25 killer singles that are 60 years old

AUGUST

“You Really Got Me” by the Kinks

If “She Lied” was indeed a primitive nod toward punk rock, then the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” is a massive leap forward. Dave Davies’ absurdly simple chord riff became immediately famous. Ray Davies would go on to write songs that were a thousand times more complex, but he may bever have written a more influential one.

Dave plays the glorious, messy solo that would be as representative of what early rock was as those opening power chords. The song was so successful that Ray and Dave essentially did the exact same thing a few months later with “All Day and All of the Night.”

“You Never Can Tell” by Chuck Berry

John Lennon once suggested renaming the genre of rock & roll as “Chuck Berry.” Most early rockers would agree. Berry invented up-tempo guitar-based blues built on hooks that supported a simple, mostly redundant melody line. He had been doing it from the beginnings of rock & roll and by 1964, others were recording his originals and sometimes having greater success. But Berry didn’t slow down.

In ’64, he released St Louis to Liverpool, in a nod to the new sounds coming from across the pond. With songs like “Go Bobby Soxer,” “Little Marie” (a reworked version of “Memphis, Tennessee”), and the glorious “No Particular Place to Go,” Berry proved he was still the king of rock & roll, no matter what the Billboard charts said. I have a particular fondness for “You Never Can Tell,” probably owing to Quentin Tarantino’s use of it in Pulp Fiction. If you ever have a meal in Jack Rabbit Slim’s, this will be the song playing on the box.

“It Ain’t Me, Babe” by Bob Dylan

The Times They Are a-Changin’ came out in February. By August, Another Side of Bob Dylan showed that he wasn’t just a protest singer. There were political songs on the second ’64 album but it is dominated by more personal songs. Dylan showed here that he could write relationship songs that far surpassed the simple “moon-June” formulas.

The album is bookended by the raucous, fun-loving “All I Really Want to Do” and the somber, mature “It Ain’t Me Babe.” “Go away from my window – Leave at your own chosen speed – I’m not the one you want babe – I’m not the one you need.” This was a new type of folk rock. Dylan was still a year away from going electric and blowing up the world, but the seeds of revolution are there.

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