Countercultural Trends in British and American 1960’s Popular Music

Lecture 1

The 1960’s – a Disappearing Decade?

The 1960’s – the era of miniskirts, flower power... Or, on the negative side, of the
Vietnam War, the assassinations of major political figures such as the Kennedys and Martin
Luther King, the threat of nuclear annihilation as the world, on at least one occasion, stood on
the brink of a nuclear war. It is no use debating whether this decade should be remembered
for the former or the latter – both shaped it in an equally decisive manner, making it
impossible to separate the good from the bad. And on the ideological front, this was a period
marked by the most sweeping change of the ideological paradigm of the West in recent
history. In view of the role that popular music had come to play in the lives of the young, it is
no wonder that this ideological shift was reflected with particular intensity in the sphere of
rock music. Curiously enough, although there does appear to be a broad consensus of opinion
that the spirit of the era, its soaring optimism, was almost perfectly captured by the music of
the Beatles, the Sixties, with which the Fab Four (or the Moptops, as they were often
affectionately referred to) were closely linked, are now an ideological battleground upon
which there seems to be no agreement whatsoever. Seen as everything from the foundation of
modern liberty to the primary cause of the present chaos, this carefree age has become, in the
words of the critic Ian MacDonald, the most obscure period of the 20th century,
mythologised into a mirage of contradictions – a disappearing decade.
But if the Beatles and the Sixties are so closely related, surely they must have
reflected each other’s ambiguities. Before we take a closer look at those, let us not forget that
the change of the ideological matrix that occurred in the Sixties did not happen overnight.
The seeds were sown in the 1940’s and 1950’s when, on both sides of the Atlantic, far-
reaching processes were initiated. It is often remarked that, until the advent of The Beatles,
Britain was in thrall to an essentially Victorian mindset and moral code. While it was
certainly very much in evidence long after World War Two, its slow undermining arguably
began during the war years. The coalition government formed in 1940, when the Labour
Party joined forces with the Conservatives, established an inter-departmental committee,
presided over by the economist William Beveridge, which would carry out a survey of
Britain’s social insurance and allied services and make recommendations on the basis of its
findings. The Beveridge Report was introduced in the House of Commons in 1942, primarily
for the purpose of boosting morale. It was given a wide coverage by the press but was then
shelved for the duration of the war. The report identified five “Giant Evils” in society:
squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease, and went on to propose widespread reform to
the system of social welfare in the United Kingdom to address these. Highly popular with the
public, the report formed the basis for the post-war reforms known as the Welfare State,
which included the expansion of National Insurance and the creation of the National Health
Service. The decisive defeat of the Conservatives in the first post-war election (despite
widespread admiration for Sir Winston Churchill, he was defeated by Labour’s Clement
Atlee, for the majority of the voters tended to associate the Conservative Party with the pre-
war depression, with its soup lines and widespread unemployment) indicated that during the
war large sections of the middle class had become convinced that the government would have
to assume responsibility for the less privileged members of society, while the country
struggled through more than a decade of post-war “victorious poverty”, as the writer and
critic Malcolm Bradbury described the situation in Britain between 1945 and 1960.
 It was in this climate of a slow erosion of Victorian moral standards that, as the poet
Philip Larkin put it, “Sexual intercourse began”. In his poem “Annus Mirabilis”, he placed
this momentous event “In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) – / Between
the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP”. These are references to events
which defined the new spirit of the so-called “swinging Sixties”. D. H. Lawrence’s novel
Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been the subject of a high profile court case, and The Beatles
became an emblem of what some saw as “the swinging London” and others criticised as a
“permissive society”. Either way, Larkin obviously referred to a dramatic shift in attitudes to
sexuality, which, for poetic purposes, he exaggerated into the beginning of sex itself.
