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We’ve been following the Billboard charts year by year, starting in the mid 50’s. We’ve been talking about Top 40 Rock & Roll AM radio, its rise and fall. It rose with the generation of DJ’s that first brought black R&B to white audiences by mixing it in with rockabilly, country, and pop music hits from around the US and the world. The number of hits in the Top 100 of the year by black artists began to rise in the mid-50’s until a spate of unfortunate accidents and career decisions in ‘59 set the industry back on its heels, and unleashing a reaction from pressure groups opposed to rock and roll on moral and racist grounds, it being immoral, some said, to mix the races, like rock & roll was prone to do. And then there were the competing country radio stations, opposed on bottom line financial grounds, though they pretended otherwise.

So 1960 saw the “payola” scandals, which attempted to criminalize what had till then been standard if unseemly business practices the labels used to get DJ’s to play their records. Congressional hearings targeted Alan Freed, the pioneering rock & roll DJ, destroying his career and diminishing the influence of DJ’s generally in choosing the music they played for years after. Programming directors took over, playing a strict regimen of the Top 40 hits, drawing those hits from all the charts available, including regional ones. This proved wildly popular. So rock and roll continued to grow, despite the reactionaries. But rock & roll AM radio was in more trouble than it knew…

We led off that set with the top hit of the year, “California Dreaming” by the Mommas and the Poppas. That song and “Monday, Monday”, their other big hit in ’66, were written by John Phillips, the talented and troubled husband of beautiful Michelle Phillips, who lingered on the silver screen for many years after the band broke up. The real star was Cass Elliot, but this was a dysfunctional band that broke up due to sex, drugs, and jealousy long before Momma Cass choked to death on a sandwich in ’74. The band was an amalgam of two folk groups that were working Greenwich Village in NY, but once they decided to pursue pop success they left that behind and headed out to Los Angeles. It was a pattern other bands would follow. Where bands used to head to NY to make it big, now the destination was LA.

The Monkees had the #4 hit of 1966 with “Train to Clarksville”. But all the hip music lovers I knew back then dissed the Monkees as a TV band, hired through want ads in Variety. This was true: filmmaker Bob Rafelson, who later directed “Five Easy Pieces”, conceived the Monkees for a situation comedy about an unsuccessful band. Of course, it turned out they were hugely successful thanks to the musical direction of record producer Don Kirshner and the songwriting team of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. They also had good help from Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, and others in the Brill Building. But they didn’t play their instruments, they didn’t write their songs, and they didn’t even know each other before they were stars. They met on TV. That was so uncool, the cool kids said. But they sold 75 million records… Good songwriting sells.

Note the variety in those top hits: folk-rock, soul, and Brill Building pop...

But the most interesting new musician coming out of the UK in ’66, I thought, was Donovan Leitch, from Scotland. Donovan was a singer-songwriter who had written several hits in the UK the year before, including “Catch The Wind”, a great song, and “Universal Soldier”, a memorable one. The singer-songwriter was a rare breed among the Brits to that point. Donovan was already being compared to Dylan, and “Sunshine Superman”, which veers into some wild imagery, is considered one of the first psychedelic pop records – probably because it mentions tripping and blowing your little mind.

Speaking of Dylan:

While the successful folk rock bands were moving to the warmer, greener pop climes of California, New York just kept producing new folk rock bands. One of the most intriguing and shortest lived was the Left Banke, who had a big hit with “Walk Away Renee”, the #27 song of ’66. But the Left Banke had already broken up when the song hit the charts due to personality issues centering around their talented songwriter and keyboard player, Michael Brown. They released only one more hit, “Pretty Ballerina” towards the end of ‘66 before fading into obscurity.

But not these guys:

Simon & Garfunkle had a huge year in ’66 with three songs in the Top 100. We heard “Homeward Bound”, because it’s less frequently heard than “Sounds Of Silence”, which I thought myself was one of the very best songs of the year. “I Am A Rock” was their third song in the Top 100. Paul Simon wrote them all. Full disclosure: Paul Simon, Arthur Garfunkle, and I all went to the same elementary school; his mother was a teacher there. He and Artie used to perform as Tom & Jerry at our school’s Annual Peanut Festivals. So I’m biased; but I think of all the singer-songwriters to emerge in the 60’s, Paul Simon was the best. He and Dylan were the most prolific hitmakers. Dylan may have been the more inventive writer - he got the Nobel Prize for lit, after all; but he just wasn’t that good a singer. Simon was.

