Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  The slowly growing presence of a post-Beat subculture identified as hippy, often hippie,56 was certainly significant here as informal links between musicians and poets developed. Hippy was a descriptor that had grown out of hipster, a term previously encoded with meanings that evoked the dangerous cultural fringes: it conjured notions of outsiderdom and transgression. Hipsters had connections to the world the Beat Generation writers inhabited, a terrain mapped out by Norman Mailer in ‘The White Negro’, an essay actually subtitled ‘Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’. The derivation of hippy could also be connected to jazz-linked slang and terms such as hip, hep and hepcats. Hippies as a social group would be first documented in the US as early as 1965.57 Drop-outs, outcasts and followers of an alternative lifestyle were described as such around the West Coast, and particularly San Francisco, before the middle of the decade. The area known as Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco would be one of the first neighbourhoods to attract communities of these individuals – longer of hair, often with moustaches and beards, and adopting clothing that had a colourful, carnivalesque quality, often incorporating elements of the historical or ethnic. Such details set them apart from the predominantly monochrome shades of Beat men and women. Yet many of their liberal values – on politics, drugs and personal relationships, for instance – had a common ring. In the US, these organic seeds, once planted, would bloom and proliferate as the decade unwrapped, climaxing, we may propose, at the legendary three-day music festival at Woodstock in August 1969.

  The UK’s hippy scene would also take shape within quite a similar time period but it would have a different, arguably more kaleidoscopic, genesis, gathering a spectrum of different tribes, subcultures and classes. Barry Miles was both part of the British eruption and has since become one of its most prolific historians. As he explains in a later account:

  The beginning of the hippie scene in Britain was quite different from that in the US […] the underground scene came from the meeting of a number of different strands in youth culture […] the mods, the rockers, the dollybirds of Swinging London, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activists, the radical left students and the latest generation of art school graduates, most of whom were rock musicians.58

  There were various triggers that would see this somewhat disparate multitude gain a higher, and partially unified, profile. Miles adds: ‘Then came the Beatles, followed rapidly by the Stones, and the whole explosion of beat groups that transformed rock ’n’ roll […] in a year or so […] Between the rock groups, Biba’s clothes shop, Mary Quant, the widespread introduction of the pill, full employment, pop art, satirical TV shows […], the growing availability of marijuana, LSD, books by the Beat Generation, American be-bop, Surrealism, French New Wave films, associations with West Indian communities of West London and myriad other factors, an underground culture emerged.’59 Green is perhaps less convinced that this multi-coloured quilt was complemented by all its many parts. ‘The groups that “came together” […] often overlapped – there were no bounds that restricted a given individual to a given group – but were essentially discrete entities, each working to achieve its own ends, and generally existing in its own self-absorbed world’, he states. ‘There was often a sense of like minds but not always a meeting. What linked them was an inchoate desire to “change the world”, but the methods they proposed and the means they had available often kept them apart.’60

  Nonetheless, whatever the debates about common purpose or shared manifestos, the central role of Miles, initially art student and little poetry magazine editor in Cheltenham and then bookseller, publisher and writer in London, in joining up many of these particular dots in the British capital, cannot be underestimated. Miles, friend of Michael Horovitz, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins and others on the growing underground scene, had been an early youthful correspondent with Ginsberg, Kerouac and others as he pulled together his own verse collections while still at college. When he arrived in London to work at Better Books, the city’s first paperback book outlet, he was well situated to make links between published Americans and the new wave of British talent.61 The blending and merging of various streams of activity, Miles has already described, but events of late spring and early summer of 1965 would see an increase in impetus and gravitas for the fragmented forces expounding the new arts and the possibilities of cultural change.

