Why are the Early 60's so Disliked?

I'll admit for a long time I was somewhat condescending when it came to appreciating pop and rock music, pre-Beatles. My attitude was basically, "well that stuff was influential and great for its time, but it doesn't really hold up in the wake of Beatles, Hendrix, Dylan, ______", you name it.

Wow, I could not have been more wrong. Thankfully I caught the old rock 'n' roll bug again due to the American Graffiti soundtrack of all things, which led to me immersing myself in Elvis, Chuck, Little Richard, Buddy and the rest. From there on I found myself getting into Larry Williams, Lloyd Price, Freddie Cannon, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, etc. etc. Then came the early soul stuff, doo-wop, old pre-rock r & b, heavy girl group immersion, Spector, even the teen idols (laugh if you must, but I think "Venus" is actually a gorgeous song and production.)

What a turnaround-- I'd say the 1959-63 era is now one of my very favorites. There's a wealth of great stuff that seems to have been lost to the sands of time for all but us heavy collectors and those that were around at the time and still remember!

 

It was the era that gave us 'Money', 'Shakin All Over', 'Louie Louie', 'Twist and Shout', 'Kind of Blue', 'Cathy's Clown', 'Moon River', 'Heatwave', 'Shop Around'.... disliked? No!!

 

Rock 'n' roll's "dark ages". The era of the Bobbies and short-lived dance crazes. The music traded in its leather jacket for a sweater.

I'll admit that's partially hyperbole, but it's true that you have to dig deeper to find anything as wild as Little Richard or Wanda Jackson between about 1959 and '63. Only a handful of big-name performers like Freddy Cannon and Gary U.S. Bonds were performing unrefined rock 'n' roll during that period.

Country and soul fared much better. Fantastic stuff on both fronts.

 

The early 60's was the first period of 'old' music I got into personally. I find it great, it has a unique sound all it's own, I do think stuff from '64 onwards holds up better for the most part, but the 59 to 63 era just has a sound of trying something new and different, some of it works, some of it doesn't.

 

Let's not forget this pop gem

 

I don't "dislike" it, I just like the music and lyrics of the late 60s better. More creative to me.

 

It was an era of schlock. Schlock can be a guilty pleasure but it is still schlock. As Darlene Love once said, to say the music we were making was aimed at teeneagers is over-estimating it. More like 12 year olds. Some good music seeped out but not much.
It was also the era when FCC Chairman Newton Minow said tv programming was mostly a vast wasteland.

 

This is correct- this era sounds very disparate to people who weren't around simply because it hadn't yet been decided that Rock was the way to go. The Beatles, writing good songs, looking good, sounding good, put Rock on the mainstream map and made looking cool, playing and singing songs you wrote yourself the way to be. They didn't invent it but they seemed to be having such a great time doing it that everyone under 21 said "ooh, I'd like to be part of that" and they did, whether it was buying the records, growing their hair or forming their own group.

 

In UK the Shadows and cliff Richard made really great records 59/64 !..

 

It's boring to me, except for the awesome country music

 

I guess the real point of this thread is: Darn those Beatles! They almost made us forget the early '60s!

 

I've found that.

Also I've just clicked Report to ask for my repeat ones to be deleted - as you don't know if a gort will be looking in at the right time.

 

I think one reason that this era isn't as well remembered is that there were hardly any great albums yet. Pop and Rock 'n' Roll was mainly about hit singles in the 50s and early 60s. So there is plenty to collect (and to discuss) from the time beginning in the mid 60s but most people are content to have a Greatest Hits compilation or maybe only just a few downloaded songs from earlier artists.
I know rabid fans of early 60s will disagree but I think many fans of the classic era feel like I do.

That said this thread has motivated me to explore the pre-Beatles era a bit more in the next couple of days.

 

I was just about to post something to that effect... people saying to me they "...killed rock'n'roll." Just play 'em The Fab's version of Long Tall Sally and wait til the end til you say who it is!!

I do love a lot of the early sixties stuff though - The Shadows in particular (and with Cliff too.) Discovered Johnny Kidd And The Pirates properly last year and I've been kicking myself not investigating earlier! I've even bought a couple of Kenny Ball CDs this week and know this stuff from my Mum's old records when I was a kid and clung to them for years. Karl Denver anyone? Most famous for Wimoweh - but this blows my socks off every time and I have two LP copies (also called Wimoweh) with this on...



I wasn't around until 1970 and don't think I'd have heard any of this without looking for myself - probably just thought of it as 'old pre-Beatle stuff.' There's so much fun (and probably innocence) in a lot of this music and damn fine musicians too... I'm not sure it's disliked as such - just not know about, though people do have their own tastes and I've had people say to me that things sound underproduced, empty etc but I don't see that at all. I like a lot of 50s US rock'n'roll as well - with Buddy Holly being at the top.

