1960s: Revolution on Wax

Rock and roll looked finished in 1960. Elvis was in the army, Buddy Holly was dead, Little Richard was in the church and Chuck Berry was in court. What saved it was a bunch of British teenagers who had bought every one of those records, plus the Chess and Stax singles that never got played on American pop radio, and who re-exported the whole lot with a new swagger. The Beatles landed in New York in February 1964. The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, the Who and the Yardbirds followed. Gritty, catchy and cool as hell, the British Invasion gave America its own music back and made rock a global business.

Then it got weird. LSD, Vietnam and civil unrest shook the culture, and the music followed. In San Francisco the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane played the ballrooms and the park; in Los Angeles the Byrds, the Doors and Love; in London Pink Floyd under Syd Barrett, all kaleidoscope and abstraction. Jimi Hendrix set fire to everything, literally and figuratively. Psychedelic rock was colorful, experimental and built to sound like an altered state: wah pedals, backwards tape, extended solos, surreal lyrics, sitars and studio tricks.

Underneath the charts a grittier thing was happening in basements and garages. The Kingsmen cut "Louie Louie" in Portland in 1963 and nobody could understand the words. The Sonics in Tacoma played like their amps were on fire. The Standells, the 13th Floor Elevators, the Seeds and a thousand bands with one single each made stripped-down, shouted, attitude-first rock. It sold little at the time. It became the direct ancestor of punk.

Meanwhile the surf bands gave the early decade its sunshine. Dick Dale bent Middle Eastern melody through a drenched-in-reverb Fender and called it "Misirlou". The Ventures made the guitar instrumental a chart genre. The Beach Boys took car songs and beach songs and, under Brian Wilson, grew into the most ambitious studio band in America.

As rock expanded, a lot of players doubled down on the blues, but with volume and virtuosity. John Mayall's Bluesbreakers were a finishing school; Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor all passed through. Cream turned the 12-bar into a power trio's excuse for a ten-minute jam. Fleetwood Mac under Green played it straight and beautiful. Led Zeppelin's first record, January 1969, and Blue Cheer's cover of "Summertime Blues" the year before, pointed straight at heavy metal, and Steppenwolf put the words "heavy metal thunder" into a lyric about a motorcycle in 1968. The name stuck.

Pop at the start of the 1960s was written on a schedule. In the Brill Building and the offices at 1650 Broadway, songwriting teams like Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich turned out three-minute records for teenagers, and the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons and the Shangri-Las sang them. The girl groups were the sound of American radio between Elvis and the Beatles, and they were the sound the Beatles were copying.

Phil Spector took those songs into Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles and built a wall around them. Three pianos, four guitars, a room full of percussion, everything recorded through an echo chamber until it sounded like weather. "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes, August 1963, is the record every producer since has been trying to make. Brian Wilson has told the story of hearing it in his car and having to pull over.

What Wilson did with that lesson changed what pop could be. "Pet Sounds" in May 1966 was a sad, gorgeous album built from harpsichords, bicycle bells, a theremin and the Wrecking Crew, and it sold poorly in America and blew the Beatles' minds in London. "Good Vibrations", the single that followed in October, was cut in four studios over six months and promoted as a pocket symphony. By 1967 pop meant the studio, and the studio meant anything you could imagine.

As rock got white and psychedelic, soul stayed grounded, funky and full of heart. Two cities made it. In Detroit, Berry Gordy ran Motown like the car plants he had worked in: a songwriting staff (Smokey Robinson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Norman Whitfield), a house band called the Funk Brothers in a basement studio called the Snakepit, a charm school, a quality-control meeting every Friday. Out of it came the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and Martha and the Vandellas, and Gordy called it the Sound of Young America because it was.

In Memphis, Stax did the opposite on purpose. A converted movie theater on East McLemore Avenue, an integrated house band (Booker T. and the M.G.'s, with Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn), horns from the Mar-Keys, no strings, no charm school. Otis Redding walked in as somebody's driver in 1962 and walked out the label's star. Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas and Eddie Floyd made records that sounded like the room they were cut in. Down the road in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Rick Hall's FAME studio gave Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin the same kind of grit.

Aretha is the hinge. Columbia had spent six years trying to make her a supper-club singer. Jerry Wexler signed her to Atlantic, flew her to Muscle Shoals in January 1967, sat her at the piano and let her lead. "I Never Loved a Man" and "Respect" came out within months and she was the Queen of Soul by summer. Sam Cooke had already shown where this could go: a gospel star who crossed over, owned his own label, and in "A Change Is Gonna Come", recorded in January 1964, wrote the movement's most beautiful song. It came out as a single eleven days after he was shot dead that December.

