My Year In Mix: 1962
40 songs chosen for the #MyYearInMix challenge
Introduction
Welcome to the My Year in Mix 1962 challenge mix! My process in this challenge was to carve out as much space as possible around the Acclaimed Music singles of 1962, the majority of which are ear-worn.1 I didn't think I knew 1962 that well, but in fact my childhood memories of all of these songs are incredibly powerful. My parents listened to “golden oldies” format—dad was Boomer/Silent Generation cusper, mom was a hippie—so neither liked the emerging classic rock tilt of non-golden formats, and I rarely heard music on the car radio past 1964.
This mix will comprise music that feels familiar to me but that I do not have strong childhood associations with, or don’t otherwise carry any particular music-critical baggage about. Much of it is brand new to me. To get a sense of what you mostly will not find from 1962, check out that Acclaimed List. Some of those songs are as etched into my soul as any I can imagine, but also aren’t favorites—“Do You Love Me,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Love Me Do,” “Twistin’ the Night Away.”
My sense after some impressionistic research is that 1962 is a transitional year for global zeitgeists, like 1998 and 2008. From an Anglo/American-centric POV, that’s on the verge of Beatles, Britney, and Taylor, respectively. The latter two shifts are in my wheelhouse, but my sense of 1962 was very much received. The biggest initial surprise was going in expecting the Beatles on the horizon, but coming away thinking that, for the most part, the world was not screaming out for a Beatles to consolidate the landscape—and it seems particularly unlikely that any British pop act of 1962 was in a position to do it. Seems broadly similar to Britney in ‘99: Swedes from outer space.2
The second-biggest surprise, similar to my 1998 survey, is my initial impression that a lot of huge international movements of the early-to-mid-60s feel somewhat tentative, even though they are coming out of the gate strong, especially French yé-yé and Jamaican ska/reggae. Meanwhile, popular sounds hit when they’re ascending (surf, folk-rock) and descending (calypso, doo wop); American songwriting team usual suspects are at full steam even with flops; a broad swathe of genres sound pretty good, except for the unconscionable number of twist/dance craze cash-ins.3
I’m now pretty well convinced that “Love Me Do” was a true counterfactual pivot point, like what I argued about “Teardrops on My Guitar” in my Taylor Swift series. There is next to nothing about 1962 music that obviously points toward what’s about to happen. With hindsight you can diagnose sclerosis: disparate, desperate fads; instrumental party rock wallpaper and water-treading; the declining power of pop celebrity accruing to crooners at the expense of the best working artists, most in soul music. But that just means more potential paths forward; this is just the world we got.
This mix will instead be a glimpse of worlds we didn’t get: Bob Dylan as the wildest session harmonica-player you've never heard of; some other country’s guerrillas studying and then conquering the American pop machine; jazz learning to stop worrying and court the teenyboppers; mountains moving to make Bunker Hill an idol.
Harry Belafonte: Midnight Special
The first(ish) Bob Dylan recording (actual 1st appears later). An otherworldly honk ‘n’ wail, band trying to vicariously bestubble the impossibly clean-shaven force at the center, Clark Kent & the freaks.
Post-scripts:
Daniel Radosh: On his 2nd professional recording Bob insulted Harry Belafonte by throwing out his harmonica after the session bc the cheap ones he could afford were only usable once the way he played. Harry thought Bob was making a statement. Actually Bob was too a big fan but had been too nervous to say anything. Harry wanted Sonny Terry so he was skeptical when Bob showed up, but quickly won over. They only learned of their mutual admiration years later.
DagB shared a playlist of the entire recording session. A fascinating document: Dylan doesn’t fully warm up until Track 17. From the booth: “Bob, why don’t you start with something exciting?”
Richie Barrett: Some Other Guy
The tooth-whistle lisp sold me before I knew this was the famed “Beatles Cavern Club song” cover. A Leiber/Stoller session quickie with primitive electric piano that sounds like the future…and really was!
