1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  They knew the lines about trying to “make some girl” could get them banned, so Oldham and Jagger told Hassinger to mix the vocals deeper into the track so they weren’t easily understandable. Also mixed practically to inaudibility were Jones’s acoustic guitar and Nitzsche’s piano, the remnants of the song’s folk-rock origins, though alternate mixes released in the 1980s allowed them to be heard.

  Five days after Jagger had written the lyrics, the song was in the can. Oldham released it on June 6 in the United States, Richards’s misgivings be damned. “I guess he thought, ‘They can work it up all they want, but it’s about the freshness and the timing.’ Which is, after all, everything,” 7 Richards conceded. “Andrew spotted the spirit of the track … It was still not finished as far as we were concerned, but sometimes an artist’s sketches are better than the finished painting, and that’s probably one of the perfect examples.”8

  The riff cut like a scythe across the airwaves. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek remembered, “The first time I heard ‘Satisfaction’ on the radio I couldn’t believe it. The lyrics were so terrific; they were talking to all young American males. This guy is singing a song to us.”

  When kids weren’t yelling along with the “Hey! Hey! Hey!,” they tried to decipher the lyrics with the same scrutiny they had given “Louie, Louie” a few years before. Was the bit about how white his shirt could be racial commentary? Was the cigarette he smoked a joint or a Marlboro? Was it a critique of how people let consumer products determine masculinity and self-esteem?

  There was no doubt about the sexual dissatisfaction of the third verse, though its finer points were debated. Jagger clarified the next year, “‘Girlie action’ was really ‘girl reaction.’ The dirtiest line in ‘Satisfaction’ they don’t understand, see? It’s about ‘You better come back next week ’cause you see I’m on a losing streak’”—that is, the woman Jagger is hitting on is having her period. “But (people) don’t get that. It’s just life. That’s really what happens to girls. Why shouldn’t people write about it?”9

  The bottom line of the song was “I Hate Commercials and I Can’t Get Laid,” and millions across the planet related, just as they had to Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” seven years earlier. The song knocked “I Can’t Help Myself” off its No. 1 perch and stayed there for four weeks, till Herman’s Hermits “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” pushed it down—as if the sexual aggression of “Satisfaction” had scared teen girls back to their least threatening heartthrob. The Stones and the Hermits were tied for second most popular Brit band in the States, with two chart toppers each.

  When various cities banned “Satisfaction,” and Newsweek blasted the “tasteless themes” by the “leering quintet,” it no doubt helped the record become the year’s best seller. The ultimate validation came when Otis Redding covered it in July with the horns Richards originally envisioned.

  “I never thought that song was commercial anyway,” Richards would later muse. “Shows how wrong you can be.”10

  In “Satisfaction,” the Stones found their golden formula, mixing the beat of Motown, the lyrics of Dylan and Berry, and the novelty of new technology to synthesize their own style of R&B/pop/rock. The Beatles were the biggest band of the 1960s, and Dylan the most innovative artist, but the Stones released the greatest rock song without even trying, because they were permanently trying.

  9

  Long Hair and the Pill on Trial

  The Massachusetts Supreme Court takes its time to decide the fate of long hair in high school, while the U.S. Supreme Court renders its decision on the Pill on June 7.

  In 1845, President Polk had a mullet running down the back of his neck, but during the world wars, hair was kept short to keep lice and fleas at bay, and it stayed short for the next twenty years. Numerous dress code handbooks even expressly stated that boys’ hair could not be combed forward.1 But after the Beatles showed up, newspaper stories of boys being sent home from school until they got their hair cut proliferated.

