Some Underrated 60s Artists to Check Out

The decade that saw Bob Dylan, The Beatles, John Coltrane, and Otis Redding at the height of their powers speaks for itself. I can’t tell you anything new about those guys, but I can tell you about some of the ’60s musicians you might have missed. Let’s check them out.

Scott Walker

A former member of teen pop sensations The Walker Brothers, Scott Walker broke onto his own in the late 60s and became the musicians’ favorite musician, influencing everybody from David Bowie to Radiohead.

Over a series of four albums named after himself, Walker created a hypnotic, dreamlike style, as if Sinatra sang in a David Lynch film.

My favorite Scott Walker song is “World’s Strongest Man” from Scott 4. The melody perfectly showcases his smooth baritone.

A close second is the Scott 3 opening track, “It’s Raining Today”, a melancholy ballad made creepy by piercing and ominous strings.

Walker went on to fully lean into the avant-garde in his later career, but his in-between work is fondly remembered.

Jim Sullivan

In 1969, Jim Sullivan appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, with the release of his debut album U.F.O. On this album, Sullivan emerged as a competent songwriter with a mix of rock, psychedelia, country, and folk.

But the most baffling aspect of Jim Sullivan’s music is his lyrics. Jim has a singular focus on the transient and extraterrestrial, with nearly all of the songs about someone coming down from the sky or disappearing. On the title track “U.F.O,” he sings:

I’m checking out the show

With a glassy eye

Looking at the sun dancing through the sky

Did he come by U.F.O?

The question raised in that lyric was asked again when, six years later, Jim went on a road trip to his hometown of Nashville and was never seen or heard from again.

Mal Waldron

Jazz pianist Mal Waldron was already well into his career by the 1960s. He’d gotten big in the late 50s playing with Charles Mingus. His flowy, lyrical style made him a popular sideman, and he spent years as Billie Holiday’s favored accompanist.

All of that changed in 1963, when Waldron suffered a mental health crisis, understood then as a nervous breakdown. One of the results of this was that the 38-year-old forgot how to play his instrument. He even forgot what his own playing sounded like. He studied his recordings but failed to recreate his sound.

Waldron did learn to play again, but he was a sadder, wiser man. His style changed drastically, with angular, blocky chords, minimalist composition, and a heavy heap of gutbucket blues.

All of this is heard on Waldron’s seminal 1966 comeback album All Alone. The opening title track combines jazz with classical piano sounds. “If You Think I’m Licked” features repetitive minor key chords and blues lines, which sound shockingly a lot like the sort of music that would become popular in videogames.

The Sonics

Though rock got more complicated throughout the 60s, smaller bands like The Stooges, The Velvet Underground, and MC5 kept the wild spirit alive and lit the flames of punk rock.

The Sonics beat them all to the punch. Their debut album, Here Are the Sonics, features eight hard-hitting reworkings of rock soul tunes. But it’s the four originals, “The Witch”, “Boss Hoss”, “Psycho”, and Strychnine” that let their aggression shine. The songs feature repetitive power chords and singer Gerry Roslie screaming so loudly that he’s blowing out the microphone, which acts as a primitive distortion effect.

Bettye Swann

In an era where many woman soul singers like Dionne Warwick, Tina Turner, and Gladys Knight were having their biggest hits with songs written by men, the Louisiana-born Bettye Swann wrote her own greatest hit “Make Me Yours” in 1966.

It’s the self-titled compilation of her works from the late 60s (assembled in 2004) that contains her best work. The self-penned rock-and-soul “I’m Lonely For You” and “Closed For the Season”, her Otis Redding-esque cover of “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye”, and doo-wop classic “Little Things Mean a Lot” stand out in particular.

Swann had a few more hits in the 70s and continued to perform. In 1980, at the age of 36, she retired from music, changed her name to Betty Barton, worked as a schoolteacher, and became a Jehovah’s Witness.

Her music has a newfound popularity on Spotify, after several remixes, samplings, re-releases, and the use of her songs in TV shows and Volvo commercials.

The world of streaming is hard on artists, but one thing’s for sure — it makes it way easier to find some underrated gems.

-Christian Flynn

Photo: Scott Walker, 1968 (License Afbeeldingen Beeld en Geluidwiki)