Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  The introduction of the transistor radio a decade earlier had enabled people to carry music with them to the park or to school. Now the portable cassette player refined the process, so that you could choose the soundtrack for your trip – although it was several years before new albums would automatically be issued on cassette as well as vinyl, so home-taping was initially obligatory. You no longer had to carry an emblematic album cover under your arm to display your sophistication; you could simply let the music speak for you in the street. Neither the transistor radio nor the portable cassette discriminated about its audience, and the public airing of unwanted music could constitute noise pollution or an act of aggression towards the outside world, depending on one’s proximity and view.

  ‘Frightening12’, was the verdict of crooner, songwriter and teen idol Scott Walker, on the lifestyle preference of the average American adult male, c.1967: ‘[he] comes home, he sits down and puts on “background music” … He wants to hear something that completely relaxes him and that he doesn’t have to get involved with.’ Walker was equally perturbed by another dislocation between music and human emotion: the desire to evoke the psychedelic experience by means of sound effects, distortion and the howl of electronics. ‘One of these days you’ll go13 into a theatre,’ he predicted, ‘and there’ll be just a machine on the stage and you’ll forget there were ever such things as musicians or the human voice on its own … It’s going to have a deathly influence on the newer generation, maybe up to the point where they’re 27 or 30. It’s eliminating the whole poetic quality of a human being.’

  He was echoing the qualms of Melody Maker reporter Chris Roberts, who had conjectured in 1964: ‘I still have a feeling14 that any day now might find me interviewing a tall, handsome desk of recording equipment.’ Technology might have supplied Elvis Presley with a Cadillac which contained ‘a TV, hi-fi, electric shoe15 cleaner, refrigerator, telephone extension from the front, and a special round seat for two in the rear, where Elvis entertains his girlfriends’; but it also seemed, amidst the constant innovations of the late 1960s, to be imposing an alienated, emotional distance between mankind and its music. ‘Here it is at last16 – electronic “music”!’, screamed the adverts for the 1962 single concocted by future Beatles producer George Martin, ‘Time Beat’ by the pseudonymous Ray Cathode. ‘We have a long way to go17 before a computer will replace a symphony orchestra’, Martin promised then; but the following year, the first edition of the Mellotron was put on sale. It utilised banks of tape heads, holding pre-recorded sounds, to evoke a galaxy of noise: some of it recognisable as an attempt to sample the tone of a flute or a trumpet, other selections more unreal. By the time that the Mellotron was audible on records by the Beatles and the Moody Blues, it had been superseded by a synthesiser invented by Robert Moog. This was a purely electronic ‘instrument’, which enabled the user to manipulate the tone, speed, volume and pitch of sound. Demonstrated at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, it was snapped up by several leading pop musicians. Micky Dolenz employed it to provide a cacophonous, unsettling accompaniment to the Monkees’ ‘Daily Nightly’ later that year, and it soon appeared on recordings by Simon & Garfunkel, the Byrds and the Beatles. Thereafter it was turned to more conventional (and yet more surreal) use: as a substitute for a symphony orchestra on Walter Carlos’s Switched-On Bach, and again on his soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange. Popular? Classical? Nobody was quite sure. Indeed, was it even music? Once, conservative thinkers had railed against the fakery of electrically amplified instruments. Now those who played electric music were fearful of the non-human music made by machines – yesterday’s revolutionaries becoming today’s guardians of the flame.

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  fn1 John Coltrane’s miraculous extemporisation around the melody of ‘My Favorite Things’ from The Sound of Music was arguably the zenith of this trend.

  fn2 There were no words other than the Decca logo on the Stones’ cover, a brazen act of self-confidence.

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  VAN MORRISON, ACCORDING to a Bang Records advertisement from 1967, was ‘so bloody real3 he trembles in your throat and you know that it’s an infinitely minute time capsule that transcends you, whirls you to him’. In the American pop paper Hit Parader, meanwhile, Juan Rodriguez compared the relationship between rock stars and their fans to ‘mob reaction4 … The musicians dish out the most pretentious trash, and the audience hails it as “great”.’ Rodriguez concluded: ‘Pretentiousness is the scourge of modern pop music.’

