Musical Musings: Real Time 1960s

Something a little different – for this edition of Musical Musings I’m joined by Joe Rubenstein, the man behind Real Time 1960s — a project that does something wonderfully simple and completely mad. Every day, Joe reports the 1960s exactly sixty years to the day after they happened: podcasts, news bulletins, a daily timeline, video, the lot. So while we’re living through August 2026, Joe’s audience is living through August 1966, with no more idea of what’s coming next week than anyone reading a newspaper at the time had. A composer and producer based in New York, and a graduate of Amherst and the Yale School of Music, Joe came to this from documentary and educational film-making, and the sheer volume of what he’s built is staggering. We talk about how he gathers the material, how far ahead he works, and what he does when two perfectly respectable sources flatly contradict each other — because they do, constantly. We also get into the discipline at the heart of it: whether he lets himself peek ahead, or genuinely stays inside 1966 and lets the story land the way it landed then. (And yes, we discuss the news-reading voice. It’s a good one.)

Between all that, Joe picks the music, and his 1966 is a proper cross-section of a year when pop stopped being simply pop. We open with The Beach Boys‘ “God Only Knows” and Donovan‘s “Sunshine Superman”, then the sitar and tabla of The Beatles‘ “Love You To” — from Revolver, barely a fortnight old in Joe’s world — and the sunlit, slightly suspicious jangle of The Association‘s “Along Comes Mary”. After that it darkens: The Byrds turn a centuries-old ballad into folk-rock with “John Riley”, and The Rolling Stones hand out “Mother’s Little Helper”. We finish with Simon and Garfunkel‘s “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and Buffalo Springfield‘s “For What It’s Worth” — two records that sit a few months further down the road than the rest, and which point squarely at where the decade is heading. In between, Joe talks about the enormous stories nobody remembers now, the moments when the culture shifts and nobody in the room notices, and how different 1966 feels from 1960 — the mood, the unease, the first real stirrings of unrest. It’s an hour that will change how you read this week’s headlines.

We encourage all listeners to follow the Real Time 1960s project, and even better support Joe’s hard work. You can do this at their website at https://www.realtime1960s.com.

Broadcast 2 September 2026