Dumb Riffs

When I was a child, much of my time was spent sitting in the back of my parents’ car on a trip to visit family members, listening to compilations of classic sixties pop on the cassette deck. These compilations would always have some stone cold classics like the Byrds version of Mr Tambourine Man, but would largely consist of stuff by the likes of Billy J Kramer or Herman’s Hermits. Even then, I knew something was a little off with the latter band. Later, it was revealed to me: they were shite. Either way, these assorted singles from a bygone era coloured my knowledge of music for a long time, and perhaps inevitably my musical knowledge has since then been filtered through a 1960s lens. It’s a lens that distorts stuff and makes you see lots of cool colours, don’t you know? Whoa, man: your thoughts are kandy koloured, and, if the air was water, we’d all swim through it like fishes. You dig?

Ahem, you get the idea. Anyway, now I’m much older, but on a recent trip in the car with my dad, I was reminded of those days of yore when dodgy sixties compilations were common aural currency for any extended automobile journey. You see, he bought a compilation of Donovan’s songs, covering the period 1965 to 1969. Donovan, who would never be on my list of the most essential artists of the 1960s, nonetheless released some of the best singles of that era. He also released some of the most flaccid, jazz-tinged, wibble-inflected inconsequences which remind you that the epithet ‘swingin’ is not always the same as ‘good’. Both of these tendencies are reflected in equal measure on the CD.

But on listening to some of the stuff on the CD, I reflected that classic sixties albums could never quite reflect that decade as fully as a load of disparate singles lumped together; the seventies were the decade when the rock or pop album came to fruition; the albums still with us from the sixties were experiments which never fully dislodged the pocket-money friendly seven inch record from pop fans hearts. The singles chart occupied a unique place in soundtracking the times, one it probably never will again, what with the growing diversity of music formats and the lack of definitive indexes of sales; or just the lack of sales generally. Music has become less of a communal experience, and more an individualised one: MP3 players have largely replaced radios and record players.

A couple of great singles from sixties bands: The Lovin Spoonful, ‘Do you believe in Magic?’ (in fact, most of the singles by this band); Honeybus ‘Can’t Let Maggie Go’ (a song that was really their only significant hit).

Also, Lenny Kaye’s classic collection of sixties garage bands, Nuggets. (Although, this is probably too significant and cool – really what I have in mind is the kind of cack handed compilation put together by the likes of the K-Tel and Camden labels.)