“When Sgt. Pepper was released in June, it was a major cultural event,” Ian MacDonald wrote in Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and The Sixties. “Young and old alike were entranced.”
Attending a party with a group of rich older women, EMI boss Sir Joseph Lockwood found them so ‘thrilled’ by the album that they sat on the floor after dinner singing extracts from it. In America normal radio-play was virtually suspended for several days, only tracks from Sgt. Pepper being played. An almost religious awe surrounded the LP. Paul Kantner of the San Francisco acid rock band Jefferson Airplane remembers how The Byrds’ David Crosby brought a tape of Sgt. Pepper to their Seattle hotel and played it all night in the lobby with a hundred young fans listening quietly on the stairs, as if rapt by a spiritual experience. “Something,” says Kantner, “enveloped the whole world at that time and it just exploded into a renaissance.”
MacDonald added that “the album’s sound—in particular its use of various forms of echo and reverb—remains the most authentic aural simulation of the psychedelic experience ever created. At the same time, something else dwells in it: a distillation of the spirit of 1967 as it was felt by vast numbers across the Western world who had never taken drugs in their lives.”
If such a thing as a cultural “contact high” is possible, it happened here. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band may not have created the psychic atmosphere of the time but, as a near-perfect reflection of it, this famous record magnified and radiated it around the world.
Robyn Hitchcock, like a million other teenagers, dwelled intensely in the “psychic atmosphere” of that year, and in his new memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, he’s assembled a lovely, evocative, characteristically quirky portal back to that heady time. He wrote 1967 on his phone during sleepless hours between midnight and dawn, his supportive cats Ringo and Tubby nearby, and from the first word to the last he’s graphically in touch with the “contact high” that MacDonald describes, flitting in his memory from one signal event to another as 1966 turns over to ‘67.
Hitchcock writes in the present tense in 1967, an unusual move in autobiography, and crucial here: the odd flashback aside, we experience nearly everything as the teenage Hitchcock does, leaving his comfortable if emotionally fraught home for Winchester College, a Victorian-era boarding school sixty miles from London, all of the weirdness, sorrow, and bliss he experiences there as tactile for the reader as it was—as it is—for the writer/rememberer. Occasionally, Hitchcock alludes to experiences, both good and bad, that his years at boarding school will provide him in his adult years, but those are furtive, forward glances, as it were; the real action in 1967 occurs moment by moment as Hitchcock, his days soundtracked by exploding, multi-colored pop music and new ideas, works his way, skeptically and shyly, from teenager to adult.
Midway through the book, commenting on Bob Dylan’s preternatural alertness to life’s dark mysteries, Hitchcock observes that “surreal awareness is where compassion of a kind can grow.” Sympathetic kindness is shot through Hitchcock’s memories of certain family members—his sister and a patient and hip Granny, in particular, though not his emotionally distant mother—and many of his teachers, eccentrics in the classic English manner whom Hitchcock studied with a teenager’s blend of ironic distance and instinctive kindness. In one poignant passage, he imagines two of his “betters,” Miss Duplock, a desolate spinster medical aide, and Hodges, a phys ed instructor—both loners, both Winchester lifers—as a romantic pair separated by the War and other melodramas, both pouring out their hearts to each other in letters, which Hitchcock recreates for us. Dotted throughout 1967 are small illustrations, presumably by the author, of balloons with faces of many of the figures from the book. The balloons allude to a tradition with his mates at school, but are also moving images for the light-as-air presence of memory itself; let go of those recollections and they’re off forever into the ether.
“An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” So wrote George Orwell.
Hitchcock’s nodding along. Like nearly every memoir, 1967 is about family as much as it’s about anything else, as it’s nearly impossible to write about one’s life without some reckoning of how that life was shaped by family dynamics. Though Hitchcock’s parents were relatively well off, unspoken pain worked its way through the dailiness. “There was a lot of space to play in, to dream things up,” he writes. “The dreams weren’t always comforting, but what is? My father was working off his nightmares, and I was working on mine.” In addition to his father’s grave war wound and his mother’s curious distance, Hitchcock discloses that he is on the autistic spectrum (high-functioning Asperger’s), and one can only wonder about the challenges that posed for him growing up in his era, and he admits to suffering from the occasional, unbidden, nearly uncontrollable compulsion to destroy his own possessions, including, in one instance, his beloved guitars. This dark tendency of his is mentioned only in passing, as a kind of curiosity, but muddies the waters.
