When mainstream and counterculture forces sneered at each other across the barricades, Trini Lopez brought them together in a big, sunny hug. With the phenomenal success of his live version of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” in pre-Beatles 1962, Lopez’s career took off and, although never a huge singles artist thereafter, his thematic series of albums ( The Latin Album, The Folk Album, The Love Album) sold in the millions, and he became a familiar face on TV and in movies throughout the ‘60s as well as a popular live artist until his death from Covid-19 last year. After a few years of obscurity playing rock ‘n’ roll (he was even considered as singer for The Crickets after Buddy Holly’s death), he segued into folk music and, while playing club dates in Hollywood, was recruited by Frank Sinatra for his Reprise label. Only a very few of those transcend novelty appeal Trini Lopez’s The Whole Enchilada is one of them.Īlthough he was only three years older than John Lennon, singer and guitarist Lopez definitely belonged to the previous generation, audience-wise. Many such artists to ignore it, but for some, the music they made in response stands as a strange, vibrant blip in the tasteful pastel shades of their discographies. That was two years during which even the old guard, who had been the pop stars for a generation but had now been relegated to “easy listening” artists, could smell that there was something in the air. In September ’69, in the aftermath of the summer of Woodstock and Manson, the first episode of Scooby-Doo, which combined both the goofiness and sinister undertones that the adult world saw in hippie culture, like, hit the screens and in the long hangover of the Summer of Love, as hippie burnout Danny says in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, they were selling Beatle wigs in Woolworths. In 1968, “The Monkees” TV show – which had channeled the same Pop Art zeitgeist as the 1966 “Batman” show as well as the pop music of the Beatles – was cancelled, and the group – as by now it had evolved from its manufactured origins – released their unabashedly psychedelic movie Head. Yet that still left two years for its spirit to seep into the mainstream, and it manifested itself in many and varied ways. Popular history dictates that the hippie dream really took flight in 1967 with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Summer of Love and peaked in August ’69 at Woodstock, but was killed that same year by a combination of the Manson murders (which actually took place a few days before Woodstock, but that’s mythology for you), the Stooges debut album (ditto, although its shock waves took a while to spread) and the final blow of the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway that December.

Candy store prophets