Good Booty
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Beatlemaniacs’ knowing screams built the bridge between the struggle for coherence and acknowledgment that 1950s rock and roll represents and the full-blown youth movement, free in its thinking and its sense of the body, that flourished after the mid-1960s. In order to appeal to those girls who would become soul sisters and flower children, and to make the musical transition that would take rock and roll from its origins in the teenage heart into its adult phase, the Beatles learned not only from the male rock and rollers who’d set the stage for them, but from their own female peers—especially the girl groups springing up in cities like New York and Detroit, who connected rock and roll’s nonsense firmly to real life and made way for the explicit erotic confrontations that would follow. “Will you still love me tomorrow?” That was the question the first great girl group, New Jersey’s Shirelles, asked in 1960. No one knew then that it would set the tone for yet another phase of erotic revelation within music, one that would declare that love is free, even as it laid out its costs.
5
THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
© Jim Marshall Photography LLC
NEW YORK, DETROIT, SAN FRANCISCO, LOS ANGELES, 1961–1970
The laws of physics and foreplay dictate that every action stimulates a reaction. This truism can be applied in reverse: major cultural permutations alter how we view what comes before them. The 1960s played host to what’s now called the sexual revolution, a confluence of scientific, sociological, and legal shifts that pointed America toward greater permissiveness and dialogue about sex: oral contraceptive pills, major surveys of Americans’ sexual behavior by the scientists William Masters and Virginia Johnson (which became bestsellers), porn magazine publisher Hugh Hefner opening Playboy Clubs around the country, Helen Gurley Brown arguing for unmarried women’s bedroom rights in her guidebook Sex and the Single Girl and as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Intellectuals including psychiatrists Wilhelm Reich and R. D. Laing and social philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown promoted a view of social progress grounded in loosening repression.
As young people in the cities came together to create what they viewed as whole new ways of being, even the settled folks in the middle-class suburbs began quietly experimenting with the new values of a “swinging society,” with homemakers passing marijuana cigarettes at parties where one woman might end up wandering off with another’s husband. Celebrating the new freedoms of the time, the historian Theodore Roszak wrote in 1969 of the gradual demise of social conformity and the kind of narrow thinking that “seeks to reconcile us to an existence without dreams, without fantasies . . . To speak of the ecstasies of life in such a somber environment is to risk folly. Here where all men trudge, none may dance. Dancing is . . . for later.” In 1960s America, dancing was again for now—especially among the young.1
The nondancing squares who endured World War II and returned to the anxious orderliness of the 1950s had conformed so mightily to marital conventions that they produced an enormous generation that came of age in the 1960s and became known as the baby boom. These oppositional offspring produced what Roszak dubbed a “counter culture”—a world within the world, deliberately moving in opposition to the mainstream’s values. Aided by a stable economy that made freedom convenient, new drugs that altered perceptions, and those early lessons in rebellion that rock and roll offered, the countercultural generation devoted itself to new ways of being that began in the body: new dress, new dance, new sex. By the end of the 1960s, these efforts would reveal themselves as life-altering for some, but limited.
OR JUST A MOMENT’S PLEASURE
At the dawn of the 1960s, pop’s shifting subject matter gained new focus. Doo-wop and rock and roll nonsense had evoked what couldn’t be said, but now it was joined by lyrics that unmistakably spoke about the longings of teenagers, especially girls. The hits emanating from New York’s Brill Building and Detroit’s Motown label established an ethics of sexual behavior for the adolescent set, directly confronting subjects like heavy petting, sexual frustration and jealousy, teen pregnancy, and romantic abandonment. Many of the best ones were written by young men and women who were going through the very struggles their catchy little dramas expressed.
Carol Klein and Gerry Goffin were two Jewish kids who met in the student lounge of Queens College in 1958 and discovered a mutual interest in telling teen tales. Goffin wanted to be a playwright, but Klein, who was already collaborating with friends like Paul Simon and Neil Sedaka and recording a little under the stage name Carole King, persuaded him to try writing lyrics. One thing led to another, professionally and personally. They had some luck selling songs to black vocal groups. Then Klein became pregnant. They had to marry, and to make ends meet.
