Year Zero: 1966

The music critic Ian MacDonald once recalled 1966 as the high point of popular music, and he is not the only one.Footnote ⁶ Jon Savage, an English writer, broadcaster and music journalist best known for his influential book on the history of punk, England's Dreaming, belonged to the same generation, and seems to recall 1966 in similar terms.Footnote ⁷ Savage's 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded explores the popular music of 1966 in the shadow of cultural turmoil, arguing that it had a cultural valence beyond the world of entertainment, and placing it at the centre of a cultural history of that year.

The twelve-month period between January and December of 1966 represents a kind of metaphorical tipping point, extending to vast areas of British life. It was the year in which Alf Ramsey's doughty gladiators ‘brought football home’ to its birth country, while contriving to win a figurative Third World War against their opponent, West Germany, along the way. It was also the year in which the Labour Party claimed its biggest electoral victory since the Attlee landslide of 1945. Popular music, as Savage reminds us, was also tantalizingly poised between the Beat explosion of 1963–65, mod cacophonies, and the psychedelic ‘wig-outs’ inaugurated by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the early summer of 1967.

In his book, Savage's main aim is to explore what happens when political culture and popular music intersect during the 1960s. Savage attempts to establish connections between rock music and politics and the emerging of youth protest subcultures, exploring the various events and themes of 1966 in twelve essays, each based upon one ‘single’ and a few cultural and political events that occurred in the same month it was released. He argues that debates about the meaning and legacy of the 1960s in general, and its popular protest music in particular, should include a consideration of the nature of 1966 as a key year that not only continues to define us today but also remains insistently with us for better or worse. Furthermore, Savage argues that it is the music of 1966 in particular that could give us an understanding of the radical nature of the decade, and only after examining it should we consider the most significant aspect of the 1960s: its social and cultural activism. Taking into account this argument, it is unfortunate that Savage does not mention the social and economic problems of that ‘wonderful year’ (204) in Britain, ignoring certain dark sides of 1966: poverty, inequality, and an ingrained class system. For example, he does not write about the seamen's strike, a national strike that aimed to secure higher wages and less working hours, causing great disruption to shipping, nor does he refer to the beginning of the economic recession, which lasted until the 1980s. The most terrible tragedy of 1966, the Aberfan disaster in Wales, which killed 116 children and 28 adults, is only briefly mentioned in the book (464–5). None of Savage's rock stars mention it in their songs or tour concerts in 1966.

Savage explains in his introduction that he was ‘attracted to 1966 because of the music and what I hear in it: ambition, acceleration and compression. So much is packed into the 45s from this period: ideas, attitudes, lyrics and musical experimentations . . . Condensed within the two-to-three minute format, the possibilities of 1966 are expressed with an extraordinary electricity and intensity’ (xi). Savage is a pop writer in the truest sense of the word (having written for the NME, The Guardian and Mojo, among others). He is quick and to the point, he does not waste words, scrutinizing an over-familiar song with maximum thrill and minimum fuss. He dedicates around forty pages to each monthly essay, except for the one about the notorious month of August when the Beatles released Revolver and their traumatic tour in the USA, which led to violent protests following Lennon's statement that ‘the Beatles were bigger than Jesus’, ended in tears. Across nearly sixty pages describing what seems to be the most interesting month of the year, 1966 fluctuates between Sandbrook's conservatism and Marwick's emphasis on progressive forces, with a clear tendency towards the former. It seems indeed that the nature and substance of pop music in 1966 in Britain is expressed more clearly in ‘Yellow Submarine’ than in Dylan's iconic album Highway 61 Revisited, or the Rolling Stones’ hit ‘Paint It Black’. Savage's book portrays the year 1966 as one distinguished more by its apolitical cultural qualities than by its political or rebellious ones.

Why Britain?

