Introduction: Why 1967?
Ask any adult with even a passing interest in pop culture about what happened in music in 1967, and he will immediately spout, as though it is something he learned in sixth grade, “Summer of Love!” Push a little further, and he will add, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!"
Ask a more knowledgeable music fan, and she will probably add, “Monterey Pop,” and “Hendrix” or even “Pink Floyd” – perhaps even “The Velvet Underground and Nico.”
All true – but wholly inadequate to describe what was surely the watershed year in popular music. Sure, 1967 was the year during which dozens of songs and albums we still enjoy were created. But it was much, much more. 1967 was the year the post-War culture grew up and something new was born - a culture we still live with.
Why 1967? After all, there were other important years: In 1956 we saw Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, while 1964 brought The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and the British Invasion. 1972 gave us The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Exile on Main Street, and the debut album by The Eagles. 1973 delivered Dark Side of the Moon and the first two albums by Bruce Springsteen, while 1976 brought the debut album by The Ramones, the first gig by U2, and the commercial juggernauts Frampton Comes Alive, Hotel California and Songs in the Key of Life. 1984 starred Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A. and the debuts of Run-D.M.C. and the Smiths, while 1994 rocked to Nirvana’s Nevermind and the recorded debuts of Pearl Jam and Tupac Shakur.
Rock, folk, soul, funk, rap and all their musical kin have had many good years. But 1967 was different, and I plan to spend the next 12 months, week by week, showing why. Those 12 months brought the music world an unprecedented flood of new artists, and a barrage of singles and albums so remarkable that no other year can match it. Over the next 52 weeks, I will show that, among other things, 1967 brought the debut albums or singles by, among others, The Doors, Grateful Dead, David Bowie, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, The Bee Gees, Buffalo Springfield, Dolly Parton, Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, Cat Stevens, Moby Grape, Michael Jackson, Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell’s songs, Captain Beefheart, Marc Bolan, Jimmy Page’s Yardbirds, Leonard Cohen and Jefferson Airplane with Grace Slick, as well as the aforementioned Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix Experience.
These weren’t just the debuts of popular artists; these were the debuts of the artists who shaped music for the next 50 years, many of whom continue to dominate popular music.
Changes in technology and demographics
‘67 was also a year that brought changes well beyond any particular artist. It was the year that the LP first outsold the 45 single, and the year FM radio’s “free-form” programming challenged AM Top 40’s tight formats. It was the year of the first rock festivals, the first commercially-available music synthesizer, and the first global satellite broadcast – starring, of course, The Beatles.
Beyond even these momentous changes, 1967 was a sea change in the culture, the year the Baby Boomers – the first of whom were born in 1946 – reached 21. The torch was being passed from the Greatest Generation adults, personified by Frank Sinatra, to the hairy, boundary-pushing young people whose music he had years before said “fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.”
Cultural changes on every front
In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down the laws that still outlawed interracial marriage in 16 states, the same summer it welcomed Thurgood Marshall, its first Justice not to be a white male. Britain decriminalized homosexuality and liberalized its abortion laws. Denmark became the first country in the world to make written (but not visual) pornography legal.
1967 also saw a resurgence of a political reaction to all these cultural changes, first with the January inauguration, in California, of the state’s new governor, the man who would remake American politics in reaction to the changes that were accelerating in 1967, in response to the race riots that had erupted in Watts in 1965, to the growing protests against the Vietnam War, and to the formation of the Black Panther Party in Oakland in 1966. The country was edging towards mass violence, and indeed, 1967 would see exactly that: By year's end, more than 150 U.S. cities would have experienced “race riots” that would take dozens of lives, destroy thousands of businesses, and drive Detroit and Newark into urban death-spirals.
Changes roil black America
Amidst the conflicts roiling their community, black musicians went through enormous changes in 1967, a story often overlooked in the traditional "Summer of Love"-focused histories of the time. Motown suffered not just through the riots, but also through an identity crisis of sorts, as Berry Gordy tried to point his acts towards the mainstream just as the black audience was being radicalized.
