Classic Rock 1969: The Beat Goes On

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1989

Labels: Warner Special Products, Time Life Music

This release is the original release, with "Sugar Sugar" as track 4.
Various - Classic Rock 1969: The Beat Goes On is a reissue, with "RE-1" in the matrix number, and "Grazing In The Grass" as track 4.
Tracks 1-3, 5-18, and 20-22 are digitally exactly 0.7 dB louder on the RE-1 reissue.
Track 19 is digitally exactly 0.6 dB louder on the RE-1 reissue.
Slight differences in track durations arise from slight differences in the length of intro and outro silence.

Track durations obtained from software.

Volume 12 of a 30 volume set.

Complete liner notes:

Nineteen sixty-nine was the year rock embraced eclectic sounds. All kinds of music started influencing the pop marketplace - from reggae, gospel and blues to folk, Broadway and jazz. Even elaborate productions such as the rock musical Hair and the Who's "rock opera" Tommy emerged at this time. At the other end of the spectrum, a new genre known as bubblegum was invented. This simplistic music, created in the studio chiefly by anonymous musicians, helped to define pop as contrivance. As critic Charlie Gillett wrote in The Sound of the City, bubblegum was "music planned entirely as a product, not as anybody's art." This concept sustained the record industry in the years ahead.

The leading bubblegum producers were Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz, who created numerous hits for their Buddah and Super K labels. The team's domination prompted video veteran Don Kirshner to retaliate through his own medium. After all, Kirshner had inspired the whole shebang by manufacturing a television program centered on the antics of the Monkees.

In 1968, Kirshner launched The Archie Show, based on the comic strip. The music for the cartoon characters was performed by a studio group dubbed the Archies and produced by Jeff Barry, a bubblegum artist. Barry himself had co-authored many earlier '60s hits with Ellie Greenwich, including Tommy James's Hanky Panky. The Archies' music was pure formula: simple and singsongy, like a child's skip-rope chant, Sugar, Sugar burst Super K's bubble by becoming one of the best-selling records in pop history. (It was also a soul hit for Wilson Pickett in 1970.)

Following the Archies' lead, Atlanta singer Tommy Roe recorded his ultimate bubblegum statement with Jam Up Jelly Tight in 1969. Roe had been making nursery rhyme-style songs since he topped the charts in 1962 with Sheila. Joe South, also from Atlanta, was less concerned with artifice than art. South worked as a studio guitarist on countless sessions in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Nashville; he played on most of Aretha Franklin's recordings, as well as on Bob Dylan's album Blonde on Blonde. His success as a writer came when he supplied Atlanta singer Billy Joe Royal with Down in the Boondocks and Hush (covered by Deep Purple). South had his own studio in Atlanta, and was one of the first performers to play virtually all vocal and instrumental parts himself. The title of his biggest hit, Games People Play, was taken from a pop psychology book by Eric Berne.

Another white Southern boy with soul was Tony Joe White. A Texan steeped in the R & B tradition, White emerged as a creative storyteller who pumped new blood into the Nashville music industry. His Polk Salad Annie, produced by Billy Swan, became an odd top-10 hit. A humorous tale of a young woman from the Louisiana swamps, it was undoubtedly popular because of its novelty appeal, with lines like "gator got your granny ... chomp, chomp." Swan's production, combining rock and soul techniques, defined "funky," and foreshadowed a style the Rolling Stones would use on Honky Tonk Women and Brown Sugar. Although White continued to make excellent recordings, his next hit arrived indirectly when Brook Benton covered his song Rainy Night in Georgia.

White soul of a sort could also be heard from the remnants of the Blues Project, a New York cult band whose home was the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. In 1967, when Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience were introducing free-form experimentation to rock fans, the Blues Project was similarly stretching the ears of folk audiences. After the group's demise, leader Al Kooper put together a nine-piece band called Blood, Sweat and Tears, with the idea of fusing rock and jazz. Kooper left after B S & T's first album, and was replaced by David Clayton-Thomas, one of Canada's most respected blues singers, who belted out Spinning Wheel. By 1969, many rock groups, including the Electric Flag and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, were also hustling the blues with brass.