Across the Atlantic, while Americans did not have to contend with such vestiges of
Victorian mentality, the troubled relations between various segments of its multiracial,
conglomerate type nation ushered in an era of great social turmoil as the “Baby Boom”
generation came of age and increasingly brought into question the values of the preceding
generation. Following the historic Supreme Court decision which pronounced racial
segregation in educational facilities unconstitutional in 1953, the civil rights movement
gathered momentum as the Fifties turned into the Sixties. African Americans’ demands for
equal rights were joined by those of Native Americans and women, turning the social arena
into a battlefield where real blood was occasionally shed.
Despite the undeniable achievements in the areas of human rights and women’s
liberation, among others, the Sixties started being exposed to criticism even before the decade
actually came to an end. Indeed, one of its first repudiators was one of its prime exponents –
John Lennon of The Beatles. In a highly publicised interview given to the Rolling Stone
magazine in 1970, he dismissed the preceding years of social upheaval and countercultural
revolt as little more than a clothes show: “Everyone dressed up but nothing changed.” To
Lennon, then rendered austere by Dr. Arthur Janov’s “primal therapy”,1 both the Sixties and
the Beatles seemed to have been divorced from reality: middle-class daydreams founded on
unprecedented affluence and fuelled by delusional drugs. Now, insisted the therapised and
detoxified ex-Beatle, “The dream is over” (in the song “God” from his Plastic Ono Band
album, wherein he also states “I don’t believe in Beatles”).
The punk rebels of 1976-78 saw the Sixties in much the same way, their stripped-
down, furious music echoing the naked truth aesthetic of Lennon’s 1970 “primal” album. To
them, the preceding decade had been a silly self-indulgence followed by a six-year hangover
of complacent grandiloquence which had left pop culture entirely devoid of energy. “Horrid
hippies”, the self-styled Beautiful People with their vague ideals and LSD-decelerated minds
were the problem: speed, sarcasm and deliberate ugliness were the solution.
By the early Eighties, the Sixties had declined into a subject of cynical indifference to
the denizens of Margaret Thatcher’s deregulated anti-society. A figure of futility, the hippie
was presented as an unkempt, pathetic dreamer, his body unwashed and mind addled by
drugs. But at the same time, this object of scorn seemed to be a scapegoat for some obscure
sense of loss. If the Sixties had been an empty style-display (which is a concept the Eighties
had little trouble grasping), if the ambitions of the Sixties had been so irrelevant and
impractical, why such resentment at their supposed failure to realise them?
In any case, the Sixties seemed to have got something right: during the second half of
the Eighties, bored with the mechanical products of so much contemporary pop, a new
generation seized on the passionately imaginative music of the Sixties, elevating artists as
Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds or The Velvet Underground to cult status and admitting that they

1
A psychotherapeutic system in which adult neurosis is ascribed to repressed “pain” caused by traumatic
incidents in childhood. The unhappiness incurred through these “primal scenes” is released by a confrontational
therapy in which the patient emits the “primal scream”. Lennon’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album
includes many references to this technique.
2
not only revered the sounds of the Sixties but also approved of the ideals associated with
them. This style-rehabilitation of the Disappearing Decade was enthusiastically embraced in
the Acid House dance idiom of the “second summer of love” with its psychedelic fashions,
LSD-fuelled “raves” and eclectic sampling of Sixties classics.
With the arrival of the Nineties, however, popular revisionism faded as the Sixties
came under attack from a right-wing political culture in search of something to blame for the
socio-economic chaos it had created in the Eighties. Far from failing, these critics maintained,
the Sixties revolution had succeeded only too well. The rising rates of assault, robbery, drug
abuse, divorce and abortion were all the fault of the permissive society supposedly fomented
by left-wing subversives of the Sixties. In America, young conservatives accused their
parental generation, the Baby Boomers, of having created the Nineties’ victim/dependency
culture of casual violence, trash consumerism and semi-literate political correctness. The
Sixties’ anti-institutionalism, they claimed, wrecked the nation’s educational system and
plundered its social security coffers, leaving a national deficit which today’s young would
spend their lives paying off (provided they could find jobs in the first place). As for the
Sixties’ sexual revolution, it merely produced a flood of pornography and a high divorce/low
legitimacy underclass of sullenly unsocialised and unemployable youth. To these critics,
everything wrong with modern America was the fault of the irresponsible hedonists who
“liberated” the Woodstock festival instead of standing dutifully in line for tickets.
