Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  During 1967–8, Hendrix challenged and destroyed all preconceptions about the sonic limits of the guitar, creating a precise art form out of the chaos of amplifier feedback. His playing defied genre boundaries: he simultaneously played rhythm and lead, rock, R&B, jazz, a wall of noise from which he could conjure moments of beauty or terror. His three albums, Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, represented an almost unimaginably lavish fusion of commercial pop and experimental rock … and then his magic dissipated into self-doubt, traitorous business manoeuvres and an anguished decline.

  Hendrix enacted the hyperbole of one of the first rock historians, Arnold Shaw, who wrote ecstatically: ‘We are in the midst43 of an electrical explosion of sound. Magnetic tape and electronics have made the 1960s an era of echo chambers, variable speeds and aleatory (chance) and programmed (computer) composition. New procedures include manipulation of texture as a developmental technique, “wall-of-sound” density and total enveloping sound. Philosophical as well as esthetic concepts underlie these developments: a concern with sensory overload as a means of liberating the self, expanding consciousness and rediscovering the world.’ He added: ‘We are in an era of meaningful lyrics, protesting, probing and poetic. But we are also in a period when sound itself, as in jazz but in a more complex way, frequently is theme and content. If the folk orientation of rock emphasises meaning, the psychedelic stresses tone color, texture, density and volume.’

  The quest for perception and self-expression ran alongside the exploration of sound and musical form; indeed, the two were as one in the most ambitious music of the psychedelic era, as if musicians had suddenly been granted the fifth dimension referenced in the Byrds’ song. No wonder that Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs said that ‘It was like living at a time44 when Beethoven and Mozart were alive.’ Yet in retrospect, Arnold Shaw’s conclusion – published in 1969, just as its idealistic vision began to dissipate – is as sad as the swiftly fading memory of an ecstatic dream. ‘At the moment,’ he wrote, ‘it appears45 that we are on the edge of a synthesis in which composers will create, not pop, not rock, not folk, not art, but music that will embody the best qualities of each – the involvement of folk, the exuberance of dance and the dimensions of art music.’ Instead: ashes and dust.

  One nation alone fulfilled Shaw’s dream. The sequence of mid-1960s military coups which robbed bossa nova of its cultural base in Brazil triggered confusion among young musicians, at the moment when pop was undergoing its swiftest period of metamorphosis in Britain and America. The Jovem Guarda, or Young Guard, movement led by Roberto Carlos chose to place Brazil within that Anglo-American axis, as if the studio for ABC-TV’s Shindig! had been transplanted to Rio de Janeiro. It greeted the summers of acid and student demonstrations with the teen-beat that had been the North American sound of 1963–4. Their musical rivals were both conservative, lamenting the use of electric instruments in Brazilian music, and progressive, in the quest for a return to democracy and their wish to expose military atrocities. They were grouped under the title of MPB (Musica Popula Brasiliera), offering misleadingly gentle acoustic music with a political bite – epitomised by Edu Lobo’s ‘Boranda’, with its jazz-tinged vocal harmonies, and Geraldo Vandré’s almost ethereal protest tune, ‘Caminhando’.

  For a generation of young performers who cohered in São Paulo after 1965, neither the MPB nor the Jovem Guarda was quite equal to the times. Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, both in their early 20s, envisaged a music that could not only combine both approaches, but was also open to artistic influences of every kind – French new-wave cinema, experimental art, avant-garde poetry. They inaugurated a wide-ranging arts movement named Tropicália, or Tropicalismo, which took its name from an art installation by Hélio Oiticica. Gil and Veloso had already challenged the MPB establishment by reflecting the inspiration of contemporary rock. Now they masterminded an album entitled Tropicália, to raise the flag of nonconformism, joined by the psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes, Tom Zé and Gal Costa. Attempting to perform this material in public proved to be a confrontational act, as one report explained: ‘The crowd eyes the long-haired46, strangely dressed, foreign-looking Os Mutantes with suspicion. Backing Caetano Veloso on “E proibido proibir” [“It is forbidden to forbid”], the band launches into an amplified barrage of distorted noise that immediately elicits a hostile response from the audience, which begins to boo, and hurl tomatoes, grapes and wads of paper at the performers. Os Mutantes increases the distorted guitar attack in a defiant mocking of the spectators.’