  As the Morrison puff illustrates, pretentiousness – artistic ambition, cultural reach, social significance – was inherent to rock’s late 1960s appeal. Once an artist (note the noun) had transcended the trappings of fame and the desires of teenage girls, then – as Graham Nash insisted – rock could challenge authority, change social conventions, maybe even transform lives. Musicians’ pronouncements on Vietnam, the atom bomb and the ethics of capitalist culture were being heeded more closely than those of society’s elected rulers. Worshipped like gods, rock stars moved in a closeted, fantasy landscape where they could choose their peers: aristocrats, perhaps, or poets, artists, social climbers, models, photographers, intellectuals, fools, often all masquerading in the same skin.

  Egotism was a necessary ingredient of stardom: with fame came a level of attention so gratifying that it was quite possible to believe that you were ‘so bloody real’ that you could ‘transcend’ your audience – carry the weight of those who, when they listened to your music, felt as if you had taken responsibility for their souls and lives. That belief in one’s own divinity could be finely balanced by a gnawing sense that, actually, one was nothing at all. Louis Armstrong never had to live with that burden, or Bing Crosby, or George Formby; they knew who they were and what they were meant to do, and did it. But from the mid-1960s onwards, the sense of one’s own significance became an obstacle for everyone who achieved success in the self-aggrandising field of rock.

  Rock stars believed that they possessed the latent power to effect political and cultural change: one anthem, and the walls of the citadel would crack, like Jericho under Joshua’s trumpets. In 1968–9, rock stars masqueraded as political activists (and vice versa), swallowing and regurgitating whole the rhetoric of global revolution propounded by the short-lived union of hippies, Yippies, anti-war campaigners, Black Panthers and all their fellow travellers. This was the era when the cadre of Detroit radicals known as the White Panther Party could have its own in-house rock band, the MC5, complete with anthem (‘Kick Out the Jams’) and manifesto (‘Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets’). The Rolling Stones adopted a coy and ambiguous stance towards political action (‘Street Fighting Man’); the Beatles could debate Trotskyist tactics (‘Revolution’); Jefferson Airplane called for ‘Volunteers’ to man the barricades and, with David Crosby, envisioned ‘Wooden Ships’ on which the rock elite and their ‘ladies’ would escape the apocalypse if their benefit concerts for the Yippies and the Panthers didn’t result in the overthrow of the established order.

  The music that resulted was tumultuous and exultant, naïve and overblown. Its creators, especially in America, where the crisis (under threat of the Vietnam draft) was more intense than in Britain, continued to believe that music could speak more loudly than guns or money. Under this misconception, David Crosby could be surprised, in 1970, that ‘Somehow Sgt. Pepper5 did not stop the Vietnam War. Somehow it didn’t work. Somebody isn’t listening.’ Yet the loose quartet he formed with other egotists, mavericks, freethinkers and political idealists, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, came as close as any rock band to, if not changing, then at least embodying the fantasies of their vast fan base. Almost alone of their fellow rock politicians, members of the quartet continued and continue to believe in the righteous power of music, and their own role as spokesmen for a generation.fn1

  Rock’s revolutionary fervour died with the fragmentation of the grand coalition aga
inst the Vietnam War in 1970, as each organisation’s priorities (women’s liberation, black power, global anarchy) took precedence over their collective aim. The major rock festivals of the era, notably Woodstock in August 1969, seemed to promise that fans might provide the masses necessary for any healthy Marxist rebellion. The fact that such a large crowd (400,000 or more) had gathered in one place, short on food and water, exposed to heat and rain, had fed themselves on narcotics of dubious quality, and discovered that they did not lynch each other but collaborated in their hippie solidarity – that felt like a political triumph. (The subsequent documentary film about the festival mythologised that triumph for the world.) Repeating the trick over a single day, in more forlorn circumstances at the Altamont Speedway, proved to be impossible. A murder took place in front of the stage, captured by a film crew working for the Rolling Stones. Fans who had primed themselves for a hippie nirvana found themselves trapped in a violent biker movie. When it was revealed that another series of killings, in Hollywood, had been enacted by a gang of putative hippies fixated on the Beatles’ 1968 double album, another vein of idealism was drained.

