From the Vaults: Banned!
In the past, we have discussed songs that were banned from radio and TV broadcasts for various reasons. I have always maintained that there is no surer way to drive a record up the music charts than to give the artists a bunch of free publicity. These days, anything banned goes viral in the blink of an eye, but back in the 1960s, it took a little longer. It doesn’t really matter in which decade a song was released – if it was banned, it more than likely became a hit. In no particular order, here is a run down of 15 of those ‘verboten’ songs as compiled and distributed by Nostalgic Tunes:
Let’s start with an oldie but a goody. Ray Peterson is considered the godfather of ‘teenage tragedy songs’ for his 1960 hit song Tell Laura I Love Her (written by Jeff Barry and Ben Raleigh). The story of a stock car driving teen who is involved in a fatal wreck paved the way for a new genre of sad teen songs soon labeled as ‘teen tragedy pop’. The powers that be feared the young driver’s last words (yes, ‘Tell Laura I love her’) would cause a nation-wide epidemic of tragic teen driving deaths. What followed were songs like Leader of the Pack (Shangri-Las – 1964), Last Kiss (Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers – 1964), Ebony Eyes (The Everly Brothers – 1961), and even the Rolling Stones As Tears Go By (1965). The Stones entry was more about growing old and lonely, but no doubt, many teens thought this would be as tragic a fate as death in a car crash. Radio may not have played Peterson’s songs, but records were purchased and other songwriters sat up and took notice.
The Kingsman from the Pacific Northwest took a different path to get their garage rock anthem banned. Louie Louie was written in 1955 and released by the songwriter, Richard Barry, in 1956. This makes the Kingsman’s version a cover. They took a simple tale of a Jamaican sailor’s love and, by mumbling the lyrics, Jack Ely set off waves of speculation about exactly what they were singing about. Even the FBI got into the act and they were as mystified as the radio execs who basically said, “If we can’t understand it, it must be something dirty, so let’s ban it.” I printed out the entire set of lyrics in a past FTV about misheard lyrics and never did find a hint of anything worth banning. So why didn’t the band or songwriter clear up the confusion? What? That surely would have killed their golden goose. In spite of the ban, Louie Louie climbed to No 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains a beloved garage band cover to this day.
The next entry on our list began as a poem written by Cornell college student Leonard Lipton in 1959. When his college friend Peter Yarrow discovered it in a notebook years later, it became a No. 2 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Despite assurances by Peter, Paul and Mary that ‘Puff’ was actually Lipton’s nickname in college and ‘Dragon’ had nothing to do with marijuana, imaginative interpretations both in the United States and parts of Asia got it banned. It seems the melancholy nature of the song and the subject matter (a young boy no longer believing in his imaginary childhood dragon friend) doesn’t add up to a drug song. Released in January of 1963, Puff the Magic Dragon remains one of PP&M’s most popular classic songs to this day.
Folk singers Lead Belly, Josh White, and Bob Dylan all recorded versions of the early 20th century ballad The House of the Rising Son. It was never clear if it was being told by a woman or a man whose association with a New Orleans brothel had upended their life. In 1964, Eric Burdon and the Animals took the song all the way to No. 1 on the charts in both the U.S.A. and in the U.K.. The lyrical content was the reason it was banned by most radio stations in the states. The big issue in the United Kingdom was less about the lyrics than the length. Clocking in at four and half minutes, it was considered too long to air in the era when pop singles were supposed to only be two minutes long. Played on electric instruments like the Animals version (with a haunting organ part) or acoustically, House is still a powerful song. I distinctly remember the moving version Josh White, Jr. performed during an appearance at Northern Michigan University when the University imported artists representing many genres of music.
One of the most successful songs banned on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean was penned by P.F.Sloan. Sloan was the architect behind two of The Turtles early hits (Let Me Be (1965) and You Baby (1966)), Johnny Rivers Secret Agent Man , and The Grass Roots Where Were You When I Needed You? (both from 1966). When Barry McGuire recorded The Eve of Destruction (1965), he did it in one take as he read the lyrics off a hand printed sheet of paper. The song touched on just about every cultural even of the mid-1960s: The draft, the War in Viet Nam, racial strife, the threat of nuclear war, and the political hypocrisy of sending soldiers too young to vote off to war. The BBC banned it immediately for its potential to spread ‘despondency’ while some of the radio stations stateside accused the song of ‘aiding the enemy’ during the decidedly unpopular war. None of the bans mattered as the song went straight to No. 1. In his later years, McQuire turned from pop music to Christian music but still performed his big hit right up until his death at the age of 82 in 2024.