Post-scripts:
Dubdobdee: reading about him, i like that he's basically a mid-tier impresario-producer who stepped in front of a lieber&stoller mike this one time -- and punched a small but important hole in time. also the piano at the start is somehow recorded to sound like a 70s synthesiser
Me: I’ve read like three biographies of the Beatles and don’t remember this song ever even being mentioned (easily could have missed it or forgotten) but it very much sounds like it basically created the Beatles
Frank Kogan: Actually, it was the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy's Clown” that invented the Beatles (or at least invented John Lennon), but it was 1960.
Bunker Hill: Hide & Go Seek Pt. 1
Moonlighting gospel singer gets his kicks incognito as BUNKER HILL, the anti-James Brown: the band coughs up 5 bucks every time they get the note right. Not just noise (bang! clang! baaa!), a real RUCKUS.
Post-scripts:
Me: This song is featured in the original Hairspray, but I don't remember it. The first Bunker Hill experience I remember was Helene Hoffman’s all-time Golden Beat bulldozer over at People’s Pop, “The Girl Can't Dance”
Helene Hoffman: I think this was his only other single under this name/style! I didn't know/remember it being in Hairspray or the Joan Jett cover until after I sought more info on him after hearing "The Girl Can't Dance"
Me: He has a handful songs to this alias from what I saw, including a pretty wild Little Red Riding Hood song. Definitely thinking a lot about a counter-factual where Bunker Hill goes to number 1 instead of 30-something and then maybe isn't as bothered about getting kicked out of his gospel group, which from what I read is what led him to quit pop music.
Me: Better info here. Seems like he didn’t get kicked out of the gospel group after all, was just a case of having a regional hit and a follow-up flop (the Riding Hood track). Every song he released was recorded during the same Link Wray sessions!
The Ideals: The Gorilla
Complaining you’re too late for the dance craze (“it should have been out before The Monkey!”) is one way to stand out; sounding fresh is a tougher route. These Chicago strivers managed both in their sole hit.
Pérez Prado: Son of a Gun
Late-period work from Cuban bandleader and King of Mambo (of “Mambo #5” fame): “exotica” that’s a few degrees hotter than the genre he helped inspire in the ‘50s by combining mambo, jazz, and cinematic sprawl.
The Falcons: I Found a Love
[Acclaimed Music #45]
Cries of joy that hit like anguish: he’s calling out to her, sure, and anyone else in a few blocks’ radius. The Drifters like the roof for quiet; Wilson Pickett likes how the sound carries.
Trini Lopez: Sinner Not a Saint
Lopez’s one-off single at the tail-end of a bum King Records contract. Glad he got this squeaky-clean little death threat of a song out before going on to bigger things in ‘63 on Reprise.
Post-scripts:
Koganbot: “Sinner Not A Saint” written by Shel Talmy, producer of “My Generation,” “Waterloo Sunset,” etc.
The Donays: Devil in His Heart
A record that did more for the Beatles than the Beatles could do for it. The bittersweet lead vocal, lovely downward-drifting guitar, and Greek chorus are better known as, er, canon fodder for the lads.
Ann-Margaret: Slowly
Amazing in 2024 that guessing the color of someone’s panties could have as much sexual frisson as guessing the color of their wallet, while I still blush when Ann-Margaret breathes. We used to have proper smut!
Angelica Maria: Edi Edi [Eddy, Eddy]
A big, bubbly bubblegum hit from Mexico by an American-born ’50s teen idol working with songwriter Armando Manzanero. Sounds like it could launch a thousand beach party flicks.
Monica Zetterlund: I New York [In New York]
Did you know that you can sing over all these new jazz hits? Swedish singer Zetterlund takes on “Take Five” here, but found more acclaim in ’64 for her version of “Waltz for Debby.” Screw prestige, this slaps!
