I am solidly a 60’s, Boomer, hippy-era guy. But I’ve been blessed with knowing young musicians my whole life and, thanks to them, I’ve been drug (usually kicking, whining, and complaining) into several generations of music and musicians. One of the side effects of that life experience has been to doubt that there was anything earth-shakingly different about my generation of musicians and music. To the point that, now, when I hear claims along that line, a bunch of contrary evidence springs to mind in the form of Billboard’s Hot 100 and, especially, the #1 hits over the years. Mostly, the list of songs contaminating that top spot are embarrassing, regardless of the period.
My list of the worst 1960’s songs to reach Billboard’s #1 on the charts:
· 1960: El Paso (Marty Robbins), Running Bear (Johnny Preston), Teen Angel (Mark Dinning), Alley Oop (Hollywood Argyles), Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini (Brian Hyland), and Mr. Custer (Larry Verne). It’s not awful, but it’s sure not some kind of hip rock and roll evidence: Theme from a Summer Place (Percy Faith) was on the top of the charts for 9 weeks. Elvis had three hyper-schmaltzy bits of tripe that stayed on the top of the charts for 14 painful weeks. I was 12 in 1960 and nothing on the radio in western Kansas, other than the Everly’s Cathy’s Clown and Chubby Checker’s The Twist, interested me at all. In 1960, pop music was aimed at a different generation, sometimes called “The Lost Generation” (for good reason).
· 1961: Wonderland by Night (Bert Kamphert), Calcutta (Lawrence Welk), Blue Moon (The Marcells), Moody River (Pat Boone), and Big Bad John (Jimmy Dean) were the absolute worst of the #1’s, but, honestly, most of that year’s pop chart was a painful musical disaster. I, accidentally, discovered jazz in 1961, through the Columbia Record Club, and most of pop music suddenly sounded worse than boring.
· 1962: Just a bad year for pop music in general. You can pick the worst from that year, yourself, from Wikipedia’s list of top of the pops crap. Elvis’ #1 was Good Luck Charm, a bit of tripe that should have cost him any claim for the King of Rock and Roll.
· 1963: The year the Beatles “arrived” in the USA (in late December) ended with The Singing Nun’s painful drivel-ish Dominique in #1. Other than 12-year-old “Little Stevie Wonder’s” amazing Fingertips, there wasn’t much good to say about popular music that year. Pop mush was so drenched in simple drivel, mostly instrumental, that it encouraged 14-year-old me to start playing in bands (“Even I can play that simple crap.”). Early that year, I discovered the miracle of AM radio “skip” and on rare and special nights I could tune in Chicago’s WLS and I “discovered” R&B (aka “race music” in those dismal days) and started hearing music that “even I” couldn’t play or sing under any conditions. .
· 1964: Musically, it wouldn’t be unfair to say the 60’s began in 1964. The Beatles topped the chart six times with some of the absolute worst songs (for example, Love Me Do) for 18 dismal weeks, but Lorne Greene (from “Bonanza”) lowered the taste bar dramatically with Ringo. I’m going to blame the sales for that awful noise on “The Lost Generation,” but it stained us all. James Brown’s I Got You (I Feel Good) crawled to #3 after two months, smothered under garbage like Leader of the Pack, Mr. Lonely, and Ringo.
· 1965: No question, pop music took a turn for the better in 1965 with the Rolling Stones arriving on the charts and something resembling Rock and Roll finally making a consistent breakthrough in record sales. Still, Petula Clark’s Downtown held the #1 spot for two weeks, Sonny and Cher atonally whined I Got You Babe in #1 for three weeks, and Herman’s Hermits Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter and Freddie and the Dreamers I'm Telling You Now made it clear that the “British Invasion” wouldn’t be painless. Papa’s Brand New Bag made it all the way to #8 that year.
· 1966: This is the year that I always point to when I’m ridiculing “the old music is best” claim. My posterchild for pure pop crap is ? and the Mysterians’ 96 Tears, a two-chord piece of crap that stuck on the charts for 15 freakin’ weeks and at #1 for two weeks! Both the song and the even-worse-album went gold that year. It's a Man's Man's Man's World crept up to #8, idling under throw-away garbage like Winchester Cathedral, Last Train to Clarksville, and I’m A Believer.
· 1967: Coulda been a contender. Jimi Hendrix 1st single, Hey Joe/Stone Free, almost crept into Billboard’s Hot 100 list and James Brown’s Cold Sweat made it to #8, while the Monkees’ I’m A Believer, Kind of a Drag (Buckinghams), Incense and Peppermints (Strawberry Alarm Clock), and (ironically) Something Stupid (Nancy and Frank Sinatra) peaked the Billboard chart. Network television’s made-up rock band, the Monkees, held the top of the charts for 10 awful weeks.
· 1968: Another of my favorite crapband hits stuck at #1 for a whole week: Green Tambourine {The Lemon Pipers). Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower made it to #20, his only top-40 single, although the Electric Ladyland LP was the #1 album for a bit. Love is Blue (Paul Mauriat), This Guy's in Love with You {Herb Alpert}, and Harper Valley PTA {Jeannie C. Riley} were all pretty solid examples of the awful trip that we foisted on the world as “good music.”
· 1969: The last year the 60s had to redeem its reputation for coolness and Tommy James and the Shondells’ crushed that hope with Crimson and Clover with as strong assist from Tommy Roe’s Dizzy (along with a really stupid video), the incredibly schmaltzy Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet (Henry Mancini), despicable one-hit-wonder bits of tripe with In the Year 2525 (Zager and Evans), Sugar, Sugar (The Archies), and Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye (Steam). A Vegas-bound 33-year-old Elvis dumped his last #1, Suspicious Minds, on a tasteless public.
And that wraps up the worst of the 1960’s #1 Greatest Dumpster Dive. There were a lot of even more awful songs that lingered in the Top 10 through that period and some really fantastic music that never scratched the surface of Billboard’s Hot 100. SF author Ted Sturgeon once said “90% of everything is crap” and I have always thought he was an optimist. That goes for things that are the most popular at the time, too.
When I was 11 years old, RCA issued an Elvis record titled “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t be Wrong.” It would be hard to make a dumber, more easily disproved claim than that. The ten songs on that gold record are about as forgettable as any pop music on my worst of the #1’s list. To this western Kansas kid, at the time, everything about that record came to prove one of my favorite irrational arguments: the ad populum fallacy, “a claim that, if many people believe something to be true, then it must be true.” History has proved that, so consistently, to be a fallacy that the opposite claim is likely closer to the truth.