  While Os Mutantes concentrated on an oblique restating of late 1960s acid rock, Veloso and Gil – both of whom were jailed by the dictatorship, and then forced into exile – refused to be confined even by the symbols of freedom. Over the last forty-five years, they have ranged across almost every imaginable approach to song, to dance, to poetry; Gil the more physical in his approach to music, Veloso the more cerebral, both exploring simultaneously the popular and the experimental in ways which have won them the status of prophets in their homeland (and resulted in Gil being appointed the Brazilian Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2008). Like their contemporaries – Zé, Costa, Jorge Ben, Milton Nascimento, Maria Bethânia – they have kept alive a vision of music that can be both populist and driven by a firm aesthetic vision; both traditional, in its references back to the samba and bossa nova, and radical; uncompromising and yet subtle. Only the limited understanding of the Portuguese language outside its homelands has prevented them from being recognised as the true inheritors of the 1960s revolution in popular songwriting and record-making – guardians of the magical synthesis which Arnold Shaw had envisaged in 1969.

  If rock ’n’ roll47, with its heavy beats and nerve-tugging twangs and rhythmic grunts, ever invades the brain, the future indeed seems perilous.

  Ebony magazine, November 1965

  Apparently the Communists48 fear that beat music may be used as camouflage for anti-Communist demonstrations and resistance. The East German press has mounted a campaign claiming that young East Germans have gone from listening to beat groups to forming gangs which attack people in the street … Neues Deutschland, the Communist Party daily newspaper, argues that Ringo, John, Paul and George, in fact, are agents of the ‘British imperialist secret service’.

  Billboard magazine, December 1965

  Mick Jagger may not, as legend has it, have goose-stepped across the stage and offered the crowd a Nazi salute. But the Rolling Stones’ guitarist, Brian Jones, did pay homage to Hitler as the group walked towards the stage of the Waldbühne, an open-air Berlin arena built at the dictator’s request for the 1936 Olympics.fn7 Even without a public gesture of contempt, their September 1965 appearance in West Berlin was a riotous affair. Hundreds of fans clashed violently with police, cars were overturned, and trains vandalised.

  Across the Wall, the Stones’ impact was likened to that of ‘a new Führer’, the most vicious insult in the state armoury. The East German administration employed these disturbances to clamp down on a convulsive R&B band named the Butlers, who had built a substantial following during a brief period of artistic liberalism. Leipzig’s city authorities forced the group to disband, and then trained water cannons on fans who gathered to protest the decision. The official East German record company ceased all distribution of pop recordings from the West, and performances by local musicians were monitored to prevent delinquency.

  Had the Stones realised the consequences of their Berlin performance, they would probably have been elated to discover that both capitalist and Communist officials were equally concerned about the band’s cultural power. The deafening volume of the mid-1960s rock bands, and their unrestrained theatrics, made violence seem like a natural constituent of the performance.fn8 As the Who’s Pete Townshend revealed, ‘When I bash my guitar50 to pieces, I feel like I’m light and floating.’ This transcendence threatened the status quo just as much as the mind expansion of illegal drugs.

  By 1967, the Rolling Stone
s were evoking more complaints about their drug connections and sexual morality than for any propensity to violence. In their place, a young British group named the Move took firemen’s axes to puppets and stage scenery. They were refused permission to dismember an effigy of the Devil during a church service in Birmingham Cathedral, to be televised by the BBC. Other British bands that year explored the potential of noise as a means of social control, or liberation. Early performances by Pink Floyd at the UFO club in London combined ‘ear-splitting vibrations53’ and ‘liquid light that takes your breath away’, even before they had begun to assemble a repertoire of songs that dealt with sexual ambiguity and madness. (Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’ also accompanied a London striptease artist who performed an ‘LSD’ routine while being bombarded with strobe-lighting effects.) American rock venues were equally charged with sound, light and confusion. Phil Spector – no stranger himself to sonic overload – described the sensory assault at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco as ‘unbelievable’ and ‘suggested that all visitors54 to America be driven directly from the airport to the nearest psychedelic rock ballroom’. In response, chains of US radio stations launched a concerted campaign to ban any disc that reflected the moral ambiguity, latent violence and political subversion which they felt comprised the ethos of modern pop. No record would be played, they insisted, unless it was accompanied by ‘a VALID and ACTUAL55 lyric sheet for both sides’. They concluded: ‘Lyrics, song titles, offensive vocal sounds and even names of the performing groups have moved from the clever and creative to the crude and suggestive.’fn9

