“We stand today on the edge of a new frontier-the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils-a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” ~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Small Faces
The Byrds
Buffalo Springfield
The Beatles’ John Lennon continues to play the guitar as he evades a young fan who wants his cap as a souvenir during a concert in Rome, Italy, on June 28, 1965
Captain Beefheart and His Magic
Band‘s 3rd studio album was released on 16 June 1969.
In 1968, Beefheart found himself
without a label, and a completed album waiting to be released (the sessions
would not be released until 1971′s Mirror Man), when Don Van Vliet’s
(Beefheart) high school friend, Frank Zappa offered him complete artistic
freedom to release an album on Zappa’s Straight label (Trout Mask Replica was
the second album on Straight, following Alice Cooper’s Pretties for You
released in May 1969).
Van Vliet prepared for the
recording session by having the band all live in the same house, where band
members later confirmed that they were not allowed to leave, frequently abused,
verbally and physically, rationed food (being fed soybeans for a month), and
subjected to grueling rehearsal sessions that lasted 14 hours.
The resulting album is one of the
most original, confounding, alienating, and engrossing albums ever released.
“Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall
of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto
itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one,” Lester Bangs wrote.
It was a commercial disaster in
the US, but peaked (for a week) at #21 in the UK.
The Wild Bunch premiered in Los
Angeles, CA on 18 June 1969.
The film was immediately declared
a masterpiece by some critics (e.g. Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert) and
criticized for its violence by others. Sam Peckinpah had been effected by the
sanitized violence on TV and in the movies, especially compared with the
violence of the Vietnam War shown on the nightly news. He saw the violence in
The Wild Bunch as “ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful; it’s not fun and games
and cowboys and Indians. It’s a terrible, ugly thing, and yet there’s a certain
response that you get from it, an excitement, because we’re all violent
people.“
The film was a box office success
and earned 2 Academy Award nominations: Best Original Screenplay (Walon Green,
Sam Peckinpah, Roy Sickner) and Best Original Score (Jerry Fielding). Both
awards went to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (screenwriter William Goldman
and composer Burt Bacharach).
