FAVORITE HITS OF 1967

Lovely Tammi Terrell, soon deceased of a brain tumor, with Marvin Gaye

Pata Pata — Miriam Makeba
Purple Haze — Jimi Hendrix
Heroes & Villains — the Beach Boys
Happy Jack — the Who
Tin Soldier — the Small Faces
Mas Que Nada — Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66
So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star — the Byrds
The Letter — the Box Tops
Mellow Yellow — Donovan
Words — the Monkees
Chain of Fools — Aretha Franklin
Let the Heartaches Begin — Long John Baldry
Rain on the Roof — the Lovin’ Spoonful
Waterloo Sunset — the Kinks
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough — Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
How Can I Be Sure? — the Rascals
The Wind Cries Mary — Jimi Hendrix
Light My Fire — the Doors
Respect — Aretha franklin
I Feel Free — the Cream
Hello Goodbye — the Beatles
Dedicated to the One I Love — the Mamas & the Papas
There is a Mountain — Donovan
Ode to Billie Joe — Bobbie Gentry
Groovin’ — the Rascals
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again — Tom Jones
I Had to Much to Dream Last Night — the Electric Prunes
Natural Woman — Aretha Franklin
Eight Miles High — the Byrds
Wild Honey — the Beach Boys
Hole in My Shoe — Traffic
Strange Brew — the Cream
Strawberry Fields — the Beatles
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You — the Monkees
When I Was Young — the Animals
Pictures of Lily — the Who
Hey Baby — the Buckinghams
The Day I Met Marie — Cliff Richard
I Was Made to Love Her — Stevie Wonder
Itchycoo Park — the Small Faces
Baby Now That I’ve Found You — the Foundations
Sweet Soul Music — Arthur Conley
Jimmy Mack — Martha & the Vandellas
Ruby Tuesday — the Rolling Stones
It Takes Two — Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston
Hey Joe — Jimi Hendrix
I’m a Man — the Spencer Davis Group
Randy Scouse Git (Alternate Title) — the Monkees
I Can See for Miles — the Who
Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings — Tom Jones
Bernadette — the Four Tops
Show Me — Joe Tex
Homburg — Procol Harum
Magical Mystery Tour — the Beatles
She’s My Girl — the Turtles
I Feel Love Coming On — Felice Taylor
Love is All Around — the Troggs
Come to the Sunshine — Harper’s Bizarre
Get Me to the World On Time — the Electric Prunes
I Got Rhythm — the Happenings

Felice Taylor, au naturale

BEFORE THERE WAS HOLLYWOOD

We are approaching, next year, 2010, the hundredth anniversary of movie stars. Motion picture photographic apparatus and film had been devised and developed by at least a dozen different people around the world twenty years before and short film clips that passed as documentaries proliferated from the mid 1890s in France, Britain, even America: trains coming into stations, boxing matches, royal events… It was never imagined at this early stage by one of its ‘inventors’, Thomas Edison, that it could be used for entertainment purposes.

Narrative fiction on film got underway around 1900, by consensus in France first. This was entertainment. But actors, who virtually all came from the stage, were loath to be recognised on screen — for having strayed so far from legitimate acting and sunk to such moral depths: these early entertainments were mainly appreciated worldwide by poor people, who couldn’t afford to go to The Theatre. By 1909 such brave souls as ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson, the boss of leading Chicago studio Essanay, and comedian Ben Turpin who worked there, ‘came out’ and allowed themselves to be named in public.

The first international stars predated the worldwide fame of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin by four years. The first American star named and promoted as such was Florence Lawrence, formerly the Biograph Girl, in April 1910 lured by Universal Studio founder Carl Laemmle for the huge salary of $200 a week. The Vitagraph Girl, protostar at Biograph’s rival studio nearby in New York, had started three years earlier at $18 a week, boosted to $24 a week for including in her duties sewing costumes while off set.

Now the lid was off and new record salaries continued to be set over the next few years. The best-publicized race for loot was between Pickford and Chaplin, each on effectively a million dollars a year by 1916. In the early Twenties, with Chaplin, Pickford and husband Douglas Fairbanks owning and running United Artists, they could name their own price.

