The Upside-Up: Annivyrsary 1961

ISSUE #136

1961 was what MAD Magazine called an Upside-Up year. It’s strobogrammatic, rotationally symmetric—flip it upside-down while no one’s looking and the number appears to have remained the same. If 1969 is the year that changed everything, we ought to christen 1961 as the year the world flipped upside-down, unnoticed; no one seemed to be paying any attention.

Powers everywhere were starting to capsize—Britain finally ceded hegemony to America, ending a process that'd started with WWII; bells of revolution rang in Algiers, the people on the brink of overthrowing French rule; Castro announced that Cuba would be socialist, and in months the C.I.A. staged a coup to root out the threat he posed to rich Americans; at the same time, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon pinned scientific proof to the dehumanizing effects of colonization in his landmark book The Wretched of the Earth.

Meanwhile, as nations of the world divided Antarctica, another wall split Berlin in two; nine days later, on August 22, Ida Siekmann died while trying to flee West, the first of 138 to die at the Berlin Wall. This abrupt sprouting of malignant boundaries could speak to why so many flocked to a retelling of Romeo & Juliet in 1961—it was the highest-grossing film that year and won Best Picture the following spring—when West Side Story premiered on October 18th. Shortly afterward, the day before Halloween, a hydrogen bomb dubbed the Tsar Bomba reshaped the sky into a mushroom cloud rising 40 miles high over Novaya Zemlya; it was the largest explosion ever brought to earth by men.

Rock ‘n’ roll, on the other hand, was making millions of dollars by speaking to a teenager's version of shattered earth: the heaving of a heart in love and the aftershocks of its breaking. “Tossin’ and Turnin’” is an example of the former, a lovesick ancestor to "On the Floor" by Perfume Genius, an account of restless desire that's mirrored by Tony when he first sings of Maria in West Side Story. “Runaway” by Del Shannon, the second-highest charting song of the year, lies firmly in the camp of the heartbroken.

“Runaway” features the first-ever synthesizer: the Musitron. It fits that a song of such heartache might be called the harbinger of synthpop. The nuclear love songs of the ‘60s set a fertile soil for the ‘80s, growing the lovelorn likes of The Smiths and The Cure—musicians who wrote with the moodiness of those promised a love that can't exist naturally. By propagating myths about soulmates and the mortal shame of life alone (this was also the year that Barbie bagged a boyfriend, Ken), cultural messaging in 1961 helped prop up a marriage rate that kept rising until 1972; the heart remains helpless against calls of eternity, and an entire generation was primed to act on it.

Memphis’s Sun Records played a big role in keeping the love machine running by strategically deploying Elvis, top-selling artist of this and many years to come; but Sun also cut records by Roy Orbison, an oft-overlooked dork from Texas who eschewed the masculine posturing that was aimed toward teenagers and opted instead to write truthfully about insecurity and fear. Orbison’s aching “Running Scared” is a short story in 87 words, a classic builder with a final note he belted so earnestly it’s said the orchestra stopped playing in awe. Bob Dylan wrote once of Orbison in his memoir Chronicles, Volume One:

“He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he’d start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse[...]”

Something vital could be spun from old folk songs those days in the hands of someone like Dylan, but rarely were they rewarded by the mainstream; he never did have a #1 hit (“Like a Rolling Stone” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” both called it quits at #2). Most folk songs repackaged for the charts in the early '60s were nothing more than middling bullshit strung together by corporate colonizers—well-paid appropriations like The Highwaymen’s version of 1863 slave spiritual “Michael (Row the Boat Ashore).” They made their millions before disappearing to Ivy League schools.

The ‘60s were full of these types—hobbyists looking for a quick buck from a business built on selling Black music to white audiences without having to pay the creators. Artists were often complicit by complete accident, as some teenagers from Brooklyn were with “Wimoweh,” a South African song put to record by Pete Seeger in the years just before he was blacklisted. They added some English nonsense lyrics and turned it into “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” one of the most delightfully batty songs to ever hit #1—but the song had actually been written in Johannesburg, in 1939, by Zulu singer Soloman Linda. It had even been a big hit around Africa for decades; true to form for Western pop, it wasn’t until it was looted by a world power that millions were made. Linda was left to die penniless; the family won a suit in 2006 for a settlement, but nowhere near the $1.6 million Disney made off its inclusion in The Lion King.

One label putting out Black-owned Black music was Motown in Detroit, soon to be one of the most influential labels of all time. It was this year they signed four teenage girls from Inkster, MI and wrote the bouncy "Please Mr. Postman," in which Wanda Rogers sings of checking the mailbox every day as she waits for a letter from the boy she loves “so far away.” It’s safe to guess where he might be. On December 11th—the same day wunderkind Brenda Lee turned 17—President Kennedy flew 400 U.S. personnel across the Pacific in the first American helicopters to touch down in Saigon; across another ocean, on that very same day, Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for the part he'd played in the Holocaust. Past and future wars met that day with a sinister handshake and a pat on the back.

None of the Marvelettes were pictured on the cover sleeve of their first #1 hit—Motown figured white parents weren’t ready to have their children singing a song by four Black women. It's a tale told time and again about rock ‘n’ roll in these early years, before The Beatles made it palatable to racist parents. Teenagers, their prejudices not yet materialized into assets, will always be more open to crossing social boundaries in the names of beauty and love. Art experienced when young bestows patience to an open mind. Martin Scorsese was 19 when he first heard "Please Mr. Postman" and later played it during a bar fight in his breakthrough Mean Streets, forever changing how pop music was to be used on film. Another director was 14 in 1961 when he first heard the highest-charting single of that year: Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me”; 25 years later, Rob Reiner made a film of the same name as an ode to the kindness of youth in the face of evil and death—evidence maybe the young were paying attention after all.