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Counterculture: The Classical View
Counterculture: The Classical View Sheila Whiteley, University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK; Bader International Study Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada; and Hailsham, Sussex, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is a revision of the previous edition article by B.M. Berger, volume 4, pp. 2862–2864, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract Counterculture is a sociopolitical term indicating a point of dissent between dominant or mainstream ideologies and alternative value systems, so creating a collective voice that can be considered a significant minority. This article explores the origins of the 1960s, counterculture in the 1950s Beats, and the emergence of youth cultures. With music recognized as integral to hippie culture, protest, and environmentalism, attention is focused on key artists, global communication, and festivals. Liminal aspects of the counterculture are examined, and the continuing relevance of the term as symbolizing the hegemonic struggles that continue to inform everyday life in societies and cultures worldwide.
While the origins of the term ‘counterculture’ are unclear, as a key sociopolitical term it is generally accepted as indicating a point of dissent between dominant or mainstream ideologies and alternative value systems that are voiced through, for example, music, art, writing, protest, and lifestyles, so creating a collective voice that can be considered a significant minority. With its origins in the 1950s Beats, the term became an integrative label in the 1960s, where it was interpreted by theorists such as Nuttall (1970), Roszak (1970), and Marcuse (2002) as a ‘youth’ culture.
Beats The Beats of the 1940s and 1950s are identified as “the catalysts who precipitated the more widespread social rebellion of the sixties and seventies . kindred spirits determined to practice absolute personal freedom within a society governed by stifling conservative attitudes” (Morgan, 2010: p. 247). Originating in postwar Paris and influenced by the existentionalist values of Jean-Paul Sartre, nihilism, and the futility of action, they were also attracted to Eastern mysticism, poetry, jazz, drugs (marijuana), and literature. In the United States, the influence of Jack Kerouac, dubbed by Turner as “the James Dean of the typewriter” (1996: p. 13) “permeated and shaped an emerging youth culture, not least the themes of its rock culture (from the Beatles, Dylan and the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, to David Bowie, Tom Waits and Patti Smith in the 1970s).” The legacy of Kerouac’s “key works – from On the Road (1957) to the Dharma Bums (1958), Lonesome Traveller (1960) to Desolation Angels (1965) – are transience, impermanence and the prospect of fresh excitements.” and his theme of “the road is sustained in the machismo legend that surrounds rock as a live medium” (Warner, 2013: p. 30) and the associations of Route 66. Beat poet Allan Ginsberg’s legacy lies in his reputation as a campaigner for homosexuality and a libertine whose “signature poem ‘Howl!’ has been recognized both as ‘a premature gay cri de coeur’ and as a precursor to the 1960s sexual revolution” (Warner, 2013: p. 32). As Warner writes: There are various other Beat threads, too, that would feed into the history that follows – from the Buddhist affiliations of Kerouac,
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Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; interests in the ecology exemplified by Snyder and Michael McClure; the DIY enterprise of publishers of books and journals, characterized most prominently by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights, but also in the many poetry magazines produced by Leroi Jones, Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima and others, representing entrepreneurial action outside the commercial mainstream; and the black radicalism of Leroi Jones, assuming the name Amiri Barak in 1965, and essentially abandoning his Beat associations for the African-American struggle. (Warner, 2013: p. 33)
In the United Kingdom, the propeace, antiwar refrains of American Beat style resonated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which was led by philosopher Bertrand Russell, Canon John Collins, the Labor Party’s Michael Foot, novelist J.B. Priestly, and emerging musicians, artists, writers, and poets. Jazz trumpeter and writer Jeff Nuttall provides a perceptive reflection on the CND campaign and the rise of the UK underground (a term used in harness with counterculture) in his book, Bomb Culture (1970). The dialogue between Beat and Counterculture is associated with “Bob Dylan’s meeting with Allen Ginsberg at the close of 1963” (Wilentz, 2010: p. 69) and was ‘followed by the singer’s first meeting with the Beatles in the summer of 1964.’ Dylan then brought Ginsberg and the Beatles together in May 1965, “inviting them all to join him in his hotel suite after an Albert Hall gig in London” (Miles, 1990: pp. 369–370). “Thus, within a year and a half, the leading players in an increasingly influential generation of popular musicians would cross existing artistic boundaries to make positive contact with the most dynamic and high profile member of the Beat fraternity” (Warner, 2013: p. 238).
The Emergence of Youth Cultures Of equal importance to the rise of the counterculture was the identification of the teenager as a precursor to 1960s youth culture. This previously unnamed stage (postchildhood, preadolescent), identified and discussed by sociologists and newspapers alike, was triggered by a new emphasis on attitude – attributable in part to the 1950s advent of rock ‘n’ roll, coffee bars, the jukebox, and such role models as Elvis Presley and
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Counterculture: The Classical View
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Buddy Holly, and American movies cultivating images of adolescent life from Rebel Without A Cause (1955) to Rock Around The Clock (1956). Between 1946 and 1951, a record 22 million babies were born in the United States, giving rise to the phrase baby boomers. Born into an affluent economy, and a growing media technology, they were to be an important part of the emergent youth culture of the 1960s. The United Kingdom, in the 1950s and 1960s was a society in transition and the emerging teenage culture was, in part, a response to this situation. While there was less spending power for British teenagers than their US counterparts, both experienced an overall rise in the standard of living, which was accompanied by a trend toward personal consumption – fashion, records and record players, cinema and other entertainment, including coffee bar culture. What is significant, in this context, are the specifics of consumption, not least lifestyle and leisure, and by the mid-1960s it seemed that the paralyzing grayness that had characterized British society during the postwar period was replaced, almost overnight, by Carnaby Street color, an underground youth culture, and the Beatles. The identification of underground/counterculture with British youth rests more on cultural politics – arts labs, local underground magazines, legalize pot rallies, free pop concerts, and psychedelic ‘head’ shops. UFO was headlined as London’s answer to Haight Ashbury; the Electric Garden, later renamed Middle Earth, opened in Covent Garden. While there were student protests against the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square (1968) at which Mick Jagger was present, and which led to his personal response in ‘Street Fighting Man,’ sit-ins at various art colleges, and a continuing protest against war (CND, and such slogans as ‘Make Love Not War’), as my colleague, historian Steven Fielding observes, despite the visibility of Tariq Ali and the VSC, the motives of most student protesters were closer to the Beatles sentiments than those of Mick Jagger. Their 1968 song, ‘Revolution’ spelt it out: ‘we all want to change the world. But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out’.
atomic bomb were disturbing facets of a recent past, while the Cold War and the escalating conflict in Vietnam served as current reminders of the highly pathological aspects of the technocratic society (see Bennett, 2005). The 1960s counterculture has been identified as a generational youth culture that challenged both the potential disasters inherent in an advancing technology and the traditional concepts of career, education, and morality; and a cultural phenomenon with the potential to create a new cultural sphere beyond and ideologically separated from the parent culture. Evidenced in the United States both in New Left Politics (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Hippies, there is the suggestion of an initial duality – with the former embracing political activism and a concern for health, education, and the environment, and the latter a more bohemian lifestyle and cultural politics. In October 1967, while “flower power wilted, a new movement was born. This was the Youth International Party (Yippies). It was not to hit the headlines until August 1968” (Neville, 1971: p. 30) when their revolutionary strategy moved toward an attack on the establishment through aesthetic politics – mocking militarism, exorcising the Pentagon, throwing money on to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and nominating a pig for President. “At a deeper level both extremes were united in their attack on the traditional institutions that reproduce dominant cultural– ideological relations – the family, education, media, marriage and the sexual division of labor. There was a shared emphasis on the freedom to question and experiment, a commitment to personal action, and an intensive examination of the self” (Whiteley, 1992: p. 83) whether pathologically invasive or creatively expressive. As Roszak wrote at the time: “Beat-hip bohemianism may be too withdrawn from social action to suit New Left Radicalism; but the withdrawal is a direction the activist can readily understand. We see the underlying unity of the countercultural variety, then, if we see beat-hip bohemianism as an effort to work out the personality and total life style that follow from New Left social criticism” (1970: p. 66).
1960s Counterculture
Hippies
Roszak identified “the young (qualified as perhaps only a minority of the university campus population) who find themselves cast as the only effective radical opposition within their societies” (1970: p. 2). He described them as ‘technocracy’s children’ – disaffected middle-class youth who wished to break away from the bourgeois and technocratic world of their parents, and the increasing reliance upon technology and rational-scientific reasoning.