 

You won't find a bigger fan of the late 60's than myself - but lordy there was some serious schlock produced from '65-'69. To me great music is great music - I don't judge based on the era it was recorded.

 

You speak so much sense here - and a lot of 60s singles were remixed into stereo for Greatest Hits albums... which some see as substandard and prefer the single versions. I bet even back in the day, people were skeptical about buying these as they were worried about hearing their favourites 'messed about with.' I usually like both mono and stereo if they're available, by the way. Very few teens in the UK would have had the money to buy LPs and so EPs were top sellers here, along with singles of course and often the hits were left off the album - not an incentive to buy then.

Like I say above - IMO you won't go wrong with Johnny Kidd And The Pirates - a little taster...

This (and others by them) has been an earworm of mine for months.

 

There was great music and schlock in every era. Even after reading all these posts I'm still not clear on why this particular period is being pinpointed.

 

I'm not singling out your post in any way, but you raised a point that I wanted to address even though I know it'll never go over with the majority on this particular forum; but I don't necessarily see rock 'n' roll music, even in its most unrefined state, as being inherently superior to pop, or to any other genre for that matter.

In other words, you're entirely correct in saying that outside of guys like Gary US Bonds (whom I love by the way-- he's really underrated) that straight-up rock 'n' roll fell off the pop charts in a major way around that time. It's just that some of the stuff that replaced it on the charts was just as good in its own way. I'm thinking of songs such as "I Only Have Eyes for You", "Cryin'", "He's a Rebel", "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Hit the Road Jack", "Runaway", etc.

Overall I don't find 1960, for example, any better or worse a year for the pop charts than I do 1957 or 1965. Radio was just going through a pop cycle at the time, and rock did eventually make a comeback. The charts are always in flux, and the well-produced ear candy of the time was a direct reaction to the rock 'n' roll of the mid fifties and was summarily replaced by yet more rock 'n' roll in the mid sixties, and so it goes.

 

While the OP was talking about rock, I would say this is my favorite period of Jazz.

 

Best way to be - no, correction... it's the ONLY way to be.

 

I don't think the effect the assassination of President Kennedy had on the country can be stressed enough. The country got a lot more serious (or "lost its innocence" as some say) after that event.

As such, to the people who were around then, the music immediately preceding that event came to symbolize dancing on the deck of the Titanic while being oblivious to the crash. It was something that they wanted to forget because it made them uncomfortable: the dance crazes, the melodramatic girl group songs, the sappy pseudo-adult contemporary fare, etc. I think when the British Invasion hit, it gave Americans a way to forget that tragedy and start fresh, emotionally speaking.

The music afterwards took on a sociological importance not just to listeners, but to the people making it, who now had the weight of a major world even on their hands to deal with, if only symbolically.

So, we can now look back at (for example) The Orlons' "Cross Fire!" (1963) and The Beatles "Eight Days a Week" (1964 -- but a US hit in '65) and see them as somewhat similar with their walking bass lines and bouncy shuffle tempos. But they symbolize two very different worlds, sociologically speaking.

There are more factors at play here, like demographics, how people related to race, ethnicity, and gender in music, and the (unethical) American music industry -- something Joe Boyd touches on in his book "White Bicycles." Someone should write a book about this era, but I wonder if the demographic of people who really care has aged out.

I wish there was a way we could upload files here because there's a great essay about this era in a book from the '70s called "Rock Almanac" that I could scan and post. It's called "The In-Between Years" and tracks what happened musically between 1959-1963, looking not just at the artists, but at musical trends. Turned me onto a lot of great girl group songs as well, like the Sapphires' "Who Do You Love?"

 

Girl Groups
Soul
Jazz in the Top 40
Indie labels in the top 5
The Twist
Surf
Folk
Instrumentals
Hot Rod
The Doo Wop Revival of 1961
Teen Idols
Novelty Records


What's not to love?

 

In a previous thread on a similar theme, someone called the difference between pre and post Beatlemania 60s as a sort of Great Divide.

Sure a lot of the pre-Beatles music was about teenage issues rather than Zeitgeist profundity, but those teenage-growing up issues remain, and impact the music of each generation. I suspect much of today's pop music is as disposable and unsophisticated as the pre-Beatles pop seems to the average Forum member here.

Myself, I grew up listening to radio in those early 60s days, and now I can hear with older wiser ears that much of it was beautifully crafted and intended. And darn it, it was fun!

 

I honestly don't know how RS or anyone can write off a whole musical time period, but it doesn't surprise me that they do ''if it's true that they do''. I think it's that elitist ''if it ain't rock & roll and they didn't write their their own songs it's crap mindset''. It's not only the early 60s, there's also the much maligned pre Elvis 50s pop music scene, because as we've all been led to believe nothing good happened then either.

 

French Instrumental Rock!!!