Post-scripts:
Me: Here’s a cool live performance of “Waltz for Debby” with Bill Evans
Imca Marina: Taboe [Taboo]
Dutch singer had her first national hit a year later than this, her first international hit a full decade later, and is now, according to Wiki, an “extraordinary registrar.” But I like this early pop music hall effort.
Françoise Hardy: Les temps de l’amour [The Time of Love]
[Acclaimed #66]
One of the huge debuts of the year, a supernova for French pop, and I still get to include it despite its acclaimed (and Acclaimed) status because I never heard it until I was an adult.
Sylvie Vartan: L’amour c’est aimer la vie [Love Is Loving Life]
What’s the most apt reductive analogue to ‘60s French pop for yéyé dichotomies: light v. dark, sweet v. bitter, insouciance v. steely resolve? Sylvie Vartan as Tigra and Françoise Hardy as Bunny?
Mina: Improvvisamente [Suddenly]
The first woman rock ‘n’ roller (derisively called “screamers”) televised in Italy. But she can also do a moody orchestral soundtrack ballad that scares my kid because “it’s slow and pretty, but something’s not right.”
Miriam Makeba: Carnival (A Day in the Life of a Fool)
Makeba’s take on a theme from Jobim/Bonfá-soundtracked ‘59 film Black Orpheus, a sneaky, melancholy standard simultaneously more hypnotic and surefooted in her interpretation.
Riz Ortolani & Nino Oliviero: More (Modelle in blu), a/k/a “Theme from Mondo Cane”
Gonzo exploitation documentary produces an easy listening masterpiece — there it is, soundtracking naked models slathering on Yves Klein blue to create an additional masterpiece.
Post-scripts
Ike Quebec: Liebestraum
Jazz takes on “Liebesträum” are the only forms of artistic Lisztomania I recognize. This no-brainer of a bossa manages to sound relatively cool without totally burying the corny conceit.
Post-scripts:
Alternative “Liebesträm” contenders from Chet Atkins & Jerry Reed, Spike Jones, and Tommy Dorsey.
Mose Allison: It Didn’t Turn Out That Way
1962 was the biggest year of Allison’s career; he released his two best albums and many of his best songs. I picked an underrated one that worked well in sequence; I know them all by heart.
Postscripts:
[Wrote a thread about this one.] Mose Allison was the go-to cassette in my dad’s car growing up — the yellow greatest hits album with majority 1962 tracks. Included a more orchestrated “If You’re Goin’ to the City” that is inexplicably replaced on streaming with its (also good but very different) 1968 remake.
My dad said that for years he thought Mose Allison was Black and was surprised to get the cassette and see “an English race car driver” on the cover. His style is a fascinating midpoint between jazz and pop.
I also idolized him as a pianist because his playing seemed refreshingly attainable. He wasn’t a virtuoso by any stretch but his solos always sounded good in context — more the mindset of a rock guitar solo than a jazz piano solo.
His sense of humor is what I’ll clumsily call sardonic secularist skepticism — similar in spirit to “Calvin and Hobbes” and Bob Newhart and other comedy touchstones of my childhood (my dad’s and his family’s sense of humor).
I saw him perform live once about 20 years ago — a small jazz club, every song sounded exactly like how I remembered it. Allison wasn’t very musically adventurous — no radical rearrangements, almost like watching a band play its greatest hits. But it sounded great.
The Who immortalized “Young Man Blues” but they miss the perma-smirk in Allison’s work. He wasn’t rock but wasn’t quite jazz — I always thought he sounded like a middle ground between rebellion and conservatism that I associate with how I grew up. Poke at everything but don’t take it too seriously.
It’s not a stretch to think of him as a “Weird Al” figure, more amusing than funny, a consistent slow-burn career, never aiming too high. I generally don’t celebrate approaches like this, but when it works there’s something comforting about it.
