Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  In a review that was notable for reflecting every adult’s reaction to this generation-dividing cacophony, Melody Maker’s Bob Dawburn managed one (almost) accurate statement: ‘“Like A Rolling Stone” will offend10 the folk purists with its strings and electric guitars.’ The strings were a product of his imagination – testament to the sense of dislocation that the song inspired. But with this record (if not the Chuck Berry-influenced ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’) Dylan had indeed chosen to shock anyone who believed that virtue and honesty could only be delivered by the rattle of an acoustic guitar. As a result, he would be booed at that summer’s Newport Folk Festival, at sundry stops on an American tour, and then systematically on a 1966 visit to the UK which was virtually a civil war between rock and folk fans.

  Few in popular music were ready to accompany him on this journey. If his lyrics owed more to Allen Ginsberg and the decadent French poets of the nineteenth century than to any precursor in pop, his sound was indebted to the spontaneity of his musicians; and, before them, to the inspiration of his peers. Dylan had relished the spring-water harmonies and melodic verve of the Beatles; the Rolling Stones’ ragged updating of Chicago blues; and especially the Animals’ achievement in borrowing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ from his own first album, and translating it into liberating rock ’n’ roll. Everything about Dylan screamed freedom, from the chaotic howl and purr of his vocal delivery to the boundless vocabulary he commanded – which in time would persuade his less inspired peers that they too could toss together random images and call it art.

  At the Troubadour in Hollywood, Dylan had played ‘folk twist music11’ with a thirteen-piece band named the Men. Then he had met five young musicians named the Byrds, and heard their reinvention of his song ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – stripped of three of its four verses, set to a Beatlesque beat, and crowned with soaring vocal harmonies and a twelve-string guitar which had the seductive charm of the Pied Piper’s flute. It portrayed a zeitgeist which was only just emerging, but which the Byrds would help to perfect. The Byrds’ music was acclaimed as folk rock, and a genre emerged to match the definition, as groups of young guitarists raided the Dylan catalogue in search of other hidden pop gems.

  Alongside ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in the charts of August 1965 was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Do You Believe in Magic’ – a spiritual song of joy for a generation who had grown up on rock ’n’ roll, ‘the magic that can set you free’. This was a step beyond ‘Those Oldies But Goodies’ and other paeans to the recent past: beyond nostalgia, moving into the realms of transcendence, it chimed perfectly with the inchoate quest for freedom shared by the audience songwriter John Sebastian was addressing. One of them was Paul Williams, a 17-year-old college student in Pennsylvania, whose passion for what he still called ‘rock ’n’ roll’ was so intense – and, he felt, so ill-served by America’s pop media – that he founded Crawdaddy!, ‘a magazine of rock’n’roll criticism’. His desire was communication across a community of listeners, a community which as yet had no name or focus. In an early issue, he located his ideal audience: ‘anyone with an interest in discussing12 the most exciting and alive music in the world today, music that is alive not because of its heavy beat but because of its fantastic inventiveness, its ability to assimilate widely different styles of music, its freshness and awareness of a world other forms of music seem ready to desert’. Williams didn’t create that audience, but he provided its first point of contact, at a time when Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, among many others, were beginning to explore themes utterly beyond the control of the music industry. In that instant, rock culture was born, confirming what a generation had already known instinctively but never put into words: listening to this music marked them out from those who didn’t or wouldn’t hear, and united them with everyone who shared the same nonconformist values.

  Let South Africa run13 its own policies, that’s my opinion.

  Cliff Richard, 1965

  Stars and celebrities should14 not try to set any level in morals. Who are we to say what is right and what is wrong?

  Mick Jagger, 1965

  In the months after Nelson Mandela was sent to Robben Island in 1964, the politically naïve world of British pop tried to establish its moral principles. Until recently a member of the British Commonwealth, South Africa was a familiar venue for the UK’s entertainment stars. Cliff Richard & the Shadows had made a triumphant visit there in 1961, the year after the Sharpeville massacre. They played to white audiences in the cities, and added two shows in the black townships. ‘I have to say that the native15 servants seemed to be treated very well in the homes I visited’, Cliff said on his return.

