Annual Mix – Haunted Jukebox

When asking what the absolute worst era for music actually was, most Boomers and Gen-X-ers will probably answer the 1970s and the early 70s in particular. A time immediately predating me, I have no authority on what it was really like or how things turned so… brown coming out of the comparatively Day-Glo 1960s. Browsing through a list of the era’s number one hits, one finds support to back up this notion: “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree”, “The Candy Man”, “My Ding-A-Ling”—all easy targets for sure, but don’t forget when bad hits happened to good people like Paul McCartney’s putrid “My Love”. On the other hand, “It’s Too Late”, “You’re So Vain”, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and Macca’s own “Band On The Run” also topped the charts. No matter the era or the year (as we’ll see here), there was always plenty of excellent pop music to go with all the bad stuff.

Scan through the following list of fifty songs and you’ll see there’s a lot going on: the golden age of the singer/songwriter with figures as disparate as Randy Newman, Todd Rundgren and Cat Stevens; the last great gasps of Top 40 AM radio (The Fortunes, George Baker Selection); truly new sounds from other lands (CAN’s krautrock, the peculiar, Polish vocalese of the Novi Singers); psychedelic hangovers (the Martyn’s, Linda Perhacs); perennial, titanic figures at their peaks (Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison, Elton John, Paul Simon); UK glam-pop (T. Rex, Sweet) and UK art-rock (Pink Floyd, Roxy Music and their ex-member Brian Eno.)

Arguably, the creative leaps in music made by African-American artists most crucially defines this period. While Dionne Warwick and James Brown each push their aesthetic (baroque pop-soul and relentless funk, respectively) as far as they reasonably can, an upstart such as Gil Scott-Heron heavily anticipates hip-hop, another like Bill Withers writes songs rivaling Newman’s own and Curtis Mayfield, a relative veteran redefines the times by singing explicitly of them. The Pointer Sisters recontextualize the past for the present, The Fifth Dimension convey how sophisticated the latter could be and Barry White and Gladys Knight & The Pips thrillingly look ahead towards what would later become disco.

All that and novelties (Redbone), Broadway (Pippin), the rock movie musical (Paul Williams, more convincing there than as a singer-songwriter) and of course, the inaugural international smash from Eurovision-winning ABBA, whom we’ll see plenty of in the next couple of years. We officially begin next week with 1975!

1970-74: Keep On Keepin’ On

Al Stewart, “A Small Fruit Song”
Rodriguez, “Crucify Your Mind”
Novi Singers, “Torpedo”
John Martyn & Beverly Martyn, “Auntie Aviator”
George Baker Selection, “Little Green Bag”
Tom Jones, “Daughter of Darkness”
Linda Perhacs, “Parallelograms”
Van Morrison, “Into The Mystic”
George Harrison, “What Is Life”
Randy Newman, “Have You Seen My Baby?”
Cat Stevens, “Don’t Be Shy”
Harry Nilsson, “Jump Into The Fire”
Redbone, “The Witch Queen Of New Orleans”
Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Bill Withers, “Harlem”
Serge Gainsbourg, “Melody”
Dionne Warwick, “Amanda”
James Brown, “Hot Pants”
The Fortunes, “Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again”
The Who, “My Wife”
Ben Vereen/Pippin Original Cast, “Magic To Do”
Big Star, “The Ballad of El Goodo”
CAN, “Spoon”
Carly Simon, “You’re So Vain”
Curtis Mayfield, “Superfly”
The Fifth Dimension, “(Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All”
Paul Simon, “Mother and Child Reunion”
Lou Reed, “Satellite of Love”
T. Rex, “Telegram Sam”
Todd Rundgren, “I Saw The Light”
Barry White, “I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Babe”
Bryan Ferry, “A Hard Rain A-Gonna Fall”
Elton John, “Grey Seal”
Gladys Knight & The Pips, “I’ve Got To Use My Imagination”
Sweet, “Little Willy”
The Pointer Sisters, “Yes We Can Can”
Stevie Wonder, “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing”
John Cale, “Paris 1919”
Pink Floyd, “The Great Gig In The Sky”
Al Green, “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)”
ABBA, “Waterloo”
Brian Eno, “Mother Whale Eyeless”
Steely Dan, “Any Major Dude Will Tell You”
Richard & Linda Thompson, “I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight”
Kiki Dee, “I’ve Got The Music In Me”
Leonard Cohen, “Who By Fire”
Sparks, “Hasta Manana, Monsieur”
The Staple Singers, “City In The Sky”
Roxy Music, “Prairie Rose”
Paul Williams, “The Hell Of It”

Throughout this blog, I’ve posted annual playlists, at first in accordance with my 100 Albums project (from 1990-on), then rather haphazardly filling in the gaps. Last year, I deleted them all; in 2024, I’ll be posting new, improved versions of them every Sunday in chronological order from my birth year (1975) until the present.

