On his earlier singles like The Rubber Band or The Gnome, Bowie does a twee version of the psychedelia in vogue at the time, but you can tell his heart’s not in it. It’s only with Space Oddity that the theatrical, glam, shape-shifting, chameleonic Bowie emerges that we know today
“I’ll hop the first Greyhound to Carolina for the signal satisfaction of breaking off a bottle of Ripple (he deserves no better, and I wish I could think of worse, but they’re all local brands) and twisting it into James Taylor’s guts until he expires in a spasm of adenoidal poesy.”
Though I hate to put it on this list because I don’t even like the song much, I have to acknowledge the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s Simon Says as one of the most influential singles of the 1960s, because it is the song that put the gum in bubblegum music.
You can call it dated, but that’s precisely the point. There is no song that is so influential in cementing the hegemonic Baby Boomer narrative of the 1960s and, specifically, 1967 as the Summer of Love than this piece of work.
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.”
According to Barry Fantoni, who knew both the Kinks and the Beatles, the Beatles listened to see my friends and said, “You know this guitar thing that sounds like a sitar. We must get one of those.” The song just barely dented the Top Ten in the UK, but lacking the power chord riffage that made the Kinks popular in the US, the single flopped in America.
John Cale, met Lewis Allan Reed at that Pickwick party for the first time. Cale and Reed would go on to form the Velvet Underground, but the other musician was Tony Conrad, an accomplished experimental filmmaker and composer in his own right. Cale and Conrad then recruited a drummer, Walter de Maria, who is now better known as a sculptor associated with the minimalist and environmental art movements.
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
Jon Pennington continues his 100 most influential songs of the 1960s, highlights include early Beatles and Dylan as well as instrumental bands like the Ventures. the Tornados, Dick Dale and Booker T and the M.G.s… instrumentally speaking!)
some of the songs on my list will be quite common (because their influence is unavoidable), while others are more obscure, yet they are influential for other reasons. For other songs, I can’t necessarily prove that they’re influential. They’re just so ahead of their time or stand so completely out of time that they must have been influential somehow, even if I can’t prove it