Dominic Sandbrook, a historian and prolific writer on late twentieth-century British culture, develops a more polemical argument about the conservative nature of the second half of the twentieth century in The Great British Dream Factory.Footnote ⁸ He opens his book with a question:

The answer to that question, according to Sandbrook, in many respects has to do with the Industrial Revolution, Britain's imperial legacy, and of course the English language. However, Sandbrook adds, if we accept these explanations, American culture also has a strong case for being a super-cultural power. So why has British popular culture continued to be so dominant?

His explanation is that, all in all, the British, and with them most citizens of the West, still live in the world the Victorians created. Victorian values and culture were powerful forces in Europe and the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century and well into the last century, and though a lot has changed in the past hundred years, these values were ‘not as different as we often think’, as the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic games in London has demonstrated (xxxii). In his four-part book, he musters myriad examples from all spheres of popular culture in Britain in the last century, focusing especially on the period after the Second World War, with an explicit emphasis on the ‘Long Sixties’.

In each part Sandbrook discusses at length pop and rock music and their meaning and position within the social and cultural fabric. Since Victorian values are so central to his thesis, he devotes many pages to the relations between these values, pop and rock phenomena, and their significance in the world. From his many stories I have chosen three which are very telling in regard to his ‘modern Victorian’ theory. In Part One of his book, ‘Made in Britain’, Sandbrook tells the story of Birmingham, a city that has become emblematic of the industrial and urban self-confidence of late Victorian Britain. Through the stories of Swinging London, the rise of the Beatles, Black Sabbath, and others, he explores the manner in which Britain ceased to regard itself as a world-leading country in manufacturing things – steel, ships, machinery, even flour – and began to regard itself as a world-leading country in telling stories. The stories of the city of Birmingham, Black Sabbath (formed there in 1968), and heavy metal offer a perfect example of the indebtedness of modern British popular culture to the achievements of the Victorians, according to Sandbrook. Birmingham's industrial, communicational, and workshop culture and economy has turned it into a potent symbol of the Industrial Revolution like no other city. This is distinctly reflected in Black Sabbath's music, he argues. According to Sandbrook, ‘it is surely not too fanciful to see a link between the sound of the Victorian industrial giant and the noise produced by the city's heavy metal stars more than a century later’ (13).

The second part of his book, ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ tells the story of a country house in West Sussex where the notorious Redlands raid took place in February 1967, resulting in the brief imprisonment of the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Mick Jagger for drug offences. Sandbrook argues that the truly interesting thing about this story is not the drugs but the house where they were found, not the rock stars but their allegedly phony aristocratic manners – a typical example of the new rock aristocracy's fondness for portraying themselves as country gentlemen, much like the rising Victorian middle class in the nineteenth century. Sandbrook argues, ‘country houses occupy an extraordinarily prominent role in our contemporary imagination since the Victorian period, and this legacy is far greater than we often realize’ (151). The gentrification of the rock aristocracy produced musicians-turned-millionaires who ploughed their earnings into manor houses, much like the cultural superstars of Victorian England. Sandbrook argues that Rudyard Kipling, like the rock stars of the 1960s, would shy away from his fans more out of his love of being a country squire than anything else. ‘He enjoyed walking in the fields in plus fours and discussing crops with his foreman, but he drew the line at attending the local fete. In this respect, at least, he was in tune with Keith Richards’ (52).

In the final part of his book, ‘Going to the Top’, Sandbrook explores the single most striking theme of Britain's popular culture in the past century: the cult of the individual, which draws on the legacy of Victorian writers such as Samuel Smiles, preacher of the gospel of self-help. The man who, according to Sandbrook, epitomizes this better than anybody else is John Lennon, the ambitious, self-willed product of a Liverpool art college. Whatever you think of Lennon's talent, claims Sandbrook, his sheer narcissism is hard to overstate. Paul McCartney, Lennon once remarked, wrote songs about ‘boring people doing boring things’. Of himself, on the other hand, he claimed, ‘I'm not interested in writing third-party songs. I like to write about me; ’cause I know me.’ This, as Sandbrook shows, has been a very common refrain in Britain's modern popular culture and music. It is sometimes described as a uniquely Thatcherite ethos, yet it in fact hinges on the tradition of Victorian writers such as Smiles, whose self-help manifesto is at the very heart of the Mechanics’ Institute, which later developed into Lennon's art college. This is the spirit that drives the protagonists in the novels and films of the late 1950s, such as Room at the Top and Billy Liar, who believe that only by shaking off the shackles imposed by class and community can they find true happiness. However, the ethos of individual self-fulfilment, according to Sandbrook, has also found expression in everything from the Beatles and Mick Jagger to David Bowie and Keith Richards.

