Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  To begin then: how might we most usefully define the Summer of Love of 1967? Hamilton states that in the spring of that year ‘hippie leaders in the Haight called for young people around the nation to journey to San Francisco and experience the good vibrations, the spiritual enlightenment’.11 The call, however, caused some conflict within the community. ‘Many hippies criticised it as a tactic developed by the hip businesses to make money, and they feared that the Haight, already beset with tourists who jammed its streets and sidewalks, would never be able to handle the expected crowds.’12

  Nonetheless, the official hippy Council for a Summer of Love counselled against such fears. ‘Food is being gathered’, the body announced. ‘Hotels are being prepared to supply free lodging…It is the will of God that His children will be met with Love’,13 stated extracts from the hippy-linked newspaper the San Francisco Oracle, striking a distinctly Biblical tone. The result was that ‘[a]ll summer long youth invaded – youngsters hitchhiked or arrived in vans be-decked with psychedelic Day-Glo images and they arrived in their tens of thousands.’14

  Farber and Bailey describe an exodus to San Francisco in similar terms. ‘[T]housands of America’s youths made a “pilgrimage” […] invited by Haight-Ashbury’s Council for a Summer of Love and drawn by media coverage so intensive that people joked about bead-wearing Life magazine reporters interviewing bead-wearing Look magazine reporters, more than 75,000 young people flooded into the district’.15 Farrell though places the Summer of Love in a longer, historical context. He says that the Freedom Summer of 1964 ‘focused the ideas and institutions of the radical civil rights movement; the Summer of Love was a second freedom summer, but it demanded freedom, not just for African Americans, but for all Americans who had been caught in the gears of American society’.16

  Yet, if the Summer of Love does seem to represent a genuine and organised attempt – here we have, after all, a co-ordinating committee – to gather like-minded individuals in the Bay Area, we should also note that another event that took place at the start of 1967 and was also a contributory factor in the story that would unfold in the subsequent months. The Human Be-In of 14 January, staged at Golden Gate Park, saw forces from various parts of that geographical region – San Francisco, Berkeley and its environs – join together. Charles Perry, who would later publish a history of the Haight,17 recorded his reminiscences of the occasion ten years later. He saw the event as important because one of its purposes was to treat some of the rifts that had broken out between different sections of the broad counterculture with differing ideologies – the political and apolitical, the folk-oriented and rock-driven. Perry, who attended with his friends, speculates on the motivations of a gathering, which brought together electric folk – Country Joe McDonald – and acid rock – the Jefferson Airplane – and key figures from the Beat circle – Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – not to mention Timothy Leary, in his contribution to the Rolling Stone collection of memoirs, The Sixties:

  [W]e were living in Berkeley. Like most of the people we knew there, folkies, artists and dropouts from the radical-political scene, we were inclined to go on peace marches and pay some attention to the spokesmen of the Berkeley Left. But there was a dangerous narrowness about them, becoming more obvious as Berkeley became more narcissistic. Ever since the Free Speech Movement, which had brought a great blast of media attention, the politicos had come to think of fame as their natural right. But now the Haight was making the same claim, and that was a pisser. Berkeley distrusted rock and roll – throughout the McCarthy years rock had been the enemy and folk music was the true revolutionary music: pure, uncommercial, a little academic, a small pond not too over-crowded with the right size frogs. It distrusted drugs, though it had signed along on the sexual-freedom movement, which opened the door to every form of hedonism. But most of all, the Berkeley politicos despised the Haight’s lack of politics and resented the fact that these nobodies […] had stolen their thunder as young rebels and were cutting their recruiting among younger college students. The Be-In was intended, in some people’s minds at least to heal the conflict. That was the meaning of the subtitle ‘A Gathering of the Tribes’.18

  The Be-In, which drew around 20,000 participants,19 may be regarded then as a fraternal and pacifying precursor to the Summer of Love, a parley between different wings of the northern California scene and a moment when the historical divisions between the political and rock music were at least narrowed.

