(Editor's Note: It is 1966 in Jon Pennington's most influential singles of the 1960s series and the amazing thing is that some of these songs are singles at all!)
51. The Rolling Stones
Paint It, Black / Long Long While (1966) [Single]
Sitar was all over pop records in the 1960s, but no record made it as commercially viable as the Rolling Stones, Paint It Black. (The Beatles had released Norwegian Wood on the Rubber Soul LP before this, but it was never released as a single.) Paint It Black was part of a long run of Rolling Stones hits that reflected the prowess of Brian Jones at mastering new instruments (e.g., dulcimer on Lady Jane, recorder on Ruby Tuesday). Although Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are the unquestioned leaders of the Stones today, when the Rolling Stones began, Brian Jones was often considered the leader of the group, because of his instrumental skill and his status as the group's leading heartthrob.
You could view Paint It Black as a sellout, a concession by the Rolling Stones to psychedelic style, but I think that misreads history. First, if you take out the sitar, the song is lyrically and structurally similar to many blues and country songs where the singer mourns a woman who died before her time. Second, the fusion of the song's R&B/blues elements with its raga elements is more seamless than just about group ever pulled off before or since. Third, on this song, the Rolling Stones perfectly embody the Henry Ford/Velvet Underground school of acid rock: "You can have any psychedelia you like as long as it's black."
Chart Position: US #1, UK #1
52. The BeatlesPaperback Writer / Rain (1966) [Single]
You're probably already quite familiar with the A-side Paperback Writer, but I'm including this single on this list for the B-side, Rain. Rain was the first truly psychedelic single issued by the Beatles, the first sign that the LSD was really starting to kick in.
Ringo Starr calls his drumming on Rain the best he ever did with the Beatles, and I'm not in a position to argue. In fact, Starr recorded his drumming at a faster speed than the actual recording, which was then slowed down on the single to give the rhythm track a more spacey feel. The guitar sound buzzes and pulsates, while the vocals are double-tracked and compressed to make them sound like they were disembodied from the men who sang them. Then, at the end, the song includes a groundbreaking splice of Lennon singing some of the earlier lyrics backward. An extremely influential record on the development of psychedelic music, Rain hinted at the music to come that the Beatles would release on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, and Magical Mystery Tour.
A-side: US #1, UK #1
B-side: US #23, UK Did not chart
53. The CreationMaking Time / Try and Stop Me (1966) [Single]
One measure of influence that I've used in compiling this list is appearances on movie soundtracks, such as Quentin Tarantino's use of Misirlou and You Never Can Tell in Pulp Fiction. For most Americans, the Creation's Making Time did not make any dent in the consciousness of U.S. audiences until Wes Anderson used it to great effect in the montage sequence of Max Fischer's seemingly endless extracurricular activities in Rushmore. On the other hand, if you are one of those U.S. listeners and your only exposure to Making Time is from watching Rushmore, you absolutely, positively need to drop what you are doing right now and listen to the whole tune, because Anderson left out the best part of the song.
Seriously, have you listened to the song yet? Don't worry. I'm patient. I can wait.
Now that you're back, do you see what I mean? You can see Wes Anderson picked the song. The opening combo of guitar and drum is absolutely propulsive with standoffish lyrics that scream "Back off me. I've got shit to do." But then it hits you, the part that never made it into the movie. Eddie Phillips pulls off an amazing guitar solo where plays his instrument with a violin bow! You know how your older brother used to think that part in the Song Remains the Same where Jimmy Page plays the guitar with a violin bow was so badass? Eddie Phillips did it first. After pulling that off, all the Creation had to do to make an all-time classic was not screw up the final third of the song, which if you've listened to the whole song like I've told you to, you know they most certainly did not. Pete Townshend considered poaching Eddie Phillips from the Creation to become the Who's second guitarist, and Making Time shows you why.
Chart Position: UK #49, US Did not chart
54. The Velvet UndergroundAll Tomorrow's Parties / I'll Be Your Mirror (1966) [Single]
The Velvet Underground released two groundbreaking singles in 1966 before the release of the Velvet Underground & Nico LP in 1967, but I'm giving the edge to the first one, All Tomorrow's Parties/I'll Be Your Mirror. Of all the songs on the Velvet Underground & Nico LP, there is no better summation of what made the band's sound so unique than All Tomorrow's Parties.