Their individualist ethos is rooted in the art schools of the 1950s and 1960s, which were tremendous breeding grounds for creative talent, not only in popular music. These famous English institutions were in fact nineteenth-century foundations, thus reflecting the wealth and intellectual ambitions of the Victorian age (427). Citing MacDonald, Sandbrook writes: ‘The colleges’ “anarchic-individualistic ethos” fostered a love of irony, parody and pastiche, as well as a fascination with collage and experimentation’, helping to make them one of the creative forces behind British popular culture.Footnote ¹⁰

Sandbrook sums up his story with Elton John, whose first album was released in 1970. John, he argues, represents more than anything else the ability of the British to build a ‘Dreamy [Victorian] Popular Culture Factory’. Elton John was merely an ordinary suburban boy whose talent, self-belief, and sheer hard work turned him into one of the richest cultural entrepreneurs in Britain. In Sandbrook's words,

It seems, according to Sandbrook, that more than any other British pop idol and despite his colourful and eccentric personality, Elton John and his music (whose lyrics were written by partner Bernie Taupin) projected a familiar, even ordinary aspirational vision. Elton John's story, then, is a good illustration of the manner in which, far from challenging or subverting the established order, Britain's popular culture in fact ended up reinforcing it.

‘Street Fighting Man’?

In a recent interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a hero of the 1960s student movement, he tries to answer a question concerning the 1960s’ partial responsibility for the return of nationalism, conservatism, religion, and fear of immigrants in 2017.

Electric Shock by Peter Doggett – an acclaimed British music writer, best known for his books about John Lennon, David Bowie, the Beatles’ business practices, and 1960s countercultural ideology – similarly emphasizes the failures of revolutionary hopes in his approach to popular music in the 1960s, if not precisely engaging in the kind of conservative rewriting of the era seen in Sandbrook.

There is no doubt that as a phenomenon, the ‘Long Sixties’ continue to be mythologized and misinterpreted, and – it might be argued – to have a greater amount of significance extracted from them than they can decently stand. As we have seen, there are several ways of regarding the popular culture of the 1960s. Marwick and Sandbrook present some of them. For Sebastian Groes, the author of British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade, the 1960s were marked by ‘revolutions of the mind’ and an acceleration of that much bruited post-Enlightenment ‘crisis in meaning’; they were ‘an epistemological hinge moment that is clothed in myths implicated in shaping our understanding of the past, our present moment and the future of our early twenty-first century world’.Footnote ¹²

Doggett sees the 1960s in similar terms. Following the dictum of the late music critic Ian MacDonald, Doggett (like Savage and Sandbrook) claims that there is no doubt that the best popular music ever created was that of the ‘Long Sixties’, when pop and rock peaked both as new, half-invented art forms and as receptacles for rebellious social impulses. Technological and visual culture innovations were also part of this revolution: paintings, graphics, photography, and above all new stereo sound. For MacDonald, the 1960s represented ‘a revolution in the head’. He writes, ‘The spirit of that era disseminated itself across generations, suffusing the Western world with a sense of rejuvenating freedom comparable to the joy of being let out of school early on a sunny afternoon.’Footnote ¹³