  The shadows of these events seeped back through the decade, distorting the optimism that had fired Sgt. Pepper, gatherings of the hippie tribes, sunshine pop and the belief that it was enough to be young and awake to remake the world. An era when anything seemed possible was smothered in darkness, which to varying degrees – introspective depression, political dejection, black despair – would shape the decade ahead. The Rolling Stones turned out to have been the era’s most clear-sighted prophets, via a succession of records filled with foreboding and violence, from ‘Paint It Black’ through ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ to the eschatological terror of ‘Gimme Shelter’. They would signal the tribes towards the fallow ground ahead, where – like Jesus in the wilderness – they could explore the depths of their belief and self-doubt.

  It is very strange making6 a living out of being yourself.

  James Taylor, 1971

  What it boils down to7 is that we’re all potential gods in embryo, we’re all evolving towards being gods.

  Alan Osmond on the Osmonds’ 1973 LP, The Plan

  ‘Won’t you look down upon me Jesus’, called James Taylor in ‘Fire and Rain’, the song which perhaps better than any other epitomised the new rock austerity of the early 1970s. Its three verses, delivered in a voice of spiritual exhaustion by a 21-year-old former psychiatric patient, described a friend’s suicide, Taylor’s junk habit and his admission to hospital: no transcendence or euphoria there. Taylor sang with the timing of Sam Cooke and the intimacy of Bing Crosby (if, that is, the man known affectionately by then as ‘the Old Groaner’ had ever been a heroin addict). He had roots in folk and rock ’n’ roll, and enough of a Southern drawl to suggest he was a man of the fields, though he was actually the son of a professor of medicine and an opera singer. His life had been as troubled and erratic as those of any of rock’s later depressives. Yet he won an enormously loyal following, especially among young women, for whom his melancholy persona – hunched frame, hair falling across his face – made him seem like a suffering messiah.

  Taylor had a dry humour that redeemed his misery, even if it was only apparent in retrospect. But his confessional air and prevailing mood of self-pity (both encapsulated in ‘Hey Mister That’s Me Up on the Jukebox’) emphasised a theme in pop writing that reached back into the rock ’n’ roll era, and would shape the decades ahead. In the late 1950s, pop’s melancholy was entirely romantic, and juvenile: she doesn’t love me, oh woe is me. Then college kids became pop stars, and brought the trappings of romantic poetry to the teenage playground.

  Misunderstanding the lyrical sensibility of Bob Dylan, John Lennon believed he was echoing the bard when he wrote ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ (‘Here I stand, head in hand’ must be one of the least promising scenarios for any song). Paul Simon – later a lyricist as flexible and gifted as any of the Broadway maestros – called darkness ‘my old friend’ on ‘The Sound of Silence’ and hid behind his poetry books on ‘I Am a Rock’, an abject lesson in how to pervert what one has learned on a literature course. There were others engaged in self-pity and self-loathing in mid-1960s pop: the Shangri-La’s girl group fashioned an entire career from it, chronicling grief, parent–child battles, sexual dysfunction and catatonic emotional breakdown across a series of hit singles. But they were role-playing: Queens girls living out the fantasies of their producer, Shadow Morton. The vein of self-pity, self-questioning, self-annihilation only began to overflow once rock’s counter-cultural spirit had been sapped by disillusion and despair.

