1966
Year before the Music died
The Sixties were a decade of sensory overload that changed
the cultural landscape forever. If you can remember them, you
weren’t there. Charlie Parry wasn’t, but he enjoyed picking
over the pop music embers of the highpoint year of 1966.
T
he decade exploded on to the world eight
miles high over the frozen wastes of the Urals
at Sverdlovsk , when a gigantic black bat was
blasted out of the sky by Red rocketry.
America’s U2 spy plane had been overflying the
Soviet Union for half a decade, to a chorus of denials
from the White House. But after shot-down pilot Gary
Powers was parade before the world’s press, the Russians thundered angry warnings to the West. Within
months work was started on the Berlin wall. And at
one fraught session of the United Nations, Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev even took off his shoe
and banged the podium, as he fulminated against
Western imperialism.
But Nikita Sergeyevich had little to say about a
spot of cultural imperialism, when British jazzman
Kenny Ball purloined a popular Russian folksong, to
score a transatlantic hit with Midnight In Moscow.
It was the last salvo of traditional bands. The Fifties
had ended with the Drifters’ hormonal plea to Save The
Last Dance for Me . . . as the menacingly melodic beat
of the Shadows’ instrumental hit Apache, signalled the
electronic guitar band was coming of age.
The times were a’ changing as The Beatles led the
Sixties revolution in popular music. Often referred
to as “the good old days”, both by those who lived
through them, and those who wish they had, it was
the decade that reinvented pop music culture.
The early years saw a transatlantic symbiosis in
which the totally new youth phenomenon of juvenile
eroto-hysteria known as Beatlemania conquered
America. Coming the other way was a tsunami of
42
eclectic creativity unmatched ever since.
It included the overwhelming, blues-based host
of Tamla Motown, the West Coast close harmonies of
the Beach Boys and Phil Spector’s wall of sound, and
studded in between were the plaintiff riffs of the likes
of Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel.
The year 1966 saw an album chart full of what
are now regarded as classic, seminal releases. From
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, to
Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, ’66 bo