Music of the decades

Every month "Through The Listening Glass" takes a look at the music that was generating interest either by release or chart position in the previous decades. This month is a look at October 1955, 1965, 1975, 1985 qnd 1995. Those songs receiving play tonight will be:

1955 Bill Haley & The Comets "Rock Around The Clock"
1965 Manfred Mann "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"
1975 Justin Hayward/John Lodge - Blue Guitar
1985 Echo & The Bunnymen "Bring On The Dancing Horses"
1995 Everything But The Girl "Missing"

Good Vibrations

In 1966 the Beach Boys "Good Vibrations" made its debut on the US singles chart. It was a song that Brian Wilson and Mike Love wrote and Brian spent six months working on. The tracks were recorded in seventeen different sessions in four Los Angeles studios, at a cost of over sixteen thousand dollars. The recording engineer would later say that the last take sounded exactly like the first, six months earlier. The record would reach number one on December 10th 1966, and be nominated for Grammy "Song Of The Year" but in one of the most tragic Grammy injustices of all time lost out to "Winchester Cathedral" by The New Vaudeville Band.

Through the Past

In 2003 The studio session for Elvis Presley's debut single "That's All Right" was voted the most pivotal moment in rock history by Mojo Magazine readers. Bob Dylan's switch from acoustic to electric guitars in 1965 came second.

In 1996 The film documentary The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus was released. It had been filmed in December 1968, but was held back for nearly 28 years, allegedly because the Stones felt that the Who had upstaged them.

On October 12th, 1978 Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Ex-Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, was found dead of abdominal knife wounds in their room at Chelsea Hotel in New York. Vicious, nearly unconscious due to the effects of several different drugs, was charged with her murder, jailed and then released. He would die of a heroin overdose before the case ever came to trial.

In 1970 FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson responds to Vice President Spiro Agnew's charge that rock music drives young people to drugs, by playing rock music during a speech, saying that Agnew would do well to listen to song lyrics to understand what was happening around the US.

In 1965 the Who record "My Generation", a song that expresses the anger and frustration of teenagers of the day. The tune will rise to number 2 in the UK, but stalled at number 74 in the US.

Weekend musical offerings

Tommy Swing at the Patio Cafe, Fig Garden 7-9 Friday no charge (www.tommyswing.net)
Straight Up Sinners at Club Fred Saturday (www.straightupsinners.com)
Lonesome Jem Bluestein & The Lunatics at Full Circle Brewery Friday
Brothers Of the Baladi at Full Circle Brewery Saturday (www.baladi.com)

1967 - yes, it was the "Summer of Love"

On October 3rd, folk legend Woody Guthrie passed away of Huntington’s chorea in a hospital where he had spent the last ten years of his life. Along with writing "This Land is Your Land", Guthrie was a major influence on Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and many others in the folk movement.

Members of The Grateful Dead are busted by California narcotics agents for possession of marijuana at the groups' 710 Ashbury Street House in San Francisco. After six hours, they are all released on bail.

The Beatles reject an offer of $1 million, huge for the time, from promoter Sid Bernstein, to make a second appearance at New York's Shea Stadium . He originally brought the group to Shea in August 1965.