James Brown, the man called “Soul Brother Number One,” was radicalizing music on his own, guiding his band to the creation of a whole new form of music: Putting the rhythmic emphasis on the first beat – “the One” – Brown and his band created funk on May 1, and sealed the deal when he and his extraordinary band played for an impassioned audience at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on June 25 and 26. Meanwhile, over in New Jersey, George Clinton was assembling a band to back his finally-successful vocal group, The Parliaments: Funkadelic would take Brown’s brand new funk in directions even he couldn’t have imagined.
Just down the Atlantic seaboard, Bob Marley, working and living with his mother in Delaware, got his draft notice from the U.S. government and hightailed it back to Jamaica, where he reunited with his wife Rita, who introduced him to Rastafarianism. 1967 was the year Marley rejoined his friends in the Wailers, opened his own record store, and wrote and recorded the song that would be his first international hit, “Stir It Up” – helping to invent the music to be known as reggae.
Meanwhile, back in Harlem, a young family band from Gary, Indiana, fronted by an eight-year-old dynamo named Michael, won their first Amateur Night at the Apollo – playing James Brown’s “I Feel Good (I Got You).” The Jackson 5 would release its first, independently produced single – Michael off-pitch but passionate – in November.
New connections, new futures
But Michael Jackson was not the only harbinger of the future of music in 1967: This was the year that Reg Dwight became Elton John and started writing songs with Bernie Taupin, the year Donald Fagen met Walter Becker and David Crosby met Joni Mitchell. It was the year that Bruce Springsteen, who had graduated from high school (and lost his band) the day after Sgt. Pepper’s was released, would meet Steven Van Zandt. Among the groups formed in 1967 were Fleetwood Mac, Traffic, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Funkadelic, Santana, Blue Oyster Cult, the Ohio Players, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fairport Convention, Chicago Transit Authority and Sly and the Family Stone.
Female artists ascend with women's liberation
The year after the founding of the National Organization for Women, female artists would begin moving beyond their traditional role: folk or pop singer, probably singing songs by male songwriters. Led by the galvanizing new voices of Grace Slick, Janis Joplin and Laura Nyro, women would suddenly emerge all over the musical spectrum: country divas Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton would score their first hits, and Aretha Franklin would shake off a decade of musical wandering with a remarkable string of singles that would, within months, re-make her as the Queen of Soul. Carole King would leave her lyricist husband Gerry Goffin, move to California and help usher in the era of the singer-songwriter, while Joni Mitchell would leave her husband, hear her first songs recorded and begin recording her own debut album.
Even in 1967, few women actually played in bands, but The Velvet Underground’s rhythm fundamentalist, drummer Maureen “Mo” Tucker, would become the first woman to play a crucial role in remaking rock. The Velvet Underground, with its deafening sonic assault, nihilistic lyrics and stark black and white imagery, had first gained national attention in 1966, but it was in 1967 that their debut album codified what would in a few years become a crucial next step for rock: punk rock. But while the Velvets anticipated it, it was in Detroit that punk made its bow, when Iggy and the Psychedelic Stooges played their first gig at a Halloween party. 1967 was the year that Patti Smith and Richard Hell would move to New York, aspiring poets who would, ten years later, change rock yet again. Deborah Harry, who in a decade would front Blondie, was in the studio doing vocals for a folk rock group called Wind in the Willows.
These and the myriad other changes that came during the 12 short months of this one year would be so total – and so far beyond any media shorthand like “the Summer of Love” – that the world on New Year’s Eve 1966 would seem utterly different than the one that dawned on New Year’s Day, 1968. This is the story of that remarkable year, when Western culture, led as never before by its musicians, and by a new generation coming of age with a vengeance, “broke on through” to a new cultural consensus, changing our culture forever.
How this will work
What follows are 52 posts, one for each week of that momentous year. As best as I can, each week will focus on events of that one week in 1967; but I will also aim to tie each week together as part of the year’s overall narrative. There are a few weeks where that will be tricky, but bear with me, and I will do my best to deliver a coherent story of this insanely complicated year.
How, exactly, this will develop will be an adventure for me as well as for you. As a blog, this will be a living bit of history, and is open to revision as new facts emerge. I will be adding to and improving every prose so that what will eventually evolve will be the definitive home on the Internet of the history of music in 1967. I am open to any informed insights and opinions that can make this blog better for everyone. Here we go…
David Watts Barton
Brooklyn, January 1, 2020