In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  Folk Music in Psychedelic Times

  Even though Dylan’s adaptation of rock and roll had made a lot of the folk scene seem passé, some singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitars still found a way to be a part of the 1967 zeitgeist.

  It is hard to imagine Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” having made much impact either five years earlier or five years later, but when I first heard it live in the studio on Radio Unnameable on February 27, 1967, I was entranced. My Fieldston classmate Paz Cohen lived across the street from the WBAI studios on East 39th Street and volunteered there, and I could actually hear her laughing in the background. The song immediately became a huge favorite of WBAI’s audience. Laura Rosenberg, another Fieldstonite, hung out at WBAI too, and it was where she fell in love with weekend late-night host Steve Post, whom she eventually married. Laura recalls, “For most of the year, WBAI had ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ to themselves and it was a huge help in the fundraising marathons. They’d promise to play it when $10,000 in total pledges came in and the phones would light up.”

  By the end of 1967, Reprise Records had signed Guthrie and released his debut album, ending WBAI’s monopoly on the song but mainstreaming it to underground rock stations and record stores around the country. Alice’s Restaurant was the first album reviewed in the first issue of Rolling Stone in November. Written by Wenner, the review ended with a salute to Guthrie: “It’s his first album and it is, without qualification, excellent.” The album made such an impact that Arthur Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde was one of the big countercultural film hits of 1967, agreed to direct a movie of Alice’s Restaurant (not a music video, but a full-length feature film), starring Guthrie, which United Artists released in 1969.

  Arlo, the son of Woody Guthrie, was twenty years old at the time, and the album’s title song is best remembered for presenting a satiric approach to avoiding the military draft. The verses are spoken, the chorus is sung, and it’s a sardonic, laid-back, shaggy-dog story that conveys the hip sensibility of the moment. To listen to Arlo describe loading garbage into a Volkswagen microbus was to think you had made a new friend who would just as soon smoke a joint with you as perform. It’s not until almost eight minutes in that Guthrie reveals the song is actually political. Yet by the end, antiwar sentiment is vivid and the message is clear—do whatever you need to do to avoid the war.

  In 1967, Phil Ochs left Elektra Records to sign with A&M Records in the hopes of greater commercial success. By all accounts, Ochs was jealous of Bob Dylan and thought a label change would help. The resulting album, Pleasures of the Harbor, did not achieve Ochs’s commercial dreams, but it contained four of his best songs: the title song, “Flower Lady,” “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” and “Crucifixion,” which was, in part, an elegy to President Kennedy. Ochs was arguably the most reliable attendee of antiwar protests and other left-wing concerts of anyone in the folk or rock worlds. “There is no way to overstate the importance of Phil Ochs to the movement,” says Cora Weiss.

  Judy Collins made a major contribution to musical culture in the late sixties by introducing two songwriters whose work would resonate for many decades. She was the first to record Leonard Cohen’s songs “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” on her 1966 album In My Life. On her 1967 album Wildflowers, Collins sang Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” As a result of this attention, Cohen was signed by Columbia Records and released Songs of Leonard Cohen later in 1967. On Wildflowers, Collins also made the first recording of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” which became a hit and also led to Mitchell’s first album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968.

  Joan Baez released the album Joan in 1967, but her impact was greater that year as an activist. A pacifist since her teenage years, her ideas were influenced by Thoreau, Gandhi, and A.J. Muste. Baez had established the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in 1965 with philosopher Ira Sandperl. The previous year at Berkeley, she had sung to support the Free Speech Movement and refused to pay the estimated 60 percent of her taxes that would go to the Defense Department, saying, “I do not believe in war.”

  Baez was close to Dr. King and appeared in the South whenever asked in connection with protests. Like Mahalia Jackson, she was often asked by King’s aides to privately lift his spirits with a song. She performed “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington in 1963, and was among the few who encouraged King to oppose the Vietnam War. Baez was arrested as part of Stop the Draft week in Oakland in October 1967. While she was serving her thirty-day sentence at the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center, King and Andrew Young visited her. So did antidraft activist David Harris, whom she would marry in March 1968. (At the Woodstock Festival in 1969, Baez performed pregnant with Harris’s child while he was in jail for draft evasion.)

  One day in the spring of 1967, a bunch of Fieldston heads were sitting in a circle in Central Park playing a stoned kissing game when Baez and a guy walked by, then sat down and played with us for a few minutes. She actually kissed me on the cheek. We didn’t even make a big deal about it afterward.

  Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding featured another reinvention of his sound and a return to more acoustic instruments, albeit with a Nashville production, after having released three albums in the previous two years, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. In May 1967, the documentary Don’t Look Back was released, which followed Dylan on tour in England the previous year and further enhanced the singer-songwriter’s mythic status. There is no way to overstate Dylan’s influence on other artists or on my generation. We all quoted his lyrics: acidheads, political radicals, mainstream liberals, and fans of folk, rock, and poetry. Like millions of people, I was more affected by Dylan’s work than that of any other artist. I just can’t think of anything new to say about him.

