‘All You Need is Love’: The five best songs released during the 1967 Summer of Love
It’s the summer of 1967, and love is in the air. It’s a love for your friends, for your family, for the air that you’re breathing and for all of the people standing around you in a field at the Monterey Pop Festival.
It’s a love for Otis Redding, performing an unbelievably raw, evocative and powerful rendition of ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)’, and it’s a love for all of the other incredible music that has been performed on that stage over the last few hours and California days. In fact, there’s been almost too much to keep up with, just like there have been too many amazing new releases through the year to stay on top of. You need time to slow down a little bit so you can process all the new songs and albums from all your favourite artists that keep on coming out.
Just scratching the 1967 surface, there were tracks like ‘Light My Fire’ by The Doors, ‘I’m a Believer’ by The Monkees, ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles, ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harum and ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ from Van Morrison, ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ by Frankie Valli, ‘Cold Sweat’ by James Brown, ‘Funky Broadway’ by Wilson Pickett and ‘I Was Made To Love Her’ by Stevie Wonder; while Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Velvet Underground, all released their debut albums. That’s not even to mention that The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And those don’t even form half of the great releases from the year.
There must have been something in the water in 1967 that was leading all of our all-time greats to put together so many of their all-time greatest songs in a single calendar year (well, maybe not the water actually—it was probably the explosion in LSD and marijuana use that blew open everybody’s minds).
Though the Summer of Love is synonymous with all the incredible music that came to us that year, it’s worth remembering that the term actually had wider social implications, as well. The year was about a coming together of different subcultures and groups, a seemingly incongruous mix of people from all walks of life, who seemed separated along lines of ideology at first glance but who soon came to realise that they had plenty of the same goals in common, and plenty of the same wishes for the better world that they believed was possible.
Must have been nice, right?
Just like plenty of disparate genres were being appreciated by wider and wider audiences, from rock, folk and psychedelia to world music, soul music, rhythm and blues and more, so too the flower children and the hippies, the beatniks, anarchists, college students across America and other countercultural cohorts put their differences aside when they realised that the driving factor behind all of the things they were pushing back against (the Vietnam War, government overreach, commercialism, consumerism and capitalism, the rising tide of individualism and ‘The American Way’) was love.
Love for their communities, for the better world they envisioned, for their fellow man, for the present and especially, love for the future.
As well as coming together at the Monterey Pop Festival that summer, the various groups had already come together for the Human Be-In events held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and in Denver’s City Park, while other gatherings occurred in Haight-Ashbury Park (also in San Francisco, where you must be sure to wear flowers in your hair), New York’s Tompkins Square Park and elsewhere across the country.
Now looking back, we have had more time to catch up and take stock of the excellent releases that came from the summer of 1967. There probably hasn’t been a single year since which saw such an incredible string of releases, though practically all of the artists synonymous with the Summer of Love continued to create great music over at least the next few years, and some of them, luckily, for even longer.
Five best songs from the Summer of Love of 1967:
‘Waterloo Sunset’ – The Kinks
Released in May, as everybody was preparing to spring into summer, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is just about as perfect a love story turned rock-and-roll song as you could ever hope to hear.
Opening with that descending run of notes which is the musical equivalent of a shiver running down your spine, it leads straight into the timeless and simply iconic riff from Dave Davies and his Guild Starfire electric guitar, before his big brother Ray sweeps in with those sumptuous vocals and images. This one is as beautiful, romantic and natural as a sunset, and for as long as you listen to ‘Waterloo Sunset’, you will surely be in paradise.
Incidentally, one of my music teachers at school, Julie Stanning (a wonderful woman and teacher), was married to her childhood sweetheart, Terry. With this song as their soundtrack, Terry would often meet Julie at Waterloo station, with millions of people swarming around them like flies. Despite the millions, though, when they got together, there were only two who mattered.
‘Soul Man’ – Sam & Dave
There was a lot of great music coming out in 1967, and so much of it had a connection with Memphis. Whether it was being recorded at the legendary Stax Studios or down the road in Muscle Shoals, AL, with a bunch of Memphis-born side-men playing on the songs, the American South was a hotbed for the greasiest, gutsiest and simply put, greatest soul music ever recorded.
Actually, for some of the greatest music ever recorded, full stop. England’s northern white dancers can try and claim some of it as Northern Soul, but actually, this is Black music from the Deep South, pure and simple.
Two of the greatest soul singers and performers of their time and any other, were Sam & Dave, and they proved it with 1967’s ‘Soul Man’. Singing raucously, braggingly and swaggeringly over a funky groove laid down by the Stax house band, Booker T Jones on piano, Isaac Hayes on organ, Steve Cropper electrifying on guitar, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn on bass and human metronome Al Jackson Jr on drums, with Wayne Jackson, Charles ‘Packy’ Axton and Don Nix playing those iconic brass hooks, it doesn’t really get much better than this.
‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher’ – Jackie Wilson
If ‘Waterloo Sunset’ sounds like paradise, then this song from Jackie Wilson sounds like heaven. No wonder Van Morrison went on to write the song about this soul singer that he did.
The Summer of Love was about lifting, pushing and demanding that everybody get higher. Plenty of people took that a little too literally, while others were looking to push on to higher ground culturally, to create a better society and world for everybody to live in.
However, anyone who was turned on and tuned in to Jackie Wilson knew that this love is not about a narcotic high or a political one, but about the pure, spiritual elation and joy that people experience by giving each other the gift of true, beautiful love.
‘All You Need is Love’ – The Beatles
OK, fine, there were probably better Beatles songs released in 1967, but which of them better or more perfectly encapsulated the mood, the essence, the feeling and the ethos of the Summer of Love than this one?
But more than that, these lyrics shouldn’t just be emblematic of the period, but should be carried in each of us, every single summer and all year long, as a collective credo. Lines like “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done”, or “There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made”, or “Nothing you can save that can’t be saved”, or even “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be”, prove that nothing is impossible, if you’re both driven and surrounded by love.
There is so much more complex beauty and truth in the simplicity of these sentiments than there is in the most mind-bending and convoluted pseudo-intellectualism of other far-out and psychedelic songs from that summer. “All you need is love”, yeah, that sounds about right.
‘Respect’ – Aretha Franklin
It wouldn’t have mattered what year Aretha Franklin’s version of ‘Respect’ came out; it would have been the best song, the best vocal performance, the best playing and the most viscerally moving track in body and soul, any calendar year.
You might think that you know the almighty power of this performance from having heard it a million times already, but just listen again and let it wash over you like it was the first time. Can you imagine anything more brilliant than hearing Aretha Franklin singing and playing with as much force as this, with the likes of Spooner Oldham, Chips Moman, Jimmy Johnson, Tommy Cogbill, Roger Hawkins, King Curtis, Charles Chalmers, Willie Bridges, Melvin Lastie and Carolyn and Erma Franklin playing and singing out of their skins behind her? I certainly can’t.
This is one of those recordings that makes you glad that you were ever born, that makes you wonder and marvel at the miracle of human creativity and of the phenomenal luck we have that not only did all those people come together to sing and play this song so well together, but that Jerry Wexler was there to record it, Atlantic Records were around to release and distribute it and that we get to be alive to hear it any time we want.
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