The hippies were a significant aspect of the counterculture and were initially centered on San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district, representing a style of cultural politics and ostensibly rejecting mainstream society. Not least they advocated nonviolence and peace, promoting instead openness and tolerance, seeking spiritual guidance from sources outside the JudeoChristian tradition, particularly Eastern religions, as well as astrology. Their promotion of recreational drugs, such as marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was justified as a means of attaining an expanded consciousness. The novelist Ken Kesey was one of the best-known literary spokesmen for the movement, and became famous for the bus tours he made with the so-called Merry Pranksters and his advocacy of LSD. Wolfe (1968) documented the travels of Ken Kesey and his ‘Merry Pranksters’ during the mid-1960s. Similarly, Thompson’s (1993) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also pays due homage to the countercultural legacy and its vision of a new world. Folk and rock music were an integral part of hippie culture. In a period of heightened social, political, and psychological
By way of a dialectic Marx could never have imagined, technocratic America produces a potentially revolutionary element among its own youth. The bourgeoisie, instead of discovering the class enemy in its factories, finds it across the breakfast table in the person of its own pampered children. (1969: p. 34)
Nuttall (1970) also draws attention to the escalating Cold War and the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust. As Bennett notes, ‘During the late 1960s, the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the horrific realization of the destructive power of the
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Counterculture: The Classical View
awareness, and rapidly increasing global communications technologies, popular music was recognized as a social force, which expressed issues of cultural and political significance across a wide geographic area. As Jeff Nuttall observed, two of the aims of the Underground were “to release forces into the prevailing culture that would dislocate society, untie its stabilizing knots of morality, punctuality, servility and property; and [to] expand the range of human consciousness outside the continuing and ultimately soul-destroying boundaries of the political utilitarian frame of reference” (1970: p. 249), a philosophy which resonated with the identification of rock as a political weapon. In this respect, John Lennon’s ‘All You Need is Love’ is significant as the world’s first live global television linkup. Composed as a ‘sing along’ for the international television program, ‘Our World,’ the program was broadcast via satellite on 25 June 1967, and was viewed by an estimated 400 million people in 26 countries throughout the world. As a collective experience, rock appeared to provide the means whereby young people could explore “the politics of consciousness, love, loneliness, depersonalization the search for the truth of the person, and the attempt to set up an alternative life style” (Roszak, 1970: p. 156). Richard Neville comments, “From Berlin to Berkeley, from Zurich to Notting Hill, Movement members exchange a gut solidarity, sharing common inspirations, strategy, style, mood and vocabulary. Long hair is their declaration of independence, pop music their Esperanto and they puff pot in their peace pipe” (1971: p. 14). It is also relevant to note that the distinction between music for living by, and music for leisure was of fundamental importance to the counterculture, highlighting the ways in which music and sociocultural politics could fuse into a collective experience. As such, the impact of noise (inharmonious sound, distortion, dissonance, and the connotations surrounding discord itself) can be interpreted as underpinning a revolutionary agenda suggestive of a state of creative anarchy (to an extent, this can be traced back to the romantic anarchism of the Beats), which is arguably distinct from the more soft-focus connotations of ‘All You Need is Love’ (The Beatles, 1968) and the pacifist agenda implicit in such slogans as ‘Make Love Not War.’ Although it is recognized that the fight against middle-class prurience led increasingly toward an explicit identification of sexual freedom with total freedom which, at its extreme, embraced pornography, including the so-termed velvet underground advertisements for blue moves and classified ads, and play power’s “Female Fuckability Test” (Neville, 1971: p. 14). As such, while love was fundamental to the philosophy of the counterculture, there was nevertheless a marked difference between the transcendental spirituality promised to followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the revolutionary liberation of the Yippie Party’s Jerry Rubin and his symbolic call for patricide. If, however, Roszak is correct in identifying “beat-hip bohemianism as an effort to work out the personality and total life style that follow from New Left social criticism” (1970: p. 66), then a movement toward a communality based on love could appear a logical development. Discord and the darker extremes of ‘noise’ thus come into focus as the first stage in the countercultural agenda of establishing a relevant and alternative lifestyle. An extreme example comes from the MC5, Detroit’s leading underground band, who performed at revolutionary rallies against a political backdrop of racial inequality and
suppression, most notably the 1967 riots when confrontations with the US national guard and US army troops resulted in 43 deaths and over 7000 arrests. Managed by John Sinclair, ‘Minister of Information’ for the White Panthers, the band’s second single, ‘Looking at You’ was supposedly recorded in downtown Detroit “sometime circa the 1967 riots, feeding the myth that the band were a group of ‘rock and roll guerrillas’ who both fomented and embodied disorder with their rousing performances” (Waksman, 1998: p. 47) and feedback-laden sound. Further violence against protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was highlighted by MC5s revolutionary rallying cry, ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers.’ As Jim Deregotis writes, “Strange as it seems in retrospect, the music industry thought revolution might be the next big marketing concept circa the late ’60s, and MC5 were signed to Elektra (along with their younger ‘baby brother’ band, the Stooges) by Danny Field (A&R) who later managed The Ramones.” Jim Deregotis, The ‘MC5 Classic still has plenty of kick to it,’ Great Albums: The MC5, Kick Out the Jams’ 11 August 2002 http://www.jimdero.com/News2001/GreatAug4MC5.htm http:// www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/kick-out-the-jams19690405 accessed 14.04.11. The Beatles also offered a vision of chaos in the Coda to ‘A Day In the Life’ (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967) where a spiraling ascent of sound challenges “the warm combination of acoustic guitar and piano” (Hannan, 2008: p. 59) that introduces the song, the complacency inherent in contemporary society (‘A crowd of stood and stared.,’ ‘a crowd of people turned away’). The dramatic effect of the indeterminate textures of the ascending orchestral clusters is contextually anarchic in its intrusion into the passacaglia-like countermelody of the first two verses, albeit that Lennon’s lyrical vocal “features an unusually expressive use of nonharmonic tones, notably the leaps to dissonant notes in the latter part of the first and fourth bars (‘I read the news to-day/ohboy-/a-about a luck-y man who/made the grade’), so hinting at an underlying disillusionment” (O’Grady, 1983: p. 137). McCartney’s second section is more frantic in its delivery, coming to an abrupt and fuzzy conclusion at the words “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” the vocal line becoming obscured by the progressively louder orchestral unisons on the root of each chord, before a two-bar unison brass motif plunges the key down a minor third for the return of the first section. This time, the bass leads to the intense orchestral build up before the shifting timbres of the final sustained piano chord and its 30-s decay lead finally into “a noisy 15 kHz tone leads to a 2-s piece of gibberish which was cut into the run-out groove of the L.P” (Hannan, 2008: p. 61), so casting doubt as to whether the song’s powerful imagery and disruptive musical aesthetics would inspire listeners to wake up and question (as suggested by the ringing alarm clock that heralds McCartney’s middle section and the crowing cock in ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ or whether it would be interpreted as yet another example of the Beatles’ love of the “slicks and tricks of production” (Goldstein, 1967: p. 173). Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc note that psychedelic rock has used alarm clocks, chimes, bells, the effects of clocks ticking, and other effects to signal psychedelic awakening. “Within and without: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Psychedelic Insight” in Julien (2008: p. 111). It is also reported that
Counterculture: The Classical View
McCartney’s interest in the avant-garde, and his admiration for Stockhausen, led to the inclusion of an “instrumental passage. [with] a spiraling ascent of sound. [starting] the passage with all instruments on their lowest note and climbing to the highest in their own time” (Martin and Pearson, 1994: p. 56). (see Whiteley, 2013: for a full discussion of the Beatles and ‘A Day in the Life’ and the MC5 and ‘Kick Out the Jams.’) It is also suggested that songs associated with the counterculture – “through their musical style, their mode of performance, use and interpretation – point towards particular historical moments, knots of collective experience, cultural traditions and so forth. At this level – the level of styleindicators and cultural codes – music can be taken to represent to us the features of a specific conjuncture (neoGramscianism), structure of feeling (Raymond Williams), or chronotope (Bakhtin)” (Middleton, 2000: p. 231) and in previous work (Whiteley, 1992) it was suggested that “drugrelated experience works through anaphonic musical signs (i.e., signs that work through structural analogy with non-musical experiences of time, space, movement etc), culturally mediated semiotic coding musical features that work through comparison with other, familiar effects in different styles; intracultural interpretation (what countercultural listeners said, cultural resonance (analogy between aspects of the music and of the cultural context); technological innovation” (Middleton, 2000: p. 231). While examples can be drawn from, for example, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Doors and the Rolling Stones, its most striking focus can be found in the musical and performing body of Jimi Hendrix, where there are intersecting discourses not only of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘psychedelia,’ but also of race, gender, and sexuality. Significant examples would include ‘Purple Haze,’ ‘Love or Confusion,’ ‘Are You Experienced,’ and ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ (Whiteley, 2000: pp. 235–261). The hippie’s identification with the metaphysical is explored in Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (The Beatles, Revolver, 1966), which set the agenda for psychedelic music in its evocation of the Vedic teaching ‘Be Here Now’ – living in the present but conscious of both past and future. Rather than the more usual, extravagant colors of psychedelia, the colliding musical circles are introspective, a sensory experience of Timothy Leary’s voluntary ego-death. Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (Leary et al., 1964) is a paraphrase of The Tibetan Book of the Dead which had influenced Lennon’s personal experience of LSD and his composition, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ This is achieved by looped effects which constantly move to the ‘eternal’ presence of the tonic (an orchestral chord on Bb major; a Mellotron played on flute setting; another Mellotron oscillating in 6/8 over the 4/4 pulse of the melody line, moving from Bb (the flattened 7th) to C (the tonic on its string setting), so suggesting a musical metaphor for the tug between the conscious/unconscious of psychedelic experience (Whiteley, 2002: p. 219). George Harrison’s ‘Within You Without You’ (Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, 1967) also reflects his search for Eastern mysticism. As George Martin reports, “What appealed to George was the sound – the unique sound the instruments made when used in this very ancient (Indian classical) tradition” (Martin and Pearson, 1994: p. 126). Encapsulated by an endless drone and metric shift between fours, fives, and threes, “the vocal line is doubled by
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two dilrubas (the dilruba is a bowed lute with a buzzy, nasal, hollow-sounding timbre) and, at certain points, by a (Western) string ensemble (eight violins and three cellos) and, at other points, sitar”. “Harrison’s vocal sound is mantra-like, sitting in the back of the mix, dominated by the elaborate tabla playing” (Hannan, 2008: pp. 54–55). While the search for expanded consciousness through both hallucinogenic drugs and the metaphysical of Eastern religions were important aspects of music associated with the hippie counterculture, “the lyrical content of popular music also took on increasingly radical dimensions as the 1960s progressed. Songwriters and lyricists saw it as their artistic responsibility to respond directly to current social and political issues which, during the mid-1960s, were becoming increasingly more turbulent” (Bennett, 2004: p. xv). These included protests against the war in Vietnam, including The Doors ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ where the promotional film showed singer Jim Morrison being blindfolded and shot, a scene intended to parody the ‘summary executions of untried opponents’ featured in US media reports about the Vietnam War (Snowman, 1984: p. 163). The anti-Vietnam War protest was supported by many musicians including John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, who staged a 10-day bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada, in the cause of world peace. ‘Give Peace A Chance’ was written by Lennon, and recorded live in two sessions in the hotel bedroom.