Bobby Fuller came to LA from El Paso, Texas by way of Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico. But Fuller produced his own records too, in his own home studio – and he kept that Southwest sound. “I Fought The Law” was a great cover of the tune by Sonny Curtis, the guitarist who took Buddy Holly’s place with the Crickets. The Fuller Band had moved to LA and signed with Del Fi records, who’d put out Richie Valens “La Bamba” and “Donna”. And after kicking around a while, they had a hit with “I Fought the Law”. Soon, they appeared on Shindig, and they had a couple other tunes showing some promise – and then in July of ’66, Bobby Fuller turned up dead, beaten up inside his car just outside his Hollywood home, with a stomach full of gasoline. It was ruled a suicide. Really?

Johnny Rivers was back with 2 hits in the Top 100: “The Poor Side of Town”, the #9 song of the year, and “Secret Agent Man”, which we heard there.It began as the theme song to the American licensed version of the British TV spy show, “Danger Man” with Patrick McGoohan, later to become “The Prisoner”.Rivers original version was only one verse and one chorus long, as that was all the opening credits required; but as the song proved popular, he soon recorded this full length live version at the Whisky A Go Go club in Hollywood.

The Righteous Brothers were back with another blue eyed soul composition by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, “You’re My Soul and Inspiration”, the #12 song of the year. I wasn’t alone in appreciating Bill Medley’s baritone/bass vocals in a period when most bands featured tenor voices.

Motown was still sitting comfortably atop the heap of cross-over, white friendly soul music. And the Temptations, with David Ruffin in the lead, were still cranking out hits. They had 2 songs in the Top 100, “Beauty Is Only Skin Deep”, and the one we heard, “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg”, the #39 song of the year. The Temptations hits this year were written and produced by Norman Whitfield along with Ed Holland. Whitfield would become the main production guy for the Temptations and wrote or co-wrote 92 hits on the US charts, including “I Heard It On The Grapevine”.

While the Temptations were perennial hitmakers, the Capitols were a one hit wonder band. “Cool Jerk” was a reworking of a lewd but popular dance tune in Detroit clubs called the “Pimp Jerk”. The Capitols cleaned up the lyrics and had a big hit with it on tiny Karen Records, with the Funk Brothers playing behind them. A classic, covered famously by the Go Go’s and the California Raisins on their debut album.

The Marvelettes, Motown’s first great girl group, had been eclipsed by the Supremes the past few years, but they staged a comeback in ‘66 with “Don’t Mess With Bill”, written and produced by Smokey Robinson. Unfortunately, the Marvelettes were difficult to work with, and Motown stopped putting their full promotional muscle behind them. They had health and substance abuse issues, and by 1969, they were through as a band.

But their rivals, the Supremes, were still going strong:

The Four Tops were still coming on strong, and “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” which made it to #5 for the year, was their biggest hit ever. Had to be, to reach #5 in these years. Their other big hit that year, “Standing In The Shadows Of Love”, which climbed to #6 on the pop charts, #2 on the R&B chart, didn’t make it to the Top 100 for the year.

New Orleans born Robert Parker wrote “Barefootin’”, and then it was arranged and produced by Wardell Quezergue, a legendary figure in New Orleans music, known as the “Creole Beethoven”. Quezerque (that’s Q-u-e-z-e-r-q-u-e) came up playing trumpet in Dave Bartholomew’s band, but he’d gone to music school, so he wound up arranging and rearranging songs Bartholomew. He helped create the New Orleans funk sound, and you can hear it in the horns on that cut. But New Orleans was about to find itself in competition not just with Motown, NY and LA, and the Brits, but from nearby Alabama of all places…

Percy Sledge had his biggest hit in ’66 too, with “When A Man Loves A Woman”, the #31 song of the year. It was the first #1 hit recorded in Rick Hall’s FAME Studios at Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, and it marked the beginning of a very successful partnership between Atlantic Records and Muscle Shoals. Atlantic had previously worked closely with Stax, but an acrimonious session with Atlantic recording star Wilson Pickett, led to Stax’s refusal to record any more non-Stax artists for Atlantic. Which is how they lost Aretha Franklin and “Respect” to Muscle Shoals later that year. Sledge was from Alabama, so it was good that he got to record the first big hit at Muscle Shoals. Others would soon follow

James & Bobby Purify were from Florida, but “I’m Your Puppet” was written by Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn who worked at Muscle Shoals and so it was recorded there as well. Muscle Shoals had great studio musicians and a great sound. It became Atlantic Records co-founder Jerry Wexler’s favorite place to record.

And so, when the Stax studio threw Wicked Wilson Pickett out for being a jerk and told him not to come back, Atlantic Records took him to Alabama and the “Land Of A Thousand Dances”, the old Chris Kenner tune, became his first hit out of Muscle Shoals.

