1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  Its aching desolation further propelled the group away from its adolescent image. As the chaotic upheaval of the 1960s intensified, for many it reflected a mourning for the stability of 1950s culture and tradition, the flip side to the era’s dazzling change. In McCartney’s own life as well, unimaginable success came with grueling complications, and at times he yearned for simpler days—but knew there was no going back.

  On October 26, Queen Elizabeth II made the Beatles Members of the Order of the British Empire in honor of the huge revenues they generated for the United Kingdom when they opened the U.S. market to English bands and helped popularize all things British, from fashion to cars such as the Jaguar and Mini Cooper—for being “Super salesmen for Britain,” McCartney later called it. Prime minister Harold Wilson had submitted them for consideration, as he was a fellow Liverpudlian, and many felt it was a bid by him to look good to younger voters. Some older soldiers sent back their medals in protest.

  The group arrived at Buckingham Palace in Lennon’s Rolls-Royce, waving to the masses held back by the police, some kids clambering onto the gates and lampposts for a better look. In the Great Throne Room their names were called out, and they each separately walked forward and bowed. The Queen shook each of their hands. “It’s a pleasure to present you with this.”

  “Thank you.”

  After the ceremony, she asked them, “Have you been together long?”

  “Yes, many years,” McCartney said.

  “Forty years and it don’t seem a day too much,” said Starr.

  He later recalled, “She had this strange, quizzical look on her face, like either she wanted to laugh or she was thinking, ‘Off with their heads!’”14

  * * *

  The not-so-secret story of the Beatles is the competition between the two primary composers. Lennon was the leader of the band back in 1957 but realized McCartney was talented and brought him in. When Martin agreed to produce the Beatles, he had to decide whether Lennon or McCartney would be the front man. At the time, all groups had a leader, à la Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Martin found Lennon’s voice slightly stronger, but McCartney’s looks appealed more to female fans. Then, in the first of many ways in which Martin thought outside the box, it suddenly occurred to him that there didn’t need to be one front man. Thus the band was freed to evolve in its naturally dual-powered way.

  Nineteen sixty-three was the heyday for Lennon-McCartney writing songs together, both for themselves and for other artists. In that year and the following, they gave away sixteen compositions to their manager’s other clients and groups such as the Rolling Stones.

  All their songs were credited to Lennon-McCartney until the end of the decade, but by 1964, Lennon and McCartney would usually write the initial drafts of songs separately. Whoever initiated the song would usually sing lead. Then they’d get together and help each other polish off the compositions. For instance, Lennon mostly wrote “Ticket to Ride,” but McCartney came up with the idea for the unusual drums, and played lead guitar.

  Martin said Lennon’s forte was words and McCartney’s was music. Lennon penned lyrics and then had to come up with the music, while McCartney came up with melodies and then needed words. Each envied the other’s gift.15 McCartney was the son of a bandleader, and Lennon benefited from his musical embellishments. Lennon in turn would mercilessly bash any weak lyrics, challenging McCartney to push himself.

  After “Please Please Me,” their next three singles were joint efforts, but then “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which was primarily McCartney’s, went to No. 1. At this point, Lennon stopped writing songs for other artists and focused on generating twice as many Beatle cuts as McCartney, and the next five A sides were his. McCartney was actually writing as many songs as Lennon in 1964, but they were given to Peter and Gordon, Cilla Black, and Billy J. Kramer, either because they weren’t as strong or because he’d agreed to take the assignment.

  Playboy asked Lennon, “Was there resentment from McCartney at first?”

  “No, it wasn’t resentment, but it was competitive … up to that period it was mainly my domination of the record scene. Although I never dominated the fan worship because the kids … the girls always went for him. Mine was a male following more than a female following.”16 Lennon’s desire to wrest the attention away from the heartthrob McCartney pushed him to write the hits and be the wittiest Beatle in press conferences and films.

  But “Yesterday” marked the beginning of a shift in balance between the two. Henceforth, McCartney would give away only one song a year to other artists and catch up with Lennon in his number of Beatle cuts per album, even surpassing him two years later. After “Yesterday,” almost all the Beatles’ A sides would be McCartney’s, as Lennon dived into the rabbit hole of his psychedelicized mind.