Festivals Festivals were an important medium for spreading countercultural ideology. The open-air ‘Be-In,’ Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, which attracted 20 000 people and featured such pioneering acid-rock groups as Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Steve Miller Band, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful dead. “An overawed Time Magazine recorded, ‘The huge crowd was peaceful . an amazing tribute to Haight-Ashbury.’ More accurately it was a tribute to LSD and marijuana, which had been distributed by a dazed Santa Claus” (Neville, 1971: p. 28). The scale and coverage of the Monterey Festival of June 1967 made it an event of supreme importance to the rock world. American acts on the bill included the Byrds, the Paul Butterfield Band, the Grateful Dead, the Blues Project, the Mothers of Invention, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Doors. Woodstock is recognized as the most important festival of the period, attracting between 400 000 and 500 000 people. It is remembered both for its ‘bringing together’ of the countercultural generation and its music, which was both politically subversive while acting as a springboard for the more commercial rock and pop events that followed. Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag” was a direct criticism of the Vietnam War and its sing-along chorus was made world-famous through its inclusion in Michael Wadleigh’s film Woodstock (Three Days of Peace and Love) (1970). Joni Mitchells ‘Woodstock,’ dedicated to the Woodstock festival, contains a reference to bombers turning into Butterflies, the bombers in question being those attacking North Vietnamese targets (Bennett, 2004: p. xvi). It was, however, Hendrix’s performance of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’
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that provides the most compelling example of rock as a political weapon. Even though the words are not sung, they were familiar to his audience, and the feedback and sustain provide a commentary on the flag itself as, at the words, ‘broad stripes and bright stars,’ the sounds plummet and waiver. The attack comes at the evocative ‘rocket’s red glare’ where Hendrix creates the sound of a fighter plane “coming out of a deep dive, the impact of bombs striking the earth and the cries of the Cambodian peasants” (Henderson, 1990: p. 245). The straight melody finally comes through on ‘gave proof through the night’ and the anthem ends to the sounds of feedback and sustain and a final ear-shattering grind as the guitar strings are treated to a crude bottleneck slide against the mike stand (Whiteley, 2004: p. 25). As Charles Shaar-Murray writes: “the ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive almost white audience wallowing in a paddy field of its own making; the clear, pure, trumpetlike sounds of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through clouds of tear-gas, the explosions of cluster-bombs, the screams of the dying, the crackle of flames, the heavy palls of smoke stinking with human grease, the hovering chatter of helicopters” (1989: p. 24) (see Whiteley, 2004: pp. 18–28). Jimi Hendrix, together with Richie Haven and Sly Stone were the only Afro-American artists to appear at the Woodstock, which has been identified as both the “defining moment of the late 1960s and the swansong of the countercultural movement that characterized the era” (Bennett, 2004: p. xviii). If Woodstock is largely described as utopian, then the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont heralded the end of the Age of Aquarius. It also raises the question “of the relationship between performer/audience, the performance, and the musical text itself; that the unmitigated violence at Altamont suggests that for many the songs were interpreted as inciting brutality, that they provided a model for behavioral patterns” (Whiteley, 1997: pp. 84–85). While most agree that the reason for the violence at Altamont – which began well before the Stones took the stage – had more to do with the hiring of Hells Angels as security, few would argue that the menacing subject matter and sound of songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Midnight Rambler’ would “hardly calm the already explosive atmosphere” (1997: p. 84). The Maysles Brothers film of the concert, Gimme Shelter (1971) provides a disturbing insight into those attending Altamont: one murdered, total dead four, two run over, one drowned in a drainage ditch, hundreds injured, and countless more stoned on acid. Altamont was only one of a series of crisis, which signaled the end of the 1960s counterculture. The association of LSD with Satanism which had resulted in the murders of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by members of the Manson ‘family’ led to a panic reaction to the adverse effects of drugs. Publicity surrounding the death of famous rock stars also led to highly volatile criticisms of the counterculture and in particular the concept of creativity through drug experience. In September 1970, Hendrix had been found dead from inhalation of vomit following barbiturate intoxication. On 4 October of the same year, Janis Joplin died from a heroin overdose. In 1971, Jim Morrison died of a heart attack caused by heroin or alcohol in Paris. Personal survival seemed paramount and the US broadcast license authorities warned radio stations that they would be subverting the government’s
campaign against drug abuse if they played lyrics, which mentioned dope. Finally, the shooting of four students at Kent State University tragically proved how deep was the gulf between those who wanted to change America and its policies in Vietnam, and the conservative majority who believed in law and order above everything else.
