You can stop arguing now, the greatest ever year for music was 1967.
tl;dr — here’s the proof
There was a time when rock music and it’s various offshoots were widely regarded as radical, rebellious, even dangerous. This began sometime around the point that Elvis swivelled his hips on American television, and continued for at least four decades; even as late as the mid-1990s, it was possible for Keith Flint and his striking appearance to outrage parents by jumping around an underground tunnel while announcing himself as a twisted firestarter. Perhaps in truth it was never more than a branch of light entertainment — managers were getting rich off their performers as soon as rock was invented — but for a surprisingly long time it felt like a vibrant art form by continuing to reinvent itself.
In 2021 rock music feels to me like jazz did when I was younger. There’s a sense that all the great songs have been written, the canon is fixed, and all that’s left to do is pay homage to the greats. That probably sounds unfair if you’re a teenager who’s excited by drill or grime, and at 44 I’m definitely not qualified to speak about them, but as the rock era survivors start to die off in ever greater numbers, we can’t be too far away from the point where the most successful touring acts are covers bands, performing the classics like a jukebox musical. Abba are still with us, but they’ve already found a way to play live shows without actually turning up.
We’ve reached the point where the fun, excitement and innovation has been replaced by an endless stream of curation. Almost every major rock act has had a biopic by now, those that haven’t have certainly featured in a documentary on BBC4 or Sky Arts. Back catalogues are reissued again and again, in surround sound, on heavyweight vinyl, with new mixes or material that was never meant to be heard recovered from the vaults.
Most depressingly for me, magazines that covered new music have folded one by one until the last ones standing are Mojo and Uncut, the titles that specialise in regurgitating features on the same handful of acts with ever diminishing returns. I can’t bring myself to read them anymore — there’s nothing new to learn about the recording of Revolver, Gram Parsons’ stint in the Byrds, or Brian Wilson’s struggle to follow Pet Sounds. When details of the latest batch of reissues include a short side panel interview with the guy (it’s always a guy…) who handled the remastering, it feels like you’ve picked up a trade journal by mistake. If rock music was a University course, I graduated with honours many years ago and don’t need to do my resits.
For a while one of the most common ways of compiling this canon has been through lists of the usual suspects. All time classic albums, best vocalists, greatest guitar solos etc, most of them telling you more about the intended audience than the quality of the music they contain, but recently there’s been a trend towards hailing a particular year instead. David Hepworth has written a book arguing the case for 1971 as the greatest year for rock; James Acaster published one on his love of the albums of 2016; some reissues labels have focussed on whole series of compilations grouped around individual years.
If you’re bored of the same old names being rearranged in marginally different order, there’s a certain appeal to this approach. One of the highlights of reading the weekly music press was the end of year critics and readers polls, even if they didn’t always age well. Restricting the entry criteria also gives an opportunity to look at lesser known artists who may not have had a long career or much success, but do at least have a release that qualifies. And it speaks to a very simple instinct in all of us, namely ‘which is best?’ I can’t pretend to have done much more than skim read the Frank Zappa module on my rock music course, but I’ve always loved his quote that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Music is such a personal thing and affects listeners in such different ways, that most musical debates can essentially be distilled down to “my band’s better than your band”.
So when a friend of a friend tweeted about the supremacy of the music of 1991 and challenged all-comers to suggest a better year, I couldn’t resist. It only took a little thinking to come up with 1967, which is not a particularly radical choice. The Beatles and Stones were in their pomp, Aretha had suddenly found her groove, Jimi Hendrix was creating new standards for his peers, and the Kinks released a serious contender for the most perfect pop song ever written. Within minutes I had 20 songs to match his 20, dropped them into a playlist, and posted my response.
Except… I was barely getting started. Some ridiculously good songs got left out. Those with a knowledge of mixtape rules know that a common one is one track per artist, but how do you do justice to the finished product when either Strawberry Fields or A Day In The Life has to be cut? If I reluctantly had to omit Some Velvet Morning from the list of 20, who knows what other classics just failed to squeeze in? And what about the ones I simply hadn’t realised were released in 1967? I’m ashamed to say my initial take missed (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher, which I consider to be one of the greatest singles ever recorded.
So I disappeared down a rabbit hole of remembering / sleeve note checking / Googling. The new playlist is 104 songs long, though I’m not convinced it’s finished yet. Some were tracks I’d been disappointed to leave off the first list, others only occurred to me when I thought about the topic some more, still more were tunes that I suspected were from the right period but needed to confirm. But if ‘1967’ was a reflex response to the original question, I am now pretty convinced that the evidence for the prosecution has been heard in full, and it’ll stand up in court. There was an incredible amount of superb music crammed into just 12 months.
There’s a surprising amount of variety available to the listener. The 1960s soundtrack is often reduced to a shorthand of Swinging London and perhaps some Motown, and obviously those are well represented, but meanwhile James Brown and Sly Stone were starting to invent funk music; Bobbie Gentry was releasing a startlingly fully formed first album; Pink Floyd were putting out singles that sounded like an accompaniment to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, while Jefferson Airplane made the link explicit; Leonard Cohen signposted the way to the more serious music that would soon follow, even while The Turtles and the Monkees showed there was still life in the bright pop that had dominated preceding years; Lee Hazlewood continued to exist in a genre all of his own; Desmond Dekker was a harbinger of the reggae sound that had been stirring in Jamaica for several years. And however much critics hail the influence of songs on The Velvet Underground and Nico, it’s certain that many times more people will be able to sing the words to the soundtrack from The Jungle Book.
Is my playlist a true representation of how listeners would have heard music in 1967? Absolutely not — I wasn’t born, but know enough from representations of my own youth to know how much the media gets wrong a few decades down the line. Some of the records here would never have got airtime on Radio Caroline or the newly launched Radio 1, and it’s a very subjective list, because it’s my list. One curiosity I picked up on was how many giants of the time didn’t do their best work in 1967. So there are no entries for Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder or The Temptations, and Elvis was still a few months from his career renaissance. Even the Stones only get a single entry — She’s a Rainbow rarely features in discussions of their best singles, but I’ve always had a sneaking affection for that wonky piano line.
There’s also the question of songs that only got their dues later. Within the list there are several records which had no impact on the charts, but took on a new life a few years later when they got picked up by the Northern Soul scene. They’re 1970s records really, no-one was dancing to There’s a Ghost in my House or Gone with the Wind is my Love in 1967 (though they should have been). Georgie Fame’s No Thanks was actually relegated to a B-Side, and it’s easy to imagine how it might have sounded tired on release with everything else that was happening, but at a distance of half a century, when stood up next to his big hits from a couple of years earlier it holds up well.
The exercise of checking the release dates for inclusion also highlights the flaws of the curation by year approach. Extending 1967 by 6 weeks in either direction would have yielded at least 20 fantastic additional records for the playlist — Nancy Sinatra’s Summer Wine, Marlena Shaw’s Let’s Wade in the Water, (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay… It’s not as if people stop listening to older releases the moment the calendar flips to January 1st. While compiling the list I’ve almost convinced myself that the second greatest year for music was 1968, which feeds into this idea that the late 1960s were a truly remarkable time. At this point I have to acknowledge that while I find the reverential approach of the likes of Mojo and Uncut deeply dispiriting, at its root they may really be onto something, and perhaps we should be finding a way to celebrate this era, but in a way that goes beyond the cliched established narrative.
Anyway, what I’ve been trying to say all along was captured in the title. The greatest ever year for music was 1967. Here’s the proof.*
*Play it on shuffle. I didn’t envisage a running order when I was adding songs, and it’ll be a truer reflection of how music is usually experienced.