The Summer of Love arrived in Aotearoa in the middle of winter. That’s where the Melochronometer set us down this week: 1967, with the red readout still glowing and the heater on. Over in San Francisco the season had been building since January, when somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand people turned up to a “Human Be-In” in Golden Gate Park. By the northern summer, as many as a hundred thousand young people had poured into a single neighbourhood, Haight-Ashbury, which had nowhere near enough room for them. It didn’t last. On the 6th of October the locals staged a mock funeral called “The Death of the Hippie” and carried a coffin through the streets. New Zealand held a funeral of its own within a day of it. A fortnight earlier we’d voted almost two to one to end six o’clock pub closing, and on Saturday the 7th of October the country’s pubs ran their last six o’clock swill, fifty years after it had started as a temporary wartime measure. On the Monday, the bars stayed open until ten.
The records from that year have a habit of turning out to be something other than what they started as. This ten-song trip has a riff a manager overheard in a dressing room on Boxing Day and wouldn’t let go of, and two recordings in different keys and at different speeds that somebody was told to turn into one. There’s a song its own composer tried to keep in the drawer, a waltz that got straightened out, a Motown hit played at the wrong speed on purpose, and a slow blues from five years earlier that came back as something nobody had a name for yet. There’s a singer who talked his own record boss into signing the band that would overtake him, and a Dylan song one of the Byrds didn’t want to record at all. There’s a record whose strings were added mainly so nobody would be embarrassed to put it out. And for twelve straight weeks in the middle of that northern summer, the top of the American chart was passed from one act in this hour to the next — the full story’s at the end of the show. Almost every record in this set began life as something else, which is about the most 1967 thing a record could do.
Tracklist
- Jimi Hendrix — Purple Haze — Are You Experienced
- The Doors — The Crystal Ship — The Doors
- Love — Alone Again Or — Forever Changes (2015 Remaster)
- The Beatles — Strawberry Fields Forever — Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane - Single
- Vanilla Fudge — a) STRA (Illusions Of My Childhood-Part One) b)You Keep Me Hanging On c) WBER (Illusions Of My Childhood-Part Two) — Vanilla Fudge
- Dionne Warwick — I Say a Little Prayer — The Windows of the World
- James Brown — Cold Sweat — Cold Sweat & Other Soul Classics: James Brown
- Bobbie Gentry — Ode To Billie Joe — Ode To Billie Joe
- The Association — Windy (Remastered Version) — Insight Out
- The Byrds — My Back Pages — Younger Than Yesterday