The song that made the difference for them confronted the serious side of sexual exploration. They created “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” in their ground-floor apartment in Sheepshead Bay, with baby Louise right there; Gerry’s day job testing polymers in a chemical plant meant they could only write at night. Klein came up with a melody that rose and fell like the female sexual response that sex doctors Masters and Johnson were busy analyzing. Goffin’s lyric put the moment’s pleasure in tension with the fear of consequences to come. Somber and majestic, not nonsensical at all, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” expresses teenagers’ awareness of the weight of erotic desire. The feeling wasn’t entirely enjoyable, especially for girls—the decision to act on what Goffin’s lyric called “the magic of your sighs” was no light thing. “Though now in his twenties, Gerry hadn’t forgotten which three-letter word was foremost in the mind of every teen. It was s-e-x that kids thought about when they listened to lyrics about hearts full of love, hearts breaking, lovers longing, youth yearning, cars, stars, the moon, the sun,” King wrote in her memoir.2
What makes “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” a pop turning point isn’t simply the earnest lyric or the mounting melody. It’s the vocal from Shirley Owens of the Shirelles, the group of New Jersey high schoolers who recorded it and took it to the top of the charts. Owens, who at first found the song too “country” for her taste, doesn’t embellish Goffin’s words. She just tells it like it is in her affectless alto, the only gesture toward virtuosity a quick, elegant drop into her lower register on the phrase “You say that I’m the only one.” Listening, it’s easy to imagine this plainspoken girl sitting up in a car’s bench backseat and straightening her skirt before delivering the message. Her eyes are wide open, no stars.
Musicologist Jacqueline Warwick notes that the girl group sound of the Shirelles and other Brill Building–associated acts “was predicated on the sounds of adolescent female voices audibly going through hormonal development—most girl group singers really were girls, with ages ranging from 11 to 18 in most representative groups.”3 Employing this fluctuating register, they mirrored the boys of rock and roll and doo-wop in manifesting a truly teenage point of view, with an authority more studied voices couldn’t match. The backing vocals in girl group songs carried over the stimulated rush of nonsense, using the syllables of playground games and mash-note margin scribbles. But at the center of these songs, Owens and her sisters didn’t talk nonsense. They put an end to it.
An Ebony magazine article published in June 1960 asked “Are American Dating Customs Dangerous?” It focused on the courtship of model Lourdes “Lulu” Guerrero, a member of a large family from the Dominican Republic, and Clyde Otis, who, it happened, was an executive at the thriving New York record label Mercury. Guerrero and Otis practiced the Dominican custom of “duenna,” or chaperonage. Every date the couple had included another family member, often Lulu’s mother. (This old-fashioned approach worked for them: Otis and Guerrero wed and remained married until Otis’s death in 2008.) Accompanied by a sidebar that noted the rapid rise in US illegitimate birth rates, the article portrayed Lulu as the winner in this relationship. “Her adherence to an ancient and honorable dating code throws into bold relief the freedom which Americans expect and almost always get.�
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That freedom, according to Ebony, was perilous. By 1966, the magazine was reporting unwed motherhood among African Americans as a national crisis while noting that the men involved remained mostly unaffected. “The barbs are tossed at one-half of the duo responsible for illegitimacy—as if the sex had been a unilateral act.”5 Girl group music staged the conversations that a male-dominated larger culture refused, not only about pregnancy, but about abuse in relationships (the Crystals’ controversial King-and-Goffin-penned 1962 track “He Hit Me [and It Felt Like a Kiss]”), male criminality (the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets”), early marriage (“Not Too Young to Get Married” by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans), and moral confusion (the Supremes’ “Let Me Go the Right Way”).
