| 'We simply, as the expression of the time went, “let it all hang out", and we took our clothes off and jiggled the extremities of our anatomies around for the cameramen who were hanging about, and danced for three days non-stop.' |
| One of the favourite adjectives of the enthusiasts for the cult of youth was 'classless' and it bears examination. Much was made of the humble origins of such aristocrats of youth culture as the Beatles, David Bailey, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, Sandie Shaw and Twiggy, but one swallow does not make a summer and a handful of actors, photographers, models and singers do not make a class revolution. For every Paul McCartney there was a Jane Asher, for every Mick Jagger a Marianne Faithfull, and for every Mary Quant an Alexander Plunket-Greene. Again, the myth was what mattered; because people thought class was no bar to advancement, it did (for a while and within a limited range of professions) become less important. |
| Times were changing because the class system was changing such a lot and whoever you were you could make it big. You could come from a working-class home, the poorest of the poor, and you could be a star very, very quickly, as people like Twiggy proved. |
| It became fashionable to be working class. I'm sure everybody remembers the fact that even the aristocracy started speaking with cockney accents and it was very, very fashionable to be a working-class boy made good and it was terribly unfashionable to be posh. And we all used to put on accents. We stopped talking nicely and started speaking just slightly wrong. |
| The accent that emerged as a result of this self-conscious vowel-shifting was neither public school nor proletarian but a hybrid drawl with a hint of the transatlantic. It was diffused through the influence of pirate disc-jockeys and achieved its quintessence in the laid-back mumblings of Mick Jagger. Accused by a radio interviewer of 'trying to project the image that the Rolling Stones are a lot of inarticulate yobbos' he replied in as yobbish a voice as he could manage: |
| We don't really try and project anything. People who write the articles really know what they want more or less and so they write 'Oh, the Rolling Stones are a load of yobs' and everyone is very prepared to believe it. I really don't care whether they think we're a load of yobs or not. I don't mind what they think about me. |
| Pop stars like Jagger were at least partly responsible for establishing the late-sixties convention that to be inarticulate was not necessarily to be stupid; it was, on the contrary, evidence that one's thoughts were too deep for words; or that one's life was so different, exciting and trendy that one had no point of contact with one's interlocutor; or that one was out of one's skull on dope; or all three. |
| As we have seen, until the mid-sixties, the middle-class grammar-school-and-university tradition was not only outside commercial pop culture but was deeply suspicious of it. Alongside the Mozart and Sibelius in the record rack might be a Joan Baez LP or even 'Freewheelin' Bob Dylan', but it was quite impossible to pronounce the words Gerry and the Pacemakers without an involuntary curling of the lip. |
| The next generation along, hitting their teens in 63 or '64, were a good deal less sniffy about the whole thing. Because youth culture was being taken seriously by The Times and the Guardian (and because it was taking itself ever more seriously) an interest in it was ceasing to be intellectually disreputable. |
| When the Animals recorded a couple of songs from the first Bob Dylan LP, supplying a rock backing where Dylan had strummed acoustic guitar, a taboo was broken. The Byrds' folk-rock version of 'Mr Tambourine Man' went to number one in the summer of 1965 and Dylan himself promptly hired a rock group to accompany his increasingly surrealistic lyrics. There were those who hissed and shouted 'Judas!' when he brought his band on tour, but for every unreconstructed folknik he alienated, he recruited two or three devotees to his new, intellectually-respectable brand of rock'n'roll. |
Dylan's arrival, I mean it was a great arrival because we'd been listening to Dylan from the early sixties and I was fantastically impressed with his stuff and when he electrified I was made up. I mean a lot of the folkies threw up their hands in horror, didn't they? Gave him this terrible time. But of course he was absolutely great electric.