  Two years later, the Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell was booked to appear in South Africa, but was persuaded by the Musicians’ Union to abandon her trip. In 1964, trumpeter Eddie Calvert announced that he was unwilling to tour while the apartheid regime endured. The Beatles cancelled their tentative plans to perform in both South Africa and Israel, without explanation.fn1 So the South African government entered into subterfuge, offering contracts to Adam Faith and Dusty Springfield which promised that they would perform to multiracial audiences. They arrived, to discover that only whites were allowed inside the concert halls. Faith returned home immediately, and was condemned for staging a publicity stunt. Springfield, who had once said ‘I wish I’d been born coloured17’, arranged her own, unsegregated event, and was expelled from South Africa. Back in Britain, Peter & Gordon star Peter Asher accused her of making life more difficult for black South Africans. ‘I don’t really see that playing18 before segregated audiences means that you support segregation’, he added.fn2

  Individual gestures aside, there was no platform within British entertainment for a political stance. The BBC refused to broadcast Manfred Mann’s cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘With God on Our Side’ in February 1965 because ‘the song might offend people19’. (It also banned the Earthlings’ novelty song ‘Landing of the Daleks’, because the tune included a message to Doctor Who in Morse code: ‘SOS, SOS – THE DALEKS HAVE LANDED’. This might, the BBC feared, alarm nervous listeners.) But the merging of rock ’n’ roll and folk in 1965 allowed pop to become a debating chamber for social and political issues which ranged from the banal to the apocalyptic. Every nation seemed to have its Bob Dylan: Antoine in France; Nacho Mendez in Mexico; Raimon in Spain; Claude Dubois in Canada – all young, angry, politically committed, controversial.

  Hair – its length and cleanliness, or otherwise – was a cause célèbre for the young pop star of the 1960s. The Beatles were lampooned and then loved for their moptops. The Rolling Stones’ immaculately shiny locks were frequently described as ‘filthy’ in the press. An American teen magazine gasped in wonder at Jimi Hendrix’s ‘African bushman hairdo20’. All of them helped to extend the boundaries for children and teenagers, very slowly acclimatising parents, teachers and bosses to the recognition that long hair did not automatically signify dirt, disobedience or delinquency. A couple named Sonny and Cher – effectively the first hippie pop stars, although no one recognised them as such – cornered the market for hirsute bravado in 1965. They claimed their rights to long hair on their worldwide No. 1 duet, ‘I Got You Babe’, and on Sonny’s self-pitying solo single, ‘Laugh at Me’. So perfectly did their blend of teen-beat and folk rock catch the moment that they registered six simultaneous hits on the American chart. So convincing was Sonny’s adolescent alienation that it was sobering to remember he was already 30 years old.

  ‘A song’s lyrical content21 could become as respected as the dominating beat’, one journalist noted with an air of bemusement in June 1965, to which Paul McCartney replied: ‘Protest songs make me concentrate22 too much on the lyric, which I don’t like.’ But the equation of summer 1965 was, as Billboard magazine noted, ‘Rock + Folk + Protest23 = An Erupting New Sound’, which was ‘selling big’. The first beat-group venture into protest was so subtle that it passed almost unnoticed: in 1964, the Searche
rs added strings and gentle electric backing to Malvina Reynolds’s vision of a world after nuclear apocalypse, ‘What Have They Done to the Rain?’ (The Searchers’ other records of that period, especially ‘Needles and Pins’ and ‘When You Walk in the Room’, paved the musical path for the folk-rock explosion of the Byrds.) Thereafter, pop played its protest cards more flamboyantly.

  For an industry unused to youth speaking its mind, there was no difference between the pacifist anthems of a Joan Baez, the moral ambiguities posed by Bob Dylan, and the all-purpose nihilism of Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’, a 1965 hit which was as poetic as a dictionary and was inevitably barred by the BBC as being ‘not suitable for light entertainment’. McGuire was the target of an American military clampdown on records that might prove ‘inimical to military morale24’, and were therefore lifted from forces’ playlists and banned from sale in army stores. ‘It is absurd to expect25 that we should encourage a situation whereby US soldiers handle nuclear weapons as part of their military duties,’ a spokesman said, ‘then spend their off-duty time listening to music telling them nuclear weapons are wicked.’

