1966: THE YEAR THE DECADE EXPLODED
Jon Savage
Faber & Faber $55
Nineteen sixty-six was the year of Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown and Paint It Black and Pet Sounds; the year of Revolver and John Lennon saying "we're more popular than Jesus now", which came back to haunt them when they toured America later in the year. It was also the year in which the Vietnam War continued to escalate, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale started the Black Panther Party, and the first gay riot, predating Stonewall by three years, took place in San Francisco.
The excellent new book by the author of England's Dreaming, that great history of punk rock, gives a chapter to each month of the year, each chapter kicking off from a detailed analysis of a song and focusing on one theme: April is LSD and The Third Eye by the Dovers; August is Summer in the City and gays – Joe Meek and Brian Epstein, the San Francisco riot and John Rechy's novel about compulsive cruising, Numbers; May is Norma Tanega's Walkin' My Cat Called Dog, Pop artist Pauline Boty, girl groups and women's rights. The need for context leads him out of the frame: the chapter about Black Power has to talk at some length about the Selma march and Watts riots of the previous year before it can deal with what took place in July 1966.
If you think the '60s have been done and done and done, Savage's book is more than the routine clip show. He has done a massive amount of research into the pop papers and the underground press and as far as possible tells the story from a contemporaneous point of view: mediatised nostalgia is replaced with an immersiveness that lights on the now forgotten, such as the slew of anti-anti-Vietnam war songs that protested against the protesters. Our idea of the '60s tends not to include the fact that The Ballad of the Green Berets would be the biggest American hit of 1966 or that Donovan's version of Buffy Saint Marie's Universal Soldier would provoke a riposte in Jan Berry's Universal Coward: "He just can't get it through his thick skull that the mighty USA/ Has got to be the watchdog of the world." You can do your own research too: the singles discography at the end is 12 pages long.
Savage doesn't do anything as banal as pronounce a verdict, but along with the liberating energies, the sense of a new dawn rising for anyone who wasn't a straight white man, there are enough of the things that still seem unsettling even for those who don't buy into the neo-conservative disdain for the period. He describes a photograph (easily Googled) of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and John Paul Getty III and his wife Talitha on a windswept hillside in Ireland, the heir in a state of drug-induced collapse.
The faint sinisterness of the image encapsulates the morbidity and hysteria elsewhere represented by the scenes at the Philadelphia Art Gallery when Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick were mobbed by the crowd or the increasingly cynical attitude pop stars took to their own fame. The man who took that photo in Ireland, Michael Cooper, would be dead by the mid-'70s, as would Talitha Getty. By book's end everyone is saying the London scene is played out, Governor Reagan is coming down hard on Berkeley, the teenagers are rioting on the Sunset Strip, LSD is everywhere and doing a lot of people not much good at all. Savage has to finish the book in December 1966, but if things were starting to feel as if they were falling apart, there was a whole lot more falling apart to done.