Playlists

The magic’s in the music, and the music’s in me

Posted on by brucehhackett

The mid-1960s was a uniquely fertile time in rock music history. The Beatles had arrived to shake up the status quo. Bob Dylan was changing the kinds of things we sang about. Motown was bringing effervescent soul to mainstream audiences. The palette of musical styles was exploding with variety — folk rock, funk, psychedelia, country rock, bluesy hard rock, Big Band rock, bubblegum pop and more.

In the midst of this, basic rock groups with exhilarating vocal harmonies were forming in small towns and big cities across the nation, churning out solid hit singles that caught listeners’ attention and sold millions. Some managed only one decent song (“one-hit wonders”) while others managed to sustain their stay on the charts for two or three years’ worth of singles, or more.

I feel lucky to have been coming of age during this vibrant time. In 1964, I was nine years old the night when we all watched Ed Sullivan together. By 1970, I was 15 and buying albums every week, listening to hipper music on WMMS-FM in Cleveland, Ohio. But for six years, it was all about the music I heard on Top 40 radio, sometimes buying the 45 RPM singles I heard on WIXY 1260 on the AM dial.

Many of these feel-good songs of the Sixties are still favorites of mine 60 years later, with their words and melodies indelibly etched in my memory. You could make a case that some of them were slight, inconsequential, even a little cringey, but most of the ones I’ve featured here are arguably time-capsule classics, well worth hearing again, or for the first time, perhaps, for some younger readers.

I’m not alone in my appreciation of these great hit singles from the Sixties. Virtually every summer since 2010, a handful of the artists responsible for these tunes pool their efforts to mount a musical revue known as the Happy Together Tour, named for the iconic 1967 hit by The Turtles. The brainchild of Turtles singers Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (who also marketed themselves as Flo and Eddie in the ’70s), the 60-date tour has featured such acts as The Grass Roots, The Buckinghams, Gary Puckett & The Union Gap, Mark Lindsay (of Paul Revere and The Raiders), The Association, Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees, The Cowsills, The Vogues, Jay and The Americans, Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels, and Little Anthony. These tours have often sold out their venues to eager patrons looking to escape to some semblance of their simpler youth.

Curiously, I’ve never attended one of these gigs. I guess I’m leery that what I hear may fail to meet even modest expectations. Better to just crank up the originals on my sound system.

To do that properly, I’ve selected ten of these bands (and some honorable mentions) and offered brief career summaries, highlighting their best work in the Spotify playlist at the end. I can reasonably assure you that you’ll love 75% of the songs I’ve picked, maybe more.

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The Turtles

I always found something indescribably joyous about the hit records of The Turtles. Emerging in 1965 with a harmonious cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” the group proceeded to churn out at least three of my favorite pop tunes of the period: “You Baby,” the ubiquitous “Happy Together” and “She’d Rather Be With Me.” The effervescent melodies, and especially the glorious vocals of Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman on these tunes, have had a lasting impact (on me, anyway), and so have lesser hits like “Elenore” and “You Showed Me.” By 1970, the group dissolved, but Kaylan and Volman branded themselves as Flo & Eddie, performing as a duo and also as part of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. The duo resurrected The Turtles and, as previously mentioned, spearheaded the popular Happy Together reunion tours in the ’80s, ’90s and beyond that featured a half-dozen bands reliving their glory days. Sadly, Volman died just last week at age 78.

Paul Revere and The Raiders

Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, this band, led by organist Revere and lead singer/teen idol Mark Lindsay, were picked by impresario Dick Clark in 1965 to be the house band on his afternoon pop music showcase, “Where the Action Is.” Their gimmicky Revolutionary War costumes and a comedic approach to their live performances made them seem like a joke in some circles, but their string of a dozen catchy, potent Top 20 hits between 1966 and 1971 made Revere and The Raiders a commercial success, beginning with the #11 hit “Just Like Me.” The early hit “Kicks” was notable as an early anti-drug message song which made them seem decidedly unhip to the growing rock intelligentsia, but it was followed by the hard-rocking “Hungry” and “Good Thing” with lethal bass lines and strong vocals by Lindsay. Five years later, they scored their only #1 hit with “Indian Reservation,” a tribute to the Cherokee Native American nation.

