The Asian Age

Not just ‘Sgt. Pepper’: Many 1967 musical firsts echo today

- Hillel Italie

Sgt. Pepper” was only the beginning. Half a century after the Beatles’ psychedeli­c landmark, it stands as one of many musical astonishme­nts of 1967 that shaped what we listen to now.

It was a year of technical, lyrical and rhythmic innovation, of the highest craftsmans­hip and most inspired anti-craftsmans­hip. The rock album became an art form, and the tight, twominute hits of Motown and Stax began to give way to the funk of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone and the fiery candour of Aretha Franklin and “Respect.” It was the dawn of the rock festival, in Monterey, and of the pop soundtrack, Simon & Garfunkel’s music for “The Graduate.”

And it was the year Bob Dylan and the backing performers who would name themselves the Band quietly gathered in a pink house just outside of Woodstock, New York, and recorded dozens of songs old and new that were the birth of “roots music” and the foundation for rock’s most famous bootleg, “The Basement Tapes.”

“We were in our own little world, up in the mountains, kind of isolated from everything that was going on,” says the Band’s Robbie Robertson. “But looking back at that time, you could see that the stars were aligned and there was a magic people have been trying to dissect ever since.”

There were endings in 1967 — the deaths of Otis Redding and Woody Guthrie — but many more beginnings. Few years contained so many notable debuts, from artists who would influence punk, heavy metal, glam rock, progressiv­e rock, new wave and other musical trends: The Velvet Undergroun­d, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, along with first albums by Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin (with Big Brother and the Holding Company), the Grateful Dead, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Sly and the Family Stone, who called their record “A Whole New Thing.”

The month before Woody Guthrie died, his son, Arlo, debuted with the album “Alice’s Restaurant”. Side One was the anti-war classic “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”, 18 minutes of deadpan absurdity about Thanksgivi­ng and litter that would become a holiday tradition for the emerging “progressiv­e” FM radio format.

In 1967, a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout, Jann Wenner, borrowed $7,500 and from a San Francisco loft turned out the first issue of Rolling Stone, which helped bring serious attention to music then-dismissed by most establishm­ent newspapers and magazines.

During a recent interview, Wenner said 1967 was an ideal time to launch such a publicatio­n. Rock was not only maturing, but becoming more interconne­cted. The Monterey festival in June helped introduce the Who and Hendrix to American audiences and musicians, while also bringing together performers from Los Angeles (the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas) and San Francisco (the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane).

“There was a lot of energy and recognitio­n of fellow artists coming from around the world and trying to do the same thing,” Wenner says.

“All those new, highly visual acts at Monterey expanded greatly the idea of what you can do on stage,” says the music critic Robert Hilburn. “After those events alone, anything seemed possible — this rock ‘n’ roll force was unleashed in all its creative power and glory.”

Music scenes thrived throughout the United States and in England, where the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream and others were making some of their best music; and a young Reg Dwight renamed himself Elton John and began his songwritin­g partnershi­p with Bernie Taupin.

Besides “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the Beatles released the hits Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane and unveiled their paean to the Summer of Love, All You Need is Love. The Stones issued the acclaimed “Between the Buttons” album and the classic two-sided single Ruby Tuesday and Let’s Spend the Night Together. The Who’s “The Who Sell Out” cleverly interspers­ed mock-radio commercial­s and jingles between such hits as I Can See for Miles. Cream’s “Disraeli Gears”, often listed among rock’s greatest albums, includes the band’s signature song, and one of rock’s signature guitar riffs, Sunshine of Your Love.

“The classic album era begins around this time and it canonizes music in a very different way than when you hear a single,” says Ann Powers, a music critic for NPR and author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music, which comes out in August. “And that’s a powerful reason why the music remains so resonant, because the album is a like a novel set to music. It’s the form we share with our children and the form we teach and the form we collect.”

In the US, San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district was the home of Flower Power and Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” the unofficial anthem. It was the year Joplin, the Dead and other San Francisco acts broke through nationally and Jefferson Airplane released its two most famous songs, Somebody to Love and White Rabbit.

 ?? AP ?? In this June 1967 file photo, Paul McCartney (from left), George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon of The Beatles appear backstage during a break in rehearsals for the live broadcast on the “Our World” program at EMI studios in London.
AP In this June 1967 file photo, Paul McCartney (from left), George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon of The Beatles appear backstage during a break in rehearsals for the live broadcast on the “Our World” program at EMI studios in London.

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