  Massachusetts’ Attleboro High School student George Leonard Jr. went to court over the issue. By night he was Georgie Porgie, the front man for a band called the Cry Babies, which played sock hops, churches, and amusement parks. On September 11, 1964, three days into his senior year, the school’s principal sent him home and said he couldn’t come back till his hair was decent. A hearing before the school committee upheld the principal’s ruling three weeks later. Porgie’s manager was his father, and in a brilliant PR move, George Leonard Sr. filed a lawsuit saying his son was a professional musician who needed to have long hair for his job. Besides, it was his constitutional right. Leonard Sr. asserted that the school was overstepping the parents’ domain and illegally keeping his son from graduating. He asked for a speedy hearing, but the Superior Court did not accommodate him—it would not be until a year later, on October 8, 1965, that “George Leonard, Jr., vs. School Committee of Attleboro” would go before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, with a decision rendered on December 7 (see chapter 25, “Christmas Time Is Here”).

  Though the waiting was interminable, the front-page news coverage led to Porgie opening for the Stones in Rhode Island and playing with the Barbarians, the garage band that wrote the anthem “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” In real life, the Barbarians had long hair, but in the song, they took on the role of roughnecks taunting a proto-hippie, sneering that his long blond hair and skintight pants meant he had to be either a girl or from Liverpool.

  Rolling Stones’ memoirs are peppered with anecdotes of brawls with people who insulted their hair. In New York City, people spat at their feet, and Wyman recalled four or five men screaming “faggots” at them. “Brian yelled: ‘Let’s go get the colonists.’ So Mick, Keith and Brian jumped into their convertible and started fighting with them.”2 Wyman didn’t say who won that fight. But at the Heathrow Airport restaurant, when an American started taunting them, Mick approached and, per author Philip Norman, “received a punch in the face that knocked him backwards. Keith tried to come to his aid, but was also felled.”3 Another time, when a Frenchman asked Richards if he was a Supreme, Richards slugged him in the face and scared him off.

  High school student John Lauber found himself forced to contend with the same sort of animosity in the spring, when the bleach-blond hair draped over his eyes angered fellow student and future presidential candidate Mitt Romney (son of Michigan governor George Romney) and a pack of his conservative buddies.

  “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” Romney exclaimed to his friend Matthew Friedemann, as Friedemann recalled years later.4 Romney and his gang tackled Lauber, pinning down his arms and legs. Lauber cried for help as Romney cut off clumps of his hair. Years later, Romney said he did not remember the incident but admitted, “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks in high school. Some may have gone too far, and for that I apologize.”5

  Still, things were nowhere near as draconian as they were in the Soviet Union, where “hairies,” as young people with mop tops were called, were hauled into police stations and given haircuts.6

  One of the first pop songs to reference overtly the flak young men were getting for the new style was by Sonny and Cher, who recorded “I Got You Babe” in late spring backed by the Wrecking Crew. Sonny Bono had cannily fashioned himself into an ersatz Ringo Starr, while Cher’s offbeat Armenian beauty made her the ultimate beatnik babe. In the song, she speaks for all the young women who encouraged their boyfriends to grow out their manes despite the cultural blowback, telling Sonny to disregard those who say his hair is too long.

  After the song hit No. 1, Bono followed it with his own solo single, “Laugh at Me.” “I never thought I’d cut a record by myself, but I got somethin’ I wanna say. I want to say it for Cher, and I hope I say it for a lot of people.” In the song, he demands to know why people made fun of him and tried to make him run because of the hippie clothes he wore. (Maybe it was because his vest was made of bobcat fur?) He knew that such harassment had
to stop someplace, sometime—and meanwhile he accepted their laughter as the price he had to pay for freedom. The song made it to No. 10 in the United States, No. 9 in the United Kingdom, and No. 1 in Canada, despite being sung by a voice that was even less traditionally “pop” than Bob Dylan’s.

  A subgenre of protest songs rose up, with lyrics directed not at a political problem but rather at oppressive conformity itself. Both the Turtles’ “Let Me Be” and the Leaves’ “Too Many People” rail against a society trying to “rearrange” them. In “Let Me Be” the Turtles triumphantly declare that they aren’t fools and won’t be used as pawns for others’ selfish ends. The Animals roar that they will think and do what they want in “It’s My Life.” The Beatles, too, advise listeners to “Think for Yourself.” The Stones bellow to “Get Off of My Cloud.” Both they and the Kinks had songs named “I’m Free.” Even Dean Martin’s son released “The Rebel Kind” with his band Dino, Desi and Billy. (Desi was the son of Desi Arnaz Sr. and Lucille Ball.)

