The spirit of 1967: Rock ‘n’ roll’s revolutionary year
“Sgt. Pepper” was only the beginning. Half a century after the Beatles’ psychedelic landmark was released on June 1, 1967, it stands as one of many musical astonishments of that year which 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, two-minute hits of Motown and Stax began to give way to the funk of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone and the fiery candor 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”
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