Maybe the closer analogue is Tom Lehrer. Like with Lehrer, as far as I’m aware there are zero truly bad Mose Allison songs, though some are derivative of older work or ho-hum.
Jimmy McGriff: I’ve Got a Woman
[Acclaimed Music honorable mention]
McGriff developed his hard blues perpetual jam style in the 5 years before recording this debut cover. Roared right out of the gate and maintained the same level for decades as the music mutated around him.
Post-script:
Me: The cover itself is a canny and apt one—Ray Charles is someone I think of immediately as a comparison point, but Charles wasn’t nearly as monomaniacal in his personal playing style as McGriff.
Would love to read more about the five years in which McGriff, who played piano from childhood but played bass in early bands, developed his style, don’t know if there are any major biographies of him, though.Frank Kogan: Only knew the name "Jimmy McGriff" and the vague idea he was R&B or jazz - which he is, one of those "or"s that's an "and." But this feels major in an unassuming slop-bucket sort of way, and he's definitely worth a further search (and worth someone's research).
Me: I listened to him when I played organ for "color" in a jam band in high school and college -- the arrangements/bands change through the funk era but his playing style stays pretty consistent. Think the band here has a ramshackle force to it that matches his playing rather than just complementing it.
Jimmy Cliff: Since Lately
I was surprised by how mild the ska and early reggae I sampled felt amidst the exhilaration of Jamaican independence in ‘62. Early Cliff singles are charming, lovely even, but the zeitgeist feels distant still.
Derrick Morgan & The Beverley’s All-Stars: Forward March
My choice of a direct response to Jamaican independence (the other option was Lord Creator’s “Independent Jamaica.”) Went with my imperfect ears over my surely more imperfect footnotes.
Lord Kitchener: Love in the Cemetery
Calypso had cooled as a global trend (Lord Kitchener returned to Trinidad after 15 years living and recording in London the same year this came out), but it’s basically impossible to screw up a cemetery song in 1962.
Claudine Clark: Walkin’ Through a Cemetery
Hey Bobby “Boris” Pickett, show don’t tell! Clark is the narrator AND the monster (dolphin-goblin?), and she still makes you wanna dance with the creepy crew instead of watching from the sidelines.
Wanda Jackson: Whirlpool
Not as queasy as the previous year’s “Funnel of Love,” but I like how the slinkiness of the sequel suggests that maybe now she’s the funnel.
Gene Pitney: Mecca
Frank Kogan rec 1/2, a Pitney Canadian B-side with wider release in ‘63. Harmonic minor backdrop helps conjure a melody that suggests an opposite side of the street that might as well be a world away.
The Orlons: The Conservative
Frank Kogan rec 2/2. Not sure how you’d use “conservative” pre-Goldwater ‘64, but doubt she’s looking for a John Bircher. Sounds tongue-in-cheek anyway: you can hear the wooden ruler between the dancers.
Oscar Brown, Jr.: Mr. Kicks
Didn’t know Brown before picking this vocal jazz track to kick off a run of demonic character sketches. Song’s good, career’s incredible: writing “The Snake” & discovering the Jackson 5 are the tip of the iceberg.
Post-scripts:
This version is a Quincy Jones arrangement, right on the cusp of Jones’s pop crossover. An earlier version was recorded in 1960 but as far as I can tell only release on a deluxe edition of his debut with bonus track outtakes in 1996.
Here is a live performance from 1961 with some context from a YouTube commenter:
This great song was part of an ill-fated 1961 musical called Kicks & Co., which starred Burgess Meredith as Mr. Kicks, an emissary of Satan sent by him to frustrate racial desegregation efforts on an African-American college campus. The music was by Oscar Brown Jr. himself, who does a fabulous job getting into the spirit of it here. Thanks for posting this. Rest in peace, Oscar.
