Double Shot (of My Baby's Love), Swingin' Medallions (1966)

Even today, when I hear the Swingin' Medallions sing “Double Shot (of My Baby's Love)," it makes me want to stand outside in the hot sun with a milkshake cup full of beer in one hand and a slightly-drenched nineteen-year-old coed in the other. - The late humorist Lewis Grizzard, 1993


I was checking out an old compilation mentioned in a recent Shindig! magazine called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, and among the scores of songs to be found on the 1998 reissue was Double Shot (of My Baby's Love) by the nicely named Swingin' Medallions.

Now this crowd pleaser is a song that gets you up and at 'em whether you feel like it or not. Never mind that it juxtaposes what passes for "love" with having a monster hangover. I was never one to fixate too much on lyrics if the music was great, which it usually is if it has a 4-or-more-piece horn section.

Who were all these clean-cut white boys you see pictured above? I never knew. Natives of South Carolina, they got their start playing the college circuit and their reputation for fun, fun, fun spread like wildfire. Amazingly, a younger version of them is still out there, with their website pronouncing them "the party band of the South."

If you happen to be in the area of the Flip Flop Beach Music Festival in Greensboro, N.C., in September, you'll be able to see them, in fact. In 2012 they sponsored a 5-day cruise to Nassau! The only original member, John McElrath, founded the band in 1962 with drummer Joe Morris, who later invented the plastic tennis ball container. (I saw this in an old interview, and it's confirmed on his LinkedIn page.) Influenced by James Brown and Ray Charles, the inclusion of brass instruments in the band was never in doubt.

As performed by the Medallions, it was a cover of a much slower rendition several years earlier by a Louisiana band called Dick Holler and the Holidays. Fun fact: Holler was the composer of the Dion hit Abraham, Martin and John. His son David recently commented on YouTube that Double Shot was written by Don Smith and Cyril Vetter in a bowling alley. (All of them had been previously in a band called the Rockets, which at one time included such personnel as Dr. John.) In any case, the song was a local hit, but the label went belly up. When the Medallions came upon it, they tried out any number of arrangements before settling upon the one that soared to the Top 20.

Double Shot has long been a favorite tune of Bruce Springsteen. I'll close this stroll down memory lane with a 2009 performance by The Boss and the Medallions together onstage. Party on, Garth. 

Come 'Round Here (I'm the One You Need), Smokey Robinson & the Miracles (1966)

Now when you need the love he's never shown you - come round here
And when you need some loving arms to hold you - come round here
Now I may not be the one you want
But I know I'm the one you need

If I ever needed proof that music becomes a part of us, I confirmed it a few days ago when I was compiling a playlist for an upcoming Dance Dance Party Party event here in Akron. 

I sensed that a certain soul song from my early teens was straining to break out of my brain, its driving rhythm close by but still lurking just out of reach. I knew it was a song that was somewhat rare, not the biggest hit that this artist had ever had, but recalled that, whatever it was, it had rearranged my molecules when I first encountered it.

My mind kept fixating on Stevie Wonder, and I checked over his early discography, but nothing was jumping out. Then suddenly my thoughts drifted to Smokey Robinson.  That man's been everywhere on my radar screen lately - keynoting at SXSW, guesting on Elvis Costello's Spectacle show, tweeting, singing the heartbreaking eulogy for the Melvin Franklin character in the Temptations miniseries. Could it have been a Miracles song? 

Checking out his early discography with the Miracles, I saw Come 'Round Here (I'm the One You Need). That title stirred the embers of something deep within me, but I still wasn't sure if it was what I was thinking about.  Was it on YouTube?  It was!  And then I clicked on it ...

I'm always rediscovering songs that I once loved and had forgotten all about, but my reaction to this one was intense. To literally excavate something like that from the fiber of one's being produces a feeling that's hard to describe. I doubt that I've heard it more than a handful of times in the 44 years that have elapsed since I listened to the vinyl single obsessively and danced my heart out in my room at the age of 13.  It is probably the most underrated song in the Smokey-Miracles canon.  Now that it's back in my life, I know it will never leave.

As pretty much everyone knows, Robinson was and is a prolific songwriter for himself and the Miracles as well as any number of the Motown fixtures, such as the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and the Marvelettes.  But this song was not one of those.  It was written by Motown's legendary writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland.  The works of Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier, as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame says, "epitomized the Motown sound: a fluid, uptempo style that combined catchy lyrics with the fervor of gospel, the groove of R&B and the polish of pop."

I am guilty of overusing the word "masterpiece," but what can I do?  This is one.  Robinson's near-desperate pleas, half sung, half wailed ... Marv Tarplin's juicy riffs piling on the tension ... the inimitable James Jamerson on bass along with the rest of the Funk Brothers.  All in all, an almost otherworldly synthesis of astounding talent among young men who were the building blocks of the Motown empire that blessed us with, as it was known, "The Sound of Young America."

