“The mood was new music. I just had five years of top-ten records all over the world, and then in 1963 the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came in and changed popular music. I thought my career was over. I was twenty-three.”
NEIL SEDAKA
The second American Revolution, nearly two hundred years after the first, was being fought not only for equality, enfranchisement, and civil rights but for the abolition of laws and strictures that enslaved creativity in literature, film, and the arts as well. From folk festivals to film sets, on printing presses and celluloid, the nation was ready to bare its breasts.
Gay Talese: In 1963, I was thirty, and I was married—we pretty much eloped. My wife was a junior editor at Random House, and I had joined the New York Times back in 1953 as a copy boy and became a reporter. Also, I was writing a lot on the outside. I needed the money, as I was living beyond my means on a newspaper salary. Esquire was paying me the most and not editing me.
I was ready to move but I was also worried about paying the rent. The New York Times was a steady income, and we didn’t have any children in ’63. One of the stories was an assignment in London in 1963 to do Peter O’Toole [who would soon star in Lawrence of Arabia].
I don’t know when I heard the Beatles first, but they were still in London and I knew about them. They were a little group, eccentric in appearance, with their long hair and dress. I was aware of that. When I first heard them it had an impact. You were aware of new music and new people.
We had the same feeling when Kennedy was elected. When you have a young man in the White House, my generation were very much feeling that our time had come, with Kennedy as our youthful figure with international power. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a good testing ground for him.
Kennedy was a master of language. He was wonderful. I covered his speeches. I was interested in the sidelines. I covered Cape Canaveral, writing about the astronauts; they were stars, Kennedy was a star. And now this new music personified by the Beatles was in the air.
Sir Frank Lowe: In a sense ’63 was the greatest year of my life because I came back from America, and if I hadn’t come back and they hadn’t wanted to draft me I would have stayed there.
Britain had been dull and America exciting. But it had all changed, driven by the working-class because they had nothing to lose.
Gay Talese: There was a change in fashion—you saw this in the streets. The Beatles had their own fashion. There was a youthful look, a new style in almost everything. It was really propelled by the presidency in the U.S. The president, Kennedy, made a tremendous impression, and it was augmented by his advisors, who smoked cigars and didn’t wear a hat. Everyone used to wear a hat, but Kennedy didn’t wear a hat. My father told me that a man is not fully dressed without a hat. But Kennedy changed that.
We knew about his sexual appetite, but it seemed at variance with his bad back—it was public now that he had a bad back. He had a sexy wife who probably wasn’t sexy, but she looked sexy and well-dressed—the suits and the pillbox hat—and fashion was very much coming in, especially for women. You had the miniskirt—the anti-fashion fashion—and the classic fashion that Jackie personified: the well-designed suit or coat. The knockoffs were accessible to young people. Fashion—who could afford the designer suit? The economics always affect fashion. I felt the emphasis on youth. Kennedy was possibly the youngest president in history and it affected the whole culture.
Norma Kamali [American fashion designer]: I had just graduated from FIT [the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City] and all the jobs were superficial, so I thought, “I am going to travel.” I saw an ad in the Times for a position at Northwest Airlines. At the time, working for an airline was like working for Apple. That was the desired place to get a job.
I didn’t know I wanted to be a designer. Absolutely not. I hated the whole fashion thing at FIT. Everyone looked like Mad Men. Matching hats and handbags. I just didn’t fit in. I was so miscast. I thought they were all so superficial and so someone at the airlines said to me, “When you go to London”—I was going to Paris first—“this person said there are some boardinghouses in this area in London called Chelsea, and you can stay for six dollars a night. It’s a nice little area, and it’s really pretty.
So I meet my friend Betsy in Paris and I’m waiting for her in the lobby of the Normandy Hotel, and there are these British guys who obviously are in some kind of a group in the hotel. Steve Winwood was in the band, and they were all thinking that I am French and made jokes about me and my friend Betsy.
We started talking in English. And they went, “Oh, gosh, why don’t you guys come with us. We are doing a tour around Paris and just outside.” So we went with them, and they said, “When you come to London there’s this club called the Speakeasy, and you have to come. Everyone’s there.”
We didn’t know anybody. Nobody was anybody yet. It was still so early. The Stones and Beatles hadn’t come to New York yet.