The Monkees

Probably the most lasting legacy of the bands included here belongs to The Monkees, who had the undeniable advantage of starring in their own scripted TV series for three years (and even won a Best Comedy Emmy for the debut season). Indeed, they were hired as actors, as part of a plan to make a weekly show about a fictional pop group in the zany vein of The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” film. Their first records featured group members Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones on vocals, but all the instruments were played by studio musicians instead, and The Monkees’ biggest hits were written by professional songwriters like Neil Diamond, Carole King and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (Hart died last week at age 86). “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m a Believer” were both huge #1 hits on US pop charts, while “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” “Daydream Believer” and “Valleri” all reached the Top Five. They eventually demanded and won the right to play on their recordings and contribute their own material, but interest waned and the hits stopped in 1969. Numerous comebacks and reunion tours involving at least two of the four members were staged in the decades since. Dolenz is the only Monkee still alive in 2025.

The Buckinghams

This Chicago-based band was unique in several ways. They were one of the first pop bands to incorporate horn arrangements in their repertoire, which was the brainchild of producer James Guercio, who went on to produce horn-driven bands Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago. The Buckinghams had five Top 20 hits, all of which peaked during the calendar year 1967: “Kind of a Drag” (#1 in January), “Mercy Mercy Mercy” (#5 in February/March), “Don’t You Care” (#6 in May), “Hey Baby They’re Playing Our Song“(#12 in August) and “Susan” (#11 in October). Four of those were written or co-written by Chicago-based songwriter Jim Holvay, while “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” was penned by Cannonball Adderley Quintet keyboardist Joe Zawinul, who went on to form jazz fusion pioneers Weather Report. Most of the lead vocals were handled by guitarist Carl Giammarese, who still performs with a new Buckinghams lineup, often as part of the Happy Together Tour.

The Lovin’ Spoonful

Led by singer-songwriter John Sebastian, The Lovin’ Spoonful cut their musical teeth in Greenwich Village in the early ’60s as a jug band, and churned out some of the most popular tunes of the mid-’60s period. “Do You Believe in Magic” became an anthem of sorts as their debut single in 1965, followed by such memorable pop classics as “You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice” and the easygoing “Daydream” and “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” I’d say their finest moment came with the irrepressible “Summer in the City,” a #1 smash in 1966 that bemoaned the noisy humid daytime and celebrated the cooler, festive nighttime hours. “Nashville Cats,” “Rain on the Roof” and “Darling Be Home Soon” rounded out their Top 20 chart successes in 1967. Sebastian made a memorable impromptu appearance at Woodstock and began a solo career the next year. The Spoonful was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.

The Dave Clark Five

Many readers may not know or remember that The Dave Clark Five were a close second to The Beatles among the groups who made up the “British Invasion” of US pop charts in 1964-1965. They came from the Tottenham district of North London, with Dave Clark’s gunshot drumming, Mike Smith’s keyboards and lead vocals and Denis Payton’s sax and guitar being the prominent elements of their sound. They scored 10 Top Twenty singles on US charts, with their early hits (“Glad All Over,” “Bits and Pieces,” “Can’t You See That She’s Mine“) competing simultaneously with The Beatles’ first big singles. Their commercial success continued in 1965 with “Because,” “I Like It Like That” and “Catch Us If You Can,” while “Over and Over” became their only #1 in the last week of 1965, edging out The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” from the top spot in the final week of 1965. The DC5 appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” 18 times, more than any other rock band. Clark, a shrewd businessman, negotiated their royalty deals that made him wealthy. In 2008, they, too, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Grass Roots

In 1965, the songwriting/producing team of P.F. Sloan and Steve Barry, in tandem with Dunhill Records owner Lou Adler, created an imaginary group called The Grassroots so they could record their folk-rock song “Where Were You When I Needed You.” When the demo ended up reaching #28 on the US pop charts, they searched for and found a band called The Bedouins, and convinced them to become The Grass Roots. Several lineup changes occurred over the next year, and by 1967, they hired Rob Grill as lead singer, and the band’s fortunes took off. From 1967 through 1971, The Grass Roots charted eight songs on the Top Twenty, most notably 1968’s megahit, “Midnight Confessions.” Also popular were such tunes as “Let’s Live For Today,” “Bella Linda,” “I’d Wait a Million Years,” “Temptation Eyes” and “Sooner or Later.” With Grill in charge, The Grass Roots attempted to tour in the late ’70s, but it wasn’t until the Happy Together tours of the mid-’80s and beyond that they were able to attract sizable audiences again.

