Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Margaret Forster, author of Georgy Girl, 1966

  Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century.

  Leonard Bernstein, 1966

  People who develop a love affair with pop music usually do so aged ten or eleven, maybe twelve at a push. At least, that is the oldest you can be and still fall in love with any guitar, any bass drum, soak up the whole of the Top 20 and love it all without question. Some people, for this reason, will have a favourite year – say 1960, 1975, 1985, 1997 – that is objectively a bad year for pop; it may seem to them that pop had evolved to reach the point of perfection (in the guise of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ or ‘I’m Not in Love’ or ‘A Different Corner’ or ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’), and that that single year produced the records against which all else in the future has to be measured.

  1966 is different. It was the first time that modern pop music had been seen as culturally and artistically significant. Anyone looking at any random Top 20 from 1966 will be able to pick out half a dozen singles that are stone, ten-out-of-ten, copper-bottomed classics. Brand-new, forward-looking, everyone pulling their weight. It was the year Leonard Bernstein theorised pop with a US TV documentary called Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. He said he was ‘fascinated by this strange and compelling scene called pop music … It’s completely of, by, and for the kids. And by kids I mean anyone from eight years old to twenty-five … It raises lots of questions, but right now, for openers, here are the two that concern me most. One: why do adults resent it so, and two: why do I like it?’ 1966 was the year it all came together.

  One clue that something magical was happening was, perversely, Phil Spector’s retirement. The man who had done more than anyone to progress the sonic impact of pop, to turn the studio into an instrument, and to elevate the teenage experience into an art form, could see no new avenues for the wall of sound after ‘River Deep – Mountain High’. The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson had once been just a Spector disciple, belittled by his teacher’s callous rejection of ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, which he had written as a hymn to the Ronettes. Now he used everything he’d learnt from Spector and created the Pet Sounds album, more subtle, more moving than anything either had cut before. Pop had caught up with Spector and, if he couldn’t be at the top of the tree, he would rather quit.1

  Pop music was now treated as a genuine art form – by The Times in England, by Tom Wolfe in Esquire. All other contemporary art – cinema, poetry, painting – seemed to coalesce around it. In Liverpool, one of the Mersey poets, Roger McGough, got into pop with the Scaffold (‘Thank U Very Much’, UK no. 4 ’67); a few others started a group called, with an arched eyebrow, the Liverpool Scene. In New York, Andy Warhol gave his patronage to the Velvet Underground. In cinema, soundtrack writer John Barry became a bona fide pop star; not only did he score the James Bond films – ‘million dollar Mickey Mouse music’, as he called it – but he also married teenage model and actress Jane Birkin, who herself would have a number-one single in 1969; it was hard to imagine Dimitri Tiomkin doing anything as flash. Talking about his Cadogan Square flat, Barry nailed the new scene: ‘I put on a suit and walk in one direction, throw on some blue jeans and walk in another, into Chelsea. I’ve got the best of both worlds.’

  And maybe when John Barry gave that interview, David Bailey was on his way round to the flat to shoot Jane Birkin (though Barry would have been wise to stay in, given the photographer’s reputation). Bailey was the thinly disguised subject of Blow Up, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s sexy movie based around the London art scene that included a live performance by the Yardbirds. The lead character was played by David Hemmings, an actor who would soon release an album of his own, with instrumental backing by the Byrds. And so it went on. Everything joined up.

  London was the centre of the new order and the Rolling Stones were its embodiment, the ultimate dandy pop stars for louche aristocrats to be seen with. They would be seen at Old Etonian art dealer Robert Fraser’s gallery – ‘Groovy Bob’ already numbered Paul McCartney among his circle of friends. Claes Oldenburg remembered: ‘The role of the Rolling Stones was to be the bad kids on the block, early punks if you like, and the Beatles were the good guys. They played their roles very well. They came to the openings, and Mick Jagger said awfully nasty things to everybody and Paul McCartney was very nice, charming.’ The Stones had already satirised the slumming debutante in ‘Play with Fire’, the flip side of ‘The Last Time’ in ’65. Now, with Marianne Faithfull on his arm (who may have grown up in a terraced house in Reading, but had a cut-glass voice and an Austrian baroness for a mother), Mick Jagger was the highest-profile example of a suddenly classless society. Rich folks had patronised pop before, with Jackie Kennedy seen twisting at the Peppermint Lounge in 1962, but this time the gatecrashers were running the party. Everything was pop. Everyone – Michael Caine, Peter Blake, Truman Capote, Princess Margaret – was a pop star.

