Nominate album: John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - Blues Breakers
featuring the greatest guitar playing I’ve ever heard (Eric Clapton)
1 Like
Nominate song: Nina Simone - Lilac Wine
4 Likes
Nominate album: The Byrds - Fifth Dimension
I was debating this or Simon & Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme so I’m going for this now that Sound of Silence has been nominated. Those first 6 Byrds albums are stellar, hard to pick a favorite and I guess I don’t have to in this thread.
3 Likes
An excellent album and song. I don’t know why I’ve favored Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme of the two '66 albums, but it’s definitely not something I’ll argue about. Maybe it’s simply overfamiliarity with the title track and I Am a Rock, but they’re both great tracks.
1 Like
NOMINATE SONG: The Walker Brothers - The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore
5 Likes
Speaking of the Walker Brothers:
1966 was the year Jacques Brel released an album called Ces gens-là, featuring this song…
…which was covered (in English) by Scott Walker the following year.
3 Likes
Nominate album: Norma Tanega - Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog
You might know the opening track You’re Dead from the theme music to What We Do In The Shadows, or possibly the title track which was a minor hit in 1966. It’s well worth sticking around for the rest of the album in my opinion. Folk-pop on the face of it, but lots of interesting things going on too, a bluesy influence (including Hey Girl, a cover of In the Pines) and odd time signatures and phrasings.
3 Likes
1966 saw the first of many self-titled albums by Roberto Carlos (not that one).
Not heard all of them yet, but the 1966 one is pretty nice.
Part of the problem with sifting through the best of a mid-60s year’s output is that there’s so much music in specific genres that have since been rediscovered and/or amplified that it’s not readily associated it with any one particular year. By which I mean things like northern soul…
…yeh-yeh…
…freakbeat…
…or Jamaican ska.
2 Likes
Nominate song: The Rolling Stones - Paint It, Black
While I wasn’t aware of this at the time (as I wasn’t born yet but also didn’t start truly listening to the stones until this century), this track wasn’t on the original UK release of 1966’s Aftermath. It was released as a single shortly after the album, and replaced Mother’s Little Helper as the first song on versions released in the Americas the same year. One of their best.
5 Likes
Some songs from 1966 albums I like that (I think) haven’t already been mentioned.
The Kinks - Face to Face
The Seeds - s/t
The Remains - s/t
The Rolling Stones - Aftermath
The Troggs - From Nowhere
Jacques Dutronc - Et moi, et moi, et moi
The Who - A Quick One
3 Likes
The wonderful Nancy Sinatra’s first three studio albums all came out in 1966. They really worked their pop stars hard and churned em out in the 60s.
Her signature tune from the debut Boots, written by her key collaborator Lee Hazlewood.
The definitive version of the Sonny Bono-penned Bang Bang from the second album, How Does That Grab You?
And this one from the third album Nancy in London, a duet with Lee Hazlewood which would also be included on 1968’s excellent Nancy & Lee album.
4 Likes
Also a big year for the Holland-Dozier-Holland writing and production partnership at Motown.
5 Likes
1966 gave us Walk Away Renée
Although the superior Four Tops version didn’t arrive until early ‘68
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The superior Billy Bragg version didn’t arrive until 1986