There were a couple other Latin-infused tunes in the top 100. Chris Montez had the #88 hit, but it’s a tepid affair. Thank the rock & roll stars that in ’66 Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs were back with “Li’l Red Riding Hood”, one of the great novelty tunes. So that’s this year’s follow-up on the oft hidden Latin pocket in American roots music. There was one more – the #2 tune of 1966 that we haven’t played yet, coming up this next hour…

We’ve been continuing our history of rock and roll AM radio, listening back to 1966, the year when the British tide finally began to go out. Folk-rock took up a lot of the resulting slack on the Billboard pop charts even as soul music was in its peak years and funk was coming on strong. It was a great year on the R&B charts, though us young white Top 40 listeners didn’t hear that much of it. Not nearly enough. So what was country music doing while all this was going on?

“The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Sgt. Barry Sadler, was the #10 song of the year or the #1 song, depending on which Billboard chart you look at for 1966, as it was revised later. Either way, it was huge. Sadler’s song was written for the John Wayne film, “The Green Berets”, but a choral group sang it there instead.

The list of the Top 100 country hits for ’66 looks much like the Top 100 R&B list in that it’s surprising how many now familiar tunes didn’t make it from there to Billboard’s Top 100 for the year. Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough To Take My Man” and “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind”); “Flowers On The Wall” by the Statler Brothers; Merle Haggard’s “The Bottle Let Me Down”. None of these made Billboard’s Top 100 for the year. The only one that did was David Houston’s “Almost Persuaded”, a tune I only dimly recall.

It’s instructive to find another country tune in Billboard’s Top 100 that didn’t even make the country charts: Sandy Posey’s “Born a Woman”. If you listen closely to the lyrics, you can tell why. After disclosing an unflinching list of things that oppress women in this man’s world, most notably men themselves, the song concludes that her man makes it all worthwhile. It’s a cop-out ending to an otherwise feminist lyric. “Stand By Your Man” it wasn’t. And it struck a chord that male country station DJ’s didn’t like, apparently. A chord that a lot of women must have resonated to. So politics was rearing its head even within country music, as Johnny Cash described in the #17 song on the country charts in ’66: “The One On The Right Is On The Left”: "Just work on harmony and diction, play your banjo well, and if you have political convictions, keep 'em to yourself!"

Thanks, Johnny! That lesson was meant for folk groups, not country artists of course. Though Posey recorded in Nashville under Chips Moman, it wasn’t till 1978 that she began to put songs on the Country charts. It should be noted that Senator Everett Dirksen had the #6 hit on the country charts that year, “Gallant Men”. Dave Dudley scored with “What We’re Fighting For” and “Vietnam Blues” on those same charts.Country music was drawing its battle lines, but they were losing on the pop charts generally.Meanwhile…

The irony of Cash’s satire on the politics in folk music was that folk music was losing its political edge in these years as the epicenter of folk music moved from NYC to the West Coast. Bob Lind was from Maryland originally, but he wound up in LA writing songs that helped develop the new folk rock sound while recording himself for World Pacific Records. “Elusive Butterfly” was his biggest. And sappiest.

The third song we heard in that set of folkish pop rock was “Good Vibrations”, by the Beach Boys. The Boys had three hits in the Top 100 for ’66, the others being “Sloop John B” and “Barbara Ann”. “Good Vibrations” was a studio production, assembled out of fragments totaling 90 hours of tape, recorded with his bandmates and other musicians over several months in ‘66. It’s considered an early flower power entry, a precursor to the psychedelic era soon to come, further up the coast in San Francisco.

Instro surf music had its last gasp on the charts in ’66. The music had moved on, but folks still liked the sound enough to make a surf style TV jingle into a hit. “No Matter What Shape Your Stomach Is In” was an Alka Seltzer jingle given the full treatment by the T-Bones. Liberty Records in LA used the “T-Bones” as a group name for instrumentals recorded by musicians in the Wrecking Crew, that legendary group of LA session musicians who backed up hundreds of Top 40 hits throughout the 60’s. They began as the house band for Phil Spector but were soon providing session work for most of the studios in LA. Wrecking Crew musicians made good money without touring, so Liberty Records had another band, who didn’t play on their own records, to tour for them. That’s the LA/NYC style, personified by Phil Spector, who didn’t care a bit about the bands he produced except in so far as he could use them.

The antidote to this crass commercialism, at least in California, were the high school garage bands that sprung up in the wake of instro surf music in the early 60’s. Like street corner doo wop groups in NYC, these young groups were formed of amateurs performing for their friends. And more often than not, they had a song of their own that got them launched into recording. And these might became commercial hits too, though sometimes the only hits these bands would ever have. The Surfaris would release only 5 singles over their two year career. “Wipeout” was the only one that went anywhere, but it was enough, becoming a big hit in ’63. It was so big that they released it again in ’66, and it made the Top 100 once again! So there was still a market for surf – but the bands had moved on. Garage rock was going vocal:

They were an influence on the next band we heard as well, the Count Five, with “Psychotic Reaction”. The Count Five were more authentically a garage band, formed around high school friends from San Francisco. They began as a surf band but changed direction as so many did under the influence of the British invasion. “Psychotic Reaction” was influenced by the Standells style, and soon became a cornerstone of garage rock as it veered into psychedelics. “Psychotic Reaction” used feedback and distortion instead of the cleaner Stratocaster sound of instro surf. And so the music evolved, depending on local influences.

