Little Anthony & The Imperials 1965 – Hurt So Bad
The first time I really heard “Hurt So Bad,” it wasn’t on a crackling vinyl 45 or a classic radio…
Oldies Songs
The Beach Boys 1965 – Help Me Rhonda
The Southern California sun is a fickle thing in a pop song. It promises endless summer, but in 1965, The…
Johnny Mathis 1958 – A Certain Smile
The late hour had always belonged to Johnny Mathis. I remember those nights, the kind where the streetlights outside my…
Bobby Pickett 1962 – Monster Mash
I was eight years old, huddled by a giant cathode-ray tube television, the volume turned low so my parents wouldn’t…
Grass Roots 1966 – Where Were You When I Needed You
It’s always the echo of a forgotten era that hooks you. Not the pristine, over-lit nostalgia of a re-mastered box…
Van Morrison 1967 – Brown Eyed Girl
There are some songs that resist all attempts at critical dissection, not through complexity, but through sheer, radiant familiarity. They…
Little Eva 1965 – Loco-motion
The early 1960s were a moment suspended between the raw grit of late-period rock and roll and the gleaming, sophisticated…
Jackie DeShannon 1965 – What The World Needs Now Is Love
The year is 1965. The air is thick with a strange brew of optimism and impending fracture. Pop music is…
Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs 1965 – Wooly Bully
I remember the first time I heard it—not as a blast of nostalgia on an oldies station, but as a…
Booker T & The MGs 1967 – Green Onions
I want you to imagine a humid afternoon in Memphis, 1962. It’s Sunday at the old movie theatre on McLemore…