  When Ginsberg arrived on UK shores after a global trek concluded by a European sojourn in May 1965, Miles played host. Shortly afterwards, when the poet, perhaps the most pro-active and social of the Beat Generation clan, attended Dylan’s gig at London’s Royal Albert Hall and met the Beatles, it was clear there was a great possibility of a dynamic network taking shape. Within days of the Albert Hall gathering, Ginsberg had confirmed his genuine interest in the group by heading to Liverpool for a week, to meet poets, artists and musicians.62 Returning in time to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday in London, his guests included both John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom left early after a celebratory but inebriated Ginsberg caused some offence by removing all his clothes.63

  But the stimulus for a major breakthrough in the UK alternative poetry scene was barely a week or two away. With Ginsberg in London and Corso and Ferlinghetti about to arrive, Barbara Rubin, a film-maker and friend of Ginsberg, proposed that they should organise a reading in the capital, one on a scale never seen in the city, perhaps never even in the US. Miles, Horovitz and others in their circle were supportive though surprised when Rubin suggested that they secure the largest available venue they could. The Albert Hall was booked for ten days hence, at high expense and unquestioned risk, but work towards creating a programme and attracting an audience began in earnest. With three of the major names from the US Beat community present, there was already a headline bill of real status. But the organisers also wished to give British and European poets a chance to read, too. Horovitz, Adrian Mitchell and Pete Brown, were joined by other UK writers: Alexander Trocchi,64 who would host the occasion, Christopher Logue, Harry Fainlight, Spike Hawkins and George McBeth, and poets from Europe, including the Dutch writer Simon Vinkenoog. The occasion, on 11 June 1965, drew a huge crowd of more than 7,000 to one of the city’s great concert spaces and, even if Miles called it ‘one of the worst poetry readings ever’65 – Ginsberg had drunk too much, Corso was indulgent and Burroughs’ voice, on tape, hardly discernible over the PA, though Ferlinghetti read well – there was a general sense that the event’s significance outweighed the actual detail of the lengthy programme. Green said ‘its importance and effect of the entirety far transcended that of its individual parts’.66 In short, this extraordinary gathering of numerous fragments, many of whom recognised brotherly and sisterly spirit among the audience but had not actually met them until this time, suggested that London – like New York, like San Francisco – had a sizeable underground that had indeed been buried until this audacious, undoubtedly ambitious, one-off venture exposed the secret hoards to the light. It was also a key platform for confirming interest in poetry, as a live, oral form, but specifically Beat poetry, too. England’s progressive activists – like Miles and Horovitz, Brown and Mitchell and Nuttall, too, who also tried and failed to present a performance art piece of his own at the same Albert Hall occasion67 – had, through a series of coincidences and some impressive risk-taking, established that, behind the tightly-drawn curtains of mainstream British life, there was a significant, resistant column, interested in radical literature, art and, by clear implication, an alternative politics too, perhaps. The International Poetry Incarnation had other names, as well: Wholly Communion was the title of the film that the UK film-maker Peter Whitehead shot and released, a short and grainy but evocative record of this seminal occasion, while Poets of the World, Poets of Our Time68 is what it read on the tickets. Richard Neville, one of the founders of the underground magazine Oz, later described it as: ‘Cosmic Poetry Visitation Accidentally Happening Carnally’.69 Obscured until then by its splintered nature, the London gathering solid
ified hundreds, probably thousands, of individuals into a recognisable movement for social change which would continue its efforts through the 1960s and well beyond.

  Yet, if we then wish to support the notion that popular music had now somehow commenced its public alliance with the clan of rebellious writers, it is hard to find crystal clear evidence at the Albert Hall. If Ginsberg had convened with Dylan and the Beatles just the previous month, there may be some plausibility in the claim that rock ’n’ roll would now inevitably, and quickly, join the procession of poets and dance to the Beats. Yet the actual evidence was underwhelming. Miles, a reliable witness in these matters, recalls: ‘I don’t remember any rock musicians being there unless you count Julie Felix as one, more folk really. Ferlinghetti was staying in her Chelsea apartment. It’s possible that Donovan attended as he was certainly at the Ginsberg reading at Better Books a few weeks before. John Dunbar says he was there, so maybe Marianne Faithfull was, since he was married to her at the time, but I’ve never heard her speak about it. But no, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones.’70

