Category: 1965-1969

“Feeling Alright” (1969) * Written by Dave Mason * Produced by Denny Cordell * 45: “Feeling Alright” / “Sandpaper Cadillac” * LP: With a Little Help from My Friends * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#69 – 1969; #33 – 1971 reissue)

“Feeling Alright,” the opening track on the first album (With a Little Help from My Friends) by explosive British rock n’ soul singer Joe Cocker, was an ideal complement for the cover image of Cocker in mid-convulsion. It’s a celebratory performance by him and his all-star studio band (Jimmy Page and Stevie Winwood grace the back cover), with pianist Artie Butler, especially, giving a signature contribution. The thing is, all this good feeling turns the original meaning of the song, first recorded in 1968 by writer Dave Mason’s (and Stevie Winwood’s) Traffic, on its head. “You feeling alright?” go the lyrics. “I’m not feeling too good myself.” It was a coy, bummer breakup song with a crucial question mark in the title.

In Cocker’s wake, the song would appear in numerous cover versions, usually as upbeat album filler. Two versions, by Mongo Santamaria (happy) and Grand Funk Railroad (sorta happy with a bummer undertone), charted in the lower regions. Cocker would finally claim virtual ownership of the song in its joyous guise by re-releasing it in 1971, probably in response to its electrifying presence in his 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen concert film. A Billboard ad (Jan 22, 1972) for the reissue featured a postcard with an inscription by Cocker saying, “My friends – I’m alive and well – and feeling alright!” (Note the exclamation point.) The 2012 Denzel Washington film Flight latched onto the song’s dual nature by using the Cocker track for an opening cocaine snort and the Traffic one for the sobering closing credits.

Iron Butterfly encouraged you to expect ultra-heaviness. Their signature track “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” clocked in at 17:05, an honorable tally during the free form radio years. The instrumental hook is sludgy and emblematic enough of the era, though, to immunize even the shortened version on 45 of any potential dishonor, especially when backed on the flipside by the haunted house anthem “Iron Butterfly Theme” (from their debut album titled Heavy). Doug Ingle’s Vox Continental organ asserted itself early on as the band’s key component, although they managed to sound holistically sprightlier than organ-centric contemporaries such as Deep Purple and (especially) Vanilla Fudge. Listen to the cheerful, yes, butterfly vibe on album opener “Most Anything You Want” for a clearer illustration of this premise. Also listen, at the bridge (around 1:48), to how Ingle teases on Ray Manzarek’s key riff for “Light My Fire.”

“Daddy Loves Baby” (1966) – The Toreros * Written by Don Covay * 45: “Come” / “Daddy Loves Baby” * Label: Decca

The Toreros, from the Netherlands, materialized in the early sixties under the spell of the Shadows’ Iberian motifs and echoing guitars. A 1966 single found them at a longhaired crossroads. Hollies or Stones? Side A proposed the former, while side B argued for the latter. That B side, “Daddy Loves Baby,” stands as the band’s best record, turning Don Covay’s suave, soft-shoe original into prime garage band stomp fodder. When you add Frank Sinatra’s 1957 “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” to the timeline, a song that ends with Sinatra’s own “Daddy loves baby” statement, the Toreros find themselves at the two-levels-of-deevolution mark. To their credit.

“Ode to Billie Joe” (1967) – King Curtis and King Pins * Written by Bobbie Gentry * Produced by Tom Cogbill and Tom Dowd * 45: “Ode to Billie Joe” / “In the Pocket” * Label: Atco * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 #28; R&B #6

Bobbie Gentry’s breakthrough single, in the summer of ’67, made for one of those pop music moments where every ear seemed bent toward a specific song. Gentry sang gently about an apparent suicide and some undisclosed item being thrown over the Tallahatchie Bridge. She gave more info about events surrounding the telling of the tale (multiple servings of apple pie and biscuits) than she did about the tale itself. More notably, the music churned irresolutely–a lone nylon string guitar went back and forth between 9th and 7th chords while four violins and two cellos swirled into the ether and then back around.

The record made an impression on country music, proposing a Gothic approach that, on one hand, went against its audience’s culture of certainty, but on the other, paid tribute to the abiding darkness in Appalachian folk song. Soon Dolly Parton was singing about jumping from “The Bridge” with an unwanted child and Charlie Rich was reporting on the mysterious events of “July 12, 1939,” and all of Tanya Tucker’s first singles bumped Gentry on the shoulder while reaching for William Faulkner.

