First: a disclaimer. I tried to figure out how to migrate From the Sound of It to my other website, Wellwrought, but can’t do it so I’m back here.

Why I ever thought it would be good to have a Belay Bob hosting a lyricist blog is anyone’s guess. Now that that’s out of the way..

The antecedents of rock are principally in the fifties: rock’n’roll, rockabilly, rhythm’n’blues but generic rock begins in the fabled 1960’s

Sure, you can point out all the pop and country and big bands with crooners but the foment of the sixties encapsulates much of what we take from the music. This is not to pretend that there is a sixties rock that can represent all the subgenres that began then: heavy metal, hard rock, acid rock

More tally 

This year death has barely drawn a breath
Hardly idle with our idols 
Quakes and shakes soon am I tidal
 measured end and mass incendiary

This time of engaging in gauging crime
from somewhere subhuman to somehow sublime
The devil his due
divulge and you die

Plan it and see if it's spinning through space
the grounds may confound but you still found the place
with pursed lips and pursestrings
groundbreaking discovery

You might think this a trifling peculiar considering how much I have let go through the net in terms of ‘authenticity’ but I’m going to say the above does not meet our criterion; it’s not sixties rock, it’s a poem. There were plenty of poems being written then, some even being performed on stage to muted background music, but we are attempting to encapsulate everything from the bikers to the mods, a stray Ted. We want to keep the hippies happy, prop and prepare protester fare, drag haut cauture and drug culture into the innocent mix

So if we can’t write our song that is secretly about two thousand and sixteen and pass it off as sixties, what next? Besides actually grabbing icons and images from the era and bunging them in and then, when questioned, claim that this represents the chaos and confusion, brother.

The solution is to not indulge in caged metaphor and describe some real incident or place or person, no small irony in doing that considering how much the sixties was hellbent on breaking tradition.

You Could Have Told Me 

You're the consequence of all my recompense
You're patchouli flavoured and Heaven sense
The way I had things planned
 I'd only take your hand
For one more whirl of boy meets girl
You could have told me
How I'd fall for you How I'd call to you
You could have told me
Now I see it's true I need to be with you

You're the destiny and distilled desire
Mirrored in the mire pirrhouetting to the pyre
The things I cherished then
I declared perish them
Since this better plan a woman and a man

(C)
You're the circumstance of when I circled chance
I'll never leave for love or roam for romance
I was sure of something else
Why, while I keep this to myself