CHAPTER 4

electric music for the mind and body

The “lost chord” of this book’s title is metaphorical, but many of the actual chords of sixties music are the most evocative surviving manifestations of the spirit of the times. There are hundreds of books focused on individual artists who made memorable music in 1967, as well as countless playlists, box sets, radio programs, and PBS fundraising specials that enshrine and comment on them.

As a former rock critic, I am well aware that any attempt to curate music from the sixties is fraught with peril. I reiterate that this book is a subjective history and it is not remotely comprehensive. The intent is to give a bit of context for how some music of the period interacted with other aspects of the culture. Dozens of great artists and pieces of music go unmentioned, including many whom I love.

 

Underground Radio

Even though as a teenager in the sixties I had no idea that there was a music industry that helped connect us to the songs that reflected our version of the real world, business did indeed affect us. The most effective way for artists to reach listeners was to get their music heard, and the most effective means was radio play. Previously, this would have excluded a lot of “underground” bands, but American radio was being reinvented in San Francisco in 1967.

Tom Donahue was a successful thirty-nine-year-old deejay on the San Francisco Top 40 station KYA; he began each show with his trademark line: “Here to blow your mind and clean up your face.” He had become a fan of the local acid rock scene, even though most of these artists never got played on Top 40 radio. The Doors did have a Top 40 hit with “Light My Fire” on their eponymous debut album, but one night in January 1967, Donahue stayed up all night playing the album over and over again, and it occurred to him that there was an unserved audience who were drawn to entire albums and songs like “The End,” which was more than eleven minutes long, nearly triple the length of anything that could get played on Top 40 radio (and way too weird).

The Pacifica radio stations’ foray into hip late-night programming in LA and New York were anomalies. Hundreds of other FM stations in America primarily aired classical music and foreign-language or public-affairs programming, and they made very little money. Donahue discovered that KMPX in San Francisco was hovering near bankruptcy and he persuaded the owners to give him control over most of their programming for the new format that he would create, focusing on the music young hippies liked.

On Friday, April 7, 1967, Donahue’s new format of “free-form,” album-based rock music was launched with “no jingles, no talk-overs, no time and temperature, no pop singles.” It was an immediate success. By the time I first visited the Bay Area in August, it seemed like KMPX was being broadcast in every store and every car in Berkeley. One could walk several blocks and never miss a song or an intro. Advertising money quickly came from hip stores and concert promoters. Since Donahue insisted that commercials either be tailored for KMPX or produced by his staff, the ads didn’t interfere much with the vibe of the station. Local artists like Janis Joplin regularly showed up at KMPX. When Joe Smith of Warner Bros. Records wanted to offer the Grateful Dead a record deal, it was Donahue who made the introduction.

Within months, FM stations in many other cities were hiring freaks to replicate Donahue’s format. There was a new baby boomer market to address, and more than half of FM receivers in the country could now broadcast in stereo. There was also legal pressure. Effective in 1965, the FCC had ruled that in markets with over one hundred thousand in population, FM stations that were owned by AMs had to limit the amount of time they simulcast the AM signal; this created a need for cheap, original programming.

In Southern California, Donahue himself initially programmed KPPC, which was broadcast out of a church basement in Pasadena. KPPC could be heard in the Los Angeles market, and it was where Elliot Mintz would soon move his show.

As Mintz recalls, “AM deejays shouted at amphetamine-driven speed, using virtually the same language that jocks used in the fifties. On FM, it was as if you would meet someone on the street who would describe an experience with you. We heard disc jockeys talking our language. They didn’t sound like radio announcers, they sounded like us. When they talked about music it was like they were explaining to a friend what a concert was like.”

As much as the deejays identified with the hippie culture, they were subject to FCC-imposed limitations and a much straighter ownership culture than the underground press had. No songs with dirty words, no cursing on the air, and at some stations, no politics. On October 9, 1967, Donahue wrote to the KMPX staff: “Just a reminder that KMPX is a music station. Stay away from political comments or opinions. And since we do not broadcast the news, stay away from any news that doesn’t involve music or musicians. The music is sufficient to speak for us.”

The music spoke very loudly. For artists like Country Joe and the Fish and the Grateful Dead, “underground” was the only radio exposure they got and, as it turned out, all that they needed. For the first year or two of the format, there was no research on what worked with audiences, so the deejays programmed their own shows intuitively and could go from the blues to Ravi Shankar to Jimi Hendrix. They played long songs like Dylan’s eleven-minute “Desolation Row,” and invented creative tricks like the “segue” of one song into another. When the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in the summer, KMPX played it in its entirety—a notion that seems obvious in retrospect, but was a novelty at the time.

During the few years before corporate broadcasters took over the programming, Mintz recalls wistfully, “We were beating on tom-toms and saying, Hello in there . . . you’re not crazy. There wasn’t first class and caboose. We were all in it together.”

 

The Fillmore

By the end of 1965, the growing audience for psychedelic rock in San Francisco had created a new business. Bill Graham opened the Fillmore Auditorium on December 10, 1965, with Jefferson Airplane as the headliner.

Graham was born as Wulf Wolodia Grajonca to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. He was sent away to escape the Nazi regime, and was raised in a foster home in the Bronx from the time he was ten years old. He had moved to San Francisco in the early sixties, and initially he’d had aspirations to be an actor, but when he couldn’t get that career going he took to managing the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a countercultural collective that was integral to the formation of the hippie scene (and which gave rise to the Diggers). Graham was soon involved as a promoter in several of the early psychedelic dances.

Graham was thirty-five years old when he opened the Fillmore. He had a vision of how the new iteration of rock and roll should be presented. He commissioned posters by local psychedelic artists such as Rick Griffin and Mouse, which soon became cherished expressions of the culture. Unlike conventional promoters who presented rock shows as cheaply as possible, Graham treated each show as an art form. He printed programs, and featured the kinds of light shows that Ken Kesey had experimented with.

Graham was the prototype of a kind of hippie businessman who genuinely understood a lot about the youth culture and who was personally well liked by most of the bands, but who was also unapologetic about the fact that he was running a business. He exuded a gleeful sense of entitlement when it came to making a profit.

Although assorted radical groups sometimes demonized him, Graham walked the line between a genuine understanding of hippie culture and the tough realities of the music business far better than any of his competitors. He was the very opposite of “laid back.” He paced nervously backstage with a clipboard and personally introduced many of the shows onstage, raging at anyone who disrespected his concept of what made the Fillmore special.

Because he did so much business on the East Coast and would soon open a Fillmore East in New York, Graham ostentatiously wore a Movado watch that showed the time on both coasts. His earthy charisma worked as well on the local cops as it did on acidheads. Although he was capable of blowing up at an artist who refused to do an extra encore, Graham loved many of the bands who played for him. Artists may not have made the percentage of profits from Fillmore concerts that would later become the norm, but they felt appreciated and safe when they played there. There was a moment at the Trips Festival in 1966 when Jerry Garcia broke his guitar and Graham tried to repair it. Although the instrument proved to be unfixable, Garcia appreciated the intensity of his effort and a bond was formed that served Graham well. If a business guy was okay with the Dead, he was okay with most other artists as well.