Allen Jones: We lived on one floor at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, and I had a studio on another floor. That was very exciting. Wow, this is America and I’m here. We were so excited, and we didn’t know that back home, London was becoming an epicenter, too. We knew Warhol enough to say hi, but he was still just another artist on the scene then.
What I was really worried about wasn’t being sent to Vietnam but that I’d come back to my parents from an American airbase wearing an American uniform, which might upset them. [British nationals who were permanent residents in the United States were eligible for the draft.] I did get called up for the draft. But the recruiting officer said, “You’re wasting my time.” I was twenty-six, white, and married. [American men between eighteen and twenty-six were drafted; Jones was already at the upper limit of the age range. In addition, men in college, as well as married men were often excused from the draft or received a deferment.]
I had lived there for a year, but my wife got homesick—and pregnant—and I couldn’t afford to bring up twins in private education in New York. So I returned to London.
Norma Kamali: Our first night [in London] we went to Margaret Street where the Speakeasy Club was. You went down to this place, it was like a coffin with drapes. Silent and dark. And you get led in through these drapes, and there was everybody who was a musician at the time. I mean everybody.
But I wasn’t impressed—I didn’t know who they were. I would come back to my job at the airline and no one had a sense back in New York who they were. It was English Motown. It was the music of choice. British music was happening. I met Jimmy Page [later a member of Led Zeppelin] and all these guys. Kids. I was Norma from New York, and I didn’t know who I was.
This shaped who I became. The moment was so big and we knew it was different from our parents, but I don’t think we knew how profoundly different it was till ten or twenty years later. So it was highly charged living in that moment, and I was stimulated every day. Every day in London there was something new that had never been done before. And every day since then, it’s been a take on or a look back or a nod to things at that time.
Carly Simon: My sister and I were touring the second year I was in college, which would have been ‘63. Lucy started to play the guitar, and there was some guy David who was a folksinger, and he was all I ever wanted and could ever have dreamed of, and he was on Martha’s Vineyard and his parents were friends with my parents.
It was David who taught Lucy some chords, some picking. They had gone to school together when they were very little. They were friends from Martha’s Vineyard and from school, and he taught her the chords, and so she learned and I copied off her.
So by 1963, the summer, we both knew about three or four chords, and we thought we’d get a job singing in a nightclub with our two guitars. And we hitchhiked to this place called the Moors in Provincetown, and nobody would pick us up on the way up, they just passed us one after another. We were yelling at people who passed us, “We’ll see you at the Moors. We’ll be the stars and you’ll just be the little plebs and you’ll wish you knew us.”
We went up to audition, and the band that was playing there were just drafted to the war in Vietnam, so we were hired on the spot because it was the same day that the guys had left. We had about four or five songs. We did some folk songs by Joan Baez—she was so popular then. There was a song “West Virginia.” We both did vocals. Everyone thought we were gay! They thought we were a gay act. We were called the Simon Sisters. We didn’t really know what gay was.
We spent the rest of the summer gaining ground on our repertoire, and then that fall Charlie Close, our manager, had us audition at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. That was my sophomore year. We were getting our repertoire stronger, and we had fifteen songs. We were the opening act for a lot of people that fall—Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Bill Cosby, and Dick Cavett.
Gay Talese: I was hugely ambitious and driven in 1963. But I wanted to live freely. I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to be beholden to the New York Times, but I had to pay the bills. I had to have a job. I left the Times completely. I was writing all over, getting extra money.
I was sent to London to interview Peter O’Toole. He was the most interesting man I had ever met. While he was an international movie star, he was also very smart. His frame of reference was amazing. He knew art, opera, poetry; he was a very intellectually curious person and a nice person.
I stayed at his big house in London after I wrote a profile of him; he invited my wife to come over and we spent a week or so after I’d done the research for the piece for Esquire. He convinced me that I was being a little too cautious as a person with regard to my personal life. Just stop practicing birth control. Don’t worry about the money. You’ll make it. And I was persuaded by this because [of] the person who was telling me. This was a guy who was taking chances being an actor. He had lots of small parts before he got big parts.