  What though was the appeal of the invitation, to participate in a Summer of Love that followed? We can surely begin to explain that attraction by describing the ingredients that had, by as early as the previous year, started to provide the foundations of the growing Haight-Ashbury scene thought, by 1966, to be home to some 15,000 hippies.20 Quoting one such hippy who attempted an overview of the community, its values and its concerns: ‘The Haight-Ashbury had four or five grapevines cooking at all times, and the two words that went down the wire most in those days were dope and revolution. Our secret formula was grass, LSD, meditation, hot music, consolidation, and a joyous sexuality’,21 a gathering of ideas to which we will return in due course.

  Hamilton also discusses the clothing that set the members of this exotic world apart. ‘They wore mod styles, mini-skirts, Beatle boots, colourful paisley prints, Edwardian and velvet clothes, or perhaps Buddhist robes or flowing capes’ but narcotic stimulants – ‘marijuana smoke drifted around them’ – and most specifically psychedelic drugs ‘permeated the entire scene’. For the hippies, LSD or acid, was ‘an avant garde tool – it elicited spontaneity, the ability to see previously hidden connections, and feelings of oneness with the universe. Hippies believed in spreading love, freedom, peace, sincerity, and creativity, and they considered acid essential in doing this.’22

  Marwick agrees with the centrality of acid to the movement. ‘What then distinguished a hippie? The essential ingredients were LSD and everything associated with it’.23 But he also raises a different point about the definition of hippy and how far we should associate it with US society alone. He believes that there may have been 200,000 hippies in America by the end of the 1960s but proposes that there may have been that many again in other locations around the world. Certainly his account – that of a British historian, after all – aims to provide a more international reading of the phenomenon. He asks:

  Was the hippie essentially an American invention? What was a hippie? […] The notion of the ‘bohemian‘ is a useful one […] The bohemian is ‘different’, defies convention, but is not necessarily thereby engaged in trying to subvert ‘bourgeois’ society. The Beats of the fifties were particularly potent rebels in that the ideas and attitudes they generated continued to exert influence throughout the sixties, but they were bohemian in that their central commitment was to art, basically novels and poetry, not to social, still less political causes.24

  Considering the etymology of the term hippy, he connects it to the language of Beat, ‘hep’ – as in ‘most up to the moment’25 – becoming ‘hip’ and then being adapted and attached to the later subculture here under consideration. Marwick adds: ‘The linguistic origins are indisputably American. However, while recognising America as it birthplace, a French commentator highly critical of the whole hippie movement insisted that the European wave was originated in Britain by the Albert Hall underground poetry festival.26 And in the American sources, […] we find the view being quite strongly expressed that the hip place to be is London.’27

  Nonetheless, we should recognise, too, that the main focus of this cultural phenomenon remained in the US during 1967, with one of the defining moments of the Summer of Love occurring in another part of California on 16, 17 and 18 June when the Monterey Festival, the first outdoor music gathering of its kind, the precursor to the great end-of-decade festivals at Woodstock in 1969 and, in the UK, the Isle of Wight in both 1969 and 1970, convened, bringing together an extraordinary coalition of talent, familiar acts and those,
as yet, little known: established artists such as the Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding and the Who and the next generation of stars in Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

  Lou Adler, record mogul and producer/manager of the Mamas and the Papas at the time, was a significant player in the organisation of Monterey, alongside John Phillips, a member of the very vocal group Adler was then steering. The pair involved a number of the highest profile musicians of the day in the planning of the festival, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Brian Jones and Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham among them. Says Adler:

  [J]ust a few months before the gathering at Cass Elliot’s house, someone – I think it was Paul McCartney – said it was about time that rock and roll became recognised as an art-form, instead of just a musical phase. Rock and roll had in fact grown up; we had experienced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and Dylan going electric. By the time John [Phillips] and I met again with the promoters and other artists, those three days at Monterey seemed like a great idea […] We thought that any festival should be nonprofit […] The promoters weren’t geared to that thinking. Since it was a commercial venture, they were interested in producing a profit, naturally and rightfully so.28

