(Editor's Note: 1968 and the end was nigh, on one hand bubblegum was up and coming and on the other, psychedelia was in full effect)
71. The 1910 Fruitgum Company
Simon Says / Reflections From the Looking Glass (1967) [Single]
After the Beatles started expanding their minds and their sound on Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's, the less adventurous members of their Beatlemaniac fan base were not willing to go along with them after they got "too weird." This created an opening for Don Kirshner to invent the Monkees, but the members of the Monkees eventually got enough clout as musicians to rebel against their creator. (Mike Nesmith having a whole pile of F.U. money because his mother invented White Out didn't hurt either.)
Leave it to Buddah Records to find a way out of this problem. 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. Some bubblegum enthusiasts might prefer to select the Lemon Pipers, Green Tambourine as the first bubblegum hit, but the Lemon Pipers were actually a legit garage/psych band before making their Faustian bargain with Buddah Records. The 1910 Fruitgum Company broke the mold, because it was designed from the start to be an anonymous, studio-only outfit recorded on the cheap to eliminate any expenses accrued from touring, stroking rock star egos, or accommodating demands for artistic integrity.
Simon Says not only sold 5 million copies (selling way more than Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, for instance), but it also established a basic template that combined nursery rhyme lyrics with a blatant play for a then-untapped prepubescent pop singles market. This template was responsible for not only numerous subsequent bubblegum singles, but also paved the way for the 1970s explosion of vanilla teen pop stars like Donny Osmond, Bobby Sherman, and Lief Garrett.
But if you think the influence stops there, you haven't heard the half of it. The marketing genius behind the bubblegum business model was Buddah executive Neil Bogart. Bogart would ride out the bubblegum craze until it ended a short while later, later founding Casablanca Records, the label that gave us such symbols of 1970s excess as Kiss, Donna Summer, and the Village People.
Chart Position: US #4, UK #2
72. Bob DylanAll Along the Watchtower / I'll Be Your Baby Tonight (1968) [Single]
This is actually a 1968 French single of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower that was not released in the United States, but I'm using it as a stand-in for Bob Dylan's John Welsey Harding LP, which was released on December 27, 1967. In the fall of 1967, when the world was waiting for Dylan to release his follow-up to Blonde on Blonde, most people assumed that Dylan would release something excruciatingly big, something with even grander ambitions than he displayed on Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited. In short, people expected Blonde on Blonde II: Bigger and Badder.
Instead, Dylan went the opposite direction with his John Wesley Harding LP, repudiating psychedelic excess and studio overproduction, replacing the amphetamine-fueled word salad of the lyrics from his electric period in favor of a sparer, starker, more Biblical language. Instead of trying to beat the Beatles and the Stones at "Can you top this?", Dylan won the game by refusing to play, while the Rolling Stones and the Beatles got criticized for overreaching on Her Satanic Majesty's Request and Magical Mystery Tour, respectively.
The result is that Dylan ushered in a "back to basics" movement that would eventually sound the death knell for 60s psychedelia, Jimi Hendrix's awesome cover of All Along the Watchtower notwithstanding. The Beatles would go from psychedelically covered LP jackets to the White Album a short while later, while the Rolling Stones would finally emerge out of the Beatles' shadow by going back to their R&B roots.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or the UK
73. CreamSunshine of Your Love / SWLABR (1967) [Single]
The most important proof of the influence of Cream's Sunshine of Your Love is that lazy movie and TV directors always use it when they want to segue into a character having a flashback to the 1960s. Yet beyond that, the song still retains some of its luster despite overuse, because Cream represented a commercial breakthrough for the same power trio format originally pioneered by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, although Cream had no use for a frontman who didn't pull his weight instrumentally.
Clapton certainly had the guitar chops, but he thankfully took enough acid that he no longer had such a bug up his butt about blues-based authenticity as he did when he left the Yardbirds. Jack Bruce pulled off one of the most earth-shaking bass accompaniments ever done for a psychedelic song, while Ginger Baker's drummer displays both jazz prowess and proto-heavy metal power. Clapton hasn't improved on it since.
Chart Position: US #5, UK #25
74. Larry Williams & Johnny WatsonNobody / Find Yourself Someone to Love (1967) [Single]
In 1967, Larry Williams and Johnny "Guitar" Watson hooked up with the California psychedelic band Kaleidoscope in the hopes that adding some hippie flavoring to their R&B would give them a nice follow-up to the minor hit they had with Mercy, Mercy, Mercy that just barely scraped the Billboard pop charts at #96. At the time, Kaleidoscope might have been viewed as the musicians with the more promising career. Larry Williams was primarily known for older R&B songs like Slow Down and Dizzy Miss Lizzie, which both made into the Beatles' repertoire, while Kaleidoscope was an up-and-coming psych band that had a great gimmick in that all the bands members were multiinstrumentalists who played exotic instruments like dulcimer, dobro, oud, mandolin, and bouzouki.