Countercultures: The Broader Picture While academic attention has been focused largely on the United States and the United Kingdom, the hippie movement quickly established a presence throughout the Western World, with countercultural movements emerging in, for example, Christiania (Denmark) (see Hall, 2014), Naples (Italy) (see Vacca, 2013: pp. 67–84), East and West Berlin (Germany) (see Stahl, 2014), and in some areas of South America, Asia, and the former Soviet bloc. In Paris, university students and workers joined forces to protest about workers’ right and the conditions in factories, while across Europe students occupied universities and demonstrated for better facilities. Although activists received considerable attention, as Joel Fort observed, “they probably number no more than tens of thousands in such groups as the Students for a Democratic Society, antiwar and antidraft groups, student power advocates and some elements of the hippies and yippies. There are the equally radical groups of special minorities, namely the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and others seeking power, dignity and sometimes justice for racial and cultural minorities” (1969: p. 210). In the United States, attention focused on Civil Rights. “In October 1966 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNC) was established to enable students to become organized in the battle for civil rights. However, neither the SNCC nor President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill, passed in 1964, served to alleviate the abject poverty and total political impotence of African Americans. Increasing racial discrimination and harassment across the US led to inner-city riots.[as] Civil rights organizations were superseded by the Black Power movement under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael” (Bennett, 2004: p. xvii). Civil Rights activist, Martin Luther King was best known for his advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience and his stirring speech ‘I have a dream.’ He was assassinated on 4 April 1968. Malcolm X, the human rights activist was assassinated on 21 April 1965. His father had earlier been murdered by the Klu Klux Klan. Black artists associated with the Black Power movement included James Brown, ‘Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ and Aretha Franklin, ‘Respect.’ It is also interesting to note the emergence of the so-called Jesus hippies, commonly dubbed ‘Jesus freaks.’ Questioning “the authority of the church and reinstating biblical authority, most commonly apocalyptic, they simultaneously retained what was widely considered a countercultural aesthetic, often sporting the hippie image while using popular music for Christian proselytizing.” As Young observes, “Barry McGuire’s classic ‘Eve of Destruction’ (1965) gained notoriety within the context of radicals, revolutionaries, and those who were convinced the world was on the brink of either cosmic or physical annihilation. Along with Bob Dylan, McGuire’s conversion to Christianity gave credibility to the rising Jesus-freak revolution. As celebrities such as Johnny Cash and Eric Clapton converted, revivalistic
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Christianity found entry into the entertainment industry, launching a groundswell of activity . Fleetwood Mac’s Jeremy Spencer joined the rigid and controversial commune the Children of God, a notable doomsday group. Secular rock groups also explored religious themes, adding to the already enigmatic culture of Christian hippies. These included The Byrds’ version of ‘Jesus is Just Alright’ (1969), Ocean’s ‘Put Your Hand in the Hand’ (1970), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ (1969), and Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit In The Sky’ (1969) (see Young, 2013: pp. 51–67). Despite the breadth of the countercultural movement, research suggests that women were largely marginalized. As Roszak observed, the struggle for liberation was seen mainly “as the province of men who must prove themselves by ‘laying their balls on the line’. Too often this suggests that the female of the species must content herself with keeping the home fires burning for her battle-scarred champion or joining the struggle as a camp follower. In either case, the community is saved for her, not by her” (1970: footnote to p. 65). Despite the emergence of the so-termed women’s liberation movement and the questioning of power relations in personal life (in reproduction, sexual relationships, the household division of labor, popular culture, why certain ethnic minorities and working class women were marginalized in their access to the production and consumption of knowledge and culture, and why women generally were not represented within the hierarchies of science and arts) the counterculture remained male-dominated. The breaking down of old-restraints (‘free love’) privileged a male sexuality, confirming the traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity under the dubious banner of progressiveness, and in the field of music there was little real opportunity to either take control or enjoy the prestige offered to male artists. Apart from the biting social and political commentaries from such performers as Joan Baez and Buffy St Marie and the significance of such frontline artists as Mama Cass (The Mamas and the Papas), Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane), and Janis Joplin (albeit at a cost, with Joplin dying in 1970 and Cass Elliott in 1974) the musical ethos of the period undermined the role of women, positioning them as desexualized earth mothers, fantasy figures, and easy lays. (Whiteley, 2000: pp. 1–94) It is thus suggested that while there were highly political elements within the counterculture, the movement was not uniformly politicized in a way that dictated that the only way forward was to overthrow the capitalist system by whatever means. Feminist academics identified patriarchy as the major obstacle in achieving personal freedom, and attitudes toward gay and lesbian artists remained problematic, despite the United Kingdom’s Homosexual Reform Bill (1967), the promotion of camp taste and drag culture at Andy Warhol’s New York Factory, and the Velvet Underground’s uncompromising insights into urban culture, sexuality and voyeurism in the Velvet Underground and Nico. Warhol’s Factory also provided a refuge for drag queens who are celebrated in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), thus providing a crucial link with the 27 June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, and the subsequent riots that were the flashpoint of the American gay liberation movement of the 1970s. In retrospect, it is apparent that the 1960s counterculture incorporated diverse groupings, including student protest,
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peace and antiwar movements, the civil rights movement, environmentalists, the utopian, dystopian, apocalyptic, and freaks these are discussed in Whiteley and Sklowers edited text on Countercultures and Popular Music (2013), and could also “manifest itself differently at specific times and within specific places depending on local socio-economic, cultural and demographic circumstances” (Bennett, 2013: pp. 19–31). More recently, the term counterculture has come to symbolize ‘forms of social action and/or alternative lifestyles and belief that appear – or can be made to appear – to link with the aesthetic, political and cultural trends associated with the late 1960s manifestation of counterculture’, so providing a socioculturalpolitical analogy for the ‘hegemonic struggles that continue to inform everyday life in myriad societies and cultures across the globe’ (Bennett, 2013).
See also: Civil Rights Movements; Counterculture: 1960s and Beyond; Culture, Sociology of; Ecofeminism; Feminist Political Theory and Political Science; Gay and Lesbian Movements; Identity Movements; Minorities; Movements, Social; Political Protest and Civil Disobedience; Religion and Youth; Social Protest; Subculture, Sociology of; Urban Sociology; Youth Culture, Anthropology of; Youth Culture, Sociology of; Youth Movements; Youth, Music, and Peace Building.
Bibliography Arnold, G., 2014. Contradictory cultural rhetoric in ‘Woodstock’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’. In: Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), Countercultures and Popular Music. Ashgate, Aldershot. Bartkowiak, M.J., 2009. The MC5 and Social Change: A Study of Rock and Revolution. McFarland, Jefferson, NC. Bennett, A. (Ed.), 2004. Remembering Woodstock. Ashgate, Aldershot. Bennett, A., 2005. Culture and Everyday Life. Sage, London. Bennett, A., 2013. Reappraising countercultures. In: Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), Countercultures and Popular Music. Ashgate, Aldershot. Deregotis, J., 11 August 2002. The ‘MC5 Classic Still Has Plenty of Kick to It, Great Albums: The MC5, Kick Out the Jams’. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/ albumreviews/kick-out-the-jams-19690405 (accessed 04.04.11.). Fort, J., 1969. The Pleasure Seekers: The Drug Crisis, Youth and Society. Grove Press, New York. Ginsberg, A., 1956. Howl and Other Poems. City Lights, San Francisco, CA. Goldstein, R., 1967. I blew my cool through the New York times. New Times and the Village Voice, 173. Hall, S., Jefferson, T. (Eds.), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in PostWar Britain. Hutchinson, London. Hannan, M., 2008. The sound design of sgt. pepper’s lonely heart’s club band’. In: Julien, O. (Ed.), Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 45–62. Henderson, D., 1990. The Life of Jimi Hendrix: ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, rev ed. Omnibus Press, London. Hicks, B., 1970[1996]. Jimi Hendrix: a memorial (northwest passage, 29th September 1970). In: Potash, C. (Ed.), The Jimi Hendrix Companion: Three Decades of Commentary. Schirmer, Schirmer, New York, pp. 207–210. Julien, O. (Ed.), 2008. Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today. Ashgate, Aldershot. Kerouac, J., 1972a. On the Road. Penguin, London (Original published 1957). Kerouac, J., 1972b. Desolation Angels. Panther, London (Original published 1965). Kerouac, J., 2007a. The Dharma Bums. Penguin, London (Original published 1958). Kerouac, J., 2007b. Lonesome Traveller. Penguin, London (Original published 1965). Kesey, K., 1973. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Picador, London (Original published 1962).
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Leary, T., Metzner, R., Alpert, R., 1964. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’. University Books, New Hyde Park, New York. Marcus, G., 1991. Lester Bang, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung. Literature as Rock ‘n’ Roll, Rock ‘n’ Roll as Literature. Minerva, London. Marcuse, H., 2002. One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Routledge, London and New York (Original published 1964). Marx, K., 1969. Theories of Surplus Value. Lawrence & Wishart, London. Martin, G., Pearson, W., 1994. Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper. McMillan, London. Middleton, R. (Ed.), 2000. Reading Pop. Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Miles, B., 1990. Ginsberg: A Biography. Viking, London. Morgan, B., 2010. The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. New York Free Press, New York. Neville, R., 1971. Play Power. Paladin, London. Nuttall, J., 1970. Bomb Culture. Paladin, London (Original published 1968). Olivier, J. (Ed.), 2010. Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today. Ashgate, Aldershot. O’Grady, T.J., 1983. The Beatles: A Musical Evolution. Twayne Publishers, Boston. Potash, C. (Ed.), 1996. The Jimi Hendrix Companion: Three Decades of Commentary. Schirmer Books, New York. Reising, R. (Ed.), 2002. ‘Every Sound There Is’: The Beatles Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll. Ashgate, Aldershot. Reising, R., LeBlanc, J., 2010. Within and without: sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts club band and psychedelic insight. In: Olivier, J. (Ed.), Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 103–120. Roszak, T., 1970. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocrati Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Faber and Faber, London. Shaar-Murray, C., 1989. Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop. Faber and Faber, London. Snowman, D., 1984. America Since 1920. Heinemann, London. Stahl, H., 2014. Auditory traces of subcultural practices in 1960s Berlin. A bordercrossing soundscape of pop. In: Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), Counterculture and Popular Music. Ashgate, Aldershot. Thompson, H.S., 1971. Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles. Random House, New York. Thorbjorg, D.H., 2013. Countercultural space does not persist: Christiania and the role of music. In: Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), Counterculture and Popular Music. Ashgate, Aldershot. Turner, S., 1996. Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster. Bloomsbury, London. Vacca, G., 2013. Music and countercultures in Italy: the Neopolitan Scene. In: Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), Counterculture and Popular Music. Ashgate, Aldershot. Waksman, S., 1998. Kick out the jams! The MC5 and the politics of noise. In: Swiss, T., Sloop, J., Herman, A. (Eds.), Mapping the Beat. Popular Music and Contemporary Theory. Blackwell Publishers Inc., Malden MA, pp. 47–76. Warner, S., 2013. Text and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll. The Beats and Rock Culture. Bloomsbury, New York. Whiteley, S., 1992. The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Countercultue. Routledge, London. Whiteley, 1997. Little red rooster v. the Honky TonkWoman. Mick Jagger, sexuality, style and image. In: Whiteley, S. (Ed.), Sexing the Groove. Popular Music and Gender. Routledge, London, pp. 67–99. Whiteley, S., 2000. Progressive rock and psychedelic coding the work of Jimi Hendrix. In: Middleton, R. (Ed.), Reading Pop. Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 235–261.
