Station #1: The Greatest Decade

Here I go with a guided tour of each of my eight Bluebeat stations, or “crates”. (I begin each one with the description that appears on the website.) I’ll talk about why I created it, why I chose to include or omit certain music and the general vibe I was shooting for, as well as my own experience in listening to it.

Let’s start with the first and biggest of the stations…

The Greatest Decade

“The Most Powerful Drug Is the Human Soul! The 'Sixties were a surreal (and glorious) juxtaposition of contrasting styles. This crate recreates the pleasure I felt then, but using a much wider range of music than what was on the radio at the time.”

Current Bluebeat Ranking: 224 (as of 9/1/07)

Highest Ranking: Top 20

Created: 19 months ago

Last Changed: 2 months ago

Running Time of Contents: 383 hours

Of all my radio stations, this is the inevitable one, the one I had to build. It contains by far the largest and most varied repertoire of all of them, with albums by dozens of ‘Sixties artists comprising over 380 hours of music. Theoretically, you could play the station twenty-four hours a day for fifteen days and nights and never repeat a single song!

Why the ‘Sixties? I grew up listening to a lot of radio back then, and the music exposed me to a world of incredibly intense feeling I never knew existed within the confines of my staid, religious, middle-class home. The wild blast of joy that was the music of the very early Beatles was just the beginning. Through the force of his personality, Bob Dylan kicked open a hundred doors and demonstrated that language could work its magic in a song as powerfully as in a novel or a poem. The Rolling Stones both taunted and excited me; The Doors disturbed me; Motown liberated me. Otis Redding’s performance of “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” -- though not a blues song -- gave me my very first taste of the blues’ majesty. Aretha’s steamroller of a voice revealed the primal power of black gospel.

Dusty Springfield cooed and whispered her repressed longing into my brain. Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes projected an utterly carnal innocence. Joni Mitchell radiated adult sensuality -- even when her voice broke like a little girl’s. The Animals introduced me to working-class rage; The Who charmed me; The Kinks made me laugh and think. Jefferson Airplane fed my head; Cream blasted my ears and mind; Buffalo Springfield evoked the paranoia I was just beginning to feel myself. Sly Stone confronted the psychedelic world with a chuckle and a grin and a seemingly endless supply of hummable, danceable tunes. Creedence Clearwater Revival rocked the American proletariat, but added a whole new political power to the beat. And over and above it all, the older and wiser Beatles hovered like guiding spirits, turning their hand at dozens of different styles while remaining quintessentially, inimitably themselves.

As the years wore on, I couldn’t seem to stop making new and exciting discoveries. A remarkably belated revelation was the music of The Velvet Underground, which hit me with sledgehammer force (as it must have done for countless younger listeners in the late ‘Sixties) when I purchased my first single-disk retrospective of the mighty New York band in the 1990’s. It was as if a whole new aspect of the era opened up for me, and though the urban reality that Lou Reed and Company depicted was quite dark, the music was wonderful (and, sometimes, surprisingly joyous).

More recently, I’ve had the good fortune to meet up with a bunch of fine lads known as The Small Faces, who were a very big deal in their native England but, thanks mostly to inept management, never broke through in a big way in the American market. (They enjoyed only one major hit Stateside: the classic “Itchykoo Park.”) The Small Faces started out as one of the finest pop-soul bands in Britain, only to evolve, in the psychedelic era, into one of the island nation’s most experimental groups, all without losing their sense of humor or becoming the least bit pretentious.

Finally, there are the bands that almost nobody has ever heard of. One of the best of these, in my view, is the San Antonio-based psychedelic band The Children. Their album Rebirth (which begins with the remarkable “Daybreak”) was “reborn” – that is, re-released on CD – several years ago.

All this is my way of saying that the study of the music of the 1960’s is literally inexhaustible. For many major artists of that era, there exists more and more music to hear (often in the form of bonus tracks, or of entirely new CDs, as in the case of The Beatles). And there are artists who were, or have become, cult figures (The Pretty Things, The Monks), whose work from decades ago now exists on CD to explore and appreciate. A trip to the ‘Sixties is thus not just a stroll down Memory Lane; it’s a journey to a musical world that remains to a great degree uncharted to this day. And I like to think that The Greatest Decade captures that world. But you won’t know if I’m right until you sign up with bluebeat.com, or, if you’re already signed up, clicking here to listen in to my radio station.