  Why were people so uptight over such a simple thing as hair?

  The “Greatest Generation” of World War II had bonded in its monumental fight to overcome the Axis Powers and returned from war to create the most widespread prosperity history had yet seen. It embarrassed jingoistic, homophobic parents to have their boys look effeminate—even if most of the boys adopted the haircut to get girls.

  As the months passed, the hair began to represent more than just fashion. Last year the new long-haired British bands sang songs as innocuous as those of the previous generations. But, obliquely at first, musicians were now starting to sing about drugs, premarital sex, and Eastern religion while questioning the Vietnam War and the entire capitalist system.

  Ironically, in the artists’ subversion of “old-fashioned American values,” they had an unlikely ally: businessmen. Plenty of hustlers in the music, TV, and print industries found that the latest form of teenage rebellion meant money, just as it had with the 1950s rock and beatnik crazes. So, despite the growing displeasure of parents, the flood of music, movies, and TV shows with long-haired boys kept coming. Later in the decade, many baby boomers would experiment with dropping out of society, claiming to loathe technology and capitalism. But, ironically, the counterculture owed its existence to both.

  Across the heartland, kids suddenly realized there were alternative lifestyles beyond Main Street. Rebellion was a choice they could see others making on TV, whether in the form of wearing Cuban-heeled Beatles boots or protesting the draft. Music had primarily served as entertainment, but now it began influencing life-and-death decisions. Do I help voter registration in the South? Do I go to Vietnam? Do I take a job I don’t want for the paycheck so I can keep up with the Joneses?

  Soon, to the older generation, long hair symbolized antiwar cowardice; an “in your face” advertisement for the kids’ political stance. (Even worse were earrings on young men, and it was not unheard of for fathers to rip them out of their sons’ ears.7) For the other side, the insistence on long locks asserted a primal American value—“Give me liberty, or give me death!” As one’s mane became the battleground of the American culture war, the musicians found themselves increasingly in the crosshairs.

  * * *

  Long hair was changing the identity men had assumed for decades, but the Pill was affecting the identity women had embodied for centuries.

  In 1951, Planned Parenthood pioneer Margaret Sanger arranged for a grant for Dr. Gregory “Goody” Pincus to study how to inhibit ovulation via hormones. Nine years later, on June 23, 1960, the FDA approved the oral contraceptive pill Enovid. By 1965, five to six million American women—one out of every four married women under forty-five—were taking it.8

  Still, a number of states banned the use of contraceptives even for married couples. In 1879, Connecticut legislator P. T. Barnum (of the Barnum and Bailey circus) had sponsored a law that outlawed making or selling birth control. So when the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut opened in November 1961, it was shut down within two weeks. Its directors, Estelle Griswold and C. Lee Buxton, were arrested and charged with distributing contraception, and each fined a hundred dollars.

  Griswold v. Connecticut went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the case was argued on March 29. On June 7 the Court decreed that the Constitution protected the “right to marital privacy.” Its decision meant that state laws that banned birth control could be overturned, and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare could now begin distributing the Pill and other birth-control services to low-income, married women as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, not only in the United States but also internationally, through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Nixon continued the approach, and by 1969, 8.5 to 13.0 million women were taking the Pill. By the mid-1980s, that number had grown to 80 million; and in 2000, to 100 million.

