Popular '68

Only Stones, Equals, Beach Boys, Hugh Montenegro and Arthur Brown for me. Two of my least favourite Beatles hits, though still better than some of the crap they were to release the following year.

1968 is a funny year to evaluate, because I was only a toddler then. So I’ve voted with hindsight and surprisingly quite a lot of these get 6 or more. Only 6 didn’t make the cut, including one Beatles song and one Beatles cover.

A not-especially vintage 12/20 for me, too. A lot of fives in that list.

There were two ‘phantom’ number ones in 1968, that topped the other (NME) chart but not the one that Tom’s using:

Help Yourself – Tom Jones 2 weeks
Eloise – Barry Ryan 2 weeks

I had forgotten that this year includes my absolute least favourite #1 of all time – possibly my least favourite piece of recorded music of all time – Joe Cocker’s WALHFMF.

That’s not at all primitivist, and it’s all the worse for it.

Would have been an interesting example of A/B testing, to publish this poll before and after the Olympic opening ceremony.

A huge agreement with Swanstep #4. I bought an Arthur Brown album from the cheap CD rack years ago and was blown away by the whole thing. Magnificent for those ‘I am a bit off my face’ moments – did his stuff ever resurface in clubs?

Or the gorgeous middle eight of Do It Again. Or the freaky drum intro. To be honest Swan I thought you were initially referring to Mony Mony (and the blockheaded but irresistible Baby Come Back).

What a shame Eloise was denied a Popular thread.

Less of a shame about Help Yourself, which weirdly only got to no.5 on the Guiness chart.

Surely the come-down from 1966 Beach Boys to ‘Do it Again’ isn’t so much in the inventiveness of the record but the tune itself: after all those leap-filled melodies on Pet Sounds et al it’s a shock to hear a vocal line made up of three adjacent notes, and three hackneyed adjacent notes at that.

I can understand why this sort of thing would appeal to Brian at the time, (since you can’t really go further than the setting of ‘Columnated ruins do-o-min-o’ why not try going in the opposite direction?) but to me it’s more an interesting record than a loveable one.

I remember this year having the longest single of all time (just short of 8 minutes)- Macarthur Park by Richard Harris. Personally I loved it, but would like to know what the comments here would have been if it made No.1. I was 14 at the time and admittedly more of a “nerd” than “cool” – only became less nerdy in my late teens.

Admittedly this is one of the most overblown records of all time, but somehow it worked and i believe it got to No.3

Overblown is sometimes wonderful. See also Eloise from this year, and the entire Jim Steinman canon.

Tom remarked in one of his pieces (I can’t remember which and don’t feel in the mood just now to find out) something along the lines that an accomplished singer can ruin a song (something similar I heard years ago was that nobody could sing Leonard Cohen like Cohen himself doesn’t). This was never more true than with Macarthur Park; many better singers have been there and it just doesn’t work, the song comes out like a laughable piece of kitsch. In Richard Harris’s hands, or rather larynx, it’s monumental.

Perhaps that restless, angry year, the year of les événements de mai, the Grosvenor Square riots, Black Power salutes on the Olympic rostrum and tanks on the Václavák, demanded explosions.

@18 Yes, I remember it well. The chart Tom is working to isn’t the one most of us paid attention to at the time, it’s an affectation of Guinness. Despite what certain persons who weren’t around or weren’t old enough to know (naming no names) may protest. We oiks from bog-standard comps didn’t work to the charts published by the NME, Melody Maker, Record Mirror let alone a rag for the retail industry; the BBC chart was canon.

It’s Dominic Sandbrook syndrome innit. Bright young things who think because mummy and daddy bought them into a posh school and Oxbridge their scribblings about a period they didn’t live through are gospel despite bearing little resemblance to the experiences of those who were there.