  Leonard Bernstein realised, quite quickly, that this extended beyond party guest lists and the extent of your credit on Carnaby Street. This was an important movement, said Bernstein, socially and musically:

  I think this music has something terribly important to tell us adults, and I think we would be wise not to behave like ostriches about it.

  Throughout pop in 1966, there was a sense of friendly competition, as if everyone was willing this golden moment to continue. Previous modern pop eras had felt fleeting – no matter how thrilling they may have been, there was no sense of progress from one Little Richard record to the next.2 Now everyone felt obliged to better their previous record, and everyone else’s previous record.

  On the Four Tops’ ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’ (US and UK no. 1), the drums send out signals to the distant damsel in distress, the woodwinds pine in empathy, and then Levi Stubbs rides in on a white horse, reaching down to pull the girl from the swamp. 1966 was the year John Lennon made his crack about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus – here was a Tamla Motown record that was a viable secular crutch, something to truly give you succour when the rain came down. Soul had many screamers who over-emoted, but Levi Stubbs wasn’t one of them. Usually Four Tops songs found him standing in the shadows on a lonely street, but on ‘Reach Out’ he got to be a hero for once. It was followed at number one by the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’; in a way, they are the ultimate number ones. Both records condense so much, deftly mixing so many genres and new sounds inside three minutes, that you can only marvel at how it must have felt to hear them on the radio for the first time.

  For a sense of progression, take a look at some runs of singles from late ’65 through ’66: the Beatles’ ‘We Can Work It Out’, ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’; the Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Ann’, ‘Sloop John B’, ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Good Vibrations’; the Kinks’ ‘Till the End of the Day’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and ‘Dead End Street’. This is also how the Rolling Stones ended up with the formless cacophony of ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby’;3 it was a relative failure, but you had to try, you had to.

  There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time round. It could come only out of the ferment that characterises today’s pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today’s most important pop musicians, sings his own ‘Surf’s Up’. Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity. It is a symbol of the change many musicians see in our future … Serious and silly, sweet and grandiose.

  A friend of mine’s earliest memory is of his father coming home from work with a 45, telling the family to gather in the front room because he had something very important to play them. It was ‘Good Vibrations’. Aside from its brief appearance on Inside Pop, the outside world wouldn’t get to hear ‘Surf’s Up’ until its official release in 1971, but it didn’t seem to matter at the time, when there was so much you could draw from ‘Good Vibrations’, modern pop’s first multi-movement single, the first suggestion that it was bursting out of its s
kin and its ideas and ambitions couldn’t be contained on a seven-inch single. Little did anyone know this would be the last time Brian Wilson and the group’s bellicose cheerleader Mike Love would gain commercial joy from their combative relationship. Brian had his classical leanings, and Mike was a jock with a roving eye for Southern girls ‘who keep their boyfriends warm at night’; Love came up with the chorus hook, and Brian’s disparate elements fell into place – it was a UK and US number one in October ’66, and felt like the future.

  A quick dissection of ‘Good Vibrations’: the opening keyboard sound always feels to me like sunlight through a kitchen window first thing in the morning, the death-ray theremin of the chorus sounds like Star Trek (first screened in 1966), and when I hear the harpsichord section there’s a girl in a white dress sat on my lap in the back of an old jalopy. ‘Good Vibrations’ can make synaesthetes out of all of us. On top of all that, it’s a pretty faultless love song. Right here, friends, we have the pinnacle of sixties pop.

  And it’s not only the Beatles who make these inventions. For instance there’s a group known as the Left Banke that has a tune called ‘Pretty Ballerina’. This tune is built, not in the usual major or minor scale, but in a combination of the Lydian and Mixolydian modes – imagine that! Comes out with a sort of Turkish or Greek sound. Rather unusual, wouldn’t you say?

  Over in New York, a classically trained keyboard player called Michael Brown had been paying close attention to the emergence of the Zombies. ‘She’s Not There’ was a far bigger hit in the States than it was in the UK, and Brown was inspired. He formed a band called the Left Banke and roped in his dad, the arranger Harry Lookofsky, to oversee their first single. The other players were rudimentary, so Lookofsky focused on Brown’s harpsichord and the string quartet; ‘Walk Away Renee’ (US no. 5) was the first bona fide baroque pop hit at the end of ’65.

