The Beatles along with Bob Dylan were the most influential forces in music during the 1960s. And while there was already something fresh and invigorating about The Beatles’ early recordings, their creativity leaped during the making of their milestone album, Rubber Soul (1965).
New York musician-writer John Kruth (a Milwaukee resident from the late ’80s through the mid ’90s) recounts the heady excitement of the era in This Bird Has Flown: The Enduring Beauty of Rubber Soul Fifty Years On (Backbeat Books). Kruth, who previously authored biographies of Roland Kirk and Roy Orbison, wrote This Bird Has Flown in a jocular, highly personal style; an adolescent when The Beatles materialized on Ed Sullivan, he has vivid memories of a time when rock music was expected to startle the audience with newness. In This Bird, Kruth examines each of the album’s tracks and The Beatles in light of their influences—musical, literary and cultural—as well as those whom they influenced, which was practically everyone.
Everybody’s Heard About the Bird: The True Story of 1960s Rock ’n’ Roll in Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press), by Rick Shefchik
Like most states, Minnesota had a thriving rock ’n’ roll scene by the end of the 1950s as teenagers rushed to embrace the new beat. The title of Everybody’s Heard About the Bird refers to The Trashmen’s garage hit “Surfin’ Bird” (1963), which briefly elevated the band to national popularity. But as veteran St. Paul journalist Rick Shefchik shows, Minnesota was home to other groups whose music rippled across Top-40 radio, especially The Castaways (“Liar, Liar”). Shefchik draws a detailed mural of the Minnesota music scene, including the role of newspapers, radio stations, recording studios and record shops.
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The Great British Recording Studios (Hal Leonard Books), by Howard Massey
With its association with The Beatles, Abbey Road became Britain’s most famous recording studio. However, it wasn’t the only facility in the U.K. that produced great rock recordings in the 1960s and ’70s. Howard Massey goes into loving technical detail, describing the equipment and including floor plans and vintage photos of Abbey Road, Trident, AIR and dozens of other studios familiar to music fans who read the jacket notes on their favorite albums. In the analog age, each studio had a unique sound based on the acoustics of the room and the often custom-built recording gear.
Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales that Inspired “Stagolee,” “John Henry,” and Other Traditional American Folk Songs (Cornell University Press), by Richard Polenberg
The title tells all: Cornell history professor Richard Polenberg looks into the backstories behind America’s story ballads—the songs based on true events that fill the nation’s folklore. In some cases, as in The Animals’ cover of “House of the Rising Sun,” the songs made their way into pop culture. Many of Polenberg’s choices are murder ballads. Others reported on disasters ranging from the Titanic’s encounter with an iceberg to the boll weevils that ruined the cotton crop (and drove many African Americans northward in search of work).