  ‘Eve of Destruction’ did not specifically mention the conflict in Vietnam, but as the mid-1960s progressed, a protest movement against American involvement in South East Asia became apparent across the Western world. It drew the cultural fault line of the decade, and not only in nations committed to the conflict. By 1970, rock was awash in anthems decrying the war, the single crusade that could command support from every element of the counter-culture. Yet in 1965, as America’s troop deployments quickened, it was those standing behind government policy who held the stage. Country music, the voice of the white South, and traditionally a conservative bastion, provided a receptive market for songs supporting the troops. ‘Vietnam Blues’ described a veteran’s incredulity as he returned from the front line to find his fellow countrymen demonstrating in favour of the Viet Cong who had been trying to take his life. It was written by a former soldier, Kris Kristofferson, later a stalwart of radical causes. By 1966, there were almost a hundred similar records on the market.

  The most successful was a country song by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, in praise of the special forces of the United States Army. Sadler was already recognisable as the soldier pictured on the cover of Robin Moore’s best-selling book The Green Berets. ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’ added martial drums to a veteran’s pride and became the biggest US hit of 1966, aided by RCA’s most lavish publicity campaign since the launch of South Pacific. Within a month, Sadler’s single and album (the latter including such songs as ‘Saigon’, ‘Trooper’s Lament’ and ‘Salute to the Nurses’) were at the top of the Pop, Country, and Easy Listening charts. A German translation sung by Austrian troubadour Freddy Quinn was a huge hit in West Germany, but banned in the East, though that didn’t prevent it spreading by word of mouth behind the Iron Curtain.

  The rock culture coalesced around more local concerns. A curfew on Sunset Strip inspired clashes between demonstrators and police, and a strangely ambiguous protest from the Buffalo Springfield, ‘For What It’s Worth’. Fifteen-year-old Janis Ian wrote ‘Society’s Child’ about a relationship that crossed taboo racial boundaries. Less than a year into their career, the Monkees targeted their fans’ parents on ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, a caricature of bourgeois complacency. America was edging closer to the social satire that had surfaced in Britain in 1965, when Ray Davies positioned himself between Dylan and Noël Coward as he lampooned ‘A Well Respected Man’ and the ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. He maintained an ironic stance towards the acceptance of pop, and pop stars, by the aristocracy and by the luminaries of what was known in 1966 as Swinging London. This media-hyped caricature of Britain’s booming pop and fashion scenes suggested that the entire nation, rather than just a square mile of its capital, was spilling over with the equivalent of the 1920s Bright Young Things (or, as Ray Davies called them, ‘the Carnebetian Army’, after London’s boutique-crammed Carnaby Street). For the remainder of the decade, Davies continued to explore tensions in the English class system, via songs of almost unbearably poignant lyricism which remained defiantly out of step with his peers.

  The most intense pop furore of the mid-1960s was aroused when John Lennon commented on the decline of interest in Christianity amongst the young. His words were printed in the US teen magazine Datebook, which highlighted the line: ‘We’re more popular than Jesus26 now.’ In an uncanny preview of the ‘viral’ madness of the Internet age, this statement raced across the country and was widely interpreted as being blasphemous. Datebook’s editor, Art Unger, attempted to defuse the controversy by suggesting: ‘I believe it is good27 for American teenagers to read a point of view with which they have very little contact.’ But an organised boycott amongst religious conservatives led to anti-Beatle demonstrations, well-publicised (but actually negligible) bonfires of the group’s records and fan magazines, and sporadic radio boycotts of their music. It was a haunting moment for Lennon, who for the first time since he achieved stardom was forced to face the consequences of his actions. But the airplay bans, which began in Alabama, had little effect upon the sales of their latest single, which itself suggested that the group, and the audience, had changed. In what might almost have been a calculated attempt to broaden their appeal, the record combined ‘Yellow Submarine’, a children’s song with a chorus that could easily be rewritten to fit any crusade, and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, a baroque ballad set to a string quartet. At once childlike and starkly adult, the new Beatles seemed to have nothing to say to teenagers, who could be forgiven for their bewilderment as their idols appeared, quite deliberately, to take leave of their senses.

  Everyone needs kicks28 … Drugs don’t harm you. I know. I take them.

  Pete Townshend, 1966

  Most of the kids I know29 about who really sing hard rock … most of them are hooked on drugs, and that’s a big price to pay to sound colored.