Norma Kamali: I was going to London the tail end of ’63. I walk along the Kings Road and looked around, and all of a sudden I see shops, and they are really interesting and different, and I see people dressed in a different way. People in short skirts. We had our knees covered and we wore stockings. Oh my god this is unbelievable, and I was so excited, like, totally excited. And I think the Beatles song [“I Wanna Hold Your Hand”]—I think they had just released a record, and I can’t remember when I first heard it but I know I heard it when I was walking down Kings Road because the song was blaring out of the shops. The sound was so new and this was so new. Everything was so new—the contrast from this, the radical new color explosion, to little old ladies all dark and gray—it was an explosion from black-and-white into Technicolor. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I had chills the whole time. I was in awe. I knew I had found my star. I fit in here. I knew I didn’t fit in at FIT. But all of this was like coming home: this is where I belong. It was the freedom—it was very liberating for me. My mind was exploding with ideas.
Henry Diltz: We were still in our suits—our uniforms. It was jazz and folk and comedy, and we had four station wagons and we went to all the colleges. We played with Nina Simone and Herbie Mann. We were the folk music. We signed on to a bus tour and it was forty-one nights on a bus, and there was a gospel group—the Gospel Pearls: three-hundred-pound ladies who sang amazingly. In the South there was one hotel who wouldn’t let us stay there because of the black people. Should some of us stay there? No—hell no. We are going to stick together.
We all smoked grass at the time. We got forty-five dollars a week and everything was paid for. It was fun as hell. Our generation, we thought we were up-and-coming and we knew all the answers. We were smoking grass, but as the guy from the Doors said, we weren’t taking drugs, we were taking sacraments. We wanted to get insights. I was taking acid, just starting, in New York in ’63.
Robert Christgau: I was part of the political wing but we were outnumbered by trippy self-indulgent hedonists who by then had never known a year in which the GDP went down or the income of their parents went down—never in their lives, ever. We had experienced nothing but economic expansion. I could go get my little crummy job, live parsimoniously, save money, and take five months off.
What encapsulates the mood of ’63 for me is that someone is able to put a pack on his back with the collected poems of W. B. Yeats and a few other books and spend five months on the road with nine hundred dollars in the bank. That is freedom, and it was just there. If I needed to get a job I could just go get a job tomorrow. It was not an issue. No anxiety whatsoever about employment. And that is why the economic factor is so important. Getting a casual job to get you to the next place was an absolutely assumed thing.
Gay Talese: I remember in ’63 one of the pieces I wrote was about a movie actress named Romy Schneider. The lack of resistance to sexual impulsiveness you followed up with infatuation, and you just did it. It was in Vienna. And I remember us talking, and she was not aggressive but during the conversation with her, where she was very forthcoming about her hatred of her mother, we went to bed, just like that. The world had changed. And a couple of days later my wife came over, and the film was moving from Vienna to Rome, and we went to dinner with a lot of people from the cast, and I was dancing with Romy, and it was so easy when you have had a sexual experience with a person, and my wife noticed it. The spirit of the time was just fulfill your impulses. There was no resistance. It was the sexual revolution beginning.
Linda Geiser: If I saw the director or leading man seducing the girls, I would admire the girls but I thought it was a bit yucky to sleep around. We used diaphragms because we didn’t like condoms. When I cheated on my boyfriend once or twice I didn’t feel guilty, but I felt it wasn’t worth it. I wanted to be free all the time and do what I wanted. I knew one thing: what I wanted was to be an actress. I didn’t want to be married.
Robert Christgau: In my world, if you had a girlfriend, you slept with her [even though you weren’t married]. And that was the way it was, and everyone I knew did it. There were not a whole lot of libertines in my group of friends. And it’s the candor about sex that changes. Not what you do.
But in the early sixties I don’t believe there was a lot of casual promiscuity. It seems very important that you can sing about sex in songs. That’s a big deal, that there is a certain amount of sexual explicitness in sex songs that wasn’t there [previously], and it ought to be. I do think it was a big deal. There was a level of prudishness that was being exorcised from the culture. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller—those things are really important. It was ridiculous for those books to be banned.
I was having sex at least every two weeks throughout that entire period. I partook of some of that easy casualness. It seems to me that one of the main things of ’63 is not that sexual mores were changing but that sexual practice was being acknowledged.
Gay Talese: In ’63 I wrote a piece for Esquire about [the Broadway director] Joshua Logan, a homosexual who was married. I knew that. I didn’t mention that, but in one scene I did say he was having a fight with an actress, Claudia McNeil, who was the star of the show Tiger Tiger. Claudia got mad at Joshua. He was saying, “You are acting like some queen up there.” And she said, “You’re the queen.” That was the term for being a homosexual. And Esquire was worried about a lawsuit and said, “We are not ready to use that.”
