1967 in Music

700 hours for one album A band spends 129 days at a London studio, working evenings with no deadline, bouncing between two four-track tape machines to simulate eight tracks. The production costs reach 25,000 pounds, roughly five hundred times what their debut album cost four years earlier. On one track, a forty-piece orchestra is instructed to start at the lowest possible note on each instrument and climb to the highest over twenty-four bars. The orchestra is recorded four times and mixed down, creating the equivalent of 160 musicians. The final chord is an E major played simultaneously on three pianos and a harmonium, with the engineer gradually raising the gain as it fades for forty-five seconds. The album prints its lyrics on the back cover for the first time in pop history.

One session in Alabama, then everything falls apart A singer who spent six years recording jazz and pop standards that went nowhere is taken to a studio in northern Alabama. The interplay between her gospel piano and a session player's electric piano produces something neither could do alone. One track is completed before her husband gets into a physical confrontation with the studio owner and takes her back to New York that night. The unfinished B-side is completed weeks later with the Alabama rhythm section flown north. The A-side hits number one. Within months she has five major singles, including a radical rearrangement of another singer's song that becomes a civil rights and feminist anthem.

A coin toss and a burning guitar Two bands share a festival bill in California and neither wants to follow the other. A coin flip decides the order. The losers close the festival on Sunday night, and the guitarist ends his set by dousing his instrument with lighter fluid and setting it on fire. He has been famous in London for months but is virtually unknown in America. This is his major debut on home soil. Earlier that weekend, a soul singer from Memphis performs for the first time in front of a white rock audience, and a San Francisco band arrives so unknown that festival organizers ask them to play a second set so the cameras can capture it.

No bass player, no problem A Los Angeles band releases its debut in January with no bass guitarist. The keyboard player covers bass lines with his left hand on one instrument while playing organ with his right. The singer fuses beat poetry with a baritone croon. Their biggest single runs over seven minutes on the album but is edited to three for radio. On a live television appearance in September, the singer agrees to change a lyric that the network considers a drug reference, then sings the original words anyway on air. The band is never invited back.

30,000 copies and every one starts a band An album recorded primarily in four days at a run-down New York studio enters the chart at number 199 and drops off two weeks later. A lawsuit over a photograph on the back cover pulls it from stores for five months. Radio stations refuse to play it. The songs address heroin addiction, sadomasochism, and urban alienation over a droning viola and deadpan vocals that reject every convention of the psychedelic year surrounding them. The album sells almost nothing. Its influence, measured in the bands it inspires, is incalculable.

Down the hall from the biggest album in the world A young band records its debut at the same London studio where another group is finishing the most expensive pop album ever made. The two sessions overlap for months, and the musicians visit each other's rooms. The debut is led by a twenty-one-year-old guitarist and songwriter whose material draws on English childhood, nursery rhymes, and outer space rather than American blues. His mental health is already deteriorating. Within a year he will be unable to perform, replaced by a friend from art school. The album defines British psychedelia as something whimsical and literary rather than bluesy.

The pirate stations go dark For three years, unlicensed radio stations broadcasting from ships off the British coast have been playing pop records to an estimated fifteen million daily listeners, filling a gap the BBC refuses to address. In August, a new law makes it illegal for British citizens to work for or supply the offshore stations. Nearly all of them shut down at midnight. Six weeks later, the BBC launches a new pop channel, hiring many of the same disc jockeys who had been broadcasting illegally. The first voice on the new station belongs to a former pirate radio presenter.

A poet walks into a recording studio at thirty-three A Canadian writer known for novels and poetry books a session with the same talent scout who signed a young folk singer five years earlier. The scout falls ill and is replaced. The new producer wants strings and horns; the writer wants almost nothing. The finished album arrives in December: spare, literary, built on acoustic guitar and a deep voice that barely qualifies as singing. It spends eighteen months on the UK chart. The writer is the oldest debut artist anyone can remember.

Three and a half days in New York A British power trio records its second album in under four days at a New York studio because their visas are about to expire. The producer is an American who will later form his own band. The string arrangements are written by a session musician who will soon co-found one of the heaviest bands of the next decade. The album is named after a roadie's mispronunciation of a bicycle part. Its biggest track, a riff built on a descending blues figure, becomes an anthem when released as a single the following year.

A southern gothic mystery on the pop chart A woman from Mississippi writes and records a narrative song about a suicide told through dinner-table conversation, over a minimal acoustic arrangement. It holds number one on the pop chart for four weeks. The song offers no explanation for what happened on the bridge, and fifty years of listeners will argue about the verse the narrator's family is too distracted to finish. The singer wins three Grammys, including Best New Artist.

The whistled ending that was supposed to be temporary After months of performing for rock audiences who had never heard him before, a soul singer begins working on new material with his guitarist in Memphis. They record a song unlike anything he has done: quiet, reflective, built on acoustic guitar and the sound of waves. The final section is a whistled melody, a placeholder. He plans to return and write proper lyrics for it. He leaves town on December 8. Two days later, his plane crashes into a frozen Wisconsin lake. The song is released as it is, whistle and all, and becomes the first posthumous number-one single in American chart history.

The best songwriting team walks out The production trio responsible for dozens of hits at a Detroit label, including nearly every major single by its biggest female group and its biggest male group, leaves over a royalty dispute. They start their own labels. The parent company sues. The departure forces the label to diversify its creative base, which eventually produces some of the most ambitious albums of the early 1970s. But in the short term, the machine that made hit after hit with mechanical precision loses three of its most essential parts at once.