The Kicks & Co. production was directed by Lorraine Hansberry and features this incredible poster:
Brown also wrote the only musical that Muhammad Ali(!) ever starred in, Buck White—another short-lived run. Here’s a clip of Buck White on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Dr. Horse: Jack, That Cat Was Clean
R&B singer Al Pittman’s spoken word swing ode to ostentatious finery calculates the value of the titular clean cat’s threads to the penny. Appropriately included in at least one compilation as an ancestor of rap.
Henry Lumpkin: Mojo Hannah
A scrappy tale of a curse that’s scariest in its opening threat: “I’m takin’ four strands of your hair & a five-dollar-bill…” Original of a much-covered song, but it didn’t save Lumpkin’s faltering Motown career.
Ray Cathode: Time Beat
A dorky experiment from a pseudonym of George Martin and Maddalena Fagandini at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, about two weeks before Martin met the Beatles. RIP Ray Cathode–another senseless casualty of Beatlemania.
The Black Albinos: Shish Kebab
A Dutch instrumental rockabilly band who decorated their handful of mid-60s singles with all manner of din: animal noises, grunts, trills, whistles. A literal and figurative hoot.
The Ring a Dings: Snacky Poo
Rough and raucous—punkish?—one-off from the elusive Ring a Dings, who drag what sounds like a John Marascalco-penned Little Richard cast-off down into the mud and kick a glob into your eye.
Post-scripts:
Did not feel 100% on my detective work trying to figure out who the Ring a Dings are. Might be a one-time alias for the rockabilly Burnette brothers, who claim the song on various box sets.
It’s also featured on a compilation of songs that were popular in Pittsburgh, but have no clue if that has anything to do with where the band is from or is just a fluke of radio/jukebox popularity in the area.
Pete Drake: The Spook
Debut single by a legendary steel guitarist and producer who seems to casually anticipate Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats by a good seven years.
H.B. Barnum: It Hurts Too Much to Cry
An alternate universe’s winner in the Wall of Sound (studio) space race. Barnum orchestrated this lush melodrama and then went on to advise every tier of pop royalty from Queen of Soul to Rappin’ Duke.
Carole King: It Might As Well Rain Until September
[Acclaimed Music #73]
When King sings this Brill-ish UK hit she wrote for Bobby Vee, you can sense some Tapestry in there if you squint, but to me it’s all about the intense double-tracked vocals.
Les Paul & Mary Ford: After You’ve Gone
A sweet rendition of a Les Paul classic on Paul & Ford’s final album together. Commence mix wind-down!
Carolyn Hester: I’ll Fly Away
Initially picked this just to capture the burgeoning folk movement and only afterward realized I’d unintentionally bookended my mix with the first two Dylan recordings. Neat!
Skeeter Davis: The End of the World
[Acclaimed Music #29]
This might be the best song ever recorded.
Ear-worn (adj.): the quality of an earworm having long hardened into permanent memory.
If the Beatles remind me of Britney Spears, Bob Dylan is more like Taylor Swift—you see exactly the slot he’s going to fit into, but you can’t imagine how big things could possibly get once he breaks through. Also, re: those Swedes from space, the metaphor is imperfect. They were songwriters, not leads of Swedish bands, and the earlier breakthrough is with Backstreet Boys, not Britney Spears—and the Spice Girls also paved the way sans Swedes—but I don’t think any of that is comparable to what happened to pop music as a whole after Britney.
I checked my 1962 mix against Chuck Eddy’s year report and did pretty well at including things he mentioned, but was also amused by his reminder of Charlie Gillett’s distaste for twist music:
“None of the successful records had much to recommend them beyond their insistent beat,” Gillett frets, as if an insistent beat can’t be its own reward.
For the record, Gillett is wrong and Chuck is right (the twist beat is incredibly important, and the “successful records” are great), my gripe is only with the magnitude of inferior cash-ins. They don’t suck on principle, only in practice.
"Sinner Not A Saint" written by Shel Talmy, producer of "My Generation," "Waterloo Sunset," etc.