I said, “Let me see if I can get him to give me permission.” He was on vacation in Mexico. I called him and he said, “No. I would rather you didn’t use it.”
“So what do you want me to put in there?” And he said “Why don’t you put in ‘empress.’ ”
Gay wasn’t even in the language. They were queens and faggots, if you are talking crudely. But ’63 was the beginning—a forerunner of the sexual revolution.
Terry O’Neill: So much was changing around us in 1963. In our young crowd we knew people who were gay, like Brian Epstein or actors, but we didn’t address it or draw attention to it; it didn’t seem to matter, unless you were a raving heterosexual and a gay guy came on to you. But they didn’t. Gay men had their own way of being discreet. They kept themselves to themselves because the rest of society was so rampantly, violently homophobic, from the cops and politicians down.
It was only young people who were casual about it, almost unconcerned, not the least bit threatened. It was the same with sex, fidelity, and adultery. There was very little guilt, not many boundaries. Your girlfriend’s best friend would sleep with you. You’d pick up with your best mate’s girl if they’d split and you fancied each other. There didn’t seem to be any issue. Sex was fashionable, like music and clothes. Mind you, I think this was still very much a London scene. Out in the provincial cities you’d still get a bottle in your face if you slept with your mate’s girl, whether he was with her or had split with her.
Gay Talese: I don’t think infidelity was part of the fashion in America but it went uncondemned. Kennedy’s affiliation with Hollywood is what appealed to young people like me. Kennedy’s affairs were common knowledge, and not just because I was a journalist. [But] my father and people like him wouldn’t believe it, but I knew people and it was common knowledge among my circle, and it wasn’t scandalous.
We had our flings, and sometimes it led to divorce. In my case it didn’t.
Linda Geiser: A whole bunch of people, including Warhol, we all went out together. Soho opened up for the first time. It was in the days when you weren’t allowed to live in the lofts. They were commercial rooms, and the landlords would come at night and throw you out. That was one of the biggest changes—it was when Soho changed to living quarters for living artists.
I was in a group of young people that was doing all kinds of things. Andy Warhol was part of it. One day he told us to put on leotards, and then we were painted by him and his group. We had to make these funny movements. We were a train or something. We did it on the [subway] platform at West Broadway. Then my agent called me and said he had an audition for me. It was a movie. My agent said, “So-and-so star doesn’t want to do it. This part doesn’t need a well-known actress, it needs a face.”
I knew immediately The Pawnbroker was going to be a controversial movie because of the nudity, because it was the first movie about a concentration camp, and because I knew nudity couldn’t be shown. But I was fine to show my bosoms for a few seconds.
Sidney Lumet only wanted to do it his way. Sidney had been to Hollywood, and he said, “I don’t want to work in Hollywood, where the producers are cutting my film and telling me what to do.” They had the cutting rights, not the director. He said, “I am going to do it in New York,” and he started shooting.
Rod Steiger didn’t want a salary. Rod got a car, a Cadillac—this crazy idiotic car that he was futzing around in—and then a percentage of the film later. He was driving us crazy with this car. We all had to take a ride in it. He was so proud of this thing.
I was paid three thousand dollars a week! For six weeks! At the shop I was making two-fifty an hour, no more than a hundred dollars a week. On Broadway we got a hundred twenty a week.
I was not aware that I was making one of the great movies of all time. He told me about the nudity from the beginning. My father was upset, but I said, “Papa, it is revolutionary.” We had to wait. We were filming in the fall, in September. It didn’t take very long to shoot that scene. The whole thing took maybe an hour.
I knew right away that the film had a problem getting a release date ’cause I knew it couldn’t be released that usual way and Sidney was not giving in. There was the feeling of rebellion against the old establishment. The young people wanted to do things their way and do new things.
Bob Gruen: I was eighteen in ’63, trying to graduate from high school. I lived on Long Island. I wanted to go to [the] Rochester [Institute of Technology in upstate New York]. I was interested in photography and I knew they were the best photography school.
I was starting to listen to folk music in high school, and my friend was playing guitar and he taught me how to play. I remember the Weavers and I remember my friend came over with a Dylan album sometime that year, saying, “You have to hear this record, this guy is amazing.” I fell down on the floor laughing. I said, “This guy is not a singer. Are you kidding me?” But he said, “Listen to what he says.”
