The BEST decade - a look at 'that' decade

Those of us fortunate enough to have spent our teenage years in the 1960s should be feeling especially sad at the premature passing of George Best. Not just because he was a brilliant footballer or that he lived a Faustian lifestyle " but because he was a true icon in an age that gave us the cultural foundations of our modern existence, and, more specifically, created the music we love.

Best was part of an era that gave us discothiques and a dance style that didn’t require a course of lessons with Fred Astaire…a time that emancipated both sexes from the strict social constraints of previous generations
…a decade that exploded with artistic creativity, social change and political reform …a period splattered with unique, yet varied, fads, phases and fashions of dress, attitude and lifestyle. It gave us television with more than one channel and coloured pictures, telephones in almost every home, ‘pirate’ radio stations that didn’t just play the most popular music, ‘package’ tours by black American artists and so much more.

It’s a sad indictment of the current age that the modern denizens of culture and fashion have so little original thought that they seem to be continually plundering the ‘sixties’ style stronghold for ideas. … flourished in an atmosphere of unbridled creativity, improvisation and imagination …George Best flourished in an atmosphere of unbridled creativity, improvisation and imagination in the cultural world around him, because that it exactly what he provided on football pitches more used to stifling skill and extinguishing extroversion " an excitement> an unpredictability…a flare that seemed to be in perfect harmony with his contemporaries. Muhammad Ali was doing the same thing in square rings, as were John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King in political circles, NASA astronauts on their orbits, Matron doing the rounds, Princess Margaret getting around…and as for the turntables " Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Philadelphia plus a host of other smaller towns and cities were delighting the twinight twirlers with their jazz fused, gospel tinged, shakers and movers. Teenage males wore suits, or Levis and Ben Shermans with brogues on less formal forays, and back combed their hair, whereas the girls donned boots above their knees, and tight skirts that only hovered a couple of inches above W" never has the sight of so little thigh been so evocative. Girls danced in circles, with handbags safely huddled at the core, to avoid being too easily picked off by the marauding males who hovered menacingly on the extremities. Most thought drugs were what Americans called medicine…football grounds smelled of urine…it was far colder in the winters and much hotter in the summers.

The few grainy, black and white images of Best playing football reminds us how little visual evidence existed, at the time, of almost anything worth seeing in the sixties. Unless a black American group had a hit and appeared on Top of the Pops or Ready, Steady Go! or actually toured (several groups did, but posed as bogus Temptations, Drifters et al) it was virtually impossible to know what many artists looked like, let alone see them perform. The same went for individual. There seemed to be a kind of mystery surrounding soul music …the ONLY source of information for years, and we depended on it hopelessly …regarding everything from where it came from, how it was made, what the performers looked like and who they were. All we had was record labels, the odd review in Blues and Soul and maybe an interview or a picture in the same magazine, if we were lucky. Blues and Soul was, quite literally, the ONLY source of information for years, and we depended on it hopelessly.
The traditional music papers would only cover soul acts if they could prove they’d made squillions of quid for their company, or well known pop groups made any mention of them. Information was like rare nectar and we gorged on it hungrily.

It is quite sad that even to this day, there are still many artists, musicians, production staffers and entrepreneurs responsible for creating great music, who remain unidentified, unappreciated and unknown. In the early days of clubbing, Geno Washington, Herbie Goins, Jimmy James and several other equally forgettable clones with a tenuous link to America, would pack ‘em into dancehalls and nightclubs across the land. They would ‘cover’ the most popular songs of the period to soul starved crowds eager to witness ANY manifestation of this new, exciting, vibrant black American music phenomenon. When promoters, and the more enlightened black record companies combined to exploit this enthusiasm by actually organizing a tour,img src="/uploads/img43946303864f7.jpg" alt="" style="margin: 11px; width: 300px; height: 167px;" align="right"> it was usually in the form of a ‘package’ show that featured as many artists as they could afford to bring, plus a touring band. Some were successful. The Stax Volt Tour played to packed theatres across the country in 1967. Some were not. The Motown Tour of 1965, which featured Marvin Gaye, Temptations, Supremes, Martha &Vandellas, Stevie Wonder and Earl Van Dyke Sextet was not " even though Ready Steady Go! dedicated an entire iSpecial Edition’ to the label. Several of the dates, again in theatres, played to crowds numbered in only the double digits. And don’t let the Motown publicity bullshitometer tell you any different. In both cases, actual footage of both the RSG! show and the Stax tour wasn’t made commercially available until at least 20 years after the events. It seems strangely ironic that the reams of sixties footage, featuring a wide cross section of hitters and hopefuls, now available on DVD, is finally released at a time when the mortality rate amongst their number is at its highest, and their chances of belated recognition and approval for the survivors is so low.

Those of us fortuitous enough to have witnessed Best in action don’t recall his efforts in isolation. The visions of him on a pitch, or at a party, conjure up many other personal memories and emotions, indelibly linked to the era in which they occurred. The youth club, scooters, first girlfriends, special mates, 18th birthday parties, school, hormones, discothèques ……that special time that is seldom forgotten and highly prized…and so on. Every generation venerates its youth as that special time that is seldom forgotten and highly prized.
A unique time that almost defines the participants by their own corner of the larger time warp. If we really are defined as the sum total of our experiences, then our youth contributes the greatest single component to our later development. The icons contained therein define our selective memory. The faces, the music, the events, the places, the experiences, the memories…and when they expire or fade, a small part of our own perception of our world goes with them.

E for B and Georgie B!

Rob Moss
http://www.hayleyrecords.co.uk