(Editor's Note: Jon Pennington's series on the most influential singles-remember them, reaches the Summer of Love but again, Pennington finds influences where I would most certainly have missed them)
61. The Doors
Break On Through / End of the Night (1967) [Single]
The Doors are not only influential as a psychedelic band, but also because just about every new wave, goth, industrial, and "college rock" vocalist in the 1980s from Siouxsie Sioux to Nick Cave to Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen were all trying to sound like Jim Morrison. Ian Astbury of the Cult is still trying to fill the Lizard Man's shoes, and not very successfully at that. Now that I've justified a place for the Doors on this list, I can think of no better single to showcase on this list as the Doors' debut, Break On Through. Sure, Light My Fire is the huge hit, but it's commercial breakthrough is not as difficult to explain, because it's still just a sexy come on delivered by a guy in leather pants, something Tom Jones has built a 40-year career around. In addition, Manzarek's jazzy keyboard noodling on Light My Fire sounds much more dated when compared to Break on Through, in which Morrison issues a shamanistic invocation to expand your mind until it shatters to smithereens. Except for perhaps the 13th Floor Elevators, no band made leaping nihilistically into the psychedelic void sound so attractive as the Doors did on this single.
Chart Position: UK #64 (1991 re-release), US Did not chart
62. The Beatles
Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever (1967) [Single]
Critical consensus in the 1980s often declared the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper LP as the best album of all time, based on its reputation as a pioneering concept album. One reason that consensus was unsustainable is that two of the best possible songs that could have been on Sgt. Pepper's were left off the album, because George Martin didn't realize that the old business practice of separate singles from album releases no longer made sense, either in the context of the late 1960s or with a group as huge as the Beatles. Don't believe me? Sir George Martin himself called leaving Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever of the Sgt. Pepper LP "the worst decision of my professional life."
Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, the two sides of the best double A-sided single ever, were originally conceived as components of a Beatles "Northern childhood" concept album about the Fab Four's formative experiences growing up in Liverpool. After George Martin rush-released the two songs, because he didn't have anything else to fulfill the demands for a new Beatles single, the architecture of the concept album started falling apart, although the Sgt. Pepper's conceit dreamed up by Paul and A Day of the Life at the end of the LP gives the illusion of conceptual coherence in the middle. Instead, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever only got released on LP after the Beatles needed something to keep Magic Mystery Tour from turning into a bigger critical debacle.
This is all a shame, because the wonderment of the two songs on the single cannot be denied. Penny Lane is buoyed by upward harmonies and Bach trumpet filigrees, while the lyrics are a fine-grained set of vignettes about Liverpool life, even though the reference to "finger pie" is probably some schoolboy's idea of a dirty joke. Strawberry Fields is even more groundbreaking sonically with different sections of the same song played at different speeds then spliced back together, while the lyrics are the most introspective that Lennon ever did with the Beatles.
Penny Lane: US #1, UK #2
Strawberry Fields Forever: US #8, UK #2
63. Soft MachineLove Makes Sweet Music / Feelin' Reelin' Squeelin' (1967) [Single]
Soft Machine is best known today for the blend of psychedelia, progressive rock, and jazz known as the Canterbury Sound. The A-side of their debut single, Love Makes Sweet Music, reminds me of Stevie Winwood and the Spencer Davis group vocally, but the instrumentation reminds me more of what the Who might have done in one of their more pop-psych moments, circa I Can See for Miles.
But the A-side is not the reason why this single is on this list. It's the B-side that has the most influential sound, even if few records could absorb all the influences it projects. The lead vocals by Kevin Ayers are in a pseudo-ominous Cookie Monster growl that anticipates death metal and industrial, while the instrumentation veers from raga to jazz to guitar feedback to recorder tootling to cluster chords on an electric keyboard, as if the band couldn't stand to stay in the same style for 5 seconds.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or UK
64. Pink FloydArnold Layne / Candy and a Currant Bun (1967) [Single]
Pink Floyd was the first great UK psychedelic band that could only be judged as a psychedelic band. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, and the Beach Boys had all done work in the psychedelic style, but their careers didn't rise and fall according to the popularity of psychedelia as a genre. Pink Floyd, on the other hand, was the first major UK band to do their best work as a psychedelic band, because otherwise they would have been just some third-rate R&B band playing the English pub circuit.
The A-side of their debut single, Arnold Layne, isn't necessarily typical of the material on their first album, Piper at the Gates of Down, but it definitively establishes Syd Barrett's demented take on quintessentially English eccentricity. The lyrics may sound tame nowadays, but at the time, the BBC couldn't handle the implication that Mr. Layne not only stole women's underwear, but he did so because it looked good on him. Candy and a Currant Bun is perhaps even more amazing than the A-side with a food as lust metaphor that I'm still trying to parse out, although Robyn Hitchcock has probably built an entire career around trying to outdo that B-side.
