This course, part 1 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the days before rock (pre-1955) to the end of the 1960s. This course covers the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Rock emerged in the mid 1950s as a blending of mainstream pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western--styles that previously had remained relatively separate. This new style became the music of the emerging youth culture and was often associated with teen rebellion. We will follow the story of how this rowdy first wave of rock and roll (1955-59) was tamed in the early 60s but came roaring back with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then went psychedelic by the end of the decade.
Psychedelia in London and Underground Favs
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A História do Rock, Parte 1
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Psychedelia (1966-69)
How can music be psychedelic? Underground psychedelic scenes in San Francisco and London. Psychedelia in LA. The Summer of Love and the rise of hippie culture. The birth of FM rock and rock magazines. Woodstock and Altamont.
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John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
We now jump across the Atlantic Ocean, well across the continent of North
America and then across the Atlantic Ocean, from San Francisco to London, to
talk about the psychedelic scene that was developing there.
And there are so many parallels and parallels and differences that the
compare and contrast discussion with this is I think really quite fascinating.
I, the, for the first period up to 1967, we'll get the same kind of thing in
London. That is mainstream groups of music that
we, that we know. that, that makes the charts, that.
That, that gets distributed pretty widely and then groups that really sort of
stayed within the London subculture. And so, there is a subculture going on in
London, starting already in 1965, just like in San Francisco and then breaking
out in 1967 some of the groups breakout. Nationally break out into the United
States and have success, some don't and we'll talk about that as we go.
What's interesting about the British take on psychedelia is that that British, the
British the British people who develop a psychedelic scene in London only had
limited information about what was going on in San Francisco.
We have to remember back in 1965, 1966 the air travel was much less frequent and
available than it is today. There weren't a lot of people that had
gone back and forth between San Francisco and London, especially young people.
only sort of 20, 21 years old, not enough life experience for that to have been
part of it yet. And so, really what you knew about San
Francisco was really something that somebody might have told you or, or
something that had appeared somehow in a newspaper, remembering that there.
Aren't actually a lot of, sort of, youth oriented newspapers.
Certainly, no television shows, there was no internet, there was no cable TV.
I mean, how would you find out about it? So, what's interesting is, with the
information they had, they developed a psychedelic culture that has all the
basics, sort of, features of the San Francisco one, but a very different kind
of English accent that goes with it. So, that comes from the fact that there
wasn't a lot of direct contact. Some people had been back and forth but
not a lot. One guy who had been back and forth was
Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet. And we should say about the San Francisco
scene that it, it arose of course in the same place where beat culture had arisen
around the City Lights book store and people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
And sort of, this had happened in the late 50s, of course within the beat
culture the music of choice was jazz and not rock and roll.
Allen Ginsberg however was very interested in helping promote, not only
poetry, beat poetry, but also the idea that LSD could be a, a way to higher
consciousness and more poetic awareness. And so, in the summer of 1965, he comes
to London and helps to organize a poetry reading kind of thing.
Brings a bit of the San Francisco thing to London.
They put this, this event together called, Poets of the World, Poets of Our
Time in the Royal Albert Hall in the summer of 1965.
And a lot of historians would say, that really sort of marks the beginning of the
psychedelic underground in London. And when that happens, a lot of people
who've been to San Francisco and know what's going on and sort of share.
A bit of what they know by the fall of 1965, a guy by the name of Michael
Hollinshead opened something called the World Psychedelic Center.
And his job really is to be like Ken Kesey was in San Francisco, the kind of
Johnny Appleseed of LSD and the whole kind of counter culture kind of
experience. And sort of becomes the center for
Psychedelia in London. Again, very much and underground kind of
thing. So, that opens in the fall of 65, in
February of 1966, the Indica Bookshop opens up.
That's a book shop that's devoted to a lot of these kind of counter cultural
kinds of books and, and, literature. The Indica book shop is the book shop
that John Lennon goes into to get his copy of Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic
Experience, which ends up being quoted to a certain extent and Tomorrow Never
Knows, which had been recorded just around that time in 1966.
So, Indica Bookstores open in 1966, the London Free School, a school devoted to
the idea of people being able to take classes for free to help raise their
awareness of all kinds of social culture but also pragmatic Kinds of issues and
topics. That opens in March of '66, the
International Times, which is kind of their version of the oracle or later
Rolling Stone magazine, a magazine devoted to some of these kinds of things
starts to be published in October of 1966.
And in December of 1966 The ufo club or UFO Club events start to happen where
evenings are planned around psychedelic kinds of things.
Now we're talking about, I'll talk about things that happened in 1966 within the
psychedelic underground London. By way of contrast it's important to note
that in April of 1966 there was a Time magazine cover story About Swinging
London, so the idea is that if you went to London in 1966, you were going to get
kind of mod London. I mean you were going to get the, the,
the, the kind of London that Austin Powers kind of makes fun of, right?
That's not quite yet hippie London, right?
That sort of Carnaby Street sort of mod mod style.
That's what was happening on the mainstream.
And while that was happening, and while Time Magazine was trumpeting it to
Americans who were, maybe, thinking about a vacation in London at the same time.
