Was music really better in the 1960s?
Yes, is the short answer, but this is no delusional hark back to the sham that the past held better days. Although the current headlines might insist otherwise, we are now in the midst of a relative golden age that the 1960s helped to spawn, especially if you’re anything other than a straight white male. However, the reasons are myriad as to why music blossomed in an unmatched harvest in that fabled era of rapid change.
A revolution was afoot. It was, on the surface, a strange metaphysical revolution. Even the keen minds of the day were somewhat bewildered by it. Buffalo Springsteen sang “there’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear” and Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
Artists had been taking their marks for a while, but the bang that started the race was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This atrocity coincided with the invention of stereo sound that rendered music immersive, an upsurge in vinyl meant that Bob Dylan’s profound messages could be piped into living rooms, and a sudden coalescing of art and society at large meant that culture became pop. It was, in essence, a Renaissance period whereby music suddenly turned the monochrome world multicoloured.
Things genuinely were happening, and every day too. Traumas and tragedies lived side by side with great strides and new feats. As Jarvis Cocker writes in the Guardian regarding Tom Wolfe’s gonzo exploits in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: “How do revolutions happen? How does an idea spread from one mind until it takes over an entire society? This is the only book I can think of where you can see that process at work. Written at almost the same time as it was happening, not in some fog of nostalgia or revisionism many years later. A revolution can’t be just a pet project of the intelligentsia – it also has to connect with some obscurely felt impulse and desire felt by the public at large.”
This domino-tumbling revolution was fuelled by energy being unearthed and unleashed through new technologies and the new mediums that they burst into life. But the vigour of advancement was one thing, the wild world progress was breaking into only amplified it further. This collision was collated by Bill Holt for his experimental album, Dreamies. Like many people, he had grown up amid the stilted conservative world of the ‘50s, but suddenly that preordained lifestyle seemed out of place.
Growing up he says his life was “very much like a frozen dinner, all prepared for you by others. Then, out of the blue that orderly world is shattered. The shattering started with the assassination of President Kennedy.” And then young kids were plucked from the streets by the draft and shipped off to die unfairly in their droves. If that isn’t going to cause a cultural shake-up then nothing will.
So, societies came together. Ideas were passed around like a doobie in Kingston, germinating a vitalised response to the times and that response was spearheaded by great artists—great artists who appreciated the true essence of the zeitgeist because they had grown up in the shadow of war and the scared shackles that followed defying future liberation until the kids took the reins. Music rising to the peak of cultural prominence was perfect for this because kids could declare themselves the main engines of it, and they offered up their naive assertions with youthful immediacy.
So, from 1963-1970, you had The Beatles harnessing the zenith of pop culture with teeny-bopper tunes that gave them more fame and exposure than literally anyone has had before or since in human history. Then they moved through the great alongside the revolution itself, becoming pathfinders by pinching the potency of Bob Dylan, the sonic pioneering of The Beach Boys, the open activism of Nina Simone, and the bold rock ‘n’ roll soul of Jimi Hendrix. This storm engulfed the public consciousness. Music suddenly meant more than it ever had. As Dylan opines in his memoir: “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic.”
In 1967, 200 million people saw The Beatles play ‘All You Need is Love’ via a ground-breaking satellite link-up. At the time, that wasn’t far from one in 16 people on the entire planet receiving a message of unified peace in one fell swoop of sonic beauty. Capturing such an audience was an untold feat, and amid tempestuous times, the ‘Fab Four’ broke through clouds of uncertainty with an assegai of hope and exultation that basked blue skies and Godspeed over a flowery movement we are still positively reeling from to this day. And that’s the point, there could quite easily be a better song that ‘All You Need is Love’ released next week, but the idea of one in 16 people listening to it at once is ridiculous; is the fault of the song or a slight on the modern age? Neither, it just shows that art at its best can transcend the world at large, and the conditions of the counterculture revolution were allowing bands like The Beatles to tap into that readily. Now, it’s just not so easy, and that’s not the fault of modern music or the artists, it’s just that times have a-changed.
And The Beatles were far from alone too. You had ground-breaking albums being released every other week in that unprecedented seven-year modern Renaissance of progress. It unified the masses. There was just cause for this unification too. As Bill Holt explains: “When you hear ‘we interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin’ – that was happening for real all the time. We were on the edge of our seats a lot. We interrupt to tell you the President was shot to death. We interrupt to tell you Martin Luther was shot to death. We interrupt to tell you the Soviet Union has atomic missiles in Cuba aimed at Washington DC and the world might be coming to an end soon.” This background adrenalised the music that shone through this melee of madness, and with new tools to propel the songs, everything was novel and nothing had been done before, imbuing the projects with true originality and inspiration, sharpened further by a slight competitive air.
As Holt told Psychedelic Baby Mag about his own creation: “I wanted even somebody getting stoned listening to Dreamies to get that subliminal message out – we being the heirs of a great revolution. Remember, back then communism was real. There was a bellicose USSR saying they would bury us. Today it’s dead, more an intellectual concept. Back then it was very real.”
So, essentially the vitality of the music in the 1960s was driven by circumstances which have now abandoned us. There was a great germination period that might only happen every few hundred years when an unexpected but monumental leap is sprung upon us. Thus, while the great music of today might even surpass some of the ‘60s best, it just doesn’t quite carry the same weight. That is not a sign of regression, but rather continuation. Music still continues to develop, expand, and push boundaries beyond the horizons of the past in beautiful ways.
If the ‘60s was a passionate flood of culture, then the rapids may have waned and the water receded, but it has left very fertile ground that continues to harvest groovy new fruit. And the most beautiful legacy of that, is that we still have the ‘60s with us too, and it is all acknowledged now; black composers, female jazz stars, you name it. The gorgeous heirloom of that uproarious period is the progressive now. All this egalitarianism and fighting for rights is still ramping up. We might not have the vitalised pizzazz of the past, but that renaissance has borne the best of today. Which, let’s face it, would be a shitshow without it, just as it was back then.