Daniel Levitin (born December 27, 1957, San Francisco) is an American cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, best-selling author, musician, and record producer. Levitin is best known for three #1 best-selling books, This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, and The Organized Mind. He is also known for scientific articles on absolute pitch, music cognition and neuroscience. Levitin worked as a producer and sound designer on albums by Blue Öyster Cult, Chris Isaak, Jonathan Richman, and Joe Satriani among others; as a consultant on albums by artists including Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder and Michael Brook; and as a recording engineer for Santana and The Grateful Dead. Records and CDs to which he has contributed have sold in excess of 30 million copies. (More from Wikipedia)
Now, of all of the songs that Greg Shaw could have used to name and then subtitle his magazine Who Put the Bomp, two of them came out in 1963, and the other in 1964, though that one could just as easily have been made in 1963. Why 1963? Greg Shaw was 14 in 1963; and, according to neuroscientist and author Daniel Levitin in his book, This is Your Brain on Music, this is when the brain is most susceptible to the influence of music. As quoted in Bomp 2, Levitin writes: “Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged.”
Many years later, Greg Shaw wrote in 2001: “One of my favorite phases of 60’s garage was 1963, when nobody had ever heard of England, and songs like ‘Louie Louie’ [by the Kingsmen] and ‘Surfin’ Bird’ [by the Trashmen] were drawing on 50’s R&B to create something new.”
(May 2013)