Robert Christgau: Till April 18, 1963, which was my twenty-first birthday, I am living in my garret in Manhattan, and I set off on a hitchhiking trip around the country and it lasts till the middle of September. It takes me fifteen thousand miles, and I slept on people’s floors—I visited all my friends all over the country. I spent some time in Berkeley and in LA—I had never seen California before.
The whole notion of America was very important to me. At Dartmouth I read British literature, and I was reading American fiction at the time because I felt I didn’t really know it and I wanted to see America as I read about it on the road. And so I was listening to the radio all this time.
My musical experience was delivered to me by AM radio. “Surfing USA” by the Beach Boys—it was just starting to come up during that year. It had a utopian vision of America. It was a utopian time.
I liked pop art for the same thing: the edge, the incongruity. Some people think pop art was satiric. I didn’t and never have. I liked it. They knew they were doing something outrageous. But was Andy Warhol satirizing or was he celebrating? Yes, sometimes there was a satiric element, but essentially it was a celebration, and that was what it grew out of. It was a rebellious time and yes, there were certainly things to get rebellious about. There was a civil rights movement, of which I was extremely aware.
Allen Jones: I did a drive for three months with my friend from college, Peter Phillips. He had a Harkness Scholarship—very prestigious—that allowed him to live in America for two years, and you had to travel for part of the time beyond your hometown. So Peter rang up and said, “I’ve got this car and it’s free, how about doing a road trip?” We drove for three months down to Key West and the West Coast and through Salt Lake City and Niagara. We never went down to Alabama: freedom riders, civil rights—you don’t want to go down there in New York license plates.
We stuck to the coast. In South Carolina you’d go into a diner and there’d be two walkways—one for whites and one for blacks—and we walked down the black one because we couldn’t take it seriously, but we soon wised up to that. It wasn’t very funny.
A car had broken down, there’s a white woman in the back and the driver, who is black, has the bonnet [hood] up. We stopped and asked if we could help. He was stunned. The American woman in the back said, “No! Just tell the people at the garage in the next town.”
Gay Talese: Civil rights began in ’63 with the freedom riders. I was covering some of it. We had race riots in New York. But there was no “we shall overcome” spirit. [Martin] Luther King hadn’t emerged as the leader yet. He was around. But there was fear and mistrust of black people.
Henry Diltz: We weren’t really tuned in to what was happening outside, other than the Vietnam thing. We were only interested in the music. On the West Coast there was Scott McKenzie, who later sang “If You’re Going to San Francisco.” Beautiful high voice. There was another guy who played the banjo so beautifully—one of the Clancy Brothers, the Irish folk band. The Troubadour was the mecca. I didn’t have to worry about the draft because I was technically in the reserves. I just dropped out of sight. It added to the college atmosphere. That added to the “us vs. them” attitude to authority. It fed it. Why would we go to a foreign country and shoot someone we don’t know? For no good reason? More evidence of the wrongness of the people in charge and the rightness of us who were opening up to life. We were taking acid. We rejected the old world. Yeah, it was self-indulgent. I never did a nine-to-five job.
And two streets away from the Troubadour in LA was the Tropicana Motel, and everybody stayed there. We lived at the Tropicana and played at the Troubadour. But we used to play a whole week, not just one night. It was the clubs and the college concerts. We’d travel in a van across the country from state to state and do a folk club for a week and a few colleges and then move on, and we’d go to New York and do a couple of TV shows. I remember that young dude Dylan coming out.
Al Kooper: Folk and rock and roll were very differentiated from each other. They didn’t like each other. I liked both and that made it tough for me.
I heard Dylan in the Village. His voice was tough for me. Paul Simon said, “Have you heard Bob Dylan?” And I said, “Yes, but I don’t get it.” He said, “Forget the singing, it’s the guitar playing that’s really good. Forget the singing.”
Carly Simon: I miss how easy it was to learn songs from each other backstage. You’d just take out your guitar and no one was self-conscious and no one was a star in those dressing rooms at the Bitter End [a club in Greenwich Village]. You just felt so comfortable teaching each other songs. It was collegial and it was like a college campus, and you’d just go from one room to another: “Hey, I’ve got this new tune, dig this.”
The big difference for me and everybody was being a singer/songwriter. That was a new cult—to be your own person through your music. I really think why Dylan was so important was not just because of his talent, but he took Woody Guthrie a step further. It wasn’t only songs about the Depression, it was songs about inside your heart. It was a new energy.
