For me, summer music still means rock, and I still consider summer 1966 the peak of the rock/pop era. AM singles were still the order of the day, and lots of them appeared that year from artists we would learn to love.
That summer, I worked nights in a sheet metal plant that disrupted radio signals so badly that we could only listen to a local station that played the same dozen singles over and over from midnight to dawn, broken up by reading the news and weather.
Now that I often use song titles as mystery/crime titles, I realize for the first time just how many of them came from 1966. Spring brought the Rascals, and two sure-fire best-seller titles, which I don’t think anyone has used yet: “You Better Run” and “Come On Up.” It also brought us Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Kicks,” which had the first guitar riff I learned to play when I bought a guitar later that year. They followed with “Hungry,” and that great crushing bass line should have worked for a vampire story, too, but was 30 years too soon. I don’t think anyone has written a mystery about a robbery at a food bank, either.
The Beatles released Revolver (A perfect title). The LP featured the great gloomy chamber mystery “Eleanor Rigby” and titles like “For No One” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which Lee Child should have snapped up years ago. Aftermath is the Rolling Stones’ first great collection of all original material, and the American version offered “Paint It Black,” a light-hearted funeral story. The British version gave us “Under My Thumb,” “Out of Time,” “High and Dry,” and “Take It or Leave It,” all of which scream to be plotted.
So does the first—and only—Standells record to get airplay in Michigan. “Dirty Water” mentions the Charles River in Boston, even though the band was from LA. What could make that water dirty…or bloody?
By summer’s end, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels gave us “Devil With A Blue Dress,” and Walter Mosley recognized the possibilities in that one for his Easy Rawlins series.
For obscure stuff, later to be God of All DEE-troit Bob Seger and the Last Heard offered “East Side Story,” a concise little ditty—only two minutes—about a poverty-stricken teen who is killed trying to commit a robbery. The chords sound like Van Morrison’s “Gloria” with enough fuzz on the guitar to make a shag rug. Great song that nobody else seems to remember.
Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs hit big with a great stalker song that I still have penciled into my unsold series: “Little Red Riding Hood.”
Finally, in the summer of 1966, Tommy James & The Shondells had their first massive hit, and over a dozen books (one labeled as a mystery) use the title already, which means someone else thinks the way I do.
“Hanky Panky.”
STEVE LISKOW won the 2009 Black Orchid Novella Award for “Stranglehold,” which appeared in the summer issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Who Wrote The Book of Death? is his first published novel. Currently, he is trying to sell a PI series featuring the characters in “Stranglehold.” His Web mistress daughter is Captain of the Queen City Cherry Bombs, so he is also writing a mystery that involves Roller Derby.
