Free Republic

ROUND 3 OF THE '60S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 2 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. (SUPER BOWL SUNDAY!) 32 songs, 16 pairs, 16 winners! Vote for your favorite in each pair shown. No reply, no vote. (You may abstain from any pairs but please don't overdo it! No onesies, please.) Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end the following Monday. Format: Billboard rank/seed - year - song title - act

ROUND 2 of the greatest hits of the '60s begins! Due date: Sunday, Jan 26 @6:00 pm (Eastern) This Round takes the top 6 songs of each year of the '60s per BILLBOARD, and pairs them in play-off brackets, along with the best 4 #7s as voted in Round 1 (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3807574/posts)

OK, FREEPERS, LET'S START THIS CONTEST FOR THE GREATEST SONG OF THE '60S. The baseline for the contest is the top 7 hits of each year of the '60s, as compiled by BILLBOARD. This is NOT based on personal preferences, biases, prejudices, or counter-culture fringe-element reactivity. Round 1 is listing candidate songs in order of preference. (The remaining rounds are handled as play-off brackets, starting with 32 pairs of songs to compare.) ROUND 1 We begin by using the #7 songs of each year and paring them from 10 songs to 4 (to set up play-off brackets for the rest...

Who wants to participate in a music play-off bracket-type poll for best songs of the '70s? 2 and 5 years ago I ran "tournaments" to pick the best songs of the '70s and '80s, based on Billboard rankings, so only the best of the best were included! You can view how this played out here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3249477/posts http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3635562/posts I want to do that for the '60s, and some posters expressed interest in the '60s back then.

The last time the unemployment rate was this low, the Beatles were still together. Woodstock was right around the corner. There was a new President named Richard Nixon and Donald Trump was just a recent college grad. That's how long it's been. The unemployment rate was at or under 4%, as it is now, from December of 1965 until January of 1970, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was a pivotal time in US history -- but now it is not remembered for the unemployment rate. They were not quiet years. Those were the years...

Peter Tork, a blues and folk musician who became a teeny-bopper sensation as a member of the Monkees, the wisecracking, made-for-TV pop group that imitated and briefly outsold the Beatles, died Feb. 21. He was 77. His death was confirmed by his sister Anne Thorkelson, who did not say where or how he died. Mr. Tork was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare cancer affecting his tongue, in 2009. If the Monkees were a manufactured version of the Beatles, a “prefab four” who auditioned for a rock-and-roll sitcom and were selected more for their long-haired good looks than their...

Most of the interviewees talk in the lugubrious tones of the defeated. We all know the story ends badly. But when it’s over, we aren’t told why we lost. The music is more memorable than the pictures, and the pictures are more compelling than the narration. We are deluged by sights and sounds but not enlightened as to cause and effect. The film casts the antiwar movement in a moderately favorable light. Are the protesters the real heroes here? What about the valiant US soldiers, 75 percent of whom were volunteers?

Milt Moss, a comic actor who delivered the rueful catchphrase “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing” in a memorable commercial for Alka-Seltzer in 1972, died on Sept. 26 in Manhattan. He was 93.

A feel-good song.

http://www.anderson-auction.com/lbj-no-more-ugly-children-lot94012.aspx How well the media controls history!

Sale of late ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ star’s belongings draws crowd to Denham Springs auction house Advocate staff photo by TRAVIS SPRADLING -- Geismar's Lisa Stevens, a childhood fan of the television show 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' looks over a rack of coats and dresses that belonged to the late Donna Douglas, who played Elly May Clampett on the series, before estate items that belonged to Douglas were auctioned off Saturday at Southern Heirs Auction Company in Denham Springs. The dark coat, foreground, was the only item at the auction known to be used in the series; it was given to Elly May...

Just ads and pictures mostly from the 50's and 60's.

Full Album Here

A native Washingtonian who played drums for some of the greatest singers in history needs a prosthetic leg to play the way he used to play. Woody Woodson lives in the same Northeast home he’s been in for more than 50 years, most of which he spent playing for artists like the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes and Steve Wonder. He spent years on the road with Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye. One of the biggest hits he collaborated on was the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing.” Grammy-winning musician Steve Jordan, who plays for Eric Clapton and...

"The Kinks an English rock band formed in Muswell Hill, North London, by brothers Dave Davies and Ray Davies in 1963. The Kinks, who rose to fame during the mid-1960s and were part of the British Invasion of the US, are recognised as one of the most important and influential rock groups of the era....." .....;

WASHINGTON — The historic blunders of President Barack Obama’s embarrassing healthcare rollout demonstrate spectacularly the utter failure of what? Let me tell you. They are the blunders of what was once called the “Brightest Generation” in American history, the 1960s generation. It did not start with Obama. His blunders were just a continuance of their blunders. By the 1960s generation I mean the pot-smoking, war-protesting, guitar-strumming kids of the left—not the majority from the 1960s generation, not the silent majority, but the minority. They were the miracle workers in politics: Jean-François Kerry, the Clintons, Al Gore, Joe Biden, and all...

The far left has attempted to portray their elderly hero, Frances Fox Piven, as a lonely shut-in who spends her time knitting mittens and eating Werther’s Originals in her New York apartment. But the truth is that age has not dampened Piven’s appetite for radical socialist political activities.Piven, an academic who is still on the board of ACORN-partner Project Vote, has announced that she will be co-hosting a 1960s-style “teach-in” April 5th, and she’s bringing in some heavy hitters.The national event, which will be simulcast, will also feature fellow socialist professor Cornel West and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.  SEIU is...

But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture...

Groundhog Day: The 60s Melissa Barnhart, April 2, 2010 In his book, Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Regan to George W. Bush, Bernard von Bothmer, a professor of American history at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University of California, “examines the ways in which four presidents [Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush] used their own selective versions of the 1960s for political gain in the years from 1980 to 2004. It focuses on their conscious manipulation of five topics: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Vietnam...