 

The San Francisco Sound

The Grateful Dead never had a hit song in the sixties, but they were one of the highest-profile embodiments of what came to be known as the “San Francisco Sound.” They were one of the first rock bands to have two drummers—Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann—and they had four members who could sing: Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who also played the harmonica and organ, guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, and Jerry Garcia, who played lead guitar, sang many of the lead vocals, and emerged as the first among equals in the eyes of most people in the extended Haight-Ashbury family.

Garcia was always very clear about the centrality of LSD to the creation of the Grateful Dead’s sound and attitude. Describing their first performances at Kesey’s “Acid Tests,” he said, “The audience didn’t come to see us but to experience something altogether different. We had the luxury of playing where nothing was expected of us. It gave us glimpses in the form that follows chaos. When you throw out all the rules, other stuff starts to happen. That was a clue to how we dealt with things in our interior way. I can’t imagine any other context which would have allowed us to learn that.” Mickey Hart adds, “We were just the soundtrack of the culture. We weren’t playing singles. We’d play four or five hours. How are you going to bottle that?”

The Dead were mostly apolitical, but this was not the case with Country Joe and the Fish, whose name was inspired by a quotation from Mao Tse-tung that said that a “guerrilla” is like a fish that swims in the ocean of the people. They had an attitude that didn’t pander in the slightest to the music business, and the ability to evoke the psychedelic spirits in concert. Donahue once said, “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like Country Joe and the Fish.”

I got into the band earlier than most kids on the East Coast by another one of the quirks of fate that seemed routine at the time. One day in early 1967, a bunch of kids went over to Susan Solomon’s house. Susan was a year behind me at Fieldston. Her father Seymour was a cofounder of Vanguard Records.

The Solomons had the best stereo system I had ever encountered—you could hear every nuance. Susan put on a record called Electric Music for the Mind and Body by Country Joe and the Fish, who Vanguard had just signed. We were into it right away. The kind of rock and roll they were playing didn’t have a name yet, but it was obvious that they were even farther out than Jefferson Airplane, whose “White Rabbit” was a big hit at the time.

Some of us had taken LSD in the last few months and were convinced that we were part of a rarefied elite of teenage expeditionaries and mystics who were trying to discover the meaning of life in a far deeper way than our liberal parents had. My parents were smart and progressive, but their intellectual heroes were pessimistic intellectuals like T.S. Eliot and Eugene O’Neill. We acidheads were into joy. You didn’t have to be depressed to be smart! We reveled in the fact that “White Rabbit” used images from Alice in Wonderland (which our parents had read to us as “literature”) as an obvious metaphor for a psychedelic trip.

Country Joe’s guitarist, Barry Melton, played long solos; the singer, Country Joe McDonald, had an attractive combination of fierceness and vulnerability; and the album included an overtly political song called “Superbird” that parodied President Johnson. The last song was called “Grace”; we correctly assumed it was written for the singer of “White Rabbit,” Grace Slick. Country Joe also wrote a song that I loved called “Janis” about the Big Brother lead singer who he’d briefly dated. It felt as if there was very little showbiz distance between the band and the listeners. We studied the photos on the back of the album, trying to figure out what made such an intense group of people tick. I was particularly struck by the wild look in the eyes of Country Joe’s drummer, Gary “Chicken” Hirsh.

A year or so later, Susan was interning as a substitute receptionist at Vanguard one day when the band visited the label. She and Hirsh instantly connected and by the next day she was staying with him at the Chelsea Hotel. (Paul McCartney and his soon-to-be wife Linda Eastman were beginning their romance at the Chelsea at the same time.)

Susan moved with Hirsh to the Bay Area, where members of the Dead and the Fish called her “Susie Sunshine.” They married and soon after she gave birth to their son Adam, now the singer-songwriter and composer Tree Adams. Susan would come back to New York several years later. It had been difficult being a mother in the midst of the psychedelic rock scene and her marriage soon ended. She went to college and law school as a single mother. Years later, she married the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Paul Goldberger and they had two more sons, Ben and Alex.

By 2016, Susan was the cofounder and CEO of the eleven-year-old New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute. When I reconnected with her, I wasn’t sure what her feelings would be about the psychedelic sixties given the turmoil of the times and how it personally affected her. Yet her eyes lit up when recalling the era: “There was a sense of possibility then. People felt that they could change the world with love—and briefly, it worked.”

In addition to Country Joe and the Fish, there were many other bands who helped form the San Francisco Sound, including Santana, the Steve Miller Blues Band, Moby Grape, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, whose lead singer was Janis Joplin. But the first San Francisco band to make a truly national impact was Jefferson Airplane.

Bassist Jack Casady and guitarist Jorma Kaukonen had been part of the folk scene, and even at the peak of the Airplane’s hippie power they played a psychedelic version of Fred Neil’s folk song “The Other Side of This Life.” The Airplane’s sound was unique both because of the instrumental virtuosity of Kaukonen and Casady and the spooky harmonies of Grace Slick and Marty Balin. Slick told me, “We were sloppy and never rehearsed our harmonies the way Crosby, Stills & Nash did later. We just did what we felt like and that’s how it came out. When we recorded, the people at RCA thought we were too weird to mess with so they let us do it the way we did in concert. Rock and roll is not Puccini.”

Slick was the only true female rock star of the San Francisco scene other than Janis Joplin. She joined the group for their second album. (The band’s first album featured vocals by Signe Anderson, who Slick replaced in early 1967.) The Airplane’s first hit, “Somebody to Love,” was written by Darby Slick, who had been in Grace’s first band, the Great Society, along with his brother Jerry (who was married to Grace at the time). In a Facebook post in 2016, Darby explained that the lyrics were written in the wake of President Kennedy’s death: “‘When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies,’ was very much about assassination and loss. They took away somebody we loved.”

Howie Klein, who later in life became president of Reprise Records, was a student at the State University of New York in Stony Brook in the late sixties. He had a radio show on the college station and also booked the entertainment at the college. He would go to San Francisco a couple of times a year to buy pot. Bill Graham sent Howie an early tape of the Airplane to play on his show and Howie booked them to perform on February 18, 1967. It was their first trip east after the release of Surrealistic Pillow. To save money on hotels, the band crashed at Howie’s place.

On June 3, 1967, the Airplane was a guest on the long-running teen rock and dance show American Bandstand. Host Dick Clark described the band as “a little controversial.” The show clumsily tried to acknowledge the psychedelic moment by shooting their performance of “White Rabbit” on a set which included several lava lamps and a backdrop of a Victorian house shot by a camera which was occasionally turned upside down. After the performance, Clark asked the band, “Do parents have anything to worry about?” Paul Kantner replied, “I think so—their children are doing things that they didn’t do and they don’t understand.”

