DESCRIPTION

Time-Life released this disc as [r8860150 (SUD-02) in the [l774983 series in 1990, and as [r619390 (AM1-04) in the [l328190 series in 1995.

℗ 1990 Warner Special Products 
© 1990, 1995 Time Life Inc. 

Track durations obtained from software.

Publishing:
Track 1- Delicious Apple Music Corp./Purple Records Distributing Corp./Fun City Music Corp. ASCAP
Track 2- Lowery Music Co., Inc. BMI
Track 3- Nipper Music ASCAP
Track 4- Colgems-EMI Music Inc. ASCAP
Track 5- Takya Music Inc. ASCAP
Track 6- Irving Music, Inc. BMI
Track 7- EMI Blackwood Music Inc. BMI
Track 8. 21- Stone Agate Music BMI
Track 9- Jobete Music Co., Inc. ASCAP
Track 10- Blue Seas Music, Inc./Jac Music Co., Inc. ASCAP
Track 11- PolyGram International Songs ASCAP
Track 12- Screen Gems-EMI Inc. BMI
Track 13- SBK Blackwood Music Inc. BMI
Track 14- Vogue Music c/o Welk Music/Saturday Music/Season Four Music Corp. BMI
Track 15- Cherio Corp. BMI
Track 16- Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp./Unichappell Music Inc. BMI
Track 17- Canopy Music Inc. ASCAP
Track 18- WB Music Corp. ASCAP
Track 19- Words and Music Inc. ASCAP
Track 20- Goodman Group BMI
Track 22- Irving Music, Inc./Cotillion Music, Inc. BMI

Complete liner notes:

By 1968, a vibrant sense of experimentation permeated all aspects of rock and pop. The sheer variety of music on the radio-AM as well as the newly utilized FM-was broader than ever, and some unlikely singles were becoming hits. Surprisingly, this wide-­open scene included even soft pop, or middle-of-the-road music, up to that time the most constricted form of all.

Consider just the top instrumentals. Brazilian pianist Sergio Mendes, who had settled in the United States in the mid-1960s, was a leader of the bossa nova movement, and his records were considered instrumentals even when they used voices. He had legitimate jazz credentials-his sidemen had included bossa nova guitarist Antonio Carlos Jobim and trumpet and flugelhorn player Art Farmer-but his biggest success came when he covered pop hits like The Look of Love, introduced the year before by Dusty Springfield in the James Bond spoof Casino Royale.

Hugh Masekela, the son of a South African sculptor, took up trumpet at the age of 13 after seeing Kirk Douglas in the movie Young Man with a Horn. A veteran of various Johannesburg jazz groups, including one with pianist Dollar Brand, Masekela earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London that allowed him to escape apartheid. Then he went to the Manhattan School of Music, where Harry Belafonte found him and began promoting his career. By the mid-1960s, Masekela was married to folk singer Miriam Makeba, a fellow South African expatriate, and running his own production company in Los Angeles. Masekela's jazz-Afropop fusion Grazing In the Grass sold four million worldwide.

The most off-the-wall instrumental of the bunch was Mason Williams' Classical Gas. An Oklahoma folkie, Williams completed a navy hitch and then headed for Los Angeles, where he met Glenn Yarbrough, who was a member of the Limelighters (and later became a solo artist best known for Baby the Rain Must Fall. Yarbrough introduced him to the Smothers Brothers, then playing his club, and Williams became the comedy team's guitarist and writer. (Williams also worked in other media: he wrote and designed books, and one unusual example of his artistic abilities was displayed in the New York Museum of Modern Art.) He was writing for the Smothers Brothers' controversial TV show when he made his recording debut with an LP, The Mason Williams Phonograph Record; its No. 2 single incorporates everything from classical passages to bluegrass breaks, and it won the guitarist three Grammys.

Dionne Warwick's (Theme from) Valley of the Dolls, written by Andre and Dory Previn, was the flip side of I Say a Little Prayer, and together they became her biggest two-sided single ever. But Otis Redding's (Slttin' on) The Dock of the Bay and Marvin Gaye's I Heard It through the Grapevine were the two epochal soul records that year.

Redding wrote the former shortly after his historic performance at the Monterey Pop Festival and a follow-up appearance at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, where he floored the hippies with his raw voice and uninhibited heart. Resting in the morning sun on a houseboat in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco, Otis was inspired to create this folk-flavored meditation on his life and travels.

His manager, Phil Walden, was skeptical about its chances, but Stax guitarist Steve Cropper, a frequent Redding collaborator, loved the tune. Cropper helped him polish it up before they cut it in Memphis on December 7, 1967. Three days later, the singer's private plane crashed into an icy Wisconsin lake, killing him and all but one of his band members. Dock of the Bay posthumously became a two-­time Grammy winner and Redding's first No. 1 pop hit.

I Heard It through the Grapevine was cut by three Motown acts before Marvin Gaye. The Isley Brothers' version stayed in the can, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' version wasn't released until around the same time as Gaye's. Gladys Knight and the Pips took it to No. 2 pop (and the top of the soul charts) in 1967.

But when Gaye cut the Barrett Strong-Norman Whitfield song with Whitfield producing, he brought a personal urgency to the session. His seven-year marriage to Motown president Berry Gordy's sister Anna (17 years older than Marvin) was falling apart; each partner was cheating compulsively on the other. Marvin poured all his passion and paranoia into the performance, and he wound up selling four million copies and creating a standard that has entered the Billboard Hot 100 four times since then (by King Curtis, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Roger and the California Raisins).