I was very disappointed when he went electric because I felt he had sold out to commercialism. |
| The Beatles, meanwhile, were moving away from the Merseybeat simplicities of 'She Loves You' (yeah, yeah, yeah) and venturing further with each LP in the direction of the sort of lyrics that would ring the bell with the A-level Eng- Lit crowd. |
| They say that Bobby Dylan gave John Lennon his first joint, and it's probably true, and there's a kind of mythological meaning to that. He also liberated John Lennon to write pop songs in the style of the funny little poems he'd been writing since he was five or six or seven years old. You know, John Lennon didn't think you could do that in rock'n'roll songs and Bob Dylan showed people that you could just describe the dream, that it was all right. In fact that's really what the music was all about! He was moving to meet the Beatles and the Beatles were moving to meet him, and the result really was the second-stage flowering of the sixties. |
| In May 1966 the Beatles gave up live performance; from now on they would be seen on film and television and heard on record, and that would be all. It was symptomatic of an important change in the way pop music was used. Clubs were turning from live groups to discotheques; concerts were becoming bigger, louder, more expensive and less frequent; the Dansette was giving way to the stereo 'hi-fi' and the sales of LPs were increasing at the expense of singles. Moreover, the two markets were growing apart; singles now were aimed at the teenyboppers on the one hand or the mums'n'dads on the other, while the teenagers who were serious about music bought the albums (which now began to include the tracks available as singles). In 1966, the best-selling singles were by Jim Reeves, Frank Sinatra, Herb Alpert and Dave Dee. Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich; the best-selling albums were by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Walker Brothers and the Rolling Stones The following year, the top three best-selling singles were all by Englebert Humperdinck. |
| Pop's new-found pretensions grew out of a cross-fertilisation with the cultural avant-garde which had been blossoming during the early sixties. Once the two had interbred, it became a matter of little consequence whether people flocked to Ravi Shankar concerts because of a fascination with Indian classical music, or because George Harrison and Brian Jones had taken up the sitar. It was a matter of even less consequence whether they bought the Beatles' or the Stones' records because of the sitar or in spite of it. Peter Blake painted portraits of the Beatles and some art buffs said 'Who?' and a lot more Beatles fans said 'Who?', but by and by everybody found out so that was all right. People with names like Ralph Ortiz and Gustav Metzger had been creating sculpture by tearing up armchairs and pianos, so when the Who smashed their equipment on stage this was not zonked-out mods on the rampage, this was Autodestructive Art (especially after Jeff Beck did the same thing in Antonioni's Blow Up). Then the Move cottoned on to the idea and started hacking up television sets and cardboard cut-outs of Harold Wilson and one started to wonder. |
In 1965, the poet Adrian Henri wrote:
Paul McCartney Gustav Mahler
Alfred Jarry John Coltrane
Charlie Mingus Claude Debussy
Wordsworth Monet Bach and Blake
Charlie Parker Pierre Bonnard
Leonardo Bessie Smith
Fidel Castro Jackson Pollock
Gandhi Milton Munch and Berg
Bela Bartok Henri Rousseau
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
Lukas Cranach Shostakovitch
Kropotkin Ringo George and John
(It goes on for another ten stanzas but you get the idea) |
| 'In 1960", says Jeff Nuttall in Bomb Culture, 'this poem would have been unthinkable. By 1965, such a poem was inevitable.' |
| The most influential record of the sixties was probably 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' released by the Beatles in 1967; a continuous, thematically-structured song-cycle featuring brass band, symphony orchestra, sitar, wacky sound effects, obscure lyrics and some good tunes. |
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| Sergeant Pepper was the first time I really realised how powerful music could be. I remember listening to it and just being knocked out by it. I played the whole album through and thought 'My God!' I know people say music can change your lije and I think it did in a way, because I thought ' This is what I want to be a part of. I want to be involved in this.' |
It was strange. You found that there was other music behind it. You were hearing secret harmonies I suppose, echoes of something else.
It wasn't just an LP. it was a complete experience! |
| You actually had to listen to the word.s and the words were compelling. They were about something. It was much more intelligent, let's put it like that. |
| Sergeant Pepper reached the middle-class record-racks that even Joan Baez had failed to penetrate. It also had a powerfully corrupting effect on rock'n'roll. |
| When Procol Harum sang about picking flowers on the seashore to the sound of a trumpet voluntary and a grand piano (on a record entitled 'Magdalene My Regal Zonophone') the Beatles were to blame. |
| Allen Ginsberg came to Liverpool the year after the Beatles left for good and declared it 'the centre of consciousness of the human universe'. Back in San Francisco in the summer of 1965, he told 1,200 people at a poetry conference that the 'Liverpool minstrels' were leading a 'revolution of the psyche'. Luria Castell. one of the organisers of the first big rock'n'roll dances in San Francisco (who had previously been living in a tree in Mexico), announced her intention of making San Francisco 'the American Liverpool' because, unlike New York or Los Angeles, it was 'a pleasure city'. |
| 'Basically', she said, 'we want to meet people and have a good time and not be dishonest and have a profitable thing going on.' Thus was hippiedom born of the union of idealism and bullshit. |
| Dazzled by the proposition that London was the swinging centre of the human universe, British teenagers were slow to look westward and notice what was going on. The artistic avant-garde knew about Ken Kesey's Acid Trips and Timothy ‘Turn-on-tune-in-drop-out' Leary, but for the vast majority, whose centre of artistic inspiration was the record counter at Boots, precious little percolated through. One or two Californian groups made an impression: the Lovin' Spoonful, a latter-day skiffle group (Americans called them jug bands), had a summery hit or two, and the Beach Boys were coming over all fey and tinkly, but it wasn't until 1967 and the 'summer of love' that fully-fledged, head-to-toe, Frisco-model hippies made their appearance on British pavements. They had a hard time getting noticed, because teenage style had already become a seven-days-a-week fancy dress parade. |
| (In September 1966 an eighteen-year-old from Muswell Hill had been hauled before the magistrates, charged 'that not being a person in Her Majesty's military forces, he did wear part of the uniform of the Scots Guards without Her Majesty's permission'. What with the blue jeans and the long hair, it was hardly a serious attempt at impersonating a soldier, and he was conditionally discharged.) |
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