They would go to London at the same time and places they weren't going, this
psychedelic scene was developing. So, that's in many ways, what we mean by
subculture being out of the mainstream some of the underground.
Favorites of the psychedelic scene were a group called The Pink Floyd, that was the
original version of Pink Floyd, led by Syd Barrett.
they had two early singles that were important in the U.K.
The Pink Floyd, led by Syd Barrett, never had any success in this country.
They came to this country and toured a bit, but they never really were the Pink
Floyd we know from 1973, the Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd with David Gilmour
on lead guitar. This is a very different, in many ways,
sort of, markedly psychadelic group. Early singles were Arnold Layne, which
was a number 20 hit in the UK, and See Emily Play, which was a number 6 hit in
the UK, but Pink Floyd were interesting in that they refused to play those
singles. Live, even though they had singles in the
UK, when they would play these shows, they would do these like, jam, improv
things, right? And this this frustrated many of the
patrons that came to see them at the shows, because they would be up there
sort of doing an avant-garde, improvisation thing for 15-20 minutes,
15-20 minutes maybe up to a half-hour. They wanted to hear the hit songs, so
there are all stories of people, you know, pouring beer on the band from the
balcony and this kind of thing, but they wouldn't relent because they thought.
You know, sing, radio single and live performance were two things and they
should not they should not mix. A good example of, of this sort of
improvisational approach is a track called Interstellar Overdrive which is
after it sort of begins, the tune begins, they go into kind of a live improvisation
it's very sort of Avant-guard. The track actually appears on their first
album, from August 1967, Piper. At the gates of dawn.
The song, Interstellar Overdrive, is interesting 'cause it helps us sort of
see how things of sort of partially digested stuff from America, sort of made
their way into the London Psychedelic scene.
The tune itself, the opening lick of it, of Interstellar Overdrive, was based on
the lick of A Los Angeles group by the name of Love lead by Arthur Lee.
In 1966, they had a hit called My Little Red Book.
Well it was a modest hit, but was a hit non the less.
And My Little Red Book is a song that was originally written by Bert Backarack and
Howell David. Right up sort of mainstream pop fame.
But their manager, Pink Floyd's manager, Peter Jenner had heard the tune but he
didn't actually have a copy of it and so he started humming the initial lick to
Syd Barrett who didn't quite get it right.
The lick he used is the one that became Interstellar Overdrive.
So if you have a chance, you should go check out the beginning of Love's, My
Little Red Book. And compare it with the beginning of
Interstellar Overdrive, and you hear the similarity between those two licks.
Now they don't get it quite right, because they haven't got the recording.
They've never heard Love play it at all. And so they just kind of get this
imperfect vocal rendition of it. which becomes an entirely different tune.
It's almost in many ways symbolic of the differences between the west coast
american and the London psychadelic scene.
of course the story with Pink Floyd. they recorded Piper at the Gates of Dawn
in the same summer of 1967 at Abbey Road Studios were the Beatles are recording.
Stories about Paul McCartney poking his head in and sort of hearing what these,
this young group's just making their first album were up to.
but Syd starts to really show real signs of mental instability, maybe it was the
acid. Maybe it was that he was going to be
mentally unstable anyway but the combination of the two probably wasn't a
good thing. and he started to act increasingly
erratic. His buddy David Gilmour comes in first to
kind of be in the band with Sid to kind of cover for him.
But then they just decide one day not to pick Sid up for a gig and the band, David
Gilmour essentially replaces Sid in the group.
They go on to have some great albums and albums that are really successful in the
UK. Saucerful of Secrets from 1968 was a big
one for them, Atom Heart Mother from 1970.
But they don't really have, Pink Floyd, doesn't really have their first important
U.S. success until Dark Side of the Moon from
1973. But boy, What a success that was.
In many ways, Dark Side of the Moon, more than any other record that we can think
about from the 70s, effectively takes the psychedelic aesthetic of what was
happening in London during this late 60s and brings it into the 70s And maybe it's
most full formed way, certainly a concept album as we think about Pink Floyd
through the 70's, we can almost say that The Wall from 1979 is really sort of the
last big concept album, so in many ways we could Tell the story of the sor, of,
of the concept album from Sergeant Pepper to The Wall in many kinds of ways.
Some of the other important groups that were important in the underground scene.
Again, Pink Floyd being a local group in London, never having international
success. Some of other other groups that had that,
that were part of this scene were a group called the Soft Machine which brought
together a very strong jazz influence. with Psychedelia a group called Tomorrow.
They had one big hit a couple big hits, but the big hit that they're usually
noted for was something called My White Bicycle.
Interesting, Steve Howe, who would later be in the group Yes and then later Asia,
was in Tomorrow, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, who had a song called Fire,
that got pretty good air play and was later In the 70s played on American radio
a lot, had Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake and Palmer in the group.
Well, we've talked about the London psychedelic scene and the groups that
were sort of off the radar, the subculture groups that were part of that
some of the groups that we certainly wouldn't have known about in this country
and maybe people wouldn't have really known about their concert events unless
they'd been in London. Now, in the next video Let's turn to a
consideration of the mainstream stars in Britain and what was going on that was
definitely on the radar that plugs into this idea of psychedelic music coming out
of the UK in the late 1960s.
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