(Editor's Note: Part 3 of Jon Pennington's ongoing analysis of the most influential 45s of the 1960s finds him smack dab in the middle of the British Invasion, with West Coast boy bands stealing equal parts Spectors Wall of Sound and Berry's rock and roll in attempt to steal some of their thunder)
21. The Ronettes
Be My Baby / Tedesco and Pitman(1963) [Single]
It starts with that drumbeat, an insistently knocking thump-thump-thump by session drummer Hal Blaine that demands you to take heed and listen. In fact, that drumbeat is so iconically ubiquitous that musicians who have quoted it can be found all over the map, ranging from Billy Joel (Say Goodbye to Hollywood) to the Four Seasons (Rag Doll) to the Jesus & Mary Chain (Just Like Honey). If producer Phil Spector's ultimate goal was to develop a "Wagnerian approach to rock 'n' roll," then the Ronettes, Be My Baby is Spector's Ring Cycle distilled into a 3-minute opera of teen love on wax.
Lead singer Veronica "Ronnie" Bennett's voice is pure vibrato-laden vulnerability with an ineradicable New York accent, but she's cradled in a cathedral of sound that encompasses everything from violins to castanets. According to Beach Boy Brian Wilson, when he first heard Be My Baby on his car radio, he immediately had to pull over to the side of the road to hear every detail of Spector's musical arrangement. Reportedly, when Wilson descended into madness and drug addiction in the latter half of the 1960s, he was so obsessed with Be My Baby that he would engage in binge eating then listen to that Ronettes song for hours on end. It is said that Brian Wilson's pathbreaking production work for the Beach Boys could all be traced to Wilson's desire to replicate the sounds in his head, but if that's the case, I think we can all credit (or blame) Phil Spector for putting those sounds in there in the first place.
Chart Position: US #2, UK #4
22. The Jaynetts
Sally, Go 'Round the Roses / Instrumental Background to Sally, Go 'Round the Roses(1963) [Single]
Abner Spector may be nowhere near as famous as his unrelated namesake Phil Spector, but his most famous girl group production of 1963 may have finally succeeded in outweirding crazy old Phil. What's most contemporary about Sally Go Round the Roses to my ear is the haunting, hypnotic layering of female vocals on the track, which Spector accomplished by gradually adding contributions from as many as 20 different vocalists, while soaking the track in copious amounts of reverb. The vocals, which rhythmically recite lyrics that borrow from the nursery rhyme Ring Around the Rosie, are almost incantatory in their power to bewitch the listener, while the ethereal piano ostinato in the background underlines the mystical feel. The atmospherics on the track are so mysterious that this girl group hit could be easily redone as psychedelic pop or as a goth tune, and it would still somehow never lose its impact or appeal.
Chart Position: US #2, UK Did not chart
23. The Beatles
She Loves You / I'll Get You(1963) [Single]
In the UK, She Loves You rocketed to #1 almost a week after it was released, but success was not so instant in the US. Capitol Records, who had right of first refusal for the US release of the Beatles singles on Parlophone, decided not to release She Loves You, selecting British singer Frank Ifield's I'm Confessin' as more suitable for a crossover hit into the American market. After getting turned down by several major labels, Brian Epstein got the single released on Swan Records, a Philadelphia record label whose owners had ties to Dick Clark and American Bandstand. The A-side got a favorable review in a September 1963 issue of Cash Box as a "romantic rhythm rocker" backed by "a cha cha-twist handclapper," but when Dick Clark featured it the same month on the Rate-a-Record segment of American Bandstand, the dancers laughed at a press photo of the longhaired Beatles and gave the record a lukewarm 73 rating.
Walter Cronkite was supposed to feature a short clip of the Beatles on the evening news on November 22, 1963 as humorous human interest piece, but special bulletins about the assassination of JFK completely preempted that. When Cronkite finally ran the clip of the Beatles singing She Loves You on the CBS Evening News on December 10, 15-year-old Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, Maryland liked what she heard so much that she immediately wrote a letter to local Washington DC disc jockey, Carroll James, asking "Why can't we have this music in America?" James, who had also seen the Walter Cronkite broadcast, was sufficiently intrigued by Albert's letter that he decided to track down a copy of the Fab Four's next single, I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Since no market for imported British singles existed at that time, James had a flight attendant from Britain hand-deliver a copy of the 45 rpm single to him, after which he had Ms. Albert introduce the song live on his radio station as a WWDC-AM exclusive. Capitol Records tried to get James to cease and desist playing the song ahead of Capitol's initial scheduled release date, but James had such a monster regional hit on his hand, that the genie was effectively out of the bottle.
In retrospect, Capitol's initial refusal to issue Beatles singles in the United States proved to be more profitable for the Beatles in the long run. Distribution of Beatles singles in the US in 1964 was so fragmented that a total of six different record labels had Top 40 hits with the Beatles. (To be exact, the labels were Capitol, Swan, Vee-Jay, Tollie, MGM, and Atco.) In 1963, in an era when airplane travel and long-distance phone calls were comparatively much more expensive, the speed with which musical and cultural trends crossed the Atlantic was much slower. But by 1964, with a little nudge from She Loves You, that world had changed forever.
