"REVOLUTION IS THIS YEAR'S FLOWER POWER" - SO FRANK ZAPPA WOULD SUM UP 1968 WHEN, WITH VIETNAM THE COMMON DENOMINATOR, KAFTANS HAD BEEN MOTHBALLED AS THEIR FORMER WEARERS FOLLOWED THE CROWD TO GENUINELY VIOLENT ANTI-WAR RALLLIES AND STUDENT SIT-INS.
Because they never returned to stage performance, the Beatles were spared having to be "real" musicians in front of non-screaming audiences. In the later Sixties, bands (not groups) that carried any weight were demanding public attention for lengthy "concept" albums, rock operas and other questionable epics that couldn't be crammed into a 10-minute spot on a package tour. Though gadgetry and constant retakes in the retractable spheres of the studio disguised faults while impinging on grit, there surfaced a deeper respect for instrument proficiency and, on stage, greater scope for extrapolation. Instead of screeching hysteria, there was knotted-brow "appreciation" of guitar heroes like Jeff Beck, Jimmy page and Ten Years After's high velocity Alvin Lee. Most worshipped of all were Jimi Hendrix - and the overvalued Eric "God" Clapton whose Cream trio was known to improvise a three-verse blues at triple-forte for nigh on 20 po-faced minutes.
Bands with larger personnel tore pages from the book of Jimmy Page's Led Zeppelin who likewise went in for a high-energy blues-plagiarized brutality. These "heavy metal" outfits popped up all over the world with almost the same frequency as beat groups had in 1964.
Tangential to this was a rock 'n' roll revival in 1968 with reissues of 'Rock Around the Clock' and Buddy Holly's 'Rave On' sneaking into the UK Top 50 while the Beatles weathered accusations of regression with 'Lady Madonna', and the Move invested 'Fire Brigade' with an antique Duane Eddy twang. Even "nice little bands" of progressive hue closed their shows with classic rock medleys. Tiring of psychedelia too, the Rolling Stones had dug down to a bedrock of sorts with 'Jumping Jack Flash', their most enduring 45.
The Stones, Traffic and other influential groups had fallen once more under the spell of Bob Dylan whose John Wesley Harding album steered pop away from much of the clutter that had masked many essentially banal artistic perceptions, with a production criteria so shorn of gratuitous trimmings that it sounded au naturel. Music From Big Pink by the Band, his backing group since 1966, was, however, of more insidious impact in its blend of electric folk-lore matured over years of rough nights in hick dance halls. Dylan himself liked Creedence Clearwater Revival who, sharing his and the Band's unvarnished arrangements and new lyrical directness, were to supersede the Beatles as Top Group in the New Musical Express popularity poll of 1971.
On a more acoustic tack, Traffic popularized a trend for plundering traditional material with the Seventies' 'John Barleycorn'. Their arrangement of this English folk air was thought "purer" than that of more recognized folk-rockers Steeleye Span. The Beatles had brought out the Liverpool shanty 'Maggie May' the previous year, but it was 'John Barleycorn' that spurred the likes of the Nashville Teens' 'Widecombe Fair', Alan Price's 'Trimdon Grange Explosion' (written in1882) and hit versions of the hymn 'Amazing Grace' by both Judy Collins and - a UK Number 1 - the bagpipers of the Royal Scots Guards.
In the States, musicianly acts like Canned Heat and bottleneck guitar virtuoso Ry Cooder had long been turning to their national musical heritage too. The former's album collaboration with John Lee Hooker, Hooker 'N' Heat, was symptomatic of a tendency for black blues grandees in the evening of their lives to gear their music for a wider forum by reprising their classics with some of the renowned white rock players they had inspired.
Worthy if unadventurous, such albums were often nominated for Grammy awards but any spin-off singles were hardly expected to make the charts - for, though Easy Rider might have been its film, the hit song of 1969 was 'Sugar Sugar' by the Archies. The next logical step after the Monkees, these were a cartoon group that idealized the short-haired sir-and-ma'am characteristics of small-town America. Almost as insubstantial were Ohio Express and other faceless acts manufactured as US chart fodder within the walls of Kasenetz-Katz, the New York "bubble gum" organization that knocked out material for the charts with the same lack of artistic pretension as the jobbing songwriters who had once done the same in the Brill Building.
