Stranger Than We Can Imagine (27 page)

Rock ’n’ Roll had been slowly developing over a number of decades, with its roots reaching deep into the rhythm and blues, jazz, country and blues music of the southern United States. As a cultural phenomenon it was a product of the perfect storm of teenage energy that occurred in the mid-1950s. It was music aimed directly at white teenagers with disposable income and a desire to cut loose and have a good time. It fuelled the adoption of the electric guitar and the new seven-inch 45 rpm vinyl single format, which RCA introduced in 1949.

Television censors insisted that Elvis could only be filmed from the waist up because the mere sight of him was overtly sexual. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll [is] insistent savagery,’ declared the 1956
Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook
, ‘deliberately competing with the artistic ideals of the jungle.’ The name ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’ itself was first used, in the early twentieth century, both as a euphemism for sex and also
as a description of the waves of spiritual fervour in black gospel churches.

The music itself was an expression of ecstasy and as such was simultaneously sexual and spiritual. Its sexual nature was apparent in its lyrics. The first thing we are told about the eponymous heroine of Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ is that ‘she sure love to ball’. But it was also evident beyond the lyrics, lurking in the music itself. The FBI undertook a two-year investigation into The Kings-men’s rock standard ‘Louie Louie’. They attempted to decipher the song’s slurred but innocent lyrics. The FBI’s prosecutor LeRoy New eventually concluded that the lyrics were fine, but the music itself was lascivious and filthy. He described the song as ‘an abomination of out-of-tune guitars, an overbearing jungle rhythm and clanging cymbals’, but admitted that the obscenity laws ‘just didn’t reckon with dirty sounds’.

The best records generated a sense of direct revelation and communion, not filtered through the restricting middle man of the Church, and recognised the teenager’s ever-present hormonal lust. Rock ’n’ Roll from the 1950s, and the rock music that followed, generated a sense of undefined joy and a desire to share that experience with your sweetheart. The chorus to ‘The Wagon’ by the American band Dinosaur Jr distils it into two words: ‘Baby woweee’.

Little Richard was a cross-dressing, makeup-wearing bisexual black guy, and something of a challenge for the older conservative generation. He did at least make some attempt to tone down the sexual nature of his work. A discarded early draft of the lyrics for ‘Tutti Frutti’, for example, included the helpful advice, ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy.’ But Little Richard also had a spiritual side. He quit secular Rock ’n’ Roll for the life of a pastor after being deeply affected by the sight of a bright red fireball streaking across the sky during a concert in Australia in 1957. That fireball was almost certainly the launch of Sputnik 1.

At the end of the 1950s, a string of unrelated events conspired to remove almost all of the first generation of Rock ’n’ Roll stars
from the stage. Little Richard defected to the Church, Elvis Presley enlisted in the US Army, Jerry Lee Lewis was engulfed in a scandal following his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, and Chuck Berry was arrested for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines. His legal case would drag out over the next couple of years, resulting in his being jailed in 1962. More tragically, a light aircraft carrying Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly crashed in Iowa on 3 February 1959, killing all three musicians and the pilot. This event would become immortalised in the Don McLean song ‘American Pie’ as ‘the day the music died’.

This sudden loss of most of the major players in an artistic movement was an event without parallel, and it seemed that the Rock ’n’ Roll ‘fad’ would never recover. But the circumstances which generated the demand for a new teenage culture had not changed, and the next generation of bands soon arrived to fill the void. The musicians of the 1960s were able to grow rock music in ways that would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. The unintended ‘scorched earth’ effect caused by the loss of the first generation left behind a very rich soil indeed.

Keith Richards, the lead guitarist of The Rolling Stones, begins his autobiography with an account of a run-in with Arkansas police in 1975. Richards admits he knew he shouldn’t have risked driving through the Southern Bible Belt. There had been controversy about the Stones being granted American visas for their tour, not least because of Richards’s record for drug-related offences. The band’s lawyers had warned him that Southern cops were itching to bust him. Yet he chose to ignore the danger and set off in a brand-new yellow Chevrolet Impala, laden down with a quantity of dope, pills, peyote and coke which even he considered excessive.