  In the end, a number of interested artists – Paul Simon and Johnny Rivers among them – agreed to split the initial cost and the event could proceed. Yet even then Adler reports that there were disagreements with the San Francisco bands – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service – who believed that at the festival ‘everything should be free […] except, of course, their recording contracts’,29 a somewhat sarcastic remark on the nature of the negotiations that were eventually saved by the interventions of Bay Area promoter Bill Graham and Rolling Stone magazine lynchpin Ralph J. Gleason. However, Adler’s comment is a clear indication that the share-all, peace and love ethos of the blossoming Summer of Love had already been pricked by the thorns of commercial reality. Adler’s position also reveals a certain ambiguity to these processes. The co-founder of A&M Records, he talks about a desire for a non-profit event yet sees the aim of the promoters to achieve a profit as quite justified, an ambivalent position at best.

  Preceding Monterey by a couple of weeks was the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, issued to great fanfare by Parlophone, a subsidiary of the UK-based major EMI, the most powerful label in the world by this stage, on 1 June. Much anticipated, the LP had been trailed by a double A-sided single, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/‘Penny Lane’ the previous February, two tracks that had originally been intended for inclusion on the forthcoming album. This extraordinary pair of songs, each bearing the distinct mark of the two group’s principal songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, has significance as it offers clues regarding the original blueprint for the Sgt. Pepper collection. Both of these pieces, in their different ways, represented memories of childhood and, when the group gathered in late 1966 to begin work on the next long player, MacDonald proposes that ‘they were aiming at an autobiographical album developing the Liverpudlian resonances of records like “In My Life” and “Eleanor Rigby”’.30 For ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Lennon had drawn on recollections of Strawberry Field (sic), a girls’ reform school near his childhood home in Woolton,31 while McCartney, in his piece, had re-visited schoolboy memories of the street and district of the city known as Penny Lane.32

  However, and it is a significant qualification, neither of these titles, though schemed to appear on Sgt. Pepper, ever did. While George Martin has since suggested it was ‘the biggest mistake of my professional life’33 to eventually exclude the tracks from the album, these songs did not make it to final version for reasons linked to a standard British practice of the time that saw released singles not included on albums. Nonetheless, if this was the intention of the new record – to establish a theme and pen songs around that idea – then it plainly set out initially to be a record of nostalgia, a looking back, rather than a celebration of the contemporary, a comment on the particular style and spirit of that dynamic era unfolding as 1966 slipped into 1967.

  If we are to move on to the songs that actually made the final cut, while we can still discern strands of the nostalgic within the record’s song cycle – ‘When I’m 64’ and ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ fit this bill in various ways – there is scant evidence that the Liverpool autobiographical thread actually survived, once ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ had been discarded for practical, commercial reasons rather than artistic ones. MacDonald remarks of the move: ‘Apart from putting them back to square one with the new album, the decision killed the informal concept of an LP drawing inspiration from their Liverpool childhoods.’34

  Let us now approach the finished article instead from a different position: how far can we recognise the values and concerns of the hippies of Haight-Ashbury and, by implication their Summer of Love project, in the album that was made publicly available? And to what extent are the songs on the record and, indeed, the Peter Blake-Jann Haworth conceived sleeve – such an integral part of this overall package – expressing ideas that are quite unconnected to the spirit of that time?

  As templates for this consideration I would like to return to two quotes cited earlier in this piece – the view of a hippy who refers to the key importance of ‘dope and revolution […] grass, LSD, meditation, hot music, consolidation, and a joyous sexuality’,35 and the summary that Hamilton provides: ‘Hippies believed in spreading love, freedom, peace, sincerity, and creativity, and they considered acid essential in doing this.’36