Funk was not a genre in 1960. It was a word musicians used for a smell, a feel, something earthy. James Brown made it a way of arranging a band. On "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" in 1965 he pushed the emphasis onto the first beat of the bar, turned the horns into a percussion section and the guitar into a scratch, and cut the chord changes down to almost nothing. "Cold Sweat", recorded in May 1967 with bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, went further: one chord for minutes at a time, and the drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, playing a pattern that would be sampled for the next fifty years.

Brown had already made the loudest live record anyone had heard, "Live at the Apollo", cut in Harlem in October 1962 with his own money because King Records did not believe in it. And in 1968, four months after King was killed, he released "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud", a funk record with a message that landed harder than any speech.

Sly Stone took the same rhythm and integrated it, in every sense. Sly and the Family Stone were Black and white, men and women, and their records from "Dance to the Music" in 1968 through "Stand!" in 1969 sounded like the utopia the Summer of Love had promised and mostly failed to deliver. Everything in the 1970s, from Parliament to disco to hip-hop's breakbeats, starts on the one with Brown and gets its harmony from Sly.

Folk was not new, but the 1960s politicized it. The revival that had started in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and at the Newport Folk Festival took Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Anthology of American Folk Music as scripture. Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs and Odetta sang at rallies and on the Mall in Washington in August 1963. That same summer Peter, Paul and Mary took "Blowin' in the Wind" into the Top 5 and made a twenty-two-year-old from Minnesota the most important songwriter in America.

Bob Dylan changed songwriting and then changed it again. "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" in 1963 had the protest songs. "Bringing It All Back Home" in early 1965 had an electric side. Then on July 25, 1965, at Newport, he walked out with a Stratocaster and a Chicago blues band and played three songs, and part of the audience booed. "Like a Rolling Stone", released five days earlier, was six minutes long and went to number two. "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde" followed within a year. Poet, prophet, provocateur: he had decided the folk song could be anything.

Folk rock was the fallout. The Byrds took "Mr. Tambourine Man", added a twelve-string Rickenbacker and Beatles harmonies, and had a number one in June 1965. Simon and Garfunkel's producer overdubbed drums and electric guitar onto "The Sound of Silence" without telling them and made it number one in January 1966. Buffalo Springfield wrote "For What It's Worth" about a curfew riot on Sunset Strip. By 1969 Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing three-part harmony about peace, and the singer-songwriters of the next decade, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, were already making their first records.

In 1960 the blues was a Black working-class music in Chicago, Memphis and the Delta, and its audience was aging. Two things changed that. The folk revival rediscovered the old country players: Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James were found, sometimes literally, and put on stage at Newport in front of white college kids. And in England, a generation of art students bought every Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf record they could find and started bands to play them.

The British blues boom is the story of one room, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and the players who left it. Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds because they were getting too pop, made the "Beano" album with Mayall in 1966, and somebody wrote "Clapton is God" on a London wall. He left to form Cream. Peter Green replaced him and left to form Fleetwood Mac. Mick Taylor replaced Green and left to join the Rolling Stones. The Stones themselves had named the band after a Muddy Waters song and cut their early records at Chess.

The originals were listening. Muddy Waters played Newport in 1960 and cut an album called "Electric Mud" in 1968 to chase the kids who were copying him. B.B. King crossed over to the rock audience once Bill Graham started booking him at the Fillmore, and "The Thrill Is Gone" at the very end of 1969 made it official. And when Jimi Hendrix played "Red House" or the Stones played "Little Red Rooster", a whole generation heard where rock had come from for the first time.

Jazz entered the decade at a fork. "Kind of Blue" in 1959 had shown that you could improvise on scales instead of chord changes and make something calm and enormous. John Coltrane took the idea into "My Favorite Things" in 1960, a Broadway waltz stretched to fourteen minutes on soprano saxophone, and then into "A Love Supreme", recorded in one evening in December 1964 with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. It is a prayer in four parts. He wrote the poem in the liner notes and then played it, syllable by syllable, on the tenor.