The harder rock sound that was coming to characterize West Coast garage bands had its reflection among the Brits, who were not all folk-rock effervescence like the Beatles and Herman’s Hermits. The Stones only had one song in the Top 100 for ’66, but it wasn’t bubble gum pop: “Paint It Black” is a Jagger and Richards song about the depression left behind after the loss of a loved one. The lyrics are bleak and the melody is odd – Jagger said it was “kind of a Turkish song”; Brian Jones was into Moroccan music at the time, so perhaps that explains it. But it’s not an upbeat, poppish tune.

The Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man” does sport a catchy pop melody, but the lyrics are a scathing indictment of smug, self-satisfied comfortable types, rather like Lennon’s “Nowhere Man”. Like the Beatles and the Stones, the Kinks were turning to more mature and thoughtful themes in their songwriting. Their audience was growing older.

The Troggs weren’t interested in adult themes or social satire. “Wild Thing” was a vaguely suggestive party song that was written in ten minutes, recorded on the second take, and soon became a garage rock standard. And so the Troggs became a major influence on punk rock. Music critic Lester Bangs called them the “progenitors of punk”, and they were cited as an influence by Iggy Pop, known as the “Godfather of Punk”. Iggy Pop and the Stooges would come together in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in ’67 and ’68. I mention that because, already in ’66, a hard edged, garage based proto-punk band was making itself heard along the old Chicago/Detroit greater musico-politan area:

Tommy James and the original Shondells were from southwestern Michigan, on the way from Chicago to Detroit. The were a high school band, naming themselves after Troy Shondell, from nearby Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was known for his three million selling single “This Time” in 1962. They recorded Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich’s “Hanky Panky” in 1964, but their small label had no national distribution and it went nowhere. That is, until a Pittsburgh DJ started playing it in ’65 and it caught on. By that time, the original Shondells were disbanded and they had to quickly assemble a new band. The Shondells had a number of hits through the late 60’s, veering from the bubble gum sound of “I Think We’re Alone Now” to the psychedelic styling of “Crimson & Clover”. But the garage rock sass of “Hanky Panky” is what people best remember them for.

Okay, we’re going to finish out today’s show with two more hard rocking bands from the Detroit area proper:<

Mitch Ryder was a white R&B singer from the Detroit area whose band, the Detroit Wheels, had the #32 hot of the year with the blues-rock medley “Devil With A Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly”. “Devil With A Blue Dress” was a Shorty Long/Mickey Stevenson Motown tune; “Good Golly Miss Molly” a Little Richard classic. The Wheels version is a classic in its own right. I remember this one really caught my ear back then. They had some other good tunes that touched the charts, including that seldom heard classic, “Little Latin Lupe Lu”.

Okay: we finished that set and our show for today with ? & The Mysterians “96 Tears”, the #2 song of 1966. Yeah, surprised me too. But then, I was surprised to learn years later that “96 Tears” is considered one of the great proto-punk classics. And that the band members were the sons of migrant farmers who settled in central Michigan. Which is to say, they were Mexican-Americans. ? was the stage name of Rudy Martinez, whose organ riffs propel the tune. It was a good stage name, despite its orthographic challenge as Martinez was known to claim Martian origin and to have once walked the earth with the dinosaurs. That explains their sound.

So what are we to say of 1966? In the year when the British tide finally receded, what took its place? Folk rock was the most obvious beneficiary, the apolitical, lightly rocking fusion of folk and pop that the Beatles and Dylan had helped initiate.

But folk rock was really just the newest styling of the pop that had been the mainstay of the pop charts at least since the decline of rockabilly. It wasn’t really new. The R&B charts were loaded with hits, but that didn’t translate to a resurgence of R&B on the Billboard Top 100. They mostly held their own, even as Motown was at its peak and Stax and Muscle Shoals were throwing coals on the fire.

The big losers were the white crooners who had been a fixture on the charts since the 40’s. What was new was the turn towards more literate, adult lyrics on the one hand, and towards a garage band sound that was musically primitive, raw but rocking on the other. From California to Michigan, it was spreading fast. That story will continue next time, as we finish our history of Rock & Roll AM radio with a listen back to the psychedelic sixties with hints of the punk to come. Catch you then...