Electric Shock by Peter Doggett

Author:Peter Doggett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448130313
Publisher: Random House

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fn1 John Lennon was criticised by black cultural commentators in 1965, after he told Time magazine: ‘We can sing more coloured16 than the Africans.’

fn2 In 1970, soul singer Percy Sledge toured South Africa. His show in Cape Town was ruled to be an event for non-whites only, so his white fans had to adopt blackface or masquerade as Muslims to gain admittance.

fn3 As an example of how far the music of 1966–7 could range, and still count as ‘pop’, compare Herman’s Hermits’ ‘East-West’ with the performance of the same name by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

fn4 Another pop myth to question: Capitol Records did not sabotage the release of Pet Sounds, as the group came to believe. It was promoted just as heavily as any of their previous releases.

fn5 The bill also included the Latin soul-influenced 19-year-old genius (I do not use the word lightly) Laura Nyro. Her set passed into rock history as an ill-judged disaster. The mesmerising footage of her ‘Poverty Train’ suggests otherwise.

fn6 I once asked keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, who’d been guesting with a later incarnation of the Grateful Dead, how the band communicated with each other on stage. Were there agreed signals to announce a transition from one song to the next? Hornsby smiled, and said: ‘If there are any signals, they’ve never told me what they are.’

fn7 Jones later posed for a publicity photograph in a Nazi uniform, crushing a doll beneath one of his jackboots. ‘The sense of it is that49 there is no sense in it at all’, he explained gleefully.

fn8 The Who were the first rock group to admit the danger of loud music in confined spaces. ‘It’s beginning to affect51 our eardrums’, Pete Townshend said in early 1966, while Roger Daltrey added: ‘You’d be surprised how many52 people in groups get trouble with their hearing.’ By 1967, doctors in the US were warning that music in nightclubs was ‘very likely causing temporary or even permanent hearing loss’.

fn9 So panic-stricken did these moral guardians become that rumours rapidly ballooned into facts. There was horror when it was suggested in early 1967 that some stations were in possession of a shocking new Beatles song called ‘Suicide’. One of the ringleaders of the anti-smut campaign claimed to have seen the lyrics for the Beatles’ soon-to-be-released ‘A Day in the Life’, including a reference to ‘40,000 purple hearts56 in one arm’. Neither the quotation nor the awareness of narcotic etiquette was accurate.

fn10 The Airplane’s brain-food included arguably the least commercial hit record of 1967: ‘Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil’, in which A. A. Milne sat with Timothy Leary while feedback howled around their ears.

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