Richards was pulled over and taken to a police station in the tiny town of Fordyce, where a legal standoff developed. As the media and lawyers gathered, the police petitioned a judge for the legal right to open a suitcase of cocaine they found in his trunk. During all this he did his best to discard, or divert attention away from, the drugs
hidden in his hat, about his person, and behind the door panels of his car. Richards could have opened his book with an anecdote about the success and acclaim that The Rolling Stones achieved, or about his deep lifelong love of American blues. Instead, he set the tone for his story with this farcical collision with the conservative legal establishment.

As he makes clear, he had no need to travel with all those drugs. He had cleaned up for the tour and ‘wasn’t taking the heavy shit at the time’. It would have been far safer to keep any drugs he did want with the rest of the band’s equipment. Yet despite knowing how dangerous it would be, and having no need to do so, he loaded the car up with illegal substances and drove across Arkansas.

In the 1955 movie
The Wild One
, the young biker played by Marlon Brando was asked, ‘Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘What have you got?’ he replies. He was, like the title character of the James Dean movie released the same year, a rebel without a cause. Their attitude was encapsulated in the 1966 B-movie
The Wild Angels
, in a conversation between an older minister and a young outlaw played by Peter Fonda. ‘Just what is it that you want to do?’ asks the minister. ‘We want to be free, we want to be free to do what we want to do,’ Fonda replies. ‘We want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man. And we want to get loaded, and we want to have a good time. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have a good time. We’re going to have a party.’

This was Richards’s attitude, which he summed up concisely with the statement, ‘We needed to do what we wanted to do.’ This was also Freud’s id speaking, loud and uninhibited, unconcerned with society or anyone else except itself. It might have been easy to intellectually argue against such an attitude, but that didn’t change the fact that repercussion-free individualism
felt great
.

During their mid-Sixties and early-Seventies heyday, The Rolling Stones symbolised the spirit of rebellious youth. They were ‘bad boys’, an unwholesome dangerous group that stood in contrast to the family appeal of The Beatles. They personified unrepentant individualism on a collision course with the staid establishment, not
least because of the high-profile court case that followed the arrests of band members Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones for drug offences. Keith Richards’s reputation for taking excessive amounts of drugs without dropping dead made him a rock god. To their young audience in the 1960s, The Rolling Stones represented freedom without consequences.

A predominant theme in the songs of The Rolling Stones was desiring, demanding or wanting. Mick Jagger would sing of how ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, or about how ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. Compare this to the music of The Beatles. The attitude of ‘I want’ is relatively rare in their songs. When it does appear, in songs such as ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ or ‘I Want to Tell You’, it indicates desire for human contact rather than a simple demand. The Beatles song that was written for The Rolling Stones, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, was also a plea for human contact, but one expressed in a more straightforward, demanding attitude than other Beatles songs. As Richards notes, ‘[The Beatles] deliberately aimed [that song] at us. They’re songwriters, they are trying to flog their songs, it’s Tin Pan Alley, and they thought this song would suit us.’

The Rolling Stones were consciously acting in the tradition of the ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ philosophy of Aleister Crowley and Ayn Rand. They employed satanic imagery in songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and albums like
Their Satanic Majesties Request
. They are known for the unashamed commercialism of their high ticket prices, Mick Jagger’s admiration of Margaret Thatcher, and the manner in which their lawyers went after the song-writing royalties for ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ by The Verve, on the grounds that the band had used a previously cleared Rolling Stones sample excessively. Musically the band remained resolutely conservative, sticking with Richards’s beloved blues tradition rather than branching out in more experimental directions. Many people were surprised when William Rees-Mogg, the famously right-wing editor of
The Times
, came out in support of The Rolling Stones during their trial for drug offences in an editorial memorably entitled ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’ But Rees-Mogg and The Rolling Stones were not,
perhaps, as politically different as they might first appear.

