Admittedly, I’ve never intentionally listened to the Bee Gees in my life (my brother-in-law gave this to me for Christmas), so when the lady-filled crowd screams wildly, I have to wonder what the big deal is.
But for the most part, the Bee Gees show what the big deal is.
It took a while for Capitol to figure out the Beatles. While they were initially keen for their LPs to be a mish mash of whatever tracks they were recording at the time, the Beatles were the among the first acts to look at the twenty-four inches of wax (both sides, keep up) as an opportunity to make a singular artistic statement.
But Capitol was a little slow on the uptake, continuing to grab recordings from different recording sessions and piecing them together to cash in on Beatle-mania. While they stopped releasing different North American versions once Sgt. Pepper arrived, the Beatles had been recording complete albums as early as Beatles for Sale in late 1964.
“Yesterday” and Today, largely culled from Rubber Soul and Revolver, with a few tracks from Help!, was the culmination of Capitol’s misguided practice.
You’ve probably heard the story before: Brian Wilson hears the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, decides to make the greatest album of all time. He succeeds with an album called Pet Sounds, which Paul showed John, and they started working on Sgt. Pepper’s. Paul shows some of it to Brian, who is already trying to top Pet Sounds with an album called SMiLE (which everyone is rabid with anticipation for), and Brian collapses under the pressure, succumbing to drugs and mental illness. The project is abandoned. The world wouldn’t see SMiLE until he recorded a new version in the late twenty aughts, then pieced together the original tapes in 2011.
But the Beach Boys were under a contract–they had to release something. That release, called Smiley Smile, was a compilation of the most completed songs from the SMiLE sessions (a majority of which wouldn’t appear on the finished project). Continue reading
1967 was a banner year for the psychedelic movement. The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s AND Magical Mystery Tour, the Stones released Their Satanic Majesty’s Request, the Who Sold Out, the Jimi Hendrix Experience debuted, and the hippies all moved into Haight-Ashbury.
And out of Haight-Ashbury came Jefferson Airplane, the soundtrack to the Summer of Love, and one of the hardest rocking bands in the world at that point–let alone the hardest rocking rock band with a female vocalist (in a world without Jefferson Airplane, there is no Heart, no Joan Jett, no Raveonnettes).