The Supremes were the signature female act of Detroit’s Motown label, which transformed both black pop and African American entrepreneurship under label head Berry Gordy, a believer in the integrationist potential of crossover capitalism. Gordy’s artists and the songwriters who fleshed out stories for them, like Smokey Robinson and the team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, aimed to accomplish this goal by blending unmistakably black sonic elements taken from gospel music and R&B with the supposedly white affects of modern recording studio production. Berry marketed their works as “The Sound of Young America”—an inherently political mainstream move that complemented the burgeoning civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As the cultural critic Gerald Early notes, “Perhaps Motown, for the first time in American history, gave black kids a mythicized puberty of normal teenage angst.”6 It’s arguable that doo-wop did something similar; Motown, however, more clearly expressed the agonies and ecstasies.
The moral and ethical conversations conducted in girl group records found further articulation in Motown music. Robinson’s songs for the Miracles were more psychologically nuanced than virtually anything else on the pop charts, broaching subjects like sexual discernment (“Shop Around”), repression (“The Tears of a Clown”), and enthrallment (“You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”). Marvin Gaye, who would create some of the richest countercultural albums of the early 1970s, began his career with the Gordy-penned defense of romantic fealty “Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide.” The more impulsive, experiential side of eroticism also had a place at Motown—the Temptations pushed girls’ limits with the early single “I Want a Love I Can See”—but as a whole this company, which advertised itself as sending its artists to charm school and providing chaperones on the road, made its mark by showing that rock and roll’s youthful energy could serve culture that was “classy” and viable in the commercial mainstream. By 1964, when the Beatles invaded America, Motown artists were their chief rivals. Women reigned, at least momentarily. Motown’s four No. 1 hits that year were all by women: Mary Wells’s jaunty ode to monogamy, “My Guy,” and three by the Supremes. These were all classic girl group laments about risky boys composed by Holland-Dozier-Holland: “Baby Love,” “Where Did Our Love Go,” and “Come See About Me.”
Though the Supremes’ subject matter was familiar, the voice of Diana Ross made the Supremes a bridge into the next phase of pop eroticism. Ross is not often held up as a progressive force within popular music. For one thing, she favored old-fashioned Hollywood glamour and musical sheen over grit and earnestness, and for another, certain decisions she made seemed to betray the spirit of camaraderie fundamental to the appeal of the girl groups. The story of Ross usurping Florence Ballard as the Supremes’ lead voice (the troubled Ballard was ousted from the group in 1967, and Gordy, then Ross’s secret lover, helped orchestrate her exit) is one of pop’s most celebrated tragedies, a tale of favoritism, greed, and, to some, misjudged talent that exposes the corrupt nature of the pop machine. There’s even an award-winning musical, Dreamgirls, based on the saga. Yet no singer but Ross could have taken Motown into the late 1960s, when the nation’s erotic idiosyncracies increasingly permeated popular culture, including on the hit parade.
When the Supremes entered the studio to record “Where Did Our Love Go?,” which would provide Ross with her breakthrough moment, they were cleaning up someone else’s mess. The Marvelettes, whose lead singer Gladys Horton had one of those great plainspoken girl group voices, had turned down the composition. In a hurry to record, Lamont Dozier decided to keep it in the lower key that was not quite comfortable for Ross. He also had a brainstorm: the vocal hook could be a repetition of the word baby, in a long chain that might be a plea, a come-on, or a manifestation of erotic rapture. “The only way Diana could do it was to sing, ‘baybeh, baybeh’ in that low and sultry way,” Dozier later told an interviewer. “All of a sudden, that was her sound, whereas previously she’d been up in the air.”7
Ross’s new sound wasn’t about sex; like Little Richard’s, it was of sex. And it expressed the core of a personality that connected with an erotic archetype but also challenged it. The slender, androgynous Ross was a classic gamine, the neat and fashionable Audrey Hepburn of black pop—yet she could also veer strangely off-kilter within a song, her decorum unraveling in half coos and pained cries. It was a paradoxical voice, as one admirer wrote, “a combination of sex, temptation, little-girl coyness and breathy Marilyn Monroe comeuppance.”8 And though Ross never truly joined the coming counterculture, her voice fit in with its general mood of immediacy and freakiness.
