Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Equating drugs with psychedelia was simplistic and restrictive, however. What the psychedelic experience approached – and, for some people, drugs could hasten – was a state of deeper and more truthful perception; an openness to possibility; a rejection of fear, and authority; a surrender to freedom, to pleasure, to understanding, to love. All of these elements were crucial to the state of mind known (in shorthand) as ‘the Sixties’: the hippie ethos, visible on the streets of San Francisco, at gatherings in Golden Gate Park or at the first rock festivals, and across the cities and communes of the world. Vintage newsreels suggest that a state of universal oneness existed amongst young people during this halcyon age, although only a tiny minority of teenagers and post-teens took an active part in the surreal, bead-laden, trip-taking, flower-wearing hippie experience. But the soundtrack of that lifestyle was available to all.

  Not that it was any more unified than its audience. There were certain artists, such as the Beatles and the Doors, whose music reached right across the youth spectrum in the late 1960s. But they were the exceptions. Some music evoked the institution of ‘Hippie’, with its rejection of adulthood and the bourgeois lifestyle (although most of its members were actually from bourgeois backgrounds). There was music that favoured ornamentation, cultural sampling, a leaning towards art – pop art, or collage, or a throwback to the baroque. Another strand prioritised the anxiety and repression of adolescence: turbulent, angry, nonconformist. And another placed politics above the psychedelic experience, believing that there could be no freedom for the individual without liberation for the oppressed: the Vietnamese, black Americans, eventually even women and homosexuals, although neither of those categories was uppermost in the concerns of the average rock star of the 1960s.

  Few artists of note restricted themselves to any of these imaginary genres, especially when they were exploring the epic landscape of the long-playing record, which finally began to outsell the 45 rpm single as the 1960s neared their end. Increasingly, artists who concentrated on making albums began to devalue the single, although some of those who mastered the extended form continued to indulge the audience for the miniature (the Beatles, the Who and Jimi Hendrix, to choose but three). By 1969, however, almost every pop performer could be categorised as an albums or singles act, and by then the audience was dividing along similar lines. Singles were intended for those who either couldn’t afford albums, or were looking for a quick hit of pop exuberance rather than a cultural education. Albums, meanwhile, were either aimed at adults from the pre-rock era, and were therefore an irrelevance to rock culture; or they were for the cognoscenti, the elite, the informed, alive and turned-on. Their cultural influence depended as much on their packaging as their music, not least because distinctive artwork could enable the enlightened owners to tote copies of Blonde on Blonde, The Doors, Cheap Thrills or Let it Bleed as proof of their hipness and intelligence, claiming the rebellious glamour of their idols as their own.

  There’s nothing going on33 [in the pop scene]. It will go on the same for years.

  John Lennon, October 1965

  As far as the Beatles are concerned34, we can’t just stop where we are, or there’s nothing left to do. We can go on trying to make popular records and it can all get dead dull if we’re not trying to expand at all and move on to other things.

  Paul McCartney, April 1966

  Two philosophies collided within the Beatles in the mid-1960s, almost without their protagonists being aware of what was happening. For John Lennon, rock ’n’ roll had reached an acme of perfection in its initial burst of simplicity. As he said in 1970, ‘I like rock ’n’ roll, man35 – I don’t like much else. That’s the music that inspired me to play music. There’s nothing conceptually better than rock ’n’ roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, has ever improved on [Jerry Lee Lewis’s] “Whole Lotta Shakin’” for my money.’ He added, significantly: ‘Maybe I’m like our parents. That’s my period. I dig it and I’ll never leave it.’

  Paul McCartney never denied the importance of rock ’n’ roll in his life: like the other Beatles, he found comfort in the Little Richard and Elvis Presley songs they’d loved when they were 16. But unlike Lennon, he recognised that there was more, and that music he didn’t yet know might unlock creative impulses that he could never have accessed by himself. So while Lennon sat in his suburban mansion fiddling with worthless electronic gadgets, McCartney embarked on a voyage of self-education, immersing himself in musical forms that the Beatles had always disregarded – the entire gamut of classical music, from plainsong to the avant-garde; electronic sound; jazz; the standards that his father loved. Lennon stood for the purity of rock, McCartney for ceaseless expansion. Ultimately, it was Lennon’s impulse that would triumph, ensuring that he would be regarded by many as the archetypal rock star. But it was McCartney’s ethos that was dominant during the second half of the 1960s, and sparked much of the music – from the Beatles and many others – that is remembered with such affection today.

  The same dichotomy was expressed in emotional terms. Particularly after he met Yoko Ono, John Lennon prioritised (in his writing, if not his personal life) starkness, honesty and pain. The purpose of music was to heighten the intensity of the message, not to obscure it. For McCartney, music itself was the emotional conduit and words were there as decoration or elaboration. Moreover, he saw the process of making music as being, essentially, joyful – so the dominant emotions provoked by his music were positive. Once again, Lennon won the long-term battle: the prevailing themes of rock after the early 1970s were often anger, pain and self-pity; there was ample room for depression and pessimism in the canons of metal, punk, goth and grunge. But there would always be a demand for McCartney-style optimism from those who didn’t inhabit the culture of rock. And for most of the 1960s, McCartney’s ethos seemed unassailable, until the darkness took hold amidst political disappointment, spiritual despair and narcotic overload after 1969.