  Anglophiles to a man, the Left Banke neatly invented a sound which was soft but insistently sad. Like the Zombies’ Colin Blunstone, their singer Steve Martin could belt them out if he wanted to but preferred the delicate touch, as witnessed on their second hit, ‘Pretty Ballerina’ (US no. 16 ’66). Titles like ‘Dark Is the Bark’, ‘Barterers and Their Wives’ and ‘Ivy, Ivy’ gave away their lyrical inclinations. In a 1972 letter to a fan, guitarist Rick Brand claimed their lyrics ‘were written as rather self consciously [sic] beautiful musical whimsy, as you find in the later 18th century romantic music, pre-Beethoven’.

  For a while in ’66 harpsichords and string quartets chimed with the charts – the Rolling Stones cut ‘Lady Jane’, the Kinks’ Face to Face album featured ‘Too Much on My Mind’ and ‘Two Sisters’, and the Beatles melded Purcell baroque with the soundtrack to Fahrenheit 451 for ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Possibly this was down to pop stars moving out of transit vans and into limos, away from package-tour shows in Accrington and Aylesbury, becoming society players and gaining a taste for the high life. But just as likely it was born from the excitable search for newness; no record before or since the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds has used the bass harmonica as a lead instrument. In 1966 things were moving so fast that each Beatles single seemed like a new era, and studio experimentation was a must. Bring on the clavichord, they cried.

  The apogee of this arcane sonic adventure was the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the spring of ’67, which mixed everyday lyrics with music hall and Edwardiana, creating lysergically enhanced parlour music. But as we’ll see, just months later the Technicolor dream-coats were put away, and replaced by soiled denims.

  Our pop generation reaches and spreads itself, grasping at the unattainable … The straining tenderness of those high, untrained young voices … Now of course, whereas I may call that straining after falsetto dreams of glory, you may call it nothing but a breakdown in gender, that same androgynous phenomenon of the pop scene that produces boys with long hair and ruffled shirts. And you may be right.

  That the British Invasion swept away a whole strain of pop is largely true – the careers of Dion, the Everly Brothers, Billy Fury and the Shirelles, for instance, were put on ice in spite of the consistently strong singles they released through the mid-sixties, while the Brill Building style of hit-making was replaced by the autonomous band. Yet there are clear examples of groups, still capable of growth, who were un affected. The Beach Boys were largely self-managed, and Detroit’s Tamla Motown supplanted New York’s Brill Building. Then there were the Four Seasons, a bunch of square-looking Jersey boys whose singer Frankie Valli had the most unearthly falsetto.4 Some records may sound like New York – the Five Satins’ ‘In the Still of the Nite’, the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’, Blondie’s ‘Union City Blue’ – but the intro to the Four Seasons’ ‘Walk Like a Man’ (US no. 1, UK no. 12 ’63) is the only one I can think of that sounds like the Empire State Building being constructed.

  Frankie Valli couldn’t have been more old-school New York Italian if he’d been a method actor. He cut his first single in 1953, a year before Elvis even made it to a studio. He joined the Four Lovers in ’56, who mutated into the Four Seasons in ’61. Fame was worked at, sweated for. ‘We were out there. People think we were an overnight success, but when we weren’t singing we were filling in to feed families. I was a young kid working in a bowling alley, setting up pins. Also I was a hairdresser, construction worker, florist, I drove trucks. Whatever I had to do.’

  After an aspiring singer and actor called Joe Pesci introduced Bob Gaudio to the group, they had themselves a songwriter. When producer Bob Crewe heard Valli’s skyscraping voice in 1962, he decided he had to work with them: suddenly it all clicked, and they scored three US number ones on the bounce with ‘Sherry’, ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ and ‘Walk Like a Man’. Ex-Four Lover Charlie Calello returned to score their urban dramas, and Crewe and Gaudio became a writing machine, the former seeing sound in pictures, drawing clouds and waterfalls on Calello’s orchestral notation. Between them they fashioned what Crewe called a ‘fist of sound’, a harder counterpart to Brian Wilson and Phil Spector’s west-coast teen symphonies. The stories were usually of hair-shirted anguish (‘Big Man in Town’, ‘Dawn Go Away’, ‘Bye Bye Baby’) or denial, often on some dumb point of macho principle (‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’, ‘Silence Is Golden’, ‘Rag Doll’) – with Joe Pesci as a connection it isn’t a stretch to say these records anticipated the Scorsese-era acting boom.

