This was my response to a question concerning the importance of The Beatles to the culture of their times.
Whenever I start to think about the 1960s, and in particular The Beatles and the culture of that time, I find my thoughts hijacked by a song. Hijacked so thoroughly that I am running the melody and the lyric through my mind as I write now. After attempting fruitlessly to wrestle it out and get to grips with this essay, it occurred to me that I should get it out here because it think it has a lot to contribute to certain aspects of the 1960s that Ian McDonald alludes in his opening essay in ‘Revolution In The Head’.
The song is “Surf’s Up” by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, and it was first composed and the recording begun in 1967, the year of The Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. From memory, I shall quote the final verse:
Surf’s Up
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word,
Wonderful thing,
A children’s song[1]
Whereupon, the song abruptly segues into another composition, “The Child Is Father To The Man” to provide a stunningly beautiful coda.
“Surf’s Up” was finally released on the The Beach Boys album of the same name in 1970, the year of the officially announced breakup of The Beatles. The song was not in form initially intended by its composer, Brian Wilson. It had been subject to revision and post-production by the band, and in particular Brian Wilson’s brother Carl who sang it. By 1970, Brian Wilson was a barely functioning recluse in the throes of what would become a lifelong struggle with mental illness. In this way, “Surf’s Up” eerily parallels the post-production work on “Let It Be”, but unlike Spector’s work on much of “Let It Be”, I believe Carl Wilson’s work entirely complements Brian Wilson’s original vision. What is certain is that if I were stranded on the proverbial desert island and offered the single song “Surf’s Up” vs. the entire recorded output of The Beatles, I would unhesitatingly select “Surf’s Up”.
Why?
For me “Surf’s Up” is the spirit of the 1960s. It represents musically a summation of everything Brian Wilson and The Beatles strove for at that time, with a perfection of performance, melody, rhythm and lyric. Aaron Copland was wrong. He should have said, “If you want to know about the sixties, play “Surf’s Up”.
But he did not, and we are here to examine The Beatles. This is not the time or place to look in further detail at “Surf’s Up”. But the song has given me the key to both McDonald’s particular insight, and indeed to exactly why The Beatles mirrored the zeitgeist of the 1960s.
“Surf’s Up”, more than any other song I know, is a song of feeling. Both musically and lyrically it unlocks raw emotion, and an extraordinary gamut of emotions too, ranging through joy, humor, sadness, nostalgia, beauty and almost all points in between. For me, the 1960s was the decade when emotion assumed paramount importance, and the pivotal sentence in McDonald’s opening chapter is “The Beatles felt their way through life, acting or expressing first, thinking, if at all, only later”.[2]
The context of this sentence, at the end of a paragraph criticizing The Beatles serious public pronouncements as “trite and tangled”, but praising the same motivating spirit of instantaneity as the key to the musical innovation of the band, reveals clearly the inherent conflict between emotion and reason that troubles McDonald so much elsewhere in his analysis of that time. McDonald is a Western intellectual, trained to reason, analyze and deduce. “Revolution In The Head” is a profoundly illuminating book on The Beatles, precisely because he applies those analytic techniques so well. But underlying the criticism is a sense of a nagging yearning to surrender himself to exactly the same type of spontaneity that produced The Beatles’ music. This struggle between what McDonald will allow himself to do and what he actually wants to do provides a rather tragic subtext to the book, and one that certainly provides an explanation for McDonalds’ rather puritanical tone in regard to much of the 1960s and most certainly to what came later.
Let us look more closely now the time itself. McDonald identifies two key principles, that the 1960s were conglomeration of many different social, political and cultural trends and that they were a reaction to the 1950s.[3] What were these trends? Editor Anne Charters, judging from a American literary point of view, identifies no less than nine:[4]
The Civil Rights movement
The anti-Vietnam War movement
The Free Speech movement
The Counter-Culture movement
The movement into Inner Space via drugs or other mind exploratory techniques,
The Beats and allied literary movements
The Black arts movement and the shaping of Black consciousness
The Women’s movement and the sexual revolution
The Environmental movement
To these, McDonald would add Euro-Maoism, Religious Secularization (again predominantly European), and Materialism.[5] But he would emphasize (and McDonald judges this to be the most significant trend of all) the movement towards a new way of feeling (the movement towards “inner space” and mind exploration listed above). Hence, the ‘Revolution In The Head’ of his book’s title.[6] This is what he considers to be supremely well expressed by the music of The Beatles.