I like all the famous versions of MacArthur Park about equally well, but the instrumentation on Harris’s original is especially good (it’s those ‘Wrecking crew’ guys again who played on so many great records of the time). In all versions, however, the cake imagery does prompt guffaws (but unless someone’s indulging their inner adolescent/Kenny Everett I don’t think it throws the whole song off). Food in general seems tricky in (non-leering) pop songs. Martin Fry is one of the sharper pop lyricists of the ’80s, but he’s regularly entered in ‘worst lyrics of all time’ lists for his ‘Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble/Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble’ couplet from Beauty Stab.

I like (what amounts to) Webb’s trial run for Mac. Park, the album he wrote for 5th Dimension in 1967: The Magic Garden. The songs are all short but they tend to be explosively instrumented and also built up from wild lyrical conceits. There’s a breakup-song called ‘Requiem: 820 Latham’ (i.e., an address) which talks about the moon melting etc., and about kissing sweat that ‘hangs like honey from her goddess brow’… And I’m not sure that I care to hear an undistinguished vocalist take on Orange Air.

I’d agree with punctum and wichita lineman that Do It Again has a lot of ideas packaged under some primitive sound (and that incredible snare sound in the drum intro). Come to think of it, I’d Jumpin’ Jack Flash (check those dueling guitars in the middle eight) and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly in this package. The Stones apparently worked hard to make JJF sound so crude: recording acoustic guitars on dictaphones to give them an eerie droning quality, Keef standing behind Charlie, whacking the floor tom on his kit.

It’s a year of primitivism (on this and other evidence) and the challenge was: could you make something interesting or compelling from the shrapnel left lying around after the summer of love or would you fall back on aimiable boogie?

“My name is Tommy. and I became aware this year…”

Difficult to be objective about this year, the year of my 6th birthday and so many formative experiences. “Bonnie and Clyde” is the first number one I remember from the time and “Fire” was the first record I willed to get to number one – I can still remember seeing the Top 30 list in the Mirror and being delighted seeing it at the top. And ’68 was the year for which I joined the Popular comments crew as well…

Other vague memories include seeing the league table in the Manchester Evening News “Football Pink” every Saturday night with City, United and Leeds swapping places in the top three, which seemed the natural order of things. Luckily my choice of team wasn’t decided by City winning the league but by United winning the European Cup a couple of weeks later, and the fact we lived in Stretford at the time. Otherwise I’d have had to wait until the day before my 50th birthday to see my team winning the title again!

Then in September I took leave of all the friends I’d made at infant school by that stage to move across town to Denton – ending up in the same class as one Michael Hucknall.

So I’ve ticked all but four of the year’s number ones, and even the ones I couldn’t bring myself to tick in an attempt at objectivity – Des, the Scaffold, the Ofarims – hold fond memories. Only the whiney Bee Gees one really leaves me cold.

1968 was on Pick Of The Pops yesterday. Just started listening… first track, Hold Me Tight by Johnny Nash! The only UK rocksteady hit I can think of.

Can I nominate a musical “crime” for 1968? In this case, Aretha Franklins “Say a little Prayer” failing to make No.1 anywhere.

Overblown to perfection.

Johnny Reggae is reggae innit. Swede, have you ever come across Don’t Stick Stickers On My Paper Knickers by X Certificate? None more 70s. It references clunk click, ooh you are awful, put a tiger in your tank, and sounds like Johnny Reggae times ten.

Listening to MacArthur Park, possibly for the first time, certainly for the first time intentionally. To my ears sounds more Nilsonesque pop classicism than Brian Wilson-ish mad, reaching for the stars exploration. Actually, I’d bloody love to hear a Harry Nilson version of MacArthur Park!

Back to JJF: what strikes me about most of the Stones’ ’68 stuff is not the much noted raw/back-to-basics-ness etc, but the murkiness of it: everything on JJF (and Street Fighting Man even more so) sounds like it’s looming towards you out of the dark and the rain and greasy pea-souper fog.

I’d say ’68 is like a transitionary period between 60s and 70s Stones. By ’69 and Honky Tonk Women, they’ve hit on the raw, brash bar-band sound they’ll use throughout much of the 70s as they build the World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band brand, but in ’68 there’s still magic and mystery and menace and psychedelic wierdness hanging around, curdling fascinatingly with the tougher grooves they’re starting to bring in. There’s a real serpentine menace to Jagger around this time that he’d never really have again.

