1968 in Music

Two miles from the Lorraine Motel The Memphis studio where the South's greatest soul records are made sits two miles from the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. is killed on April 4. The studio is an integrated workplace in a segregated city: Black and white musicians playing in the same room, sharing the same microphones. After the assassination, white staffers have to be escorted out of the neighborhood. The integrated house band keeps working for another year, but the collaborative spirit is permanently damaged. While businesses around the studio are wrecked during the unrest, the building itself is left untouched.

A concert broadcast instead of a riot The night after Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated, a singer is scheduled to play Boston Garden. The mayor considers canceling. A city councilman proposes broadcasting the show live on public television to keep people home. The singer stands to lose sixty thousand dollars from the broadcast killing his ticket sales. The mayor agrees to compensate him. That Friday night, Boston sees less crime than on a normal Friday in April. Nearly every other major American city is burning.

An inmate's song, heard for the first time the day before On January 13, a singer walks into a California state prison with a mobile recording unit. He plays two shows for the inmates, the first at 9:40 in the morning. Armed guards stand on walkways above the audience. The warden forbids standing. The closing song was written by a prisoner in the audience, and the performer heard it for the first time only the night before. The resulting album revives a career that had flatlined commercially. The inmate eventually gets paroled and signs a recording deal.

Thirty kids from Watts chant the chorus In August, at a studio in Van Nuys, California, about thirty young people from Watts and Compton are brought in to chant a two-line refrain over a groove built on trombone and conga. The lyrics were written on a napkin. The single holds number one R&B for six weeks and becomes the unofficial anthem of the Black Power movement. Its creator's increasingly political music costs him much of his white audience. He does not care.

A folk song becomes a samba in the studio A singer writes a song inspired by a Russian novel, structuring it as a slow folk ballad. His guitarist suggests changing the tempo entirely. The recording session is filmed by a French director in long, uninterrupted takes, capturing the song's transformation from acoustic strum to samba rhythm with congas, shekere, and a room full of backup voices. When the lead single from the same sessions is released days before a violent confrontation at the Chicago Democratic convention, radio stations ban it.

A salmon-pink house invents a genre Five musicians, four Canadians and one Arkansan, record their debut album in New York and Los Angeles after a year of playing in a basement with Bob Dylan. When their producer asks how they want the record to sound, they say: just like it did in the basement. The album arrives at the height of psychedelic excess and sounds like nothing happening in rock music: organ, acoustic piano, three-part vocal harmonies, songs about guilt and flood and harvest. One guitarist in London hears it and decides to break up his power trio.

The engineer quits, the drummer quits, the producer takes a holiday During the recording of a double album at a London studio, the chief engineer walks out mid-session. The drummer leaves for two weeks and returns to find his kit covered in flowers. The producer takes an unannounced vacation. Songs are recorded by partial lineups, sometimes by one person alone. The album includes eight minutes of tape loops, found sound, and musique concrete that one member actively opposes. It sells two million copies in its first week.

A seven-minute single on a brand-new label A songwriter writes a ballad for his bandmate's five-year-old son during the boy's parents' divorce. The band records it at a different studio across town because their usual facility does not yet have an eight-track machine. A thirty-six-piece orchestra is scored for the extended coda. At over seven minutes, it is the longest single ever to top the British chart. It is also the first release on a record label the band owns.

Jazz musicians who have never met the singer A singer from Belfast books a session at a New York studio with jazz musicians he has never played with and, by his own account, may never have spoken to. There are no rehearsals, no lead sheets. The singer is isolated in a vocal booth with his acoustic guitar. The bass player is the year's most awarded jazz instrumentalist. The drummer plays in one of the most celebrated modern jazz quartets. The album sells almost nothing on release and is later called one of the greatest records ever made.

Sixteen tracks arrive The first commercially available sixteen-track tape machine ships this year, priced between ten and thirty thousand dollars. One of the earliest units goes to a New York studio, where a jazz-rock ensemble uses it to record an album that October. In London, a major studio finally installs eight-track recorders months after a competing facility across town. The race for track count reshapes what a record can be: more overdubs, more layers, more of everything.

The New Yardbirds play Denmark After the Yardbirds dissolve in July, their guitarist recruits three musicians on the recommendation of a singer he has never heard, who was himself recommended by a singer who turned the job down. They rehearse in a room below a record shop in London. Their first gig is at a teen club in a Danish suburb on September 7, billed under a borrowed name. They enter a London studio on September 25 at eleven at night. The album costs 1,782 pounds and takes thirty-six hours to record. It comes out in January.