Category: 1965-1969

“Big Sky” (1968) – The Kinks * Written and Produced by Ray Davies * LP: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society * Label: Pye

Head Kink Ray Davies crafted an exercise in nostalgia as understated as it was grand with the Village Green Preservation Society album, focusing on the real and imagined cultural touchstones of an English upbringing. A certain archness, though, bends his delivery in every song. While it was clear in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (1966), for example, that he was poking fun by taking on an aristocrat’s accent near its fadeout, the subject matter in VGPS feels heartfelt if only for its very outpouring. So sportive is Davies’s voice, that you wonder if he’s feeling self-conscious about the project. (His face on the album cover, far right, makes you wonder doubly so.)

“Big Sky,” halfway through, is the biggie, where Davies rolls out God Himself as one of his album’s endangered curios. “Big Sky feels sad when he sees the children scream and cry,” he sings. “But the Big Sky’s too big to let it get him down.” He sounds like an imperious, inaccessible monarch who refers to himself in the third person. Davies once expressed regret over his delivery, and one wonders if he’d have rather sounded more sympathetic, angry, or less affected. 

The band does the rest of the heavy lifting, giving the track all of the pent-up emotion, release, puzzlement, and memorialization the subject calls for. Being so big, the song can be taken a number of ways, a believable consensus being that it rouses the listener’s spiritual awareness. This brings to mind Tolstoy’s Andrei Bolkonsky, who lies inert on the War and Peace battlefield and discovers that “everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky.” It’s an observation that sounds at first like mockery or disappointment, but in fact gives Bolkonsky new life, and for this he thanks God, a.k.a. Big Sky.

“Backlash Blues” (live) (1968) – Nina Simone * Written by Langston Hughes and Nina Simone * Produced by Joe René * LP: ‘Nuff Said! * Label: RCA Victor

The Summer of Soul (2021) concert film unearths footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, the forgotten “Black Woodstock” that ran for six separate nights during the summer of ’69. It’s a concert film rarity that has the power to take viewers through a full range of emotions, from giddy joy to sanctified tears and then to anger. Nina Simone, at her uncompromising peak, handles that last bit, serving it up with an equal portion of awe. “Backlash Blues” is here at full boil, with words by Langston Hughes, bearing the same vocal edge, spoken statement of purpose, and boom-crash piano it had on her ‘Nuff Said! album. This was a live recording done three days after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Her first version of the song, a studio take on her 1967 Nina Simone Sings the Blues album, captured it at a mere simmer.)

In the film, “Backlash Blues” launches Simone’s set, and by the end of it she is working the crowd with lines such as  “Black people…Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?…Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” She’s actually reading verses by the Last Poets’ David Nelson, but you wouldn’t know it.

“Swan’s Splashdown” (1966) – Perrey-Kingsley * Written by Jean-Jaques Perrey and Gershon Kinsley (Tchaikovsky uncredited) * LP: The In Sound from Way Out! * Label: Vanguard

On the back cover of this first album by Moog synthesizer trailblazers Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, the two men appear as studious music scientists dressed in lab coats. The dual meaning of the teen lingo LP title implies that they are also turning music inside out, exposing its inner essence to uncharted modes of interpretation. As Perrey made clear in an Incredibly Strange Music interview, though, he was primarily concerned with giving instrumental music the ability to express humor, something he considered to be a lost art. Partnered with Kingsley (who wrote the original version of “Popcorn”), his work on this album and the follow-up, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, demonstrates hard work at the laugh lab, sending up genres and familiar melodies with electronic squitches and squiggles. On “Swan’s Splashdown,” the Allegro Moderato section of “Danses des Cygnes” in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake gets a honked-up dressing down. You will possibly think about that ballet’s duality-themed story of the good swan and evil swan and compare it to the musicians’ story of serious music and unserious music. Or you may think about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where the character Swann, in the fourth volume (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) thinks about the “binary rhythm which love adopts… bearing no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her.” You may also wonder if SmashMouth were listening to this before concocting “Walkin’ on the Sun.”

“I Believe in Sunshine” (1967) – A Passing Fancy * Written and produced by Greg Hambleton * 45: “I Believe in Sunshine” / “She Phoned” (Columbia) * LP: A Passing Fancy (1968) * Label: Columbia, Boo (LP)