   

Out Of Time, Chris Farlowe (1966)

This post could be subtitled "Six Degrees of Separation from Chris Farlowe." Or perhaps "#1 Artists I'd Know If I'd Grown Up in the UK Instead of the US."  Or just "Now I've Heard the Term Soul-Howler Twice in 12 Hours - About Two Different People." 

The first of the two soul-howlers will be a topic for another day (thank you very much, Wade, you fiend) - if I can find any information on him!  Today, our subject is Chris Farlowe, who I discovered a few hours ago listening to my Alan Price Set channel on Pandora.  One of his songs got my attention, but I'd never heard of him, so as is my wont I checked him out. 

Turns out this guy, who at 69 years of age is still performing, was a huge success across the pond with his #1 hit Out Of Time, a song I only knew as a Rolling Stones recording. This is where the first degree of separation comes in - his association with the Stones.  More on that in a minute. 

Farlowe got his teenage start when the skiffle craze was in full swing in England, but when rock & roll supplanted that musical genre, he formed a band called the Thunderbirds, which performed both rock and R&B (guitarist Albert Lee was a member), and had a record contract which produced singles destined for the trash heap. When that contract was up, however, a power broker stepped in: Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham saw potential in another white singer who had a voice tailor-made for R&B, and signed Farlowe as a solo act.  His first song to chart was the Jagger-Richards composition Think, which was also recorded by the Stones but not heard til a few months later as an album track on Aftermath. 

Next up - Out Of Time, which was a sensation as produced by Mick Jagger for Farlowe.  It was #1 in the UK two weeks after the Kinks Sunny Afternoon and two weeks before the Beatles Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby. Here, we never heard it, only a Stones version on the Flowers LP - the following year!  Farlowe became such a soul persona that he was invited to appear on a special broadcast of Ready, Steady, Go! that spotlighted Otis Redding's visit to the UK; his cover of Mr. Pitiful got someone's attention. And wouldn't you know it - thanks to YouTube we can actually see what went on there - Farlowe singing It's A Man's Man's Man's World followed by a bit of Otis. Good God!     

His career went in fits and starts through the later 60's and 70's.  His last hit was Handbags and Gladrags, written for him by Manfred Mann's Mike d'Abo; he also ended up associated with Colosseum and Atomic Rooster. None of that panned out, but in the 80's he was featured in Outrider, Jimmy Page's debut album as a soloist (here he is singing Hummingbird on that). That led to a BBC radio live show that thrust him back into the limelight and onto the radar screen of a whole new generation.

Today, he's a special guest at concerts given by the likes of Van Morrison and yes, as recently as a few months ago, the Alan Price Set, which is of course how I got here in the first place. And he has something called the Norman Beaker Band to back him up at other times. Who knew?  This has been a revelation. Today, Farlowe's confinement in the 60's to the UK wouldn't have limited his exposure, and more people would have been able to appreciate him. I am constantly delighted by the myriad online resources that tell me in real time what people all around the world are listening to. One of the upsides of globalization ...  

The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, Walker Brothers (1966)

Here in America, we know a lot about the British Invasion, but during that momentous cultural upheaval, the odd American combo crossed the pond and became bigger there than they were here.  The Walker Brothers (not their real name) was one such group.

I knew nothing about them until now, just that I loved their second deliciously melodramatic hit, The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore.  It was the perfect song for teen girls prone to heartbreak which, let's face it, is all teen girls.

Written by Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe, who were responsible for many hits for the Four Seasons, the song was first sung and recorded by Frankie Valli but was not particularly successful - I certainly never heard that version. It's a bit of a different animal, not as operatic as the Walkers performed it.  Produced by Johnny Franz, who was the British equivalent of Phil Spector, the song's orchestral stylings enhanced its effectiveness and was pretty unusual for the time. His touch can also be heard in Dusty Springfield's output.   

The Walker Brothers = Noel Scott Engel, a bass player from Ohio who moved to California, and John Maus and Gary Leeds.  They apparently just liked the name Walker Brothers, perhaps modeling themselves after Righteous Brothers Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, to whom they've been compared.  Another American singer known to them, P.J. Proby, had moved to England to do his thing and become a star, and the guys liked the idea enough to pack up their belongings and become expatriates.  Good decision - they were huge, for several years at least.  Their concerts were screamfests.  My friend Sheila, who is a major Cat Stevens aficionado, found this intriguing link that captures the tone and reveals the Walkers' touring acts at that time were Stevens, Engelbert Humperdinck, and yes, the Jimi Hendrix Experience!  That's one out-there picture.

Their first hit on both continents, in 1965, was also a crowd pleaser, a Burt Bacharach-Hal David number called Make It Easy On Yourself, a song first recorded by Jerry Butler in 1962 (here's his version). But the group disbanded after a few years in the limelight, reuniting briefly in 1978 with an album called Nite Flights.

The history of the solo career of Scott Walker, as he became known, and which continues to this day, is quite a tale in itself, but would take up an entire post.  Another blogger has already taken care of that for me, though, so I will just refer you to his well-researched and hilarious recounting. 
  