Rising to the bait, the Boomers launched a counterattack, claiming that, au contraire,
most of the civic breakdown in Britain and America after the early Eighties was caused by
the socially ruinous tax-phobia of the Right. Reagan, they pointed out, may not have agreed
in so many words with Thatcher’s claim that “There’s no such thing as society”, but his
monetarism said the same in fiscal language. Much of what happened in the Sixties had been
spiritual in impulse, the free festivals being expressions of a shared feeling intrinsic to the
times in which they took place. Moreover, huge sections of society effectively
disenfranchised had, as a direct result of the decade’s widespread change in attitudes, found
their voice and – at last – a fair share of social justice.
The fact that the debate continues to rumble on is in itself a tribute to the
momentousness of the Sixties. But if blaming the shameless greed of the Reagan-Thatcher
era on the sociable and morally concerned We Generation is transparently silly, it would be
just as fatuous to pretend that the Sixties did not harbour its own contingent of idiots,
demagogues and outright criminals. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, a quiet bohemian
haven till the invention of the hippie movement at the Trips Festival in January 1966, lasted
barely two years before degenerating into a methedrine/heroin ghetto. Few hippie communes
survived into the Seventies without becoming cults of one kind or another. Much
countercultural rhetoric – notably its airy notion of a money-free, share-all society (“post-
scarcity anarchism”) – was mere adolescent nonsense. Many underground leaders were either
sociopaths in love with disruption for its own sake or self-dramatising opportunists on their
way to careers in Wall Street or Madison Avenue. In spite of all this, the sense of being on
the verge of a breakthrough into a different kind of society was vivid and widely felt.
Attitudes formed in this potent atmosphere were lasting, the glimpse of something better,
however elusive, permanently changing the outlooks of millions. Why?
To understand the Sixties, two overriding principles need to be considered. First, what
went on then was by no means homogeneous. Many separate trends were working in
different phases of development at the same time, much of the decade’s contradictory
character stemming from unexpected interactions between them. Second, the Sixties were a
reaction to the Fifties – which is to say that passing judgement on the Sixties without some
idea of what provoked them is tantamount to forbidding them a fair trial. While a strong case
can be made for tracing today’s falling standards to the Sixties anti-élitism, it would be as
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prejudicial to contend that this impulse was without cause as to blame it on any one social
group at large in that era.
The Fifties may have been relatively snug for the generation which had endured the
Second World War, but their teenage children saw this period as a stifling “drag” against
which they felt obliged to kick, in a desultory way, with rock-and-roll. While theirs was at
best a flirtation with freedom, their older siblings – for whom the Fifties were a nightmare
decade of Cold War paranoia and sinister power without moral legitimacy – posed a more
serious challenge to the status quo. In Britain, it was the time of the Angry Young Men,2 in
America of the Beat Generation. Isolated rebels against social and intellectual restriction, the
Angry Young Men came and went between the Suez fiasco and Macmillan’s boom of the late
Fifties. The Beats, though, more than mere heretics of the Eisenhower era, were a real
foretaste of a revolutionary future.
Often assumed to be a musical reference, the Beat Generation’s name in reality
referred to a sense of being roughed up by life and flung into the wasteland margins of a
materialistic civilisation. Carrying apocalyptic overtones, the Beat “condition”, as defined by
its leading voice Jack Kerouac, involved a state of being stripped of social insulation and
endowed with epiphanic clarity as a result. Mostly middle-class, the Beats were visionary
hobos alienated from society: “on the road” both literally and metaphorically. American
cousins of the Existentialists, not knowing precisely where they were going, they defined
themselves by what they were for and against: they were against soul-numbing materialism
(“Moneytheism”); for imagination, self-expression, Zen. Against society’s approved
depressives (alcohol, barbiturates); for outlawed stimulants like marijuana, amphetamines
and mescalin. Against rationalism, repression, racism; for poetry, free jazz, sex. Seeking self-
realisation through “hipness” and paradox, the Beats were the authentic religious voice of the
Atomic Age. As such, they were formatively influential on the Sixties counterculture in
California and New York, their sensibility reaching Britain through the freewheeling verse of
the Liverpool poets.