I originally intended to go all the way back to 1965 when the Beatles’ influence fully gelled and pop music evolved into something that one could easily differentiate from early rock and roll, doo-wop, and everything else that came before. Instead, I’m sticking with my own timeline, but preceding it with two playlists each covering a five-year period featuring roughly ten songs from every year (again, in chronological order.)

I’m uncertain as to how comprehensively one can sum up a single year in ten songs, so the only ground rule I implemented below was one song per artist. I’ve selected beloved tracks from all-time favorites (Dionne Warwick, Nina Simone, The Velvet Underground, Stevie Wonder), glorious one-shots (We Five, The Darlettes, Margo Guryan, Mason Williams) and songs that more or less begat seismic shifts in what pop music could be (James Brown’s rhythm-forward soul, The Mothers of Invention practically inventing psych-rock and The Beatles perfecting it, Desmond Dekker importing first-wave ska to the rest of the world.) Subsequent playlists will see examples of all three categories.

Over this particular five-year period, one can detect some evolving trends: although both were ostensibly conceived of as mood-music, there’s a world of difference between something like “Spanish Flea” and “69 année érotique”; similarly, The Miracles and The Supremes represent one golden mean of soul-pop, while Sly & The Family Stone and Dusty Springfield (in Memphis) each exemplify vastly different ones. In later years, there’s as much of a push to innovate via prog (“One Way Glass”), tropicália (“A Minha Menina”) and whatever swamp-rock “Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya” is as there’s one to comfort via the good ol’ bubblegum of “Sugar Sugar” and “Quick Joey Small”. Still, 1969’s “Space Oddity” is deliberately placed at the end as a bridge between explaining what the 1960s did to pop culture and anticipating what the next decade might achieve.

Check back next week for a companion playlist for 1970-74!

1965-69: Watch Out, The World’s Behind You

Marvin Gaye, “Ain’t That Peculiar”
James Brown, “Papa’s Got a Brand-New Bag”
Dionne Warwick, “Are You There (With Another Girl)”
Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, “Spanish Flea”
Tom Lehrer, “The Vatican Rag”
We Five, “You Were On My Mind”
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, “The Tracks of My Tears”
The Darlettes, “Lost”
Unit 4 + 2, “Concrete & Clay”
Vince Guaraldi Trio, “Linus and Lucy”
The Mothers of Invention, “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”
The Beatles, “She Said She Said”
Lou Christie, “Trapeze”
Nancy Sinatra, “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’”
The Rolling Stones, “Under My Thumb”
Nina Simone, “Four Women”
Simon & Garfunkel, “A Hazy Shade of Winter”
The Supremes, “Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart”
The Temptations, “(I Know) I’m Losing You”
Norma Tanega, “You’re Dead”
Cat Stevens, “Matthew & Son”
The Free Design, “I Found Love”
The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset”
The Monkees, “For Pete’s Sake”
Scott Walker, “Montague Terrace (In Blue)”
The Who, “Pictures of Lily”
Lulu, “To Sir With Love”
The Velvet Underground, “Sunday Morning”
The Zombies, “This Will Be Our Year”
Dr. John, “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya”
Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus, “Quick Joey Small (Run Joey Run)”
Lalo Schifrin, “Bride Of the Wind”
Laura Nyro, “Eli’s Comin’”
Leonard Cohen, “Winter Lady”
Margo Guryan, “What Can I Give You”
Bobbie Gentry, “Casket Vignette”
Os Mutantes, “A Minha Menina”
Sly & The Family Stone, “M’Lady”
The Association, “Everything That Touches You”
Van Morrison, “The Way Young Lovers Do”
Mason Williams, “Classical Gas”
Desmond Dekker, “Israelites”
The Archies, “Sugar, Sugar”
Stevie Wonder, “My Cherie Amour”
Dusty Springfield, “Don’t Forget About Me”
Manfred Mann Chapter Three, “One Way Glass”
Serge Gainsbourg, “69 année érotique”
Donovan with Jeff Beck, “Barabajagal”
Nick Drake, “Cello Song”
David Bowie, “Space Oddity”