The 1960s changed music. We started with a very young and eager style of rock and roll and finished the decade with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Rock and roll grew up fast and mean.
Along the way from Bill Haley to Ozzy Osbourne (by the way, Haley was married three times and had 10 children while Osbourne has been married just twice with five children and he's the bad guy?), the decade produced a lot of new takes on the genre that is rock. Many songs became popular, and many did not deserve their popularity. While every Kinks song should have shot to number 1 (I'm biased, OK?), the King of Rock should have written a few songs.
But what are some overrated songs from the decade? Ones that get a little too much love? Maybe the four that follow.
Four extremely overrated songs from the 1960s
The Monkees - "Daydream Believer" (1967)
Who should we give thanks for this song? The singers in the band who are just a step up from Milli Vanilli? I guess at least Micky Dolenz and chums truly sang on their songs (allegedly). But we were sold a bill of goods that we knew was relatively fake and we still bought it.
Is this a catchy song? Sure! But it had better be after all the money that went into the show that mimicked the Beatles and the music produced to serve as the soundtrack. Just because the Monkees sold a lot of records shouldn't make us feel any better about ourselves. We are the dupes!
The Mamas and the Papas - "California Dreaming" (1966)
California. The promised land. Go there and everything will be brilliant and perfect and happiness will chase you down whether you want it or not.
The issue with this song is that if you have never been to California, you don't know what you are missing but the narrators on the track who are missing their California home make you feel slightly bad for not missing a place you've never been just as much. Maybe you should make your own cover of this song and call it "Berlin Dreaming," or "Melbourne Dreaming." Just don't make it so dreary.
Elvis Presley - "Suspicious Minds" (1969)
Presley proves to be afraid of doing something completely different in this song. But what should we expect? At the end of it all, Elvis is really right there with the Monkees as being a packaged product that had no real soul. Presley never wrote a song but his record label forced songwriters to give him half-credit on my tracks just so he would sing them. Then he got 50 percent of the profits. Classy.
But "Suspicious Minds" just screams to be a pre-punk song of angst. Heck, country musician Dwight Yoakam covered the song and still made it more dangerous. Presley just gives us more of what he was known for: Overly produced waste that would have been better served had someone with more integrity recorded the original version.
The Bobby Fuller Four - "I Fought the Law" (1966)
This was a cover of a song originally written by Sonny Curtis of the Crickets. Curtis joined the band after Buddy Holly left to do a solo act. Holly then died in a plane crash the year after this song was penned. But the Bobby Fuller Four got a hold of the rights to record the song and could have done something akin to a Kinks treatment but instead made the vocals a lot more poppy.
The way Bobby Fuller does the song almost feels like a celebration that "the law" wins. I don't think that was meant to be the point. But this song continued its evil as Fuller died too soon either from suicide or murder the same year the Bobby Fuller Four version of the song was released.