Does this hold up? My internal struggle with “Surf’s Up” – not-Beatles though it be – suggests it does, and I will explain why below. But it also fully illustrates the problem of personalization here. I did not hear “Surf’s Up” until 1974. In reality, it is as closely tied to the 1970s as it is to the 1960s, and my view of the 1960s was colored by my experiences of the 1970s. McDonald was writing at the beginning of the 1990s, coming out a decade that he thought clearly represented an absolute decline in social, political, artistic, and cultural standards from those of the 1960s, even as he was willing to admit that many of the same trends he abhors, such a materialism and secularization, had first gathered pace in the sixties. A revolution in the head gone awry? Or the writings of a man feeling ever more out of his time?
But let us move on with the assumption that the primary trend of the 1960s is of feeling. I have referred repeatedly to “Surf’s Up” as my icon of 1960s musical feeling, but the truth is that without The Beatles it is hard to imagine that that song would have ever been composed. Brian Wilson was part of the intensely competitive circle of 1960s musicians, that, in addition to The Beatles, would include Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, Donovan, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Who, The Kinks, Jefferson Airplane and many others who fed off and in turn provided artistic inspiration for each other. An awareness of this large body of music brings The Beatles accomplishments further down to earth, but it does not detract from the fact that The Beatles were either first with many musical innovations, or if not first, refined them more successfully than anyone else.
In 1962, when The Beatles released “Please Please Me” thereby ‘hauling the music bodily out of the twelve-bar trap of rock-n-roll and rhythm-and-blues’[7], most listeners were not consciously sitting down and analyzing the novel features of this song. Instead, they were being bowled over by an incredibly joyful, catchy, loud, sexy and fresh song. By the end of the following year, the ‘Please Please Me” and “With The Beatles” LPs, plus the singles “From Me To You” and “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, had served as the soundtrack for British version of what was dubbed “Beatlemania” by the press. Wildly emotional fans, sell-out concerts, chart-topping records, and television appearances. The musical landscape was turned upside down. The charts were dominated by beat groups, many from Liverpool, others from other provincial towns such as Manchester. London’s dominance of the British pop music scene was shattered.
What was happening in England beyond The Beatles, and were they the ultimate manifestation of ‘the spirit of the English times’?
The short answer is yes. England during the late 1950s/early 1960s was undergoing what historian Arthur Marwick describes as The British Cultural Revolution. Much of this was a reaction, as McDonald points out, to the 1950s. Marwick points to fundamental changes in British society and thinking over this period. Firstly, there was a new willingness to adopt ideas from abroad, in marked contrast to the stubbornly nationalist mindset of the 1950s. Philosophy, social theory, economic theory all benefited from new receptiveness to figures such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky. Concurrently there was a revival of the intellectual left, energized by concerns such as nuclear disarmament. The Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s achieved a popularity and a cross-class level of support that served as a major dent in the rigidly maintained class lines. For now the working classes was pushing forward, driven by increased economic muscle, no longer content to see their world through the middle class prism. With the post-war baby boom population surge achieving adulthood, artistic focus was turning to younger practitioners. New consumer and electronic technologies were developing with advances such as the introduction of the transistor.[8]
Significantly Marwick sees that “popular music was the central feature of the cultural revolution. It contained the ambivalence, growth of youth culture concurrent with the growth of youth wealth. It sanctioned protest yet became immensely profitable within the existing capitalist system. It was both innovative and derivatively fed off itself. It embraced an unsophisticated participatory modus yet integrated and promoted considerable electronic technological advances.”[9]
The Beatles were the vanguard of the British Cultural Revolution. Provincial, working (or lower-middle) class, young and fun!
Reading Marwick is instructive not only because he is using a trained historian’s eye, but also he is refreshingly free of the ‘sky is falling’ mentality that sometimes mars McDonalds’ writing.
We’ll leave England temporarily now and go worldwide. In large measure, the opening up of countries to international influence, with the caveat that the Iron Curtain was now fully in place thanks to the complete self-imposed isolation of China and the closing of the border between East and West Germany in 1960, was a universal trend, prompted by political (such as the consolidation of the European Economic Union) and technological advances in communications and travel. The Beatles were becoming radio favorites in Europe and as far as Australia but America remained closed, their records, turned down by the American wing of EMI, Capitol, failing to sell for smaller labels such as Vee-Jay.[10] All of this was about to change.
John Lennon comments in Lennon Remembers that The Beatles were regarded in a far more serious light in the United States than in England.[11] Certainly, the reaction that the band generated in the U.S.A. far exceeded in scale and intensity that of England. The incorporation of The Beatles so thoroughly into the American zeitgeist is one of the most fascinating aspects of their entire story.
The nine threads (listed above) that Anne Charters uses to delineate the 1960s were not all active with equal intensity all the time. In 1964, the civil rights movement was at its height, but none of the others had reached maturation. There were activists working in all areas, but as yet they had not reached a level of widespread public acknowledgement.
What had been happening in America, above and beyond civil rights, was a series of extremely public and extremely frightening events.
It seems remarkably easy to forget today when American society is preoccupied with the undoubtedly serious concern of terrorism that, during the 1960s, America was threatened by the potentially far more catastrophic consequence of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The early 1960s saw, in addition to the dispiriting events in Europe with the closing of East/West border in Germany and the hugely symbolic construction of the Berlin Wall which gave Churchill’s description of the separation of capitalist and communist Europe, the Iron Curtain, a horrible and tangible quality, the consolidation of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. In October of 1962, Castro’s attempt to install Soviet made nuclear missiles not long after the Bay Of Pigs counter-revolutionary fiasco, led to an ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ confrontation between American President John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev, that, although resolved satisfactorily for America, generated an American (indeed, global) zeitgeist of mind-numbing fear.
Then, just over one year later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Houston.
If ever a nation had been handed a sucker-punch (short of going to actual war), this was it. Life did not stop, but the populace was emotionally shell-shocked and, knowingly or unknowingly, in need of a release from the omnipresent sense of fear and grief. Into this came “I Want To Hold Your Hand”.
And if ever there was a moment that the ‘dream’ that John Lennon declared as being over in 1970[12] began, this is it. What does any parent do to comfort an anxious child? He or she holds their hand! Now the lyrics do not actually say “America, you’ve had a terrible time, please let us make you feel better”, but the effect of the song, processed subconsciously, is exactly the same.
Thus The Beatles were uniquely placed to provide solace to a traumatized nation. Several qualities that the band possessed helped them immensely in so doing.
Firstly, and most importantly, the band possessed a coherence as a group that was, at least in public, unshakeable. Each member spoke for each group, individual egos were subsumed to the band. Not eradicated, though - each individual had a distinct personality, and the release of the movie “A Hard Day’s Night” during the summer of 1964, took pains to reinforce the stereotype. Thus John was sarcastic and witty, Harrison thoughtful and unpretentious, McCartney light-hearted and approachable, Starr down-to-earth and cuddly. Although the British Invasion carried over dozens of other groups, and groups galore would start to form in the United States, no other band ever established the blend of clearly defined individuals who uniquely complemented each other that the Beatles achieved. The Beatles had achieved a unique and irrepressible gestalt.
A second unique quality that enabled to the Beatles to engage and animate entire nations was the paradoxical combination of youth and experience that the band never failed to project. They were young, they goofed around at press conferences, they performed with all the excitement of a young person in the process of discovery (at least, at first). Yet they were also wise and experienced, and presented themselves with a poise that suggested almost complete control over their destiny. Obviously, the Hamburg years, and a full year of British Beatlemania had been instructive, but what is so striking about The Beatles in early 1964 is well they seem to ride over their fame, and the incredible hard work involved. Eventually it would become too much, and the reactive melancholy of much of “Beatles For Sale” released late in 1964, would relate to the pressure cooker environment of the prior two years. Energy and poise is a very attractive picture to project. Add youth and you have a recipe for a wonderful (literally full of wonder), exciting (but safe) regeneration that anyone can share in.
Thirdly, being Midlands British gave the band an exoticism (scarcely lessened in Great Britain where London artists and home counties accents ruled the roost) in other lands that was immediately attractive. Being able to speak more or less the same language as the natives in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, the band again achieved another paradox, being both foreign yet also comfortingly familiar.
In addition, the impact of the flood of Beatles-associated consumables should not be minimized. By proxy, through the records themselves, the pictures on the covers, the doll figures, the trays, the magazines, even sheets from the beds they slept in, a fan brought The Beatles right into his or her room. This was innovative marketing for a rock and roll band, and amplified their penetration into hearts and minds.
Furthermore, the massive interest shown by the media - newspaper, magazine, radio and television, the movie “A Hard Day’s Night” – served to keep the band constantly in the public eye. In effect, The Beatles seemed to be everywhere. There are two other points concerning the media that need to be made. The first is that the media blitz over The Beatles was unprecedented and in itself was a novelty. Thus the cynicism bred when the same ground is trodden on too many times is absent. Secondly, the media in essence conspired with itself to maintain an overwhelmingly positive image of The Beatles. It was an open secret that the band was engaging in a movable orgy with its fans, but none of this was reported. And why would anyone want to stop this bandwagon anyway – money was being made hand over fist.
So, when during the midst of this mainstream success, Bob Dylan, protest singer and incipient carrier of the Beat-poet and drug-related counter-culture, interjects himself and psychoactive drugs into The Beatles lives, it really was an epochal event. This incident is described in full detail in Nick Bromell’s “tomorrow never knows”[13].
For now the seed has been planted. The Beatles, self-contained and insulated, are going to follow a path into this alternative way of thinking and doing. Are the millions and millions of fans going to follow?
