Opening the door to every room you live in!
By the mid-60's all the new ideas of how to reinvent the future hit critical mass. The biggest generation ever had access to more ways of communicating than ever. Telephones, airplanes, freeways nationwide, record albums, fashion mags, concert tours, TV dance programs, college campuses; everything was becoming a world wide web for connecting and correcting. The Civil Rights movement had triggered this Empowerment Decade. "Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about." Try something new, resurrect something lost, use change to recreate tomorrow. Daily we are still catching up with everything they opened up.
There are actually two rebel aesthetics in the 60's. Modern Futurism and Organic Naturalism. The first encompassed the Space Age, Swinging London, Mods, Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko comics, hipster lounge music, Art Deco, modern architecture, modular art design, James Bond sets by Ken Adam, plastic and chrome. The latter rejected that as a path to sleek sterility, embracing the organic and the classic historical: marijuana, hair length, flowers, native american buckskin and headbands, Victorian jackets and granny glasses, Art Nouveu, tribal clothes from history, folds and layers, skin and natural form, ZAP Comix, complex strobing graphics, spontaneous happenings and conceptual art, ancient wisdom, and a humanist philosophy that held at its core..."love". Being the 60's, these were two views and you were free to pick and choose what you could use.
Margo Guryan was a classical and jazz student in the early 60's. Ornette Coleman was a fellow student, Milt Jackson and Max Roach among her storied teachers. Hearing Brian Wilson swayed her into the ethereal world of melodic pop. The success of her songwriting, such as "Sunday Morning" (Spanky & Our Gang, Oliver) and "Think Of Rain" (Astrud Gilberto, Claudine Longet, Jackie DeShannon) earned her the chance to record an album. The "Take a Picture" LP, which contains "Love", has become a revered pop classic that found even more fans recently in an expanded CD reissue. Margo is on the upswing with all the new attention. Check out her website here:
http://www.myspace.com/margoguryan
Her new song is an excellent comment on the current war:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q7soN6HNU3Y
"Love/ How do you know the things you do
you do not only from need and not from greed
but only from love?"
Check out my other Herstory Of Rock videos at:
http://www.youtube.com/funknroll
A great site about 60's women rockers to check out is:
http://www.myspace.com/girlgaragemayhem
Tym Stevens
Tags: MargoGuryan Beatles BrianWilson ArthurLeeLove Zombies Stereophonic Hooverphonic 1960sPop SummerOfLove PyschedelicRock
