1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  Ginsberg said, “I think Dylan offered it somewhat ironically, but I think he would have gone through with it … I think that was the beginning of our realization that national politics was theatre on a vast scale, with scripts, timing, sound systems. Whose theatre would attract the most customers, whose was a theatre of ideas that could be gotten across?”23 Still, the VDC declined to take Dylan up on his offer.

  Ginsberg’s vision of using masses of flowers in antiwar protest was perhaps his most influential meme, though the phrase “flower power” itself does not appear in his essay. One of the earliest-known appearances of the actual term would be the Flower Power Day rally organized in May 1967 by Abbie Hoffman, the activist who cofounded, with Jerry Rubin, the radical street theater group the Yippies. Hoffman may have been combining Ginsberg’s flower concept with the phrase “Black Power,” which Stokely Carmichael popularized in 1966. (Hoffman had worked in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which Carmichael chaired.) Rubin never hesitated to give props to Ginsberg: “If you want to see the birth of Yippie, [Ginsberg] came out and he gave a speech about how to march again with the Hells Angels attacking.”24 Whoever came up with the term, by the time of Hoffman’s May 1967 rally, flowers and hippies were inextricably linked. That same month, the Mamas and the Papas’ leader, John Phillips, wrote and produced Scott McKenzie’s hippie anthem, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” Flower power’s most iconic moment came in October 1967, when an eighteen-year-old actor named George Harris surprised National Guardsmen at the Pentagon by sticking carnations in the barrels of their rifles.

  * * *

  One autumn night in La Honda, the Pranksters all did DMT, the ayahuasca (yagé) brew that the Amazonian natives drank. Kesey walked outside onto Route 84. As Tom Wolfe recounted in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey stood in the middle of the road, his mind alternating between the thought that he was God and the thought that he was just high. A car came at him going fifty miles an hour. Kesey balanced on the center line and gestured. The car slowed and went around him. “And he knows with absolute certainty he has … all the power in the world and can do what we wants … the Power and the Call, and this movie is big enough to include the world, a cast of millions, the castoff billions … Control Tower to Orbiter One. CONTROL.”25

  “When you’ve got something like we’ve got, you can’t just sit on it,” Kesey said. “You’ve got to move off of it and give it to other people. It only works if you bring other people into it.”26

  Kesey loved comics and believed he was the real-life equivalent of Captain America, a man transformed into a superhero when government scientists give him a super serum. Kesey felt he was his own Cuckoo’s Nest protagonist, Randle McMurphy, inspiring beaten-down people to escape their mental prisons. “The purpose of psychedelia is to learn the conditioned responses of people and then to prank them. That’s the only way to get people to ask questions, and until they ask questions they’re going to remain conditioned robots.”27 Kesey and Ginsberg saw acid as a tool that could help the masses sweep away dysfunctional programming and determine what they really wanted, and thus recreate a healthier society.

  The Pranksters advertised their first official Acid Test with a poster hung at the Hip Pocket Bookstore of Santa Cruz. They held the test at one of the Pranksters’ homes on November 27 and charged a dollar admission. It was an unstructured performance art happening, with Owsley’s LSD, a slide show by Stewart Brand on the Native Americans’ way of life, Ginsberg chanting mantras, Cassady rapping while juggling a sledgehammer, and Kesey playing his eerie flute. But if they were going to start charging, they needed something extra.

  * * *

  The Warlocks jug band played their first gig on May 5 at Magoo’s Pizza in the Menlo Park suburb. Guitarist Jerry Garcia’s first wife, Sara Ruppenthal Garcia, said, “What we’d been doing before was very organic and elemental. Although we might not have spoken of it that way, there was this deeply spiritual aspect to it for us. When we took acid, we started listening to the Beatles. Dylan’s first electric album came out right about then, too. We had been putting him down. But taking acid and listening to that album was incredible. So the resistance to amplified music waned. And there wasn’t a huge market for jug bands.”28

  After seeing the Lovin’ Spoonful, a jug band that had gone electric, the Warlocks decided to follow suit. They recorded their first electric session at Golden Gate Studios on November 3, covering songs such as Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” in which they contrasted the downbeat lyrics with peppy organ. They already had the elastic, percolating, bittersweet sound that would still be present twenty years later on tracks such as “Touch of Grey.” The Farfisa organ of “Mindbender (Confusion’s Prince)” sounded like a more foreboding “Incense and Peppermints,” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock.