  To begin with ‘dope’ and ‘grass’, and the references in ‘A Day in the Life’ – ‘I’d love to turn you on’ (which would quickly lead to the BBC banning the song from its playlists) and ‘Found my way upstairs and had a smoke/Somebody spoke and I went into a dream’ could be construed as references to marijuana but there is no direct link beyond that one song. As for ‘LSD’, the song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ has become most famously connected to the hallucinogenic drug and the Lennon-penned lyric suggests a florid, multi-coloured odyssey that may well have been the product or record of an acid trip. That said, Lennon’s interest in Lewis Carroll has been widely reported and the song certainly possesses nuances of Alice’s adventures. Furthermore, he also claimed that the title of the song – with its apparently obvious nod to LSD – was inspired not by a drug but by a children’s drawing. It begs the question why would Lennon have wanted to disguise the source of this song at all, even if his explanation appears to be rather disingenuous and ultimately banal? MacDonald comments that ‘it was naturally assumed to be a coded reference to LSD. In fact, no such code was intended and, though the lyric explicitly recreates the psychedelic experience, the Beatles were genuinely surprised when it was pointed out to them’.37 The death of a driver in ‘A Day in the Life’ – ‘He blew his mind out in a car’ – hints that the man who died – thought to be based on wealthy socialite and Beatles associate Tara Browne – had taken a drug that was mind-altering in some fashion, which also tarnished the public reception of the piece. There is a further suggestion of drug use in ‘A Little Help from My Friends’, with some readings assuming ‘friends’ is simply a euphemism for drugs and the line ‘I get high with a little help from my friends’ seems to at least, in part, support the case.38 The track ‘Fixing a Hole’ has also attracted comment, in respect of its drug innuendo, as the title hints at the addict’s use of the needle, though McCartney has discounted this.39

  ‘Meditation’ we can link to George Harrison’s one compositional outing on the record. ‘Within You Without You’, with its sitar refrain, extra Indian instrumentation and Hindu inspired text, reflected that interest that was being expressed in matters oriental among the hippy generation, though it must be said that it was Buddhism and particularly Zen Buddhism – an inheritance from the Beat writers like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Snyder40 – that was engaging many young Californians by the mid- and later 1960s, a legacy, too, of the West Coast
’s links to Japan and the Pacific Rim, a trend prompted, at least in part, by that geographical proximity. The Beatles would, during 1967, take an active personal interest in the spiritual teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an association driven mainly by Harrison, but certainly consistent with a general feeling among many young Westerners that Eastern religions may offer possible spiritual answers to their own personal dilemmas. Of the one Harrison song on Sgt. Pepper, MacDonald says: ‘Stylistically, it is the most distant departure from the staple Beatles sound in their discography and an altogether remarkable achievement for someone who had been acquainted with Hindustani classical music for barely eighteen months.’41

  ‘Hot music’ may be interpreted in various ways. Hot had become an adjective associated with upbeat, frenetic jazz by the 1920s, and there are strong suggestions that the term also connotes passion, sex even, though the phrase also has connotations of state-of-the-art or cutting-edge. By the mid-1960s, in Haight-Ashbury, the hot music of the time would almost certainly have been represented by a raft of emerging acid rock of bands, whose guitar players Jorma Kaukonen, Jerry Garcia and John Cippollina particularly, were coaxing amplified, electric sounds from their instruments which were frequently felt to signify sonic representations of the hallucinogenic experience in concert and also on record. We might certainly see some of the guitar experimentation of the Bay Area as having some effect on the subsequent inventions and histrionics of Jimi Hendrix, who came from Seattle, further north on America’s West Coast, but had arrived in the UK by 1966. Nor should we ignore the experiments of British groups such as Pink Floyd and Soft Machine who, from the middle of the decade, had been producing sounds that drew in equal measure on electronics, improvisation and psychedelics.42 How far did these forms of ‘hot music’ inform the content of Sgt. Pepper? It would seem quite little. While there is some outstanding rock guitar work on the album – for instance, McCartney’s searing performance on the title track, a replacement solo for one Harrison had toiled seven hours to perfect only to see it end up on the cutting room floor43 – there is scant sense that the sounds of California are permeating the Beatles’ opus, even those more conventional vocal innovations that the Beach Boys had brought to Pet Sounds in all their multi-tracked glory in 1966, often regarded as the benchmark that the Beatles aimed to surpass with their next LP. The UK-centred innovations – which McCartney had certainly witnessed at venues like the UFO and the Roundhouse – may be discerned to an extent on, say, ‘A Day in the Life’, but, again, there is little direct connection with the subterranean creativity that Syd Barrett and Daevid Allen and their groups had been working on.