The best responses came from (runner up) Bob Dylan, whose “Clothesine Saga” on the Basement Tapes is his funniest song, carrying on about laundry en route to the primary revelation that the “Vice President’s gone mad,” and (winner) sax legend King Curtis, who rounded up all the spookiness, scrapped the lyrics altogether, and left us with an even more enticing mystery.

“Duel at Diablo (Main Title)” (1966) – Neal Hefti * Written by Neal Hefti * LP: Duel at Diablo: Original Motion Picture Score * Label: United Artists

By 1966, the trumpeter and arranger Neal Hefti, having made a name for himself with Count Basie and Frank Sinatra, shifted his focus to film and TV scoring. Although his themes for The Odd Couple (1968) and Batman (1966) are his most enduring, other ones paired with lesser-known projects would nonetheless sport a certain trademark heft, shall we say. The Duel at Diablo theme is one of these, catchy and finger-snappy enough to work as a TV jingle. Instead, it accompanied one of the era’s more distinctly violent and emotionally complicated westerns. Based on Marvin H. Albert’s 1957 novel Apache Rising and featuring James Garner in perhaps his most sullen role, it grappled with the grim and messy reality of US/Indian relations and offered the viewer, whom it wore down with its relentless fighting and high body count, no convenient outs. When the snazzy theme kicks in for the closing credits, it feels like a tone-deaf maneuver, if not intended as outright mockery. What’s up with you? the peppy theme asks. It’s only a movie. (Duel at Diablo‘s opening sequence plays on a TV during Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976), giving Hefti’s theme an opportunity to do double-mockery duty.)

“Hare Krishna Mantra Chant” (1966) – A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami * LP: Krishna Consciousness * Label: Happening Records

The charm of this 1966 album, one of the primary sources for the rise of Krishna consciousness beyond India (complete with an Allen Ginsberg endorsement on the back), is its simplicity. The message, as demonstrated in track one (presented here), and explained by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhubada himself on track two, is the inner peace one can find through chanting the holy names of Krishna. (See his widely available Chant and Be Happy.) Prabhubada made enough of a countercultural impression that observers were liable to view him as just another contemporary religious cult figure, one of the many who paraded through lifestyle avenues of the late sixties and early seventies. (He had led a two-hour chant of the Hare Krishna mantra at Tompkins Square in October 1966, in many ways kickstarting awareness of the now-familiar mantra, a few months before this album came out.) In truth, Prabhubada was a Vedic scholar and guru with a communicative flair, an eye- and ear-catching branch from the Banyan tree of Hinduism that’s been flourishing for millennia. In multiple interviews, George Harrison has credited this record for adding Krishna Consciousness to his Eastern spiritual menu.

The US version of Revolver may rank as one of the more grievous hatchet jobs by Capitol Records. In this case, the label altered the original UK version by pruning three notable John Lennon songs altogether (“I’m Only Sleeping,” “Doctor Robert,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). But this action gave the two remaining Lennon branches a certain increase in gravitas, especially with both of them (“She Said She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”) ending each side of the album, as if they were the only two slots that Lennon the new philosopher needed for his keynote words of wisdom. So extraordinary a production is “Tomorrow Never Knows” that all future attempts by anyone to do a cover version are rendered inadvisable and preemptively disappointing. Lennon reportedly found inspiration for the lyrics, including the opening line of “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream” from a book co-authored by Timothy Leary called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Since then the conception of “turning off” the mind has traveled in status from being a radical “drop out” gesture, to one of regrettable escapism, to one of Buddha-endorsed mindfulness and a reliable 21st-century coping mechanism.

“October Song” (1966) – The Incredible String Band * Written by Robin Williamson * Produced by Joe Boyd * LP: The Incredible String Band * Label: Elektra

With “October Song,” the hymn-like second track on the Incredible String Band’s 1966 debut album, Scotsman Robin Williamson introduces himself to the world as a bard with the ability to mystify, educate, and delight all at once. “Sometimes I want to murder time,” the 23 year-old sings of that most vexing human construct, “but mostly I just stroll along the path that he is taking.” Although the Incredible String Band album attracted positive notice in the British press, the initial trio split up after its release, with Williamson pursuing some of the Eastern musical yearnings he’d been expressing in song. He wound up in Morocco, where he amassed instruments and ran out of money; by the following year he’d be back in a duo with Mike Heron—another inventive songwriter with his own knack for expressing complexity as childlike wonder—for a series of remarkable late sixties albums. Continuing to defy/succumb to the passage of time, Williamson remains musically active.