Ornette Coleman had already taken the other road. "Free Jazz", recorded in December 1960 with two quartets playing at once, put a name on music that abandoned chord changes altogether. Albert Ayler's "Spiritual Unity" in 1964 sounded like a New Orleans brass band having a religious experience. Sun Ra dressed his Arkestra in robes and said he was from Saturn, and "The Heliocentric Worlds" proved he had at least been somewhere. Coltrane went there too before he died in July 1967, and a lot of listeners could not follow.

Miles Davis did what Miles always did: built a new band. The second quintet, with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and a seventeen-year-old drummer named Tony Williams, played standards so loosely they became new compositions. Then in February 1969 he brought electric pianos and a guitarist into the studio and made "In a Silent Way", and in August he cut the sessions that became "Bitches Brew". Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" and Wes Montgomery's "Smokin' at the Half Note" showed there was still plenty of room in the middle.

And there was bossa nova, which arrived from Rio via a saxophonist from Philadelphia. "Getz/Gilberto", released in March 1964, put Stan Getz with João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim, and the version of "The Girl from Ipanema" sung in halting English by Gilberto's wife Astrud became a worldwide hit and won Record of the Year. For a couple of years every lounge in America wanted to sound like Ipanema.

The Nashville Sound was at its peak: strings, background choirs, no fiddle, records built by Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley to sell to people who did not think they liked country. Patsy Cline was its greatest voice. "Crazy", written by a young Willie Nelson, came out in 1961; she died in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee, on March 5, 1963, at thirty. Jim Reeves, Eddy Arnold and Glen Campbell, whose "Gentle on My Mind" and "Wichita Lineman" made him a television star, carried the polished version to the end of the decade.

Bakersfield, California, was the answer to all that. Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, with Don Rich on a Telecaster, played country like a rock band: sharp, loud, danceable, "Act Naturally" in 1963. Merle Haggard, born near Bakersfield to Dust Bowl Okies and paroled from San Quentin in 1960, wrote about himself when nobody else did. "Mama Tried" in 1968 put his own prison record in a three-minute song and only softened the sentence. "Okie from Muskogee" the next year started a fight that has not ended.

The women told the truth first. Loretta Lynn, a coal miner's daughter married at fifteen, wrote "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" in 1966 and it went to number one. Tammy Wynette recorded "Stand by Your Man" with Billy Sherrill in 1968 and it has been argued about ever since. Dolly Parton put out "Hello, I'm Dolly" in 1967 and joined Porter Wagoner's television show the same year; she was already the best songwriter in the room.

Then the rock kids came to Nashville. The Byrds, pushed by Gram Parsons, made "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" in 1968. Dylan went to Nashville for "Blonde on Blonde" and stayed for "Nashville Skyline" in 1969, singing duets with Johnny Cash. And Cash, whose career had been sunk by pills, walked into Folsom Prison on January 13, 1968, with a small band and a tape machine and came out the biggest star in the genre. Country and rock have been trading songs across that line ever since.

Gospel was the sound of the civil rights movement before it was anything else. The freedom songs sung in Albany, Birmingham and Selma were church songs with the words changed. Mahalia Jackson sang "How I Got Over" at the March on Washington in 1963 and, by the accounts of people who were there, called out to King during his speech to tell them about the dream. The Staple Singers, Pops and his children out of Chicago, sang "Why (Am I Treated So Bad)" for the movement and by 1968 had signed to Stax.

And gospel kept sending its children into soul. Sam Cooke came out of the Soul Stirrers. Aretha Franklin grew up in her father's New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit and never really left it; the "sock it to me" on "Respect" is a church move. Every Motown and Stax singer had learned to phrase on a Sunday morning.

Then in 1968 a youth choir in Oakland recorded an old hymn to raise money for a trip. Edwin Hawkins rearranged "Oh Happy Day" on a two-track machine at the Ephesians Church of God in Christ, Dorothy Combs Morrison sang the lead, and a rock disc jockey at KSAN started playing it in early 1969. It went to number four on the pop chart. Contemporary gospel starts there, and George Harrison said "My Sweet Lord" was his attempt to write another one.

Jamaica became independent in August 1962, and the music of that summer was ska: American R&B played by Kingston jazz musicians with the accent flipped onto the offbeat. Clement "Coxsone" Dodd opened Studio One on Brentford Road in 1963, the first Black-owned studio on the island, and the house band he assembled became the Skatalites in 1964. "Guns of Navarone" and "Simmer Down" are what they sounded like. That second one was the first hit for a teenage vocal group called the Wailers, who would go on to be Bob Marley's band.

