1966: The Year Youth Culture Exploded

1966: the year youth culture exploded | Culture | The Guardian
17/11/15 17:05
1966: the year youth culture exploded
25 March 1966, the Jefferson Airplane and the Mystery Trend played a rock & roll
dance benefit in support of the Vietnam Day Committee. Costing $1.50 to get in, the
peace trip was held at Harmon Gym, on the campus of the University of California at
Berkeley the institution that, after Mario Savios December 1964 put your bodies on
the gears speech, had become the centre of American student radicalism, in
particular the protests against the escalating Vietnam war.
The event was one of several peace rock benefits held in the gym that spring that
cemented the link between the politicos of Berkeley and the bohemians of the nascent
San Franciscan music scene: others showcased the Grateful Dead, the Great Society,
and the (original) Charlatans. Citing one of these shows, the columnist Ralph Gleason
observed that the city was on the verge of another dancing craze such as had not
happened since the swing era. Nothing apparently untoward there.
The trouble started a few weeks later, when the San Francisco Examiner cited the
Harmon Gym event in a highly critical article on Berkeley. The sweet, acrid odour of
marijuana pervaded the area, many of the dancers were obviously intoxicated, wrote
reporter Jack S McDowell. Sexual misconduct was blatant. The background to this
was the release of an addendum to the Burns report, prepared by Californias state
senate committee, which alleged communist infiltration of Berkeleys Free Speech
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/nov/15/1966-trip-good-vibrations-pop-revolution
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Movement and much more, summed up by the phrase a deluge of filth.
Vietnam Day protest march at Berkeley. Photograph: Don Cravens/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images
Six days after the Examiner article, Ronald Reagan took the stage of the Cow Palace to
deliver a defining speech of his gubernatorial campaign. He cited the Harmon Gym
show as a prime example of what he called the morality gap at Berkeley. Conflating
rocknroll, drugs and sex the nude torsos of men and women projected by the light
show with the filthy speech movement and the Vietnam Day Committee, Reagan
called for a root and branch examination of the charges of communism and blatant
sexual misbehaviour on the campus. As he thundered: What in heavens name does
academic freedom have to do with rioting, with anarchy, with attempts to destroy the
primary purpose of the university, which is to educate young people?
Having made his name during Barry Goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan
was busy positioning himself as a figurehead in the Republican resurgence. His
positions were frequently and forcefully expressed: pro-business, anti-regulation; proself-help (as in the the creative society idea a forerunner of Camerons big
society), anti-state intervention; pro-the squeezed middle-aged, anti- the long-hairs,
communists and war protesters who seemingly thronged the campus of Berkeley.
Reagans claims about the Harmon Gym concert were, his biographer Robert Dallek
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concedes, vastly exaggerated. However they were in service to a powerful feeling:

namely that, faced with the symptoms of incipient psychedelia, many adults were
convinced the freedoms of popular culture and President Lyndon B Johnsons great
society had got out of hand. It wasnt just sex and drugs, but anti-war protest and
inner-city riot. Things were going too far too fast. It was time to apply the brakes, and
Reagan would be the most visible agent of that backlash.
The 1960s remain in the folk memory as a golden age of pop culture, with 1966
enshrined in the UK as the year of swinging London and the winning of the World Cup.
It was the year of the singles that are regularly collected on those TV advertised
compilations you buy for 5 and under: Sunny Afternoon; Reach Out Ill Be There;
Good Vibrations; Summer in the City mass pop art so imperishable that it cannot be
dimmed by cheap nostalgia and endless repetition.
Vietnam Day Committee supporters Jefferson Airplane. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
But 1966 was a year of turmoil. It began in pop and ended in rock; began in civil rights
and ended in black power; began in the great society and ended in the Republican
resurgence. Inspired by the success of the civil rights movement and boosted by the
money pouring into the music and youth industries, young people in the US and the UK
began to think of another way of life, that didnt involve being like your parents. They
were beginning to envision what the future might be.
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It was also the year that the torch passed from England to America, from London to
Los Angeles, which became the central pop location, thanks to the Mamas and the
Papas, the Beach Boys, and the Monkees ersatz Beatles who bloomed just as the
originals left the stage. California had its own youthtopias, reasonably autonomous
zones where the young could congregate and try out new ways of living: the
Haight/Ashbury in San Francisco, the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.