  Crudeness and suggestiveness could come in many forms. ‘Dirty Water’ by the Standells, once a lightweight dance combo transformed by spring 1966 into a snarling garage-rock band, hymned the ‘robbers and thieves’ and ‘frustrated women’ to be found by the Charles River in Boston. ‘Have you heard about the Strangler?’, lead vocalist Dick Dodd (once a Mouseketeer on TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club) shouted provocatively over the fade-out. ‘I’m the man, I’m the man.’ Here was the rock band as a tool of incoherent machismo, arrogant, angry, self-convinced, but essentially confused – adolescent, in other words, but 100% male. As, indeed, were all the other bands who would be retrospectively packaged into the same genre as the Standells: garage punk, it was called by the early 1970s, or simply punk rock.

  That was the spirit of the stuttering narrator of the Who’s ‘My Generation’; of Jeff Beck’s inflammatory guitar on the Yardbirds’ mid-1960s records; of the whole band, surging and psychotic, on Them’s ‘Mystic Eyes’, two minutes of flashing intensity retrieved from an epic studio improvisation. While the British garage punks were children of wartime fear and austerity, fighting to escape from the grey conformism that was their generation’s inheritance, their American equivalents were refugees from other kinds of emptiness: geographical isolation, meaningless consumerism, the looming threat of military service in Vietnam, ambition thwarted in the interests of mediocrity.

  So it’s not surprising that mock-Standells and mini-Stones, besotted with what they believed was happening in England, crawled out of every community in America, and could usually find a recording studio cheap enough to hire, and a local entrepreneur who dreamed that he might become the Brian Epstein of Idaho or Maine. This was another era, like the mid-1950s, when the amateurs seized control, and nobody in a suit understood what the kids wanted, or why. At its commercial peak, garage punk could load the US charts with such strange offerings as the Music Machine’s ‘Talk Talk’ (‘my social life’s a DUD!’), the Electric Prunes’ ‘I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night’ (a confusion of shuddering and surreal sound effects, to convey the epic pain of teenage romance) and the Magic Mushrooms’ ‘It’s A-Happening’ (nuclear apocalypse as acid trip, or vice versa). After which, inescapably, this road led once more to Jimi Hendrix.

  This was the point at which conflicting urges – the confusion of adolescence, the wonder of psychedelic discovery and the consciousness of music’s boundless power – collided, to provide what Donovan called (in ‘Epistle to Dippy’) ‘elevator in the brain hotel’. Jefferson Airplane issued the command of the moment in ‘White Rabbit’: ‘feed your head’.fn10

  Even acts as self-consciously straight, in their off-the-peg hippie clothes, as the 5th Dimension (‘Up, Up and Away’) and the Supremes (‘The Happening’) caught the vibe. The Association, whose forte was polite harmonies and snapshots of love, offered ‘Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies’, a celebration of transcendent pantheism and sonic experimentation. The Beatles sent out a simplistic message to the world, ‘All You Need is Love’ – John Lennon delivering starry-eyed panaceas to his audience in a voice dripping with acid intensity. But for the people of 1967, the people who were living in this world, one record stopped time: Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, with its blend of Bach and self-conscious ‘poetry’. The Easybeats’ ‘Heaven and Hell’ was being promoted as ‘The Disco-Delic Subterranean Seismic Record Experience of the Year’, but the Beatles thought that Procol Harum’s single was more important than Sgt. Pepper: a glimpse of nirvana destined never to be repeated.