By 1966 the tempo dropped. Rocksteady was slower, sweeter, with the bass out front and vocal groups like the Paragons and the Techniques singing American soul harmonies over it. It lasted about two years. In 1968 the beat changed again, choppier and more driven, and Toots Hibbert of the Maytals wrote a song called "Do the Reggay" that named it. Lee "Scratch" Perry, who had worked for Dodd, put out "People Funny Boy" the same year with a crying baby on it, one of the first records with the new feel and a producer already treating the studio as a toy.

None of this was heard much outside Jamaica and the West Indian neighborhoods of London, where Trojan Records started in 1968. But the machinery was in place: sound systems, versions, producers as auteurs, a bass-first way of hearing. The next decade would send it around the world.

New York Latin music in the early 1960s was the mambo generation getting older. Then the kids who had grown up on both Tito Puente and Motown made boogaloo: Cuban rhythm, English lyrics, a soul backbeat and handclaps. Joe Cuba's "Bang! Bang!" in 1966 and Pete Rodríguez's "I Like It Like That" in 1967 were the hits. It ran for a few years, and most of the established bandleaders ended up cutting boogaloo records themselves to keep up. It proved there was a Latin audience that also bought R&B.

In 1964 a Dominican flautist named Johnny Pacheco and a lawyer named Jerry Masucci started a label and called it Fania, after an old Cuban song. They sold records from the trunk of a car in Spanish Harlem. By 1967 they had signed a teenage trombonist from the Bronx called Willie Colón, and by 1968 they had a house orchestra, the Fania All-Stars. Eddie Palmieri, working across town with two trombones and a rougher sound, cut "Azúcar Pa' Ti" in 1965. Nobody was calling it salsa yet. They would.

Brazil had bossa nova, which went global through Getz and Gilberto, and then Sérgio Mendes made it pop with "Mas Que Nada" in 1966. Under the military dictatorship that took power in 1964, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé and Os Mutantes made Tropicália: Brazilian song swallowing the Beatles, Hendrix and the avant-garde whole. The collective album "Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis" came out in 1968. By the end of that year Veloso and Gil were in jail, and then in exile in London. And at Woodstock in August 1969, a young Mexican-American guitarist from San Francisco named Carlos Santana played "Soul Sacrifice" with a conga player and a timbalero and told rock what it had been missing.

Electronic music in 1960 lived in university studios and radio workshops, and it was mostly unlistenable on purpose. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop changed that by accident. In 1963 Delia Derbyshire realized Ron Grainer's theme for a new children's science fiction show called "Doctor Who" by cutting and splicing tape of oscillators and a single plucked string, note by note, and it became the first electronic signature tune on television. Millions of British children heard the future every Saturday and did not know it.

Terry Riley's "In C", premiered in San Francisco in November 1964 with Steve Reich in the band, was written for acoustic instruments but thought like a machine: fifty-three short patterns, a pulse, and players who move through them at their own speed. It is the founding document of minimalism and the reason a lot of electronic music since has been built on loops. The Beatles, meanwhile, made "Tomorrow Never Knows" in April 1966 from tape loops running on five machines at once, with the engineers holding pencils to keep them taut.

Robert Moog showed his modular synthesizer at an audio engineering convention in 1964. Wendy Carlos, who had met him there, built a studio in a Manhattan apartment and in late 1968 released "Switched-On Bach" on Columbia Masterworks: Bach played one line at a time on a monophonic Moog and stacked on an eight-track. It sold over a million copies and made the synthesizer a real instrument. Silver Apples, a New York duo with a home-built stack of oscillators, put out one of the first electronic rock records the same year. The Monkees, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds all bought Moogs. The 1970s were going to be loud in a new way.

Punk did not exist in 1969. Everything it would need did. The garage bands of the mid-decade had already stripped rock back to three chords and a shout. The Velvet Underground, managed by Andy Warhol and ignored by everyone else, had put out a record in March 1967 about heroin and sadomasochism with a viola droning through it, and sold almost nothing. Brian Eno later said everybody who bought it started a band.

Detroit finished the job. The MC5 recorded "Kick Out the Jams" live at the Grande Ballroom over two nights in October 1968, with a manager who ran a political party and an opening line that got the record pulled from a Detroit department store chain. Down the road in Ann Arbor, the Stooges, with a singer who called himself Iggy and treated the stage as a contact sport, released their first album in August 1969: "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is three chords, a sleigh bell and one piano note hammered for three minutes. In 1976 the kids at CBGB and the 100 Club would know every word.