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Crashed out from the pace ... Bob Dylan. Photograph: Fiona Adams/Redferns
Pop Modernism was beginning to fragment under the impact of marijuana, LSD, and
sheer exhaustion. Pops Herculean acceleration resulted in many casualties: during
1966, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones all crashed out from the pace, but
not before they had provocatively expressed their dissatisfaction Dylan with his
polarising electric show segments, the Beatles with their notorious Butcher LP
sleeve (pulped by their American record company, Capitol, at a cost of $200,000), the
Rolling Stones with the drag video for Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in
the Shadow?
At the same time, there were the new total environments: the lightshows of the San
Franciscan ballrooms, the op art designs of cavernous new discotheques like New
Yorks Cheetah, the sensorium of Andy Warhols Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which
gave the impression of everything occurring simultaneously. By 1966, many strands
of art, music, and entertainment were all coming to the same point by different means:
the total focus on the instant that is the hallmark of many eastern religions; the
happening; the drug experience; the ecstasy of dancing.
It was also a year of incredible fertility in black American music. To name just one
artist: James Brown visited the UK for the first time in March; played Madison Square
Garden in April; appeared on Ed Sullivan for the first time in May, with his own
musicians. In late June, he was the only major pop star to play for the activists on the
March Against Fear, two days after they had been tear-gassed by state troopers: this
was the last great united action of the civil rights movement and the moment when
Stokely Carmichael launched the idea of Black Power.
James Brown also made one of two records that, during 1966, completely exploded
linear time in their respective quests for the perpetual present. The first was Tomorrow
Never Knows. The second was on the flip of the single Dont Be A Drop-Out: Brown
placed a song called Tell Me That You Love Me, adapted from a live recording. Looping
the vocal with a guitar figure by Lonnie Mack, Brown and producer Bud Hopgood
created a shocking delirium of sound with an insanely fast drum pattern that directly
prefigured drumnbass, nearly 30 years later.
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A shocking delirium of sound ... James Brown. Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns
Pop music was the new Olympus. Lou Reed recognised it as the arena for his
generation: The music is the only live, living thing. Writing in the same issue of Aspen
magazine, Robert Shelton agreed: The age of the new mass arts is moving us upward,
inward, outward and forward. In this era of exploration, there are many breeds of
navigators, but few more daring than the poet-musicians who are leading our pop
music in new directions expressing an avant-garde, underground philosophy to a
mass audience, deepening the thinking of masses of young people.
Many records by those poet-musicians made the charts. The most obvious example
is the Beach Boys Good Vibrations, recorded in sessions that spanned 60 hours over
seven months, at a cost of $50,000. It was technological yet emotional, sensual and
spiritual designed as a moment of fusion that would reset pop cultures polarity to
positive.
What was thrilling about 1966 was the way in which things were not business as usual,
a feeling that can still be heard in the records of the year: music was connected to
events outside the pop culture bubble and was understood to do so by many of its
listeners. It was a year when audacious ideas and experiments were at a premium in
the mass market and in youth culture, with a corresponding reaction from those for
whom the rate of change was too quick.
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The ecstasy of dancing ... Photograph: Lvenich/ullstein bild via Getty Images
The more the young pushed forward, the more the adults pushed back. In the summer,
the most famous pop group in the world came up against immutable forces:
xenophobic rightwing protesters in Tokyo; the agents of President Marcos, taking
physical revenge for an alleged insult; and the deep south disc jockeys who, incensed
by the reprinting of John Lennons comments about the Beatles being more popular
than Jesus, organised boycotts, threatened the groups tour and conducted Beatle
Burnings.
The polarity had flipped from positive to negative. The Beatles seemed to have
become a lightning rod for all sorts of tensions that had little to do with their music:
they had become a target for all those who resisted the pace of change. In August the
writer James Morris declared that the Beatles absolute aloofness to old prejudices
and preconceptions, their brand of festive iconoclasm, has developed an attraction for
me, as it has for millions more sceptics the world over. But this iconoclasm had its
dangers. As Morris quoted an elderly acquaintance: Ill tell you what the trouble with
the Beatles is: theyve got no respect.