  But there was another group called the Warlocks, who had a recording deal—not to mention a third group of Warlocks who would soon rename themselves the Velvet Underground. (“Warlocks” was tied with “Wailers” for most popular name of the year.) So they had to pick a new name. They took DMT. Then, as bassist Phil Lesh recalled, Garcia picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary and the pages fell open. “The words ‘grateful’ and ‘dead’ appeared straight opposite each other across the crack between the pages in unrelated text … In that silvery elf voice he said to me, ‘Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?’” It was a folklore term common to many mythologies—describing a spirit who is thankful that someone has arranged his burial.

  Leary’s Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead advocates ego death in an acid trip. Perhaps the band’s name referenced that, just as Huxley’s The Doors of Perception was the inspiration for the name for the Doors. Garcia also enjoyed EC (Entertaining) horror comics, with their crypt keeper and attendant ghouls.29 Perhaps the new name also had something to do with a car crash Garcia was in four years before. His friend was driving ninety miles per hour and flipped the car, sending Garcia through the windshield and his other three friends out of the car as well. The automobile landed on one of them, killing him. Garcia said the tragedy was “where my life began. Before then I was always living at less than capacity. I was idling. That was the slingshot for the rest of my life.”30

  Merry Prankster Page Browning, a friend of Phil Lesh’s, told Lesh and Garcia stories about the Pranksters’ cross-country bus trip. Garcia had been at some of Kesey’s parties back when Kesey was at Stanford. Browning came to one of the group’s gigs, and then told Kesey they’d be good for the Acid Tests.

  The band’s first show as the Grateful Dead was on Saturday, December 4, in San Jose, at the second Acid Test, after a Rolling Stones gig at the San Jose Civic Auditorium. The Pranksters gave out flyers to concertgoers leaving the show. The handbills featured a picture of Uncle Sam saying, “Can You Pass the Acid Test?” along with the address. Up to four hundred people came.31 Per Stones bassist Bill Wyman, Keith Richards and Brian Jones attended, and within a few days the band recorded “19th Nervous Breakdown,” in which Jagger sings about his first trip.

  The Prankster named Mountain Girl (a.k.a. Carolyn Elizabeth Adams Garcia, who would become Garcia’s second wife) recalled that the Dead at first “were almost voyeuristic. They would come through, perform, and take off again.”32

  Sara Ruppenthal Garcia said, “The new thing was, ‘Can You Pass the Acid Test?’ Do you have the resources to open up your nervous system to anything? I wasn’t sure I could … It meant a lot to him [Garcia], and it was hard for him to figure out. He was amazed by it.”33

  Garcia’s brother Clifford said,

  Actually, Jerry didn’t love that scene up there at Kesey’s right away. It took him a while to fit into it. He was always telling me, “These people are up in the woods getting ripped and doing this…” like it was beneath him to do that. I said, “Jerry, people do that all over. What’s the big deal? If you want to play with these guys, that’s
what you have to do.” I’d lay that kind of trip on him whenever I talked to him about it. I said, “Don’t feel bad about doing that shit.” He didn’t think they were too stable of a group and he knew they were party animals. He wasn’t into it. It was a wild scene.34

  But gradually, Garcia realized that the band had the freedom to play at the Acid Tests if they wanted to and the freedom not to play if it got too strange. They ended up performing at, by guitarist Bob Weir’s estimation, every Acid Test except one, in Mexico. Weir said,