 

It Tears Me Up, Percy Sledge (1966)

Recently, the children of the late Jerry Wexler, the legendary Atlantic Records producer and coiner of the term "rhythm and blues" when he worked at Billboard, put on a memorial concert in New York to coincide with the festivities surrounding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary concert.  

One of the performers at the event was keyboardist Spooner Oldham who, along with the virtuoso songwriter Dan Penn, wrote the definitive, the most raw, anthem to love's anguish, It Tears Me Up.  Drenched in pain, the song is a portrait of someone quite simply reeling from betrayal.  Many have sung it but the great Percy Sledge was its first interpreter.  

Wexler was probably the single reason we even knew about Sledge.  Wanting to establish a recording base in the Deep South for Atlantic, Wexler decided to distribute Sledge's signature song, When A Man Loves A Woman, at a pivotal time in Atlantic's A&R evolution.  It became a sensation.  (My prior post on that story is here.)

After that, Wexler began to send more and more artists to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record. Oldham was one of the session musicians working there, which gave rise to hit after hit.  Said Sledge in Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere To Run, "What drew everybody to Muscle Shoals ... well, it sits right at the bottom of the mountains. ... When you got mountains standing that high up over you, all the way around for, like, fifty, sixty miles, then you've got a bass track."  

The partnership of Penn and Oldham was one of the most fertile out of that southern crucible, that also included Memphis.  Penn, who once said, "I can't tell where Spooner stops and I begin when we write a song," is a gigantic (and, I feel, unsung) talent - a man through whose songs every emotion no one wants to feel can be experienced.  A Woman Left Lonely, I'm Your Puppet, Out of Left Field and Cry Like A Baby were other songs the two co-wrote, and Penn has written many, many more that everyone recognizes with numerous other collaborators. 

More recently, Penn took on a new project,  producing western soul men the Hacienda Brothers, based out of Tucson.  I have never heard a more heartwrenching or redefining version of It Tears Me Up, bolstered particularly through its use of pedal steel guitar where horns were in the original version. You could be the happiest person alive and you'll want to slit your throat after hearing it.  Find their 2007 album What's Wrong With Right and prepare to suffer.

Rain, The Beatles (1966)

I can't imagine being a bass player when this song hit the scene, It would've totally changed everything.- YouTube commenter

Well, look who's having a significant birthday today!  It's my friend Jim, and there's a party tonight so I told him I'd do a post in his honor, and I'm a woman of my word. 

First, a vignette about this day in musical history.  I can barely fathom this little item, and I certainly wouldn't have any way of knowing this without the internet, but something quite peculiar happened on James' birthday in 1964, when he was a teenager, let's just say.

On that day, if you happened to be in the Indianapolis area, you could have dropped in on the Indiana State Fair and seen the Beatles for $3, $4 and $5, depending on your budget, I guess. No, I didn't leave out a zero. There's a page where the old tickets are posted.  And another with concert footage.  And another, the set list.  I'm still scratching my head - the organizers knew they were dealing with the actual Beatles, didn't they?  And not a tribute band?  How, at the height of their fame, were the Beatles selling their wares for those prices?  It's a mystery. 

Anyway, Jim's favorite song wasn't on the playlist that day, but today it is and it's the legendary B-side to Paperback Writer that many consider to be the best B-side that anyone ever recorded - Rain. 

I remember Rain as one of the last 45s where the Beatles were playing as a powerful unified force of nature before it became all about the album and the artistic and/or personal splits began to be apparent.  Highly exotic, droning and masterful, Rain was especially notable for its prominent bassline - Paul McCartney is considered by some to be the greatest melodic bass player who ever lived, and his licks on this blew people away who understood such things.  Others point to the drumming as being exceptional in the Ringo canon, including Ringo himself.  

It was also the first song in which they used a backwards vocal track, which contributed to its psychedelic feel.  As described by Alan W. Pollack, the musicologist who analyzed every Beatles recording in his "Notes on ..." series,  the track was "the unprecedented (and in retrospect, historically significant) trailing vocal of John's, dubbed over the backing track by playing a tape of his earlier vocal in reverse.  The actual splicing and mixing in of this special effect was done very smoothly, especially by the standards of 1966 technology.  No pops, no clicks, no sudden change of ambiance, etc." 

The image above makes it appear as though Rain was the A-side of the record, but in fact the sleeve looked different on the two sides.  I remember finding that intriguing at the time, for no particular reason, but now it seems quite apt since history showed that Rain was probably as important a song as Paperback Writer, if not more so. 

Anyway, happy happy birthday Jimmy!  Have a delightful day, and I'll see ya later.

For No One, Beatles (1966)

And in her eyes you see nothing
No sign of love behind the tears
Cried for no one
A love that should have lasted years

It was this past week in 1966 that an event many felt was a seminal one in the evolution of Beatles musicology occurred - the release of their album, Revolver.

