1960S Rock and R'n'b

Chapter Seven 1960s rock and R’n’B The 1960s counterculture was made up of two distinct groups, writes John Orman. What he calls the ‘dope culture’ used rock music simply for ‘lighting up, boogying, making love, and relieving boredom’. The ‘rock culture’, on the other hand, took the music more seriously, considering it, in his words, ‘the mechanism that would help form a new, alternative culture that would go “back to the land”, live communally, “do dope”, and try new sexual relationships while ignor- ing the establishment’ (Orman 1984: 158). For this faction, rock musicians led the rejection of conservative ideas regarding sexuality, family, work and consumption; what the Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner summed up in the song ‘Hijack’, on his album Blows Against the Empire (1970), as the demand for ‘free minds, free dope, free bodies, free music’. Expressed in this way, the preoccupations of the counterculture were largely humanist and anthropocentric. Yet allied to these concerns was a mystical view of the natural world that bordered on pantheism, shared by many musicians, with the notable exception, as we shall see, of Frank Zappa. ‘Flower power’ was a Romantic desire to return to what was perceived as a simpler, more natural form of social life based on the communal patterns of premodern tribal societies. The rock music associated with the hippie counterculture was integral to this newly emerging subculture of New Age environmentalism. Moreover, several of the leading figures in the sixties rock scene went on to become environmental activists in the decades that followed. Joe McDonald became involved in animal rights and whale conservation; after two decades of environmental activism in his own locality, Ed Sanders of The Fugs founded the Woodstock Journal in 1995 with his wife, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders; Stewart Brand, former member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who put on a taped music and slide show called ‘America Needs Indians Sensorium’ at the Trips Festival in San Francisco in January 1966, founded the 120 The Jukebox in the Garden Whole Earth Catalogue in the fall of 1968, and in 1996 became a founder member of the Long Now Foundation, dedicated to promoting long-term thinking about the future of global ecosystems (Brand 1999). Yet the nascent environmentalist critique produced by the rock counterculture was limited and contradictory, in that rock culture also stood for hedonism, individualism, egocentricity, escapism and consu- merist fashion: values largely antithetical to radical environmentalism. Moreover, its adherence to a pastoral ideal of nature mystified questions of technology and economics, while its commitment to idealist notions of social change, particularly shaped by a naive faith in the trans- formative powers of both rock music and LSD, prevented the emergence of a more trenchant, materialist understanding of American society. In addition, the counterculture’s inherent elitism, evident in its stress on youth as the new agents of revolution, and its consequent polarisation of society into the ‘hip’ and the ‘square’, prevented its members from addressing their own complicity in consumer society, and took the place of a more potentially radical questioning of class and racial division in the United States. It also made youth culture easily assimilable into the conservative discourses of the mass media (Cantwell 1996: 307-8; Frank 1997: 14). Consequently, in the 1960s, as Eric Mottram put it, the ‘energy of the searching young in America remained depoliticised and exploited’ (1988: 215). Rock songs, writes Robert Pattison, ‘are either about the ideal triumph of self as it moves to encompass more territory or about the splenetic self-questioning that accompanies failure of this goal’ (1987: 110). In the ‘secular pantheism’ of the rock performer, it is as if the self expands to embrace the whole universe. According to the Romantic anarchist politics of the counterculture, lifting social repressions would liberate the essential creativity and goodness of this autonomous, individual self. For poet Allen Ginsberg, the cosmic self apparently revealed by LSD prefigured a new ecological relationship with one’s environment. Most ‘acid’ mysticism was vague and egocentric, typified by the admonishment to ‘feed your head’ in the Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ (1967a). That LSD culture focused on such an Alice-in- Wonderland trips of individual self-discovery, rather than on the formation of a wider social and ecological self, was a problem that Ginsberg strove to address in his writings in this period. .

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