Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

Lena thinks it may have been Zuma Beach, which she and her family visited many times in her youth, although circumstances make it more likely to have been Santa Monica Beach. In any case, one evening in 1968, her father – and therefore my father-in-law – was indulging in his habit of taking photographs of the sunset. Since this was an age before selfies, he was approached by another gentleman on the same beach who asked whether he wouldn’t mind taking some pictures of him and his young child. Not only did my father-in-law oblige, but he also offered to get the film developed and send both film and photographs back to this gentleman. Names and addresses were exchanged, and Lena's father was as good as his word. Lena’s father thought no more about the matter at the time; although he watched The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on TV, he was not particularly concerned about “keeping up” with trends or people. But having told his work colleagues the gentleman’s name, they were...

The story begins with Bones Howe, a producer who, along with Jimmy Webb, worked on the first two albums by The Fifth Dimension – Up, Up And Away and The Magic Garden . This work was a happy affair, and while putting these records together Webb regularly confided in Howe about how he would like to expand the vocabulary and structure of the popular song. Spellbound, as with so many others, by Pet Sounds and Pepper , he was looking to do something similarly (if amiably) disorientating. Upon completion of The Magic Garden , Howe urged Webb to be as good as his word and compose the epic song that was in his head. Webb responded with a twenty-minute, multi-movement cantata – i.e. one whole side of an album – which he called “MacArthur Park.” Howe instantly thought of another of his production clients, The Association, who in late 1967 were looking towards the experimental and adventurous. Webb and Howe duly approached the group with this great notion. Figuring that The Ass...

 Clint Eastwood and Patrick McGoohan finally encountered each other in 1979's  Escape From Alcatraz , but in 1968 they were two curiously similar loners; the Man With No Name and Number Six both wander through alien lands made all the more unreal by their aching closeness to normality. But whereas  The Prisoner  climaxed with the steamroller irony of "All You Need Is Love" on its soundtrack, the Sergio Leone Westerns relied on stretching to its breakable limit the axis of Hollywood "morality." Can anyone say, watching the climax of  The Good, The Bad And The Ugly , as Eastwood, Wallach and van Cleef stand in a summer solstice triangle in the middle of a graveyard desert amidst an oasis of greenery, pistols all pointed at each other in the Mexican standoff pose, that any of these three memes of men are describable as "good"? What are the degrees of "bad" and "ugly" at play here - and "play" may be the key motif, for the...

The Box Tops were still riding on the success of their brief (as in lasting under two minutes) 1967 number one hit “The Letter,” a record whose success owed much to Vietnam but which sounds more like the last record ever to be made, a breathless, desperate communiqué from someone who knows he doesn’t have much time left – I am reminded of the scene in Threads when Jimmy tries to run across Sheffield towards Ruth’s house but the bomb drops before he can get there (the record’s closing sound-effects play like the world being vapourised). Mindful of one thing or another, their record company opted to use other musicians on the follow-ups, such that the teenage Alex Chilton is the only Box Top who appears on “Cry Like A Baby.” Not that that’s a loss; on the contrary, Dan Penn’s production and Wayne Jackson’s arrangement drive Chilton towards a particularly intense vocal performance (Penn co-wrote the song with Spooner Oldham). It does sound a little like Alex Sings Aretha , but...

The song was originally to be performed by Judy Garland, who was going to star in the film of Valley Of The Dolls but turned up drunk on the first day of shooting and was promptly replaced by Susan Hayward – Garland was not the only actress associated with the film who would not live to see the seventies. Then another of the film’s leading actresses, Barbara Parkins, suggested bringing in Dionne Warwick to sing it. It has been suggested that the lyric was changed, either by Warwick herself and/or the author of the source novel, Jacqueline Susann, to make it more relevant to the film’s plot. Although the song reflects a Bacharach and David influence, Burt Bacharach was only involved in producing what was a re-recording, since Warwick’s contractual obligations meant that the original soundtrack rendition could not be released as a single. The song was actually composed by the then husband-and-wife team of André and Dory Previn and the complexity of the music – the song involve...

Written by soul star Don Covay in his gospel-singing youth – although a version also appeared on record in 1967, credited to Don Covay and The Goodtimers – “Chain Of Fools” reaches right back into Biblical fundamentals, and Aretha rips its church of regret wide open to allow it to burn with her fury. Covay demoed the song for Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler, initially with a view to Otis Redding singing it, but Wexler wisely thought it much more suited to Aretha. Her record is a catalogue of sin-damning chastisement, as though it is not just an errant man whose ways she is decrying, but an entire culture. All the record’s elements coalesce into a fiery ball – Arif Mardin’s arrangement, Joe South’s astonishing, almost slackerly lead guitar which could have bounced off a Velvet Underground record, Roger Hawkins’ startling drumming, and even Spooner Oldham’s subtly accusatory electric piano in the midst of the mix, as well as the ominous backing vocals (Erma and Carolyn Franklin, and El...