John Cale plays a relentlessly repetitive and reverberating piano motif inspired by his collaborations with minimalist composer La Monte Young, although it also reminds me of the pulse note from Terry Riley's In C. (Terry Riley was not only John Cale's replacement in La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, but also ended up collaborating with Cale on the 1971 Church of Anthrax LP.) For his part, Lou Reed turned all the notes on his guitar to D, adopting the same one-note "ostrich tuning" that he used on his early 45 with the Primitives. Then, added to this fusion of avant-garde and garage rock, Nico contributes vocals with a distinctly blasé, Eurotrash sensibility, borne out of Nico's experience as a cabaret singer. Except for perhaps Morticia of the Addams Family, there is no other woman of the Sixties who prefigured the goth aesthetic as much as Nico.
Both the A-side and the B-side were inspired by Lou Reed's encounters with Andy Warhol's Factory scene, while the lyrics successfully embody Lou Reed's ambitions to write rock music that incorporated both journalistic and Beat Generation sensibilities. I'll Be Your Mirror was one of the gentler songs on the Velvet Underground's first LP, which makes me surprised it was selected as the B-side instead of the A-side, but Verve Records probably had no idea what to do with promoting the band. Two songs with Nico on lead vocal were chosen for the band's first single, because the producer Tom Wilson was more interested in launching the ex-model Nico's career than the rest of the band, who weren't as easy on the eyes. However, even when the record company made allowances for commercial concerns, the uncompromising vision of the Velvet Underground still shines through.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
55. Four TopsReach Out I'll Be There / Until You Love Someone (1966) [Single]
Reach Out I'll Be There brings us both minor key darkness and the light that pierces through that darkness. Like a black version of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, no other product of the Motown sound is as heartbreakingly operatic as the A-side of this single. Phil Spector made Wagnerian symphonies for white teens, while the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting and production team at Motown made soul symphonies that appealed to teen audiences with adult sensibilities, people who knew that sometimes the world beats you down and "your best just ain't good enough."
Chart Position: US #1, UK #1
56. The Beach BoysGood Vibrations / Let's Go Away for Awhile (1966) [Single]
Bootleg and authorized releases of Brian Wilson's long delayed Smile LP have resuscitated his reputation among post-1990s indie popsters, but in the 1960s, Good Vibrations was the most likely song that an average radio listener would ever hear of Wilson's lost album. Recorded for an unprecedented budget of $50,000, Good Vibrations represented Brian Wilson's attempt to recreate the pocket symphonies inside his own head. Wilson spent months recording the song, using over 90 hours of magnetic tape, recording tiny snippets of vocals and instrumentals piece by piece, supremely confident that the musical collage would all finally come together. In the final analysis, the rapturously psychedelic blend of electro-theremin, sawing cello riffs, and sunshine California vocals that Wilson captured on the A-side proved that his confidence was fully justified.
Chart Position: US #1, UK #1
57. Frank ZappaTrouble Comin' Every Day / Who Are the Brain Police? (1966) [Single]
Frank Zappa has never produced satire as pointed as the songs on both sides of this early Mothers of Invention single. Trouble Comin' Every Day has the right amount of garage grunginess to make it a great 1966 single, but it is distinguished by its politically radical lyrics, which look back at the 1965 Watts riots and suggest, "Maybe those black guys have a point." As members of L.A.'s freak subculture of the mid-60s, Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were subject to a lot of hassles from the brutality-prone LAPD for long hair and suspected drug use, a factor which led a lot of white guys in the era to empathize with black guys who had been dealing with police brutality since forever. L.A. in the 1960s gets the reputation for producing less substantive music than the San Francisco scene, but nobody in the blessed-out SF scene ever said anything as radical as Zappa's plaint, "I'm not black, but there's a whole lotsa time I wish I could say I wasn't white."