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Technological, but sensual and spiritual ... the Beach Boys. Photograph courtesy of Jon Savage
More than any other year thus far in that decade, it was the time when that increasingly
assertive and visible youth culture collided with realpolitik. In the UK, Time magazines
idea of Swinging London came up against the Labour governments wage freeze:
another kind of austerity. The age of pop seemed to be swinging to a stop,
observed the Sunday Times that August. Late in the year, a senior Time magazine
editor opined that swingin has got out of hand because it is the kind of fun only a rich
nation can afford and England is no longer a rich nation.
While Good Vibrations was rising to No 1 in the UK and the US, the anti-youth culture
backlash began. Within a week of Reagans election as governor of California, a major
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disturbance erupted on the the Sunset Strip, when a protest by over a thousand teens
incensed by the heavy-handed policing of archaic curfew laws provoked a strong
reaction. With LA being a media centre, it made national news. Over the next few
weeks, both sides escalated their rhetoric, climaxing in brutal police beatings on 26
November and 10 December.
What was left after the Sunset Strip riots was an unpleasant aftertaste, a harbinger of
the more serious flashpoints to come. For what it seemed to come down to was
generational warfare what Derek Taylor, then the Beach Boys PR, called the whole
rotten issue of the Old v the Young. As the journalist Jerry Hopkins wrote that
December, just after the height of the rioting, the fact remains that there are two
factions, two sides. One generation does not understand or refuses to try to
understand the one behind it the line has been drawn.
The young had begun to flex their muscles to see beyond a market to a different way
of life. As Time reported, In the US, citizens of 25 and under in 1966 nearly
outnumbered their elders: by 1970, there will be 100 million Americans in that age
bracket If the statistics imply change, the credentials of the younger generation
guarantee it. Never have the young been so assertive or so articulate, so well educated
or so worldly. Predictably, they are a highly independent breed and to adult eyes
their independence has made them highly unpredictable.
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Police search African American youths during the Watts riots. Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock
The 60s peaked in 1966; it was the year when the decade exploded. The songs from
that time still enchant successive generations, but they were also a response to their
place and time. It was, as the writer and cultural catalyst Tony Hall said that December,
pretty obvious that contemporary music reflects contemporary life and vice versa.
Pop did reflect the world during 1966, that there was something more than image and
sales at stake.
It wasnt just the sudden loosening of bonds caused by the Beatles success and the
money that flowed into the youth sector. The music of that year co-existed with the
move towards greater social freedom, whether in the liberalising legislation of the UKs
Labour government or the various US liberation movements, civil rights groups like the
SNCC and the SCLC, the National Organisation of Women, homophile groups like the
Daughters of Bilitis, Vanguard or the Mattachine Society. It spoke of the drive towards
democracy and openness that makes it still contested today, that militate against the
generational nostalgia that renders the period rote.
Whats fascinating is how politicised the High 60s remain. This era has consistently
been denigrated by rightwing politicians over a 30 year period, since the
Reagan/Thatcher era. The structures of society have been altered in particular by
laws relating to youth benefits, structural unemployment etc to remove power from
youth as a cohort. But still the High 60s are dismissed by various pundits and
historians, as overhyped, unrealistic, elitist, only a few people in London quite apart
from the ad hominem attacks on major figures. That viewpoint proposed by the likes
of Dominic Sandbrook in itself is interesting: why do they do it and who does it
benefit?
Todays neo-liberals see everything in strictly financial terms and seek to impose that
vision on the rest of us. Its all about money, nothing else. But, as the old saying goes,
they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Attempting to reprogram
the mid-60s in that guise, while a tempting provocation, simply succeeds in smearing
the past with the values of the present. Going back to the primary sources, you enter
an entirely different world. During 1966, young people were creating an exciting,
progressive mass culture in plain sight. They dared to dream. For a while, they got
away with it, and that spirit remains inspirational.
1966: The Year The Decade Exploded by Jon Savage (Faber & Faber, 20) is
published on 19 November. Click here to buy it for 16 with free UK p&p.
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1966: the year youth culture exploded | Culture | The Guardian