Books about sixities music.

Apart from White Bicyles and Faber Book of Pop and The People's Music what books do you guys out there recommend?

Sorry I didn't get back sooner, but I only just read the thread.

My favourite band is the Velvet Underground, so I can recommend Uptight - The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bokris and Gerald Malanga. I've just bought -arrived yesterday, in fact - Rob Chapman's A Very Irregular Head about the great Syd Barrett, which has had some very good reviews.

I take your point about White Bicycles though: it's a cracker.

Thanks cappybear. A question I want an answer for from anyone who was there is: what songs of the sixties in particular were most influencial in how music making and the arts in general became the property of the people rather than the entertainment industries: e.g. ordinary people writing their own songs, joining rockn roll bands, writing poetry etc etc.? ( see The People's Music: Ian MacDonald

From my perspective I would say the Grenwich Village Folk scene of the late fifties and early sixties, especially Joan Baez and the very early Bob Dylan - "Blowin' In the Wind", "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and other self-penned tunes created the environment for such as the Fugs, The Mugwumps, The Lovin' Spoonful, and so forth. In San Francisco, the Airplane and the Dead, and in L. A. The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and so forth. Of course in a garage somewhere in the great Northwest, the Fogarty boys and two of their friends were learning their instruments, preparing to burst on the scene a few years later.

Of course probably the single most important song in this regard is the Beatles' "I want to Hold Your Hand".

I struggled with putting Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys in this group because, while they wrote a lot of their own stuff, it didn't exactly spark the flowering that the Beatles did. After the Beatles, if you didn't write and play your own songs, you just weren't cool anymore. The Beatles nearly single-handedly killed Tin Pan Alley.

gene: I was going to disagree with you - what about Graham Gouldman, Goffin/King and so on. But even Graham and Carole tried the solo route. Still, at least in pop music and country, songwriting for others is pretty big. Also, the role of the "producer" remains strong, especially in hip hop type stuff. Of course, wasn't George Martin the sixth Beatle and, arguably, more important than one or two others?

I don't know about Graham Gouldman, I think he, too, was influenced by the homegrown success of the Beatles, I thin it was the zeitgeist, but Carole King and Gerry Goffin as well as many others, Neil Sedaka and Barry Mann included worked out of Don Kirshner's operation at the Brill Building. They were TPA style song-writers.

Of course all I can give is what I know from my own experience back then. Remember we're talking about 45 - 50 years ago. I really do believe it was the Beatles that changed it all. There's no doubt the Beatles changed the world, and I think bands writing and playing their own music was part of what they wrought. For all you young whippersnappers out there, there has not been another cultural phenomenon like the Beatles, since. They didn't just shake the teen/YA world, they shook everyone's world.

As far as production is concerned, self-production had to wait for the computer and the CD. Everyone, regardless of whether they wrote and played their own stuff, had to rely on professional production studios and standard methods of distribution. Who first did their own production/distribution I have no clue, but it would have been sometime in the late seventies and early eighties, I'm pretty sure.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets wrote/played their own stuff, as did some of the early rockers, Roy Orbison comes to mind here, but they were just isolated instances that didn't make much difference. No, it was the Beatles.

BTW, nice to run into you here Slick. I always like it when I see people from other areas of LT in some of the less frequented corners.

Re: Brill building Neils you mean Neil Diamond! But, more good examples of the sea-change.

I'm enjoying this thread and don't have any special expertise, but am curious: what aspect of the role of producers would you, geneg, or anyone else qualify in re: those artists in 70s (think: Jimi, others?) who ended up building their own studios? That is, did DIY / self-production get an early boost from that trend, as narrow as it was?

And I wonder how much the dub and other studios in Jamaica influenced artists like Jimi who started thinking about their own studios. I believe the Stones and others were influenced by what was coming out of Kingston, but have no idea how aware they were of the distribution & production.

The Jazz scene (I'm thinking of the Impulse! story, how certain artists like Trane and his wife began recording things themselves) may also have had an effect on other artists, though not yet on the industry.

In any case, all of this may have had an influence which wasn't felt until the 1980s, as geneg suggests. Just trying to connect some dots, appreciate any response.

ETA Link to the Impulse! book I mentioned: The House that Trane Built by Ashley Kahn http://www.librarything.com/work/971370/book/52754399

Thanks geneg for that final sentence. I might quote you at my conference presentation on this topic later this month!

I hope quoting me doesn't get you in trouble. It often does me.

I'm pretty certain The Beatles is a good answer to just about any question regarding rock and roll and its impact on the democritization of popular music.