The B-side has an anti-cop sensibility just as strong as the A-side, long before L.A.'s first gangsta rappers were even diapers. The draggy, buzzing guitar sound that opens Who Are the Brain Police? prefigures Black Sabbath's guitar work on Iron Man by several years, while Zappa alternates occasional snippets poppy vocals and melodies with echo, dissonance, and ear-splitting feedback. Zappa's lyrics on the B-side use plastic and chrome as a metaphor for conformism and inauthenticity, a metaphor he would overuse later, but on this single, Zappa's satire has never been sharper, because he has been forced to convey it in the context of a rock solid garage band.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
58. GodzLay in the Sun / I Want a Word With You (1966) [Single]
The Godz may be the first band ever formed by New York avant-hipsters working at the same record store, an achievement that predates a lot of Pitchfork's critical darlings by over three decades. Guitarist Jim McCarthy, bassist Larry Kessler, and drummer Paul Thornton were all working together as salesmen at the 49th Street Sam Goody's, when they decided to record their own songs, after attending a rehearsal by the seminal rock group, the Fugs. Kessler had just recently gotten a second job at ESP-Disk Records where his task was to get more record stores to stock the Fugs, when he decide to use his connections at ESP-Disk to get the label's founder, Bernard Stollman, to give them some studio time.
Stollman only booked 2 hours of studio time for the Godz, but in their own minimalist, sloppy, and discordant style, the Godz cranked out an album's worth of songs later released on the LP, Contact High. The single from that session, Lay in the Sun/I Want a Word With You, has folk rock instrumentation, such as harmonica and guitar, accompanied by Jim McCarthy's yelping, Dylanesque vocals, but the melody and rhythm of both songs is so improvisational and skeletal that the single is closer in spirit to the free jazz ensembles recording on ESP-Disk at the time than the more chart-friendly folk rock of the era. Freak folk doesn't get any freakier than this.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
59. The Velvet Underground"Loop" (1966) [EP]
For its December 1966 issue, Aspen magazine turned over total control over its design and editing to Pop Artist Andy Warhol. Warhol transformed the magazine into a multimedia package with a cover resembling a box of Fab laundry detergent. Included in this package was a 5-inch flexidisc that included Loop, an experiment by John Cale released under the Velvet Underground name.
In an essay proclaiming Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music as the "greatest album ever made," Lester Bangs wrote, "If you ever thought feedback was the best thing that ever happened to the guitar, well, Lou just got rid of the guitars." The only problem with Lester's argument is that John Cale had the idea about ten years earlier. With his composition Loop, Cale created a sheer noise blast of guitar feedback minus guitar that prefigures industrial rock, noise rock, and drone rock. Loop is the only composition ever released during the 1960s on a single that could force Sunn O))) to confront the question, "Who's your daddy?" both figuratively and literally.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
60. The EthixSkins / Bad Trip (1966) [Single]
Cork Marcheschi was the bass player in mid-60s nightclub act from the San Francisco Bay area called the Ethix, but he also had a formative experience in 1962 listening to Edgar Varese's pioneering work of electronic music, Poeme Electronique. The Ethix got some gigs in Las Vegas as a show band, but the band quickly collapsed after the Vegas police found out that the band had underage members who couldn't play in venues where alcohol was sold. Out of this experience, Marcheschi decided to appropriate the Ethix name all for himself and release an experimental electronic music single, something that tried to combine rock guitar with the same kind of avant grade electronic experimentation that guys like Don Buchla and Morton Subotnick were doing at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. In this sense, the Ethix was one of those groups that's simply a mask for a one-man-band noise rock experiment, a precedent that one-man "groups" like Foetus or Nine Inch Nails would unknowingly follow much later. Skins is a guitar, electronic, and drums instrumental that's much more minimalist than most garage band or pop electronic fare of the time, while Bad Trip marries guitar skronk with what sounds like a cackling man on maracas recruited from a mariachi band on a peyote bender.
Marcheschi's aspirations were so avant-garde for the Ethix single that he considered the listener's decision to play the single at 33 or 45 rpm as equally valid. Eventually, after abandoning the Ethix moniker, Marcheschi would meet a psychedelically inclined guitarist named David Blossom who shared Marcheschi's view that "…rock 'n' roll is electronic music, because if you pull the plug, there's no more sound." The Blossom-Marcheschi combination would then result in the formation of the seminal 1960s electronic psychedelic band, Fifty Foot Hose, a band with a cult following that is as fervent as it is small.
Chart Position: Did not chart in US or UK