I wasn't one of those people. I was underwhelmed, disappointed, even, in the tracks on Revolver. The fact that it marked a new phase in the Beatles' development as studio musicians just didn't resonate with me, because the majority of songs didn't resonate with me.

But lurking amidst the various ditties about taxes and yellow submarines was a gem called For No One. It was a song that Emmylou Harris once described as being about "love hurting real bad." It was notable for being such a stark departure from what surrounded it. And it was notable on its own merits, for nailing what it feels like when the look in your former love's eyes has gone dark and cold - even if tears are flowing from those same eyes.

Several things about this song made it interesting apart from its naked emotion. At first blush it appears to be outlining the all-too-familiar perspective of the one suffering - "Your day breaks, your mind aches" ... But we switch back and forth between hearing his anguish and watching her movements, presumably separate from his. A well done juxtaposition that made the song even more harrowing. Such power Paul McCartney packed into such a small space.

For No One also featured a haunting instrumental solo by Alan Civil, a French horn player of international renown who was asked by George Martin to become part of the recording session, because McCartney wanted a horn break.

Some say the song was so perfect because McCartney was writing about the demise of his relationship with the beautiful actress Jane Asher who, it must be said, I wanted to be for a full five years of my teenybopper life. (To her credit, Asher, who continues to act and is a much sought-after cake baker, has never sunk to a tell-all about their romance. If she hasn't by now, she probably never will. A true class act.) But unless they broke up at some point before the relationship ended completely (1968), the chronology is off. Regardless, it is McCartney at his best and purest.

As to Revolver, I will say that I also love everything about And Your Bird Can Sing. Everything. And Eleanor Rigby was a masterpiece in its own right. But because it was released simultaneously with Revolver as a single, I have always thought of it independently of the album because that is how I experienced it.

I Can't Let Go, Hollies (1966)

Oh I tried and I tried but I can't say good-bye/Feel so bad baby, oh it hurts me/When I think of how you love and desert me/I'm the broken-hearted toy you play with/You got me goin', I need you baby/I can't let go and I want you baby/I gotta have all your love, I can't let go

In the annals of those songs that depict just how pathetic one can be when on the losing end of love, no one served it up better than the Hollies did with I Can't Let Go. Pop music has never had a shortage of these basket case-type songs, but the Hollies' otherworldly high harmonies made misery sound positively alluring.

Somewhat underrated in comparison to other British Invasion groups, the Hollies were the consummate singles band, their songs almost freakishly stimulating from their upbeat three-part harmonies. I've read in several places that Paul McCartney thought Graham Nash's high note at the end of each chorus in I Can't Let Go was a trumpet! The song is also notable for its fabulous "I know that it's wrong and I should be so strong but the thought of you gone makes me want to hold on" bridge. Great production all the way around.

Another one of those songs that many people, including myself, probably assume was a group original, actually a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based singer named Evie Sands had that distinction the previous year. Sands was allegedly Dusty Springfield's favorite singer. Never heard of her, but what a unique interpretation of the Al Gorgoni-Chip Taylor composition (Taylor, aka James Wesley Voight, uncle of Angelina Jolie) also wrote the Troggs' Wild Thing and Merrilee Rush's Angel of the Morning). Taylor is an interesting figure in the industry to this day - check out this interview to see how many artists he's touched and been influenced by.

Hollies guitarist Tony Hicks, who had a 12-string solo in this, discovered Taylor's song as a demo, and while it wasn't a huge hit in the U.S., in the U.K. it soared to #2. Somehow I remember it very vividly and it's great to discover it again.

You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, Dusty Springfield (1966)

"What set it apart from pure kitsch is that she, like any grand diva, treated this work of somewhat dubious artistic merit with the integrity and creative energy one would bestow upon an aria." - The Queer Sixties by Patricia Juliana Smith

All her life, Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien struggled to be comfortable in her own skin. In the persona of Dusty Springfield, she propelled herself to phenomenal success in her own country and beyond, becoming one of the most beloved and electrifying music interpreters of all time.

Of her many memorable recordings, it's You Don't Have To Say You Love Me to which I have the most visceral reaction. Springfield's stratospheric delivery can be appreciated as the product of massive talent alone, but it taps into something in everyone who has ever tried to convince themselves that they're willing to settle for a love that is decidedly less than reciprocal. Her repeated "believe me" is one of the most shattering endings to any song in pop history, melodramatic as it is. (She herself called it "schmaltz.") It was actually an Anglicized version of a song she'd heard at an Italian music festival; she asked her friends Vicki Wickham, who booked acts for Ready Steady Go! and Simon Napier-Bell, who managed the Yardbirds, to write English lyrics. Their efforts + her soulful stylings = worldwide stardom.