Whiteley, S., 2002. Love is all and love is everyone: a discussion of four musical portraits’. In: Reising, R. (Ed.), ‘Every Sound There Is’: The Beatles Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 209–221. Whiteley, S., 2004. 1. 2. 3 What are we fighting 4? Music, meaning and the star spangled banner. In: Bennet, A. (Ed.), Remembering Woodstock. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 18–28. Whiteley, S. (Ed.), 2012. Contre-cultures I: Théorie et scènes. Volume ! La revue des musiques populaires, vol. 9. numéro 1. Éditions Mélanie Seteun. www.seteun.net / [email protected]. Whiteley, S. (Ed.), 2013. Contre-cultures II: Utopies, dystopies, anarchie. Volume ! La revue des musiques populaires, vol. 9. numéro 2. Éditions Mélanie Seteun. www. seteun.net / [email protected]. Whiteley, S., 2013. Kick out the jams: creative anarchy and noise in 1960s rock. In: Goddard, M., Halligan, B., Spelman, N. (Eds.), Resonances: Noise and Music (Continuum, 2013). Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), 2013. Counterculture and Popular Music. Ashgate, Aldershot. Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), 2014. Counterculture and Popular Music. Ashgate, Aldershot. Wilentz, S., 2010. Bob Dylan in America. Bodley Head, London. Wolfe, T., 1989. The Electric Coll Aid Acid Test. Black Swan, London (Original published 1968). Womack, K. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Young, S.D., 2013. Apocalyptic music and countercultural Christian influences. In: Whiteley, S., Sklower, J. (Eds.), Contre-cultures: Utopies, Dstopies, Anarchie, Éditions Mélanie Seteun, vol. 9–2, pp. 51–67.
Discography Beatles, All You Need is Love. Barry McGuire’s classic ‘Eve of Destruction’ (1965). Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner. ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Love or Confusion’ ‘Are You Experienced’ and ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ MC5 ‘Looking at You’, ‘Kick Out the Jams’. Tomorrow Never Knows’ (The Beatles, Revolver, 1966). The Byrds’ version of ‘Jesus is Just Alright’ (1969), Ocean’s ‘Put Your Hand in the Hand’ (1970), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ (1969), and Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit In The Sky’ (1969). ‘Within You Without You’ (Sgt Pepper ’s Lonely Heart ’s Club Band 1967) ‘A Day In the Life’ (Sgt. Pepper ’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967).
Filmography Maysles Brothers. Gimme Shelter (1970) Maysles Films (USA). Rebel Without A Cause (1955) to. Rock Around The Clock (1956). Woodstock: Three Days of Music, Peace and Love. A Once-in-a-Lifetime Celebration, 1970. Warner Bros. Inc.: A Warner Communication Company.
Abstract Counterculture is a sociopolitical term indicating a point of dissent between dominant or mainstream ideologies and alternative value systems, so creating a collective voice that can be considered a significant minority. This article explores the origins of the 1960s, counterculture in the 1950s Beats, and the emergence of youth cultures. With music recognized as integral to hippie culture, protest, and environmentalism, attention is focused on key artists, global communication, and festivals. Liminal aspects of the counterculture are examined, and the continuing relevance of the term as symbolizing the hegemonic struggles that continue to inform everyday life in societies and cultures worldwide.
While the origins of the term ‘counterculture’ are unclear, as a key sociopolitical term it is generally accepted as indicating a point of dissent between dominant or mainstream ideologies and alternative value systems that are voiced through, for example, music, art, writing, protest, and lifestyles, so creating a collective voice that can be considered a significant minority. With its origins in the 1950s Beats, the term became an integrative label in the 1960s, where it was interpreted by theorists such as Nuttall (1970), Roszak (1970), and Marcuse (2002) as a ‘youth’ culture.
Beats The Beats of the 1940s and 1950s are identified as “the catalysts who precipitated the more widespread social rebellion of the sixties and seventies . kindred spirits determined to practice absolute personal freedom within a society governed by stifling conservative attitudes” (Morgan, 2010: p. 247). Originating in postwar Paris and influenced by the existentionalist values of Jean-Paul Sartre, nihilism, and the futility of action, they were also attracted to Eastern mysticism, poetry, jazz, drugs (marijuana), and literature. In the United States, the influence of Jack Kerouac, dubbed by Turner as “the James Dean of the typewriter” (1996: p. 13) “permeated and shaped an emerging youth culture, not least the themes of its rock culture (from the Beatles, Dylan and the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, to David Bowie, Tom Waits and Patti Smith in the 1970s).” The legacy of Kerouac’s “key works – from On the Road (1957) to the Dharma Bums (1958), Lonesome Traveller (1960) to Desolation Angels (1965) – are transience, impermanence and the prospect of fresh excitements.” and his theme of “the road is sustained in the machismo legend that surrounds rock as a live medium” (Warner, 2013: p. 30) and the associations of Route 66. Beat poet Allan Ginsberg’s legacy lies in his reputation as a campaigner for homosexuality and a libertine whose “signature poem ‘Howl!’ has been recognized both as ‘a premature gay cri de coeur’ and as a precursor to the 1960s sexual revolution” (Warner, 2013: p. 32). As Warner writes: There are various other Beat threads, too, that would feed into the history that follows – from the Buddhist affiliations of Kerouac,
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Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; interests in the ecology exemplified by Snyder and Michael McClure; the DIY enterprise of publishers of books and journals, characterized most prominently by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights, but also in the many poetry magazines produced by Leroi Jones, Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima and others, representing entrepreneurial action outside the commercial mainstream; and the black radicalism of Leroi Jones, assuming the name Amiri Barak in 1965, and essentially abandoning his Beat associations for the African-American struggle. (Warner, 2013: p. 33)
In the United Kingdom, the propeace, antiwar refrains of American Beat style resonated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which was led by philosopher Bertrand Russell, Canon John Collins, the Labor Party’s Michael Foot, novelist J.B. Priestly, and emerging musicians, artists, writers, and poets. Jazz trumpeter and writer Jeff Nuttall provides a perceptive reflection on the CND campaign and the rise of the UK underground (a term used in harness with counterculture) in his book, Bomb Culture (1970). The dialogue between Beat and Counterculture is associated with “Bob Dylan’s meeting with Allen Ginsberg at the close of 1963” (Wilentz, 2010: p. 69) and was ‘followed by the singer’s first meeting with the Beatles in the summer of 1964.’ Dylan then brought Ginsberg and the Beatles together in May 1965, “inviting them all to join him in his hotel suite after an Albert Hall gig in London” (Miles, 1990: pp. 369–370). “Thus, within a year and a half, the leading players in an increasingly influential generation of popular musicians would cross existing artistic boundaries to make positive contact with the most dynamic and high profile member of the Beat fraternity” (Warner, 2013: p. 238).