  No one had ever even imagined that stuff like that could possibly happen until it did. It was actually better than realizing my dreams … You would walk by a microphone, for instance, and maybe say something, and then a couple minutes later you’d hear your own self in some other part of the room coming back at you through several layers of echo. The liquid light shows began there. I think it was the first time anyone saw them. People were rather gaily adorned: dyed hair, colorful clothing and stuff like that. And everybody was loaded to the gills on LSD. There was a lot of straight-ahead telepathy that went on during those sessions. We learned during those sessions to trust our intuitions, because that was about all we had to go on. When you learn to trust your intuitions, you’re going to be more given to try things, to experiment. And you’re going to be more given to extemporaneous assaults of one sort or another. We learned to start improvising on just about anything. We were participants, and so were they. We were all just making waves, as big and bold as we could, and seeing where they rippled against each other and what kind of shimmers that all caused.35

  The Dead started to do long extended improvisations, a jazz-like approach with a rock beat.

  The third Acid Test, on December 10, was in a log cabin, the first one with a strobe light. Along with the Dead, the poster advertised “Cassady and Anne Murphy vaudeville.” Each Test was bigger than the one before, and established the template for the rock concerts and raves to follow, with the light show’s pulsating amoeba river-skies projected over the group and the dancers. On December 17, at Muir Beach, the organizers showed some of the bus movie. When cops showed up in the parking lot, Garcia headed them off and somehow convinced them there was no reason for them to go inside. As the police walked away, Garcia touched his hat to them with the words “The trips, Captain.” From then on he was Captain Trips.36

  December 18’s Test was in Palo Alto, Christmas Eve’s in Portland, Oregon. Over the next few weeks, Acid Tests would be held on the Sunset Strip and even in Watts, before a return to San Francisco for the Trips Festival of January 21–23. The Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company played for ten thousand attendees. A thousand people were turned away each night.

  Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Gary Duncan said, “Things like that have to exist secretly. That’s why, when they brought it into the public eye, it sort of went away. That early side of San Francisco was never really publicized. There was a while when the place was just totally free. You could go anywhere, do anything you wanted, and nobody hassled you. The spotlight wasn’t on everybody. As soon as the spotlight came on and there was money to be made, then it went the way of all things.”37

  The Acid Tests were the epicenter of the trilogy of books that together encapsulated the trajectory of the counterculture. Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg are protagonists in On the Road, the book that ignited the Beat movement; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test captures the hippie era’s idealistic peak; and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas portrays the burnout of the morning after. But one justly famous passage from Thompson’s book recounts the euphoria of San Francisco nights before people knew the dream was doomed to crash. Flooring his motorcycle across the Bay Bridge, Thompson was “absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was … There was madness in any direction, at any hour … There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning … We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”38

  24

  Rubber Soul

  The Beatles release their synthesis of folk, rock, soul, baroque, proto-psychedelia, and the sitar on December 3.

  Dylan hung out with the Beatles a couple of times at the Warwick Hotel when they were in New York on August 13–17 for The Ed Sullivan Show and the Shea Stadium gig. Whenever he visited the Beatles, he brought a copy of his new record to play for them. “Hey, John, listen to the lyrics, man.”

  But Lennon was getting high and drunk on wine. “Forget the lyrics!” Lennon recalled, “You know, we’re all out of our minds; are we supposed to be listening to lyrics? No, we’re just listening to the rhythm and how he does it.”1

  But whether or not he was aware of it, Lennon continued to borrow words from Dylan songs. For Help!’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” he took the image of “facing the wall” from Dylan’s “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met).” In an attempt to make it less Dylanesque, he replaced the harmonica with a flute. In fact, Lennon stopped playing harmonica entirely, which he had done on eleven earlier Beatle songs.

  The Beatles returned to London on September 1 and entered the studio on October 12 to record their new album. That day, they did the first take of “This Bird Has Flown,” the working title of “Norwegian Wood.” The guitar sounded close to some of Dylan’s riffs: slightly reminiscent of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and another, as yet unrecorded, song that Dylan played for the Beatles when they were hanging out. The track needed something to set it apart.

