Read 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Online
Authors: Andrew Grant Jackson
These heavy ramifications were still being conveyed, for the most part, by musicians using an upbeat pop structure that, to our ears today, carries a sense of innocence and, sometimes, naïveté. In a 2012 paper entitled “Emotional Cues in American Popular Music: Five Decades of the Top 40,” researchers at the University of Toronto and Freie Universität of Berlin studied the tempo and key of more than a thousand hits from 1965 to 2009 and determined that music today is statistically slower and sadder.
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Our culture interprets songs in major keys with fast tempos as happy and uplifting, whereas slow, minor-key songs are interpreted as sad, serious, complex, and sophisticated. In the 1960s, 85 percent of Top 40 songs were in a major key, whereas in the first decade of the 2000s, only 42.5 percent were. In the 1960s, songs averaged 116 beats per minute, with the average song length being just under three minutes, while today, 100 beats per minute is the norm, with an average song length of just under four minutes. Contemporary songs often combine a minor key with a fast beat, fostering a more ambiguous, mixed mood than the “feel-good” oldies.
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The music itself is vastly different in other respects. In 1965, much of it was still recorded live. Stax Records had just a one-track mono recorder for artists such as Otis Redding. Other facilities, such as Abbey Road, where the Beatles recorded, had four-track recorders. The bands would record the rhythm track live, and then overdub their vocals and perhaps additional instruments. A large portion of bands in 1965 excelled at harmonies, from the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Beach Boys to Motown groups—an art much less prevalent today. Nineteen sixty-five was a year with one foot in the world of doo-wop, still embraced by the Four Seasons and Smokey Robinson, and the other in the future as British art school rockers transmogrified the blues with fuzz boxes and distortion. It is that tension of awakening awareness and experimentation inside the old-school framework that makes 1965 unique, the ground zero moment when the monochrome door opened onto a kaleidoscopic Oz waiting on the other side.
The Beatles and the Animals lure Bob Dylan toward rock; while Dylan, the Who, and the Kinks influence the Beatles’ first No. 1 single of the year.
At the end
of 1963,
after President Kennedy was assassinated, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, were hanging out at The Ad Lib, a nightclub in London. Two
New York Post
writers, Al Aronowitz and Pete Hamill, joined them
.
Aronowitz, who in 1959 had done a twelve-article series on the Beat Generation for the
Post
, was trying to convince the Beatles to listen to the folk singer Bob Dylan, whose third album,
The Times They Are A-Changin’
, was about to be released. John Lennon, a notoriously bad drunk, scoffed, “To hell with Dylan, we play rock and roll.”
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The funny thing was Lennon had started out playing a British combination of folk music, blues, and ragtime called skiffle. And when Dylan was in high school, he was quoted in the yearbook as saying that his ambition was to “join Little Richard.” At the high school talent show, he and his band blasted a cover of Danny and the Juniors’ “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—until the principal cut the mike.
Dylan’s producer, Tom Wilson, actually wanted Dylan to play with a band, and the singer-songwriter had recorded a rock-and-roll single, “Mixed Up Confusion,” a year earlier. But his manager, Albert Grossman, who wanted to market Dylan as a folk singer, had the single retracted almost as soon as it was released. At the time, the intellectual folkies looked down on rock and roll as commercial kid stuff.
Still, that evening at The Ad Lib, Lennon, who didn’t know about Dylan’s rock past, sneered, “Dylan, Dylan. Give me Chuck Berry, give me Little Richard. Don’t give me fancy crap. Crap, American folky intellectual crap. It’s crap.”
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“Ach, come off it, John,” Paul McCartney said.
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Soon McCartney and George Harrison had
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
on heavy rotation in the Beatles’ hotel rooms.
* * *
The following February,
the week the Beatles made their first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, Dylan was on a road trip with some friends when he heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the radio. He “nearly jumped out of the car,” his tour manager later recalled.
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“Did you hear that?” Dylan cried. “That was fuckin’ great! Oh man.”
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Dylan later said, “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies, made it all valid … But I kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction where music had to go.”
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Dylan also felt a kinship with the band because he believed that they were singing “I get high” in the bridge of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Dylan smoked marijuana regularly and had a bag of it perched on the station wagon’s dashboard for the length of the trip.
When he returned to New York, he got an electric guitar.
* * *
On March 23, 1964,
Lennon appeared on the BBC TV show
Tonight
to promote the release of his first book,
In His Own Write
, a collection of cartoony sketches and short satirical pieces. His shtick in both
Write
and its sequel,
A Spaniard in the Works
, was to spell words as they sounded and then twist them into absurd puns (“Last Will and Testicle”), partially masking gleefully mean tales of death, violence, deformity, and marital ambivalence. There were vignettes about pubic crabs, putting dogs to sleep, men marrying horses, and beating your friends to death on Christmas. They would have shocked readers’ parents had they bothered to decipher them.
Backstage, host Kenneth Allsop challenged Lennon to write more personal songs like the bits in his book, rather than the generic love songs the group had been releasing.
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The encouragement to dig deeper coincided with Lennon’s gradual conversion to Dylan. When the group recorded “I’m a Loser” on August 14, Lennon included a lyric inspired by the clown who cried in the alley in Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” “I objected to the word ‘clown,’ because that was always artsy-fartsy, but Dylan had used it so I thought it was all right, and it rhymed with whatever I was doing.”
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* * *
Aside from the apocalyptic visions
of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and some absurd comedy tracks, the bulk of Dylan’s early songs were grounded in reality. That was beginning to shift, though. In his autobiography,
Chronicles
, Dylan writes that when his girlfriend Suze Rotolo introduced him to the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, “That was a big deal.” In 1871, the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud had written, “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences … He reaches [for] the unknown and even if, crazed, he ends up losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them.”