The Emergence of Youth Cultures Of equal importance to the rise of the counterculture was the identification of the teenager as a precursor to 1960s youth culture. This previously unnamed stage (postchildhood, preadolescent), identified and discussed by sociologists and newspapers alike, was triggered by a new emphasis on attitude – attributable in part to the 1950s advent of rock ‘n’ roll, coffee bars, the jukebox, and such role models as Elvis Presley and
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Buddy Holly, and American movies cultivating images of adolescent life from Rebel Without A Cause (1955) to Rock Around The Clock (1956). Between 1946 and 1951, a record 22 million babies were born in the United States, giving rise to the phrase baby boomers. Born into an affluent economy, and a growing media technology, they were to be an important part of the emergent youth culture of the 1960s. The United Kingdom, in the 1950s and 1960s was a society in transition and the emerging teenage culture was, in part, a response to this situation. While there was less spending power for British teenagers than their US counterparts, both experienced an overall rise in the standard of living, which was accompanied by a trend toward personal consumption – fashion, records and record players, cinema and other entertainment, including coffee bar culture. What is significant, in this context, are the specifics of consumption, not least lifestyle and leisure, and by the mid-1960s it seemed that the paralyzing grayness that had characterized British society during the postwar period was replaced, almost overnight, by Carnaby Street color, an underground youth culture, and the Beatles. The identification of underground/counterculture with British youth rests more on cultural politics – arts labs, local underground magazines, legalize pot rallies, free pop concerts, and psychedelic ‘head’ shops. UFO was headlined as London’s answer to Haight Ashbury; the Electric Garden, later renamed Middle Earth, opened in Covent Garden. While there were student protests against the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square (1968) at which Mick Jagger was present, and which led to his personal response in ‘Street Fighting Man,’ sit-ins at various art colleges, and a continuing protest against war (CND, and such slogans as ‘Make Love Not War’), as my colleague, historian Steven Fielding observes, despite the visibility of Tariq Ali and the VSC, the motives of most student protesters were closer to the Beatles sentiments than those of Mick Jagger. Their 1968 song, ‘Revolution’ spelt it out: ‘we all want to change the world. But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out’.
atomic bomb were disturbing facets of a recent past, while the Cold War and the escalating conflict in Vietnam served as current reminders of the highly pathological aspects of the technocratic society (see Bennett, 2005). The 1960s counterculture has been identified as a generational youth culture that challenged both the potential disasters inherent in an advancing technology and the traditional concepts of career, education, and morality; and a cultural phenomenon with the potential to create a new cultural sphere beyond and ideologically separated from the parent culture. Evidenced in the United States both in New Left Politics (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Hippies, there is the suggestion of an initial duality – with the former embracing political activism and a concern for health, education, and the environment, and the latter a more bohemian lifestyle and cultural politics. In October 1967, while “flower power wilted, a new movement was born. This was the Youth International Party (Yippies). It was not to hit the headlines until August 1968” (Neville, 1971: p. 30) when their revolutionary strategy moved toward an attack on the establishment through aesthetic politics – mocking militarism, exorcising the Pentagon, throwing money on to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and nominating a pig for President. “At a deeper level both extremes were united in their attack on the traditional institutions that reproduce dominant cultural– ideological relations – the family, education, media, marriage and the sexual division of labor. There was a shared emphasis on the freedom to question and experiment, a commitment to personal action, and an intensive examination of the self” (Whiteley, 1992: p. 83) whether pathologically invasive or creatively expressive. As Roszak wrote at the time: “Beat-hip bohemianism may be too withdrawn from social action to suit New Left Radicalism; but the withdrawal is a direction the activist can readily understand. We see the underlying unity of the countercultural variety, then, if we see beat-hip bohemianism as an effort to work out the personality and total life style that follow from New Left social criticism” (1970: p. 66).
1960s Counterculture
Hippies
Roszak identified “the young (qualified as perhaps only a minority of the university campus population) who find themselves cast as the only effective radical opposition within their societies” (1970: p. 2). He described them as ‘technocracy’s children’ – disaffected middle-class youth who wished to break away from the bourgeois and technocratic world of their parents, and the increasing reliance upon technology and rational-scientific reasoning.
The hippies were a significant aspect of the counterculture and were initially centered on San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district, representing a style of cultural politics and ostensibly rejecting mainstream society. Not least they advocated nonviolence and peace, promoting instead openness and tolerance, seeking spiritual guidance from sources outside the JudeoChristian tradition, particularly Eastern religions, as well as astrology. Their promotion of recreational drugs, such as marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was justified as a means of attaining an expanded consciousness. The novelist Ken Kesey was one of the best-known literary spokesmen for the movement, and became famous for the bus tours he made with the so-called Merry Pranksters and his advocacy of LSD. Wolfe (1968) documented the travels of Ken Kesey and his ‘Merry Pranksters’ during the mid-1960s. Similarly, Thompson’s (1993) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also pays due homage to the countercultural legacy and its vision of a new world. Folk and rock music were an integral part of hippie culture. In a period of heightened social, political, and psychological
By way of a dialectic Marx could never have imagined, technocratic America produces a potentially revolutionary element among its own youth. The bourgeoisie, instead of discovering the class enemy in its factories, finds it across the breakfast table in the person of its own pampered children. (1969: p. 34)
Nuttall (1970) also draws attention to the escalating Cold War and the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust. As Bennett notes, ‘During the late 1960s, the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the horrific realization of the destructive power of the
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awareness, and rapidly increasing global communications technologies, popular music was recognized as a social force, which expressed issues of cultural and political significance across a wide geographic area. As Jeff Nuttall observed, two of the aims of the Underground were “to release forces into the prevailing culture that would dislocate society, untie its stabilizing knots of morality, punctuality, servility and property; and [to] expand the range of human consciousness outside the continuing and ultimately soul-destroying boundaries of the political utilitarian frame of reference” (1970: p. 249), a philosophy which resonated with the identification of rock as a political weapon. In this respect, John Lennon’s ‘All You Need is Love’ is significant as the world’s first live global television linkup. Composed as a ‘sing along’ for the international television program, ‘Our World,’ the program was broadcast via satellite on 25 June 1967, and was viewed by an estimated 400 million people in 26 countries throughout the world. As a collective experience, rock appeared to provide the means whereby young people could explore “the politics of consciousness, love, loneliness, depersonalization the search for the truth of the person, and the attempt to set up an alternative life style” (Roszak, 1970: p. 156). Richard Neville comments, “From Berlin to Berkeley, from Zurich to Notting Hill, Movement members exchange a gut solidarity, sharing common inspirations, strategy, style, mood and vocabulary. Long hair is their declaration of independence, pop music their Esperanto and they puff pot in their peace pipe” (1971: p. 14). It is also relevant to note that the distinction between music for living by, and music for leisure was of fundamental importance to the counterculture, highlighting the ways in which music and sociocultural politics could fuse into a collective experience. As such, the impact of noise (inharmonious sound, distortion, dissonance, and the connotations surrounding discord itself) can be interpreted as underpinning a revolutionary agenda suggestive of a state of creative anarchy (to an extent, this can be traced back to the romantic anarchism of the Beats), which is arguably distinct from the more soft-focus connotations of ‘All You Need is Love’ (The Beatles, 1968) and the pacifist agenda implicit in such slogans as ‘Make Love Not War.’ Although it is recognized that the fight against middle-class prurience led increasingly toward an explicit identification of sexual freedom with total freedom which, at its extreme, embraced pornography, including the so-termed velvet underground advertisements for blue moves and classified ads, and play power’s “Female Fuckability Test” (Neville, 1971: p. 14). As such, while love was fundamental to the philosophy of the counterculture, there was nevertheless a marked difference between the transcendental spirituality promised to followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the revolutionary liberation of the Yippie Party’s Jerry Rubin and his symbolic call for patricide. If, however, Roszak is correct in identifying “beat-hip bohemianism as an effort to work out the personality and total life style that follow from New Left social criticism” (1970: p. 66), then a movement toward a communality based on love could appear a logical development. Discord and the darker extremes of ‘noise’ thus come into focus as the first stage in the countercultural agenda of establishing a relevant and alternative lifestyle. An extreme example comes from the MC5, Detroit’s leading underground band, who performed at revolutionary rallies against a political backdrop of racial inequality and
suppression, most notably the 1967 riots when confrontations with the US national guard and US army troops resulted in 43 deaths and over 7000 arrests. Managed by John Sinclair, ‘Minister of Information’ for the White Panthers, the band’s second single, ‘Looking at You’ was supposedly recorded in downtown Detroit “sometime circa the 1967 riots, feeding the myth that the band were a group of ‘rock and roll guerrillas’ who both fomented and embodied disorder with their rousing performances” (Waksman, 1998: p. 47) and feedback-laden sound. Further violence against protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was highlighted by MC5s revolutionary rallying cry, ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers.’ As Jim Deregotis writes, “Strange as it seems in retrospect, the music industry thought revolution might be the next big marketing concept circa the late ’60s, and MC5 were signed to Elektra (along with their younger ‘baby brother’ band, the Stooges) by Danny Field (A&R) who later managed The Ramones.” Jim Deregotis, The ‘MC5 Classic still has plenty of kick to it,’ Great Albums: The MC5, Kick Out the Jams’ 11 August 2002 http://www.jimdero.com/News2001/GreatAug4MC5.htm http:// www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/kick-out-the-jams19690405 accessed 14.04.11. The Beatles also offered a vision of chaos in the Coda to ‘A Day In the Life’ (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967) where a spiraling ascent of sound challenges “the warm combination of acoustic guitar and piano” (Hannan, 2008: p. 59) that introduces the song, the complacency inherent in contemporary society (‘A crowd of stood and stared.,’ ‘a crowd of people turned away’). The dramatic effect of the indeterminate textures of the ascending orchestral clusters is contextually anarchic in its intrusion into the passacaglia-like countermelody of the first two verses, albeit that Lennon’s lyrical vocal “features an unusually expressive use of nonharmonic tones, notably the leaps to dissonant notes in the latter part of the first and fourth bars (‘I read the news to-day/ohboy-/a-about a luck-y man who/made the grade’), so hinting at an underlying disillusionment” (O’Grady, 1983: p. 137). McCartney’s second section is more frantic in its delivery, coming to an abrupt and fuzzy conclusion at the words “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” the vocal line becoming obscured by the progressively louder orchestral unisons on the root of each chord, before a two-bar unison brass motif plunges the key down a minor third for the return of the first section. This time, the bass leads to the intense orchestral build up before the shifting timbres of the final sustained piano chord and its 30-s decay lead finally into “a noisy 15 kHz tone leads to a 2-s piece of gibberish which was cut into the run-out groove of the L.P” (Hannan, 2008: p. 61), so casting doubt as to whether the song’s powerful imagery and disruptive musical aesthetics would inspire listeners to wake up and question (as suggested by the ringing alarm clock that heralds McCartney’s middle section and the crowing cock in ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ or whether it would be interpreted as yet another example of the Beatles’ love of the “slicks and tricks of production” (Goldstein, 1967: p. 173). Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc note that psychedelic rock has used alarm clocks, chimes, bells, the effects of clocks ticking, and other effects to signal psychedelic awakening. “Within and without: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Psychedelic Insight” in Julien (2008: p. 111). It is also reported that
