Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

In America this is practically the Lovin’ Spoonful’s signature song, but in Britain it is little-known; it appeared on their 1965 album Do You Believe In Magic? and as the lead song on a four-track E.P. but was never a single. Nevertheless it is a charming little ditty adding to the gradual spaced-out-ness of the imminent summer of its year with careful electric piano, Zal Yanovsky’s scratchy guitar solo and an almost vaudevillian gait to both music and lyrics as John Sebastian muses over having to decide the better of two options, or pathways, to pursue. Since there was never any subtext to the Spoonful’s songs any metaphorical notion of politics or war is not really supported, and this is just about love and girls (we even get the same mock-stentorian adult commentary that we find in "Summertime Blues"); but the record is worthy and studiously goofy enough not to sound out of place on Beck’s Odelay . Or on any of the first four albums by the Monkees, who are about...

Another number two on both sides of the Atlantic , and almost certainly the only hit record to incorporate the word “bulltoad” in its lyric, John Sebastian found himself and his band touring with the Supremes in late 1964 and toyed with the idea of writing a “Where Did Our Love Go”/”Baby Love”-type song. This eventually became “Daydream,” possibly the first slacker record to appear here – albeit a Greenwich Village folk club/jug band notion of slackerdom - and certainly the earliest indication that something dreamy called psychedelia was about to come in and dominate, although Sebastian has always insisted that there is no drug subtext; the aim was just to have a top ten hit with a laidback, feel-good record. In “Daydream”’s case one is almost taken back to the thirties, with its palpable kinship to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Lazybones” and its lovely semi-random roundelays of whistling, harmonica and distant Bill Frisell-like guitar echoes. Later that same year, “Summer In The C...

There is something ironic about the fact that the Beach Boys’ only appearance in this list is with their most spontaneous and least thought-through record, not to mention that “Barbara Ann” also proved to be their big British breakthrough hit, much to the annoyance of some of the group (“I Get Around” had made the UK top ten in 1964, largely because the Beach Boys came to Britain to promote it, but their subsequent singles tended to stall in the mid-twenties under the presumption that they were “too American” for British ears). “Barbara Ann” is the song which closes the Beach Boys’ Party! album. Capitol demanded new product for Christmas ’65 but Brian refused to be rushed into new material; they had already released a Christmas album and a live album and it was too early for a greatest hits compilation, so the compromise of a “party” record – which in the mid-sixties was unprecedented for a pop group – was reached. Actually the party was in the studio and aided with sound...