With economic contentment in Britain and America at the turn of the Sixties, with
Macmillan’s Conservative government riding high on the “never-had-it-so-good” business
boom and the first-generation rock-and-roll rebellion having collapsed, most of its leading
figures hors de combat, there seemed no reason to suppose that the youth disquiet would be
resurrected. In the USA, the “kids” were diverted by cars, beach movies, bobbysox heart
throbs and surf music. In Britain, cheap Vespas and Lambrettas offered youth transport and
prestige symbols, while jive-halls and espresso bars catered for surplus adolescent energy.
Pop boiled down to a turnover of clean-faced “teen idols” mass-produced in Denmark Street
(the centre of British popular music business) or imported by quota from America. Prosperity
had even lulled the fighting spirit of the Angry Young Men, John Osborne and Arnold
Wesker muttering peevishly that there were “no great causes left”. Appearances were
deceptive, however. Beneath the wiped and polished surface of British culture around 1960
lay a festering mess of sexual ignorance, prejudice and repression only slightly ameliorated
since the 19th century.3 Erotic experience was mostly confined to the dutiful discontent of
marriage, while women were so routinely belittled that they barely noticed it.

2
A group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the
1950’s. The group’s leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis; even Iris Murdoch was, for a
brief while, described as an Angry Young Man, even though she was hardly angry, not exactly young (having
been born in 1919) – and by no means a man, as Malcolm Bradbury described her appearance on the British
literary scene.
3
Kingsley Amis’s novel Take a Girl Like You (1960) and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) offer good
examples of this.
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 In this docile social context, one of the most powerful currents to animate the Sixties
was that of black emancipation. Embodied politically in Africa’s drive for independence and
the march of the civil rights movement in America, its most immediate impact on white
culture was made through music, beginning with the blues, rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-
blues records which, entering Liverpool via its harbour-city import shops, inspired The
Beatles. They never failed to admit in their interviews that the influence on them of black
singers, instrumentalists and songwriters was fundamental to their early career. The Beatles
acted as a major conduit of black energy, style and feeling into white culture. They were no
mere imitators, however, and following a tough period of apprenticeship in Hamburg,
Germany, they soon outstripped their American peers in melodic and harmonic invention,
baffling even seasoned professionals with their surprising chord sequences (Lennon and
McCartney were not only unable to read music but firmly declined to learn).
The Beatles’ appearance in 1962-63 coincided with the fall of Conservatism.
Although Harold Wilson’s Labour government was forced to increase income tax to deal
with a balance of payment crisis, buoyancy in the property market, aided by full employment,
quickly created a youth-led consumer boom. Spearheaded by The Beatles, the two-year
“British Invasion” of the American top ten established Britain as the centre of the pop world
with a flowering of talent matched nowhere else before or since. As British Pop Art and Op
Art became the talk of the gallery world, a new generation of fashion designers, models and
photographers followed the lead of Mary Quant (the creator of the miniskirt) in creating the
boutique culture of Swinging London, epitomised by Carnaby Street, to which international
film-makers flocked in the hope of siphoning off some of the associated excitement into their
pictures (e.g. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, based on a short story by Julio Cortázar,
features a cameo appearance by The Yardbirds, including Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in their
line-up).