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McCartney’s interest in the avant-garde, and his admiration for Stockhausen, led to the inclusion of an “instrumental passage. [with] a spiraling ascent of sound. [starting] the passage with all instruments on their lowest note and climbing to the highest in their own time” (Martin and Pearson, 1994: p. 56). (see Whiteley, 2013: for a full discussion of the Beatles and ‘A Day in the Life’ and the MC5 and ‘Kick Out the Jams.’) It is also suggested that songs associated with the counterculture – “through their musical style, their mode of performance, use and interpretation – point towards particular historical moments, knots of collective experience, cultural traditions and so forth. At this level – the level of styleindicators and cultural codes – music can be taken to represent to us the features of a specific conjuncture (neoGramscianism), structure of feeling (Raymond Williams), or chronotope (Bakhtin)” (Middleton, 2000: p. 231) and in previous work (Whiteley, 1992) it was suggested that “drugrelated experience works through anaphonic musical signs (i.e., signs that work through structural analogy with non-musical experiences of time, space, movement etc), culturally mediated semiotic coding musical features that work through comparison with other, familiar effects in different styles; intracultural interpretation (what countercultural listeners said, cultural resonance (analogy between aspects of the music and of the cultural context); technological innovation” (Middleton, 2000: p. 231). While examples can be drawn from, for example, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Doors and the Rolling Stones, its most striking focus can be found in the musical and performing body of Jimi Hendrix, where there are intersecting discourses not only of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘psychedelia,’ but also of race, gender, and sexuality. Significant examples would include ‘Purple Haze,’ ‘Love or Confusion,’ ‘Are You Experienced,’ and ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ (Whiteley, 2000: pp. 235–261). The hippie’s identification with the metaphysical is explored in Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (The Beatles, Revolver, 1966), which set the agenda for psychedelic music in its evocation of the Vedic teaching ‘Be Here Now’ – living in the present but conscious of both past and future. Rather than the more usual, extravagant colors of psychedelia, the colliding musical circles are introspective, a sensory experience of Timothy Leary’s voluntary ego-death. Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (Leary et al., 1964) is a paraphrase of The Tibetan Book of the Dead which had influenced Lennon’s personal experience of LSD and his composition, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’ This is achieved by looped effects which constantly move to the ‘eternal’ presence of the tonic (an orchestral chord on Bb major; a Mellotron played on flute setting; another Mellotron oscillating in 6/8 over the 4/4 pulse of the melody line, moving from Bb (the flattened 7th) to C (the tonic on its string setting), so suggesting a musical metaphor for the tug between the conscious/unconscious of psychedelic experience (Whiteley, 2002: p. 219). George Harrison’s ‘Within You Without You’ (Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, 1967) also reflects his search for Eastern mysticism. As George Martin reports, “What appealed to George was the sound – the unique sound the instruments made when used in this very ancient (Indian classical) tradition” (Martin and Pearson, 1994: p. 126). Encapsulated by an endless drone and metric shift between fours, fives, and threes, “the vocal line is doubled by
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two dilrubas (the dilruba is a bowed lute with a buzzy, nasal, hollow-sounding timbre) and, at certain points, by a (Western) string ensemble (eight violins and three cellos) and, at other points, sitar”. “Harrison’s vocal sound is mantra-like, sitting in the back of the mix, dominated by the elaborate tabla playing” (Hannan, 2008: pp. 54–55). While the search for expanded consciousness through both hallucinogenic drugs and the metaphysical of Eastern religions were important aspects of music associated with the hippie counterculture, “the lyrical content of popular music also took on increasingly radical dimensions as the 1960s progressed. Songwriters and lyricists saw it as their artistic responsibility to respond directly to current social and political issues which, during the mid-1960s, were becoming increasingly more turbulent” (Bennett, 2004: p. xv). These included protests against the war in Vietnam, including The Doors ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ where the promotional film showed singer Jim Morrison being blindfolded and shot, a scene intended to parody the ‘summary executions of untried opponents’ featured in US media reports about the Vietnam War (Snowman, 1984: p. 163). The anti-Vietnam War protest was supported by many musicians including John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, who staged a 10-day bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada, in the cause of world peace. ‘Give Peace A Chance’ was written by Lennon, and recorded live in two sessions in the hotel bedroom.
Festivals Festivals were an important medium for spreading countercultural ideology. The open-air ‘Be-In,’ Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, which attracted 20 000 people and featured such pioneering acid-rock groups as Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Steve Miller Band, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful dead. “An overawed Time Magazine recorded, ‘The huge crowd was peaceful . an amazing tribute to Haight-Ashbury.’ More accurately it was a tribute to LSD and marijuana, which had been distributed by a dazed Santa Claus” (Neville, 1971: p. 28). The scale and coverage of the Monterey Festival of June 1967 made it an event of supreme importance to the rock world. American acts on the bill included the Byrds, the Paul Butterfield Band, the Grateful Dead, the Blues Project, the Mothers of Invention, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Doors. Woodstock is recognized as the most important festival of the period, attracting between 400 000 and 500 000 people. It is remembered both for its ‘bringing together’ of the countercultural generation and its music, which was both politically subversive while acting as a springboard for the more commercial rock and pop events that followed. Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag” was a direct criticism of the Vietnam War and its sing-along chorus was made world-famous through its inclusion in Michael Wadleigh’s film Woodstock (Three Days of Peace and Love) (1970). Joni Mitchells ‘Woodstock,’ dedicated to the Woodstock festival, contains a reference to bombers turning into Butterflies, the bombers in question being those attacking North Vietnamese targets (Bennett, 2004: p. xvi). It was, however, Hendrix’s performance of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’
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that provides the most compelling example of rock as a political weapon. Even though the words are not sung, they were familiar to his audience, and the feedback and sustain provide a commentary on the flag itself as, at the words, ‘broad stripes and bright stars,’ the sounds plummet and waiver. The attack comes at the evocative ‘rocket’s red glare’ where Hendrix creates the sound of a fighter plane “coming out of a deep dive, the impact of bombs striking the earth and the cries of the Cambodian peasants” (Henderson, 1990: p. 245). The straight melody finally comes through on ‘gave proof through the night’ and the anthem ends to the sounds of feedback and sustain and a final ear-shattering grind as the guitar strings are treated to a crude bottleneck slide against the mike stand (Whiteley, 2004: p. 25). As Charles Shaar-Murray writes: “the ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive almost white audience wallowing in a paddy field of its own making; the clear, pure, trumpetlike sounds of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through clouds of tear-gas, the explosions of cluster-bombs, the screams of the dying, the crackle of flames, the heavy palls of smoke stinking with human grease, the hovering chatter of helicopters” (1989: p. 24) (see Whiteley, 2004: pp. 18–28). Jimi Hendrix, together with Richie Haven and Sly Stone were the only Afro-American artists to appear at the Woodstock, which has been identified as both the “defining moment of the late 1960s and the swansong of the countercultural movement that characterized the era” (Bennett, 2004: p. xviii). If Woodstock is largely described as utopian, then the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont heralded the end of the Age of Aquarius. It also raises the question “of the relationship between performer/audience, the performance, and the musical text itself; that the unmitigated violence at Altamont suggests that for many the songs were interpreted as inciting brutality, that they provided a model for behavioral patterns” (Whiteley, 1997: pp. 84–85). While most agree that the reason for the violence at Altamont – which began well before the Stones took the stage – had more to do with the hiring of Hells Angels as security, few would argue that the menacing subject matter and sound of songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Midnight Rambler’ would “hardly calm the already explosive atmosphere” (1997: p. 84). The Maysles Brothers film of the concert, Gimme Shelter (1971) provides a disturbing insight into those attending Altamont: one murdered, total dead four, two run over, one drowned in a drainage ditch, hundreds injured, and countless more stoned on acid. Altamont was only one of a series of crisis, which signaled the end of the 1960s counterculture. The association of LSD with Satanism which had resulted in the murders of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by members of the Manson ‘family’ led to a panic reaction to the adverse effects of drugs. Publicity surrounding the death of famous rock stars also led to highly volatile criticisms of the counterculture and in particular the concept of creativity through drug experience. In September 1970, Hendrix had been found dead from inhalation of vomit following barbiturate intoxication. On 4 October of the same year, Janis Joplin died from a heroin overdose. In 1971, Jim Morrison died of a heart attack caused by heroin or alcohol in Paris. Personal survival seemed paramount and the US broadcast license authorities warned radio stations that they would be subverting the government’s
campaign against drug abuse if they played lyrics, which mentioned dope. Finally, the shooting of four students at Kent State University tragically proved how deep was the gulf between those who wanted to change America and its policies in Vietnam, and the conservative majority who believed in law and order above everything else.
