The Beat Goes On, Part XVII.

040. The Yardbirds “For Your Love”
(Graham Gouldman)
1965
Available on For Your Love

Gregorian chant. Unhinged Persian tabla science. J. S. Bach-style harpsichord. And Keith Relf getting his sensitive-dude voice on. Eric Clapton’s in there somewhere too, but you can barely hear a guitar and he quit soon after because he hated the literate transgenre-pop, non-blues direction this song took the band in. (Which is probably the biggest blank check for making fun of Eric Clapton I could ask for. I’ll just mutter something about Cream under my breath and move on.) Songwriter Gouldman is one of the secret pop geniuses of the 60s, the ’Birds’ manager at the time and producer of this song, which deserves more recognition than it usually gets as one of the greatest British Invasion bombs in a year that was chock-full to spilling over with them.



039. The Rolling Stones “No Expectations”
(Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
1968
Available on Beggars Banquet

The term “roots-rock” is inherently unsatisfactory. While it’s obvious to the least attentive ear that country, the blues, soul, and rock & roll are blood relations, the fact remains that most people who try to combine them end up with little more than generic boogie-rock, succeeding (if they do) on the strength of energy and personality rather than any real feel for the roots in question. The Stones, beginning in early 1968, are one of the few rock acts who not only get it right, but actually build on the traditional forms in new and beautiful ways. Brian Jones’ stunning bottleneck slide is the star here, only approached by Mick’s lovely gentle/raw vocals and Nicky Hopkins’ tasteful honky-tonk piano. They would dig deeper into the country/blues dichotomy over the next five years, but they would never quite match the midnight elegance of this pop-gutter lament.



038. Booker T. & the MG’s “Hip Hug-Her”
(Steve Cropper/Donald “Duck” Dunn/Al Jackson, Jr./Booker T. Jones)
1967
Available on Stax Profiles

Not as ubiquitous as “Green Onions,” not as soundtracky as some of their other hits, this track (for me) hits the perfect medium between cool, close-to-the-vest playing and the hip-shaking dynamite that dance floors need. It’s not funk, exactly, but it’s slow-burn funky. Cropper’s crisp, stinging guitar complements Booker T.’s stop-start organ surges, and the rhythm section keeps it unobtrusively but definitively in the pocket. The record cover shows four twig-thin white girls in the eponymous trousers, and for the 2:26 that the track lasts I can almost imagine a Josie & the Pussycats type thing where they’re the ones playing the music. But of course, no four hot white girls ever grooved this well.



037. Simon & Garfunkel “I Am a Rock”
(Paul Simon)
1966
Available on The Sounds of Silence

Memo to every emo kid, anywere, anytime: Stop it. No, seriously, put down the Bic, crumple up the notebook paper and throw it away, unsling the guitar and put it in its fashionably-scuffed case. Now, go outside and go to your local record store (okay, your local Best Buy, you suburban dinks). Get your mom to drive you. Find a Simon & Garfunkel CD with this song on it. Oh, you’ll be able to find it; your parents’ generation can’t get enough of these twittering self-absorbed showmen. Go back home, put it in your stereo, and play this track. Play it over and over again. And ask yourself this question: “Do I have anything to say that Paul Simon did not already articulate, better than I can ever hope to do?” Then ask yourself: “Is there any room left in the world for such weedy self-pity after he satirically demolished it with this song?” The answer, in both cases, is no.



036. Steppenwolf “Born to Be Wild”
(Mars Bonfire)
1968
Available on the Easy Rider soundtrack

Reason #1: Dude, it was written by a guy who called himself Mars Bonfire. Reason #2: Even if “motorcycle rock” isn’t exactly your favorite dish at the World-Wide Pop Music Sunday Buffet, it’s still cooler than you are. And this song invented it. Reason #3: Listen to it not as some kind of proto-heavy metal (’cause it’s not; it’s just hard-edged boogie) but as part of the continuum of genre-melting West Coast music of the late 60s, including Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Sly & the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. It’s pop with a grinding guitar tone. Reason #4: Dude, it was written by a guy who called himself Mars Bonfire.



