Led Zeppelin - Since I’ve Been Loving You

The 1960s was one of the most dramatic and controversial decades in American history. Opinions about its achievements and failures continue to be divided between those who condemn the decade as the source of much that is wrong with contemporary America and those who hail it as the last time the nation made a concerted effort to realize its best ideals. Yet amid passionate disagreements about the significances and legacies of the 1960s, few dispute that popular music was a powerful cultural, social, and economic force in the period, or that it has played an important role in shaping how the decade has been remembered.

The Motown soul of the Temptations and Marvin Gaye; the folk revivalism of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez; the folk-rock syntheses of the Byrds; the surfing sounds of the Beach Boys; the free jazz of Archie Shepp and Ornette Coleman; the girl-group sounds of the Chiffons and Crystals; the southern-fried soul of Percy Sledge and Otis Redding; the lush Nashville countrypolitanism of Eddy Arnold and Tammy Wynette; the country-rock blends of the Flying Burrito Brothers; the progressive, psychedelic sounds of the Grateful Dead and the Doors; the self-reflective meditations of singer-songwriters James Taylor and Laura Nyro; the daring blues-rock-jazz blend of Jimi Hendrix; the pioneering funk of James Brown; the garage rock of the Standells and Seeds; and the avant-garde noisescapes of Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground, these and many other styles and artists can be fun and effective vehicles for helping students explore the complexities and ambiguities of this pivotal decade.

Hello Dolly!, and Mary Poppins—not necessarily what one thinks of as quintessential expressions of the turbulent 1960s. In the early 1960s, however, adults dominated the market for albums while singles were the main currency for the pop, rock, and soul styles with the greatest youth appeal. Yet even later in the decade, albums by the Monkees and Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Sound of Brass far outsold the debut albums by Big Brother and the Holding Company, Velvet Underground, Love, and Jefferson Airplane that we conventionally think of as far more redolent of the mood and preoccupations of late 1960s America.

The underlying point here is an obvious but important one: we need to be careful to acknowledge and be prepared to take seriously the sheer range of popular music that struck a chord with different audiences during the 1960s. Indeed, talking about that diversity reminds students that—sex, drugs, and rock and roll clichés aside—there was no single experience of the 1960s shared by all Americans. In a decade characterized by deep social tensions, it should not surprise us that there were important generational, racial, gender, class, regional, and ideological differences among performers and audiences, and within the entertainment industry itself.
Source: What’s That Sound? Teaching the 1960s through Popular Music by Brian Ward

Led Zeppelin - Since I’ve Been Loving You

• On the album Led Zeppelin III.
• Released 5 October 1970

"Jimmy Page did his guitar solo in one take. Engineer Terry Manning called it "The best rock guitar solo of all time." The song was recorded live in the studio with very little overdubbing. If you listen carefully, you can hear the squeak of John Bonham's drum pedal."

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