  Nina Simone, 1969

  Like the rest of the pop press, the girls’ paper Honey struggled to translate the changing face of pop culture into language appropriate for its vulnerable, school-age readership. ‘Psychedelia! Wot’s that?30 It’s the new kind of music’, it announced in February 1967. ‘When you hear it, you’re meant to “Freak Out” and that means have a spontaneous reaction, only we aren’t quite sure what. Still, “Freak Out” parties are held, but we can’t say exactly what happens because it all depends how the “Freak Out People” react to Psychedelic music.’ Another paper, EMI’s Record Mail, edged gingerly towards the truth: ‘It involves an effect produced31 on the audience by the sounds of psychotic music and by unusual lighting effects intended to reproduce hallucinations experienced by scientists while under certain drugs.’

  That was still deliberately misleading. It was not only scientists who were experimenting with ‘certain drugs’, but the people who were making, and buying, hit records; perhaps even the elder siblings of Honey’s readers. Cannabis and marijuana had been available in Britain and America for many decades (the notorious ‘jazz cigarette’), and had been used by musicians black and white since the 1920s. But now the almost noisome sweetness of cannabis smoke was everywhere while, more alarmingly, the ‘psychotic’ music of EMI’s definition was being influenced by a hallucinogenic named LSD. This had spread from the American West Coast to Europe in 1965, and was being consumed by many of music’s most creative figures. (Heroin was widely believed to be favoured only by jazz artists, while cocaine only entered the public consciousness in the 1970s.) Within weeks of Honey’s article, ‘psychedelic’ had been adopted as a blanket description for any popular music that stepped beyond the parameters of 1964–5 – and, by 1967, that covered a multitude of artists, ranging from LSD-crazed madcaps to staid light orchestras searching for a vestige of contemporary appeal.

  There was, the public were told, another strand to this psychedelic mystery: the influence of the East. The drone that had so attracted Ray Davies had enter
ed British pop in 1965 in the Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’; likewise the classical Indian instrument, the sitar, which was exposed on a series of songs by the Yardbirds, Beatles and Rolling Stones. ‘Soon there’ll be sounds32 that people have never dreamed of,’ predicted Barry McGuire in 1965, ‘the integration of Eastern and Western music. The Eastern scales and quarter-tones will integrate well with rock ’n’ roll music. The Byrds, Beatles and others are already doing it.’ George Harrison adopted Ravi Shankar as his guru, with the result that the rather appalled sitar maestro found himself performing to festival crowds of stoned hippies who could not distinguish between his tuning-up and his complex compositions.

  The most striking reflection of Shankar’s music in Western pop was also the single most profound step towards the psychedelic world. The Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’, first recorded in late 1965, marked a startling advance from the gentle folk rock of their early records. Aside from the keyword ‘high’ (which Bob Dylan mistakenly believed he had already heard on the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’), its lyrics provided metaphorical snapshots of the band’s recent trip to Britain. But so compelling was the instrumentation – Jim McGuinn’s lead guitar consciously channelling the spirits of Shankar and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, David Crosby’s staccato chords cutting across the rhythm like an urgent bulletin from the future – that it was possible to intuit the most narcotic of meanings into the entire package. (McGuinn still claims that the title was simply a reference to air travel, with no drug connotations.) Yet the Byrds’ invitation to frolic in the new world was beaten into the marketplace by ‘Kicks’, Paul Revere & the Raiders’ warning about the perils of taking a chemical ‘magic carpet ride’. Thereafter there were drugs everywhere: playfully implicit on Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’, heightening the multidimensionality of the Byrds’ ‘5D’, and blatantly referenced on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ – although that song’s narcotics were sedatives designed to ease adults through a troubled world (and were portrayed negatively) rather than hallucinogenic or hypnotic. Eventually LSD would provoke the Animals’ Eric Burdon into renouncing ‘all the good times that I wasted having good times’ (‘Good Times’): ‘when I was drinking’, he lamented, ‘I could have been thinking’. Marijuana and cannabis would become as common among the young as was alcohol with their parents, especially in America. Only a self-styled elite initially sampled LSD, but when Paul McCartney admitted his own experiments, he aroused a flurry of criticism (less virulent, however, than when John Lennon had compared the Beatles with Jesus). The extent of rock’s heroin use only became apparent at the end of the decade, when it claimed casualties such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison (although its exact role in all three deaths remains open to question). The publicity attached to all these drugs (and more) would attract the attention of the police, and lead from the mid-1960s onwards to the arrest – and occasionally imprisonment – of many musicians.