Favorite Songs of 1968

1968 was a peculiar year for me in music. At the time, I was 11-12 years old and had much different musical tastes back then than I do now. So many of the songs from that year that are now among my favorites were then among my least favorites! But I’m reviewing the years AS I LIVED THROUGH THEM, so my list of favorite tunes may seem a bit patchy.

1968 was the year of the long song, with hits like Hey Jude (by the Beatles), MacArthur Park (by Richard Harris), Time Has Come Today (by the Chamber Brothers), and Sky Pilot (by Eric Burdon and the Animals) taking up huge swaths of time on radio play (I liked all of them). It was also a year of national tragedy, marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Dion memorialized these two within his touching Abraham, Martin, and John. The Rascals summed up the social climate of the country with their People Got to be Free. Judy Collins’s Both Sides Now, which I called “Clouds” back then, has only grown in stature with me over the years. Mechanical World (by Spirit) and Journey to the Center of the Mind (by Ted Nugent) were two of the better hard rockers. Mighty Quinn, by Manfred Mann, was my #3 song back in ‘68. It was one of those tunes whose lyrics kept gnawing at me and wouldn’t go away. My #2 favorite song of that year was an example in the recording business of “phasing gone wild”: the psychedelic Pictures of Matchstick Men by the Status Quo. And my top favorite song of 1968? A long instrumental piece, dominated by the keyboard, whose title and artist escaped me all the way into the late 1990s, when a coworker told me that he had heard it while driving through Georgia; the radio announcer identified it as America, by Keith Emerson (of later Emerson Lake and Palmer fame) and the Nice. America was an inspired rock adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s America (from West Side Story) and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. But back in 1968, I knew nothing of this. I just thought that it was the coolest thing I had heard in a very long time! And I still like it a lot.