I thought about Orwell’s essay “Such, Such were the Joys…” while reading 1967. Published after Orwell’s death for fear of libel, the essay is a blistering—some have said exaggerated—account of his years at the St Cyprian’s preparatory school, which he attended between the ages of eight and thirteen. Hitchcock’s memories of Winchester are nowhere near as unhappy as Orwell’s were of his boarding school, yet Orwell’s dry recollections of the English education system is a kind of transparency that settles over 1967.
“A child may be a mass of egoism and rebelliousness,” Orwell wrote, “but it has no accumulated experience to give it confidence in its own judgements. On the whole it will accept what it is told, and it will believe in the most fantastic way in the knowledge and powers of the adults surrounding it.” In the essay’s famous concluding lines, Orwell wrote that if he were to return to the school as an adult, he would feel “what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!” Hitchcock’s memories of Winchester are generally affectionate, in part because he remains an early teen, when the world dazzles every day with some new head-lifting experience. But he, too, felt keenly the gap between his teachers’ benighted, entrenched superiority and his own growing, confident sense of his environment.
Unsurprisingly, Dylan is Hitchcock’s favorite teacher. “It’s pretty clear to me that Dylan knows the meaning of life if anybody does,” he marvels.
He has momentum, direction, intuition—wisdom. My elders and betters—teachers and parents, people who drive cars and look compromised—they have experience and they call the shots: they decide where you live and where you go, and until recently they told you when to go to bed, too. But they haven’t seen to the bottom of the barrel the way Dylan has: they haven’t glimpsed the fundamental pointlessness of everything. Or if the have, they can’t acknowledge it.
Later, Hitchcock tosses off one of his most brutal, cutting lines: “One of the main functions of private education in Britain is to stunt people emotionally and then send them out to run the country.”
Did I mention music? It’s everywhere in the memoir, on turntables in the Winchester dorms and dusty common rooms (and once in a hiding place under the floor), on the radio, in Hitchcock’s knocked-out heart and mind. Music rises to the surface of the book as it does in Hitchcock’s alert perceptions, stray lines, a melody hook, or a galvanizing voice catching his attention and inspiring him to believe that these artists—there’s a new one every week, it seems—somehow posses the keys to the meaning of life, are singing about it, but in a language that Hitchcock only half comprehends.
Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, the Incredible String Band—the groups all line up dutifully and look the familiar part in 1967, but because we’re experiencing them for the first time along with Hitchcock, all of the Classic Rock, of-the-era dust is blown away, a magic trick of sorts that Hitchcock performs. We’re left with, and we share, the vibrations of strange, psychedelic newness pulsing through Hitchcock and his mates, some of whom are dubious, more of whom are as enraptured as he is. (Brian Eno, with his blue sunglasses worn indoors at “Happenings” and his receding hairline, also makes a few mind-bending cameos in 1967, but because he’s remained weird, we don’t need him refreshed for us.)
Throughout, Hitchcock’s rightly suspicious of his own memories, yet he intrinsically trusts them too, the great paradox of the memoirist. “Oh, what can you remember?” he writes early in the book. “It bends itself to suit you, as much as it can: the facts are sleeping in the cellar of memory. You can fish them up, dormant mackerel of the soul; to swim once again in the pond of your consciousness; but somebody else is going to recall those mackerel differently from you.” Elsewhere, in one of several italicized “break in” passages in which he writes from the present, Hitchcock admits that “looking back from the other end of life I feel amazed and a tad envious: who the fuck was I, this teenage creature?”, adding humorously, “I’m in this narrative from a time so remote that it might as well be a historical novel.”
Music was literally in the air. In one of my favorite passages, Hitchcock describes a disused pigsty on his parents’ land. “What did we do down there, my sister and me and our occasional friends? We wheeled the radio in its pram, of course, and made small bonfires, on which my sister cooked stinging-nettle soup. If there were enough of us we played hide-and-seek. When it rained we took shelter under the one remaining pigsty roof; hearing the Beatles sing ‘From Me to You’ still transports me back to that dark, musty pig boudoir.” Memoir ignites when an ordinary detail, recollected and filtered through desire, becomes something larger. The radio in that pram! Just a fact of charming mid-60s British country life, of course, but also such a charged image, the infant Beatles, minded by two knocked-out, maturing kids, poised to grow into adulthood and change the world. (Robyn hid a stack of dirty magazines in that pigsty, too, but that’s a story for another memoir.)