Dylan, singing by himself in ’63, was the road being paved for the great soloists and the Woodstock era. They weren’t political. He was singing about “tonight I’ll be staying here with you.”
Stevie Nicks [singer/songwriter, Fleetwood Mac]: I had been transferred to Arcadia, California, going into tenth grade. I was sixteen in 1963. I got this magical guitar teacher. After one month of lessons, this guy leaves for Spain and sells the guitar to my mom and dad, so that guitar was laying on my bed—I still have it—and I wrote a song that day.
I’d just broken up with a guy who started going out with my best friend. My first great love, star quarterback, he was great at everything. I was the new girl, I was kinda freaky ’cause I’d come from Salt Lake City. Arcadia was very society. I was dressing Hicksville. I had a straw bag; I stood out. England hadn’t crossed over, but I’m me and I’m cute, and I meet Steve.
We went out for a month. Nothing happened, but being with him was fantastic. If it wasn’t for this guy I might never have written this song. I was as in love with him as I’ve ever been since. There was nothing like the pill, but things were changing. Nobody was sleeping with anyone, but making out in the car—I’ll never forget that, it was fantastic.
And I get this guitar, and my first song goes, “I’m sad but not blue, boy loved another,” et cetera. I remember it like it was yesterday. At home at that time I was very close to my parents. I played that song to them, crying tears over my guitar. My parents were totally supportive as long as I went to school.
I’ve learned ten chords, which is all I know today. I didn’t feel I needed any more lessons, and I started writing all the time. It was my joy. I wanted to chronicle what was going on in my life, but by then my best friend had broken up with Steve. My memory of him is pure even though he betrayed me. The girl became my very best friend. I didn’t get mad with them. I knew writing songs would be my path.
It was a musical happening. This was something very different from Elvis and Sinatra—they were entertainers. Fifteen-year-olds were inspired, involved. It was a revolution. Young people had a voice, had something to say, dancing in the streets and cafés.
Neil Sedaka: The mood was new music. The mood was something more thought-provoking and the culture of the time was changing—clothes, the arts—and I was not part of it. I was an outsider. I had just had five years of top 10 records all over the world. I had ten hits in a row from ’58 to ’63, and then in 1963 the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came in and changed popular music.
The first time I heard the Beatles [in April 1963], my wife and I were on our honeymoon on a cruise, and there was a jukebox on the Queen Elizabeth and I heard, “Is there anything that you want . . . ” [from the Beatles song “From Me to You,” released in April 1963].
Al Kooper: Neil got spooked. Many of his teammates had their songs recorded by the Beatles and made a lot of money, but Neil didn’t. They were all writing the same kind of songs. They had their songs in the top 10 every week. We were all in the same building [the Brill Building]. I was nineteen and living with my parents in Queens and commuting to New York every day and going home at night. We wrote for a living, me and two other partners. We were nicknamed “the Three Wise Men.”
Neil Sedaka: I listened to the Beatles and the Stones. I preferred the Beatles because Paul was smiling and looked very wholesome, and the songs were well constructed. The Stones were a little more turning their back and sticking their tongue out. I preferred the Beatles and started writing in that kind of style.
The rebels versus the nice lads. Contrived a bit. John was from Liverpool and an outsider type. Jagger was from the suburbs. It was a switch. It was no longer the solo, smiling American singer. It was more rebellious, painting pictures, more evasive writing, more metaphorical; mine were more happy-go-lucky, tra-la-la songs.
I was fascinated. It was the next step. The Beatles music was an English take on the American Brill Building, and Paul has told me that he was very influenced by the Brill Building.
Carly Simon: Nineteen sixty-three was such a splendid year because that was the year I went to the South of France. I was rebelling against my mother and sister trying to push me into being a Simon Sister when I wanted to go off with my boyfriend and back to school. I was being pushed into show business. I got into a lot of French music, and [DJ] Johnny Holliday and I bought a lot of 78s and listened to them.
I knew that I had a good voice. I was confident about that, but getting onstage was another thing. I had such a bad stammer, and when I was asked to read out loud at school I would stammer terribly, and that carried over into being in the limelight, anyway. I felt pulled in two directions. I liked the ability to meet and make music with people like Judy Collins and various people. But it was never fun for me. I didn’t like to perform. I felt like I was being dragged along by my sister. I was very nervous to perform.
