(1334) Afternoon all. Running this as a polit-post, not as a separate feature.

Things significantly changed between 1963 and 1964

… especially in music. Question is … what exactly? We could start here:

The song itself is not my style, a bit too girlie for mine but still better than the next year and the two after that … innocence of the west gone forever.

Bear something else in mind … which Penseivat wrote on Chubby Checker:

“Sadly, his career seemed to revolve around that atrocious activity called The Twist, and it didn’t last, as did (not) those who failed to adapt to music tastes…”

My thing about dancing was always for the male and female to be physically joined for most of a dance … shirley that was the whole point of it … contact with the girl … dancefests today at least concentrate on that aspect, though the “binary” is wonky and garish today … awful.

No, what had started around 1960 and Chubby Checker was largely responsible for it was male and female separating, showing off at each other their own individual moves … that was me gone for a start. 1963 was almost the last hurrah for real men, real ladies. You call The Stones men? Jagger prancing and mincing? The Beatles with their women’s hairdos? I warr but a lad in 1963, it was way before “my time”, which was 1968.

Plus the drugs insinuated themselves back in, post-Leary … not just grass but the hard stuff especially. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Controversial statement from me now, not in 1964 of course as a kid … but the sweeping away of innocence in The British Invasion was no advance for the west. Older style “fun” music, danceable, no longer required by “the kids”?

The angry, aggressive “hope I die before I get old” (The Who) … you call that an advance? What forces were behind such savage changes? Go to Laurel Canyon to find out.

……

Fast fwd five or six years … in fact to January 68. One year later, the long (best) album version of Crimson and Clover came out. 👇🏻 The Sep before Jan 68, I’d had my first close encounter of the female kind, now it was reprised … in fact she and I were only discussing it a couple of days ago (2025).

So that song, though it did not emerge for another year, was soooo appropriate for the situation. What I might call the end of the time of romances, courtships … thereafter, everything was only about sex as it is today … can you see Paul and Paula (the song) selling today?

……

And lastly, looking at the song itself … yes, one more time but not the uninterrupted version … it’s a reaction video. Now, I’m going to be waycist here … I’ve heard all sorts … black, white, male female … it’s the blacks who get best what the band is trying to do … and the younger the reacters, the better … these two seem late millennial to me.

Just remembering myself in Jan 69, hypothetically listening as a reacter: “Er not bad, we like the song, a bit complicated, a bit overthought.”

These two though start analysing the instruments, the mixing … mixing in 1968/9? Always fascinating to me to hear what the young have to say about what we did and heard.