  The Court also struck down restrictions on the Pill’s distribution to unmarried women, but oral contraceptives were still not readily available for them in many states. Whether unmarried women could receive the Pill was left to the prerogative of the doctor writing the prescription, and many people still believed that premarital sex was wrong. College students would sometimes wear fake wedding bands or engagement rings to doctor’s appointments. Often, doctors realized the rings were phony but wrote the prescriptions anyway, believing that it might prevent future abortions.9

  In the fall, a female reporter for the Pembroke Record, the newspaper of the women’s college at Brown University, asked the university’s Dr. Roswell Johnson for a prescription. When he provided one, the reporter wrote about it, and the story unleashed a firestorm of criticism against the doctor. Johnson responded that he denied many requests and had dispensed prescriptions—after “a great deal of soul searching”10—only to two students who were each engaged and over twenty-one. He also stressed that they both had parental consent. “I want to feel I’m contributing to a solid relationship and not contributing to unmitigated promiscuity,” he said.11

  The New York Times, Newsweek, and Time reported on the brouhaha. A Gallup poll found that 77 percent of American women disapproved of the Pill being prescribed to unmarried college students.12 It wouldn’t be until the 1972 Supreme Court case Eisenstadt v. Baird that unmarried people’s right to possess birth control was formally decided.

  But however unmarried women got it, the Pill did indeed lead to a surge in premarital sex, just as moralists had feared. In 1965 approximately 75 percent of female college graduates were virgins. By 1969 that number had decreased to 45 percent.13 The National Center for Health Statistics reported that “the proportion of women who delayed sexual intercourse until marriage [had] declined from 48 percent among women who married in 1960 to 1964, to 21 percent among women who married in 1975 to 1979.”14

  In the mid-1960s, most colleges and universities did not allow women to stay out past curfew, and being caught having sex could lead to suspension or expulsion. In many schools, when a man visited a woman’s dorm room, three out of the couple’s four feet had to stay on the floor at all times. But by the start of the next decade, many dorms at schools such as Harvard and Radcliffe had gone coed.15

  * * *

  The beginning of the sexual revolution corresponded with the loosening of censorship laws. For the first time, the U.S. Production Code allowed breasts to be shown on screen, in Sidney Lumet’s feature film The Pawnbroker, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in June 1964 but could not secure U.S. distribution until April 1965 due to the controversy. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court argued whether John Cleland’s erotic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill (1748) was obscene, and decided it was not as long as it was not marketed only for “prurient appeal.”

  Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine attempted to make sexuality as wholesome as the girl next door and conflate it with upward mobility and intellectualism. He interspersed nude pictorials with reviews of all the consumer products a man of leisure needed in a time of unp
aralleled prosperity (hi-fi, sports car) and interviews with luminaries of the day such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Marshall McLuhan, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan.

  But the ultimate symbol of the new era was the miniskirt. In the 1800s, laws required woman to wear long skirts and petticoats and prohibited them from donning pants, boots, or overalls. After women won the right to vote in 1920, liberated flappers raised hemlines to the knee, but they dropped back down during the Depression.

  Skirts crept higher throughout the 1950s and had arrived back at the knee by the early 1960s, whereupon King’s Road designer Mary Quant raced Paris’s André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin to push the boundaries. Courrèges’s collection showed some thigh, and the designer maintained that he had invented the new form. Quant said, “It was the girls on the King’s Road who invented the mini. I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes in which you could move, in which you could run and jump, and we would make them the length the customer wanted. I wore them very short, and the customers would say, ‘Shorter, shorter.’”16 Quant was the one who named the skirt, though—after her favorite car, the Mini.

  In the summer, Quant took her latest collection to the United States and went on a multicity tour of department stores with a fashion show dubbed “Youthquake.” Its models wore skirts that showed seven inches of leg above the knee as they danced the Frug and the Twist to rock played by a Milwaukee band called the Skunks (complete with black hair with a white line dyed down the middle, and a song called “Youthquake,” composed for the occasion). The tour climaxed in New York on September 1. Soon Boston’s (ironically named) Puritan Fashion Group began producing the miniskirt and distributing it through J.C. Penney.17

  But the world wasn’t necessarily ready for it, as Jean “The Shrimp” Shrimpton would soon learn. The world’s first internationally known model, Shrimpton flew to Melbourne, Australia, for the Victoria Derby on October 30. According to legend, her dressmaker, Colin Rolfe, ran out of material, and thus her dress ended 3.9 inches above the knee. Shrimpton assured him that no one would notice.