In reality, as the title of the A-side might have predicted, nobody really profited much from this single, not Larry Williams, not Johnny "Guitar" Watson, not Kaleidoscope. In fact, the musician who would emerge from this with most successful subsequent career was Johnny "Guitar" Watson, who had his career reenergized during the funk era of the 1970s. However, what's most amazing about this single is that it has white musicians and black musicians creating a novel raga-funk hybrid out of a position of mutual admiration and respect, with nobody riding on anybody's coattails and nobody depending on anybody else for street cred. Other predominantly white bands who have experimented with world music as Kaleidoscope did, such as Camper van Beethoven or Vampire Weekend, have never attained the sheer funkiness that this Larry Williams/Kaleidoscope collaboration did.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or the UK
75. Les Yper SoundPsyché Rock / Too Fortiche (1967) [Single]
The Les Yper Sound is actually the French avant-garde electronic composer Pierre Henry under another name, making buzzy bleep-bloop discotheque Europsychedelia that sounds a lot fresher than some of the more "authentic" psychedelic bands from that period. Stereolab paid tribute by including a song called "Les Yper Sound" on their Emperor Tomato Ketchup album, but you probably know about the A-side, either because you've heard the Fat Boy Slim remix or because the A-side sounds really familiar if you've ever heard the theme song to Futurama. The B-side is less familiar than the A-side, but it's no less good with overamped drumming and bloopy electronic drip drip noises that remind me of similar noises on Jamaican dub records from the 1970s, although with a more Eurotrashy feel.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or the UK
76. Blue CheerSummertime Blues / Out of Focus (1968) [Single]
Blue Cheer was a psychedelic band less interested in metaphysical profundity than in getting high and cranking their amplifiers to 11. Their remake of Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues combined acid-fried guitars, surly vocals, and ungodly thumping drums in such an all-out rock holocaust that it simultaneously fathered both heavy metal and grunge. The B-side is a fine continuation of the mastodon riffs on the A-side, but I'm not sure your ears or your brain could take the punishment (or the gratification).
Chart Position: US #14, Did not chart in the UK
77. MC5Looking at You / Borderline (1968) [Single]
White Detroit area beatnik activist John Sinclair had just finished serving a 6-month sentence for marijuana possession in the fall of 1966, when members of the local countercultural community decided to throw a welcome back party for him with a top local rock band, the Motor City Five, by then already known as the MC5 for short. At first, Sinclair dismissed the MC5 as "jive rock 'n' rollers" who didn't understand that the true musical and political revolution was the free jazz movement linked to black nationalism, until the members of the MC5 confronted Sinclair and told him that yes they did indeed know who Sun Ra and John Coltrane were. Sinclair then quickly changed course, envisioning the MC5 as a band that could convert the unwashed Caucasian teen masses to the revolutionary program of "total assault on the culture" laid down by the White Panther Party.
Sinclair's earnest leftism has diminished the MC5's critical reputation over the years when compared to another Detroit area band, the Stooges, but the best case for the MC5 as protopunk pioneers can be found on their independently issued single, Looking at You/Borderline. It may sound politically naive today that people could have believed that you could make revolution solely with electric guitars, but after listening to Looking at You, I don't blame people back then for believing it.
Borderline is even more amazing with sheets of guitar feedback lying underneath of overlapping waves of harmony vocals that sound almost raga-like, yet without sounding gimmicky. The feedback is both used experimentally and for its sheer sonic crunch, an approach that even Sonic Youth could envy.
Chart Position: Did not chart in the US or the UK
78. The ByrdsYou Ain't Going Nowhere / Artificial Energy (1968) [Single]
The B-side, Artificial Energy, is a horn-fueled antidrug song that lyrically suggests that the Byrds had grown tired with psychedelia, but it's the A-side that's proved to be more influential. Like the Byrds did on their debut single, they signaled a desire to change current musical trends by recording a Bob Dylan song, except this time, their version of You Ain't Going Nowhere has a strong country & western flavor. With this A-side, they prefigured much of the alt-country movement of the 1990s, but you can also see how they made commercially viable the kind of corporate country rock that was all over the 1970s radio landscape, as the heavy rotation of Eagles songs that still persists on any local classic rock station will show you. Do not get mad, because this gave us the Eagles. Just listen to the A-side and mourn for what might have been.
Chart Position: US #74, UK #45
79. The Rolling StonesJumpin' Jack Flash / Child of the Moon (1968) [Single]
Dylan may have initiated the back to basics movement, but no band embraced it as heartily as the Rolling Stones, who also saw the return to their roots as an ideal moment to emerge from the Beatles' shadow. The Rolling Stones would soon hit their stride releasing their most commercially and critically successful run of albums (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street), but Jumpin' Jack Flash is the single that got the Stones their mojo back. Child of the Moon on the B-side is the kind of dark-hearted psychedelia (a la Paint It Black) that would have improved Their Satanic Majesty's Request, if it had been included, but the song has just enough bluesy tinges that you sense that the band already wants to stop fucking around and go back to playing blues again anyway.
Chart Position: US #3, UK #1
80. The Crazy World of Arthur BrownFire! / Rest Cure (1968) [Single]
Arthur Brown's opening invocation, "I am the god of hellfire!," makes him the godfather of legions of heavy metal Satanist wannabes, while the Crazy World of Arthur Brown stage show featured masks and pyrotechnics several years before KISS even knew what to do with face paint. On top of this, the way that the A-side completely dispenses with guitar in favor of electric organ also prefigures the rise of organ-fueled progressive rock, such as Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, which only makes sense since Carl Palmer was in The Crazy World of Arthur Brown anyway.
Chart Position: US #2, UK #1