Rant #1,450: 1967

1967 was an interesting year.

It featured the so-called "Summer of Love," where, spurred on for their hatred of the Vietnam War and everything having to do with it, hippies made their major foothold on our civilization, and not only was this a social movement, but this thinking entered seemingly everything in our lives, from the clothing we wore to the foods we ate.

And it certainly entered our musical spectrum, with acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones fine tuning their musical focus to something a little more substantial than "boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl" and the like.

Then how were the Monkees, in 1967, the world's most popular rock group, outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined?

And all of this was happening when I was all of 10 years old.

1967 is the focus of my latest personal musical meandering.

If you remember last year, at about this time of year, I started my "Bubbling Under" crusade, where I attempted to collect, via MP3 file, every Billboard "Bubbling Under" tune--those tunes that never made the Hot 100, but fell in the 101 and up placement on the charts--from the years 1964-1971.

With the help of some outside forces, I was able to do just that, and now I have over 1,000 songs, many of which I didn't know existed, at my disposal to listen to whenever I want.

Now, my next musical crusade is the year 1967. Since I now have all the "Bubbling Under" hits of that year, I am now looking for every Hot 100 tune of that year.

This was a year that gave us such great songs as "Pleasant Valley Sunday" by the Monkees, "Never My Love" by the Association, and "Penny Lane" by the Beatles, but it also gave us "Wild Thing" by Senator Bobby, "I Found a Love, Part 1" by Wilson Pickett, and "You Better Sit Down Kids" by Cher--and my goal is to get every single one of them on MP3.

It also featured the advent of album-oriented rock, with the coming of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," an LP without an official single released from it during the year. It nonetheless rose to the top of the charts, and greatly impacted popular music then and to this day.

A lot of the music I am looking for I already have, which is great. I have the actual 45 they came on, so I will go directly to the source for those.

Although I would prefer to get the actual 45 recordings, I will settle for the album version of these tunes, and I have a lot of those too.

But I do not have everything, and this is where my other sources come in.

Again, this is just for me, just for me to have and listen to mainly in the car.

It is a fun thing to do, a nice side thing to everything else I do during the week, and during this upcoming summer.

It should take a few months, just like the "Bubbling Under" crusade did, and I am sure I will uncover some gems, just like I did with that pursuit, songs that I didn't even know existed.

I will certainly keep you up to date on this endeavor, on my favorite year in music, bar none.

By the end of it, I am sure I will be in something of a "Purple Haze," but on this "Ruby Tuesday," I am sure that I won't hit a "Deadend Street" and I can say "I Had a Dream," and "Oh Yeah!," I will be "Walkin' In the Sunshine" at the end of this pursuit.

"Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!"