The Association

In 1964, an ad hoc folk group called The Inner Tubes became the house band at The Troubadour in Los Angeles, eventually expanding to a 13-member lineup called The Men. That group was streamlined down to six musicians who called their harmony vocal group The Association, with Terry Kirkman, Larry Ramos and Jim Yester leading the way. By 1966, they had honed their sound and found success with two big singles: a cryptic song about marijuana called “Along Comes Mary” and the harmony-rich ballad “Cherish,” which topped the charts. These two tracks gave them enough cachet to earn them an invitation to be the opening act at the legendary Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, and they built on that with two more huge singles that year: “Windy” (another #1) and “Never My Love” (one of the most-played songs of the 20th Century, according to BMI). They continued releasing albums into the early ’70s but as times changed, the group dissolved; still, a revised lineup of The Association participated in several editions of the Happy Together reunion tours in recent years.

Tommy James & The Shondells

James was only 17 when he and his group, The Shondells recorded “Hanky Panky” for a small Michigan-based label. It sold regionally, but the band soon broke up, and two years later, a Pittsburgh DJ unearthed the track and gave it airplay, and within a month it was the #1 song in the country. James corralled another group, The Raconteurs, to become the new lineup of The Shondells, and on the strength of “Hanky Panky,” signed to Roulette Records, run by mafia-connected Morris Levy. James and The Shondells charted seven Top Twenty hits between 1966-1969, most prominently “I Think We’re Alone Now” (#4), the garage-rock classic “Mony Mony” and the trio of psychedelic pop tunes from 1969 (“Crimson and Clover” in February, “Sweet Cherry Wine” in May and “Crystal Blue Persuasion” in August). James almost died from a drug overdose in 1970, but he returned as a solo artist for one last hit in 1971, “Draggin’ the Line.” He’s been a regular on the nostalgia tours.

Herman’s Hermits

Here are three things I bet you never knew about Herman’s Hermits: 1) Peter “Herman” Noone, at 15, had been a child actor on the British TV soap opera “Coronation Street” before becoming a pop singer; 2) he was given the nickname Herman based on his supposed resemblance to the animated character Sherman on the “Mr. Peabody” cartoon feature from the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” series; 3) In 1965, Herman’s Hermits were ranked #1 (ahead of the #2 Beatles!) as the Top Singles Act of the year in the US. They logged 24 consecutive weeks in the Top Ten that year, and in total, charted 14 Top Twenty singles between 1964 and 1967. Some were cringeworthy novelty songs like “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am,” but most were catchy, pleasant ditties like “I’m Into Something Good” (by Carole King) and “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat,” or white-bread covers of The Diamonds’ “Silhouettes” and Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World.” Noone, with various backing musicians, has been a regular presence on nostalgia events and tours since the 1980s.

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Honorable mentions:

Gary Lewis & The Playboys (“This Diamond Ring,” “Save Your Heart For Me,” “She’s Just My Style,” “Everybody Loves a Clown,” “Green Grass“); Spanky & Our Gang (“Sunday Will Never Be the Same,” “Lazy Day,” “Like to Get to Know You,” “Give a Damn“); Jay & The Americans (“She Cried,” “Come a Little Bit Closer,” “Cara Mia,” “This Magic Moment“); Gary Puckett & The Union Gap (“Woman, Woman,” “Young Girl,” “Lady Willpower,” “This Girl is a Woman Now“); The Box Tops (“The Letter,” “Cry Like a Baby“); The Cowsills (“The Rain, The Park and Other Things,” “Hair,” “Indian Lake“); The Vogues (“You’re the One,” “Five O’Clock World“).

Worthwhile “one-hit wonders” from the ’60s period:

The American Breed (“Bend Me, Shape Me“), Every Mother’s Son (“Come on Down to My Boat“), The Standells (“Dirty Water“), John Fred and His Playboy Band (“Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)“), The Music Explosion (“Little Bit o’ Soul“), The Knickerbockers (“Lies“), The Gentrys (“Keep On Dancing“), Syndicate of Sound (“Little Girl“), The Blues Magoos (“(We Aint Got) Nothing Yet“), “The Easybeats (“Friday On My Mind“).

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Goodbye stranger, it’s been nice

Posted on by brucehhackett

Ever wonder how rock bands come up with their names? For example, what, exactly, is a Supertramp?

Around 1900, the legendary Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw took an interest in an unknown writer named W.H. Davies, who had spent several years traveling the rails in the United States as a vagrant and beggar while developing a talent as a poet. In 1908, Davies wrote about his peculiar life in the critically praised book “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.”

