AM GOLD MUSIC OF THE 60s & 70s
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mustang_lvr
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mustang_lvr
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- Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2005 10:45 pm
1967
The Turtles were a former surf-band (known as the Crossfires) riding the folk-rock bandwagon.Put together by Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman,who later performed as Flo and Eddie,the group was breaking up when songwriters Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon (of the Magicians) brought a dub of Happy Together to a Turtles gig at the Phone Booth in New York City.The dub had been rejected so many times it was almost unplayable,but Kaylan and Volman liked the song.And Happy Together gave the Turtles career a second wind.Though it sounds buoyant,it is according to the writers,the depressed fantasy of a guy in love with a woman who doesn't care for him.
The Turtles were a former surf-band (known as the Crossfires) riding the folk-rock bandwagon.Put together by Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman,who later performed as Flo and Eddie,the group was breaking up when songwriters Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon (of the Magicians) brought a dub of Happy Together to a Turtles gig at the Phone Booth in New York City.The dub had been rejected so many times it was almost unplayable,but Kaylan and Volman liked the song.And Happy Together gave the Turtles career a second wind.Though it sounds buoyant,it is according to the writers,the depressed fantasy of a guy in love with a woman who doesn't care for him.
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mustang_lvr
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Daydream Believer,written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio,was the first Monkees hit on which the boys played their own instruments;Nesmith led that rebellion against Don Kishner and the other businessmen who assembled and controlled the group.But without the benefit of their TV show,which the network canceled in 1968 after 59 episodes,the Monkees began slipping off the charts a little more than six months after this recording went to No.1.Their fellow Beatles imitators the Bee Gees were still on the ascent with songs like To Love Somebody and The Lights Went out in -Massachusetts.
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mustang_lvr
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1967
Love Is Here and Now You're Gone was one of the last Supremes efforts before Florence Ballard was replaced by Cindy Birdsong and Diana Ross took over star billing for the trio.Lamont Dozier,who cowrote and coproduced as usual,recalled that the idea was to take advantage of Diana's unique "Talk-singing" style:"She would start singing these songs and if they touched her emotionally,she would just cry and sing on the spot...it was no big surprise that she went into the movie business.
Love Is Here and Now You're Gone was one of the last Supremes efforts before Florence Ballard was replaced by Cindy Birdsong and Diana Ross took over star billing for the trio.Lamont Dozier,who cowrote and coproduced as usual,recalled that the idea was to take advantage of Diana's unique "Talk-singing" style:"She would start singing these songs and if they touched her emotionally,she would just cry and sing on the spot...it was no big surprise that she went into the movie business.
1967
Dionne Warwick's I Say a Little Prayer joined (Theme from)Valley of the Dolls to become her most successful two-sided hit.Aaron Nevills's Tell It Like It Is used a black expression that hippies and the student left had begun to adopt.Neville disliked the song before he cut it,as did writer Lee Diamond,former leader of little Richard's band.But by the time producer George Davis was finished,the record sounded so good that Neville's small label was swamped trying to press (and pay for) enough copies to keep up with the demand.
Dionne Warwick's I Say a Little Prayer joined (Theme from)Valley of the Dolls to become her most successful two-sided hit.Aaron Nevills's Tell It Like It Is used a black expression that hippies and the student left had begun to adopt.Neville disliked the song before he cut it,as did writer Lee Diamond,former leader of little Richard's band.But by the time producer George Davis was finished,the record sounded so good that Neville's small label was swamped trying to press (and pay for) enough copies to keep up with the demand.
Come Back When You Grow Up marked the return of teen idol Bobby Vee to the top 10 after a five-year absence.Welshman Tom Jones scored with Green,Green, Grass of Home, a curly Putman country standard inspired by a scene in John Huston's 1950 The Asphalt Jungle in which the driver of a gang's getaway car retires to his native South.British chanteuse Petula Clark's Don't Sleep in the Subway was patched together by producer Tony Hatch from fragments of three songs.
1967
The Cowsills had a story almost as unlikely as that of Bobbie Gentry.The Rhode Island singing family group was put together by retired U.S. Navy chief petty officer Bud Cowsill,who combined his wife with his four younger sons.They built a repertoire of 500 songs as they toured,and Cowsill pere used his two other sons as roadie and sound engineer and took his four year-old daughter along for the ride .
The Cowsills had a story almost as unlikely as that of Bobbie Gentry.The Rhode Island singing family group was put together by retired U.S. Navy chief petty officer Bud Cowsill,who combined his wife with his four younger sons.They built a repertoire of 500 songs as they toured,and Cowsill pere used his two other sons as roadie and sound engineer and took his four year-old daughter along for the ride .
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Running the Cowsill's as a military model Bud Cowsill went $100,000 in debt and was on the verge of surrendering before writer-producer Artie Kornfeld came to the rescue.Kornfeld got the group a deal,gave them The Rain,the Park and other Things and launched a $250,000 promotion campaign that made them so popular that they inspired the TV show The Partridge Family. At which point the partridges began putting the Cowsills out of business.
