1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  In fact, it was a gospel song that kept Presley at the top of the charts that year. His five-year-old cover of “Crying in the Chapel” was released as a single for Easter and surprised everyone by becoming a No. 3 hit in the United States and No. 1 in the United Kingdom. Presley began to think it was time to start seriously recording again. Next spring he would record the classic gospel album How Great Thou Art and, during the sessions, cover Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” With Dylan covers being all the rage, it could have been the most notable one of all; Dylan later called it “the one recording I treasure most.”34 Naturally, Presley’s clueless manager buried it on a lame soundtrack album. Still, the King was on his way back.

  IV

  AUTUMN

  17

  Next Day You Turn Around and It’s Fall

  Frank Sinatra begins his comeback with September of My Years, the Beatles’ “Yesterday” hits No. 1 on October 9 and becomes the most covered song of the decade, and the Rolling Stones rush to record their own song with strings on October 26.

  Frank Sinatra, a.k.a. the Chairman of the Board, was trying to figure out how to push his way back into “Beatle land.” At the moment, he was firmly ensconced in easy listening, which was as much its own alternate dimension as country.

  In the 1950s, many radio stations wanted to play popular songs without the rock beat. Billboard started listing such songs on a chart separate from pop, R&B, and country. It changed the name a number of times (pop-standard singles, middle-road singles) until finally settling on easy listening in 1965.1 It became the most popular FM format nationwide (rebranded “adult contemporary” in 1979). Like Muzak and elevator music, it was safe for doctors’ offices and supermarkets, generally the modern version of big band music.

  Nat King Cole, who passed away in February, was one of easy listening’s mainstays. Sinatra gave Tony Bennett a huge boost when he told Life that Bennett was the best singer in the business. Bennett’s version of “The Shadow of Your Smile” beat out “Yesterday,” Sinatra’s “September of My Years,” and “King of the Road” for Grammy Song of the Year. The song was the theme to Liz Taylor’s movie about Big Sur bohemians, called The Sandpiper, and won the Oscar for Best Original Song as well. Everybody in easy listening covered it: Barbra Streisand, Shirley “Goldfinger” Bassey, Perry Como, Andy Williams (who had the top-rated NBC variety show), Herb Alpert, Trini Lopez, Johnny Mathis, Bobby Darin, and even Marvin Gaye, his desire to be an old-school crooner still going strong.

  The Righteous Brothers and Phil Spector had returned in July with “Unchained Melody.” Another group of “brothers” with resounding baritones—the Walker Brothers—scored in August with “Make It Easy on Yourself,” a track written by the easy listening kings Burt Bacharach (music) and Hal David (lyrics), a powerhouse team from the Brill Building. Other Bacharach-David hits included Jackie DeShannon’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” Manfred Mann’s “My Little Red Book” (covered by Love), and Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” and “What’s New Pussycat?”

  The most indelible easy listening image of the year was the album jacket of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights, featuring model Dolores Erickson. She was three months pregnant when they photographed her, and was no doubt responsible for many of the six million copies sold. (She was actually covered in shaving cream, because it didn’t melt under the lights.) “Sorry, we can’t play the cover for you,” Alpert would tell audiences. The album’s instrumental version of “A Taste of Honey” made it to No. 7 and won four Grammys, including Record of the Year (which was different from Song of the Year).

  Sinatra’s Rat Pack itself was the embodiment of the old-school image of masculinity that the “Beatle land” proto-hippies were upending: in tuxedos, with Jack on the rocks in hand instead of a joint, hair short and neatly coiffed. Sinatra and Dean Martin sang in the bel canto (“fine singing”) style of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Italy—conversational, relaxed, with clear diction. (In marked contrast to the likes of Mick Jagger, who followed Fats Domino’s dictum that one shouldn’t sing the words too clearly.) The Pack was perhaps the last hurrah of vaudeville, with Martin prat-falling in mock drunkenness and Sammy Davis Jr. defying gravity as perhaps the greatest tap dancer on earth.