The Airplane did not shy away from politics the way the Dead did. However, shortly after the release of Surrealistic Pillow, the band took some flack from the left because they agreed to do several commercials for Levi’s blue jeans. In a letter to the Village Voice in May 1967, Abbie Hoffman complained about the endorsement: “It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realize they are just doing their ‘thing,’ but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over one hundred workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions.” The band opted out of doing anything more for Levi’s; in fact, they never did another commercial for anyone.

Despite Hoffman’s criticisms, no lasting damage was done. Hoffman soon became friends with Slick, and the Airplane was the only group written about favorably in Anita Hoffman’s Trashing (published under the pseudonym Ann Fettamen). On their first trip to New York, in addition to their regular gigs, the band played a free concert for the Diggers on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel.

They were also as into psychedelia as the Dead were. The Airplane visited Leary in Millbrook, and handfuls Orange Sunshine acid were often thrown into the audience at their shows. In her memoir, Grace Slick described her first peyote trip: “Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything and everyone seem equally important. Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was all just energy, exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.” Not all that different from Huxley’s description in the fifties, nor from what my friends and I talked about—that is, when we could actually form the words.

 

Monterey

Lou Adler was thirty-three years old in 1967 and was a powerhouse in the then-small Los Angeles music business. His label Dunhill Records had Steppenwolf under contract, and Adler had produced and released “Eve of Destruction,” but his biggest artist was the Mamas & the Papas, who’d had a string of hits that resonated with hippie audiences. Even though the group did not have a guitar hero and was more pop than rock, the Mamas & the Papas’ harmonies and lyrics connected with potheads (especially on the song “California Dreaming”) and the photos of the band on the album cover gave them a distinctly hip aura. Adler and John Phillips, the group’s leader, were approached by promoter Alan Pariser and William Morris agent Benny Shapiro, who had a contract with the fairgrounds where Monterey Jazz Festival had been taking place. They were planning the first Pop Festival, and they’d booked Ravi Shankar and some blues acts but they realized they needed a bigger name to sell tickets.

“They offered us more than the Mamas & the Papas usually got for a show,” remembers Adler, “but that night at three in the morning, John called me with the idea that to do something special, all of the artists should perform for free with profits going to charity.” Phillips thought that with this approach they could afford to have three days’ worth of performances and thereby do justice to the cultural moment. Benny Shapiro was old-school and hated the idea. So Phillips, Adler, Johnny Rivers, Paul Simon, and Terry Melcher each put up $10,000 to buy him out. Phillips and Adler opened an office at the old Renaissance Jazz Club on Sunset Boulevard in LA to pull the festival together. They only had seven weeks before June 16, which would be the opening night of the festival.

Simon & Garfunkel immediately committed, as did Johnny Rivers and the Byrds. To broaden their reach, Adler enlisted Andrew Loog Oldham, the producer and manager of the Rolling Stones, who had temporarily moved to Los Angeles to avoid his native London. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted for drugs in Keith’s Redlands home weeks earlier and Oldham didn’t want to attract the attention of the London police. He recruited the Who for the festival, and also asked Paul McCartney for advice on artists. The Beatle said that Jimi Hendrix was a must. The twenty-five-year-old Hendrix had recently electrified London club audiences with his mind-blowing virtuoso fusion of blues and rock guitar, and had dazzled the Beatles by playing a psychedelic version of the title song on their newly released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at London’s Albert Hall.

Then the Monterey team headed north. Adler acknowledges, “We knew we needed the fresh rock and roll coming out of San Francisco, and that people there thought of us as slick and commercial.” It didn’t help that Phillips had just written and produced “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” for Scott McKenzie. It was an instant hit on Top 40 radio, but was perceived by the Haight hippies as a simplistic exploitation of their scene. Adler, Oldham, and Phillips flew up to San Francisco for a meeting with the managers of the Dead and the Airplane. Adler remembers, “It almost came to blows and I couldn’t figure out what the fight was about. I guess they thought we were somehow gonna make money from their culture.”

In his memoir Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead, the band’s former manager Rock Scully gives his version:

 

It starts with John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas coming to see us, representing themselves as fellow musicians who have also taken acid or maybe taken acid . . . Phillips is a musician whose group we respect, but why, we wonder, is he talking like that? The hip malapropisms, the music-biz clichés, the fake sincerity. We are soon to discover that once you get beyond the fur hat and the beads he is just like a goddamn LA slicko. We all get the same vibe from him: he’s here to exploit the San Francisco hippie/love phenomenon by building a festival around us and Janis and Country Joe and Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Airplane.

 

Nonetheless, in deference to Oldham, Scully kept a relatively open mind. The trio of festival guys then met with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason, a respected figure in the Haight community. Based on their commitment to donate all profits to charity, Gleason gave the festival his blessing. Scully was impressed that the Beatles PR adviser Derek Taylor was brought in to do the press. Paul Simon’s enthusiasm also had weight with some of the San Francisco musicians. Despite lingering misgivings, the Airplane, the Dead, the Fish, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Moby Grape signed on to play at the festival.

The newly powerful KMPX talked up the festival and ticket sales exceeded expectations. The press office was overwhelmed with 1,100 requests for credentials. Derek Taylor said yes to everybody. The international coverage of Monterey dwarfed even the attention that the Be-In had received. Moreover, the festival was filmed. In order to pay for the costs of putting it on, Adler had made a deal for $400,000 with the ABC television network. They chose as the director D.A. Pennebaker, who had made the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back.

The crowd at the Monterey County Fairgrounds was so large that having sold twelve thousand tickets, the promoters decided to take down the fence and let another twenty thousand people in for free. Grace Slick recalls, “Even the stalls selling food and concert items were quaint and uninfected by corporate logos and pitchmen. Police cruisers had orchids on their antennas.” A large banner on stage read, LOVE, MUSIC AND FLOWERS.

Owsley and his partner Rhoney Gissen Stanley were there of course. Mama Cass (of the Mamas & the Papas) asked Owsley to bring acid and he arrived with thousands of purple tablets. He also carried a Murine bottle filled with liquid LSD, which he made available to all of the musicians backstage. Ravi Shankar, who didn’t do any drugs at all, angrily walked out of his dressing room when it was offered to him.

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding all became overnight rock stars because of media excitement and word of mouth about their performances. Grace Slick wrote of it:

 

Were we, the bands, there to invoke the spirits? The gods? Were we pagan? No labeling was necessary. We were all shamans of equal power. Channeling an unknown energy, seeking fluidity. I felt like a princess in a benign court—one without thrones or crowns. I could see “royalty” in every direction. The audiences was just more of “us.” The performers were just more of “us” . . . It was shades of Huxley, Leary, the surrealists, Gertrude Stein, Kafka—the inexhaustible list of artists who’d encouraged multiple levels of observation. It was our turn. We were ready to breathe, ready to celebrate change.