  Along with copies of Ravi Shankar’s albums Portrait of Genius and Sound of the Sitar, Harrison had recently bought a sitar. His conversations with David Crosby about Shankar while they were tripping last August had inspired him. Also, when the Beatles arrived back in Britain from the States, the Kinks were at No. 10 on the charts with the Indian-influenced “See My Friends.” When the Kinks toured Australia and Asia at the beginning of the year, they had a stopover in Bombay. Ray Davies said, “I remember getting up, going to the beach and seeing all these fishermen coming along. I heard chanting to start with, and gradually the chanting came a bit closer, and I could see it was fishermen carrying their nets out.”2 Author/jazz musician Barry Ernest Fantoni recalled socializing with the Beatles one night when they heard the Kinks’ song. Realizing Davies’s guitar sounded like a sitar—the Kinks’ song has no Indian instruments, but the guitar imitates a tambura, while Ray’s vocal whine and drone lend his voice an Indian quality—they discussed getting one for their next record.3

  Lennon asked Harrison if he could add the instrument to “Norwegian Wood.” “He was not sure whether he could play it yet because he hadn’t done much on the sitar, but he was willing to have a go.”4

  Harrison’s sitar flourishes, as rudimentary as they were, kicked the nascent Indian craze into high gear. Soon Donovan, Them, the Moody Blues, the Pretty Things, Paul Butterfield, the Doors, and Traffic all employed “raga rock,” as the Byrds’ publicist coined it for the release of their sitar-inspired “Eight Miles High,” in 1966. Even the Velvet Underground appropriated the Indian drone. Next year, Harrison would travel to India to study with Shankar, the beginning of a life-long friendship. Just as Harrison’s twelve-string arpeggio at the end of “A Hard Day’s Night” birthed the sound of folk-rock, his growing fascination with Indian instruments would soon expose millions of Beatles record buyers to world music. When his India trip led him to pursue Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi, it also encouraged countless baby boomers to look into Eastern philosophy.

  Still, despite the sitar, Dylan knew Lennon had borrowed from him again. Three months after Rubber Soul’s release, he mocked both the waltz time and storyline of “Norwegian Wood” in “4th Time Around,” then ended the song with an appeal not to ask for his crutch. Al Kooper recalled, “I asked him about it—I said, it sounds so much like ‘Norwegian Wood,’ and he said, ‘Well actually, “Norw
egian Wood” sounds a lot like this. I’m afraid they took it from me, and I feel that I have to, y’know, record it.’ Evidently, he’d played it for them, and they’d nicked it. I said, ‘Aren’t you worried about getting sued by The Beatles?’ and he said, ‘They couldn’t sue me!’”5

  Dylan played “4th Time Around” for Lennon in a hotel and asked the Beatle what he thought about it. Lennon said he didn’t like it. Still, Dylan played it to all of London at the Royal Albert Hall the final night of his ’66 world tour. Lennon later admitted to interviewers that it made him very paranoid,6 and he ceased writing Dylan-inspired songs. It seemed ironic for Dylan to complain, considering he had appropriated melodies from other sources for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Hard Rain,” “Don’t Think Twice,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and “She Belongs to Me,” to name just a few.

  On the surface, Lennon’s short and abstract lyrics were the antithesis of Dylan’s, but the American had freed him up to express alienation and ennui in a way that hadn’t been done before. And Dylan convinced him he didn’t need to separate the part of his brain that composed pop songs from the one that wrote the subversive wordplay of his books, and the two sides began to meld.

  “Norwegian Wood” itself concerns an extramarital affair in the apartment of a young lady who owns nothing on which the singer can sit, just the ’60s version of Ikea, the “Norwegian wood” of the title. Peter Asher, who lived down the hall from McCartney in the Asher household, “had his room done out in wood; a lot of people were decorating their places in wood … But it’s not as good a title, Cheap Pine, baby,” McCartney said.7

  In the song, the woman tells the singer she has to go to work in the morning. He ends up sleeping in the bathtub. Then, when he wakes up, she’s gone, so he lights a fire. McCartney elaborated that the female in the song “led him on, then said, ‘You’d better sleep in the bath.’ In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn’t, it meant I burned the fucking place down.”8