  But in one way they were more progressive than the rockers, the first interracial supergroup. Italians had long suffered their own version of discrimination in the United States, so Sinatra would insist that Davis be allowed to stay in the hotels they played, and he and Martin would accompany Davis to MLK rallies.

  That didn’t stop them from joking about race. Onstage at the Sands Hotel in Vegas, Martin would pick Davis up and say, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this wonderful trophy.”2 Sinatra would throw the tablecloth from a dinner tray over Davis with “Put on your sheets and we’ll start the meeting,” prompting Davis to cry, “Oh come on!” and storm offstage in mock-disgust. When Davis danced, they’d say, “I think it’s the African Queen, folks.”3

  “Did you ever see a Jew Jitsu?” Sinatra asked Davis, who had converted to Judaism.

  “Did you ever see a WOPsicle?” Davis shot back.

  “Shut up, Sam, and sit in the back of the bus!”

  “Jewish people don’t sit in the back of the bus.”

  “Jewish people own the bus!”4

  “He sho’ sing good for a white fella, don’t he?”

  When they weren’t sticking tongues out at one another, Davis would try to grab Martin’s ass. When Martin rebuffed him, Davis pouted and said, “You weren’t like that last night.”5

  You could almost make the case that Sinatra enabled the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. When Rat Pack member Peter Lawford’s brother-in-law Jack Kennedy was running for president, Sinatra got his mobster friend Paul “Skinny” D’Amato (a.k.a. Mr. Atlantic City) to make sure Kennedy won the West Virginia primary. Kennedy’s father, Joe, then asked Sinatra to ask the head of the Chicago Mafia, Sam Giancana, to help deliver Illinois in the presidential election.6 (Democratic mayor Richard Daley helped rig it as well.) Kennedy beat Nixon by the smallest margin in history; his assassination gave Johnson the opportunity to push through his social programs.

  The Rat Pack gave its last show for twenty-three years on June 20. It was broadcast live to movie houses across the country, a fund-raiser for a St. Louis halfway house for ex-convicts, the favorite charity of Sinatra’s good friend Teamster vice president Harold Gibbons. The Pack had run its course after countless “summits” at Vegas casinos and in movies such as Ocean’s Eleven, Sergeants 3, and Robin and the 7 Hoods.

  Martin had parlayed a number of big hits the previous year into the new Dean Martin Show, which began its nine-year run on NBC in September. But though Sinatra had released two essential singles last year, “My Kind of Town” and “Softly, as I Leave You,” he hadn’t managed a Top 20 pop hit since “Witchcraft” a decade before, except for “Me and My Shadow,” with Sammy, in 1962. His song with Tommy Dorsey’s band, “I’ll Never Smile Again,” had been the very first No. 1 on the first Billboard chart back in 1940. He’d earned seven more since, and wanted another. But he was turning fifty in December. Was it too late?

  Sinatra had already been washed up once, in the 1950s, and had recreated himself as a serious actor with From Here to Eternity. He got serious again and looked mortality in the face with one of his strongest albums, September of My Years, released September 25. In the title track he wonders what happened to his youth, but children’s laughter on a carousel helps him come to terms with aging as the bittersweet orchestral arrangements of Gordon Jenkins bathe him like an autumn breeze.

  Driving in his car, Sinatra had heard the Kingston Trio’s “It was a Very Good Year” on the radio and decided to cover it for the album, as it echoed the same theme. In it, he looks back on the women from different eras in his life—small-town girls at seventeen, city girls who live upstairs at twenty-one, blue-blooded ladies in limos at thirty-five. The song might
have inspired Lennon’s “In My Life,” which the Beatles recorded a few weeks later, on October 18. “Good Year” went to No. 1 on easy listening and won the Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance and Arranger. The LP took home Album of the Year.

  Sinatra’s comeback continued with the TV special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music. The press release read that it was for people who were “tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons.” During the show, Sinatra gives thanks to all the deejays who still played him in “Beatle land.” The special was shot on tape right when TV switched over to color full time, aired November 24, and won an Emmy and a Peabody Award.

