One of my pet musicological theories is that the years 1967-74 were the most creative 7-year period in the history of musical humanity.<\/p>\n
Why those years? The social and technological revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, the women’s movement, the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements, the sudden unifying singularity of television and mass (and alternative) media across national boundaries — made possible new convergences across a wide range of cultural\u00a0spheres, including among musicians coming out of the rock, folk, jazz, blues, classical, and avant-garde traditions, not to mention\u00a0interlocutors from India, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Albums like Sgt. Pepper’s<\/em>\u00a0and festivals like Isle of Wight became crossing points for new, experimental conduits\u00a0of musical creativity. And while Woodstock (or Altamont), the deaths of MLK and Robert Kennedy, and the visible decline of the counterculture at the end of the 1960s are often taken as a denouement\u00a0rather than a new beginning, with the early to mid 1970s indicating a certain washing out of the radical creativity of preceding years, in music I believe that creativity became funneled into more strictly musical forms.\u00a0Culturally or politically this might seem, in retrospect, as a kind of backpedaling, and there is no doubt that 1968 was a political high point that, for those involved in it, cast its shadow on years to come. But I think it’s precisely that fecund shadow that expressed itself musically over the years that followed.<\/p>\n In the worlds of rock and pop, for instance, one could start with the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament\/Funkadelic, the prog and space and glam rockers at their best (a necessary qualification), sundry movements around the world (British folk-rock, Brazilian Tropicalia, German “Krautrock,” Jamaican reggae and dub, Afro-rock’s various styles), and the nascent elements that were to become punk, the musically more interesting post-punk of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the burgeoning dance musics of the time. Some of these incorporated\u00a0influences from jazz, African music, Indian and other Asian musics, and some or many of these were blended more directly into the experiments of psychedelic bands, Miles Davis, the AACM scene in Chicago, and others.<\/p>\n Here are just a handful of\u00a0cases in point…<\/p>\n Not long after\u00a0Bob Dylan had retreated with members of (the not yet named) The Band to stew up the\u00a0strange “invisible republic” of The Basement Tapes<\/em>, which Greil Marcus famously interpreted as “The Old, Weird America<\/a>,” Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) was brewing up\u00a0the\u00a0more surreal mix of Delta\u00a0blues and swamp rock, avant-garde and free jazz, backwoods hollerin’ and socially and ecologically inflected\u00a0Americana that constituted Trout Mask Replica\u00a0<\/i>(1969) and\u00a0Lick My Decals Off, Baby<\/em> (1970).<\/p>\n Here’s his Magic Band as captured on German TV in 1972:<\/p>\n