by the British ambassador to the United States, Sir David Ormsby-Gore, Jagger even befriended Princess Margaret. (It was said Queen Elizabeth disapproved of their decades-long friendship, which is why she avoided the 2003 ceremony in which Jagger was knighted wearing Adidas sneakers.)
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Naturally there was some ambivalence toward social climbing in a group formed to emulate working-class black bluesmen. Jagger has it both ways. In “Play with Fire,” the contempt in his voice says he doesn’t need the socialite, but he’s also bragging to us about the rarified circles that want him.
Jagger’s warning to the young lady becomes gradually more unsettling because of the amount of personal information he knows about her mother, an heiress who owns a block in one of London’s richest neighborhoods. Jagger knows that the father was never home so the mother went out for “kicks” in the exclusive London district of Knightsbridge—presumably with Jagger. In retaliation, the father took the mother’s jewelry away and gave it to the daughter, and now the mother has to party on the poorer side of town, Stepney. Jagger warns the daughter that she had better not fool around with him if she wants to keep her jewelry, or the father will cut her off, too, and she’ll have to go live with her mother.
It’s a (more cynical) precursor to the mother-daughter rivalry in the Mike Nichols film
The Graduate.
In an interview decades later,
Rolling Stone
’s editor Jann Wenner said, “At the time to write about stuff like that must have been somewhat daring.”
Jagger replied, “I don’t know if it was daring. It just hadn’t been done. Obviously there had been lyric writers that had written stuff much more interesting and sophisticated—say, Noel Coward, who I didn’t really know about. He was someone that your parents knew.”
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Even if it wasn’t daring, it was innovative considering that while the Stones were recording the song, the Beatles’ lyrically basic “I Feel Fine” was on top of the charts. A few months after “Play with Fire” was released, in February 1965, Dylan would write his own epic about a rich girl’s descent to the streets, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
In painting a detailed story and naming specific parts of town, Jagger/Richards brought a lyrical specificity to rock that, to date, only Chuck Berry and his disciples the Beach Boys had explored, with the latter band’s milieu confined to the innocent world of drive-ins and malt shops.
Initially the Stones attempted an up-tempo version called “Mess with Fire,” which fizzled.
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But, as Nitzsche recalled, the band was flexible; when something didn’t work, they didn’t hesitate to try it in a different style. Still, by 7:00 a.m., drummer Charlie Watts, bassist Bill Wyman, and Brian Jones had fallen asleep on the studio couches while a janitor swept up. Jagger and Richards left them there as they went into the echo chamber. Phil Spector took over bass on a tuned-down electric guitar while Richards played what he called “Elizabethan blues” on his acoustic. In his playing, Richards had been influenced by Big Bill Broonzy, a guitarist who toured the college circuit in the 1950s, playing music from the era of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) alongside folk and blues songs.
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Nitzsche played harpsichord, creating an atmosphere almost akin to that of a horror film. Jagger’s muted performance increased the menace by underselling it. His tambourine and Nitzsche’s tam-tams rounded out the sound.
Half a mile away, at the Gold Star and Western Studios, Brian Wilson was simultaneously adding a cornucopia of instruments to
The Beach Boys Today!
. Spector had already been melding pop and classical, as had Burt Bacharach, but the era of baroque pop, a.k.a. chamber pop, in which bands fused elements of classical with rock, had now officially begun.
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The next day, January 13,
in the Columbia recording studio in New York City, Dylan played solo on acoustic guitar or piano for the first day of sessions. On the 14th, however, producer Tom Wilson brought in a whole platoon of musicians: three guitarists (blues guitarist Bruce Langhorne, pop guitarist Kenny Rankin, and general session guitarist Al Gorgoni), two bassists (William E. Lee, father of filmmaker Spike Lee; and Joseph Macho Jr.), a pianist (Paul Griffin), and a drummer (Bobby Gregg).
In three hours, from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m., the eight of them recorded almost all of
Bringing It All Back Home
’s first side: “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (captured in one take), “Outlaw Blues,” “She Belongs to Me,” and “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” They didn’t rehearse; Langhorne later described their chemistry as telepathic. That evening, Dylan did another session with future Lovin’ Spoonful John Sebastian on bass and John Hammond Jr. on guitar, but no cuts from that session made the album.
The following day the original musicians returned for another 2:30–5:30 p.m. session, except pianist Paul Griffin, who couldn’t make it. (Frank Owens covered for him.) The day went as smoothly as the one before. Dylan would demonstrate a track on piano, and then the ensemble would try it at a couple of different speeds. “Maggie’s Farm” was captured in one take, and they also got the electric rocker “On the Road Again” in the can.