(Editors Note: Jon Penningtons most influential songs of 1960s continues)
31 Them
Baby Please Don't Go / Gloria (1964) [Single]
This is the first 45 on the list where you don't have to split hairs about the A-side vs. the B-side, because they both kick ass equally. Baby Please Don't Go is R&B stomp with a bass line so good that the song vibrates, while Gloria uses organ and drums to goose the lead singer, Van Morrison, into a froth of sexual anticipation. Gloria was a standard in the repertoire of 1960s American garage bands, but Van the Man's singing also had a heavy influence on Jim Morrison's vocal style, after he saw Them at the Whisky A-Go-Go in L.A. during the early days of the Doors. The Lizard King would later repay the favor by covering Gloria on the Doors, Alive She Cried album.
In addition to their influence on American garage bands, Them had indirect influence on several later psychedelic groups, not just the Doors. Jimi Hendrix recorded a cover version of Gloria, whereas the Grateful Dead got the inspiration to write Caution Do Not Stop on Tracks after listening to Them's Mystic Eyes on the car radio in an LSD haze while stuck at a railroad crossing. Van Morrison would later go on to release the seminal psych-jazzy Astral Weeks LP, while Them would release some solid heavy psych music of their own under their own name and as the Belfast Gypsies.
A-side: UK #10, US Did not chart
B-side: US #71, UK Did not chart
32. The PrimitivesThe Ostrich / Sneaky Pete (1964) [Single]
Lewis Allan Reed was living with his parents in Long Island, commuting during the workweek to his job as an employee of the budget record label, Pickwick. Reed’s job was to crank out songs like an assembly line, akin to a Bizarro World version of the Brill Building, when in the fall of 1964, he read a news item by the fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard about a new fad for using ostrich feathers in the latest couture for the dance floor. Sensing an opportunity, Reed wrote The Ostrich, a spoof of dance craze records with nonsensical instructions like “You take a step forward/You step on your head.”
Since Pickwick's modus operandi was to make records on the cheap for quick profits, Reed recorded the song almost immediately with some Pickwick employees who probably wouldn't have looked out of place on a Season One episode of Mad Men. The A-side begins with a guitar screech that sounds almost like an air raid siren (or ESG's UFO) then segues into Brooklynese vocals with fey falsetto backup vocals accompanied by a chord sequence swiped from the Crystals, And Then He Kissed Me. The hook on the B-side, Sneaky Pete, isn't as catchy, but Sneaky Pete still has the same stylistic combination as the A-side of oddly tuned guitars, Merseybeat thrashing, and backup vocals that sound like a transvestite bar's tribute to Phil Spector. So, in a way, the Primitives brought a gay sensibility to garage rock that was just as ahead of the curve as Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp, which came out the same year.
Commercially speaking, the Ostrich sank like a stone, but it was enough of a regional hit in the Cleveland area that Pickwick probably made money based on their ultracheap business model of shoestring recording budgets and assembly line songwriting. Pickwick was enthusiastic enough about the single that they wanted to send a version of the Primitives out on tour, but the Pickwick employees who actually sang on the track were a little too "suit and tie" to look convincing in the post-Beatlemania era. For this reason, Pickwick went on the lookout for some random longhaired dudes that they could pass off as the Primitives. And therein hangs a tale.
A short time later, some twentysomething women took a liking to two longhaired men they ran across in Lower Manhattan and invited them to a party where it just so happened that the executives of Pickwick Records would be. But these longhaired guys weren't just any random bohemians. They were serious avant-garde musicians who both played in minimalist composer La Monte Young's Eternal Theatre of Music. When Pickwick offered them the chance to go on tour as members of the Primitives, they immediately jumped at the chance to play rock stars.
One of the avant-garde musicians was John Cale, who met Lewis Allan Reed a.k.a. Lou 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. The New York art world pedigree of the Primitives was so solid that art historian Branden Joseph calls the Primitives the first true American "art band," a phenomenon exemplified by so many later bands like Sonic Youth and Talking Heads where avant-gardists decide to go slumming as rock stars.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
33. The Sonics
The Witch / Psycho (1965) [Single]
This 45 is an all killer, no filler one-two punch of garage rock from Tacoma, Washington that inspired the grunge movement both stylistically and geographically. Lead singer Gerry Roslie has raspy vocals that sound like gargling gravel, while the Parypa Brothers on bass and guitar used to attack their speakers with an ice pick in pursuit of the rawest sounds possible. Steadfastly refusing to acknowledges the changes wrought by the British Invasion, the Sonics had a sound that served as colossal F.U. to the Beatles, sticking to the standard pre-Beatles combo format of bass, guitar, organ, and snarling saxophone. The saxophone might have made the Sonics sound retro at the time, but now they almost sound like a premonition of how punk rock and new wave made saxophones cool again (e.g., The Stooges, Fun House; X-Ray Spex, Oh Bondage Up Yours!). Besides, the lyrical content on both the A-side and the B-side are all about how the wimmen are driving ya cray-ay-ay-ay-azy, which means that the Sonics had hipster misogyny down pat at least a year before the Rolling Stones caught on (e.g., Under My Thumb, Stupid Girl).
