1968 - Mark Kurlansky [110]
Acid was having a profound effect on popular music. The Beatles’ 1967 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album reflected in music, lyrics, and cover design the drug experiments of the group. Some of the songs were descriptive of fantasies experienced while under the influence of LSD. This was also true of the earlier song “Yellow Submarine,” which was the basis of a 1968 movie. John Lennon’s first imaginary voyage in a submarine was reported to be the result of an acid-doused sugar cube. To the audience, Sergeant Pepper was about drugs, one of the first of the acid albums—the coming of age of psychedelic music and psychedelic album design. Perhaps because of the drug use that went with listening to this music, Sergeant Pepper was said to have profound implications. Years later Abbie Hoffman said the album expressed “our view of the world.” He called it “Beethoven coming to the supermarket.” But at the time, the ultra- conservative John Birch Society claimed that the album showed a fluency in the techniques of brainwashing that proved the Beatles’ involvement in an international communist conspiracy. The BBC barred the airing of “A Day in the Life” because of the words “I’d love to turn you on” and Maryland governor Spiro Agnew campaigned to ban “With a Little Help from My Friends” because the fab four sang that that was how they “get high.”
The Beatles did not invent acid rock, the fusion of LSD and rock music, but because of their status, they opened the floodgates. San Francisco groups had been producing acid rock for several years but by 1968 a few of these groups such as the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead became famous internationally while many others such as Daily Flash and Celestial Hysteria remained San Francisco acts.
The newly campus-focused music was not only about politics and drugs, it was also about sex. Rock concerts, like political demonstrations, were often the foreplay of a sexual encounter. Some singers were more open than others about this. Jim Morrison, the velvet-voiced rocker of the Doors, in tight leather pants, called himself “an erotic politician.” In a 1969 Miami concert, he urged the audience to take off their clothes and then announced, “You want to see my cock, don’t you? That’s what you came for, isn’t it.” Janis Joplin, the scratchy-voiced balladeer, said, “My music isn’t supposed to make you riot, it’s supposed to make you fuck.”
Most articles about the new lifestyle alluded with varying degrees of candor to the impression that these young people were having a lot of sex. Sex was now called “free love,” because, with the pill, sex seemed free of consequences. It was not entirely free, as Mark Rudd learned his sophomore year at Columbia when he went on penicillin for the case of gonorrhea passed to him by a Barnard student who had gotten it from a married philosophy instructor. In fact, penicillin, discovered in the 1940s, had been the first pill to sexual freedom. The second, the oral contraceptive, was developed in 1957 and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. As college physicians found, it rapidly overtook all other birth control methods and by 1968 had became commonplace on college campuses.
The popular slogan “Make Love Not War” made it clear that the two were interconnected—students could demonstrate against making war, and then, in the exhilaration of having stood with the thousands, survived the clubs and the tear gas, they would not