Dylan’s senses started getting disordered in “Chimes of Freedom.” Caught in a thunderstorm, he and his friends hear the lightning and see the thunder. Synesthesia, in which a sensation is perceived by a sense other than the one being stimulated (for instance, seeing sounds or hearing images), was an effect sometimes attributed to the hallucinogen LSD. According to music producer Paul Rothchild, he and Dylan’s road manager Victor Maymudes introduced Dylan to the drug at the end of April 1964, following the wrap of his spring tour. Some accounts say Dylan wrote “Mr. Tambourine Man” after staying up all night listening to music while on acid.
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The tambourine man himself was Bruce Langhorne, Dylan’s session guitarist for numerous albums. “On one session, Tom Wilson had asked [Bruce] to play tambourine,” Dylan remembered. “[The tambourine] was as big as a wagon wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind.”
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Called a Turkish frame drum, the instrument had small bells attached inside that gave it the “jingle jangle” sound referenced in the lyrics. The song’s “magic swirlin’ ship” was a giant float Dylan and his friends saw in a Mardi Gras parade on that February road trip, after being awake for three days on speed, weed, and booze.
But regardless of whether drugs were an influence, “Mr. Tambourine Man” captures Dylan’s joy of writing until dawn, when the weariness turned to trance and his mind opened into a dreamlike space between waking and sleep, freeing him to wander beyond time, drunk on alliteration and the pure sounds of words.
In June 1964 he recorded
Another Side of Bob Dylan
in one day, and taped a version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” accompanied by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. But he decided he could do the song better, at a later date, and kept it off the album, though he played it live at London’s Royal Festival Hall and the Newport Folk Festival.
“It Ain’t Me Babe” was another new song he performed at the Royal Festival Hall. Both a London
Times
critic and Dylan fan Johnny Cash thought its “no, no, no” chorus was a spoof of the “yeah yeah yeah” chorus of the Beatles’ “She Loves You.” By then, Dylan had cooled on the Beatles, in the face of their continued deluge of the media, and told his journalist friend Aronowitz that he thought they were bubble gum.
Still, ten days after Dylan recorded
Another Side
, his fourth acoustic album, a band from Manchester released a rock version of a song from his self-titled debut album, called “House of the Rising Sun.” The Animals’ organist, Alan Price, was a huge Dylan fan, and the group had been covering the song on tour with Chuck Berry. It had been going over so well that their producer, Mickie Most, had decided to make it their next single, even though the subject matter was about gambling in whorehouses. The band captured the tune in one take, and it hit No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, one of the darkest songs ever to top AM radio. Rock critic Dave Marsh called it the first folk-rock song.
Price laughed in an interview, “I got told this story by Joan Baez. She said when Bob Dylan heard it they were driving up the coast, past Monterey, California, and he stopped the car and got out and beat the bumpers. He was miffed because he wanted to play electric folk music and when he heard that we’d got there first he was really annoyed.”
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The Beatles also became harder for Dylan to write off when their first feature film,
A Hard Day’s Night
, was released in August of that year. United Artists had originally undertaken the film merely for the soundtrack money, but the team assembled to produce it was exemplary. Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor’s previous film was Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove
; Liverpudlian Alun Owen’s screenplay would be nominated for an Oscar; director Richard Lester’s quick edits and hand-held moving camera would set the template for all rock videos to follow; and the witty exuberance of the Fab Four garnered comparisons to the Marx Brothers, much like Dylan’s first album’s liner notes compared his stage mannerisms to those of Charlie Chaplin.
So on August 28, 1964, Aronowitz took Dylan to meet the group at New York’s Delmonico hotel. When Dylan arrived, the Beatles offered him amphetamine pills. While Dylan was certainly no stranger to speed, he said that he’d prefer “cheap wine” instead.
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“I’ve got some really good grass,” he offered.
When the group admitted that they didn’t smoke pot, Dylan was nonplussed. But what about their song about getting high?
The band explained the lyric in “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was not “I get high” but “I can’t hide,” as in the singer couldn’t hide his love for his woman.
At that point, the Beatles had smoked marijuana only a few times, and none of these had been transcendent experiences. One evening they learned the Twist. Another time Lennon and his wife, Cynthia, smoked a joint with some other couples, but the already trashed Lennon threw up in the bathroom and staggered home.
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Still, the Beatles were tentatively game. The road managers stuffed towels in the door cracks and drew the shades so none of the fans singing Beatles songs outside could see. Dylan rolled some joints and offered one to Lennon. Perhaps flashing back to his earlier bad night, Lennon passed it on to Ringo Starr—“My royal taster.”
There were cops guarding the hallways from fans, so Starr and Dylan went into the back room. Starr didn’t know he was supposed to share the joint with Dylan and smoked the whole thing. When he returned, the others asked how it was.
“The ceiling’s coming down on me,” he replied.
The others leaped up and went into the back with Dylan to try it. McCartney said, “For about five minutes we went, ‘This isn’t doing anything,’ so we kept having more. ‘Sssshhh! This isn’t doing anything. Are you feeling … gggggzzzz!’ and we started giggling uncontrollably.”
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Soon everyone was in hysterics. Dylan answered the constantly ringing phone with “This is Beatlemania here.”
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McCartney became convinced he had discovered the meaning of life and, after spending an eternity trying to find a pencil, had road manager Mal Evans write down his words of wisdom.
The next morning the group looked at the paper, which read, “There are Seven Levels!” “And we pissed ourselves laughing,” McCartney said. “I mean, ‘What the fuck’s that? What the fuck are the seven levels?’”
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Soon the band was smoking marijuana for breakfast.