Finally, She Loves You's influence must also be traced to the "yeah yeah yeah" chorus that the Beatles' adult detractors often lampooned. For example, when the Beatles appeared for the first time in Time magazine in the November 15, 1963, the Time article didn't even mention She Loves You, but didn't miss an opportunity to malign Beatles songs as consisting "mainly of "Yeh!" screamed to the accompaniment of three guitars and a thunderous drum." Folk musicians, on the other hand, knew that She Loves You presaged the beginning of a new era. Gene Clark, who would join the Byrds one year later, was on tour with the New Christy Minstrels when he first heard She Loves You in 1963 on a jukebox in Norfolk, Virginia. Clark recalled, "I might have played it 40 times in the two days the New Christy Minstrels were playing that town. I knew, I knew, that this was the future."
Chart Position: US #1, UK #1
I Wanna Be Your Man / Stoned(1963) [Single]
Nothing underlines the dialectical relationship between the Beatles and the Stones better than this early Rolling Stones single with a Lennon/McCartney A-side. Lennon and McCartney had been writing songs in friendly competition with each other since their mid-teens, but Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, by contrast, had much less appetite for writing their own songs, until they saw Lennon and McCartney finish writing a song in front of them. That song, as you might have guessed, was I Wanna Be Your Man, but the Rolling Stones version of this tune certainly cannot be mistaken for the Beatles. Instead of tight Everly Brothers harmonies like the Beatles would do, the Rolling Stones foregrounds Mick Jagger's bluesy vocals with a rawer guitar tone, slide guitar riffs, and a bouncing R&B bassline. The B-side, Stoned, is not as good, but it firmly establishes the Rolling Stones as the anti-Beatles, as the Stones get down with a Green Onions-style instrumental, while Jagger intermittently mumbles about how "stoned" he is. At the time, "stoned" was more likely to be interpreted to mean drunk instead of drugged, but even so, it still made the Stones sound badass.
Chart Position: US Did not chart, UK #12
25. The Trashmen
Surfin' Bird / King of the Surf(1963) [Single]
The bird is the word. Nothing in pre-Beatles trash culture comes close to the sheer Dadaist craziness that is Surfin' Bird. The Trashmen were in the unenviable position of being a surf rock band in Minneapolis, Minnesota of all places when they somehow got the bright idea to mash up two songs, "The Bird Is the Word" and "Papa Ooh Mow Mow," by an R&B doowop group, the Rivingtons. The Trashmen retained the title of both songs, but otherwise bludgeoned everything else with drumming probably inspired by the Surfaris, Wipeout, which had hit the charts a few months earlier. In addition, the vocalist ad-libbed an entire middle section that made it even more frenzied than the doowop songs that originally inspired them. In short, the Trashmen mangled their original sources so much that it's practically punk rock. At least the Ramones thought so, who covered Surfin' Bird on their Rocket to Russia LP. If nothing else, the Ramones certainly learned from the Trashmen that sometimes strategic stupidity is the smartest strategy of all.
Chart Position: US #4, UK #3 (2010 anti-X Factor campaign)
26.The Beach BoysI Get Around / Don't Worry Baby(1964) [Single]
The A-side, I Get Around, is a classic statement of the Beach Boys formula of sun, sand, surf, girls, and cars, but not necessarily anything groundbreaking. By contrast, the B-side, Don't Worry Baby, is also ostensibly about sun, sand, surf, girls, and cars, but somehow achieves a level of emotional poignancy that it completely transcends that formula.
Like many musicians, Brian Wilson had the classic insecurity that he would be blindsided by new trends that would turn him into a has-been overnight. As I already mentioned in an earlier entry, Brian Wilson had that epiphany borne out of insecurity when he pulled over to the side of the road to listen to the Ronettes, Be My Baby. Don't Worry Baby was Brian Wilson's attempt to write a sequel to Be My Baby that would attract the attention of the Ronettes, but Phil Spector wasn't interested. Instead, Wilson transformed the song into a male analogue to Be My Baby, dramatizing masculine insecurity in a surfer's Wall of Sound epic that makes you completely forget that the lyrics are merely about a guy facing the prospect of losing his car in a bet. If the A-side is all about Mike Love's directive "Brian, don't fuck with the formula," then the B-side is all about Brian finally getting the courage to fuck with that formula. Without Don't Worry Baby, Brian Wilson wouldn't have gone on to make Pet Sounds or Smile, and a lot of post-1990s indie pop would not be mining the Beach Boys for inspiration.