Setting her fate in motion when she informed the nuns in the convent where she went to school that she was going to be a jazz singer when she grew up, Springfield paid her dues in the music business as a teenager performing as one of the Lana Sisters, and then joined her brother's folk trio the Springfields. (Check out this unbelievable clip! And this one. Once again, I had no idea ...) Touring the U.S. with the Springfields in the early 60s, she was gobsmacked by the emerging sounds of Motown. Back in Britain, and once on her own, she was American soul music's top promoter, hosting a Ready Steady Go! special in 1965 that introduced the Temptations and Supremes, among others, to a new audience.

For all her prodigious talent, the strong-willed Springfield was never sure of herself. Last week Mombi and I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where a piece of Dusty memorabilia was quite telling - an exhibit devoted to Atlantic Records' Jerry Wexler included a letter written to him by Springfield as he was planning the much ballyhooed Dusty in Memphis recording. Perhaps overwhelmed by the fact that the sessions were happening in the same Southern soil where many of the musicians she idolized also laid down tracks, she basically rejects most of the songs he was suggesting for the project - often discounting her ability to do right by them.

Wexler disagreed. He'd seen her hold her own - the only white performer - on the British Motown revue (catch this priceless performance with Martha and the Vandellas!). There weren't very many white women on the planet who had as much soul as Dusty - then or now.

634-5789, Wilson Pickett (1966)

The simplicity of a particular song can provide a canvas for many artists to interpret it their way while not diminishing the original one little bit.

I found this to be true yesterday when I stumbled upon the Wilson Pickett hit 634-5789. For a while there I was virtually mainlining it and several other versions (those of Tina Turner with the divine Robert Cray and Sam and Dave, specifically). Such a life-affirming, finger-popping, backbone-slipping song and greatly needed right now.

A product of the hands-down-great Stax writing partnership of Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd, concocted specifically for Pickett to follow up his smash hit In the Midnight Hour, 634-5789 and its braying horns boils over with soul - the happy kind. The "Wicked" Pickett, as he called his bad self, didn't care for it at first, to put it mildly. Gerry Hirshey relates the story in Nowhere to Run: Pickett threw the lyric sheet in the trash and he and Floyd "went down like scrapping bearcats, flailing at each other until Cropper managed to get them apart." Obviously he got over it.

Always rough and ready, Pickett left the Alabama cotton fields to live with his father in Detroit. For several years he sang in a gospel group called the Violinaires. In time he was lured by his neighbor Willie Schofield to put his raspy gospel stylings to work in a secular group that Eddie Floyd had formed in 1956, the Falcons. The depth of Pickett's remarkable talent just before it was unleashed on the larger world can be experienced in his singing lead as a Falcon on I Found A Love at the Apollo Theater; truly spine-chilling stuff.

After a record label that Floyd was later associated with in Washington, D.C. struck a distribution deal with Atlantic Records, which also distributed for Stax, it was just a matter of time before Floyd and Pickett were reunited in Memphis. Atlantic bought out Pickett's contract with the small label he had been recording for in Detroit after he left the Falcons, and fame and fortune became his.

96 Tears, Question Mark & the Mysterians (1966)

One of my favorite ways to waste time in the mid-60s was calling up Washington/Maryland/Virginia radio DJs and making requests or trying to score an open phone line for a contest. In 1966, I finally was the '10th caller' and won my first vinyl 45. Damned if it wasn't 96 Tears by Question Mark & the Mysterians. Why do I remember that? Who knows - I just do.

I've always harbored a fondness for a certain kind of hard-bitten, testosterone-driven garage-ish rock. Give me quality fare by the Amboy Dukes, Bob Seger System or Standells and I was in some kind of heaven that helped me tap into the male side of my psyche, I guess. The Troggs, Them and Yardbirds from the other side of the pond had similar effects on me. Though a girl, I was as disaffected a youth as any, so the sensibility that oozed from the pores of this kind of music suited me just swimmingly. It wasn't trying to be pretty, it wasn't pretty, and yet it was alluring.

Question Mark and the Mysterians has been described as one of the first garage or punk-style bands to emerge in the U.S. and 96 Tears was a definite anomaly at the time it scaled the charts. The week it was #1, the group shared the Top 5 with the Monkees, Four Tops, Johnny Rivers and Left Banke. Like many such songs, 96 Tears started out as a local hit (they lived in Bay City, Michigan), but the British Invasion had opened up a mass market for bands that up until then were pretty much hanging out in their garages and basements. It got coveted airplay on CKLW in Detroit, and a recording contract with national distribution soon followed.

I loved playing it on my dinky turntable, especially because I knew my mother hated it, probably even feared it. That exotic Link Wray-like guitar (his theme song for the Batman TV show was big that year)! The organ riff! The seductive rhythm! They were Latino - even better! Nothing like my sanitized suburban existence - it just didn't get any better than that, some days.

Rudy Martinez (or ? as he is apparently legally known) and his Mysterians are still out there recording and performing, and have a bit of a following, although they never really had other commercial success of this magnitude.

Cool Jerk, Capitols (1966)

We all looked pretty goofy when we danced in the 60s, and never goofier than when we got down to the fabulous soul ditty Cool Jerk by the Capitols. But who cared - this song was pure kinetic energy that converted instantly to joy - which can happen when you're, as the song said, cookin' and smokin.'

