Sounds of the Sixties: "Gentleman Rock"

[Bent Fabric]

Some imagination, creativity and subjectivity are always involved when sifting through the relics of yesteryear and attempting to sort them into some probable, likely or even believable history. When enough time has passed, it all becomes a form of historical fiction.

And so it goes with those moments between JFK/the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and...I dunno, Woodstock/Altamont/Kent State.

There was long hair, there was exotic pop/rock/R&B everywhere all of a sudden, Stax and Motown were kicking it out, kids were getting high on 11 different herbs and spices, and the garage boom was...it was a good time to be selling guitars and drums.

But...surely not everyone who jumped aboard went full on freak out, right? Couldn't you take the electric instruments and harmonies and focus them more towards a sort of "parent pleasing" middle ground? Something more palatable and innocent seeming? No "I'm Down" or "Eight Miles High" or "My Generation" - something objectively (if retroactively) closer to the Lettermen than to the Rolling Stones.



Now, I can't prove that any of this is deliberate. Arguably, people just become what they are going to become, but...I'd hate to be tasked with proving that some part of the American guitar army weren't sanding down the idioms of the day with some conscious understanding that there was a much bigger audience out there if you brought Mom and Dad along. Maybe "Surfer Girl" was an attainable expression of innocence, whereas "I Get Around " was just a bit too "heavy".



Simon and Garfunkel were a fine point of convergence for the boomers AND their parents - assuredly, they smoked weed and were quite forward looking in their way (subway walls, tenement halls), but they weren't nearly as feral and toothy as Bob Dylan. Paul Simon was probably quite happy to speak to Time Magazine. Their music carried an air of gentle, collegiate respectability - I'm certain there was a generation who happily filed The Graduate soundtrack next to their Brothers Four records. Paul Simon mentions this at the beginning of his solo career (1972, Rolling Stone) - pointedly belittling the Rolling Stones by reminding the reader that S&G always appealed to much larger cross section of the population. And what is Bookends if not the very platonic ideal of "a Sgt. Pepper for a bridged generation gap."



OK, seriously - those fucking lyrics. You can't tell me these folks were heading down the same road as Jim Morrison at ANY point.

In fairness, a lot of these acts probably could have at least gone full on Shadows of Knight (or Steppenwolf), but...it may have still been believed at that moment in time that young people's music WASN'T going to go further and further out. Maybe we grow the hair out a little, but...maybe there's ultimately a game to be played (show business, Dick Clark) and maybe the smart money is on a more trad. arr. presentation of pop music that doesn't piss anyone off.



We've all got a different song in our hearts, right? I mean, there's a lot of validity in balladry - maybe there were scores of young people on either side of the jukebox for whom the uptown sounds of Burt Bacharach and Tony Hatch were ultimately just more meaningful than Love, the Raiders or the Seeds. Maybe some of these kids come out of high school marching bands and have a sophisticated sense of harmony and finesse - "If I Fell" being their ultimate takeaway from the British Invasion. Even the Zombies mixed their Bo Diddley covers in with some very musically knowing nods toward a softer, more timeless sound.

Who's to say these kids are squares? The Chad and Jeremy, Jonathan and David side of the British Invasion is nothing to sneeze at.



I mean...that's nice, isn't it?

But...undeniably de-fanged.

How many of these American acts were formed directly in response to "the Beatles boom"? The shit was surely infectious, and...I can't imagine there weren't at least a few people for whom the idea of a more family-friendly version (the "Til There Was You" version) looked like money in the bank.



No offense, but...wimps, right?

Ironically, the most literal minded "Beatles reactive" thing that ever happened in the States (the Monkees) became an instant Frankenstein monster...writing their own songs, playing their own instruments, taking Hendrix on tour. Shit, even their first couple of records - overseen by the cigar chomping suits and executed in traditional means (professional songwriters, session players - real assembly line shit) - are fucking gnarly in their way (droney songs about weed, and garagey, heavy guitar riffs ala "Saturday's Child", "She", "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone").