  There was an accompanying double album, though only three new songs were recorded for it. (And those were new versions of old hits: “Come Fly with Me,” “Love and Marriage,” and “I’ll Never Smile Again.”) When Sinatra started his own label five years before, he rerecorded many of his hits from the 1940s and ’50s, and the best of them were compiled onto A Man and His Music. Many Sinatra purists insist on the originals, but some like his redos better. The originals are more sensitive, tentative, halting, but the older Sinatra swaggers and swings more, rocks a little faster (probably because he just wanted to bang them out and get out of the studio), more in the cocky Swingers lounge style that he came to symbolize for later generations. A Man and His Music is a lively contrast to the somber September of My Years, and won the Grammy Album of the Year for 1966. What is mysterious is that records today indicate that A Man and His Music was released in November 1965, which would seem to make it ineligible for the 1966 Grammies. The win is also a surprising achievement for a greatest hits retrospective comprised of rerecorded songs. All this would lead one to believe that Sinatra seized on some sort of technicality and put the fix in with the Grammy voters—were the album not packed wall to wall with classics such as “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Luck Be a Lady,” “I’ve Got You under My Skin,” and “In the Wee Small Hours.”

  * * *

  Sinatra would take breaks from a film shoot to fly to Vegas for a gig, wired on speed, and then get back on the plane and return to the shoot, often doing only one take per scene, and getting dangerous if asked to do more. During the filming for Von Ryan’s Express (the No. 10 movie of the year), he met twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow, a star on the soap opera Peyton Place. In August, he took her on a chartered 168-foot yacht with twenty-three crew members; maybe it was there she lost her virginity to him.

  Their May-December romance was echoed among many couples across the country. As youth began to revel in the sexual revolution, middle-aged marrieds looked out, haunted, from their windows, wondering if they’d played it too safe with their lives. By decade’s end, the archetype of the older man bewitched by the flighty hippie girl would be prevalent in films such as Cactus Flower and a whole mini-genre starring Peter Sellers: I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!; There’s a Girl in My Soup; Hoffman; and The Bobo.

  At Sinatra’s pad, Farrow’s friends from India would come over and hand him a flower. “That made him feel square for the first time in his life,” Farrow said.7 When Sinatra’s daughter Nancy threw him a huge fiftieth birthday party in December, he didn’t bring Farrow because he knew his ex-wife (Nancy’s mother) would be there. That night, stewing by herself, Farrow took scissors to her waist-length hair. “I chopped my silly hair off because I was bored with me,” she told Sinatra when he returned.

  “It’s terrific. Now you can go out for Little League like the rest of the boys!”8

  Sinatra’s ex Ava Gardner later quipped, “Ha! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a little boy.”

  After Farrow had Vidal Sassoon clean up her handiwork, her example ushered in the new pixie cut, as the model Twiggy did as well.

  The following year, Sinatra married Farrow and knocked the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” out of the No. 1 spot with “Strangers in the Night,” and then returned to No. 1 the next year with “Something Stupid,” a duet with his daughter. That was the same year the Sands casino cut him off for running up a five-hundred-thousand-dollar debt. When he got belligerent, shouting atop a table, the manager knocked his teeth out, so Sinatra drove a golf cart through the casino’s plate-glass window. “This place was sand when they built it, and it’ll be sand when I’m fucking done with it!”9 Swinging through his midlife crisis His Way.

  * * *

  Though he was perhaps the world’s most eligible bachelor, Paul McCartney actually lived with the family of his girlfriend, Jane Asher, during the first few years of Beatlemania. When he wasn’t on tour, he stayed in the garret of the Ashers’ eighteenth-century five-story townhouse on Wimpole Street in London, enjoying warm dinners with Jane; her brother, Peter (of the pop duo Peter and Gordon); her mother, Margaret; and father, Richard, the head of the psychiatric department at the Central Middlesex Hospital. McCartney’s room was next to Peter’s, which was why he ended up writing four songs for Peter and Gordon (including “A World without Love” and “Woman”).