Parallel with the conscious, hucksterish invention of stardom in the States, in 1910 superstardom in Europe was also flourishing. In early 1911 a Russian popularity poll listed:

1. Max Linder
2. Asta Nielsen
3. Valdemar Psilander

Linder is the recognised first comedy stylist of film. Having overtaken in popularity his Pathe studio colleague Andre Deed, who created the first internationally popular screen character in 1905, Max had been popular too for a couple of years and was just becoming known in America. He was Chaplin’s prime influence.

Asta Nielsen was a truly international superstar from Denmark, a small nation that became instrumental in the new film industry, especially via the Nordisk company that exported films to America. The Abyss, about sexual betrayal, made her a sensation across Europe by the end of 1910. She influenced fashions across continents (at first outside America) and became a powerful producer in Germany with her director husband Urban Gad. Known for her androgynous sex appeal, Nielsen went on to play Hamlet convincingly on screen. In different ways she was the forerunner of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

Psilander, a fellow Dane, was the first heroic screen idol of Europe. In a few years, having foregone offers in America, the evermore dominant nation in film, he would sink with the fortunes of his nation and commit suicide in 1917. In the meantime, Ivan Mozhukhin (Mosjoukine in France) of Russia rivalled him in screen magnetism and became the most admired actor of silent film.

American popularity surveys in 1912 had brought Vitagraph veteran Maurice Costello (seven years before one of the first screen Sherlock Holmeses) to the fore, challenged by newcomer Francis X. Bushman. Bushman’s leading lady at Essanay studio, Dolores Cassinelli, was officially named the top female box-office star both that year and the following one.

In 1913, according to the first contemporary Photoplay magazine poll, that took eight months to complete, comedienne Mabel Normand

Mabel as 'Mickey'

of Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio was America’s most popular female star, until overtaken in the early months of 1914 by Margarita Fischer, Topsy in an early Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Kathlyn Williams, who had begun to star in her own adventure serial and was currently appearing in big western hits The Squaw Man and The Spoilers. When voting ended in April 1914 a surging Mary Pickford, former Griffith girl and the new favorite of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Company (soon to become Paramount Pictures) was still some way down the list:

1. J. Warren Kerrigan (Victor)
2. Margarita Fischer (Flying A)
3. Arthur Johnson (Lubin)
4. Kathlyn Williams (Selig)
5. Mabel Normand (Keystone)
6. King Baggot (Universal)
7. Mary Pickford (FP)
8. Mary Fuller (Universal)
9. Francis X. Bushman (Essanay)
10. Beverly Bayne (Essanay)

Note the preponderance of females of high popularity (and accordingly high salaries) in an era supposedly of oppressed women — in contrast to today, when women are lucky to have one entry in the top 10.

Earlier, films such as The Count of Monte Cristo (Selig, 1907) had been shot in the Los Angeles area, and The Squaw Man directed by Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille for the Lasky Company in a barn locally popularized the district as a film colony. It was 1915 that a new generation of studios, including Universal and Fox, Famous Players and Lasky — soon joining to form Paramount — relocated from the East Coast to the district centered on Hollywood.

BEATLES BOOK: Can’t Buy Me Love

Can’t Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould (Piatkus, 2007) is one of those religious books about the Beatles that starts from a standpoint of unquestioning admiration for the Liverpool pop group and ends in total devotion, as in devout worship of a single entity, monotheism. And they were a single entity, as proven by their desultory solo careers in the post-Beatle era, when none of them could foot it for creativity and cohesive output without Brian Epstein to push them along and producer/arranger George Martin to fill in the many gaps in their songs and make each one into a finished product.

In this 400-page love letter to an act, nay, an industry easy to endorse — Didn’t they sell the most records? — Gould doesn’t let tweaking of facts and half-truths stand in the way of a good myth that rates in commercial potency with Harrypottermania and Lord of the Rings, and matches them too in fictional blarney. My question is, Why even bother to write such a book when the Beatle legend has already been so insidiously planted and firmly cemented in people’s minds over the past forty years as the be-all-and-end-all of the Sixties?