  London

  Notwithstanding the cultural power of British rock and fashion, it was an American who brought the hippie idea most fully to the London music scene in 1967. Joe Boyd was a native of Boston and a sound engineer who had worked for the Newport Folk Festival (he was in charge of the sound when Dylan went electric in 1965). Boyd moved to London, originally to work for Elektra Records, and produced the Incredible String Band’s first album, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, a hippie classic.

  At twenty-five years old, Boyd was tuned into London’s growing psychedelic scene. One of his closest friends was John “Hoppy” Hopkins, who by the sixties was a trendy photographer. Earlier in his life, Hopkins had been a nuclear technician who quit his job because he believed in disarmament. He also loved LSD. The two of them somehow got the wherewithal to open a club called UFO. UFO became the center of a psychedelic explosion in London that compressed into nine months the arc of discovery, creativity, popularity, and implosion that took two years in Haight-Ashbury.

  UFO opened its doors on Friday, December 23, 1966, at ten thirty at night, and didn’t close until six the following morning. Pink Floyd was a quasi house band there, performing dozens of times. Careers launched at UFO include the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and the Soft Machine. Procol Harum played at UFO in 1967 on the night “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was released.

  Emulating the Fillmore, UFO featured light shows and advertised their concerts with psychedelic silkscreened posters. After the bands played, the club showed popular movies, most frequently samurai films directed by Akira Kurosawa or black-and-white American comedies starring W.C. Fields. UFO also hosted the British premiere of New York’s avant-garde director Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Yoko Ono was a frequent attendee and populated her film Bottoms with UFO patrons.

  Nigel Grainge, who would go on to start Ensign Records and sign Sinead O’Connor and Thin Lizzy among others, was in his early twenties and went to UFO weekly. His favorite band was Tomorrow. Although they never made it to America, Tomorrow epitomized the London psychedelic scene. Their most beloved song was “My White Bicycle,” an homage to the bikes that the city o
f Amsterdam made available for free to its citizens and visitors. Boyd says, “The sixties . . . peaked just before dawn on July 1, 1967, during a set by Tomorrow.” He called his memoir of the sixties White Bicycles.

  In the book, Boyd wrote,

  An atmosphere of agape was pervasive in 1967; people were fundamentally quite nice to each other. Most hippies pitied rather than hated the straights. I suppose it helped that we were stoned much of the time. What London witnessed in the spring of ’67 was more than an endorsement of a new musical style, it was mass immersion in the subculture that gave rise to it.

  In another parallel with San Francisco, there were tensions between those who were primarily into psychedelia, art, and music, and radicals whose emotional connection was more political. The club allowed just about any leftist group to pass out information about rallies and bail funds, but Boyd kept a strong hand on the music. The hippies never developed the rapport with local skinheads the way the Diggers had with the Hells Angels, and when some long-haired patrons were beaten up, Boyd asked Michael X, a leader of London’s black nationalists, to provide “security.” The sight of black men in berets and karate poses deterred the skinheads from causing any other incidents.

  John Lennon played a test pressing of the soon-to-be-released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at UFO, and Jimi Hendrix hung out there when he returned to London. Boyd recalls booking the band the Move, who he loved, but who attracted a different crowd of “weekend hippies.” He laments, “There was no stopping the juggernaut. The underground was becoming the mainstream. Kaftans and beads were everywhere.” So was the press. The reactionary tabloid News of the World published a front-page piece about teenage girls going topless at UFO and the landlord of the building evicting the club. Boyd tried relocating to the much bigger Roundhouse venue but the economics didn’t work with the higher security and rental costs, so UFO was gone by the end of September.

  The Rolling Stones’ year revolved largely around their drug bust. Andrew Loog Oldham produced a tongue-in-cheek Stones single, “We Love You,” which starts with the sound of jail doors clanking, and features Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney harmonizing to indicate solidarity.

  Another London band, the Moody Blues, were never a critic’s favorite and never played UFO. Grainge, for example, considered them a pop band with one hit, “Go Now,” to their name, and that had come out in 1965. Yet in 1967 they reinvented themselves and released one of rock’s few concept albums of that era, Days of Future Passed, which had the hit “Nights in White Satin (The Night).” The next year, the Moody Blues released In Search of the Lost Chord, and lest there was any doubt that they had become acidheads, the album included the song “Legend of a Mind,” the chorus of which repeats the phrase “Timothy Leary’s dead,” referencing the death of Leary’s ego while also being a tribute to his vision.

  Not Necessarily Stoned

  There were at least two major rock artists who were publicly antidrug in 1967. Donovan was one of the most popular and influential musicians with hippies in 1967, having released the aforementioned Mellow Yellow, and not long before that, Sunshine Superman, which to me stands as one of the definitive albums of the sixties. The title song was Donovan’s electric departure from the folk acoustic sound, and the backup musicians included future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. The album features “Season of the Witch,” a prophetic classic about the impending collapse of hippie idealism—“Beatniks are out to make it rich / Oh no, must be the season of the witch.”