The person we have to thank for this is Ollie McLaughlin, one disc jockey and record producer who refused to be dwarfed by the Motown juggernaut. Based outside of Detroit in Ann Arbor, not exactly an urban hotbed, McLaughlin started three record labels, named them after his daughters Karen, Carla and Moira, and started to turn out and promote artists that captured the attention of young America, including Del Shannon and Barbara Lewis.

Motown's house band, the Funk Brothers, were known to moonlight, and if the instrumental arrangement of Cool Jerk sounds vaguely familiar, it's because some of the Funk Brothers were serving it up in their spare time. That's Bob Babbitt on bass, Johnny Griffith on piano and Eddie Willis on guitar, and it was as tasty as tasty could be. The Capitols themselves were singer and drummer Sam George, guitarist Donald Storball (who wrote the song), and keyboardist Richard McDougall.

Nothing much happened for the Capitols after Cool Jerk, and I don't recall ever seeing them even perform it anywhere. However, Parliament/Funkadelic's Bootsy Collins gives it all he's got with the surviving Funk Brothers in their documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Catch it if you can.

Together Till the End of Time, Spencer Davis Group (1966)

Note: Another guest blogger is haunting our midst today, one KarmaSartre, as he's known in the blogosphere. KS had the great good luck to grow up in and around San Francisco so he's a veritable font of knowledge and insight on my favorite topic. He's got one of the most wicked senses of humor that I know, but he takes his baby boomer music very seriously, so here he is on one of his favorites:

One of the most beautiful songs in the history of rock and roll, Together Till the End of Time was written by Motown producer and songwriter Frank Wilson and was the lead track on the Spencer Davis Group's Autumn '66 album. Like most of their great songs, it was stunning, pure Stevie Winwood. His 17-year-old pipes are magnificent. I had heard his version of Georgia on My Mind (why didn't he play Ray in the movie?) , so I knew his capabilities were even greater than his Force-9 performances on Gimme Some Lovin and I'm A Man.

If you can hear it through your tears, Together Till the End of Time conveys the youthful promise of love as the pathway out of this place ... and a better life in the future ... and "Wouldn't It Be Nice"... and young lovers at the edge of an absurd, madding, thoughtless society ... and "there's a new world somewhere, they call it the Promised Land" ... and holding tight to each other before spinning forever into oblivion. We have heard that before.

But the melody is almost painfully beautiful, and Stevie's vocal, the soulful wailing of a 90-year-old in the precocious body of a young man blessed with perfect pitch, an incredible range, and a supernatural sense of the blues, separates it from all the rest. It's a song to live for.

I saw Stevie perform with Traffic, right after Dave Mason had left. He played organ and ran the bass line with the foot pedals, then broke out his guitar for a perfect "Dear Mr. Fantasy" - he was radiant. Then, decades later, back in the high life, he nearly lulled me to sleep with the low spark of his high-heeled dirge. Oh, would that he had sprung Together ... on me.

Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart, Reflections (1966, 1967), The Supremes

It's taken me this long to
narrow down the Supremes' music catalogue to just two songs that I feel represent Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson at their absolute pinnacle.

Each of these songs, Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart, and Reflections, showcases the Supremes in their finest moments. And I think I selected these in the end because neither of them is from the usual mold from which, let's face it, so many of their songs were cast.

No Holland-Dozier-Holland composition was ever arranged into a sassier and more hard-driving record than Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart ... it exudes sensual energy of the most life-affirming kind. The blending of Ross' wail with Ballard's and Wilson's surging backing ooh-ooh-oohs puts me into the same frenzy 42 years later as it did as a teenager. The Funk Brothers' Benny Benjamin's 4/4 stomp alone ensures its place in the pantheon of kinetic history and what's up with Jack Ashford on the tinkling vibes? It just doesn't get any better than this, and it was never duplicated, unlike so many of the other carbon-copied hits. Inexplicably, one of the few Supremes hits not to chart at #1.

Reflections was the Supremes grown up and responding to shifting musical trends. Opening with an oscillator that led to its being pegged "psychedelic soul," it was just a beautiful song and an indication of what the girls could have done together if Berry Gordy had left well enough alone. It will forever symbolize the Supremes on the cusp of demise, being the first song on which Gordy put Ross on a pedestal and gave her top billing, and the last on which Ballard appeared. I'll admit its place in my heart is in part secured because of its inspired "casting" as the opening theme song of China Beach, one of the best ensemble TV shows ever made on any subject and certainly on war, in this instance the Vietnam war. The character of Colleen McMurphy, for me, was every bit as influential as that of Mary Richards in embodying young women's stories at that time in our evolution.