1968
By 1968,a vibrant sense of experimentation permeated all aspects of rock and pop. The sheer variety of music on the radio--AM as well as the newly utilized FM-was broader than ever,and some unlikely singles were becoming hits.Surprisingly,this wide-open scene included even soft pop,or middle-of-the-road music,up to that time the most constricted form of all.
By 1968,a vibrant sense of experimentation permeated all aspects of rock and pop. The sheer variety of music on the radio--AM as well as the newly utilized FM-was broader than ever,and some unlikely singles were becoming hits.Surprisingly,this wide-open scene included even soft pop,or middle-of-the-road music,up to that time the most constricted form of all.
1968
Consider just the top instrumentals Brazllian pianist Sergio Mendes,who had settled in the United States in the mid-1960s,was a leader of the bossa nova movement,and his records were considered instrumentals even when they used voices.He had legitimate jazz credentials--his sidemen had included bossa nova guitarist Antonio Carlos Jobim and trumpet and flogelhorn player Art Farmer--but his biggest success came whe he covered pop hits like The Look of Love, introduced the year before by Dusty Springfield in the James Bond Casino Royale.
Consider just the top instrumentals Brazllian pianist Sergio Mendes,who had settled in the United States in the mid-1960s,was a leader of the bossa nova movement,and his records were considered instrumentals even when they used voices.He had legitimate jazz credentials--his sidemen had included bossa nova guitarist Antonio Carlos Jobim and trumpet and flogelhorn player Art Farmer--but his biggest success came whe he covered pop hits like The Look of Love, introduced the year before by Dusty Springfield in the James Bond Casino Royale.
1968
Hugh Masekela,the son of a South African sculptor,took up trumpet at the age of 13 after seeing Kirk Douglas in the movie Young Man with a Horn. A veteran of various Johannesburg jazz groups,including one with pianist Dollar Brand,Masekela earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London that allowed him to escape apartheid.Then he went to the Manhattan School of Music,where Harry Belafonte found him and began promoting his career.By the mid-1960s, Masekela was married to folk singer Miriam Makeba,a fellow South African expatriate and running his own production company in Los Angeles. Masekela's jazz-Afropop fusion Grazing in the Grass sold four million worldwide .
Hugh Masekela,the son of a South African sculptor,took up trumpet at the age of 13 after seeing Kirk Douglas in the movie Young Man with a Horn. A veteran of various Johannesburg jazz groups,including one with pianist Dollar Brand,Masekela earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London that allowed him to escape apartheid.Then he went to the Manhattan School of Music,where Harry Belafonte found him and began promoting his career.By the mid-1960s, Masekela was married to folk singer Miriam Makeba,a fellow South African expatriate and running his own production company in Los Angeles. Masekela's jazz-Afropop fusion Grazing in the Grass sold four million worldwide .
1968
The most off-the0wall instrumental of the bunch was Mason Williams' Classical Gas. An Oklahoma folkie, Williams completed a navy hitch and then headed for Los Angeles,where he met Glenn Yarbrough,who was a member of the Limelighters (and later became a solo artist best known for Baby the Rain Must Fall). Yarbrough introduced him to the Smothers Brothers,then playing his club,and Williams became the comedy team's guitarist and writer.(Williams also worked in other media: he wrote and designed books,and one unusual example of his artistic abilities was displayed in the New York Museum of Modern Art.)He was writing for the Smothers Brothers' controversial TV show when he made his recording debut with an LP,The Mason Williams Phonograph Record; its No.2 single incorporates everything from classical passages to bluegrass breaks,and it won the guitarist three Grammys.
The most off-the0wall instrumental of the bunch was Mason Williams' Classical Gas. An Oklahoma folkie, Williams completed a navy hitch and then headed for Los Angeles,where he met Glenn Yarbrough,who was a member of the Limelighters (and later became a solo artist best known for Baby the Rain Must Fall). Yarbrough introduced him to the Smothers Brothers,then playing his club,and Williams became the comedy team's guitarist and writer.(Williams also worked in other media: he wrote and designed books,and one unusual example of his artistic abilities was displayed in the New York Museum of Modern Art.)He was writing for the Smothers Brothers' controversial TV show when he made his recording debut with an LP,The Mason Williams Phonograph Record; its No.2 single incorporates everything from classical passages to bluegrass breaks,and it won the guitarist three Grammys.
Dionne Warwick's (Theme From) Valley of the Dolls,written by Andre and Dory Previn,was the flip side of I Say a Little Prayer, and together they became her biggest two-sided single ever.But Otis Redding's (Sittin'on)The Dock of the Bay and Marvin Gayes I Heard it Through the Grapevine were the two epochal soul records that year.
Otis Redding wrote the former shortly after his historic performance at the Monterey Pop Festival and a follow-up appearance at the Fillmore West in San Francisco,where he floored the hippies with his raw voice and uninhibited heart.Resting in the morning sun on a houseboat in Sausalito in Sausalito,across the bay from San Francisco.Otis was inspired to create this folk-flavored meditation on his life and travels.