I wanted to marry my boyfriend, a writer. I had a picture of myself, in the kitchen with a lot of intellectual people sitting in the kitchen, and I’d be making coffee. I was being very quiet.
But that was not what happened. We [the Simon Sisters] weren’t making very much money, and whatever we got as an allowance from my parents. I was probably getting about twenty-five dollars a week from gigs, and when we were at the Bitter End it was fifty, but that was for the two of us. We’d been on for a week, and then we’d be off for a month. And then we’d play the Gaslight [Café, on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village]. We were always the opening act.
Al Kooper: Paul Simon’s story is amazing. They were rock and rollers when we met, and for about eight years. They had a hit R&R record as Tom and Jerry. Then he and Art reinvented themselves as folk singers in 1963. They called themselves Simon and Garfunkel—their real names. I think they reinvented themselves because of Bob Dylan.
Paul Simon started playing stuff on an electric guitar, and it sounded better on an electric guitar to me. He was finger-picking, and he taught me how to finger-pick, and that changed my life. I’d seen Bob Dylan perform. I bought tickets. Paul Simon had got me interested. Seeing him in concert I had a reformed opinion of him. I didn’t let the voice deter me and I got into the other aspects. He filled the Town Hall, and he was getting bigger.
Bob Gruen: This was the beginning of what we called the “protest movement,” which involved the [Vietnam] war. This is the time of the civil rights movement. Phil Ochs was singing songs about civil rights. Rock and roll was a rebellion. Civil rights was more serious. It had a purpose.
Neil Sedaka: People would come up to me and say, “Oh, didn’t you use to be Neil Sedaka?” At twenty-three! I was able to write in that rock-and-roll style but people wouldn’t buy me. The time wasn’t right. At that time in ’63 the most influential musician was Dylan. Folk music was bubbling. I went to clubs in the Village. It was funky, floppy, druggie—not my scene. The Brill sound was on the way out. My career slowed, each record sold less and less. Then my records stopped selling or playing.
Carly Simon: We did a show with the Carter Family [a traditional American folk group] and they all wore matching clothes, sitting down and playing their mandolins and their accordions. I think it was the trend.
Our image was confused. We met with this woman who was a choreographer who taught us movement with what we sang like the Supremes and Motown groups. I objected to those strange dance movements because it didn’t go right and it wasn’t me. There was something studied about it. I reacted very negatively to it. I thought I was being pulled along to something I wasn’t attracted to. I had a sense it wasn’t us. We’d meet in this dance studio and do these dance steps. We got to dance with Burt Bacharach, and they were all confused about what we were. Bacharach was a great hero of ours, along with Dionne Warwick.
We were on our way up to Newark. We were doing a college tour in ’63. We’d got back to the Bitter End, and then the rehearsal studio to learn these dance steps, and then we’d meet with Bacharach. In fact, he gave us a song called “Once.” There were odd influences that came from a lot of different places.
Chrissie Most: Mickie used to fly to America every second week, and he would go to the Brill Building—where all the songwriters worked on Broadway. He met Carole King, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, and all the others. That’s how he got all the songs. They wrote songs to order.
Allen Jones: The experience of going to New York—it’s the city for me—the energy level there is spectacular. During the sixties I still had the green card and I kept going back and forth. There is this feeling of breathing deeply. If you have anything to offer in America you have a chance. In Britain they’d always want to know which school you went to.
I’d come back to London after the first trip. I said, “I simply have to get a green card.” I had to move to New York. It was seminal. I was just married to a beautiful blonde—after I was thrown out of the Royal College, I’d started teaching, and I was taking out the beautiful blonde, the best student; this was a cardinal sin. She was nineteen and four years younger than me.
I went to the American embassy for a green card, and I swore [to] something and then they said, “Within six months you’re eligible for the draft.” The Vietnam War was really getting going. It was a sobering thought. Hockney, who was going to and from New York, said, “Wear different-colored socks [to your draft board interview], and if it doesn’t work, take a bus to Niagara [so you can cross the border to Canada].”
Neil Sedaka: I thought my career was over—and I was twenty-three. I had had my run. The Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, they [had] all had five years, and it seemed to be the pattern. I was no longer salable. I was entranced by the Beatles and Stones. But my audience wouldn’t accept the tra-la-la’s and doobie-doo’s and the happy songs I was associated with.