But...then on the other side of the "guitar line", you've got the more cooperative kids.



I mute this stuff on the oldies station every day. You hear it between "Hot Fun in the Summertime", "Positively Fourth Street" and "Good Vibrations"...this sort of "filler". It's all capably executed and semi-functional, but...it's Hamburger Helper, ultimately. No nutrients and certainly no striking flavors.

Now, yeah, I most certainly like a lot of bland, smooth music (Bread, Bee Gees, Olivia Newton John, Carpenters, etc.) - all of this sort of pristine, soothing, almost oppressively gentle stuff - but I feel like there's a form of popular 1960s (and, I suppose, beyond...when you consider that the likes of the Grass Roots took both of their ideas limping right on into the 1970s) music that seems to avoid character and purpose as deftly as a Chicago motorist avoids potholes. I'm probably splitting hairs, but heard 50+ years later, so many of these songs seem to have no greater aspiration than "We're gonna be an OLDIE some day!"

No inherent crime, necessarily, but...when your kids ask what you did in the war...



(That one veers into "Lumberjack Song" territory after the instrumental break...and those people were probably depraved degenerates)

(See also)



Wonderful, stirring, music...but...tell me it's not "glee club damaged" (or don't).

Just as you and I believe (with some accuracy) ourselves to contain multitudes and nuance and hidden depths, so I'm sure it goes for any number of these acts.

I'm definitely prepared to accept every strength of the "Harper's Bizarre were a fucking Trojan Horse of subversive content!!!!" counter-arguments.

I mean, to the extent that I could even be said to be mounting an argument here. Some of us may intuit a particular wave of "neutered beat boom" in the more clean cut side of "the stuff that cooled off the airwaves after 'White Rabbit'", and it may form part of some larger exploration of the era and its various little niches and peculiarities ("A&M schmaltz" is something that is easy and cheap to collect - I feel like I ended up with about 7,000 Tijuana Brass, Brasil 66, Sandpipers, Chris Montez, Claudine Longet, etc. records at some point...for a grand total of 30 cents. I play some of this stuff, and...surely, the thrift store bins tell a true story - namely, that it ended up in more homes than, say, Mr. Tambourine Man or A Quick One). Come in cool, come in hot, send the remaining members of the We Five or the Magicians over to my place to settle the score.

But, first...

Were these guys narcs, man?

[Phenomenal Cat]

I just have to reply, but I haven't collected my thoughts, exactly. That you liken this Gentleman Rock to Hamburger Helper makes the lineage to Imagine Dragons all too clear. This is immensely likable music. You can't get too pissed about it. But I think we are mistaken to sort this out from what The Stones or The Yardbirds were trying to do. Folks from the older generation are more than happy to lump it all together. You haven't lived until you've sat with Uncle Mike explaining how The Beatles were "crap" but Paul Revere & The Raiders were "surprisingly muscular" (in all fairness, Uncle Mike also insists "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came after Sgt. Pepper). Maybe Spanky & Our Gang were for people who found The Mamas & Papas too edgy, but then we don't know if Elaine McFarlane was a soft-rock Janis Joplin offstage. We just don't know!

Yeah, I'll be back.

[Bent Fabric]

I intuit a prominent "gallantry" in a lot of this stuff. Maybe there's a lot of unison vocals (or at least something very "blocky" about the harmonies) that add to the "wholesome masculinity" of the whole package.



The waters are sufficiently muddy. "Folk rock" is a neighbor/occasional co-parent of the sort of general "Ivy League Beatles", but...certainly the cleaner end, and...again, the edges are sort of perceptibly beveled in a way that just kind of reeks of town cars and sweaters.

[Osgood]

Surely covering an old Gershwin standard helps fitting into the cathegory




(provided you are not a white hippie doing Summertime)

[Bent Fabric]

Hell of an entry!

