What song held the number one spot for the longest during the counterculture age?
It wasn’t that long ago when the single reigned supreme as the counterculture arrived during the mid-1960s.
A generation of dropped-out hippy kids was eagerly snapping up the coveted 45 disc during the rock and roll revolution of their youth, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley’s ephemeral flame perfectly captured for a jukebox’s 7″ library.
The single’s primacy grew so great that Billboard consolidated its numerous disparate charts to create the enduring Hot 100, still the American standard to this day. As the 1950s passed, the British invasion’s US pop conquest carried over the breakneck pace for pumping out the next big hit, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks all steadily rolling out singles with dizzying speed and indebted to the American artists they cut their teeth with.
The LP format, long the preserve of classical music or film soundtracks, grew to be embraced by rock and pop as the perfect foil for the increasing creative ambitions and conceptual scope that the evolving countercultural trends were inspiring. Before long, The Beach Boys, The Mothers of Invention, The Who, and Bob Dylan all further realised the concept of the album as any artist’s ultimate expression, a work in itself where each track shares a coherency and forms a stylistic uniformity.
Suddenly, the Hot 100’s primacy gave way to the Billboard 200 album chart. Yet, singles were never completely killed off. While rock branched off into the LP age, later reaching its inevitable prog conclusion, pop still chased the commercial fortunes of a coveted number one, and many of the bands Rolling Stone was lauding at the time had their cake and ate it, managing a healthy presence on both charts.
The exact peripheries of the counterculture are woolly. London was pretty swinging by 1965, and Ken Kesey was coaching across the States in aid of his famed Acid Test parties long before psychedelia had become a household term.
If we’re to place arbitrary bookends, let’s plumb for 1967 when the summer of love was in full bloom and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had definitively ushered in the album medium’s gold standard, and close the era with 1972 when glam’s glitter presented the Woodstock cohort with its first musical challenge.
So, which song was number one the longest?
In the UK charts, the storm clouds that rumbled around the hippy dream’s slow death seemed pretty remote to the casual pop fan. Enjoying an impressive eight weeks at number one in 1969, The Archies’ ‘Sugar, Sugar’ stood as one of the decade’s biggest-selling singles, and one of the earliest examples of a virtual band. Written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, the fictitious band were all lifted from the Archie comic book series and remained the most successful cartoon group until Gorillaz’s arrival in the 2000s.
Stateside, Simon and Garfunkel’s folk gospel ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ held the Hot 100’s top spot for an impressive six weeks in 1970, but the kings of the singles chart during the countercultural age were The Beatles‘ ‘Hey Jude’.
Dropped in August 1968 as a stand-alone single, a few months ahead of their eponymous double LP, Paul McCartney’s seven-minute sing-along ode to John Lennon’s son Julian broke records at the time for its number one hold, and was destined as a McCartney live favourite for the rest of his solo career.
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