The emphasis on informal and immediate fun that was the hallmark of Swinging
Britain during pop’s peak years of 1965-67 was less evident abroad, particularly in America,
where two other socio-cultural movements were unfolding. Inherited from the Beat
Generation of the late Fifties, the first of these took the form of a radical “counterculture”
which, springing up in opposition to the materialism of the mainstream society, arose in
California with a special concentration in and around San Francisco. Though framed in terms
of sexual liberation and scaffolded by religious ideas imported from the Orient, the central
shaft of the counterculture was drugs, and one drug above all: d-lysergic acid diethylamide,
or LSD. Synthesised in 1938 by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist looking for a cure for
migraine, LDS is a powerful hallucinogen which profoundly alters one’s outlook on reality.
The British writer Aldous Huxley was one of the most important figures in the early
history of LSD. He was a figure of high repute in the world of letters and had become
internationally famous owing to his dystopian novel Brave New World. His experiments with
psychedelic drugs (initially mescalin) and his descriptions of them in his writings did much to
spread awareness of psychedelic drugs to the general public and arguably helped to glamorize
their recreational use, although Huxley himself treated them very seriously, describing his
experiences in some detail in his essays The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and
Hell (1956). Having relocated to America in 1937, he settled down in California in the
1950’s, becoming something of a guru to the hippie movement of the 1960’s. Terminally ill
from cancer, in November 1963 Huxley had his second wife Laura administer LSD to him
several hours before his death, and sailed into the Great Beyond under its influence, seen off
by his loving wife whispering to him.
Recruited by Dr Timothy Leary to the existing countercultural pharmacopeia of
marijuana, mescalin and magic mushrooms, LSD came to the attention of the mass media in
early 1966, when, as state legislatures moved to ban it, the former Beat Allen Ginsberg urged
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that all healthy Americans over the age of fourteen should take at least one “trip” in order to
perceive “the new wilderness of machine America” as it really was.
The LSD view of life took the form of a smiling non-judgementalism which saw
“straight” thinking, including political opinions across the board from extreme Left to far
Right, as basically insane. To those enlightened by the drug, all human problems and
divisions were issues of perception, not substance. With LSD, humanity could transcend its
“primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility” and, realising the oneness of all creation, proceed
directly to utopia. This, however, was not the only utopian prescription on offer. Born from
the freedom rides and marches of the civil rights movements, the American New Left aimed
at discrediting the System – the “power-élite” perceived as directing the somnambulistic
progress of a media-drugged mainstream “Amerika” – and, more specifically, the Vietnam
war. Centred on Students for a Democratic Society, this movement was campus-based,
youth-orientated, deeply idealistic and highly self-righteous. As such, it had much in common
with the burgeoning student protest movements in France and Germany. In each case, the
governing motifs were the “repressive tolerance” of an unfeeling institutional hierarchy
without moral mandate as against everything new, young, unprejudiced, experimental and
irresponsible.
The student revolts of the late Sixties – not only in Western Europe but in
Czechoslovakia, America and Japan – were surprisingly quickly forgotten. By 1972, the
campuses had settled down and “student demonstration time”, as The Beach Boys had
serenaded it, was so much a thing of the past that it was possible to attend university in the
mid-Seventies without knowing it had happened. At its height, this tumult divided America
against itself more violently than at any time since the Civil War and came within a whisker
of sweeping the French government out of office; yet its actual achievements were meagre: a
few curriculum changes and some minor additions to civil rights legislation. Though the
revolutionary Left’s calls for “self-rule” and “participatory democracy” were timely, its
venerable class-war ideology was an anachronism even in 1968. Instead, the real legacy of
the Sixties’ democratic impulse was handed down from sources rooted in that era: the civil
rights movement (black emancipation and multiculturalism), the hippies (environmental and
health pressure groups) and the permissive society (feminism and gay liberation). Essentially
populist, the Sixties were also essentially non-ideological – socially reformative rather than
politically revolutionary. As such, the events of 1968 were a kind of street theatre acted out
by middle-class radicals too addled by theory to see that the true revolution of the Sixties was
not taking place in the realms of institutional power but in the minds of ordinary people: it
was a revolution in the head. Few were unaffected by this and, as a result of it, the world
changed more thoroughly than it could ever have done under merely political direction.