Chart Position: UK #20, Did not chart in US
65. Jimi HendrixPurple Haze / 51st Anniversary (1967) [Single]
Hendrix spent years in thankless jobs in the United States as an R&B sideman, but he didn't truly discover his own sound until he started listening to Dylan and hanging out with white folk rockers in Greenwich Village. We might underestimate Dylan's effect on inspiring unconventional singers today, but Dylan gave Hendrix the confidence that he could sing, despite his soft-spoken mumbly voice. Another thing Hendrix discovered in Greenwich Village was good acid, which along with his love for science fiction gave Hendrix the inspiration for Purple Haze. Hey Joe may have been Jimi Hendrix's first hit single in the UK, but nothing said "Strap in. You're in for a bumpy ride." more strongly than the blaring, contrapuntal opening notes of Hendrix's introductory solo on Purple Haze.
Chart Position: US #65, UK #3
66. Scott McKenzieSan Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) / What's the Difference (1967) [Single]
Ironically, the song on the A-side was written by an L.A. musician (John Philips of the Mamas & the Papas) to publicize a rock concert 100 miles from the city in the title (the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival). 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. The song purportedly inspired protesters during the Prague Spring in their yearnings to create "socialism with a human face" before having their dreams crushed by Soviet tanks, but I mostly shudder at the song for its twinkly, twee optimism that led thousands of idealistic youth to embark for San Francisco, only to have a nontrivial percentage end up as speed addicts and Hells' Angel gang bang fodder when the Haight-Ashbury crashed and burned later.
Chart Position: US #4, UK #1
67. The Parliaments(I Wanna) Testify / I Can Feel the Ice Melting (1967) [Single]
Before George Clinton's Parliamentfunkadelicthang revolutionized 1970s funk, he came up with (I Wanna) Testify, a forward-looking blend of Impressions-style soul, chords that sound if they were borrowed from 1960s sunshine psych pop, and embryonic funk moves. This is what the funk sounded like before the Age of Aquarius optimism died. Nobody at the time could have predicted that R&B nightclub groups would soon be trading in the matching suits for Afros and wah-wah pedals, but the A-side was definitely a harbinger of things to come.
Chart Position: US #20, Did not chart in the UK
68. The Chambers BrothersTime Has Come Today / People Get Ready (1967) [Single]
The Chambers Brothers started out as a black gospel act that played to white folkie audiences, but they had aspirations of electrifying their sound. In fact, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, they played their own brand of gospel folk with electric guitars, but that historical fact usually gets ignored because that's the same festival where Dylan decided to "go electric." Eventually, the band acquired a white drummer in search of a more "rock" sound, which ultimately resulted in Time Has Come Today.
The first version of Time Has Come Today was originally released in 1966 (with radio promotion advertisements with voiceover from Morgan Freeman!), but the song didn't start taking on the form that most people remember until the song got stretched out into an 11-minute version on the album, The Time Has Come. Then, after the long version got made, two different edits of the single were eventually made, one clocking in at 3:05 and another clocking in at 4:45.
Personally, of all the single versions, I prefer the 4:45 version as the truest vision of when the soul got psychedelicized. From the get-go, the reverb opening Time Has Come Today definitively establishes that nothing improves a song more than MORE COWBELL!, decades before Christopher Walken made it a fratboy catchphrase. Meanwhile, the extended echoey breakdown of cowbell and the band shouting "Time!" make the 4:45 version of Time Has Come Today the closest thing that the 1960s ever produced that resembles a modern 12-inch dance mix. Finally, the prior experience of lead vocalist Lester Chambers as a gospel frontman gives the shouty vocals an urgency that few protest songs of the 60s could match.
Chart Position: US #11, Did not chart in UK
69. The Velvet UndergroundWhite Light/White Heat / Here She Comes Now (1967) [Single]
When the Velvet Underground recorded their second LP, they had the chance to make their music more accessible, but instead they decided to be even more uncompromising than their first LP. White Light/White Heat, the A-side from the title track of that LP, has Lou Reed banging the piano relentlessly and repetitively with less of the minimalist aspirations as Cale's piano work on the first LP, while the guitar work sounds like some of the Merseybeat piss-takes that Lou Reed wrote as a staff writer for Pickwick Records. The feel of the instrumentation is both rollicking and propulsive with Moe Tucker on drums adding more cymbal wash than most VU songs, until the A-side ends in about 20 seconds of feedback. The B-side is comparatively less hard-edged than the A-side, but the song has that throbbing, repetitive, incantatory feel that characterized some of the best fusions of minimalism and garage rock from the first LP.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or the UK
60. Sly & the Family StoneDance to the Music / Let Me Hear It From You (1967) [Single]
I like looking at the back issues of Billboard magazine on Google Books, but Billboard is still a trade publication, which means you have to take the reviews of new singles with massive grains of salt. However, when I read the review for the Dance to the Music 45, I understand how even the reviewer for Billboard couldn't deny the specialness of that record. The review read: "The wildest dance record of the week is this raucous rhythm number that could come from left field and prove a giant. Beat, arrangement and vocals are sensational."
Radio audiences at the time simply couldn't believe how fresh Sly & the Family Stone's major label debut single, Dance to the Music, sounded. The concept is simple yet so revolutionary. Write a funky self-referential song that calls attention to what it's doing so clearly (e.g., "All we need is a drummer for people who only need a beat.") that even the squarest members of your audience can't stop dancing. There had been interracial bands before, such as Booker T. & the MG's and Love, but no band had embodied the ideal of interracial collaboration so well as Sly & the Family Stone did in laying down the combination of funk and San Francisco acid rock found on Dance to the Music.
Chart Position: US #8, UK #7