They're getting a lot of "respectable guy" mileage out of this song.

[Rayge]

I'm not quite sure I understand exactly what qualifies (for reasons possibly generational, possibly geographical), but since you put The Association and the Vogues in there, both great groups, and I haven't linked to this recently, here's one of my favourite tracks from the period:

[Bent Fabric]

You haven't lived until you've sat with Uncle Mike explaining how The Beatles were "crap" but Paul Revere & The Raiders were "surprisingly muscular" (in all fairness, Uncle Mike also insists "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came after Sgt. Pepper).

Uncle Mike, like a lot of boomers, carries the deeply honorable distinction of "having BEEN there" (if you fought in any version of the punk or hardcore wars, you can surely appreciate these credentials). He can do a good tight five on "Beatles vs. Stones" (you've heard it) and has any number of similarly fixed narratives (hard and fast immutable, inflexible and shopworn truths...real terra firma) on the Beach Boys, etc. And, yeah - there's bound to be a wild card in there ("If you never SAW the Five Americans, you're not gonna understand acid rock.").

[Bent Fabric]

The Turtles (whom I love) are an interesting case.

They started out with Dylan and sort of general "protest" vibes, and eventually went into fairly freaky territory (last two albums/psychedelic era singles...and well beyond for Mark and Howard, obviously), but...they certainly took a mid career detour into cologne and mouthwash music.





I do consider it a mostly American phenomenon for sure, although...there was certainly a subset of UK 1960s chart pop that utilized similar throwbacky totems - this general sort of good timey, carefree, innocuous, happy go lucky moderate revelry that was never going to be mistaken for Tomorrow or the Troggs...all these people like the Foundations (PURE Hamburger Helper!) or the Tremeloes whose records bore a certain facelessness and sounded like they could have been recorded at ANY point in "the past":

[Count Machuki]

But, first...

Were these guys narcs, man?

Plastic people, man.
Plastic. People.

[bobzilla77]

The sixties though, you kinda NEEDED a generation gap.

I've had the thought that Herman was really a little too interested in having Mrs Brown think favorably of him. He should just have sex with the mom and leave the daughter to go chasing after Mick Jagger.

[sloopjohnc]

There are dozens of "sunshine pop" comps around these days. I remember Feeb being a fan, which is funny, because he was one of the most subversive and rebellious guys on here - and his own music proves that point.

For my dad and mom, it was the Carpenters and John Denver. I think they're the epitome of what you're writing about.

I think they drew the line at Bread.

[bobzilla77]

Some of that sunshine pop stuff is downright weird. The Free Design are kind of a trip - they confound expectations and meet them at about the same rate. I can see why musical eccentrics get into it.

I see that as a little different from what John's talking about though, which I think those pop groups that were the "nice guys" the to the Stones' "bad boys."

[Phenomenal Cat]

The Association's "Cherish" came on MeTV Fm a week or so ago, and you wouldn't believe my wife's eyerolls during this rather stiff and uber-manly bridge:

Oh I'm beginning to think that man has never found
The words that could make you want me
That have the right amount of letters, just the right sound
That could make you hear, make you see
That you are drivin' me out of my mind

But then the song picks up this huge momentum in the following verse, a little modulation, and they return with the chorus and it is PURE ELATION.

Cherish is the word I use to descri-iiiiIIIIIIIIiiiiIIIIiiiiiiiiiibe!

I wouldn't trade it for a thousand "Lady Jane"s.

[Matt Wilson]

The sixties though, you kinda NEEDED a generation gap.

I've had the thought that Herman was really a little too interested in having Mrs Brown think favorably of him. He should just have sex with the mom and leave the daughter to go chasing after Mick Jagger.

Or do what Dustin Hoffman did and have sex with both of them.