 

Perhaps no artist was more affected by Monterey than Eric Burdon, whose group the Animals had been one of the stars of the British Invasion a few years earlier, most notably with their cover of the old blues song “The House of the Rising Sun.” Burdon had been mesmerized by seeing Hendrix take rock and roll to a whole new level in London and was enthralled by the Haight-Ashbury scene and by acid (he wrote a song called “A Girl Named Sandoz,” a reference to the original Swiss manufacturer of LSD). The band was well known by the time they took the stage on the first night of the festival. Rock critic Joel Selvin wrote that “Burdon did nothing short of reinvent himself in front of the audience.”

Two months later, Eric Burdon and the Animals (as the band was now called) released the single “San Franciscan Nights.” The record starts with a spoken word intro by Burdon: “This following program is dedicated to the city and people of San Francisco, who may not know it, but they are beautiful and so is their city.” He urged Europeans to “save up all your bread and fly Trans Love Airways to San Francisco, USA. Then maybe you’ll understand the song. It will be worth it, if not for the sake of this song, but for the sake of your own peace of mind.” In England the B-side was “Gratefully Dead,” another gesture of respect to the San Francisco scene. In November, the band released Burdon’s song “Monterey,” a celebration of the festival, with shout-outs to many of the artists he saw play there.

Adler recalls, “By the end the policemen had flowers in their hair and the national guardsmen had painted flowers on their shaved heads. For one weekend the harsh realities of Vietnam, student unrest, the Cold War, racism, and urban riots were suspended and even transcended.”

Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was there, and at John Lennon’s request arranged to have a photographer friend smuggle back a couple dozen of Owsley’s purple tabs to London. Also present was actor Dennis Hopper, as well as Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, who were so impressed with Hendrix that they asked him to open up for them on their upcoming tour. After the first couple of dates, there were so many complaints from parents of young Monkees fans about Hendrix’s sexuality that he was dropped, but by then it didn’t matter. As Slick says, “If any musician represented that era, it was Jimi Hendrix.” His talent was so extraordinary that he immediately entered the pantheon of rock icons alongside the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan.

Adler, Phillips, and Pennebaker all thought they had a feature film, not a mere TV program. Adler gleefully told me, “ABC was run then by Tom Moore, a Southern ‘gentleman,’ so we showed him Hendrix fornicating with his guitar and predictably he said, Not on my network. He gave us the film. They were fine with losing the $400,000. They just wanted to get us out of the office.”

The film, Monterey Pop, is considered one of the best rock films ever. Yet at the time, its existence fanned flames of mistrust among the San Francisco contingent. The Dead refused to be included unless they could also approve the way they were portrayed and where the foundation made donations—two bridges that were too long for Adler to cross. Joplin initially refused to let the Big Brother set be filmed, but her performance was so explosive that her new manager, Albert Grossman (who also managed Bob Dylan), persuaded her to repeat the set so she could be in the movie. It is now one of the performances Joplin is most remembered for. She had seen Otis Redding at the Fillmore while she was on acid a few days earlier, and later said his show had inspired her to dig deeper.

After the festival, Adler became aware that the Grateful Dead had taken the backline amplifiers from the festival, so he called Scully to ask for them back. “Why don’t you come and get them,” Scully sneered, “and wear some flowers in your hair.”

Gleason had brought a young journalist named Jann Wenner to Monterey. In November, Wenner would start publishing his new magazine, Rolling Stone. The first page of the inaugural issue had a piece by Michael Lydon, “The High Cost of Music and Love: Where’s the Money from Monterey?” It reported that there was a net profit of $211,451 (including the money from ABC). All of that was given away to various charities by the Monterey International Pop Foundation that Adler and Phillips had set up, but the article implied that the promoters and artists had been profligate in incurring expenses, citing as an example the $345 spent on a hotel room for Johnny Rivers. In a further attempt to ingratiate the new magazine with the Monterey skeptics around the Dead, the piece concluded, “A festival which should and could have been all up front still leaves questions asked and unanswered.”

Fifty years later, all income allocated for the festival producers from licensing of film footage is still given out by the foundation to a variety of organizations in the name of the artists who performed at Monterey. Looking back, the carping seems absurd, but given the sense of dread that the hippie community was experiencing as mass media overwhelmed its subculture, a certain amount of paranoia was to be expected.

 

New York

The Lovin’ Spoonful’s lead guitarist, Zal Yanovsky, left the band in mid-1967 in the wake of a pot bust that had happened earlier in the year in San Francisco. A Canadian citizen fearful of being barred from the States, Yanovsky had been pressured into setting up the bust of a pot dealer, an act for which he was demonized in much of the hip world. There was an unsigned full-page ad in the Los Angeles Free Press asking fans not to buy the band’s records and women “not to ball them.” Ralph Gleason defended the Lovin’ Spoonful in an early Rolling Stone piece, but the bad vibes ended Yanovsky’s role in the group and that pretty much eroded their relevance, although they would not officially disband until 1969.

The Lovin’ Spoonful’s lead singer, John Sebastian, continued to make wonderful music as a solo artist. In the context of twenty-first-century arena-rock nostalgia, Sebastian is not a commercial giant like Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton, but in 1967, he was as incandescent in creativity and influence as anyone.

The departure of the Lovin’ Spoonful from the rock culture was a huge loss and an early wake-up call about the fragility of the scene. The band’s fragmentation hit particularly hard in New York City, where they had been the princes of Greenwich Village for most of my high school years. (Louie Gross, the first guy I bought pot from, boasted that he had sold to the Lovin’ Spoonful and, man, was I was impressed!)

However, New York hip culture was very resourceful, no one more so than Steve Paul, whose club the Scene briefly became a powerful magnet for rock-and-roll culture. Paul was born in 1941 and at the age of seventeen decided that being a press agent was his path to becoming part of the show-business world that enthralled him. He figured out how to get items into gossip columns in New York City daily newspapers, of which there were seven at the time. “The rule was you needed either to give them three jokes or three pieces of gossip they wanted for every item you’d get for your client,” he says. “I wasn’t good with jokes so I was spending all my time desperately trying to get people to tell me secrets.”

With the energy of obsessive youth, Paul succeeded well enough that at the age of eighteen he got the gig as press agent for the Peppermint Lounge, which became internationally famous as the launching pad of the Twist dance craze.

In 1964, a showbiz vet at the age of twenty-two, Paul hustled the money to open the Scene, which was located on 46th Street near Eighth Avenue. He attracted a unique cultural mix, including Allen Ginsberg, Richard Pryor, Tennessee Williams, Liza Minnelli, and Sammy Davis Jr. Andy Warhol and his “Superstars” were also regular customers. (There is a photo of Edie Sedgwick meeting Mick Jagger at the Scene in the book Edie: An American Biography.)

Paul greeted patrons at the door with insults or cosmic witticisms. Photographer Linda Eastman, who would marry Paul McCartney a couple of years later, was a fixture. The then-unknown Tiny Tim opened most shows with a solo ukulele performance of music from decades past.