Carly Simon: I had heard the Beatles’ album. (I got all the Beatles to sign it for me—it was given to me by a friend who was a DJ. I’ve since given it away. Horrific. I can’t believe I did that.) I’d heard whatever they had out there on the radio. Everybody was into the Beatles.
Neil Sedaka: We were all discussing it. We knew we had to change and be more introspective and get out of that comfortable atmosphere or we’d just write the same thing over and over again. In ’63 in England it was more hedonistic, and no one really understood what was happening. They were young. They were kids. I knew there was more in me and that I was a creative person and that I wanted to change styles and develop and grow. I was still going to the Brill Building. I had a much more career-minded sensibility.
Norma Kamali: When I was [in London] I would bring back clothes from Biba and from the Kings Road, which was fantastic. I would spend the eighty dollars I made as a flight attendant each week and I would bring back clothes for friends. And then it got that I was bringing back so much with a big cloth garment bag, and that’s how I started my business. I opened a little basement store on Fifty-first Street and I started selling clothes I bought in London. It kept growing from that, and I started to make my own clothes. But it was that experience in London that made me think of fashion in a completely different way. I understood that anything was possible. I had permission to do anything I wanted.
You would relish the fact that you came up with something new. The way you dressed each day was an expression of something that no one had seen before. People were like a piece of art every day. I remember when I arrived back from the first trip. I always had needle and thread with me. I was wearing a skirt to my knee and I remember literally sewing the hem of the skirt all the way ’round so it was a short skirt.
Cars stopped, and I was talked to as if I was a prostitute. No one had seen legs before. And forget legs—that didn’t have stockings and garter belts. It was unheard of. You had to be brave because no one dressed that way in New York. They thought I was nuts or crazy. Not even stoned, just crazy—no one was really stoned yet.
It gave me permission. I had the inclination, but I didn’t have permission before. You didn’t have to dress like your mother. Everyone could be fashionable. Anyone with a sense of style could do it, and it started the first concept of democratic fashion.
Carly Simon: There was a convergence of a lot of images. You are trying to work out who you are and which mannequin you were. I was already becoming the hippie, and we all went down to the Village and had our ears pierced, and had long hair, and the antiwar movement was building a lot of steam. People were talking about it in coffee shops. People were going to Washington [to protest].
Bob Gruen: My parents were brought up in the Depression. At my age it was a much more difficult time. In 1963, it was pretty affluent: people were building houses, and it was a different world financially and opportunity-wise. I just thought about not wanting to work nine to five. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had no plan. I just wanted a life where my parents wouldn’t bother me and I could sleep late in the morning.
I liked songs that had meaning. Rock and roll is the freedom to express your feelings very loudly. And that is what I lean towards. Bob Dylan. “Like a Rolling Stone” is a much deeper and a stronger sentiment. On guitar I would learn how to play Dylan songs. That was what I wanted to sing. I didn’t want to be anything. I was playing guitar and taking pictures for fun.
Neil Sedaka: With the death of Kennedy it was a shock and a big change. We recognized our mortality. The civil rights movement was playing out.
Stevie Nicks: I had a song I wrote about the Kennedys—[the song is about] a dream, I’m putting on my makeup and someone knocks on the door and says, “They’re ready for you,” and a man takes my arm, and it is Martin Luther King, and the Kennedys are all there and one says, “There’s a piano.”
When he was assassinated, I was playing music. I was listening to the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” I was very taken with that particular song; it was different from anything I’d heard—folkie and rock-and-roll.
I got a truckload of singles—lot of country, lot of Everly Brothers. At the end of that year I all of a sudden find myself flipping to R&B. We’re driving along, I’m in the backseat, and I’m singing along to “Be My Baby” [by the Ronettes], a Phil Spector thing. My mom and dad said, “Where did you get this love of R&B?” ’Cause my grandfather was a country singer on the road. When I gave him an album [later], I saw a flash of jealousy in his eyes—we knew I was going to make it.
Robert Christgau: Supposedly it was teenagers listening, but I was not a teenager and neither was John Lennon. The Beatles didn’t change this [music] and neither did Bob Dylan. This shit was happening without them. What were the Beatles showing us or getting ready to show us? The British invasion was about the Beatles and the Stones and a lot of other people going back to American music that had been forgotten or dismissed. The songs I’m talking about are mostly from African Americans.