[Bent Fabric]

It's temping to say that this is all bunk, but for being faced with groups bearing fairly blatant names like Every Mother's Son.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Mother%27s_Son

So sayeth Wikipedia:

Coming from a folk rock background situated in Greenwich Village, the group utilized its clean-cut image to score their only Top 40 hit "Come on Down to My Boat" in 1967.


Through Farrell's connections in the music industry, five major record labels expressed interest in the band; ultimately, MGM Records signed the group as a clean-cut alternative to the 1960s counterculture.

Much of the music on the album was described as "clean summer rock (with almost imperceptible echoes of The Beach Boys)".

[Loki]

Some of these are more Pop than Rock, but hey.

Not sure if any of these qualify










What about Latin, like Astrud Gilberto; Sergio Mendes, etc?

[Bent Fabric]

That Mercy song is a glorious throwback - and, yeah, we're definitely talking about a time when the general shape of popular music sort of accelerated en masse...that particular type of record in the Woodstock era was probably downright life-affirming for a certain kind of music fan who didn't really want to deal with "Whole Lotta Love" or "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida". The promotional clip is heart warming in its way - some swell guys and gals singing a ice song in the rec room.

Quite where the Fifth Dimension fit into all this, I'm not sure.

[zoomboogity]

That guy looks familiar:



I've always liked the idea of sunshine pop, but then I hear it, and halfway through, I'm ready to move on. When a song is only 2:15 long, that's not a sign of good things to come. I just finished hearing Is Yours Is Mine by Gene Clark, and that's the sort of thing I always hope to hear, and it always falls short of the mark. But he's just a better songwriter than 99% of this stuff, so it would be silly to expect anything more out of these bands, whose songwriting was second-tier at best. (I'm making some Gene comps for the car, and I just compiled the first disc, 20 songs from With The Gosdin Brothers and Gene Clark Sings For You. Man, is it tasty.)

Points to Herman's Hermits for introducing Keith Moon to M-80's. For a band with such a squeaky-clean image, i bet they had their share of adventures on the road.

surely, the thrift store bins tell a true story - namely, that it ended up in more homes than, say, Mr. Tambourine Man or A Quick One).

Not necessarily - maybe the Byrds and Who albums were of a higher quality, so the people who bought them were more likely to keep them. I do have a soft spot for Come Saturday Morning by The Sandpipers, though. And while none of the Brasil '66/'77 from the early A&M era of 1966-1972 is perfect from start to finish, there is plenty of great material written by the best of that genre (Jobim, Edu Lobo, Marcos & Paulo Valle, Dorival Caymmi). So they're sort of like The Monkees in that regard: remove the drippy Davy Jones ballads, and there's definitely quality music to be found that puts them just a step above.

So a lot of this stuff... maybe not so much Hamburger Helper, more like a Quarter Pounder with cheese.

[Davey the Fat Boy]

Maybe I’m not quite understanding the premise of this thread. It seems to spring forth from the idea that there was all of this great, raw guitar rock -‘and then a wave of 60s gentle-folk performed a testicular separation procedure of some kind.

But wasn’t the truth more that the hard stuff and the softer stuff all existed together on concurrent tracks?

[Bent Fabric]

Oh, for sure - nothing about the "Gentleman Rock hypothesis" is as hard nosed as all that. And, crucially, I think - it is an inherently playful reading of history.

If one can buy testimony that the Beatles (and worse!) were initially seen by some moms and dads as cultural terrorists (and there was some resistance, be it to the hair, the general air of irreverence,or the perceived noisiness of the beat group sound), it does follow that a more (some might say, perfectly organically...in some cases, perhaps more cynically fashioned) sanded down vocal group variant with less "Yeah!" in the lyrics and a generally more upstanding approach was bound to find a more receptive market share. I'm quite fond of the first Cyrkle LP (and a lot of this shit...including, and perhaps especially, the "A&M schmaltz"...Baja Marimba Band and all), but it does seem like the sort of thing you'd want handy when making the Gentleman Rock playlist.