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
34. Yardbirds
For Your Love / Got to Hurry (1965) [Single]
The most immediately apparent feature that makes For Your Love distinctive is that the standard rock keyboard and drums instrumentation has been replaced by harpsichord and bongos. This may not sound unusual at this late date, but the Yardbirds' harpsichord kicked off a whole "baroque rock" trend during the 1960s that gave us acoustic and electric harpsichord textures on records ranging from the Rolling Stones' Lady Jane to the Left Banke's Walk Away Renee to the Partridge Family's I Think I Love You. The Beach Boys had some harpsichord on 1964's When I Grow Up to Be a Man, but the Yardbirds actually made the harpsichord rock.
Another reason that For Your Love is historically important is that it signaled the departure of Eric Clapton from the Yardbirds, because he felt For Your Love was too poppy. The guy who gave us mawkish tripe like Tears in Heaven is worried about blues authenticity? Now, that's rich. Personally, I think the Yardbirds were better off losing Clapton and getting Jeff Beck instead. Just listen to the B-side, Got to Hurry, and you'll see what I mean. It's a ho-hum, shuffling blues instrumental that superficially resembles Booker T. & the MG's Green Onions, but even compared to other Green Onions knockoffs, it's nowhere near as fun as the Rolling Stones, Stoned. The B-side suggests the derivative direction the Yardbirds might have followed if Clapton stayed in the band, while the A-side suggests the way forward toward the innovations the band would accomplish with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.
Chart Position: US #6, UK #3
35. The ByrdsMr. Tambourine Man / I Knew I'd Want You (1965) [Single]
If the Beatles and Bob Dylan are two of the biggest musical influences on the Sixties, then the Byrds are the band that finally figured out how to "Beatleize" Bob Dylan. Founding members Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark were all veterans of collegiate folk groups, such as the Limeliters, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and the New Christy Minstrels, before they joined forces to record a demo as the Jet Set that married Beatlesque harmonies with folkie guitar strumming. The original founding trio then acquired mandolin player Chris Hillman as a bassist and Michael Clarke as a drummer, but Clarke was recruited less because of his musical ability than because of his resemblance to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.
The group failed at cashing in on the British Invasion after recording a relatively imitative Beatlesque single as the Beefeaters, but their luck changed when their manager Jim Dickson acquired an unreleased acetate of Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man. Now renamed the Byrds, the group thought Dylan's 2/4 meter was unsuitable for a rock 'n' roll arrangement, but gradually came around as they started to rehearse the song in 4/4 time. When Dickson brought in Bob Dylan to encourage the Byrds to perform their version of Mr. Tambourine Man, Dylan marveled, "Wow, man! You can dance to that!"
When it finally came time to record Mr. Tambourine Man, the producer Terry Melcher shoved aside all the members of the Byrds except Roger McGuinn with L.A. session musicians taken from a group known as The Wrecking Crew. Despite Melcher's reliance on session musicians, the most important musical contribution came from the sole remaining group member, lead guitarist Roger McGuinn. Inspired by the movie Hard Day's Night, McGuinn played a Rickenbacker guitar, just like the one George Harrison used in that film. Then, after incorporating the Beatles' instrumental sound into a folk recording, McGuinn decided to use a rhythmic chord pattern partially inspired by the Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby. With a fusion of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Dylan, Roger McGuinn on Mr. Tambourine Man effectively created the first synthesis of American folk rock.