035. Roger Miller “Dang Me”
(Roger Miller)
1964
Available on All Time Greatest Hits

Best known to VCR-reared children of the 80s like myself for voicing the rooster narrator/bard Alan-A-Dale in Disney’s Robin Hood (he wrote the songs too; “Not in Nottingham” remains a peculiarly affecting favorite), he was also one of country music’s great lyricists, with a sly wit that ran as easily to satire as to cornpone. His pop hits like the hobo anthem “King of the Road” or the British Invasion-courting “England Swings” only tell half the story: he was deeply comfortable with country music’s broad conventions too, and did them even better. If the tempo of this song were slightly different, and it didn’t depend so heavily on his wordless vocalizing to the guitar lines, it could be one of those cold-eyed “I’m a mean sonofabitch” Johnny Cash songs, only funnier.



034. Small Faces “Itchycoo Park”
(Ronnie Lane/Steve Marriott)
1967
Available on There Are But Four Small Faces

Apparently, Itchycoo Park is a real place, like Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane. Steve Marriott grew up in the neighborhood; its real name, boringly enough, is Little Ilford Park. It sounds like a nice place, alright, or at least it would be until some jackass started braying “It’s all so beautiful!” at the top of his lungs. I’m kidding, of course; it works perfectly in the song, which is pastoral pop-psychedelic blue-eyed soul at its finest. I can’t ever really forgive Marriott for abandoning the rest of the band to do leaden boogie in Humble Pie, even though the Faces (my favorite 70s band) were born of the ashes, and of course that lead singer went on to do the same thing . . . .



033. James Brown “Say It Loud! (I’m Black and I’m Proud)”
(James Brown/Pee Wee Ellis)
1968
Available on Say It Loud!

“Uh! With your bad self.” Yes, this is a call to radical racial realization, re-identification, and revolution, but first and foremost it’s a dancefloor-sex tune, like everything the Hardest Working Man in Show Business did between 1965 and 1975. I don’t want to make Dave Chapelle go crazy and decamp to Africa again, but as a white dude I love singing along to this song. Well, chanting along; Brown even proto-raps during the verses. I’m not black, but I’m proud to live in a time, a country, and a culture where something like this could become a hit. And I’m a music geek: obviously, on some level, I want to be black. Partly James Brown’s fault, of course, for making it sound so easy.



032. Vladimir Ussachevsky “Wireless Fantasy”
(Vladimir Ussachevsky)
1960
Available on Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music

A lot of early electronic music focuses on sounds that couldn’t be approximated by acoustic instruments. Often this means ear-bleeding white noise, cycled through again and again for half an hour or so. But once in a while you’ll get a composer/tape manipulator/crackpot techno-fiddler who understands the things that are important to pop, like dynamics, tension and release, rhythm, and narrative. This is one of those: a beautiful, ominous, industrial-strength piece “for tape,” as the compositional databases have it, that sounds like the distress call of a ship trapped in Arctic ice as glaciers steadily creep up on it, drawing nearer and nearer . . . . I’d bet my eyeteeth that every sound editor and soundtrack composer in Hollywood knows it by heart. Oh, and there’s still plenty of ear-splitting shards of white noise, for those who want it.



031. Joni Mitchell “Chelsea Morning”
(Joni Mitchell)
1969
Available on Clouds

Is it even possible today to realize the impact Joni Mitchell had when she first burst on the scene in the late 60s, both a fully-formed songwriter and deeply idiosyncratic singer, arranger, and performer? Women weren’t supposed to be able to do that; they could sing songs that other people wrote, or they could send demos around and have other people sing their songs, or (if they were really radical and liberated) they could join a band and let the guys do half of the singing. Joni made no apologies for doing what she did just as well as Dylan or any other person-with-a-penis, without being beholden to any of them or following in anyone’s footsteps in particular. She gathered up various musical strains that were in the air, and weaved something entirely new, complete, observational and distinctly female — not girly, not “feminine” — out of them. Forget the boys’ club: sisters can trump Leonard Cohen all by themselves.


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