More than sixty years later, a fledgling British band known as Daddy was founded by two songwriting musicians — Rick Davies (no relation to the author) and Roger Hodgson. Soon enough, they wanted a new name to avoid confusion with another group called Daddy Longlegs, and their guitarist Richard Palmer, a fan of the Davies’ book, suggested Supertramp. It took a few more years before the group found success, but Supertramp went on to become one of the more popular progressive rock/pop groups in the UK, the US, Canada and much of Europe during the late ’70s and early ’80s.

This week, Rick Davies, who co-founded the group, played keyboards, sang and wrote more than half of their celebrated 10-album catalog, died of cancer at age 81.

I confess I wasn’t much of a fan of Supertramp at first, based on the early singles “Dreamer” and “Give a Little Bit,” written and sung by Roger Hodgson, whose high-pitched voice grated on my nerves in much the same way that Rush’s Geddy Lee did. (Well, not THAT bad, but it can be pretty annoying at times.). So I didn’t buy Supertramp’s albums, and therefore wasn’t exposed to the more bluesy, progressive rock songs that Davies wrote and sang, which were every bit as fundamental to the group’s oeuvre as Hodgson’s more melodic pop.

That changed big-time in 1979 when, along with millions of other music fans, I heard the song “Goodbye Stranger,” featuring Davies’ gritty voice and an explosive rock arrangement. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “this is Supertramp? This is way meatier and more interesting than the other stuff I’ve heard from them.”

The tune emerged as one of four hit singles from their multiplatinum #1 LP “Breakfast in America,” which brought the band worldwide fame. While Hodgson’s songs and vocals dominated the airwaves (“The Logical Song,””Take the Long Way Home” and the title tune), Davies’ keyboards and sax man John Helliwell’s powerful riffs gave the overall sound serious heft, and the album’s stellar production won a Grammy that year.

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When Davies and Hodgson first joined forces in England in 1969 as founders of the band that would become Supertramp, they were an unlikely pair. Davies came from working class roots and preferred blues and jazz; Hodgson was a private school kid who leaned more heavily toward pop and music hall genres. Their earliest recorded songs were joint efforts, but starting with their third album, Davies and Hodgson wrote independently and always sang lead vocals on the songs they wrote.

Supertramp began recording around the same time as other British progressive rock groups like Genesis and Yes, but those groups found their audiences more quickly and had significant commercial success in 1971 and 1972. Supertramp didn’t catch on until their lineup changed in 1973-74, adding Helliwell, bassist Dougie Thomson and drummer Bob Siebenberg, and they came up with the quality material that comprised their breakthrough album “Crime of the Century,” which included Davies’ compelling “Bloody Well Right,” a bitter critique of the British economic caste system, and other sophisticated works by Davies like “Rudy” and “Asylum,” and Hodgson’s “School.”

It’s not a stretch to make a few comparisons between the songwriting of Davies and Hodgson and the John Lennon-Paul McCartney partnership. In The Beatles, Lennon and McCartney started out writing songs together, but their different sensibilities and influences led them to write separately, and their final three or four albums contained songs written almost exclusively by one or the other. The same thing happened in Supertramp. Also, Lennon’s love for the rock ‘n’ roll of Elvis Presley contrasted with McCartney’s preference for the pop of Buddy Holly, much like Davies’ rough-edged tunes were at variance with Hodgson’s sweeter melodies.

Hodgson ruminated on that difference in a 1979 interview: “We realized that a few of the songs on ‘Breakfast in America’ really lent themselves to two people talking to each other, and at each other. I could be putting down his way of thinking and he could be challenging my way of seeing things. Our ways of life are so different, but I love him. That contrast is what makes the world go ’round, and it’s what makes Supertramp go ’round as well. His beliefs are a challenge to mine and my beliefs are a challenge to his.”

Supertramp (from left): Rick Davies, Dougie Thomson, John Helliwell, Roger Hodgson, Bob Siebenberg

Sadly, though, that divergence in styles and inspirations proved to be, eventually, Supertramp’s undoing. Where the two songwriters had initially respected each other’s work in an “opposites attract” sort of way, Hodgson felt he was growing apart from not only Davies but the rest of the band, both musically and spiritually. As the group contemplated their follow-up to “Breakfast in America” in 1982, Hodgson made it clear he wanted a pop album, while Davies had his sights set on returning to the prog rock of past albums, even putting forth a complex 16-minute piece that would be the album’s cornerstone. They both bristled at having to compromise their own vision, and the resulting LP, “…Famous Last Words…,” felt jarringly contradictory to many critics and to the band members themselves.

