Music Review: Various Artists - Summer of Love: The Hits of 1967 (2CD+DVD)

Time-Life has put together a good collection of 40 songs that were playing on radios and record players back in 1967. That year the hippies and their ideas broke on through from the counterculture into the mainstream. It started in January with San Francisco’s Human Be-In and peaked in the summer, June specifically, when The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and two weeks later The Monterey International Pop Music Festival, the first major rock show of lasting notoriety, took place. Life as everyone knew it would never be the same.

In the July 7, 1967, TIME magazine cover story entitled, “The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture,” they described the hippie creed for its readers: “Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun.” They weren’t too far off as people, particularly the young, were tried of society’s seemingly arbitrary restraints and rules, so they started to explore peace, love, Eastern religions, sexual liberation, and consciousness expansion through psychedelic drugs.

All the arts were affected by this paradigm shift, and the most noticeable changes took place in music. Summer of Love allows you to hear them as the smooth sounds of the early to mid ‘60s, folk, Motown and the British Invasion, give way to blues, psychedelia and feedback. The straightforward pop of The Association’s “Windy,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her,” and Harpers Bizarre’s pointless cover of Paul Simon’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” sound as if they had to be from earlier in the decade when placed alongside Cream’s “I Feel Free”, Big Brother & the Holding Company’s “Down on Me,” and The Yardbirds’ “Stroll On.”

Summer of Love includes famous musicians like Donavan with “Season of the Witch” and Van Morrison with “Brown Eyed Girl,” bands you may not know, but whose songs are familiar like The Youngbloods’ “Get Together” and Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and then there are bands like The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and Blues Magoos who are known by people you should never play Musical Trivial Pursuit against for money.

Article Author: El Bicho

This writer is a member of The Masked Movie Snobs, a collective that fights a never-ending battle against bad entertainment. Follow at twitter.com/ElBicho_MMS

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