Countercultures: The Broader Picture While academic attention has been focused largely on the United States and the United Kingdom, the hippie movement quickly established a presence throughout the Western World, with countercultural movements emerging in, for example, Christiania (Denmark) (see Hall, 2014), Naples (Italy) (see Vacca, 2013: pp. 67–84), East and West Berlin (Germany) (see Stahl, 2014), and in some areas of South America, Asia, and the former Soviet bloc. In Paris, university students and workers joined forces to protest about workers’ right and the conditions in factories, while across Europe students occupied universities and demonstrated for better facilities. Although activists received considerable attention, as Joel Fort observed, “they probably number no more than tens of thousands in such groups as the Students for a Democratic Society, antiwar and antidraft groups, student power advocates and some elements of the hippies and yippies. There are the equally radical groups of special minorities, namely the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and others seeking power, dignity and sometimes justice for racial and cultural minorities” (1969: p. 210). In the United States, attention focused on Civil Rights. “In October 1966 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNC) was established to enable students to become organized in the battle for civil rights. However, neither the SNCC nor President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill, passed in 1964, served to alleviate the abject poverty and total political impotence of African Americans. Increasing racial discrimination and harassment across the US led to inner-city riots.[as] Civil rights organizations were superseded by the Black Power movement under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael” (Bennett, 2004: p. xvii). Civil Rights activist, Martin Luther King was best known for his advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience and his stirring speech ‘I have a dream.’ He was assassinated on 4 April 1968. Malcolm X, the human rights activist was assassinated on 21 April 1965. His father had earlier been murdered by the Klu Klux Klan. Black artists associated with the Black Power movement included James Brown, ‘Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ and Aretha Franklin, ‘Respect.’ It is also interesting to note the emergence of the so-called Jesus hippies, commonly dubbed ‘Jesus freaks.’ Questioning “the authority of the church and reinstating biblical authority, most commonly apocalyptic, they simultaneously retained what was widely considered a countercultural aesthetic, often sporting the hippie image while using popular music for Christian proselytizing.” As Young observes, “Barry McGuire’s classic ‘Eve of Destruction’ (1965) gained notoriety within the context of radicals, revolutionaries, and those who were convinced the world was on the brink of either cosmic or physical annihilation. Along with Bob Dylan, McGuire’s conversion to Christianity gave credibility to the rising Jesus-freak revolution. As celebrities such as Johnny Cash and Eric Clapton converted, revivalistic
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Christianity found entry into the entertainment industry, launching a groundswell of activity . Fleetwood Mac’s Jeremy Spencer joined the rigid and controversial commune the Children of God, a notable doomsday group. Secular rock groups also explored religious themes, adding to the already enigmatic culture of Christian hippies. These included The Byrds’ version of ‘Jesus is Just Alright’ (1969), Ocean’s ‘Put Your Hand in the Hand’ (1970), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ (1969), and Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit In The Sky’ (1969) (see Young, 2013: pp. 51–67). Despite the breadth of the countercultural movement, research suggests that women were largely marginalized. As Roszak observed, the struggle for liberation was seen mainly “as the province of men who must prove themselves by ‘laying their balls on the line’. Too often this suggests that the female of the species must content herself with keeping the home fires burning for her battle-scarred champion or joining the struggle as a camp follower. In either case, the community is saved for her, not by her” (1970: footnote to p. 65). Despite the emergence of the so-termed women’s liberation movement and the questioning of power relations in personal life (in reproduction, sexual relationships, the household division of labor, popular culture, why certain ethnic minorities and working class women were marginalized in their access to the production and consumption of knowledge and culture, and why women generally were not represented within the hierarchies of science and arts) the counterculture remained male-dominated. The breaking down of old-restraints (‘free love’) privileged a male sexuality, confirming the traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity under the dubious banner of progressiveness, and in the field of music there was little real opportunity to either take control or enjoy the prestige offered to male artists. Apart from the biting social and political commentaries from such performers as Joan Baez and Buffy St Marie and the significance of such frontline artists as Mama Cass (The Mamas and the Papas), Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane), and Janis Joplin (albeit at a cost, with Joplin dying in 1970 and Cass Elliott in 1974) the musical ethos of the period undermined the role of women, positioning them as desexualized earth mothers, fantasy figures, and easy lays. (Whiteley, 2000: pp. 1–94) It is thus suggested that while there were highly political elements within the counterculture, the movement was not uniformly politicized in a way that dictated that the only way forward was to overthrow the capitalist system by whatever means. Feminist academics identified patriarchy as the major obstacle in achieving personal freedom, and attitudes toward gay and lesbian artists remained problematic, despite the United Kingdom’s Homosexual Reform Bill (1967), the promotion of camp taste and drag culture at Andy Warhol’s New York Factory, and the Velvet Underground’s uncompromising insights into urban culture, sexuality and voyeurism in the Velvet Underground and Nico. Warhol’s Factory also provided a refuge for drag queens who are celebrated in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), thus providing a crucial link with the 27 June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, and the subsequent riots that were the flashpoint of the American gay liberation movement of the 1970s. In retrospect, it is apparent that the 1960s counterculture incorporated diverse groupings, including student protest,
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peace and antiwar movements, the civil rights movement, environmentalists, the utopian, dystopian, apocalyptic, and freaks these are discussed in Whiteley and Sklowers edited text on Countercultures and Popular Music (2013), and could also “manifest itself differently at specific times and within specific places depending on local socio-economic, cultural and demographic circumstances” (Bennett, 2013: pp. 19–31). More recently, the term counterculture has come to symbolize ‘forms of social action and/or alternative lifestyles and belief that appear – or can be made to appear – to link with the aesthetic, political and cultural trends associated with the late 1960s manifestation of counterculture’, so providing a socioculturalpolitical analogy for the ‘hegemonic struggles that continue to inform everyday life in myriad societies and cultures across the globe’ (Bennett, 2013).
See also: Civil Rights Movements; Counterculture: 1960s and Beyond; Culture, Sociology of; Ecofeminism; Feminist Political Theory and Political Science; Gay and Lesbian Movements; Identity Movements; Minorities; Movements, Social; Political Protest and Civil Disobedience; Religion and Youth; Social Protest; Subculture, Sociology of; Urban Sociology; Youth Culture, Anthropology of; Youth Culture, Sociology of; Youth Movements; Youth, Music, and Peace Building.
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Discography Beatles, All You Need is Love. Barry McGuire’s classic ‘Eve of Destruction’ (1965). Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner. ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Love or Confusion’ ‘Are You Experienced’ and ‘Spanish Castle Magic’ MC5 ‘Looking at You’, ‘Kick Out the Jams’. Tomorrow Never Knows’ (The Beatles, Revolver, 1966). The Byrds’ version of ‘Jesus is Just Alright’ (1969), Ocean’s ‘Put Your Hand in the Hand’ (1970), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ (1969), and Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit In The Sky’ (1969). ‘Within You Without You’ (Sgt Pepper ’s Lonely Heart ’s Club Band 1967) ‘A Day In the Life’ (Sgt. Pepper ’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967).
Filmography Maysles Brothers. Gimme Shelter (1970) Maysles Films (USA). Rebel Without A Cause (1955) to. Rock Around The Clock (1956). Woodstock: Three Days of Music, Peace and Love. A Once-in-a-Lifetime Celebration, 1970. Warner Bros. Inc.: A Warner Communication Company.