Gaye's labelmates the Temptations had another Strong-Whitfield gem in I Wish It Would Rain. David Ruffin's unforgettable reading made the song stand out from the Broadway ballads that dominated the Tempts' In a Mellow Mood album. The 5th Dimension was a pop-soul group that made a career out of smooth harmonizing, usually on songs by Jimmy Webb or Laura Nyro, who wrote Stoned Soul Picnic. With A Beautiful Morning, an obvious attempt to recapture the success of its 1967 chart topper Groovin; the nation's leading "blue-eyed" soul band changed its name from the Young Rascals to the Rascals.

Dion and Jose Feliciano were folk-­rock surprises. Dion fled his native Bronx for Miami in 1968 to kick heroin, which had kept his career on hold much of the decade. During that period, he also became a huge blues fan. Dick Holler wrote Abraham, Martin and John as a blues shuffle the day after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Producer Phil Gernhard and Dion spent nearly three weeks reworking it into this form, which Dion insisted was his form of blues even if everyone else considered it topical folk-pop; the single also marked his return to Laurie, the label where he and the Belmonts had their early hits.

Feliciano was born blind in Puerto Rico, and his family moved to New York's Spanish Harlem when he was a child. He made his first appearances on the Hispanic circuit but quickly moved downtown to Greenwich Village folk clubs. In addition to singing, he played guitar, bass and congas on his remake of the Doors' Light My Fire, which marked his first foray into the pop-rock world.

Spanky and Our Gang (Like to Get to Know You) were Chicago's answer to the Mamas and the Papas; leader Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane even sang the late Mama Cass Elliot's parts in the mid-1980s re-formed version of that group. Merrilee Rush went top 10 with Angel of the Morning after Evie Sands's version failed because Cameo, her label, went out of business two weeks after releasing it in 1966. When Rush began getting some attention in her native Pacific Northwest, songwriter Chip Taylor, who had penned Angel in a 10-minute burst that ended a half-day of false starts, hired his own promo man to make it a nationwide hit.

The Vogues, who were originally the Val-Aires but dressed so sharp that they had to change their name, broke out of their native Pittsburgh by working up two different shows, one for teens and one for parents. Turn Around, Look at Me managed to please both audiences. The members of Classics IV were from Jacksonville, Florida, but their Spooky broke first in Louisville, Kentucky; remnants of the group later evolved into the Atlanta Rhythm Section, purveyors of mid-1970s Southern boogie. Glen Campbell continued his crossover success with the atmospheric Wichita Lineman, one in a series of country place-name songs written for him by Jimmy Webb.

Bobby Goldsboro, a Southerner who had never enjoyed country hits before, had an even bigger crossover with Honey, written by Bobby Russell (Little Green Apples, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia). After deciding at the last minute to stay home one weekend night, Russell started contemplating how much the tree in his front yard had grown in the last four years, and somehow from that observation he built this ballad about the death of a young bride.

-John Morthland

TRACKLIST

1. The Rascals - A Beautiful Morning 2:34
2. The Classics IV - Spooky 2:51
3. José Feliciano - Light My Fire 3:31
4. Sérgio Mendes & Brasil '66 - The Look Of Love 2:42
5. Spanky & Our Gang - Like To Get To Know You 3:12
6. Mason Williams - Classical Gas 3:05
7. Merrilee & The Turnabouts - Angel Of The Morning 3:12
8. The Temptations - I Wish It Would Rain 2:48
9. Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing 2:16
10. Dionne Warwick - Do You Know The Way To San Jose 2:55
11. Bobby Goldsboro - Honey 4:00
12. B.J. Thomas - Hooked On A Feeling 2:48
13. The Fifth Dimension - Stoned Soul Picnic 3:26
14. The Lettermen - Goin' Out Of My Head / Can't Take My Eyes Off You 3:06
15. Hugh Masekela - Grazing In The Grass 2:37
16. The Vogues - Turn Around, Look At Me 2:46
17. Glen Campbell - Wichita Lineman 3:02
18. Dionne Warwick - (Theme From) Valley Of The Dolls 3:34
19. Cass Elliot - Dream A Little Dream Of Me 3:14
20. Dion (3) - Abraham, Martin And John 3:19
21. Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine 3:16
22. Otis Redding - (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay 2:40

Barcode and Other Identifiers:

Rights Society ASCAP
Rights Society BMI
Matrix / Runout 10 OPCD 2604-2 07

Remastered At Hit And Run Studios
Phonographic Copyright (p) Warner Special Products
Copyright (c) Time Life Inc.
Published By Delicious Apple Music Corp.
Published By Purple Records Dist. Corp
Published By Fun City Music Corp.
Published By Lowery Music Co. Inc.
Published By Nipper Music
Published By Colgems-EMI Music Inc.
Published By Takya Music Inc.
Published By Irving Music, Inc.
Published By EMI Blackwood Music Inc.
Published By Stone Agate Music
Published By Jobete Music Co., Inc.
Published By Blue Seas Music, Inc.
Published By Jac Music Co., Inc.
Published By PolyGram International Songs
Published By Screen Gems-EMI, Inc.
Published By SBK Blackwood Music Inc.
Published By Vogue Music
Published By Welk Music
Published By Saturday Music
Published By Seasons Four Music Corp.
Published By Cherio Corp.
Published By Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.
Published By Unichappell Music, Inc.
Published By Canopy Music, Inc.
Published By WB Music Corp.
Published By Words & Music, Inc.
Published By The Goodman Group
Published By Cotillion Music, Inc.
Manufactured For Time Life Music
Manufactured By Warner Special Products