I like She’s A Rainbow and We Love You (esp the video with Keef in his newspaper wig), but my favourite Stones song of the time has got to be (relative flop) Have You Seen Your Mother… – really nice marriage of furious garage-rock momentum with everything-but-the-kitchen-sink psych-era production values – should have been a much bigger hit!

“the TODALLY bonkers world of Art Brown”; this is why Britain will be relying on UN food parcels before 2020.

Being childishly rebellious, I thoroughly enjoyed throwing “Stray Cat Blues” back in the face of my Stones loving Dad when he complained about the lyrical content of some of what I was listening to when a teenager. Soon put paid to that line of reasoning.

Sorry but apart from the Pinball Wizard story that is total bullshit.

Why should anyone admire anyone for “embracing their inner scumbaggery” or being “menacing”? This is the thing that holds pop or rock back from getting anywhere; this stupid leather kecks, rocknroll, chicks drugs n SLEEEEEEEEEEAZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ notion that was antiquated at the outset. “Rock and roll” as premature heritage factory/theme park is BORING. I mean if Jagger’s going to drool over 15 yr old girls, shouldn’t Scotland Yard be rounding him up (I don’t CARE that it was ’68; it was shit then and it’s shit now), but no, we preserve him as some skeletal reminder of HOW IT USED TO BE without recognising that HOW IT USED TO BE had already been proved USELESS.

Also ’68 Cohn’s a shit writer; too many presumptions and assumptions, inability to see outside his own head, let alone the bigger picture. OK he was only about twelve or something when he wrote this but I wrote better than him when I was twelve.

Totally wrong, received opinion about the White Album (but so was anybody related to it called George); I demolished all that type of thinking when I wrote about it on TPL, go look it up, I’m not your butler.

Rock “growing up” doesn’t NECESSARILY mean turning into the Moody Blues.

I vote “Stray Cat Strut” for the win.

As for The White Album, I find much of it boring and unsatisfying. I actually used to like it a lot more, but I’ve got bored of it over the years in a way that I never have with most other Beatles albums. Even some of the songs I like are little sketches. The sound is mean and thin and spare compared to the joyous exuberance of their last…well, of nearly all their stuff up to this point. It’s an interesting album and it’s a good album by anyone else’s measure, but it’s very near my least favourite Beatles album, probably only Let It Be I enjoy less. Actually, much of Abbey Road is ropey too, but then I’d say Come Together and Here Comes The Sun are better than nearly everything on The White Album.

Agreeing with the concensus is not the same as lazily adopting the concencus: you shouldn’t assume that anyone who disagrees with you does so through ignorance, but I will check out your article and see if it does indeed demolish my thinking. I’m quite open to having my mind changed.

Ah yes, Let It Bleed has much of the stuff I vaguely thought was released a little earlier.

Reading your White Album piece now: fascinating reading, makes me want to relisten to the whole album, which as I mention, I used to like a lot more: curse you, I meant to get some work done this afternoon!

On The White Album: I guess it’s been a real victim of what Tom Ewing and Lord Sukrat were calling the ‘cull mentality’ a while back. I always used to be a real completist, determined to see the worth in even the flimsiest and most throwaway tracks, but there’s nothing like having to choose your favourite 16GB of music to carry round with you to make you succumb to the cull mentality: Martha My Dear is no longer a charming slice of whimsy, it’s occupying space that Charles Wright, The Zombies, Tricky or Billy Bragg (to cast a glance at the pile of CDs waiting to be podded) could be sitting in. And so all of history gets reduced to what feels best to jog or cook or blot out the night bus to!

Mind you, there are loads of albums on my iPod with filler tracks that I regularly skip on random play, but I still keep on there because I sometimes like to listen the whole album and I can’t say The White Album is among them. Maybe because the Beatles did so much great stuff, I don’t have to make the effort to enjoy something of less obvious charms. I did really enjoy your article and I will give the album another listen in full and see if I change my mind!