  So the period between 1965 and 1968 was a rare – indeed, possibly unique – moment in the history of American and British popular music. It was a time when exploration and discovery were everything; when all border controls were lifted; when soft drugs, modern technology and hippie rhetoric combined to make pop musicians in their 20s feel that they could create the music of the spheres – or, as Phil Spector had once put it, ‘little symphonies for the kids’.fn3

  Ironically, Spector was an early casualty of the Era of Endless Dreams: too controlling, too wedded to the single gargantuan sound that was his trademark. He was tied, also, to the single rather than the album, which was a form he never understood. The true pop genius of the mid-1960s needed to be master of both, although their commercial imperatives could be starkly at odds. Some of the most notorious pop battles of the 1960s were conducted between idealistic musicians and the businessmen who had to finance their increasingly crazy ideas. That was simply one of the reasons why the most emblematic artist of this era was the Beach Boys’ singer, composer, arranger and producer, Brian Wilson. He was besieged by negativity from his father, cousin and record company, all telling him to forget musical experimentation and maintain the teen-beat formula that had made them rich. He was also subjecting his frail psyche to an alarming regimen of unsupervised hallucinogenic drugs, while sustaining a creative burden which within the Beatles, for example, would have been shared by Lennon, McCartney, and record producer George Martin. With the Beach Boys’ 1966 album Pet Sounds – teenage pop’s first viable rival to the thematic records of Jean Shepard and Frank Sinatra – Wilson retained just enough of the group’s natural effervescence to sustain their commercial appeal amidst his stunningly complex and baroque instrumental arrangements.fn4 Their single ‘Good Vibrations’, constructed over six months of sessions at several California studios, succeeded on sheer daring alone in unifying a dozen different melodic fragments. But – like Stan Kenton’s 1944 single, ‘Artistry in Rhythm’ – 1967’s ‘Heroes and Villains’ was a necklace of unlike jewels: each stone dazzl
ing, their collective purpose unclear. The unfinished Smile album in which both singles would have played a key part was both an epic artistic quest and an almost deliberate step away from commercial responsibility. Had it been completed in 1967, rather than enjoying a surreal shadow-life as a myth, then its fate would likely have mirrored the album that attracted the most gushing reviews and the sparsest sales of any front-line product of the era: Van Dyke Parks’s mannered, gem-like and utterly uncommercial album, Song Cycle.

  Foremost among the artists who could sustain economic success, pop legitimacy and rock credibility in 1967 were the Beatles. Their first single that year demonstrated the extent of their musical progress, and the split in their creative partnership. Paul McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane’ turned their shared Liverpool heritage into hippie legend; ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ expressed John Lennon’s complex psychological conundrums. If the former was pop art, creating multifaceted substance out of the everyday, the latter was art pop, self-consciously excluding the mass audience. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was a stunning exhibition of pop’s daredevilry and technological prowess, a milestone in Lennon’s life of compulsive self-expression, and a breathtaking record. But it was not designed to engage its audience – unlike, for example, the Sgt. Pepper album, which opened with a direct message to the Beatles’ fans: ‘We’d like to take you home with us.’

  Pepper was the biggest pop happening between the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan’s show and the assassination of John Lennon. There are tales of people walking through San Francisco, New York, or London, hearing nothing but that album blasting from every open window. And if they are exaggerated, then it barely matters. Examined coldly today, much of the album seems threadbare and spiritually empty: a triumph of costume over content. At the time, its variegated sheen, stylistic diversity, melodic verve and spirit-of-Swinging-London packaging added up to An Event.

  It symbolised an era – a year or so – when everything was epic (everything, that is, apart from Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album: Dylan hated Pepper’s pretensions). There was nothing that couldn’t be enhanced by an orchestra, sound effects, backwards tapes, Indian instruments, abrupt shifts of key and time signature, distortion, noise, random conversation, throwbacks to the past, glimpses of the future. Not only did pop embrace postmodernism almost whole, chewing up its own history and spitting it out with LSD-inspired genius, but it carried the public along. Psychedelia (or a pop impression of it, short on drugs but long on orchestral budgets) was now the mainstream. To choose records almost at random: in the final months of 1967, the Who’s ‘I Can See For Miles’, Sagittarius’s ‘My World Fell Down’, the Buckinghams’ ‘Susan’, the 5th Dimension’s ‘Carpet Man’, the Rascals’ ‘It’s Wonderful’, Simon Dupree’s ‘Kites’, the Bee Gees’ ‘World’, the Hollies’ ‘King Midas in Reverse’ and Keith West’s ‘Sam’ all attempted to cram a lifetime of ideas, inventions and madness into one four-minute single, and achieved at least some degree of commercial recognition for doing so. Of these, ‘Sam’ was the most revelatory: it was the second excerpt from Mark Wirtz’s Teenage Opera, an attempt to out-Pepper Pepper which, like the Beach Boys’ Smile, was the musical equivalent of one of Orson Welles’s grand conceptions of a film that could never be finished.