Motown would later align itself with the civil rights movement and, in the person of Marvin Gaye, find a champion of both frank sexuality and broad political awareness. Yet even as its stars’ interests shifted, as far as romance went, black pop of the 1960s remained relatively conservative. The seductive or self-protective dynamics of romantic coupledom would remain at its center as it matured. By the mid-1960s, though, on the wilder West Coast, a different musical contingent—the mostly white kids who were turning rock and roll into Roszak’s “counter culture”—was doing away with a focus on the individual, providing a different kind of liberation for kids who didn’t want to save dancing for later. The leaders in that scene replaced forthright ethical debates with minds blown and bodies constantly whirling.
FREE LOVE MUSIC
When the guitarist Gary Duncan left his Central Valley hometown for San Francisco in the late 1950s, he found a Beat scene full of poets, painters, and speed freaks. But it was evolving. The new hippie houses grew ever more communal—especially after LSD, a hallucinogen psychiatrists had been using to treat alcoholics and patients with minor personality disorders, became a leisure drug. The psychedelic experience broke down barriers among roommates so they felt like family. Everyone was making art, and art was seductive. “You’d go to, say, 1990 Page Street [in the Haight-Ashbury District], open up the door, and there’d be a fourteen-bedroom Victorian house with something different going on in every room: painters in one room talking to each other, musicians in another room,” Duncan reminisced. “It was really cool, and to all outward appearances, there was nothing happening. It was like a secret society . . . There was a while when the place was just totally free.”9
This feeling of ultimate freedom extended to erotic exploration. If earlier 1960s pop by the girl groups, Motown, and even the Beatles and Rolling Stones confronted desire as an ethical minefield to traverse, the countercultural rock played by Bay Area bands like Duncan’s Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and above all, the Grateful Dead, worked on principles of safe, open space. Music making created a zone where anything, including lovemaking, could happen. Dance, as much as hallucinogens, was the chemical agent that cleared the philosophical ground. “Everyone should dance every day,” wrote novelist Tom Robbins, then a reporter for a Seattle hippie paper, in 1967. “Dance at a discotheque. Dance in your living room. Dance in bed. Stick flowers in your typewriter and dance at the office. Dance at the supermarket with a smoking banana in your teeth.” Robbins assumed that this dance would involve multiple orgasms.10
Free love had roots in the utopian communities of the nineteenth century and
in the writings of early feminist thinkers such as Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman. In mid-’60s rock, however, free love became an ideal expressed in music, as played by psychedelic bands at San Francisco’s Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom. Historian Michael Kramer notes that in these halls where people gathered to trip and dance, several factors created a magical feeling. Wild light shows disoriented the senses. Posters on the walls invoked Eastern religions and pagan scenes, utopian-seeming alternatives to the strict Judeo-Christian propriety many revelers were trying to shake off. Simply being in these faded grand palaces of bygone eras made the bands and their audiences feel like they were creating a new city within the city, one more like Peter Pan’s Neverland than like the boring neighborhoods where they’d been raised. Dancing called forth this new world. Kramer writes, “In the erotics of dancing bodies, participants engaged many issues key to public life: intimacy and collectivity, immediacy and distance, community and otherness, the supposedly mundane and the grand-historical. Their activities helped constitute a public sphere that seemed to flicker in and out of existence, much like they themselves did in the strobe lights of the psychedelic dance floor.”11
Outside the ballrooms, old ways still lingered. Feminist reassessments of the 1960s counterculture, especially as it flowered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, have exposed the scene’s sexism. “The women of the Haight were having sex with lots of different men and living in alternative families, but they were still expected, and many of them still wanted to be, pregnant and dependent,” the historian Alice Echols wrote in 2002. And this was an almost entirely white scene, prone to casual racism. Brown-skinned goddesses with towering Afros adorned many psychedelic posters, and cartoons that came dangerously close to the minstrelsy era’s “coon” imagery were common in underground newspapers that spread the news about the ballroom shows. Meanwhile, people of color were being pushed out of their own former neighborhoods by “urban renewal” that made available the very spaces countercultural youths used to liberate themselves.12