The Scene entered another realm of hipness after Paul saw the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Monterey Pop Festival and booked their first New York dates in June of 1967. Hendrix fell in love with the place and would frequently jam there after the other artists were done with their sets. In ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, Hendrix biographer David Henderson wrote:

 

Jimi soon found the Scene club irresistible . . . Fans did not hassle you there . . . you could go there and party, or play and just sit alone and drink, and no one restrained you either way . . . He could jam any time he wanted to . . . When the chairs would finally be upside down upon the tiny tables. When Steve Paul himself would finally have to pull the plug, while Jimi, alone in his universe, would be totally unaware of the hour or of the devotees and workers who patiently waited within the exhilaration of his sound. At the Scene, Jimi would completely let himself go—playing all he knew and didn’t know, going beyond sharing—playing all. Trying to get it all out.

 

During the making of the Electric Ladyland album, Hendrix would often work out arrangements at the Scene and then walk a few blocks to the recording studio, the Record Plant, and lay down tracks.

The Doors played their first gigs in New York at the Scene, and in the next few months Jeff Beck, Traffic, and the Chambers Brothers followed suit. The Scene closed in 1970 because of some issues with mob-connected owners of the building, but this didn’t end Paul’s career in the music industry.

After reading a short Rolling Stone piece about Johnny Winter, Paul flew to Texas and became his manager. He subsequently managed Johnny’s brother Edgar, roles in which Paul made far more money than he ever had at the Scene. But for many of Paul’s friends, this transition reminded them of what he had said when Tiny Tim had a novelty hit and performed on The Tonight Show: “Tiny Tim, who was the universe, gave it up to become a mere star.”

Psychedelic energy could not be contained by elites and it soon migrated to Long Island, where singer and organist Mark Stein, bassist Tim Bogert, drummer Joey Brennan—later replaced by Carmine Appice—and lead guitarist Vince Martell formed the Pigeons. The band name was changed to the Vanilla Fudge after they got signed to Atlantic Records. The Fudge were very loud and played long, trippy extended versions of songs like the Supremes hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” Their first album came out in 1967, and although they never got attention from the early rock critics, stoner fans loved them and the band is considered one of the seminal origins of what would come to be known as “heavy metal.”

The death of John Coltrane from cancer at the age of forty on July 17 was a devastating loss, but it focused even more attention on his 1965 masterpiece, A Love Supreme, which was informed by a deep spiritual vision. Coltrane was influenced by both Muslim and Hindu texts. A posthumous album called Om, released in 1967, included chants from the Bhagavad-Gītā. A religious congregation in San Francisco regarded Coltrane as a saint and eventually formed the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church, which incorporated his music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy.

While most of the jazz world remained fixed in the zone of virtuosity and prehippie cool, a few embraced psychedelia in the space that Coltrane had helped to create. Ornette Coleman, long an innovator, released The Empty Foxhole with Charlie Haden on bass and Coleman’s ten-year-old son Denardo on drums. Denardo says, “The title was obviously a reference to Vietnam.”

The trippiest figure to emerge from the jazz world was Sun Ra. Like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, Sun Ra was in his fifties in 1967. Born Herman Poole Blount, he was a highly talented pianist who got work at a young age in local Alabama bands. In his twenties, he claimed to have had a spiritual experience that transported him to the planet Saturn and back. In the early fifties, he legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, which was soon shorted to Sun Ra. (“Ra” is a reference to ancient Egypt’s god of the sun.) An avid reader of history and mystical texts, Sun Ra became a fixture in the Chicago music scene with his label El Saturn Records and a band with frequently changing members called the Arkestra.

Sun Ra and the Arkestra arrived in New York in the early sixties and within a few years became as ubiquitous as the Fugs at rock shows, benefits for countercultural causes, and outdoor celebrations. The Arkestra had flamboyant stage shows and costumes, and Sun Ra’s mystical intensity both fit in perfectly with and broadened the psychedelic scene. Although most mainstream jazz players thought he was too weird, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were both vocal admirers.

 

Psychedelic Rock Spreads Its Roots

The hippie idea traveled around the country seemingly overnight. The New Yorker’s Ellen Willis would write of “the bohemianization of rock” and insisted that “psychedelic music was not so much a sound as a spirit.” That spirit was not limited to New York and California. In Philadelphia, Todd Rundgren created Nazz in 1967 and went on to have a career that still evoked psychedelia decades later. In Detroit the MC5 were formed in 1964, and by 1968 had recorded one of the seminal political rock albums with an energy that prefigured the punk movement. Believe it or not, Ted Nugent’s first band, the Amboy Dukes, based in Detroit, released a psychedelic rock song, “Journey to the Center of Your Mind,” in 1968; it was a period when Bob Seger was also developing his career in Michigan prior to his debut release in 1969.

There was a vibrant music scene in Boston fueled by the city’s vast college population. The psychedelic bands Ill Wind and the Hallucinations were local favorites. In 1968 an assortment of record company executives and local radio programmers tried to declare the “Bosstown Sound” as the successor to the scene in San Francisco. The young community of rock critics sharply criticized the contrived gimmick but the scene would nurture many important rock bands of the early seventies, including the Cars, Aerosmith, and the J. Geils Band, which Peter Wolf, a popular underground deejay, joined as lead singer in 1967.

Duane Allman and his younger brother Gregg grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, where they formed their first bands, the Escorts and the Allman Joys. I saw them in another incarnation, Hour Glass, at the Fillmore in 1967, two years before they finally formed the Allman Brothers Band, which fused blues roots with psychedelic culture, and created “Southern rock.”

One of the most intense psychedelic local music scenes sprouted in 1965 in Austin, Texas, home to a lot of excellent roots musicians and to the University of Texas, which, like various other colleges at the time, included many students who were enthusiastic about LSD. Singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who was precocious enough to take acid in his early teens, recalls that the players at football rival Texas A&M referred to the University of Texas team as “the hippies” instead of their traditional nickname, the Longhorns. The center of the scene was a club called the Vulcan Gas Company. Bands that emerged from Austin included the Conqueroo, Shiva’s Headband, and the 13th Floor Elevators, whose first album, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, released in 1966, is, along with the Airplane’s debut album, considered one of the first psychedelic rock albums ever released.

 

Folk Music in Psychedelic Times

Even though Dylan’s adaptation of rock and roll had made a lot of the folk scene seem passé, some singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitars still found a way to be a part of the 1967 zeitgeist.

It is hard to imagine Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” having made much impact either five years earlier or five years later, but when I first heard it live in the studio on Radio Unnameable on February 27, 1967, I was entranced. My Fieldston classmate Paz Cohen lived across the street from the WBAI studios on East 39th Street and volunteered there, and I could actually hear her laughing in the background. The song immediately became a huge favorite of WBAI’s audience. Laura Rosenberg, another Fieldstonite, hung out at WBAI too, and it was where she fell in love with weekend late-night host Steve Post, whom she eventually married. Laura recalls, “For most of the year, WBAI had ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ to themselves and it was a huge help in the fundraising marathons. They’d promise to play it when $10,000 in total pledges came in and the phones would light up.”