A transitional period, the Sixties witnessed a shift from a society weakly held together
by a decaying faith to a rapidly desocialising mass of groups and individuals united by little
more than a wish for quick satisfaction. The decade’s mass transition from sacred to profane
was reflective of a spiritual crisis en masse. The Christian glue which had once cemented
Western society had been progressively weakened by the shocks of scientific discovery (the
most catastrophic ones being the realisations that the earth is not the centre of creation and
that humanity is physically descended from the apes). In the Sixties, socially liberating post-
war affluence conspired with a cocktail of scientific innovations too potent to resist: TV,
satellite communications, affordable private transport, amplified music, chemical
contraception, LSD and the nuclear bomb. For ordinary people – the true movers of the
Sixties – these factors produced a restless sense of urgency headily combined with
unprecedented opportunities for individual freedom. Abandoning a Christian world of
postponed pleasure for a hungry secularism fed by technological conveniences, they traded a

6
hierarchical social unity in which each “knew his place” for the personal rewards of a modern
meritocracy.
The irony of modern right-wing antipathy to the Sixties is that this much-
misunderstood decade was the creation of the very people who voted for Thatcher and
Reagan in the Eighties. It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites condemn a decade
in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of
material security within an economy of high employment and low inflation. The social
fragmentation of the Nineties and the Noughties, which rightly alarms conservatives, was
created neither by the hippies (who wanted to be “together”) nor by the New Left radicals (all
of whom were socialists of some description). So far as anything in the Sixties can be blamed
for the demise of the compound entity of society, it was the natural desire of the “masses” to
lead easier, pleasanter lives, own their own homes, follow their own fancies and, as far as
possible, move out of the communal collective completely.
The truth of the matter is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of the Fifties had
broken down, there was nothing – apart from, in the last resort, money – holding Western
civilisation together. Indeed, the very labour-saving domestic appliances launched onto the
market by the Sixties consumer boom speeded the melt-down of communality by allowing
people to function in a private world, segregated from each other by TVs, telephones, hi-fi
systems, washing machines and home cookers. It is no accident that Mrs Thatcher should
have founded her outlook on the conviction that society does not exist – and no surprise that
her favourite Sixties tune is “Telstar” by the Tornados, a record symbolising the rise of
technology-driven post-war prosperity and mass social emancipation. She and her radicalised
post-consensus Conservative voters are the true heirs of the Sixties. They changed the world,
not the hippies (and certainly not the New Left). What mass society unconsciously began in
the Sixties, Thatcher and Reagan raised to the level of ideology in the Eighties: the complete
materialistic individualisation – and the total fragmentation – of Western society.
The destabilising social and psychological evolution witnessed since the Sixties stems
chiefly from the success of affluence and technology in realising the desires of ordinary
people. The countercultural elements usually blamed for this were, in fact, resisting an
endemic process of disintegration with its roots in scientific materialism. Far from adding to
this fragmentation, they aimed to replace it with a new social order based on either love-and-
peace or a vague anarchistic European version of revolutionary Maoism. When contemporary
right-wing pundits attack the Sixties, they identify a momentous overall development, but
ascribe it to the very forces which most strongly reacted against it. The counterculture was
less an agent of chaos than a marginal commentary, a passing attempt to propose alternatives
to a waning civilisation.
Ironically, the harshest critics of the Sixties are its most direct beneficiaries: the
political voices of materialistic individualism. Their recent contribution to the accelerated
social breakdown inaugurated in the Sixties – economic Darwinism wrapped in socio-cultural
prejudices – has not helped matters. Yet, even the New Right cannot be held responsible for
the multifocal and fragmented techno-decadence into which the First World is currently
sinking. If the Sixties seem like a golden age to us – radically disunited, dominated by and
addicted to gadgets, our raison d’être and sense of communality unfixably broken – it is on
account of the fact that the hippies’ unfashionable perception that we can change the world
only by changing ourselves looks in retrospect like a last gasp of the Western soul.

Literature: Ian MacDonald: Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties,
Pimlico, London, 1995.