A-side Chart Position: US #1, UK #7
B-side Chart Position: US #24, UK Did not chart
27. The Animals
The House of the Rising Sun / Talkin' 'Bout You(1964) [Single]
The Animals were five rough-hewn blokes from Newcastle, an industrial city in Northern England even more marginal to the London pop scene than the Merseybeat scene made famous by the Beatles. Before the Animals version came along, the most well-known cover version of the old folk standard, The House of the Rising Sun, was a cover version recorded by Bob Dylan on his eponymous debut album. When Bob Dylan first heard the Animals version of The House of the Rising Sun on his car radio in 1964, he reportedly jumped out of his car seat, immediately recognizing that his version of the song had been rendered obsolete. Dylan's suspicions were further reinforced when, during a tour of England in early 1965, he realized he could not play House of the Rising Sun without being accused of stealing from the Animals. (Ironically, Dylan had borrowed his arrangement of the song from Dave Van Ronk, but preempted Van Ronk in getting the song recorded. Van Ronk had originally learned the song from an Alan Lomax field recording, but Dylan still borrowed chord sequences and bass notes from Van Ronk's arrangement.)
With their bluesy organ-dominated remake of a favorite tune among American folkies, the Animals had unintentionally invented folk rock, a year before either Dylan "went electric" or the Byrds recording of Mr. Tambourine Man. In fact, Dylan viewed the organ sound as so crucial to the impact of the Animals cover of House of the Rising Son that he eventually decided to add more electric organ to his own recordings, a factor which heavily influenced Dylan's classic trifecta of mid-60s albums: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde.
Chart Position: US #1, UK #1
28. Chuck Berry
You Never Can Tell / Brenda Lee(1964) [Single]
Although Chuck Berry is crucial to the history of rock 'n' roll as a whole, most of his best work came out in the 1950s, but in the early 1960s, he was largely out of commission, serving a term in prison for allegedly transporting an underage girl across state lines for immoral purposes. Chuck Berry enters the list now for You Never Can Tell, not only because of the film's appearance in the movie Pulp Fiction, but also because the lyrics are a wry celebration of teen consumerism. The historical importance of the Beatles, Help! is often overrated, because people think that lyrics like "My independence seems to vanish in the haze" were the first time that songwriters ever fit polysyllabic words into a pop song. By contrast, Chuck Berry's You Never Can Tell not only came out one year before Help!, but it also squeezes in words like "mademoiselle," "jitney," and "hi-fi," while tossing off brilliant couplets like "They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale/The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale." Even after coming out of prison, Chuck Berry was so awesome he wrote a song that simultaneously expands your vocabulary while you're dancing the Twist.
Chart Position: US #14, UK #23
29. The Kinks
You Really Got Me / It's All Right(1964) [Single]
The first single by the Kinks, a cover version of Little Richard's Long Tall Sally, had little to distinguish it from the Beatles version of the same song, while the B-side was rather derivative Merseybeat. The Kinks did not finally find a sound of their own until their third single, You Really Got Me. Ray Davies was trying to work out the chords for Louie Louie when he came up with a riff based on chords structured around a perfect fifth, what heavy metal and punk guitarists now call "power chords." Ray's brother Dave then built upon Ray's innovative opening riff by slicing the speaker cone of his amplifier with a razor and poking it with a pin. Then, for the final ingredient, session pianist Arthur Greencastle comes in with a keyboard vamp so insistent it could practically drill into your skull. The only Beatles influence that the Kinks retained was the slow build-up to a screaming chorus, inspired by the Beatles remake of Twist and Shout, but this time the Davies brothers outdid their inspiration. With a combination of power chord riffing and distorted guitar soloing, the Kinks laid out a blueprint for dozens of hard rock and heavy metal bands to come.
Chart Position: US #7, UK #1
30. Nina Simone
Mississippi Goddam / Sea Lion Woman(1964) [Single]
In the fall of 1963, Nina Simone heard a radio news broadcast about four black girls killed when a group of Ku Klux Klansmen detonated a cache of dynamite hidden under Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The girls were at Bible study. According to Simone, "It was more than I could take, and I sat struck dumb in my den like St. Paul on the road to Damascus: all the truths that I had denied to myself for so long rose up and slapped my face." Out of this experience, Nina Simone wrote the incendiary A-side to this single, Mississippi Goddam.
Mississippi Goddam was recorded live at Carnegie Hall in the spring of 1964. The melody is like a show tune, or as Simone says in an aside after the second verse, "This is a show tune but the show hasn't been written for it yet…" Yet within the guise of a jaunty show tune, Miss Simone sneaks in a lacerating critique of the Deep South as an impediment to racial progress, evoking "Hound dogs on my trial/School children sitting in jail." As the magazine Stereo Review once wrote, "Compared with her Mississippi Goddam, the protest songs of white "folkie" singers seem like the liberal posings of affected schoolboys."
The judgment of Stereo Review magazine was also shared by militant civil rights activist, Robert F. Williams, who fled to asylum in Fidel Castro's Cuba after ending up on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list due to trumped-up kidnapping charges. When Robert F. Williams began broadcasting Radio Free Dixie that beamed signals from Cuba to the Jim Crow Deep South, he could think of no better taunt to the segregations he despised than Nine Simone's Mississippi Goddam.
Chart Position: US #102, UK Did not chart