The Waterboys's Blog

FROM 'BE MY BABY' TO 'A WHITER SHADE OF PALE':

Transcendent hit singles, 1963-67

Classical....yes

Jazz...yes

Rock'n'roll...yes

All were spiritual forces, liberators, vehicles of innovation and freedom.

In fact, all music of authentic intent and origin has a spiritual aspect. And any performance or recording - even a lowly one - can be a spiritual door-opener for someone, depending on circumstances, context and the consciousness and needs of the listener.

But certain records, viewed from an objective perspective, manifest sufficient grace and perfection to achieve a critical mass of a transcendent quality that can perhaps be best described as sacredness.  Or maybe they simply channel a kind of love.  The archetypal such record is The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows, many peoples’ favourite of all time.  God Only Knows is filled with grace in its sentiment, performance, melody and sound.  In fact, its musical production is one of its most exquisite aspects; the way the horn in the intro is set against a delicate vamp is a masterstroke of sensitive arrangement.  Of similar potency is the famous chorus of voices in the outro.  In each of these we hear a high, fine beauty - intricate, organic, co-operative - and our purest emotions respond.  God Only Knows, as millions of us have discovered, has the power to draw from the human animal a transcendent response.

Such records are rare, and in my opinion grace and perfection in the pop hit single is found but seven times, and each of those between the years 1963 and 1967.  

Before Phil Spector’s 1963 production of Be My Baby, pop music had the power to entertain, to incite and to liberate.  But it took Spector’s innovative and thrilling use of recording technique to bestow on pop music the power and possibility of transcendence.  By deploying multiple pianos, guitars, bells and drums, then overlaying the whole with the full promethean rush of the orchestra, Spector turned human emotion into pure sound.  That Spector's alchemy operated almost exclusively on teenage hearts and minds, working its visceral magic on individuals in the throes of the most emotionally tumultous period of their lives, added a wild, karmic spin to the adventure, as anyone who was a teenager in the early sixties will confirm.  

Pop music, recording technology and media communications were all then in their innocent phase.  Self-consciousness, nostalgia and irony were almost a decade away, and in the seven or eight uncynical pioneering years left to it, pop music explored an as-yet unparallelled golden age of pure creativity.  

All the examples I’ve identified of the transcendent pop hit come from those years.  After 1971 the majority of pop music makers were too self-aware - and not yet evolved enough - to be truly unselfconscious and natural in their work.  A self-referential consciousness entered music.  When it was good – Roxy Music or David Bowie, and later the best of punk – it was very good.  And when it was bad – smug or knowing records, over-cooked recording techniques that favoured sophistication over emotion, form over content – it was very bad.  But never was the self-referential consciousness transcendent.  By its very knowingness it is grounded.  And with a very few exceptions this applies to the pop music of the last 40 years.  We haven't yet unlearned our smartness and discovered how to do again what we once didn't know how not to do!  The moment when the equation was right – the alchemical combination of innocence, innovation, talent, momentum and new technology – has gone.

So until a new set of cultural factors creates the conditions for grace, perfection and transcendence to once again manifest in popular music, the records made in the bright sun of 1963-1970 will remain the high standard.  Here is my choice of the seven truly transcendent hit singles on the British charts during that time, the ones that in my opinion achieve a form of sacredness:

Be My Baby by The Ronettes                        October 1963

- see above

God Only Knows by The Beach Boys             August 1966

- see above

Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys              October 1966

- creates an atmosphere of aural sunshine, a space of golden wellbeing into which the listener is fully invited and admitted. Several of its passages have a palpable sacredness.

Penny Lane by The Beatles                          February 1967

- freshness and joy turned into sound.  Listening to Penny Lane is like participating in a gorgeous dream in which one is always fully conscious in a sparkling, benign present moment.  And part of the power of Penny Lane is that wherever the record is played - whether heard on the radio, in a bedroom or floating across a street - it imposes its dream of benign effervescence on its environment.  

Strawberry Fields by The Beatles                 February 1967

- a headlong rush into the ineffable, the unknown.

Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks                     May 1967

- love alchemised into sound.

A Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procol Harum      May 1967

The combination of the magnificent organ melody, the beautiful hazy surreal lyrics, the soulful vocal, and the ineffable, magisterial drum fills, create a rolling moment-to-moment unfoldment of grace and power.

Each of these records has the power to bring forth a transcendent response, to touch and spark the listener’s love and imagination in an intensity that can accurately be called spiritual.  This surely is the highest aim of pop music.

A note.  Interestingly - to me, at any rate - none of the spritual hits I listed in my last blog are in the above roll-call.  They were all records with lyrics expressing aspects of spirituality, and transmitting, with different degrees of effectiveness, the essences of those aspects.  But it would appear that singing about spirituality, even when doing so authentically and potently, is no guarantee that in terms of execution the record will achieve pure spiritual heights.   Love and an attraction to the surreal and ineffable would appear to be surer routes to transcendence.  There is a deep mystery at work here.

Second note. I've deliberately not expanded the blog to include transcendent album tracks.  There are many of those, I know, but hit singles have (or had before the charts became gamed and manipulated out of all coherency) a special potency in our culture that sets them apart.  Nevertheless, I would count at least half a dozen other Beatles tracks as truly transcendent, among them Here, There And Everywhere and A Day In The Life.  And I can think of examples by other artists.  I know you will too, and please feel free to post suggestions of what you feel are transcendent recordings.  And say why.