It occurred to me as I was doing my homage to Pop-Music last week that I really only managed to stay in the 1960's and go nowhere else. The world of Pop-Music and hit-tunes goes back a very-very long ways to the dawn of recording.

So I thought I would give you a taste of what pre-rock n' roll Pop Music sounded like 60 years ago via Joni James.

Very much a cult figure these days (she's still singing and doing concerts at the tender age of 81), Joni James was that link between singers of the previous decade (the 1940's) and what was just around the corner in the early days of rock n' roll. A thin but sweet voice, James scored out of the starting gate with a two sided hit, of which tonight's track is the second side.

Purple Shades raced up the charts in 1952 and stuck around for a considerable period of time. Like most every Pop-music entry during this decade, it was wildly over-produced and over-arranged with seemingly hundreds of strings running up against a wall of horns. James runs the risk of being dwarfed by all the instrumental pyrotechnics but it's the simplicity of her voice that carries the tune in the end.

Needless to say, it got lots of radio and jukebox play. Yes, Jukeboxes were a major medium of musical exposure in the pre-transistor 50's and jukeboxes were just as responsible for making a hit record as the Disc Jockey was. And just to let you know we're being authentic in our excursion to the 1950's, we're playing an original 78 rpm disc of Purple Shades, not one of the many reissues available over the years.

Remember, we're talking 60 years ago. It's come a long way since.

The world of Top-40 Pop music, aside from being littered with good one-off intentions, is also littered with attempted style changes and their accompanying disastrous results.

Case in point; Jim & Jean who, in the early 60's, were one of the hottest duos on the Folk scene. Associated with such luminaries as Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Ian & Sylvia and a virtual who's who of others, they rode the crest of a very influential wave until 1968 when things up and changed and Folk music, if it wasn't steeped in struggle and protest, was regarded as quaint and out of step.

Attempting to break out and find a larger audience the thought was struck to attempt going in a Pop direction. For their third album they largely broke with the traditional fare they were known for and went in a direction that embraced Sunshine Pop, traces of Psychedelia and an occasional nod in the direction of Middle-Of-The-Road.

The end result was People World, of which tonight's post is the title track of the album. Issued in 1968 when music was rapidly leaving top-40 behind and the world of Sunshine Pop had more or less left the building a year earlier, the title-track single made it as high as 94 on the charts and then disappeared. The abrupt change in direction proved disastrous and the fallout was Jim & Jean split up, musically as well as matrimonially and the duo that had such a promising start became another one of Pop's great breakups.

Sadly, there was one reunion in 2006 but Jean Ray (the former Mrs. Glover) was ill and it would be her last performance before her death in 2007.

In the years since, Jim & Jean have been re-discovered and most of their material, including this album, have been reissued to a new audience and new popularity. History has been kinder than it was at the time, but still you have to wonder what might have happened had they not made the detour and kept with what they did best.

You could probably say that about a lot of acts.

In the 1960's endless discussions were spent laboring over the subject of The Communications Gap. An adjunct to the Generation Gap, The Communications Gap had more to do with selective hearing than it actually had to do with language skills. Case in point was the subject of music. Even in the 60's members of the mainstream were hard pressed to figure out what Rock music was. Rather than accept it as a form of popular music it was viewed as some secret society to which only a select few were privy to the myriad of ever-changing codes. The dark, mysterious and all encompassing Counterculture.

I ran across this panel discussion (more of an inquiry), originally broadcast around 1969 and rebroadcast in 1971. It featured a rather eclectic cast of characters, including Frank Zappa, L.A. Philharmonic Music Director and Conductor Zubin Mehta. Philharmonic Manager Ernest Fleischmann. Film composer David Raksin and the KPFK moderators Lew Merckelson and William Strother.

Zappa is viewed by Mehta and Fleischmann much the same way Esmeralda viewed Quasimodo - with a degree of repulsion and curiosity. Mehta is adamant in explaining that "young people don't understand counterpoint" as the reason they don't go to Classical music concerts. Zappa explains that Classical music has gone through a season of doldrums and the conservative programming in the concert hall needed more new and adventuresome pieces performed. The younger audiences were there - Zubin and Ernest were just going about finding them the wrong way. The borderline patronizing and condescending dismissal were symptomatic of what the universal problem was in all aspects of the 60's. Music was no exception.

What's interesting about this interview is that it pre-dates the L.A. Philharmonic/Mothers Of Invention concerts that eventually took place at UCLA in May of 1970 - the results being partially disastrous and part wildly successful in the first performance of 200 Motels which featured both the L.A. Philharmonic and The Mothers of Invention in what Frank referred to as "Zubin And The Jets". So obviously some groundwork was laid, no matter how tenuous.

But from a historic point of view this is an interesting panel discussion and one I don't think has been heard in 40 years. It's interesting to realize how much the whole field has changed in that time. Zappa went on to be regarded as a composer capable of not only his signature material, but also his serious material and was championed in that regard by none other than Pierre Boulez, who is also a respected composer and much loved musician (there was an attempt once, by members of the Philharmonic to draft Boulez as Music Director, but flattered, he declined).

So attitudes eventually change, but hearing how they arrive there is usually more interesting than the end results. This half hour broadcast gives you some idea of just what the atmosphere was like.