Granted but their lyrics were mostly pretty much in the more surreal, whimsical, music-hall, lightweight category Ian MacDonald Revolution in the Head notwithstanding. Maybe Dylan, for one, had more influence when it came to talking about power, corruption, authenticity, violence and pain to name but a few subjects.

of course your earlier post (message 6 above mentioned others) i just noted.

Perhaps the young Dylan was the latest in a line of folk-protest singers such as Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. By the time he went electric and recorded his classic albums of 1965-66, his lyrics had become more surreal and a rock star was born.

One might say that this period was the coming of age of the Lennon-McCartney partnership as well, moving from snappy, clever chart material to songwriters of the first rank. Eleanor Rigby is both surreal and sad, though I agree that The Beatles generally weren't as serious as Dylan.

For a long time, "Like a Rolling Stone" was considered the most influential song of the rock era. But I really take issue with that, as much as I love it, I still think the most influential song has got to be "I Want to Hold Your Hand". One thing about the Beatles: before anything else, and there is lots else to consider, they were one hell of a Rock 'n Roll band.

I think Dylan, for my taste was better overall, for just the reasons listed in # 11, and given the choice of Beatles and Dylan from the same period, I'll take Dylan, but his influence was slower to take hold, but penetrated deeper into the musical psyche of the generation. There has never been a better series of albums than Dylan from "Freewheelin" through "Blonde on Blonde" in my opinion. I wish I could include "John Wesley Harding" here, but I can't.

Dylan changed the nature of Rock 'n Roll from a pop oriented dance and makeout music, (makeout music doesn't get any better than this how many boys learned their female anatomy to the chunking piano in the background?) to non-dance oriented, social blues. The Beatles were a great pop oriented dance band, then, after they met Dylan and were introduced to LSD they became more introspective, influenced by Dylan's poetry as music. Dylan had a greater, more long lasting effect on the music, but the Beatles created that space wherein the singer-songwriter (I hate that term with a passion) could be heard. Yes, I know Dylan has been around since '59 or '60, but he was just another voice in the crowd until 1964 or so, after the Beatles opened the way.

Save me from serious. Dylan isn't much of a musician. Lyricist, perhaps. Songwriter? If you like long simple repetitive drones you can't dance to, he is your man!

I used to think that Dylan's songs were better when covered by other artists (Manfred Mann and Jimi Hendrix spring to mind). However, having bought most of Bob's record from the sixties and seventies over the last few years, I'm not so sure. I much prefer his version of Mr Tambourine Man to that of the Byrds (it's more fun) and If Not For You comes up trumps as well.

Still, I digress, I've seen Revolution in the Head mentioned in the press recently. Is it worth reading?

Interesting how quickly Dylan steals the limelight! Even when listening to Hendrix today (his liquid bluesy guitar sound was to me the most OUTRAGEOUS musical element since rockn roll just because it was so ECSTATIC) his vocal style (and even some of his lyrics) seemed very Dylan-inspired in their slightly throw-away half-spoken edginess.

cappybear, Revolution in the Head is the definitive statement on the Beatles. Beg, borrow, steal etc.

I'm so happy you guys are engaging with this topic.

Currently reading The Velvet Underground Companion by Albin Zak III. The book is sub-titled 'Four Decades of Commentary', and some of the commentators are far too aware of themselves. The best contributions, however, are quite illuminating and make me realise why I love the band so much. These have included (so far) an interview between Nico and Jim Condon and 'Sister Ray: Some Pleasures of a Musical Text' by Jeff Schwartz about the creation of one of my favourite tracks. You tend to forget just how avant-garde these guys were, particularly when John Cale was around. Definitely a book for dipping into though, rather than reading from cover to cover.

Have just read There's a Riot Going On by Peter Doggett This is a compelling and detailed history of politics and music of the sixties and there relationship.

What I found limited was its over all emphasis on failure, as if "the revolution" should have been achieved - and sustained. I want to hear about how ongoing all those innovations have also been: the way it has changed many aspects of global culture indelibly> How positive many of those changes have been.

To use an analogy: just because we brought the flowers and the songs to the wedding didn't mean we guaranteed there would be no divorce! Let's start over!

I began to read Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic by John French (Drumbo of Magic Band fame) but, just three chapters in, I feel ready to throw in the towel.

The book is over 850 pages long, and badly needs editing. It's basically a succession of interviews with Van Vliet's contemporaries, who spend an awful lot of time debating whether so-and-so left a band in 1962 or 1963, or whether suchabody played drums before he graduated to bass. After sixty-odd pages, I know more about Frank Zappa than the Captain. Exhausting rather than exhaustive, and not a patch on Mike Barnes's Captain Beefheart: The Biography.