But in terms of the Supremes' story, much has already been written: Three close friends from the Detroit projects, in their own girl group called the Primettes (a sister act to the Primes which, featuring Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams, was the Temptations precursor group), busting out with the knowledge that they had something special to offer as performers and dreaming of being discovered by Motown. Ross's lesser, shrill, voice but greater capacity for showbiz exploitation eclipsing the possibilities for powerful tenor Ballard and alto Wilson (both of whom could also sing lead more than competently) and setting up a chain of circumstances that led to Ballard being fired from the group in 1967, losing a lawsuit against Motown over that dismissal and ultimately dying, destitute, of a heart attack at the age of 32. And on and on ... it's a great American success story turned turbulent and tragic ... ambition gone awry. My generation was lucky to bask in it while it was good.

Summer in the City, Lovin' Spoonful (1966)

Though it's not yet summer, here in Ohio the dog days have descended suddenly so I don't feel the need to wait for further estivation to spotlight Summer in the City, a bit of an anomaly among the many earnest Lovin' Spoonful Top 10 singles that pleased us between 1965 and 1967.

The only "dirty and gritty" Spoonful hit, Summer in the City was notable for its distinctive use of organ, electric piano and rhythm section as well as sound effects mimicking the characteristic noise of a sweltering urban setting. John Sebastian tells the story that they hired an old sound man to punctuate everything with car horns, traffic and a jackhammer. To this day I can't hear the song without feeling as if I'm stewing in my own juices in a hot car, which is especially resonant at the moment as my car's air conditioning has decided to die.

New Yorker Sebastian and Canadian Zal Yanovsky were brought together by one Cass Elliott for a viewing of the Beatles' first appearance on Ed Sullivan. Enjoying their experiments melding folk style fingerpicking with electric guitars, the two for a time were members of the short-lived Mugwumps with Cass and Denny Doherty. The Mugwumps' breakup spawned two new groups, the Mamas and Papas and the Spoonful, with Sebastian and Yanovsky recruiting bassist Steve Boone and drummer Joe Butler to round out the band, which was determined to break through the British Invasion-Motown domination of the charts at that time.

Few record companies exhibited interest until Phil Spector and Brill Building songwriters showed up at their Greenwich Village performances and the spreading word led to a contract and their irresistible first feel-good hit, Do You Believe in Magic?

Indiana boy John Mellencamp, inducting the Spoonful into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, said of Summer in the City's influence, "I never got tired of hearing it. Poetic and beautiful in its course. Sexy and poignant in every breath that the singer sang. The song I assumed was written about New York City. I'd never been to New York City, but here I was in a town of 4,000 people and I related to every word that guy sang."

Tell It Like It Is, Aaron Neville (1966)

The first time Aaron Neville opened his mouth to sing with people present must have been quite a memorable experience for all involved. In any man, that unearthly falsetto would be remarkable; from this towering gentle giant, it's well and truly surreal.

Last week's news about the triumphant return of Neville and his brothers Art, Charles and Cyril to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for the first time since their homes were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reminded me that I wanted to write about his 1966 hit recording Tell It Like It Is.

Up to that point just kicking around the New Orleans clubs, working construction jobs to earn his living, Aaron's big break came when he learned that some local acquaintances were starting an R&B label called Par-Lo. George Davis and Lee Diamond had written Tell It Like It Is and, aware of Aaron's vocal talents, wanted him to cut the record.

Although a ballad, its message had certain anthemic qualities that resonated with the times, and it was a huge smash, kept at bay from the #1 spot only by the Monkees' I'm A Believer, of all things. As Art Neville says in the oral history The Brothers, "I heard Tell It Like It Is and I told Aaron, I said, 'Bro, this is the shit right here. This is the serious shit."

Unfortunately, the label wasn't solvent (the backstory on that is here), and Aaron never saw any return on that success. Though he continued to perform solo and with his brothers, it wasn't until 20+ years later when he began a collaboration with Linda Ronstadt, on which she acted as producer in some instances as well his duet partner, that he returned to the national spotlight.

Though the duets aren't his best songs by any stretch of the imagination - for one I would put in that category, check out his rendering of Ave Maria and prepare for your heart to burst - Ronstadt's care and feeding of Neville helped bring his gifts to the masses, where they deserve to be.

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, B.J. Thomas (1966)

And while we're on the subject of B.J. Thomas ... I'll write about one of his songs that brings me to tears at the first note, his gorgeous cover of Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.
"Never listen to this sad song after cocktail hour," says one YouTube commenter. Probably good advice, unless you feel like having your heart ripped out.

Growing up, country music was a musical genre that was largely relegated to a subculture many associated with Hee Haw and cariacaturish women with gigantic wigs. Consequently, my primary exposure to its worthy songs came through more contemporary artists like B.J. Thomas who took Williams' version and made it his own.

A more pleasing singing voice you couldn't hope to find. Thomas began honing that voice in church as a child in Houston, and the rich, gospel-esque tones that I've always responded to must have been nourished in that environment. He was lead singer for a group called the Triumphs when I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry was first recorded, which led to his being signed by a national label. With national distribution, it became a Top 10 hit.