The aim of Doggett's 700-page Electric Shock is to survey popular music and its technological achievements around the world in the past 130 years, from the end of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. At first glance, his questions seem basic and simple: What had people around the world been listening to? Where did that music come from? Why did they like it? And what did it bring into their lives? On closer analysis, these questions are posed through American and British prisms, asking about a world and a history that has increasingly been dominated by the music and culture of the United States with a big push from Britain.Footnote ¹⁴ Chronologically as well as geographically, the book is more limited than it at first claims, submitting to the lure of the 1960s. Almost one-third of the book is dedicated to the ‘Long Sixties’, 100 pages of which describe its peak, the seven years between 1963 and 1970 – the ‘Short Sixties’ during which ‘electric shock’ exploded and was felt by the masses. It was a moment when music ‘was tumultuous and exultant, naive and overblown’ (401). For Doggett, though, this music was ultimately powerless to create change despite its expressions of freedom, and much of it has since been emptied of its cultural content; the recent nostalgia for the 1960s and the early 1970s ‘signalled a vain quest for a golden age, from a generation who had been bottle-fed on the superiority of the 1960s to any other era of human history’ (3).

Doggett presents a nostalgic element in his own approach, describing his personal attachment to the music of the 1960s after the decade had passed, as well as this music's strange persistence in the present: ‘I was keeping the past alive, but I needn't have bothered: it was never going to die. It's easy to imagine returning to whatever will serve as a collective space in the twenty-second century, and still hearing “Walk on By” [and] “Lola” . . . in the air, just loud enough to calm the fears and aid the impulse-buying of our great-grandchildren’ (3–4). Last but not least, it seems that Doggett wrote his book not only from a deep passion for popular music but also in order to understand why our authorized list of momentous events in popular music history is essentially based on the 1960s. He leaves us with this question hanging in the air.

The lure of the 1960s

One of the main themes dominating the three books under review is that what changed during the twentieth century was not just culture or music but also the role they play in our lives. This change occurred mainly during the ‘Long Sixties’. The writers argue that it was mainly the music of the time which can provide us with a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the decade. However, the lure of the 1960s, music being central to it, has a contradictive nature. On the one hand, the 1960s were filled with protest and violence, be it war, repression, civil unrest, or gross deprivation, but on the other, they were also replete with family values. It was a period of radical protest, politically and culturally, but also a period of conservative values in family life and politics. Savage, Sandbrook, and Doggett recognize this contradiction, viewing it from different perspectives. It seems that the contribution of popular music to the revolutionary nature of the 1960s remains controversial. As part of a larger narrative, Savage depicts a direct link between popular music and political youth protest subcultures, while Sandbrook and Doggett argue in different ways that in retrospect, popular music seems to have represented a more conservative stance, leaning on traditional legacies like the Victorian one and on individualistic values that prioritized family life but did not constitute a solid ground for social activism. Additionally, as Sandbrook demonstrates with his West Sussex manor house story, 1960s music, often regarded as rebellious or subversive, did not in fact attempt to change the world order, but rather conformed to existing hegemonic traditions. Perhaps we should bear in mind the thoughts of two iconic symbols of the 1960s: David Crosby and John Lennon. When asked about the connection between rock music, the Beatles and political protests in 1968, Crosby stated: ‘Somehow, Sgt. Pepper did not stop the Vietnam War. Somehow it didn't work. Somebody isn't listening.’Footnote ¹⁵ Meanwhile, his friend Lennon once said, ‘We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything. It is exactly the same.’Footnote ¹⁶

To conclude, whether the 1960s were a rebellious or a more conservative decade, the lure of the music created in the second half of the twentieth century and especially during the ‘Long Sixties’ was contradictive. On the one hand, as the three authors show, wonderful and creative music with rebellious aspects was created at the time. On the other hand, despite the various social-political events of the 1960s, the decade's music often represents a nostalgic utopia in the twenty-first century. As we have seen, the three writers are forced to deal with the possibility that popular music ultimately did not seem to have much effect on politics, social change, or power. By emphasizing, or in the case of Sandbrook, de-emphasizing the revolutionary qualities of 1960s music, they demonstrate the entangled relationship between popular music, protest culture, and social activism.