The Spiritual Meaning of the Sixties by Tobias Churton

Author:Tobias Churton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Occult History
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2018-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 17.5. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, 1968.

There is in the psychedelic movement, with its popular wing in flower power emerging suddenly in late ’66 and ’67, the semblance of a spiritual movement.

It is not simply the case that improvements in pop were only perceived to be occurring. Expert musicologists were noticing too. At the end of 1963, William Mann, in the pages of the highly conservative Times, heralded Lennon and McCartney as composers of songs as dynamic as Franz Schubert’s. This was something, because there was much competition for the top spot where songwriting was concerned. Richard Rodgers was still going; so were Lerner and Loewe. So was Lionel Bart with his magnificent success in Oliver. And Bacharach and David, of course. Mann had noticed something. It was new. And he heard it first on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, with its state-of-the-art black-and-white cover (released November 1963, on EMI’s Parlophhone label). So many more started to listen to those vaunted “Aeolian cadences” and “pandiatonic clusters” and started to try harder, and get into the swing of the new thing. The progressive drive forward propelled everything onward: surely this was Progress. No one knew where “it” was going, least of all the Beatles, who just kept on running and grinning as if they knew something. And they just kept getting better, with George Martin’s deft encouragement and genial creative touches. Never too much, Martin never smothered “the Boys” but listened and suggested and helped, made wonders possible, because those boys were really so instinctively intelligent and had a natural gift for form and beauty, and truthfulness of expression—and sheer, patient-impatient hard work where the music was concerned.

After William Mann came Leonard Bernstein in 1967 as we saw in the last chapter. He singled out “Surf’s Up” played by Brian Wilson in 1967 for his (then) unfinished masterpiece, Smile, just at the tragic point when a poor, bedevilled Brian was succumbing to surfeit of psychedelic substance in his system, coupled with longstanding personal problems, and perhaps most destructive of his sensitivity of all, the uncompreheding hostility shown to his latest music by several key figures in his entourage, themselves narrow-mindedly worried that the risktaking new music and especially (to them) odd lyrics would lose them hard-earned cash and status. Oh ye of little faith! But Lenny Bernstein told America that pop was now a serious form of music—though not all of it, of course. One forgets how much really bad or banal, or thin, or stupid or second-rate music came out on vinyl throughout the decade, but the best was something else, no doubt of it. And Bernstein advised Americans to get ready for strange things, and do the artists the courtesy of a fair hearing and a graceful welcome. Genius was at work, and it had long hair and might look scruffy or unusual. Artistic Bohemia, which had always represented a refuge, or getaway from straight society, now seemed to be getting back in; here was the problem.

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