  Many of these records carried rich and glorious banks of voices, and epitomised the outer limits of a style named only in retrospect: sunshine (or summer) pop. These were songs that captured all the delicious, foolish optimism of the era, and expressed it through God’s gift of vocal harmony, wedded to celebratory melodies. The roots of this technicolour spasm of pop effulgence – aired around Britain by the newly opened national pop network, BBC Radio 1 – can be traced back to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the commercial folk revival, even the easy-listening sounds of Ray Conniff and the French octet, the Swingle Singers. But its primary exponents, the Mamas & the Papas (all ex-folkies), were also hippies at heart, and their hit ‘California Dreamin’’ marked the first tentative step of the West Coast counter-culture into the mainstream.

  Major sections of major US cities36 … have been literally occupied by a new breed of humanity characterised by boys who dress like girls and girls who dress like boys … they have come to listen to a complicated staccato of amplified sounds, played by artless adolescents who go by names that rarely belie their appearance.

  University of California assistant dean Donald R. Hopkins, 1967

  What we may be witnessing37 is the creation of a new, as yet unlabelled, form of music, as America around the turn of the century saw the development of jazz.

  Harvey Pekar, Down Beat, 1968

  The apotheosis of hippie was the Human Be-In at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in January 1967. It was a ‘Gathering of the Tribes’: perhaps the last occasion when all the competing passions of the counter-culture could be indulged and accepted in the same congregation without factionalism or dissension. This was also a farewell to ‘Hippie’ as a lifestyle existing outside commercialism. By the summer of 1967, when Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco’ was topping sales charts around the world, the city’s Haight-Ashbury district had become a zoo for tourists and drug casualties.

  In musical terms, the Be-In spirit survived until the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. ‘It was not the performances38 on stage which made the greatest impression on most of the veteran observers’, one writer noted. ‘It was the festival concept itself, and the total capturing of the very best in today’s younger generation and those willing to accept its philosophies as an alternative to extinction.’ The performers at Monterey ranged from Ravi Shankar to the Mamas & the Papas; from the Byrds to the virtually unknown (in the US) Jimi Hendrix.fn5 Rock bands sampled elements of folk, soul, jazz, Latin and Indian sounds, chronicling drug trips and expansions of consciousness, and offering political harangues. Jimi Hendrix set fire to his instrument; ‘his modal-tuned chicken-choke39 handling of the guitar doesn’t indicate a strong talent, either’, it seemed. And various San Francisco bands, from the strangely commercial (Jefferson Airplane) to the determinedly experimental (Grateful Dead) demonstrated why – in the words of the Doors’ Jim Morrison – ‘the West [Coast] is the best’.

  If the baroque pop coming from Los Angeles, New York and London expanded conventional ideas of how a popular song should be arranged, the psychedelic rock of San Francisco – soon echoing around the global community – exploded the very nature of song itself. The West Coast bands retained their dance-hall ancestry as they set out on extended excursions into spontaneity. Their music mimicked, intentionally or otherwise, the vanishing sense of time experienced during an LSD trip, which is why a reviewer of the Grateful Dead at Monterey who wasn’t indulging himself with acid could criticise their ‘slipshod, lazy way40 to play music’. At their most courageous and/or self-indulgent, bands would set off into the unknown with no notion of a destination,fn6 fuelled by the equally goal-free ambience of their crowd. As Eric Clapton, whose mid-1960s band Cream soon graduated from blues to equally lengthy excursions into the void, recalled in his autobiography: ‘[The audience] were listening41, and that encouraged us to go places we’d never been before. We started doing extended solos, and were soon playing fewer and fewer songs but for much longer. We’d go off in our own directions, but sometimes we would hit these coincidental points in the music when we would all arrive at the same conclusion, be it a riff or a chord or just an idea, and we would jam on it for a little while and then go back into our own thing. I had never experienced anything like it.’

  Clapton believed it was the intoxicating light shows of the era that transported the audience into a state of unity with the musicians. For Jim Morrison of the Doors, a band comprised of film and drama students, music, lights, theatre, drugs and a sense of community could transform the rock avatars into shamans – or transcendent actors from the ancient Greek theatre, liaising between mankind and the gods. Morrison wove teenage sexuality into his strange brew, eventually becoming so aroused
by his power over an audience that he could only express it by revealing his penis onstage. But the most compelling, dangerous and ultimately tragic figure of this era was Jimi Hendrix. He’d escaped the drudgery of playing a supporting role to touring R&B stars, and travelled to London, where he was greeted as the ‘Negro Bob Dylan’. Because he was black, he was initially marketed as ‘Destined to become 67’s42 Foremost Soul Exponent!’ It took several months for his US label to comprehend that an African-American might appeal to the white rock audience. The stage theatrics he’d learned on the road thrilled his audiences, but devalued his music, as he was the first to realise. Yet fans felt cheated of the full Jimi Hendrix experience if he did not perform his hit singles, play his guitar behind his head and then ritually destroy it.