  By 1966 they should have been throwbacks, as lost as Dion and the Belmonts, but Crewe and Calello were tremendously inventive arrangers, and 1966 was open to all comers. They reached the US Top 20 with a song called ‘Opus 17’ that had the most chromatic key changes of any hit single.5 The Four Seasons had sidestepped the British Invasion, and attuned and realigned their sound in late ’65 with the Motown fuzz of ‘Let’s Hang On’ (US no. 3, UK no. 4), following it with the blue-eyed soul of ‘Working My Way Back to You’ (US no. 9, UK no. 50 ’66), ‘Opus 17’ (US no. 13 ’66) and – best of all – ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin’ (US no. 9, UK no. 12 ’66); Bernstein would have heard echoes of Schumann. They took Cole Porter’s song and rendered it contemporary, with tubular bells, a scuffed Palm Springs pavement beat and an expansive, romantic intro that matched Brian Wilson’s majestic opening for ‘California Girls’.

  ‘The idea came from a date we played in Florida,’ said Valli. ‘Sinatra was appearing and we were invited. Just amazing. I couldn’t believe. So, three or four in the morning the phone rings. Bob Gaudio. Can it wait, I say? No … I got an idea for a song – it’s “I’ve Got You under My Skin”. What? The song we just heard Sinatra do? How can you make it better? Trust me, he says, I’ve got the whole thing in my head. And that’s how it came out. Almost symphonic. Beautiful.’

  Even Frankie Valli didn’t have the screamiest voice of ’66. That belonged to a Polish Italian from Pittsburgh called Lou Christie. I’ve never quite worked out how serious Christie is. His run of hits started at the same time as the Four Seasons’ and, working with a gypsy songwriter twice hi
s age called Twyla Herbert and a squeaky girl group called the Tammys, they made a batch of 45s that sounded like the Valli boys in a garden shed. There was something oddly knowing about Christie’s hits – ‘The Gypsy Cried’, ‘Two Faces Have I’ and ‘Lightnin’ Strikes’ (US no. 1, UK no. 11 ’66). Maybe it was Herbert’s input, written with the same distance of years that had made Chuck Berry’s teen-lifestyle hits seem so vivid, almost super-realist. On ‘Lightnin’ Strikes’, Christie starts pleading gruffly, unconvincingly (‘Believe it or not, you’re in my heart all the time’), then the music switches to a chocolate-box backing on the bridge, and Christie does his most gallant Bing Crosby croon (‘There’s a chapel in the pines …’ – really!). Will she swallow this hokum? Surely not, as Christie’s Mr Hyde starts to emerge on the punky pre-chorus (‘When I see lips waiting to be kissed, I can’t stop myself …’) and explodes out of his skin, shrieking his lust on the falsetto chorus – ‘Liiiiightniiiiing striiiiking agaiiiiin!’ Game over. Christie had a major hit every few years, a dozen Hot Hundred entries spread over as many years, and scored a big bubblegum hit in ’69 with ‘I’m Gonna Make You Mine’ (US no. 10, UK no. 2). After this he was a Playgirl centrefold, cut a Polish Italian take on ‘What’s Going On’ in 1971 with the panoramic Paint America Love album, gave up pop to become a truck driver for a year after it flopped, and married Miss Great Britain. He’s probably worth a book of his own.

  Many of the lyrics in their oblique allusions and way-out metaphors are beginning to sound like real poems.

  The influence of Dylan had been fully absorbed into the mainstream by 1966. On ‘Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James’ (UK no. 2), Manfred Mann told a wedding story from the point of view of a jilted lover, a tale familiar from Eddie Fisher’s ‘Outside of Heaven’ (UK no. 1 ’53) now grafted onto Dylan’s ire: ‘I can see you in the morning time – washing day, weather’s fine – hanging things upon the line, as your life slips away.’ Backed by Beach Boys harmonies (the Manfreds were the most bandwagon-happy of all the British beat groups), singer Mike D’Abo transported ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ from the Lower East Side to Dorking: ‘So you think you will be happy buttering the toast for your semi-detached suburban Mr Most?’ Bob Lind combined Dylanesque imagery (‘softly in the distance, through the canyons of your mind’) with a dreamy cloudscape arrangement, courtesy of Jack Nitzsche, on the divine ‘Elusive Butterfly’ (US and UK no. 5). And at Motown, the motormouth delivery of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ informed Stevie Wonder’s ‘Uptight’ (US no. 3, UK no. 16), while Levi Stubbs’s ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’ leaned on the cadences of Dylan’s ‘Queen Jane Approximately’, a track from Blonde on Blonde which must have been in the shops for all of a month when the Four Tops went in to cut their masterpiece. You couldn’t keep still.