1966: the year youth culture exploded | Culture | The Guardian

7/23/2019 1966: the year youth culture exploded | Culture | The Guardian

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Page 1 of 11http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/nov/15/1966-trip-good-vibrations-pop-revolution

1966: the year youth culture exploded

25 March 1966, the Jefferson Airplane and the Mystery Trend played a rock & roll

dance benefitin 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.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/sixtiesprotest/berkeley.htmhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0http://hrmediaarchive.estuarypress.com/vietnam-day-committee-march-october-1965/http://www.chickenonaunicycle.com/Harmon%2019660325-1.jpeg


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Movementand much more, summed up by the phrase a deluge of filth.

Six days after the Examiner article, Ronald Reagan took the stage of the Cow Palace todeliver 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; pro-

self-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
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674779419https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/sixties/resources/ronald-reagan-unrest-college-campuses-1967http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/sixtiesprotest/berkeley.htm


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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

societyhad 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.

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. Theywere beginning to envision what the future might be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5bUmx-hk-chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdt0SOqPJcghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EaflX0MWRohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvTczyHxNHchttp://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/05/17/the-great-society-at-50/


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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.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/beach-boys


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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, butnot 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 designsof cavernous new discotheques like NewYorks 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 SquareGarden 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 Carmichaellaunched 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 TomorrowNever 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyY6ytsVzH4http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/stokely-carmichaelhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpFSD2H2SsIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBfnukdsmSshttp://www.op-art.co.uk/op-art-fashion/http://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-butcher-cover/


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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 forwhom the rate of change was too quick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdt0SOqPJcg


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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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More than any other year thus far in that decade, it was the time when that increasinglyassertive 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 culturebacklash 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 riotswas 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.
http://www.examiner.com/article/riot-on-sunset-strip-the-1966-hippie-curfew-riots


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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

SNCCand 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.
http://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/321212/s/1966-the-year-the-decade-exploded/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3654235/The-swinging-Sixties--anthony-howard-reviews-White-Heat-A-History-of-Britain-in-the-Swinging-Sixties-BY-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-was-there-he-can-remember-them-and-he-relives-the-decade-through-this-anecdotal-portrait.htmlhttp://microformguides.gale.com/Data/Introductions/20230FM.htmhttp://now.org/about/who-we-are/http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_southern_christian_leadership_conference_sclc/http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/sncc

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1966: the year youth culture exploded | Culture | The Guardian