Describing the cover of the Incredible String Band’s The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, pictured below, Hitchcock writes how it “sums up everything I love about how 1967 is going so far. The saturated joy of it, the intricacy: everything seems to be turning into something else when you look at it closely; which, for me, is what defines psychedelia. My heart pulses like a minnow.”
Hitchcock ends 1967 with a bit of Boomer defensiveness, acknowledging that kids “reaching adolescence in the age of Harry Styles surely feel as intensely as we did,” yet also wondering “if they feel as intense about the music made now as we did about its hippie ancestors.” I marvel, as millions have and still do, about the blinding speed with which pop, R&B, and folk music evolved in the mid-60s, each week delivering a stack of new singles and albums that, as they say in the U.K., pinned back listeners’ ears, soundtracking new and thrilling ways of perceiving the world and ourselves, rendering old media lifeless. Hitchcock writes, marvelously, that Hendrix “plays a guitar solo such as my radio was never designed to reproduce.”
“The psychic shiver which Sgt. Pepper sent through the word was nothing less than a cinematic dissolve from one Zeitgeist to another,” MacDonald wrote in Revolution in the Head. Thirteen year-old Hitchcock, having listened to “Strawberry Fields Forever” for the first time, gazing, mystified, at the 45 as it rotates on a turntable in a common room, reflects, “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.” That observation—so simple, so revealing—is the heartbeat of 1967.
Though he pals around with his sister and his friends, Hitchcock cuts a bit of a loner figure in the book, I guess because while reading we’re solidly encased (one of Hitchcock’s favorite words) in his solitary, reflective pov, and also: when you’re thirteen, fourteen you begin to define yourself in opposition to others.
Two passages really resonated with me:
I wish I had a girlfriend. I wish I had a friend, really. I’m a teenager and I’ll stay one for the rest of my life.
…
Regardless, I’m grateful that the stopped clock of 1967 ticks on in me—it’s given me a job for life.
In his charming and affecting memoir, Hitchcock navigates the distance between those two poles—loneliness at one end, gratitude at the other.
“St Catherine’s Hill and Winchester College” via Creative Commons
“Robyn Hitchcock, #14” by Thomas Hawk via Flickr
The Incredible String Band, The 5000 spirits or the layers of the onion (Elektra 1967) by Svenn Sivertssen via Flickr
I greatly enjoyed reading your piece and it's intrigued me enough to look at buying his book.
I'm younger than Robyn by a couple years, and in 1967 I could sense that I was missing out on something the teens were into, but wasn't sure exactly what it was. It was scary and yet terribly exciting. There was something in the air -- you knew it because your parents were always ranting about those long-hairs and hippies and beatniks. Delicious! I was into the Monkees and songs like Incense and Peppermints for its crazy lyrics, but too young to really appreciate Sgt Pepper's. I had to catch up later.
Robyn is probably not far wrong when he claims "One of the main functions of private education in Britain is to stunt people emotionally and then send them out to run the country.” That was true during the Empire, and I'd say it's true now as well. As someone who lived in the UK for almost two decades and just returned recently, I could write a book on what I experienced and witnessed in terms of people who had been to private and boarding schools. The damage done to kids shunted off to boarding school to be raised in an institution is an issue I have studied as a psychologist, and it is heart-breaking to see people struggling with that abandonment for the rest of their lives. (Not to mention the allegations of physical and sexual abuse by teachers and fellow students that keep popping up.) These schools also entrench the class system in Britain, and I didn't realize until I worked there how defining and limiting this system is for everyone, including foreigners (who by definition have a lower status, including Americans). Being quirky and idiosyncratic is an excellent strategy for bypassing the system and doing your own thing, which is why I think people at all levels use it. There is also an enormous cost to this system, which you can see by looking at how ridiculously incompetent the politicans in the UK are running the country. That's another topic that I would write a book about, but it's already been done!
Hot damn, a great essay and so, so true to 1967 and all that went before beginning in 1963. The exchange and excitement of music between the US and the UK was huge. Though I'm American and a bit older than Hitchcock, he describes beautifully the importance of those years. Re McDonald, I think his intro to "Revolution in the Head" 3rd edition, which also has Prefaces to both the first and second editions of his book, is one of the best essays about the changes brought about in the 1960s. I will read Hitchcock's book for sure. Thanks, Joe.