![]() ![]() It’s hard to think of any one record that has influenced an entire genre as much as the 13th Floor Elevators’ seminal debut influenced psych rock. 13th Floor Elevators, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966) A live version of that and cuts like “Piece of My Heart” would shoot Joplin into stardom and, sadly, martyrdom when she died just two years later of a heroin overdose. Joplin had already wowed the Monterey Pop Festival with her performance of Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” a year earlier. and Robert Kennedy, Chicago’s violent Democratic Convention, Vietnam’s Tet Offensive), Joplin’s rasp explosively melded with the band’s psychedelic vibrations and often overlooked guitar prowess. Recorded and released during America’s infamous spring and summer of 1968 (the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. Big Brother and the Holding Company, Cheap Thrills (1968)Ĭapturing the spirit of San Francisco’s musical and cultural shifts, Robert Crumb’s iconic cover contributed almost as much to the album’s success as singer Janis Joplin’s iconic voice. The full album Green Onions would set the template for that sweet Stax soul sound. When Stax president Jim Stewart hit the “record” button and released the instrumental “Green Onions,” one of the first multi-racial bands was born-as well as the studio’s first #1 single. Jones was messing around at Stax, where he, guitarist Steve Cropper, upright bassist Lewie Steinberg and drummer Al Jackson Jr. In the summer of 1962, a 17-year-old organ player named Booker T. However, we’ve barely scratched the surface to avoid making this just a list of Beatles and Bob Dylan records, we’ve limited it to three albums per artist-which means some incredible works like Rubber Soul, The White Album and Bringing It All Back Home, while highly recommended by us, had to get bumped this time around.Ħ0. In other words, the ‘60s produced some of the greatest records of all time, but beyond that, it’s the decade taught us what music could-and should-truly be.Īs with our previous decades lists, we polled our staff, interns and writers and whittled it down to our 60 favorite albums. As the Vietnam War escalated and a nation tuned in, turned on and dropped out, the protest song became an important part of American life. Black kids and white kids started listening to the same records-a tiny sliver of common ground for future generations to build upon as the battle for equality raged on. Of course, nothing exists in a vacuum, and many of the groundbreaking artists who rose to prominence in the decade borrowed heavily from the artists who came before them, but looking back, there’s no denying the 1960s were some sort of scary, beautiful explosion of sound.Īll of a sudden, there were screaming girls, weeping and tearing their clothes off as they watched their teen idols perform. Everyone knew they would never forget it.If music as we know it today is our universe, the 1960s are the Big Bang. His lo-fi, sepia-saturated take on a school concert that descends into madness – complete with slo-mo cheerleaders, smashed up guitars and smoke and fire in a sports hall full of sweaty headbanging teens – was as disturbing and anarchic as the song itself. There’s one more thing that makes "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the song of the decade, and that’s Samuel Bayer’s now iconic video. Anger, despondency, pain and chaos ripped through a million bedrooms as we listened to Cobain wail, scream and howl lyrics that were as confusing as they were powerful: "A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido… hey." What the fuck? A generation of disaffected youth had found an anthem like no other. This was like nothing we’d ever heard before: the sound of Seattle’s grunge scene coming out of the garage like a ravenous monster. Many words have been written about "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and we’re about to add a few more, but it’s almost impossible to overstate the sonic earthquake that this song caused around the world in 1991. Like everyone else, they got into Nirvana the moment they heard the first ten seconds of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the radio: Kurt Cobain’s dirty Boston-aping guitar riff exploding as Dave Grohl’s kit and Krist Novoselic’s bass smashed their way into the song and our collective consciousness. All the cool kids will tell you that they were into Nirvana back in ’89 when they released Bleach on Sub Pop. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |