Prologue: 1966
A year is a fabrication; real life doesn’t conform to the calendar. 1967 didn’t come out of nowhere, but followed 1966 from one day into the next. And 1966 was a watershed year itself, with a number of events, particularly albums, that set the table for 1967.
In March of ‘66, the Los Angeles quintet known as The Byrds, initially billed as “America’s answer to the Beatles,” had followed their 1965 creation of folk rock by introducing a new sound into the pop lexicon with the March release of the single “Eight Miles High.” This was psychedelia, an electrified and altered extension of folk rock that was particularly well-suited to sunny, cutting edge California, but also made sure to name-check London’s scene, where a parallel explosion was happening. Yet another new sound was being born.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles, the band that had preceded both Beatles and Byrds to the top of the charts, and had first captivated America’s thriving middle class, had released its own daring creation: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, released in May, was the first album to blow minds in 1966. Nearly a year in the making, it presented leader Brian Wilson’s singular musical vision, with the assistance of the cream of LA’s professional musicians. Strangely, the album itself didn’t inspire the record sales the band was used to, and it caused dissension within the band, but its impact – particularly on other musicians, and especially on label-mates The Beatles – was undeniable, and lasting.
Music’s dominant folk songwriter, Bob Dylan, had recently joined the pop music party himself, adding a band to his sound in 1965. In June ‘66 he released one of the first two double albums in what was slowly becoming known as “rock” music: Blonde on Blonde. This was Dylan as rock star and hitmaker, a position he was quick to ditch at the first opportunity. A motorcycle accident in July, barely a month after the album’s release, had given him an excuse to retreat from public attention altogether. Holed up with his young family in his home in upstate New York, Dylan would disappear for the rest of 1966 and all of 1967. Nevertheless, 1967 would ultimately be the the most productive year of his career.
Changes on the horizon
The other double album released in 1966, just one week after Blonde on Blonde, was something completely different, though very much a product of Los Angeles: The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, released on June 26, had pointed music in a very different direction; if Blonde on Blonde was a revolutionary extension of what had come before, Freak Out! was a near-total break, an album without precedent. Unlike Dylan’s double album, its initial sales were small, and there was no hit single; but with its arch, daring vibe and scathing, satirical lyrics, its incorporation of avant garde and jazz composers far beyond pop music, and a leader in Frank Zappa who was nobody’s idea of a pop star, Freak Out! was the album that offered the greatest challenge to music’s status quo.
After all of these major releases – along with Aftermath, the first Rolling Stones album of all-original material, which had been released in the UK in April, but on the same June day as Blonde on Blonde in the US – The Beatles dropped a bombshell: Their August 5 album Revolver went places popular music had never been, the writing, playing and singing unlike anything that had come before it, and sonically, it was simply unprecedented. But with just one single from the album (“Yellow Submarine”/“Eleanor Rigby”), and with the band’s world tour concluded, The Beatles, like Dylan, promptly disappeared. Rumors would soon be swirling that, after a remarkable three years of constant hits and media attention, The Fab Four had run dry.
And when they played their last show, in San Francisco on August 29, the house was less than full, and they didn’t bother to play a single song from Revolver. The first phase of The Beatles’ career was clearly over, and what would come next, if anything, remained to be seen.
There was a substitute already waiting, though: Just weeks after The Beatles dropped Revolver and retired from touring, on September 12, a band modeled on The Beatles’ look, sound and spirit in their A Hard Days Night film of 1964 debuted on American TV. The Monkees TV show was top-rated and their first two singles had dominated the airwaves in the fall of ‘66. Their single in December 1966 was inescapable: “I’m a Believer,” written by a young New York songwriter named Neil Diamond, was everywhere, and it seemed that perhaps the disappearance of The Beatles wouldn’t be too bothersome to the pop charts.
An increasingly diverse mainstream
In fact, the Top 40 was awash in great music, from sources as diverse as the remarkable, dominant hit factory of Detroit, Motown Records, with acts like The Supremes, The Four Tops, The Temptations and a half dozen others dominating the charts. Regional sounds were on the charts from places as diverse as Memphis (Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally”), New Orleans (Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is”), and, of course, New York. Country music stars were beginning to sell records in quantities to affect the pop charts.
America’s biggest city was still important, of course, with everything from Broadway musicals (Cabaret and Mame were the big hits of 1966) to the remnants of the Greenwich Village folk scene (Judy Collins had released a genre-bending album (In My Life) in November, and Simon and Garfunkel’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” was a hit in the fall). There was Dylan. And there were still the good time, chart-topping hits of the Lovin’ Spoonful, the multimedia “happenings” of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (featuring the Velvet Underground, whose debut was being held up), and the blue-eyed soul of the Young Rascals.
And of course, England’s hitmakers still provided a dazzling array of hits, from Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown” to the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” and hits by the Animals, the Hollies and Herman and the Hermits.
But the center of gravity in entertainment remained Los Angeles, with its local music scene undergirded by America’s irresistible triumvirate of media power: Hollywood, with its music, movies and television a potent combination – as the success of The Monkees was proving.
It’s good to be king
Two somewhat older men still managed to work this nexus of popular culture to their advantage: Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. They were the Chairman of the Board and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, respectively, neighbors in nearby Bel Air. Sinatra’s daughter Nancy was friends with Elvis, and would in fact be filming a movie with him in 1967. Both men made frequent movies and commanded a loyal following across the country. More than that, they were the status quo, exemplars of American manhood and icons of success.
Still, in subtle ways, both were fading, though it wasn’t perhaps fully apparent yet – to them. Sinatra had just topped the pop charts the past summer with “Strangers in the Night,” recorded with the same studio musicians Brian Wilson had employed on Pet Sounds. Sinatra had even knocked The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” out of the top spot, and now he was back in the Top 10 with “That’s Life,” an insouciant boast that few could doubt. Sinatra had been on top forever. He’d even survived Elvis and rock ’n’ roll.
Elvis himself could still place songs in the Top 40 – he’d had four hits in ’66 – but they were mostly forgettable. Elvis was now a movie star who sang rather than a rock ’n’ roller who made movies, and cranking out three movies (and soundtracks) a year for $1 million each made him the highest-paid movie star in Hollywood. In 1966 he was enjoying the perks of that stardom to the fullest.
But 1967 would test all of that, because pop music was moving forward at an accelerating clip. Witness the new Beach Boys’ single: “Good Vibrations,” released on October 10, an astonishing piece of pop craft that had taken much of 1966 to create, and had raised the bar another few notches, challenging The Beatles themselves to up their game.
Battle lines being drawn
The one-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard known as the Sunset Strip had been the playground of Hollywood stars since the 1920s. Situated in unincorporated Los Angeles County, the area had long enjoyed looser law enforcement than Hollywood itself, and the anything-goes atmosphere had produced a string of nightclubs like the Whisky A Go Go, the Mocambo and Ciro’s, a favorite of Sinatra and his Rat Pack buddies.
By the mid-sixties the Strip had lost the older crowd, now likelier to resort to the desert cities of Palm Springs and Las Vegas. The Strip was now drawing their children in their thousands, with hip clubs like the The London Fog, The Trip and Pandora’s Box, which featured extended “residencies” by some of the new pop groups that had risen in the wake of The Beatles: The Byrds, Love, Buffalo Springfield, the Turtles and the Doors.
By the summer of 1966, the traffic on the Strip would regularly come to a standstill on busy nights, and the local police had taken to harassing young people with longish hair – “beatniks,” they still called them – by pulling over cars with little justification, arresting people who were merely leaving restaurants for “blocking the sidewalk,” and using undercover agents to entrap visitors suspected of drug use.
By November ’66, one group of businessmen had pushed Los Angeles County to impose a 10 p.m. curfew on the Strip and to enforce existing “anti-loitering” laws. The young people who’d been targeted were infuriated, so when news came that Pandora’s Box was to be demolished – for traffic rerouting, it was said – the youth saw the demolition as yet another infringement of their right to enjoy their new freedom.
A protest on November 12 drew more than a thousand people to the area in front of Pandora’s Box, at Crescent Heights Boulevard and Sunset. Among those protesting were members of many of the bands that played the Strip, along with scene makers such as young actors Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, singers Sonny and Cher, and Bob Denver, star of TV’s popular Gilligan’s Island. County sheriff’s deputies, aided by the LAPD in riot gear, decided to “clear” the area by force, using “flying wedges,” billy clubs and brute force; the panicked, then angry response by the protesters led to more than 300 arrests.
The demonstrations continued for another four nights, and the County Board of Supervisors eventually voted to rescind the permits that allowed anyone under 21 to dance. By the end of 1966, six clubs – mostly those without liquor licenses, which had provided places for underage kids to get off the street – had been shut down. But on Christmas Day, Pandora’s Box reopened for one night only to let fans hear a new song by a member of one of the club’s regular bands: Buffalo Springfield. Stephen Stills’ new song described the Sunset Strip riot, but also the sense of confrontation growing around the country. “For What It’s Worth” was a report from the front lines:
There’s somethin’ happenin’ here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
A-tellin’ me, I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down…
c. Stephen Stills, 1966
The sense of the song as a news bulletin was reinforced by the speed with which it had appeared: Quickly written, recorded and pressed, the single was released barely a month after the riot, on December 23, fast on the heels of the band’s just-released debut album. With its stately pace and subtle harmony vocals, graced by guitarist Neil Young’s ringing harmonics and Stills’ distorted answer lines, this dark song was in stark contrast to the sunny pop that L.A. typically produced. It captured the tensions of the moment, and when it hit the charts the first week of January, 1967, it became a national Top 10 hit.
But it was something more than a hit, portending something more than even “Good Vibrations” or “Yellow Submarine” or “I’m a Believer” could manage. Something was indeed happening, churning under the culture, brewing all across the world of youth culture, from Los Angeles to London, a strange brew that would boil over in 1967.