I know the Beatles really popularized it and the Stones jumped on the bandwagon (and then jumped off shortly after) - how many other popular rock groups of that era used the sitar?
I'm reading Marianne Faithfull's autobiography now (great read, incidentally! Drugs! Sex! Dressing up in funny costumes! Travel to exotic locations! Gossip!) and they certainly listened to a lot of sitar. It was de rigeuer for dropping acid. But using sitar in pop songs wasn't nearly as common as other sixties musical fads like the electric harpsichord (my fav) or the Moog.
I posted a cover of "Black is Black" by Lord Sitar a while back on buffistarawk.
You forgot "Mars Bars!".
Heh. She goes off on the Mars Bars incident. To paraphrase, "It's so stupid. It's what martini drinking old men would think is the sort of thing you'd do when you were on acid."
The best parts are her adventures with Anita Pallenberg who's just the most over-the-top and around-the-bend, decadent Black Queen you can imagine.
Heh. She goes off on the Mars Bars incident. To paraphrase, "It's so stupid. It's what martini drinking old men would think is the sort of thing you'd do when you were on acid."
Hey, to paraphrase ...LIBERTY VALANCE, when the lurid rumour is better than the truth, print the rumour.
The best parts are her adventures with Anita Pallenberg who's just the most over-the-top and around-the-bend, decadent Black Queen you can imagine.
This I can totally believe. I really must get my hands on a copy of that Faithfull book.
On a tangential note, if you could be any swinging-60s celeb for a day, say via a BEING JOHN MALKOVICH type scenario, who would you be?
Julie Andrews or Bobby Darrin, maybe.
if you could be any swinging-60s celeb for a day, say via a BEING JOHN MALKOVICH type scenario, who would you be?
See now this is the kind of question that causes me to make a list and break it up geographically:
London
David Bailey (mod photographer. Basis for David Hemmings character in Blow Up, and also the archetype for Austin Powers cover)
Andrew Loog Oldham (a madman, but a very hip one)
Keith Moon (particularly for his birthday when he drove a car into a pool)
Terence Stamp (pulled more birds than anybody in the sixties - including Julie Christie)
New York
Candy Darling (just to be that glam)
Edie Sedgwick (let's just presume the one day would have a particularly fabulous cocktail of drugs and drama and I wouldn't have to be around for the hangover and the self-loathing later)
Gerard Malanga (I'd need the whip)
West Coast
Jimmy O'Neil (host of Shindig)
Russ Tamblyn (after he'd stopped making exploitation movies, and become an artist out in Laurel Canyon)
Bruce Conner (when he was shooting Breakaway with Toni Basil)
Gene Clark
South
Either Dan Penn or Spooner Oldham during some great session in Memphis. Dusty or Aretha.
Since it is fun for all ages, but can be expensive and/or hard to find, I've gone ahead and sent Louis Armstrong's
Disney Songs The Satchmo Way
to buffistarawk.
And msbelle, note the inclusion of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett"!