The only album by this Toronto quintet, who chose a name that implied a short life, had a striking, delicate butterfly on the cover, radiating a sense of hand-crafted independence. The back cover’s song titles and credits appeared in stencil-free characters full of character. Art direction credits go to “Rainbow Ink, incorporating Cannabis Rex and the Pig,” and typography to the Tolkien-inspired pseudonym Fatty Bolger. Its label—unsurprisingly—is a small entity called Boo, but four singles (all on the album) preceded it—surprisingly—on Columbia, the major-est of labels. Still, the music preserves a garage-bound crudity. The opener, “I’m Losing Tonight,” is a keeper for its uptempo libido, while the other standout, “I Believe in Sunshine,” grabs you for its more complex, melancholic layers. It’s written, with undoubtedly cheerful and commercial intentions, by Tuesday Records founder Greg Hambleton (the brother of Ferguson, who also appears on the album and will later replace band leader Greg Price). When Jay Tefler sings, though, you know his winter breath vapors are visible, and you imagine the Canadian sun sinking dark orange behind him at something like 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s teenage music from a realm where sunshine is precious, where not much of it’s left after the school dismissal bell rings. See their band publicity photo on the too-cold playground. Hear how the piano + organ interlude seem to be emanating from an ice cave. The album sequence follows this track up with another Hambleton composition called “Island,” which merges “In My Room” with “I Am a Rock.” “I Believe in Sunshine” gets a further dose of wistfulness from this subsequent banishment to the basement.

“Plastic Fantastic Lover” (live) (1969) – Jefferson Airplane * Written by Marty Balin * Produced by Al Schmitt * LP: Bless Its Pointed Little Head * Label: RCA Victor

Not one of rock’s classic live albums, Bless Its Pointed Little Head is still memorable for the following: that hangar-esque ambience you also heard on the Jefferson Airplane’s first two studio albums; the introductory King Kong clip of Carl Denham saying “It was beauty killed the beast” to an audibly gratified Fillmore West crowd; the trippy cover and title; and the very end, when Grace Slick says, “I guess you can move your rear ends now.” But as Lucretius, the Roman philosopher, would point out, there’s atomistic, shape-forming activity going on beneath it all. They’ve named the album, in fact, after the final line in beat poet Philip Whalen’s “Homage to Lucretius,” where he writes of peeing on a snowbank and seeing it transmogrify into a yellow crystal cone, thus prompting the words “Bless your little pointed head!” In his Nature of Things, Lucretius does, indeed, refer to cones with pointed heads, and also to “trapezoids, rhombs, and so on” that atoms capriciously compose. In the album’s best track, Marty Balin sings of a lover’s “trapezoid thermometer taste,” and praises her pliable plasticity. So there you go.

“I Go to Sleep” (1966) – The Truth * Written by Ray Davies * Produced by Jeff Cooper * 45: “I Go to Sleep” / “Baby You’ve Got It” * Label: Pye

“I Go to Sleep,” an ode to what Virgil called “the sweetest gift of heaven,” was written by the Kinks’ Ray Davies and is one of his most musically crafty affairs.  Its verse melody descends helix-like into a chorus that would suit Henry Mancini’s Experiment in Terror soundtrack, while the middle eight contributes the sort of xenochronic surprise that only skillful songwriters can pull off. The Kinks never recorded it, with just a rough piano demo by Davies surviving. A good number of other artists, though, from Cher to the Applejacks to the Pretenders, made fumbling attempts.  The best versions, not surprisingly, were overseen by show band arrangers. Peggy Lee’s may well be the best, with its lush, sleepwalking tiptoe aura conjured up by Sid Feller, the man who produced Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country Music. But a version by the Truth ties for first place and perhaps has the edge for achieving a proper mod rock iteration of the song. The Truth, not to be confused with the ’80s mod revival band, were the British duo Frank Aiello and Steve “Gold” Jameson, an escapee of the pogroms in Ukraine. The arranger was Johnny Harris, who later led the show bands for Tom Jones and Paul Anka and, as his autobiography boasts, had the opportunity to refuse Elvis twice. The Truth, whose work is now collected on the 2015 compilation Who’s Wrong, had a flair for cover versions, also doing the Beatles’ “Girl” and the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” more than justice. Jameson, who recorded one solo LP in 1973, is now a Borscht Belt nostalgia comedian going by the name of Sol Bernstein.

“Sîrba Bătrînească” (1966) – Gheorghe Zamfir * Traditional * LP: Gheorghe Zamfir * Label: Electrecord

Most Americans first learned of Romanian pan flute virtuoso Gheorghe Zamfir on a last-name only basis, when late ’80s TV commercials plugged him as a mood music maestro. Of course there was, and would continue to be, more to him than that, but the small screen does have a knack for making things smaller. The pan flute tradition in Romania, where the instrument is known as the nai, stretches back to the 1600s as a regular component among lăutari musicians (that term started out meaning lutists, but has come to signify a fuller folk spectrum). Zamfir’s first record, which the national label Electrecord released when he was 25, demonstrates an expressiveness in him that manages to animate an already lively musical idiom. The last track, “Sîrba Bătrînească” (the i in the middle of the second word is more commonly an a, but I’m going with the album cover), is a traditional 2/4 dance format with southern origins named after neighboring Serbia in the southwest.  It’s a fast-tempo environment that circulates with frequency in Romanian folk, evoking scenes of unattended handcarts full of bell peppers and eggplants breaking free and rolling down steep hills. Zamfir is accompanied here by the Orchestra Florian Economu. After a few more records, he’d scale things down with a smaller band and fewer orthodox restrictions.