In Los Angeles, Canned Heat, whose primal appeal was based on the need to boogie, transformed prewar Delta rhythms into pop songs with a driving fury that hadn't been heard since the great British band John Mayall's Blues Breakers. Canned Heat's two main writers, Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, were avid record collectors who shaped their knowledge of the blues into a rock idiom. Going Up the Country was a feat of authenticity that blues-oriented groups such as Led Zeppelin could rarely bring off. Another L.A. group, Spirit, included a former Canned Heat member. Spirit's songs combined rock, country, jazz and classical elements, and, since some of them (Mechanical World, Fresh Garbage) were played frequently on FM radio, the band was deemed hip and experimental. But Spirit's commercial breakthrough came with a straightforward rocker, I Got a Line on You. Unblemished by improvisational tendencies, it stood as a last gasp of the psychedelic era.

Harry Nilsson, an eccentric who also hailed from Los Angeles, was the Beatles' favorite singer-songwriter, thanks to his collage of Beatles songs titled You Can't Do That. Nilsson wrote material for many artists (the Monkees, the Ronettes and the Yardbirds among them), yet hit his stride when he began creating intricate overdubbed harmonies for his own albums. Ironically, Nilsson's first chart success wasn't with one of his own songs but with a cover of Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin', used recurringly in the popular film Midnight Cowboy.

Early in 1969, in Oakland, California, a disc jockey gave heavy air play to a cut from an album privately pressed by the Northern California State Youth Choir. The song, Oh Happy Day, was released as a single under the choir's new name, the Edwin Hawkins Singers. It stormed both the American and British charts. Dozens of cover versions by various gospel choirs were released to cash in on the song. With the exception of the Staple Singers, the Edwin Hawkins Singers became the most influential gospel group in '60s pop. (A large choir would not have such an impact again until 1985, when the New Jersey Mass Choir backed up Foreigner on I Want to Know What Love Is.)

While gospel sneaked onto the charts as a fluke, its secular side climbed smoothly and consistently to the top 10. Tyrone Davis, who started out singing raw blues in the South Side clubs of Chicago, was best known for languid ballads done in the warm style of Bobby "Blue" Bland. On Can I Change My Mind, Davis' groove is satin and never seems to strain for effect. R. B. Greaves also possessed the soothing soulful touch. A black American Indian born in British Guyana and raised on a Seminole reservation in California. Greaves traveled through England in 1963 under the name of Sonny Childe. Six years later, he hit with Take a Letter Maria, an unusual folk-tinged recording on which he sounds a bit like Sam Cooke, who was, in fact, his uncle.

By the end of the '60s, artists with their roots firmly planted in both R & B and soul had captured the attention of both the AM and FM audiences. Nowhere was this fact more evident than in the work of the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone. Sly Stone's Hot Fun in the Summertime was the summer record of 1969. but his I Want to Take You Higher remains the one-chord song that best captures the exuberance and release of the late '60s. With all the jive of Sly towering over his regal family, producer Norman Whitfield transformed the Temptations into children of the Family Stone. Whitfield sought a contemporary style, and on records like Cloud Nine and Ball of Confusion, that meant socially aware lyrics aiming for profundity. Often, as with Run Away Child, Running Wild, Whitfield's productions were like made-for-radio minidramas.

Throughout the '60s, Jamaican pop rarely made the charts in America. The records that did - Millie Small's My Boy Lollipop, Prince Buster's Ten Commandments, Johnny Nash's Hold Me Tight - were considered novelties. But Desmond Dekker was another story. He began his career in 1963, and by 1966 had achieved international fame in ska and rock steady (both reggae precursors). When Israelites finally exposed America to reggae, Dekker had already scored 40 No. 1 hits in Jamaica. Israelites possessed all the essential ingredients - a loping beat, a jagged bass line, biblical references, a nod to American cinema and the clean production of Leslie Kong, the Sam Phillips of reggae. Dekker never had another American hit, but he paved the way for the influential film The Harder They Come and the reggae madness of the '70s. More important, like Canned Heat, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Archies and other stars from 1969, he stretched the boundaries of American pop and redefined what it could include.

- Robert Hull