Thomas achieved more enduring stardom when as a solo artist he released Hooked on a Feeling and Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head. The story goes that Thomas was handed the opportunity to record the soundtrack version of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid song thanks to Dionne Warwick, who was a fellow artist on Thomas' record label and brought him to Burt Bacharach's attention as he was casting about for the right singer. (Bob Dylan and Ray Stevens were among those who turned down the opportunity, apparently.)

When A Man Loves A Woman, Percy Sledge (1966)

I just got back from a business trip to Alabama, so wouldn't this be a good time to mention one of the most sublime songs ever to have been incubated there, Percy Sledge's unforgettable When A Man Loves A Woman?

The backstory may very well explain why it feels like one of the most authentic soul ballads ever recorded. Not a song that was handed to him by other composers as was so often the case, Sledge spontaneously belted it out one night when he was being paid to sing songs written by others in a nightclub in Sheffield, Alabama.

According to Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere to Run, one of the definitive histories of American soul music, Sledge's regular singing gig - he worked as a hospital orderly by day - was suffering mightily because a broken heart had put him off his game. One night he asked the bass player and organist accompanying him to give him any key. (He later gave them writing credits on the song.) Howling "a bunch of stray thoughts on the blindness and paralysis of love," according to Hirshey, the anguish streamed out of him in the form of When A Man Loves A Woman. I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like to be in that audience!

Later, he was signed to Atlantic Records following a local record shop audition, having further refined the fruits of that spontaneous combustion into the song we know today. Session musicians from Alabama's legendary Fame studios in Muscle Shoals backed him up on organ and horns, with the result being the perfect expression of a man hopelessly in love and being played for a fool.

I was a mere 13 years old when this was released - as I've written previously, so many of the soul songs of this period were way beyond my maturity level in their focus, yet they left an indelible impression upon me of what life was going to be like down the long and winding road.

Eight Miles High, The Byrds (1966)

The most evocative psychedelic record of the 60s, to me, is generally believed to be one of the first, Eight Miles High, written and performed by the Byrds. A cornucopia of complexity, it had many distinctive features, not the least of which were the spectral voices in alternating unison and harmony against the mesmerizing riffs of Roger McGuinn's then-unconventional 12-string guitar and Chris Hillman's throbbing bassline.

This is another one of those songs where just hearing the first notes triggers an immediate magic carpet ride back to my turbulent adolescence. The almost menacing intro, followed by "eight miles high, and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known" signaled a radical departure from the group's previous hits, such as Turn, Turn, Turn and Mr. Tambourine Man, which were Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan covers, respectively.

McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke and Hillman distinguished themselves with music that seemed a hybrid of British Invasion and contemporary folk. In fact, their first tour of the UK positioned them as America's answer to the Beatles. Unlike the Beatles, however, they all had cut their teeth in the California folk scene and, knowing next to nothing about amplified instruments, might have seemed an unlikely pioneer of this new genre. In the liner notes to the Byrds box set There Is A Season, Tom Petty writes, "Without a single member with a rock background, they came from folk trios, bluegrass, Christy Minstrels and beatnik coffee houses. It was almost like a lab experiment, mixing the elements and seeing what came out."

What came out in Eight Miles High was an acknowledged homage to John Coltrane and the emerging influence of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds' first foray into psychedelia was surrounded by controversy from the outset, with baffled radio stations banning the record in the belief that the title was referring to drugs - which it probably was to some degree. (As with so many of these songs, the real story of what the song was "about" takes different forms depending on the source. There's an entire discussion about the song's genesis that can be read online in Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock by Richie Unterberger.)

It's interesting to me now how unsettling I found the shifts in the output of many groups circa 1966. It might seem strange, but I still remember being filled with foreboding, at age 14, as I witnessed the metamorphosis of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Byrds, just to name three, from their comparatively clean cut origins to new realms that were fraught with allure, yes, but still on some level, danger.

Sunny Afternoon, The Kinks (1966)

One of the interesting aspects of the British Invasion was the inside look some bands provided into a society that was nothing like that of the U.S.

Sunny Afternoon, an acerbic satire by the Kinks on class and England's punitive tax system, was one of my favorite such inside looks. Some groups could be mistaken for any nationality, but you always knew where the Kinks hailed from.

Musically, the Kinks had their own peculiar rhythm and harmonies, personified by Ray Davies' nasal vocals. They started out as a hard-rocking band, but after a few years all that was put aside for songs that were typically vignettes of ordinary life or character studies that pinpointed the idiosyncracies of various strata of English humanity. Even the songs that sounded whimsical, such as Sunny Afternoon, weren't.

Some argue that it was precisely this nationalistic navel-gazing that was partly responsible for the Kinks failing to become as popular as other British groups. Nonetheless, in a 1995 interview with Pete Townshend commenting on influential British bands, he said, "I always think that Ray Davies should one day be Poet Laureate. He invented a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning."

Another treat I found, from 1968 - Days, from the European release of the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society - a lovely song I have absolutely no memory of.