  That was the point at which the folk tradition of the sensitive troubadour collided with a culture suddenly robbed of its optimism. As confidence in the power of collective action dissipated, and the generation of 1967 realised that it was not about to remould society in its own image, inner turmoil replaced anthemic collectivism. One of the last effective slogan songs of the 1960s was ‘Give Peace a Chance’, by John Lennon, with a message so vague and (in retrospect) so seeped in imminent defeat that it scarcely challenged the status quo.fn2 Thereafter – at least until he fell into radical company in New York in 1971, and attempted to fund and inspire the revolution single-handedly – Lennon turned sharply inwards: comparing himself once more to Christ (‘they’re gonna crucify me’) and, by the end of the decade, chronicling his agonising withdrawal from heroin addiction on a hit single. The following year, he devoted an entire album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, to the primal therapy he’d endured that summer. The technique encouraged patients to confront their deep-seated fears and pains, stripping away their defences, layer after layer, until all that was left was the final scream of the wounded baby, dragged into this world to suffer and decay.

  On the album’s key song, ‘God’, Lennon denied a list of panaceas and crutches, from Buddha to Bob Dylan, Jesus to Elvis, ending in what was (in 1970) the most blasphemous pronouncement of them all: ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’. Lennon was addicted to a cycle of belief and then betrayal, which primal therapy had enabled him to see, but couldn’t cure. His hall of icons would also have included the figures of his parents (lost), Brian Epstein (dead) – and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose transcendental meditation teachings entranced Lennon and the other Beatles in 1967, until the guru’s all-too-human failings undermined their confidence. Lennon had been the most vocal apostle of Maharishi, then his most violent detractor (and, incidentally, the only Beatle to abandon his meditation practice entirely). The Beatles’ immersion in meditation brought it to global attention; their rejection of Maharishi did nothing to halt the spread of his methods around the world. Rock stars, it seemed, were more influential as evangelists than they were as Old Testament prophets.

  Alongside the tribal euphoria of the counter-culture, the era’s infatuation with drugs triggered an acute awareness of realms beyond the everyday, of dimensions in which even political revolution might be irrelevant. Here was another facet of the self-examination to come: the search for the immortal, the transcendent, the secrets of the cosmos. Inevitably, many in the counter-culture were led to established forms of religion, just as many preferred to chart the unknown alone. Eastern religions promised deliverance from the petty morality of organised Christianity: Buddhism with its pantheistic acceptance of what is; Hinduism its piety and revelation of the divine. Some were even drawn back to the spirit of the early Christians, becoming Jesus freaks, who reinterpreted the Christ of the Gospels as a prototype hippie. All roads were possible; what mattered was the journey.

  Yet the journey could take many forms. In 1964, as the Beatles replaced him as Britain’s premier pop act, Cliff Richard made a public declaration of commitment to Christ. Three years later, he responded to the Summer of Love with a gospel album, Good News, and a starring role in a feature film funded by the Billy Graham ministry. Simultaneously, Elvis Presley – once feared by Christians as an instrument of Satan – issued his own spiritual collec
tion, How Great Thou Art, in answer (so his record company claimed) to requests from his fans. Radio stations across America combined to promote Presley’s record that Easter. Such proclamations of faith were common among artists who wanted to appeal to conservatives in the American South, or in the African-American community (the only place where it has been consistently acceptable to rock critics for people to proclaim their Christian beliefs). One of the most successful singles of 1969 was ‘Oh Happy Day’, by Edwin Hawkins’s gospel choir. This rousing spiritual chorus inspired George Harrison to record his own non-Christian hymn, ‘My Sweet Lord’, a worldwide No. 1 hit in 1970–1.

  As the US record company Word Records had already proclaimed, ‘The Sacred and Inspirational8 Market is a BIG market’. With capitalist greed coated in the veneer of sanctity, Word trumpeted the economic potential of their rich catalogue of sermons, gospel quartets, choirs and patriotic anthems. ‘Here’s Your Opportunity For Bigger Fall and Christmas Sales!’, they boasted to retailers. ‘70 million people like this kind of music! Why not profit from their desires with the world’s largest, broadest, most complete religious catalog … there are good profits from Sacred and Inspirational sales. Prove it at NO RISK! Check the proposition below! It contains all the elements necessary to put you into the religious market painlessly and profitably.’ One could almost hear the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven swinging shut.