The Beatles, mid 1964: The Beach Boys had already proven themselves far and away ahead of The Fab Four by self-producing the single 'I Get Around'/'Don't Worry Baby', released in May.

Gould’s total lack of imagination or enterprise in even choosing a relevant title — after all, he doesn’t spend much time covering the Beatles’ Hamburg sojourn when the Beatles did buy themselves ‘love’ from the Reeperbahn prostitutes — reminds me of the pathetic titles chosen by Television New Zealand whenever it wanted to screen a retrospective on the Sixties in general: All You Need is Love, Hello — Goodbye … All done because everyone knows a Beatle title will sell more product.

Among the many fictitious assertions made by Gould in a superficial book are several I have selected in relation to the Beach Boys, the acknowledged Sixties mainstream rivals to the Beatles. I explore these since the American group is one I have studied in depth: see my book Beach Boys vs Beatlemania: Rediscovering Sixties Music.

Assertion 1) — “Brian Wilson accounted for nine tenths of the talent of the Beach Boys”–Gould contrasting them with the supposedly uniformly, mega-talented Beatles.

This is bizarre. Has Gould heard nothing of the immense composing, producing and blues-singing talent of Dennis Wilson? The singing, composing and producing of Carl Wilson? The culturally-relevant lyric-writing and universally-admired bass voice of Mike Love? Al Jardine had measurably more creative and performing talent than Ringo, whose ’singing’ of lead vocals has been a politely overlooked though glaring debit in the Beatles column.

Assertion 2) — Brian Wilson’s voice wasn’t in the same class as Paul McCartney’s.

McCartney was adept at imitating a rock’n'roll screech — as taught to him by Little Richard. He had a sweet but bland voice on ballads. As for expressiveness and purity, and genuine versatility in turning his voice to any mood, Wilson takes the nod hands down.

Assertion 3) — Brian Wilson’s songs were characterised by “cloying sentimentality.”

Gould doesn’t know the difference between pure emotion expressed in music, in which Brian Wilson is surpassed by no one in mainstream music, and the Beatles’ cloyingly sentimental ‘luv’ cliches regurgitated from Music Hall. McCartney cites his father, a music hall musician, as his major formative influence.

and maybe the most ludicrous statement of all:

Assertion 4) — By 1966 the Beach Boys’ level of production, arrangements and group singing had almost caught up with “the innovations of the Beatles.”

This one sentence contains at least five blatant untruths that I can name and refute:

a) The Beach Boys produced their own recordings from early 1962 on — therefore were ahead of the Beatles in production from the start. This was readily apparent by the time of Surfin’ USA, Surfer Girl and Be True to Your School/In My Room in 1963 and became bleedin’ obvious the following year with I Get Around/Don’t Worry Baby and Little Honda/Wendy. According to the people who recorded the Beatles, including George Martin and Norman Smith, the Beatles continually clamored for the recording technicians to get more of an American sound, i.e. similar to the Beach Boys, Motown, etc–not the other way round. b) The Beatles didn’t produce their records — George Martin did. According to Parlophone/EMI recording engineer Norman “Hurricane” Smith the Beatles barely listened to their own recordings — didn’t even wear earphones in the recording booth. c) The Beatles didn’t arrange their songs — George Martin did, and according to Martin they knew almost nothing about non-rock’n'roll instruments. d) This is laughable. When did the Beatles ever dare to expose their ‘group singing’ via a-cappella? — as the Beach Boys did on occasions from the start. e) What innovations did the Beatles themselves introduce, except watering down rock’n'roll, country music, Eurocafe ballads, etc, etc, and turning around the rock direction of Motown, Atlantic, Vee-Jay, Philles, the Beach Boys, to bring back songs from musicals like ‘Til There Was You’, ‘A Taste of Honey’.? By the end of 1966 their music was more and more electronic, deserted by George Martin to leave a novice electronics wiz in charge of their recording.