When the BBC banned The Who’s My Generation, it was due to their belief that Roger Dahltrey’s stuttering vocals would offend people actually affected by the condition. Public outcry soon dissolved the ban and the song rose to No. 2 on the BBC Singles Chart (the band’s highest chart entry in their home country). The song wasn’t banned outright in the USA but some stations were shy to play it, deeming the lyric’s somewhat confrontational tone and as such, it only went to No. 72 on this side of the pond. In many ways, the entire arrangement was quite different from anything else playing on the radio in late 1965. Many listeners in the United States would rediscover the song when later LPs like Tommy and Who’s Next sent them back to The Who’s earlier works.
The next entry was banned primarily in the southern United States because using the world ‘God’ in a rock song was considered blasphemy. Paul McCartney claims God Only Knows is his favorite song of all time and it has long been recognized as one of the gems off the Beach Boys Pet Sounds album of 1966. Writers Tony Asher and Brian Wilson created a lush orchestral sounding arrangement that perfectly fit the lyrics. Wilson kiddingly hinted that they could change the title to Fred Only Knows as they watched it go to No. 2 on the BBC charts and No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Fourteen year-old Janice Ian wrote Society’s Child in 1965 and it was recorded and released in 1967. Radio stations considered the topic of interracial dating to be too controversial to air the song while others claimed Ian was too young to be weighing in on the topic. Before Verve Records signed her, twenty other labels refused to record the song which would eventually win Ian a Grammy. After it appeared in a documentary, it claimed the No. 14 spot on the charts. The chart success didn’t shield Ian from getting death threats and venues she performed in from routinely receiving bomb threats. Today it is seen as a vivid reminder that ‘the good old days’ of the 1960s were not without the trials and tribulations imposed on musical artists by society’s hang ups.
The title of the Rolling Stones Let’s Spend The Night Together was enough to put censors in a spin. When it was released in January of 1967, the BBC banned it immediately on the grounds that the song’s intent was unmistakable and not fit for public broadcast. Ironically, they would later change their mind which no doubt helped the song reach No. 3 on the U.K. charts. The Stones debuted the song on the Ed Sullivan Show on January 15 but the producers made them change the offending title lyric to “Let’s spend some time together.” Mick Jagger made it a point to roll his eyes every time he sang the altered lyric which nobody watching at home could miss. The overall radio ban kept it from only reaching No. 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S.. When played on classic rock radio these days, nobody even blinks.
Even The Beatles would find themselves getting banned for the song A Day In the Life from their 1967 masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The song was the last track on the album and the BBC issued its ban in May of 1967 just ahead of the album’s release. The offending lyric “I’d love to turn you on” was the trigger point and was cited as an overt drug reference. John Lennon said it wasn’t about drugs at all, but Paul McCartney, who wrote the bridge of the song containing the offending lyric, later said there was a drug element to the song. Paul said A Day In the Life wasn’t exclusively about drugs, but the BBC would not budge from their stance. The song is often called The Beatles most artistic creation. It included an orchestral flourish at the end where all of the musicians were recorded together and instructed to take their instruments from their lowest note to their highest. The 40 second long sustained chord at the end was played by three pianos. The ban was never relaxed but the song is still highly regarded today for producer George Martin’s innovative recording techniques.
When The Doors Light My Fire came out in April of 1967, the album version was much too long to be released for radio play. The band had played the song live for quite some time before it was committed to vinyl. The song featured a long instrumental jam that the band did not want to cut but the record company overruled them. The shortened single shot up the charts and earned them an invitation to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. As they had done with the Rolling Stones, the producers wanted them to change “Girl we couldn’t get much higher” to something less provocative. The song had been No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts during the summer and by the time they were on the Sullivan show in September, there had been no objections to playing the song on the radio.