  * * *

  Almost every Rolling Stones song was tough, if not outright mean. But sporadically throughout their career they’d surprise listeners with their vulnerable side—though typically, the motivation was cash. “Yesterday” topped the American charts for the entire month of October, so on October 26 (the day the Beatles were honored by the Queen), Jagger and Richards went into the studio with the Mike Leander Orchestra to do their own version of a song they’d written for Marianne Faithfull a year before. After Oldham discovered the seventeen-year old, he told his songwriters, “She’s from a convent. I want a song with brick walls all round it, high windows, and no sex.”17 The duo penned the ultimate Rapunzel anthem for her in “As Tears Go By,” about a rich young lady crying while watching children play outside her window. Jagger wrote the words, Richards came up with the melody.

  “Well, it was already a hit, so, you know,” Jagger laughed about the Stones remake, “and Andrew was a very simple, commercial kind of guy. A lot of this stuff is done for commercial reasons.”18 Still, they had tapped into a softer side of themselves, opening the door for future gentle classics.

  Faithfull said, “It’s a great fusion of dissimilar ingredients: ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to the tune of ‘These Foolish Things.’ The image that comes to mind for me is the Lady of Shalott looking into the mirror and watching life go by. It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written: A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.”19

  The Stones’ version went to No. 6 on the U.S. pop charts—and No. 10 on easy listening.

  18

  Folk-Rock Explosion, Part Two

  The electrified “Sound of Silence” is released in September, Dylan clones fill the charts in autumn, the Mamas and the Papas record “California Dreaming,” Goffin and King meet Dylan on October 1 and vow to catch up, while Dylan takes on the hecklers and rebuffs the activists.

  Reporter: How many people who major in the same musical vineyard in which you toil, how many are protest singers?

  Bob Dylan: Um … how many?

  Reporter: Yes. How many?

  Bob Dylan: Uh, I think there’s about, uh, 136.

  Reporter: You say about 136, or you mean exactly 136?

  Bob Dylan: Uh, it’s either 136 or 142.1

  Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” almost topped the charts in September, blocked from the No. 1 position only by Lennon’s “Help!” and then, gallingly, by “Eve of Destruction”—stymied by his own imitation!

  His post-Newport string of concerts began at Forest Hills on August 28, where they booed the electric portion of his set and someone yelled “You scumbag!”2 Dylan told the band to keep playing “Ballad of a Thin Man” until they quieted down. The crowd sang along with Dylan for “Like a Rolling Stone,” then resumed their booing. But his skin was growing thicker now. After the gig, Dylan hugged the band. “It was fantastic,” he said, “a real carnival and fantastic.”3

  During his San Francisco press conference on December 3, he acknowledged that people booed him “just
about all over” the country, but he seemed unfazed. “I mean they must be pretty rich to be able to go someplace and boo. I couldn’t afford it if I were in their shoes.”4

  The Byrds released “Turn! Turn! Turn!” on October 1, and it would become their second U.S. No. 1. Along with “I Got You Babe” and “Eve of Destruction,” it made folk-rock the third most popular genre at the top of the American charts for the year, with four hits, behind Britpop (thirteen) and Motown (six), and ahead of the Brill Building (three) and the Beach Boys (one). There was another folk-rock single released in September that would also eventually hit No. 1, though it would take three months to get there. But three months was nothing for two friends who had been struggling to make it for a decade.

  Paul Simon met Artie Garfunkel during a production of Alice in Wonderland in the sixth grade. They started practicing Everly Brothers two-part harmony, and in 1957, before they were out of high school, they sang their first single, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” on American Bandstand as the duo Tom and Jerry, right after Jerry Lee Lewis performed “Great Balls of Fire.” But their next singles didn’t do anything, and when Garfunkel found out that Simon had cut a song on his own, they went their separate ways for a few years.5 Simon worked on some compositions with Queens College friend Carole King, then pushed some of his own songs to Dylan producer Tom Wilson. Wilson recalled, “He came to me to sell tunes, and he sold me! He’s a very, very intelligent being.”6