  Often fans would loiter around the front door, so McCartney would climb out his window (four stories up), enter the apartment of the retired colonel next door, and then head down to the basement apartment, where the tenants would let him exit into the back alley.10

  Mrs. Asher was a classical music instructor—she taught Beatles producer George Martin the oboe—and McCartney and Lennon composed a number of tracks in her music room in the basement, including “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” McCartney’s exposure to the classics through Mrs. Asher no doubt abetted his growth into baroque pop. While living with the Ashers, he took piano lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which George Martin had also attended.

  While sleeping at the Ashers’ in early 1964, McCartney had the melody for his most successful song come to him in a dream. Upon waking, he rushed to the piano before he forgot it. Because the melody was heavier than the Beatles’ regular material, he was afraid he had subconsciously plagiarized it. Over the course of a year, he played it for everyone from his music publisher to the Yardbirds, to see if anybody recognized it, all the while trying to come up with better lyrics than the placeholders, “Scrambled Eggs / Oh baby, I love your legs.” (Decades later, some would claim the song bore a slight resemblance to Nat King Cole’s “Answer Me, My Love,” from 1953.)

  Lennon said, “Every time we got together to write songs for a recording session, this one would come up. We almost had it finished … We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning McCartney woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”11

  It was while McCartney was in Portugal on vacation in May that the lyrics for “Yesterday,” as the song was to be called, came to him. Decades later, he would muse that they were perhaps subconsciously inspired by his mother’s death from breast cancer when he was fifteen. When he learned of her death, he asked aloud, “What will we do without her money?” and later felt ashamed, which many have speculated inspired the line about saying something wrong. Lennon’s mother was killed two years after Paul’s, when she was struck by a car driven by an off-duty policeman. McCartney later wrote, “Now we were both in this; both losing our mothers. This was a bond for us, something of ours, a special thing.”12

  The songs for their film Help! had been locked back in February, so “Yesterday” was finished too late to make the soundtrack. Compared to Lennon’s four classics in the film, McCartney’s “The Night Before” and “Another Girl” were enjoyable but slight. But while there were only seven songs performed in the movie, the Help! album needed fourteen tracks. So McCartney banged out three cuts on June 14, each far superior to the songs of his that made the feature, and each about as different from the others as possible.

  Capitol Records was so taken with the chugging acoustic bliss of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” that they held it back to make it the opening song on the American version of Ru
bber Soul, in order to make that album seem more folk-rock. (It was one of McCartney’s many “seeing” songs throughout the year: “Tell Me What You See,” “You Won’t See Me,” “I’m Looking through You.”) “I’m Down” was his own version of the Little Richard shriekers that were his forte.

  He did two takes of “Yesterday” with just himself on guitar; none of the other Beatles could think of anything to add to the track. But producer George Martin, who had worked in the BBC’s classical music department and then recorded classical music and show tunes as the head of EMI’s Parlophone division, asked McCartney to let him add a string quartet.

  The year before, McCartney and Lennon had written a jazzy waltz for Cilla Black named “It’s for You” that featured George Martin’s orchestra. McCartney thought it turned out to be one of their best compositions, so he hesitantly acquiesced, but insisted, “No vibrato, I don’t want any vibrato!”13 He associated violins with vibrato with Montovani, a best-selling easy listening orchestra conductor who seemed corny to the group.

  McCartney didn’t want to look like he was trying to be a solo artist, so “Yesterday” was not released as a single in the United Kingdom. In fact, it was buried as the second-to-last song on the U.K. Help! album. But it was released as a single in the States on August 6, held the top spot for four weeks in October, and became the most covered song of the decade, with more than twenty-five hundred versions recorded to date. Though they didn’t actually win any Grammys, the Beatles were nominated for ten that year, six of which were for “Yesterday,” including Song of the Year. Rolling Stone would later rate it the thirteenth greatest song of all time.