Chart Position: US #1, UK #1
36. Gloria JonesTainted Love / My Bad Boy Is Coming Home (1965) [Single]
Gloria Jones never landed any hits on the Billboard charts in the United States, but her R&B career found a second life in the United Kingdom after her song Tainted Love became a favorite of the Northern Soul subculture. Northern Soul was a term that originated circa 1970 to refer to American soul music on relatively obscure regional record labels that appealed to collectors and dancers from the northern part of England who didn't like '60s Motown or '70s funk. Most Americans, if they've ever heard of Tainted Love at all, only know it as a song by the New Wave band, Soft Cell, but if you listen to the original version by Gloria Jones, you will finally realize how influential it was in teaching pasty-faced Englishmen that even synthesizers can have soul.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
37.Kim FowleyThe Trip / Big Sur (1965) [Single]
What makes Kim Fowley's The Trip so influential is that it was the first single ever marketed as psychedelic music. In fact, the earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary that uses the word "psychedelic" to describe a work of music is an October 1965 advertisement that Kim Fowley placed in the Los Angeles Free Press to sell off his excess copies of The Trip. The melody of The Trip, which aims for the same incantatory feel as the Jaynetts, Sally Go Round the Roses, underscores absurdist lyrics about green fountains, purple clouds, and emerald rats that simultaneously spoofs psychedelia in the process of inventing it. The Doors liked the song so much that they borrowed its melody for Soul Kitchen on their first LP. In addition, the song is still trashy enough that it has earned the affection of normally anti-psychedelic latter-day garage rock fans, including the collectors who gave it pride of place on Volume 1 of the seminal Pebbles series of garage rock compilations.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
38. The Rolling Stones(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction / The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man (1965) [Single]
Remember how I mentioned that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards didn't start out with the same love of writing songs as Lennon and McCartney? After Jagger and Richards recorded the Lennon/McCartney composition I Wanna Be Your Man, they realized that there was money and prestige in writing their own songs, but their manager Andrew Loog Oldham still felt it necessary to lock them in a room together until they started coming up with promising tunes.
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction is the proof that Andrew Loog Oldham's tough love strategy finally paid off. There's not much I can say about the iconic opening buzzbomb guitar riff that hasn't already been written, but the lyrics encapsulate so much angst, lust, and disquietude in the span of just a few short verses that it can agitate the blood just as much as Dylan's most impassioned protest songs. The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man is not as groundbreaking as the A-side, but it's still a great example of how the Rolling Stones could rejuvenate and modernize blues clichés with the right combination of swagger and wry, cynical lyrics.
Chart Position: US #1, UK #1
39. James BrownPapa's Got a Brand New Bag (Parts I & II) (1965) [Single]
All hail the Alpha and Omega of the Funk 1.0! If James Brown hadn't found a new bag, the man who sang Please Please Please, Try Me, and Prisoner of Love would be better known today as a balladeer instead of a funkateer. If the Godfather of Soul hadn't popularized "jammin' on the one" on this single, legions of music we know today from hip hop to the Red Hot Chili Peppers wouldn't exist.
Chart Position: US #8, UK #25
40. Bob DylanLike a Rolling Stone (Part I) / Like a Rolling Stone (Part II) (1965) [Single]
Rateyourmusic.com lists the promo version of this single as coming out in August 1965, but both Wikipedia and back issues of Billboard magazine on Google Books suggest that a July 1965 release date was more likely. Columbia Records had never intended to release Like a Rolling Stone as a single, but then Shaun Considine, a Columbia Records employee, took an acetate of the song to a New York discotheque called Arthur. Crowd reaction to the song was so enthusiastic that the DJ was forced to play it again and again until the acetate wore out. Word of mouth about the song spread to local radio DJ's who called up Columbia Records demanding a copy of the song, which eventually caused Columbia to relent and release Like a Rolling Stone as a single.
Like a Rolling Stone represented Dylan's version of the raucous organ-fueled rock that he heard in the Animals version of House of the Rising Sun, a remake that forced Dylan to drop the song from his concert repertoire. The song had its genesis in a 10-page poem that Dylan had written while fueled on amphetamines, but he successfully distilled the word salad down to its essence. Even so, the song still had a running time of 6 minutes, which made Columbia understandably reluctant to release it as a single, but the song proved so popular on Top 40 radio that it opened up radio station formats to longer songs in a way that made everything else from Macarthur Park to Hey Jude to the album version of Light My Fire possible.
When Bruce Springsteen was asked about the first time he heard the song, he said it sounded as if "somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." When Paul McCartney recalled the first time he heard it, he said, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful… He showed it was possible to go a little further." Frank Zappa said that, when he heard it, "I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else.'… But it didn't do anything, it sold but nobody responded to it the way that they should have."
Chart Position: US #2, UK #4