  Wilson was especially taken with “He Was My Brother.” Inspired by the topical songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it concerns a civil rights activist who gets shot. Wilson agreed to produce him, and Simon asked if he could include a friend at Columbia University with whom he used to sing. Simon had a strong voice, was a skilled guitarist, and wrote the songs, but Garfunkel’s tenor brought an indelible angelic harmony—“I love a song with a high, pole-vault peak,” Garfunkel would say7—and his blond afro was striking. Wilson convinced them they could use their real names, and the team recorded Wednesday Morning, 3 AM in March 1964. Wilson’s regular session guys played on the album, including Bill Lee on stand-up bass. The eerie thing was, the following June, a student Simon knew from Queens College, Andrew Goodman, went down to Mississippi to join the civil rights movement in Freedom Summer and was one of the three civil rights workers murdered by the Klan. Hearing the news made Simon ill. He revised “He Was My Brother” to reflect Goodman’s death when he and Garfunkel performed it live.8

  Simon had come up with the music to “The Sounds of Silence” in February 1964, in a mood haunted by Kennedy’s assassination the previous November. (Originally “Sounds” was plural, though later it would be changed to “Sound.”) The tiles of his bathroom made a good echo, and he’d often play guitar without the lights on, hence the song’s opening lines in which he greets his old friend darkness. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” has a verse about ten thousand people whispering and nobody listening. “Blowin’ in the Wind” asks how many ears one man has to have before he hears people cry. So Simon sings of people who talked but didn’t speak and people who heard but didn’t listen. Maybe there is something of Howl’s Moloch in the image of people bowing and praying to the neon gods they made.

  “The Sound of Silence” became one of the era’s most eloquent warnings against silent complicity in the face of murder—in the South and, later, in Vietnam. Perhaps both Simon’s and Dylan’s protest songs were informed by the Holocaust, as well, as both writers were Jews born in America while the genocide was in progress overseas. But unlike the other civil rights songs on Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, “Silence” is vague enough to be timeless, allowing The Graduate to revive it three years later to express a young suburbanite’s ennui.

  Unfortunately, silence was what greeted the album’s release. Disheartened, Garfunkel went back to Columbia. Simon heard that London was ravenous for folk, so he went there to busk. He wrote “Red Rubber Ball” with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers for a hundred pounds; the song defiantly proclaims his resilience in the face of bitter disappointment. He wrote “Someday One Day” for the Seekers as well.

  In the wake of British Dylan mania after his May tour, Simon was given the chance to record his own solo LP in June and July. Since it was released only in the United Kingdom, Simon and Garfunkel would later redo a number of the tracks, and thus The Paul Simon Songbook is like an unplugged version of the next two Simon and Garfunkel albums, minus Garfunkel, which allows one to see how much the blond singer added to the mix.

  Songbook is almost a concept album of Simon’s battle with depression. (Understandable—he and his buddy finally made an album after seven years with his hero’s producer and it flopped.) In “I Am a Rock,” Simon tries to convince himself that he’s happy living a life of isolation, but in “A Most Peculiar Man,” he turns on the oven and gasses himself like Sylvia Plath. Even in his ode to his English girlfriend, Kathy Chitty (“Kathy’s Song”), the raindrops are dying. À la Freewheelin’, Simon put Chitty on the cover with him, sitting on “Sound of Silence” cobblestones.

  “April Come She Will” takes its structure from the English rhyme “Cuckoo, Cuckoo, What Do You Do?” Love rests in Simon’s arms in the spring and then prowls the night and flies away. Other seasonal songs include “Leaves That Are Green,” in which he watches the leaves wither after his girlfriend has vanished. Its “hello goodbye” verse perhaps inspired the Beatles’ hit two years later. Simon was already cornering the market on intoxicating folk-pop you feared to listen to lest it stab you in the heart with gorgeous grief. The Simon and Garfunkel version of “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall,” recorded the following year, boasts a guitar almost as cheerful as the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen a Face”—until you remember it is about death.