  * * *

  fn1 John Lennon was criticised by black cultural commentators in 1965, after he told Time magazine: ‘We can sing more coloured16 than the Africans.’

  fn2 In 1970, soul singer Percy Sledge toured South Africa. His show in Cape Town was ruled to be an event for non-whites only, so his white fans had to adopt blackface or masquerade as Muslims to gain admittance.

  fn3 As an example of how far the music of 1966–7 could range, and still count as ‘pop’, compare Herman’s Hermits’ ‘East-West’ with the performance of the same name by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

  fn4 Another pop myth to question: Capitol Records did not sabotage the release of Pet Sounds, as the group came to believe. It was promoted just as heavily as any of their previous releases.

  fn5 The bill also included the Latin soul-influenced 19-year-old genius (I do not use the word lightly) Laura Nyro. Her set passed into rock history as an ill-judged disaster. The mesmerising footage of her ‘Poverty Train’ suggests otherwise.

  fn6 I once asked keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, who’d been guesting with a later incarnation of the Grateful Dead, how the band communicated with each other on stage. Were there agreed signals to announce a transition from one song to the next? Hornsby smiled, and said: ‘If there are any signals, they’ve never told me what they are.’

  fn7 Jones later posed for a publicity photograph in a Nazi uniform, crushing a doll beneath one of his jackboots. ‘The sense of it is that49 there is no sense in it at all’, he explained gleefully.

  fn8 The Who were the first rock group to admit the danger of loud music in confined spaces. ‘It’s beginning to affect51 our eardrums’, Pete Townshend said in early 1966, while Roger Daltrey added: ‘You’d be surprised how many52 people in groups get trouble with their hearing.’ By 1967, doctors in the US were warning that music in nightclubs was ‘very likely causing temporary or even permanent hearing loss’.

  fn9 So panic-stricken did these moral guardians become that rumours rapidly ballooned into facts. There was horror when it was suggested in early 1967 that some stations were in possession of a shocking new Beatles song called ‘Suicide’. One of the ringleaders of the anti-smut campaign claimed to have seen the lyrics for the Beatles’ soon-to-be-released ‘A Day in the Life’, including a reference to ‘40,000 purple hearts56 in one arm’. Neither the quotation nor the awareness of narcotic etiquette was accurate.

  fn10 The Airplane’s brain-food included arguably the least commercial hit record of 1967: ‘Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil’, in which A. A. Milne sat with Timothy Leary while feedback howled around their ears.

  1

  IT WAS THE perfect European hit: sung in Italian, by a native speaker who’d lived in Belgium since childhood; set to a Spanish dance rhythm; and a million-seller in Germany. The Europe-wide success of Rocco Granata’s ‘Marina’ in 1959–60 emph
asised that the Continent shared an international culture, which might find Greek singer Nana Mouskouri, the Italian starlet Mina, Siw Malmkvist (‘The Girl from Sweden’) and Danish teen idol Gitte all recording in German; or indeed, French, Italian or Spanish. Whatever their nationality and chosen tongue, their music enjoyed universal appeal across Europe – but only rarely translated to lands where English was the dominant language.

  In return, Anglo-American stars accepted that they must abandon English if they wanted to conquer European hearts. With the exception of rock ’n’ roll, the lyrics of which were assumed to be so nonsensical that they didn’t require translation, most major US and UK hits of the 1950s and early 1960s were dubbed into at least one European language. Few artists shared the advantages of Petula Clark, whose husband and home were in France, and who had consequently mastered français. The rest had to struggle their way through phonetic transcriptions of their hits, without understanding the implications of what they were singing. (Via this process, David Bowie’s eerie study of alienation, ‘Space Oddity’, emerged in Italy as a conventional tale of thwarted adolescent love.) Few, if any, English-language records were accepted in their original dialect.

  Gradually, however, even France – the most independent of European cultures – succumbed to the charisma of Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. Its acceptance of the Beatles was even swifter: barely a month after Lucky Blondo (‘J’ai un secret à te dire’) and Claude François (‘Des bises de moi pour toi’) registered hits with Lennon/McCartney’s ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ and ‘From Me to You’, the Beatles’ own ‘She Loves You’ was on the French chart. Its success was aided by the fact that its famous chorus appeared to pay homage to the dominant local sound of the era: yé-yé.