Golden Oldies

To help set the mood for the era we’re writing about, the late 1960s, we’ve been listening to a bunch of music from that time. Or rather, Jen’s been listening to most of it, and Kent has been indulging her when she comes across something particularly cool or particularly weird that she just needs to share.

The music is a mix of incredibly familiar songs and total headscratchers. For every Beatles classic, there’s a Pigmeat Markham or a Peppermint Trolley Co. For every Beach Boys song we know, there are two we were completely unaware of (that, incidentally, sound nothing like the Beach Boys).

Kent has observed that once enough time passes, a decade becomes its own musical genre, and songs that never would have been played on the same station all get lumped together because they’re of a similar vintage. This experiment is like that on steroids. We’ve been listening to Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra, Englebert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and a bunch of artists we’d never heard of. Did you know that Ray Charles had a cover of Eleanor Rigby? Or that The Tijuana Brass had a version of My Favorite Things? We didn’t! But we do now.

A writing partner will ride shotgun in your musical time machine.