When Val Kilmer portrayed singer Jim Morrison in the movie The Doors (1991), he recreated their appearance on the Sullivan show by visibly exaggerating his facial expressions when he sang the offending line. Clips of The Doors actual performance show Morrison simply singing the song without any additional emphasis on the phrase they chose not to alter. Morrison later told the show’s producers they were so used to singing the song that way, he simply forgot to alter the lyric. In truth, the band reported there was no mechanism in place to bleep the lyrics live so they went with it even though it led to Sullivan banning them from further appearances. The Sullivan ban did not keep other TV shows from inviting The Doors to perform live.
The Beatles were back in the cross hairs in June of 1967 when the BBC banned another Sgt. Pepper’s track, Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds. The corporation maintained that the initials ‘LSD’ found in the title referred to the psychedelic drug. Certainly the imagery in the lyrics sounded suitably ‘druggy’ but Lennon always said the title came from a drawing his son Julian had made of an elementary classmate named Lucy O’Donnell. The picture he drew showed her surrounded by stars and Julian Lennon confirmed this version of the story. He had lost track of Lucy but when he learned of her illness and eventual passing in 2009, Juliean attended her funeral.
Like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones were not going to be left behind by having only one song banned. Their 1968 release of the song Street Fighting Man came during a period of time when parts of the 1960s cultural revolution spawned episodes of rioting and political violence.
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and The Rev. Martin Luther King made major city radio stations wary of playing the song for fear of fomenting more violence. Mick Jagger said he was inspired to write the song after attending an anti-war rally in London and it wasn’t about violence for the sake of violence. Rather Mich felt he was writing about being full of political energy with no clear outlet for it. Obviously, the stations that banned the song heard something else. Keith Richards noted the Billboard rank of No. 48 was an obvious result of the radio ban.
We can’t quite give The Beatles credit for a third entry on this list because The Ball and of John and Yoko was done without input from Ringo Starr and George Harrison. John Lennon wanted to get the song done and out as fast as possible so he and Paul McCartney put it together at the Abbey Road Studio and it was released in April of 1969. Though it would prove to be the last No. 1 song for ‘The Beatles’ in the United Kingdom, it caused quite a stir in the United States. Many people didn’t take kindly to Lennon comparing the trials he and Yoko Ono were undergoing (trying to get married) to the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross. The radio ban didn’t hurt record sales one bit in the UK but the song peaked at No. 8 on this side of the Atlantic. The one and only time Ray the Human Juke Box (the guitar player / vocalist) and our band Knockdown had us play it live at the NCO club at KI Sawyer Airforce Base, it became a big sing-a-long. Apparently the Air Force NCOs did not find it offensive.
I will part with the Reddit list at this point because the last song they talked about was a song I never heard of performed by an artist totally unknown to me. The first version of the song was done with actress Bridget Bardot but it was sensational enough that she refused to let the label release it for fear that its scandalous theme would hurt her film career. Add the French title and I am out of my league trying to discuss it. Instead, I will nominate Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay for my last entry.
A couple of us used to drop by the AM radio studio above the Marquette Mining Journal to chat with a college student turned DJ named Mike Burr. The station, WDMJ (the ‘D’ standing for ‘Daily’) was a typical Top 40 station and Mike was an excellent DJ who liked to show off for us by uttering obscenities when his mic was muted. After swearing a blue streak, he would key the mic and become Mr. Suave DJ. We asked what would happen if he tagged the mic by accident during one of his inappropriate dialogues: “I would be fired on the spot,” he said. “The only thing that would get me fired faster would be if I played Lay Lady Lay.”
We must have looked puzzled because he had to explain that the station’s owner put it on the ‘no play list’ which, up to that point, I never knew existed. From then on, we began taking note of other songs we liked that never got on the air. Looking back, there are things that were banned back in the day that wouldn’t even make most radio listeners blink today. Times do change and it seems that the bar for banning songs has, in many cases, gotten very low!
Top Piece Video: Oh those bad boys – this would not make Eddie happy! Please note the smirk on Robbie Krieger’s face after Morrison sang the forbidden lyric – which Krieger wrote, by the way!