  In 1966, Donovan had been the first British rock star to be arrested for pot. By the time his double album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden came out at the end of 1967, Donovan, having just turned twenty-one, was into meditation and had changed his attitude toward drugs. He included these words in the liner notes:

  Must you lay down your fate to the Lord High Alchemy in the hands of the Chalk and the Drug? Magic circles he will spin and dirges he will sing through the transparency of a Queen Ant’s Wing. Yes, I call upon every youth to stop the use of all Drugs and heed the Quest to seek the Sun.

  Frank Zappa exploded onto the Los Angeles scene in 1966 at the age of twenty-five when his group, the Mothers of Invention, released the album Freak Out. The liner notes explained the title as “a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricted standards of thinking.” Zappa elaborated: “Less perceptive individuals have referred to us who have chosen this way of thinking and FEELING as ‘Freaks,’ hence the term: Freaking Out.”

  Zappa’s vision was a unique mind-bending amalgam of influences that ranged from doo-wop to jazz to classical music. (Zappa had originally aspired to be a classical composer in the footsteps of his idols Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern.) His lyrics were fiercely critical of “plastic” America, such as, “Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach . . . all the corny tricks you’ve tried will not forestall the rising tide of hungry freaks, Daddy.”

  In the summer of 1967, the Mothers did an extended run in New York at the Garrick Theatre, and at one performance Zappa invited several marines who were in the audience onto the stage to help dismember some dolls, a reference to civilian deaths in Vietnam. One of Zappa’s first press photos showed him sitting on a toilet.

  And yet Zappa was vocally antidrug. He told Elliot Mintz, “Freaking out is not just dancing and looking freaky. It’s being aware of all the forces suppressing free speech, free exchange of ideas, and doing something about it . . . Stop taking dope and get out there and do something about your environment.” Zappa never took LSD and said, “Try awareness without acid. [You] might find that it lasts longer.”

  Hollywood

  Of course, Los Angeles was not only the home of Lou Adler, the Doors, the Byrds, and Frank Zappa. It was also the center of the film and television industries in the United States, and in 1967 Hollywood was a little out of sync with hip culture, although young artists like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson would soon catch up.

  The closest thing to a bridge was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a prime-time show on CBS. Tom and Dick Smothers had a comedy folk act in which they played acoustic guitars and sang in the style of early-sixties folk groups, interrupting themselves with offbeat humor.

  Like the members of the Monkees, Tom and Dick Smothers were personally fascinated with the counterculture and wanted in—but unlike the Monkees, they controlled their own show. The Smothers Brothers invited guests such as Joan Baez, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, Steppenwolf, the Doors, and Pete Seeger, who performed “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” his antiwar song that referred to President Johnson as “the big fool.” The song was initially censored by CBS, but after fierce protest from Tom Smothers, it was aired on a subsequent broadcast. Given that Seeger had been blacklisted for years from all of the networks, this was a big deal.

  The show was canceled in 1969 after the network received too many complaints about its antiestablishment attitudes, but the Smothers Brothers had succeeded in gaining the respect of the hip community. Jimi Hendrix dedicated the song “I Don’t Live Today” to the Smothers Brothers at the Los Angeles Forum, and Tom Smothers was among the small group that John and Yoko invited to play guitar on the recording of “Give Peace a Chance” in Montreal in 1969. (The other prominent invited guest was Timothy Leary, who sang backing vocals.)

  Hollywood was still producing prehippie intellectual films such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Man for All Seasons, which dominated the Oscars in 1967. The closest connectivity between Hollywood and the counterculture was Bonnie and Clyde, which starred Warren Beatty as one of the first mass-appeal antiheroes. The film was the subject of fierce debate between the old and new American cultures. The New York Times gave it a terrible review, almost killing its success until Pauline Kael wrote a rave for the New Yorker, after which it found such a large counterculture audience that it was celebrated on the cover of Time in December 1967. Perhaps the biggest American
movie star was Sidney Poitier, who had won the Academy Award for his performance in Lilies of the Field in 1964; Poitier became the first black man to be so recognized. In 1967 he played a leading role in three blockbusters: To Sir, With Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The latter was the first Hollywood movie about an interracial romance. Many young people, both black and white, found it saccharine and paternalistic, but it reached the older generations in a way that rock and roll and soul music never could.

  For the moment, European films were generally more in touch with the counterculture. Among those that appealed to heads were Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend and Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which was nominated for Oscars for directing and writing in 1967. (Blow-Up has a scene in which the Yardbirds, who then included future superstars Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, imitated the destruction of an electric guitar, which in real life was a regular shtick of the Who’s Peter Townshend.) British cinema produced three films with classic antiheroes: Alfie, starring the young Michael Caine; Morgan, starring David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave; and Petulia (directed by Richard Lester of A Hard Day’s Night fame), which included brief appearances by both Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead.

  The Beatles

  In the three years since they had been introduced to most of their American fans on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles had dominated the pop charts, released six albums and two movies, and evolved from a pop group to a global cultural force, in part by embracing hippie culture.

  The Beatles’ new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, was released on June 1, 1967. Rolling Stone’s Langdon Winner later wrote, “The closest Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released.” I have nothing to add to the thousands who have analyzed the album’s music, but as the Fab Four were by far the most beloved and famous people among baby boomers, it is worth noting a few of the ways that they intersected with the culture of 1967.