Sounds of The City Experience

Various Artists - The Bakersfield Sound - Country Music Capital Of The West 1940-1974 (2019) {10CD Set Bear Family BCD16036}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 3.90 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 1.68 Gb
Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 83 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1940-74, 2019 Bear Family Records | BCD 16036
Country / Traditional Country / Bakersfield Sound / Honky Tonk

Buck Owens turned Bakersfield, California into the epicenter of hip country music in the mid-'60s. All it took was a remarkable streak of number one singles that steam rolled right through Nashville with their electrified twang, forever changing the notion of what constituted country music and codifying the Bakersfield sound as hard-driving rhythms, trebly Telecasters, and lean arrangements suited for honky tonks, beer joints, and jukeboxes all across America. Half-a-century later, these remain sonic signifiers of Bakersfield, so the term no longer conveys a specific sound, place, and era, a situation the weighty Bear Family box The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital of the West 1940-1974 intends to rectify.

After a few years of outdoing the Rolling Stones at their own game, Messrs. May and Co., clearly affected by their love of swinging London nightlife and all that went with it, injected their primal R&B roots with added spice (as Mike Stax, "numero uno Los Pretty Things fan," points out in his excellent liner notes). "Can't Stand the Pain" (from the 1965 Get The Picture album) has "a remarkably effective mood with a sense of a dreamy disembodiment that foreshadows what was yet to come with the arrival of psychedelia." By April 1966, B-side "LSD," yet another controversial shot in the Pretty Things' canon, helped pioneer the "freakbeat" sound, whilst the media's attacks on the Pretties slack, druggy values were foremost to the changing times - in fact, the record was a play on words about the English economy and not a celebration of the merits of LSD usage…