  * * *

  Wilson had forgotten about Wednesday Morning, 3 AM because it sold only about a thousand copies. But one day, a promotions guy told him that the album was selling in Florida. “He said, according to our guy in Miami it was ‘Sound of Silence’ they liked, but they wanted a beat put to it. So I took Dylan’s backing band and went and overdubbed it, everything, on my own, ’cause they [Simon and Garfunkel] weren’t around.”9

  “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a week away from being the No. 1 record when Dylan and Wilson recorded “Like a Rolling Stone” on June 15. After Dylan left, on the same day, Wilson gathered a different set of musicians for the “Silence” overdub: guitarists Al Gorgoni (who plays on Bringing It All Back Home) and Vinnie Bell, bassist Joe Mack, and drummer Buddy Salzman.

  Gorgoni recalled, “I remember listening to Paul’s acoustic guitar part through the headphones and basically just copping it. I had this Epiphone Casino, which had the right sound. People used to think it was a twelve-string electric like the Byrds; it’s not, it’s just me and Vinnie playing together, mixed together onto the same track. And Vinnie added a few bluesy fills that you can hear in there as well. It took us a couple hours, and it was done.”10 Since the Byrds had used an echo, engineer Roy Halee put an echo on the “Silence” track.

  Wilson said, “In fact, the single was held up from July to late September or October, by which time I’d left for MGM—more money.”11 Before Wilson left, he did the same folk-rock trick with doo-wop icon Dion “The Wanderer” DiMucci, capturing magnificent covers of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and Tom Paxton’s “I Can’t Help but Wonder Where I’m Bound,” along with Dion originals such as the aching “Knowing I Won’t Go Back There.”

  Garfunkel wasn’t too impressed when he heard the new version of “Silence.” “It’s cute. They’ve drowned out the strength of the lyric and they’ve made it more of a fashion kind of production. And you never know. I was mildly amused and detached with the certainty that it was not a hit. I don’t have hits.”12

  But then it started its slow but inexorable climb. Simon returned to the States to regroup with Garfunkel. When they played Hullabaloo, the show’s guitarist was Vinnie Bell, who plays on the record. But Simon didn’t know him and told the
musical director he wanted to show the musician how to play the guitar part. The director said he already knew, but Simon said, “No, I did a special thing on the record that I want him to do with the sound.”

  Simon introduced himself to Bell and then said, “I’d like to show you, if you don’t mind, how I did this thing on the record.”

  Bell assured him he knew just what to play.

  “No, here, just watch my fingers.”

  “Paul, I did the record.”

  Bell recalled, “And of course there was this silence. And he said, ‘Well … okay … Are you sure you did the record?’ I said, ‘Yeah. It’s this, right?’ And I played [sings part]. And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ And I said, ‘Okay, you’ll get that. Don’t worry.’”13

  At Columbia, Bob Johnston took over as Simon and Garfunkel’s producer just as he had for Dylan. They cranked out the Sounds of Silence LP in December and released it in January to cash in. LA’s Wrecking Crew performs on some of it: Larry Knechtel on keyboards, Glen Campbell on guitar, and Hal Blaine on drums. Some of the music tracks were recorded in Johnston’s home base, Nashville. The only new songs were “We’ve Got a Groovey Thing Goin’” and “Blessed,” the latter featuring Simon in his favorite pose of brooding through the dark streets among the meth drinkers, pot dealers, hookers, and thieves, wondering why the Lord has forsaken him.

  “This is probably my most neurotic song,” Simon would say to introduce “I Am a Rock.”14 It was rerecorded on December 14. It was touching to see the duo harmonize when they performed the song live, belying the singer’s insistence that he has no need for friendship. It reached No. 3.

  Just in case one suicide song (“A Most Peculiar Man”) wasn’t enough, Simon updated “Richard Cory,” a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson about a factory worker who can’t understand why the town’s richest man just shot himself. They also recorded a hit that would be held off for their next album, “Homeward Bound,” written when Simon was missing his girlfriend, Kathy. On January 1, the sepulchral “Sound of Silence” was the No. 1 record, ringing in the New Year with a distinct air of foreboding. After eight years, the two kids from Queens had finally made it.