If the attitude of The Rolling Stones can be boiled down to ‘I want’, then what is the philosophy of The Beatles? This was most clearly expressed in their contribution to
Our World
, the first global television broadcast which was broadcast to 400 million people in twenty-six countries in 1967 to celebrate the launch of a string of communication satellites. The Beatles performed a new, specially written song called ‘All You Need Is Love’. Their career began with songs like ‘She Loves You’ and ‘Love Me Do’, and ended with Paul McCartney singing about how the love you take is equal to the love you make.

If The Rolling Stones were about
I want
, then The Beatles were about
love
. This did not mean that The Beatles were against material wealth. Their attitude to money can be seen in the scathing song
Taxman
, or in the quote, commonly ascribed to Paul McCartney, about how he and John Lennon would sit down and purposefully ‘write [themselves] a swimming pool’. But judging by the evidence of their recorded output, material things were a secondary concern in The Beatles’ philosophy.

The idea that ‘all you need is love’ was a product of the hippy counterculture of the mid- to late 1960s, and was strongly influenced by the band’s interest in LSD and other psychedelic drugs. LSD did not give the user anything, but it amplified what already existed. This was not always pleasurable, so it was necessary to ensure that the circumstances surrounding taking the drug, the so-called ‘set and setting’, were favourable and positive. But the hippies were prepared to take that risk, because the drug offered a way of looking at the world that they found inspiring and rewarding.

One problem with the drug was that users would afterwards find the perspective change they experienced frustratingly difficult to describe or explain. LSD was very different to drugs like cocaine or alcohol, which are isolating and reinforce individualism. Perhaps the only thing that could be said with some certainty about psychedelic awareness was that it was very different to the individualistic outlook of ‘I want’. The Rolling Stones may have had a brief
LSD-inspired psychedelic period, which produced their 1967 single ‘We Love You’, but they followed this up with
Their Satanic Majesties Request
a few months later.

LSD caused the user to see themselves not just as a self-contained and isolated individual entity, but as an integral part of something bigger. But explaining what this bigger thing was proved problematic, and resulted in the hippies talking vaguely of ‘connection’ and of how ‘everything was one’. In this they were similar to the modernists, attempting to find a language with which to communicate a new, wider perspective. The hippies turned to Eastern religions, which they learnt about from American Beats like Allen Ginsberg and English writers like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. They tried describing their experiences in co-opted Buddhist and Hindu terms, but none of those ancient metaphors were entirely satisfactory in the modern technological age. As vague and simplistic as it may have sounded, it was simpler to fall back on the most universal non-individualist emotion to describe their experience: love. It was for this reason that the 1967 flowering of the psychedelic culture became known as the Summer of Love.

The emotion of love is an act of personal identification with an external other, when the awareness of that person is so overwhelming that any illusion of separation between the two collapses. There is a reason why the biblical term for physical love was ‘to know’ someone. As such it is distinctly different from the isolating individualism so dominant in the rest of the century. What it is not, however, is an easily extendable organisational principle that can readily be applied to society as a whole.

Christianity had done its best to promote love during the previous two centuries. The Church ordered its followers to love, through commandments such as ‘love thy neighbour’, as if this was reasonable or possible. But ordering people to love was about as realistic as ordering people not to love. Love just doesn’t work that way, and it doesn’t inspire the confidence in the Church that it seemed to think it did. It is noticeable that the more individualistic strains of American Christianity, which bucked the global trend of declining
congregations, put less emphasis on that faith’s original teachings about love and social justice.

The love culture of the hippies was brought low by the ego-fuelling cocaine culture of the 1970s and 80s. Attempts at describing a non-individualistic perspective were dismissed for being drug-induced, and therefore false. The hippies’ stumbling attempts to describe their new awareness had been too vague and insubstantial to survive these attacks and they were written off as embarrassing failures by the punks. Yet slowly, over the decades that followed, many of their ideas seeped into the cultural mainstream.