By the end of 1967, Reprise Records had signed Guthrie and released his debut album, ending WBAI’s monopoly on the song but mainstreaming it to underground rock stations and record stores around the country. Alice’s Restaurant was the first album reviewed in the first issue of Rolling Stone in November. Written by Wenner, the review ended with a salute to Guthrie: “It’s his first album and it is, without qualification, excellent.” The album made such an impact that Arthur Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde was one of the big countercultural film hits of 1967, agreed to direct a movie of Alice’s Restaurant (not a music video, but a full-length feature film), starring Guthrie, which United Artists released in 1969.

Arlo, the son of Woody Guthrie, was twenty years old at the time, and the album’s title song is best remembered for presenting a satiric approach to avoiding the military draft. The verses are spoken, the chorus is sung, and it’s a sardonic, laid-back, shaggy-dog story that conveys the hip sensibility of the moment. To listen to Arlo describe loading garbage into a Volkswagen microbus was to think you had made a new friend who would just as soon smoke a joint with you as perform. It’s not until almost eight minutes in that Guthrie reveals the song is actually political. Yet by the end, antiwar sentiment is vivid and the message is clear—do whatever you need to do to avoid the war.

In 1967, Phil Ochs left Elektra Records to sign with A&M Records in the hopes of greater commercial success. By all accounts, Ochs was jealous of Bob Dylan and thought a label change would help. The resulting album, Pleasures of the Harbor, did not achieve Ochs’s commercial dreams, but it contained four of his best songs: the title song, “Flower Lady,” “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” and “Crucifixion,” which was, in part, an elegy to President Kennedy. Ochs was arguably the most reliable attendee of antiwar protests and other left-wing concerts of anyone in the folk or rock worlds. “There is no way to overstate the importance of Phil Ochs to the movement,” says Cora Weiss.

Judy Collins made a major contribution to musical culture in the late sixties by introducing two songwriters whose work would resonate for many decades. She was the first to record Leonard Cohen’s songs “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” on her 1966 album In My Life. On her 1967 album Wildflowers, Collins sang Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” As a result of this attention, Cohen was signed by Columbia Records and released Songs of Leonard Cohen later in 1967. On Wildflowers, Collins also made the first recording of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” which became a hit and also led to Mitchell’s first album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968.

Joan Baez released the album Joan in 1967, but her impact was greater that year as an activist. A pacifist since her teenage years, her ideas were influenced by Thoreau, Gandhi, and A.J. Muste. Baez had established the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in 1965 with philosopher Ira Sandperl. The previous year at Berkeley, she had sung to support the Free Speech Movement and refused to pay the estimated 60 percent of her taxes that would go to the Defense Department, saying, “I do not believe in war.”

Baez was close to Dr. King and appeared in the South whenever asked in connection with protests. Like Mahalia Jackson, she was often asked by King’s aides to privately lift his spirits with a song. She performed “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington in 1963, and was among the few who encouraged King to oppose the Vietnam War. Baez was arrested as part of Stop the Draft week in Oakland in October 1967. While she was serving her thirty-day sentence at the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center, King and Andrew Young visited her. So did antidraft activist David Harris, whom she would marry in March 1968. (At the Woodstock Festival in 1969, Baez performed pregnant with Harris’s child while he was in jail for draft evasion.)

One day in the spring of 1967, a bunch of Fieldston heads were sitting in a circle in Central Park playing a stoned kissing game when Baez and a guy walked by, then sat down and played with us for a few minutes. She actually kissed me on the cheek. We didn’t even make a big deal about it afterward.

Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding featured another reinvention of his sound and a return to more acoustic instruments, albeit with a Nashville production, after having released three albums in the previous two years, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. In May 1967, the documentary Don’t Look Back was released, which followed Dylan on tour in England the previous year and further enhanced the singer-songwriter’s mythic status. There is no way to overstate Dylan’s influence on other artists or on my generation. We all quoted his lyrics: acidheads, political radicals, mainstream liberals, and fans of folk, rock, and poetry. Like millions of people, I was more affected by Dylan’s work than that of any other artist. I just can’t think of anything new to say about him.

 

London

Notwithstanding the cultural power of British rock and fashion, it was an American who brought the hippie idea most fully to the London music scene in 1967. Joe Boyd was a native of Boston and a sound engineer who had worked for the Newport Folk Festival (he was in charge of the sound when Dylan went electric in 1965). Boyd moved to London, originally to work for Elektra Records, and produced the Incredible String Band’s first album, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, a hippie classic.

At twenty-five years old, Boyd was tuned into London’s growing psychedelic scene. One of his closest friends was John “Hoppy” Hopkins, who by the sixties was a trendy photographer. Earlier in his life, Hopkins had been a nuclear technician who quit his job because he believed in disarmament. He also loved LSD. The two of them somehow got the wherewithal to open a club called UFO. UFO became the center of a psychedelic explosion in London that compressed into nine months the arc of discovery, creativity, popularity, and implosion that took two years in Haight-Ashbury.

UFO opened its doors on Friday, December 23, 1966, at ten thirty at night, and didn’t close until six the following morning. Pink Floyd was a quasi house band there, performing dozens of times. Careers launched at UFO include the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and the Soft Machine. Procol Harum played at UFO in 1967 on the night “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was released.

Emulating the Fillmore, UFO featured light shows and advertised their concerts with psychedelic silkscreened posters. After the bands played, the club showed popular movies, most frequently samurai films directed by Akira Kurosawa or black-and-white American comedies starring W.C. Fields. UFO also hosted the British premiere of New York’s avant-garde director Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Yoko Ono was a frequent attendee and populated her film Bottoms with UFO patrons.

Nigel Grainge, who would go on to start Ensign Records and sign Sinead O’Connor and Thin Lizzy among others, was in his early twenties and went to UFO weekly. His favorite band was Tomorrow. Although they never made it to America, Tomorrow epitomized the London psychedelic scene. Their most beloved song was “My White Bicycle,” an homage to the bikes that the city of Amsterdam made available for free to its citizens and visitors. Boyd says, “The sixties . . . peaked just before dawn on July 1, 1967, during a set by Tomorrow.” He called his memoir of the sixties White Bicycles.

In the book, Boyd wrote,

 

An atmosphere of agape was pervasive in 1967; people were fundamentally quite nice to each other. Most hippies pitied rather than hated the straights. I suppose it helped that we were stoned much of the time. What London witnessed in the spring of ’67 was more than an endorsement of a new musical style, it was mass immersion in the subculture that gave rise to it.