  That said, if the Albert Hall jamboree represented the firing of the starting pistol of this new race, it would not be long before there were tangible signs of the burgeoning worlds of British rock and Beat influence lying down together. McCartney was the most important evidence of this. Although he had been regarded, by the media establishment, as a more stable and sensible individual than his somewhat caustic and controversial composing partner Lennon, it was Paul rather than John who would dip his toes in the waters of the avant garde first and with greatest enthusiasm. Lennon had married art student Cynthia Powell in 1962 but, by the mid-1960s, the couple were leading a suffocating domestic existence in a vast Surrey mansion, away from the crowds, the fans and press photographers, but cut-off from the hubble bubble and excitements of swinging London. He had shown a literary bent, however, producing two poetry collections – In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965). While the publications were largely well-received and sold well, the work in them – verse and prose studded with puns and comic wordplay, illustrated by his own hand – owed more to the late nineteenth-century tradition of nonsense verse, from Edward Lear to Lewis Carroll, than the Beat style. But they nonetheless stressed that Lennon’s talents were not confined to the three-minute pop song.

  McCartney meanwhile was living in the heart of the capital and had become romantically attached to Jane Asher, an actress of impeccable middle-class credentials – her father was an eminent medic and her mother a prominent instrumentalist in a leading music conservatoire. Thus he was able to enjoy not only the fruits of the hippest city on the planet, as Time magazine were trumpeting at the height of the Carnaby Street hype, as a popular music star but also add to his experience as a concert and theatregoer. Among the events he attended in early 1966 was a lecture by the Italian avant garde composer Luciano Berio71 and the same year he developed fertile connections with Ginsberg via their mutual associate Miles. When Miles needed support in his new project, the Indica Gallery, McCartney provided some cash and his own physical help; when the Beatle departed a bedroom in the home of the Ashers and secured his own house in the city, Ginsberg visited. Additionally, he became acquainted with William Burroughs, who had moved to London in late 1965, and members of his circle and provided some opportunities for the author to make use of various recording studio facilities which McCartney provided.72 When the Beatles released their magnum opus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in June 1967, Burroughs was one of the faces staring from the crowd assembled, at least photographically, by the UK Pop artist Peter Blake and his then wife, fellow artist Jann Haworth, in one of rock’s most celebrated images.

  There is scant dispute that the Beatles were at the heart of this cultural excitement – their creative standing and their economic clout ensured their role as leaders of this new surge of artistic energy. Within little more than a couple of years they had become national then global stars. Significant cultural commentators in the UK and key voices in the US were quick to acknowledge the critical importance of the group as harbingers of change and purveyors of a promise of liberation, social and cultural, even political. Jeff Nuttall remarks: ‘The Beatles were […] the biggest single catalyst in this whole acceleration in the development of the sub-culture. They robbed the pop world of its violence, its ignorant self-consciousness, its inferiority complex, they robbed the protest world of its terrible, self-righteous drabness, they robbed the art world of its cod-seriousness. They reflected the scene from which they came, where all this fusion of art, protest and pop had happened previously, in microcosm, for the world to follow; so that Allen Ginsberg, visiting Liverpool a year after the Beatles left, was moved to pronounce it “the centre of the consciousness of the human universe”, a statement more perceptive than extravagant.’73 On the other side of the Atlantic, Ginsberg himself recognised very early the power generated and the possibilities triggered by the group: ‘I remember the precise moment, the precise night I went to this place in New York City called the Dom and they turned on “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, and I heard that high, yodelling alto sound of the OOOH that went right through my skull, and I realised it was going to go through the skull of Western civilisation. I began dancing in public for the first time in my life – complete delight and abandon, no self-conscious wall-flower anxieties.’74

  McCartney’s friendship with Ginsberg would persist over the latter part of the decade and the Beatle would lend further support to the wider Beat poetry project as the 1960s neared a close, when Ginsberg revealed a scheme to record poems by his hero, the great Romantic mystic, artist and poet William Blake, with the assistance of Barry Miles as producer. The poet describes the genesis of the idea:

  [A]fter the Chicago convention of last year75 […] I began setting Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to music […] they seemed the nearest thing to holy mantra or holy prayer poetry that I could find in my own consciousness, and also because, seeing that rock ’n’ roll – the Stones, the Beatles, Dylan, even Donovan, even the Birds (sic), the Band, the Grateful Dead, the Fugs, Jefferson Airplane, all the lovely youthful bands that have been wakening the conscience of the world, really, were approaching high poetry and cosmic consciousness in their content, so I was interested in seeing if Blake’s highest poetry could be vocalised, tuned, and sung in the context of the Beatles’ ‘I am the Walrus’ or ‘Day in the Life of ’ (sic) or in the context of ‘Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowland’ (sic) or ‘John Wesley Harding’ by Dylan. Also Dylan said that he didn’t like Blake, so I thought this would be an interesting way of laying Blake on him.76

  The Beatles had reserves of cash they wished to invest speculatively in interesting proposals. Apple Records was the first of these visible ventures but money was also steered towards artists and creatives from many walks of life. The Fool, who specialised in clothing and had designed the original, then rejected, artwork for the cover of the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, had painted the images that adorned Apple’s Savile Row headquarters in London. Other beneficiaries of the Fab Four float were left-field inventors and an array of talented, though unknown, musicians who would join the Beatles’ own roster. James Taylor, Mary Hopkin and an early incarnation of Badfinger were among the initial acts to to be signed.

  Apple now, with the particular enthusiasm of McCartney, agreed to form a spoken word label which would release the material through a new operation called Zapple: ‘A is for Apple. Z is for Zapple’,77 as Lennon had quipped at one point. Launched in early 1969, the label promised much as a further symbol of coming together of poetic and musical representatives of the counterculture. Miles, friend to both McCartney and Ginsberg and proprietor of Indica, a radical London art gallery and bookshop, was a trusted associate of both poet and Beatle and seemed an ideal liaison on the venture.

  Zapple appeared, at first, to be a concept with both momentum and ambition, with plans to produce spoken word records featuring a gallery of
major American names. Ginsberg, and his Blake plan, would be joined, it was hoped, by Burroughs, McClure and Kesey, Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan and Charles Olson, Kenneth Patchen, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, Simon Vinkenoog, Ed Sanders and Anaïs Nin, Aram Saroyam and Anne Waldman.78 During 1969, Miles spent time in the US recording Brautigan, Olson, Ferlinghetti and Bukowski and in the summer began taping Ginsberg’s Blake cycle with musicians. However, the climate changed quite suddenly at Apple with a new managing figure in place, the hard-nosed American Allen Klein. Concerned about rising costs at Apple, there were mass firings and Zapple was a victim of the cull. It was ‘folded without anyone even informing me’,79 recalls Miles who was left with hotel and recording costs unpaid before funds were eventually, if somewhat belatedly, negotiated.

  This relatively minor setback in the Beatles chronology would soon be followed by much bigger crises, more damaging rifts, when, not long after in 1970, the group imploded with McCartney departing after disagreements about artistic policy and management arrangements, never satisfactorily resolved after Brian Epstein’s death in 1967. Klein would, in time, be the man appointed to oversee the financial position of the other three band members, deepening the split with McCartney and leading to convoluted legal manoeuvres. Yet, if Zapple was one of the ideas that was crushed in the wake of this new fiscal probity orchestrated by Klein, Miles’ efforts to create a spoken word series was not entirely in vain. A number of recordings found new label homes including Ginsberg’s own Blake set which would eventually appear on MGM. The larger idea may have foundered on the rocks of Apple’s financial crash but the fact that McCartney was keen to develop the venture – and Zapple was conceived to realise it – provided a clear sign that a major rock artist had been willing to back a poetry project of impressive vision, one with many Beat writers at its heart. That financial exigency extinguished the venture was less to with McCartney than the new holders of the purse-strings at the heart of a business that appeared to have spun out of control.