For the month of January, I’m selecting some of the most memorable and influential songs of the 60’s. While they all hail from the same decade, these are some of my favorite songs of any era. They remind me that the 60’s were so much more than just Woodstock and psychedelic rock. It was a flourishing period for blues, folk, progressive and straight-ahead rock. #31DaysOf60sSongs
I was never part of a real band, but there were a few afternoons in high school when a few friends of mine and I had a small taste of it. We huddled into our friend’s basement where we had a couple of amps, guitars, a drum set, keyboard and a mic set up. It was our playground. “Gloria” gave us the satisfaction of knowing we could play a song from beginning to end. Only one of us was musically trained. Our drummer could barely keep a beat. But all of us were crazy about music. We had a lot of fun together. We felt like rock stars for a couple of hours. And we played “Gloria”.
Three chords. One hard rocking number from the annals of rock & roll. With Van Morrison on lead vocals and songwriting duties, Them put together a garage rock classic that had that rhythm and blues groove, that distorted, raw edge, and Van Morrison soul. Like many of the great songs from the 60’s, “Gloria” was a b-side. The single “Baby, Please Don’t Go” wasn’t too shabby either. But it wasn’t a Them original. This made “Gloria” more important in many ways. While The Velvet Underground may get credit for getting countless listeners to start their own band, “Gloria” made it possible for many of them to actually play. E - D - A - E - D - A, etc.
“G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria. I'm gonna shout it all night.”