 

In another parallel with San Francisco, there were tensions between those who were primarily into psychedelia, art, and music, and radicals whose emotional connection was more political. The club allowed just about any leftist group to pass out information about rallies and bail funds, but Boyd kept a strong hand on the music. The hippies never developed the rapport with local skinheads the way the Diggers had with the Hells Angels, and when some long-haired patrons were beaten up, Boyd asked Michael X, a leader of London’s black nationalists, to provide “security.” The sight of black men in berets and karate poses deterred the skinheads from causing any other incidents.

John Lennon played a test pressing of the soon-to-be-released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at UFO, and Jimi Hendrix hung out there when he returned to London. Boyd recalls booking the band the Move, who he loved, but who attracted a different crowd of “weekend hippies.” He laments, “There was no stopping the juggernaut. The underground was becoming the mainstream. Kaftans and beads were everywhere.” So was the press. The reactionary tabloid News of the World published a front-page piece about teenage girls going topless at UFO and the landlord of the building evicting the club. Boyd tried relocating to the much bigger Roundhouse venue but the economics didn’t work with the higher security and rental costs, so UFO was gone by the end of September.

The Rolling Stones’ year revolved largely around their drug bust. Andrew Loog Oldham produced a tongue-in-cheek Stones single, “We Love You,” which starts with the sound of jail doors clanking, and features Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney harmonizing to indicate solidarity.

Another London band, the Moody Blues, were never a critic’s favorite and never played UFO. Grainge, for example, considered them a pop band with one hit, “Go Now,” to their name, and that had come out in 1965. Yet in 1967 they reinvented themselves and released one of rock’s few concept albums of that era, Days of Future Passed, which had the hit “Nights in White Satin (The Night).” The next year, the Moody Blues released In Search of the Lost Chord, and lest there was any doubt that they had become acidheads, the album included the song “Legend of a Mind,” the chorus of which repeats the phrase “Timothy Leary’s dead,” referencing the death of Leary’s ego while also being a tribute to his vision.

 

Not Necessarily Stoned

There were at least two major rock artists who were publicly antidrug in 1967. Donovan was one of the most popular and influential musicians with hippies in 1967, having released the aforementioned Mellow Yellow, and not long before that, Sunshine Superman, which to me stands as one of the definitive albums of the sixties. The title song was Donovan’s electric departure from the folk acoustic sound, and the backup musicians included future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. The album features “Season of the Witch,” a prophetic classic about the impending collapse of hippie idealism—“Beatniks are out to make it rich / Oh no, must be the season of the witch.”

In 1966, Donovan had been the first British rock star to be arrested for pot. By the time his double album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden came out at the end of 1967, Donovan, having just turned twenty-one, was into meditation and had changed his attitude toward drugs. He included these words in the liner notes:

 

Must you lay down your fate to the Lord High Alchemy in the hands of the Chalk and the Drug? Magic circles he will spin and dirges he will sing through the transparency of a Queen Ant’s Wing. Yes, I call upon every youth to stop the use of all Drugs and heed the Quest to seek the Sun.

 

Frank Zappa exploded onto the Los Angeles scene in 1966 at the age of twenty-five when his group, the Mothers of Invention, released the album Freak Out. The liner notes explained the title as “a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricted standards of thinking.” Zappa elaborated: “Less perceptive individuals have referred to us who have chosen this way of thinking and FEELING as ‘Freaks,’ hence the term: Freaking Out.”

Zappa’s vision was a unique mind-bending amalgam of influences that ranged from doo-wop to jazz to classical music. (Zappa had originally aspired to be a classical composer in the footsteps of his idols Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern.) His lyrics were fiercely critical of “plastic” America, such as, “Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach . . . all the corny tricks you’ve tried will not forestall the rising tide of hungry freaks, Daddy.”

In the summer of 1967, the Mothers did an extended run in New York at the Garrick Theatre, and at one performance Zappa invited several marines who were in the audience onto the stage to help dismember some dolls, a reference to civilian deaths in Vietnam. One of Zappa’s first press photos showed him sitting on a toilet.

And yet Zappa was vocally antidrug. He told Elliot Mintz, “Freaking out is not just dancing and looking freaky. It’s being aware of all the forces suppressing free speech, free exchange of ideas, and doing something about it . . . Stop taking dope and get out there and do something about your environment.” Zappa never took LSD and said, “Try awareness without acid. [You] might find that it lasts longer.”

 

Hollywood

Of course, Los Angeles was not only the home of Lou Adler, the Doors, the Byrds, and Frank Zappa. It was also the center of the film and television industries in the United States, and in 1967 Hollywood was a little out of sync with hip culture, although young artists like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson would soon catch up.

The closest thing to a bridge was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a prime-time show on CBS. Tom and Dick Smothers had a comedy folk act in which they played acoustic guitars and sang in the style of early-sixties folk groups, interrupting themselves with offbeat humor.

Like the members of the Monkees, Tom and Dick Smothers were personally fascinated with the counterculture and wanted in—but unlike the Monkees, they controlled their own show. The Smothers Brothers invited guests such as Joan Baez, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, Steppenwolf, the Doors, and Pete Seeger, who performed “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” his antiwar song that referred to President Johnson as “the big fool.” The song was initially censored by CBS, but after fierce protest from Tom Smothers, it was aired on a subsequent broadcast. Given that Seeger had been blacklisted for years from all of the networks, this was a big deal.

The show was canceled in 1969 after the network received too many complaints about its antiestablishment attitudes, but the Smothers Brothers had succeeded in gaining the respect of the hip community. Jimi Hendrix dedicated the song “I Don’t Live Today” to the Smothers Brothers at the Los Angeles Forum, and Tom Smothers was among the small group that John and Yoko invited to play guitar on the recording of “Give Peace a Chance” in Montreal in 1969. (The other prominent invited guest was Timothy Leary, who sang backing vocals.)

Hollywood was still producing prehippie intellectual films such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Man for All Seasons, which dominated the Oscars in 1967. The closest connectivity between Hollywood and the counterculture was Bonnie and Clyde, which starred Warren Beatty as one of the first mass-appeal antiheroes. The film was the subject of fierce debate between the old and new American cultures. The New York Times gave it a terrible review, almost killing its success until Pauline Kael wrote a rave for the New Yorker, after which it found such a large counterculture audience that it was celebrated on the cover of Time in December 1967. Perhaps the biggest American movie star was Sidney Poitier, who had won the Academy Award for his performance in Lilies of the Field in 1964; Poitier became the first black man to be so recognized. In 1967 he played a leading role in three blockbusters: To Sir, With Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The latter was the first Hollywood movie about an interracial romance. Many young people, both black and white, found it saccharine and paternalistic, but it reached the older generations in a way that rock and roll and soul music never could.

For the moment, European films were generally more in touch with the counterculture. Among those that appealed to heads were Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend and Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which was nominated for Oscars for directing and writing in 1967. (Blow-Up has a scene in which the Yardbirds, who then included future superstars Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, imitated the destruction of an electric guitar, which in real life was a regular shtick of the Who’s Peter Townshend.) British cinema produced three films with classic antiheroes: Alfie, starring the young Michael Caine; Morgan, starring David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave; and Petulia (directed by Richard Lester of A Hard Day’s Night fame), which included brief appearances by both Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead.