Said Davies at that time, “It’s been said that there’s a certain amount of friction that’s inevitable when you’re involved in a creative process. It’s like two people are painting a picture on the same canvas. Somebody wants to put red there and somebody wants to put blue. You have problems, and the picture doesn’t get finished. In the past, we’ve always been able to work around it, but as we’ve progressed, it has become more difficult.” Said drummer Siebenberg, “It became a diluted version of what it started out to be. It was really neither here nor there.”

Davies (left) and Hodgson during the band’s glory years

Still, Supertramp charted a triumphant world tour in 1983, and I saw them perform in September of that year in what turned out to be one of Hodgson’s final dozen shows as part of the group’s lineup. I found it to be a superb, professional gig, full of both songwriters’ better songs, including their two hits from “Famous Last Words” — Hodgson’s “It’s Raining Again” and Davies’ “My Kind of Lady.”

Hodgson then made good on his vow to go solo, and within a year, he charted respectably with his debut LP, “In the Eye of the Storm,” reaching #46 in the US, and the singles “Had a Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy)” and “In Jeopardy,” which peaked at #11 and #30, respectively, on US rock charts. A follow-up LP in 1987, stalled at #163. His third and (so far) final studio album, 2000’s “Open the Door,” didn’t chart at all in the US. Hodgson has devoted most of his energies in the ’90s and beyond to performing, sometimes with a band, sometimes on his own, including several high profile events in Europe and Canada.

Davies, meanwhile, forged ahead with Supertramp, firmly in control as they followed his progressive rock vision on the 1985 LP “Brother Where You Bound,” which peaked at #21 on US album charts. The remaining foursome of Davies, Helliwell, Thomson and Siebenberg augmented their instrumentation with a handful of additional musicians (including Pink Floyd’s guitarist David Gilmour) on the ambitious 16-minute title track and the brilliant “Cannonball” single, and they toured relentlessly in Canada, the US and Europe.

In 1987, they tried a new approach for their next project, “Free as a Bird,” setting aside their progressive rock and employing synthesizers and dance-beat rhythms instead. Said Davies years later, “I thought we could be more modern and build it up with computers and drum machines and have people come in one by one, but that makes you lose the band spirit a little bit. Each time we went in, we would try to give it something different, and it ended up a lot more machine-based than anything we’d done before. That was good and bad, but I think it had some interesting songs on it.” (I agree; tracks like “Thing For You,” “An Awful Thing to Waste” and the title song are all worthy entries in the Supertramp repertoire, but in general, it’s a failed experiment that stalled at #101 on US album charts.)

They toured behind “Free as a Bird” for six months in 1987-88 before collectively agreeing to call it quits. But in 1997, they rallied with additional musicians on the album “Some Things Never Change,” which failed to chart in the US, and again in 2002 with “Slow Motion,” which suffered the same fate. Davies conceded in 2007, “These were last-ditch attempts to make things happen again, but the life had gone out of the band by that point.”

An effort was made in 2010 to honor fans’ requests for a true Supertramp reunion with both Davies and Hodgson on stage together, but that fell through. “I know there are some fans out there who would like that to happen, and there was a time when I had hoped for that, too,” said Davies. “But in order to play a great show, you need harmony, both musically and personally. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist between us anymore, and I would rather not destroy memories of more harmonious times between all of us.”

A final Supertramp tour of Europe was announced in 2015, but Davies’ first bout with cancer interfered, and although he fought it off for a while, it returned and eventually claimed him.

“It was an honor to share the stage with Supertramp back in the ‘prog-rock’ days of the ’70s,” said David Pack, guitarist/singer/songwriter of Ambrosia, the LA-based band with a similar prog rock/pop dual personality. “Rick along with Roger wrote and sang so many classic songs that were the soundtrack of our lives way back when. What a legacy. Bloody well done, Rick!”

R.I.P., Rick Davies. It’s an egregious omission that you and Supertramp are not yet in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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The Spotify playlist below features the Supertramp songs written and sung by Rick Davies, in honor of his recent passing. For the sake of completeness, at the end I’ve added eight songs written and sung by Hodgson.