 

The Beatles

In the three years since they had been introduced to most of their American fans on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles had dominated the pop charts, released six albums and two movies, and evolved from a pop group to a global cultural force, in part by embracing hippie culture.

The Beatles’ new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, was released on June 1, 1967. Rolling Stone’s Langdon Winner later wrote, “The closest Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released.” I have nothing to add to the thousands who have analyzed the album’s music, but as the Fab Four were by far the most beloved and famous people among baby boomers, it is worth noting a few of the ways that they intersected with the culture of 1967.

The album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s made two large statements. Firstly, the Beatles were deconstructing their own mythology, which would be an increasing focus of the members of the band (particularly John Lennon and George Harrison) over the next few years. The cover was the concept of British artist Sir Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, but the band weighed in on every creative detail, including the wax versions of their younger selves wearing dark suits, juxtaposed with their 1967 personas with longer hair and colorful mock-military uniforms. The eight Beatles and the dozens of other figures stood in front of an arrangement of flowers that spelled Beatles and appeared to be a grave.

The other big idea was that the Beatles were depicting themselves as part of a much wider cosmic community that included members of the counterculture like Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Terry Southern, and Aldous Huxley, as well as movie stars past and present such as W.C. Fields, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Tom Mix, Tyrone Power, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel & Hardy, Johnny Weissmuller, Tony Curtis, Shirley Temple, and Mae West (who initially refused permission but was persuaded to change her mind after receiving letters from all four Beatles). George Harrison insisted on the inclusion of the author of Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, as well as his guru Sri Yukteswar, his satguru Lahiri Mahasaya, and Mahavatar Babaji, “the deathless master.” The band wanted to include Mahatma Gandhi but their label refused because it was considered disrespectful in India and would adversely affect record sales there.

Other cultural luminaries portrayed were Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, and avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home” was the definitive song about hippie runaways, written from the idealistic point of view of a teenage girl looking for life’s meaning. “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” were widely viewed as having psychedelic references although the Beatles coyly denied it. When Time did a cover story on the band in September of 1967, it addressed the last line of Lennon’s closing song, “A Day in the Life”: “It’s been a long way from ‘I want to hold your hand,’ to ‘I’d love to turn you on.’”

In the throes of a level of productivity that future artists would marvel at, the Beatles also released three singles in 1967 that were not included on Sgt. Pepper’s: “Penny Lane” (backed by “Strawberry Fields Forever”), “Hello Goodbye” (backed by “I Am the Walrus”), and “All You Need Is Love” (backed by “Baby, You’re a Rich Man”).

“All You Need Is Love” was performed live on a worldwide TV satellite broadcast called Our World on June 25, 1967, less than a month after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s. On the broadcast, which featured different segments from all around the world, the band was surrounded by friends and acquaintances seated on the floor, including Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Graham Nash, and various girlfriends and family members, who sang along with the refrain during the fade-out. The single was released commercially the next week and was, of course, instantly number one around the world. The lyrics had an almost evangelical intensity about them, and not long afterward, the Beatles would make a global impact, especially among hippies, in another sphere altogether.

 

Black Music and the Counterculture

There was no black equivalent to the underground rock stations like KMPX. The radio stations with the biggest black audiences played R&B hit singles and it was a time of enormous creativity in the genre. Motown was having one of its many peaks, Aretha Franklin and James Brown were making their most memorable records, and Otis Redding was ascendant until he died tragically in a plane crash in December. Most white rock and roll fans had one or more of their records, but stations that played black music were primarily in the same business as other broadcasters—selling advertising spots. Between racist social/political patterns in America and economic inequalities, black and white radio audiences were largely segregated. The Temptations weren’t played on underground rock stations and psychedelic rock was not played on black radio, not even Jimi Hendrix. The one band whose music was played on R&B, pop, and underground rock stations was Sly & the Family Stone.

The Beatles and Rolling Stones had been influenced enormously by R&B and had done cover versions of songs by Marvin Gaye, Solomon Burke, the Isley Brothers, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Chuck Berry on their early albums. When the Stones first came to New York they immediately went to the Apollo Theater to see James Brown. The early history of rock and roll contributed to integration if for no other reason than the fact that black and white teenagers were dancing to the same music, sometimes together. This triggered a racist backlash that resulted in a lot of R&B hits by black artists like Fats Domino being “covered” by white artists like Pat Boone, a dynamic that engendered a lot of bitterness among black artists who were effectively blocked from white audiences.

By 1967, some of the best R&B labels, particularly Motown and Atlantic, had finally created the capacity to “cross over” many big R&B hits by artists like the Supremes and Aretha Franklin onto the Top 40 radio stations and The Ed Sullivan Show. But the very fact of their pop success made playing a lot of those songs off-putting to most underground rock deejays, who tended to focus on the popular music of the previous generation of African Americans: the blues.

The folk scene had always included a lot of blues artists. Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Josh White were fixtures at folk festivals, and Odetta was a star. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters lyric, and the Grateful Dead covered Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” on their first album. In Chicago, guitarist Mike Bloomfield and pianist Barry Goldberg started showing up at blues clubs with overwhelmingly black audiences. The older blues masters—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and others—mentored them and welcomed them onto their stages. Bloomfield and Goldberg would be in the backup band for Bob Dylan when he went electric and later formed the Electric Flag, who played the Monterey Pop Festival and got signed there to Columbia Records. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s album East-West, featuring Bloomfield on guitar, was a fixture in thousands of dorm rooms. When I was a teenager, one of the best ways of determining how much substance a new acquaintance had was checking out how many blues albums were included in his or her record collection.

American blues was even more popular in England. Guitar heroes Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton all started as blues players. When Clapton was in the Yardbirds, the band backed up Sonny Boy Williamson on a British tour; a live album of the tour was later released. Clapton’s band Cream, one of the most ubiquitous in hippie living rooms, was essentially a psychedelic blues band. Of course, Jimi Hendrix could play the blues—he could play anything.

When Bill Graham opened the Fillmore, he sought advice from Jefferson Airplane members Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady about who to book. They turned him on to many black artists, including B.B. King, Miles Davis, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Muddy Waters, who Graham would package with white rock acts.

In Berkeley, one of the most popular blues bands was led by vocalist and harmonica player Junior Wells and featured guitarist Buddy Guy. Enough of their audience was white that Wells rewrote the lyrics to the old eight-bar blues song “It Hurts Me Too” and called the new version “The Hippies Are Trying.” Wells earnestly sings, “We need more flower children / And more lovers too . . .” In the last two minutes of the song, however, he suddenly switches to a classic blues theme: “Somebody tell me—I just gotta know, how can you be so mean?”

Outside of the world of the relatively civilized flower power and rock and roll, that question loomed large for many African Americans in 1967.