The short answer is than many did and many didn’t. The creation by pop-mogul Don Kirshner of The Monkees in 1966 was a move of such stunningly cynical prescience, that when this ersatz-Beatle group appeared they stepped right into The Beatles 1964-65 shoes precisely as The Beatles themselves left them behind forever. Consequently, Monkee-mania was born and took with it many former Beatles fans, who (like the Queen) thought the band was getting a bit too strange.
But many others did follow. The transformation of The Beatles from wildly popular pop group to almost as wildly popular counter-cultural heroes is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary aspects of their career. Two factors play into this success story.
The first is that the counter-culture itself was now butting heads with mainstream values, and these trends were set in motion well before The Beatles played any role.
Secondly, The Beatles embraced a relatively benign and unthreatening aspect of the counter culture – namely the movement into ‘Inner Space’. Conditioned as we are by decades of fierce anti-drug rhetoric to regard drug use as an evil not far removed from robbery or murder, it helps to realize that drugs in the 1960s, while certainly not embraced by mainstream society, were not held in such low regard as they are today. Most people simply didn’t know enough about them to have an opinion one way or another. Radically powerful psychoactive drugs such as LSD were so far below the radar screen that they were legal until the mid-60s. Ironically, the one drug that was actively repressed, marijuana, was the mildest of all[14]. Compared to the struggle for civil rights, Vietnam-war protests, or the Free Speech movement, The Beatles explorations were positively sedate. By the time that drugs had become a major issue, they had (officially) forsworn them and were deep into Transcendental Meditation, thereby side-stepping the issue altogether. The Beatles had an uncanny knack of staying out of hot water (“More popular than Jesus” remarks or Philippine riots notwithstanding[15]).
So what was this ‘Inner Space” seeking, drug using, counter-culture all about? I’ll let Jeff Nuttall[16] spell out his vision:
(In 1963) the Underground was anxious to bring about the following developments on a large scale:
a) The spread of an ego-dissolving delirium wherein a tribal telepathic understanding could grow among men.
b) To re-ignite an overwhelming sense of wonderment at the Universe, to cultivate aesthetic perception in the face of utilitarian perception, to re-instate the metalled road as silken ribbon and the hydraulic waterfall as a galaxy of light.
c) To expand the range of human consciousness outside the continuing and ultimately soul-destroying boundaries of the political/utilitarian frame of reference.
d) To institute an international tribe or class outside the destructive system of nations.
e) To outflank police, educationalists, moralists through whom the death machine was/is maintained.
f) To release forces into the prevailing culture that would dislocate society, untie its stabilizing knots of morality, punctuality, servility and property.
g) To institute a sense of festivity into public life whereby people could fuck freely and guiltlessly, dance wildly and wear fancy dress all the time.
h) To eradicate utterly and forever the Pauline lie implicit in Christian convention, that people neither shit, piss or fuck. To set up a common public idea of what a human being is that retains no hypocrisy or falsehood, and indeed, to reinstate a sense of health and beauty pertaining to the genitals and the arsehole.
What does this extraordinary poetic manifesto tell us? Firstly, it tells that there was a rationale and a philosophy behind experimentation with drugs. Some people, at least, were not just getting high for the hell of it. Furthermore, these Utopian, trans-National concepts aimed at nothing less than the complete transformation of the individual. The ego would become subsumed into the collective, and with it all the constraints and prohibitions of ‘straight’ living would dissolve into guilt-free, fun rejoicing, mind-expanding, free-loving mode of Eden-like existence. What is valued above all is unfettered – unfettered even by ego - feeling!
Note the first statement - an ego-dissolving delirium wherein a tribal telepathic understanding could grow among men. Sounds like a bit like The Beatles doesn’t it? This extraordinary group of four individuals who seem to possess an uncanny telepathic empathy with each other, an identity as a gestalt.
This is the key. This is exactly why The Beatles became counter-cultural heroes. They had already got there. Well before their drug use, well before the fancy dress, the pyschedelic lyrics, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “Sgt. Pepper”, and the “Summer Of Love”.
Of course, as we now know, what we saw in The Beatles was a carefully built construction, an image glossed to perfection. But because that image seemed so natural, so real, and yet so fabulous (as in out of a fable), it was irresistible.
McDonald dismisses such concepts as listed above by Nuttall as “adolescent nonsense” yet acknowledges the widespread sense that statements such as these represented a sense of being on “the verge of a breakthrough to a different kind of society[17]”. Link The Beatles into this sense of renewal, and you further amplify their impact. Nuttall, writing in 1968, certainly acknowledges their importance:
The Beatles were and are the biggest single catalyst in this whole acceleration in the development of the sub-culture. They robbed the pop world of its violence, its ignorant self-consciousness, its inferiority complex. They robbed the protest world of its terrible self-righteous drabness, they robbed the art world of its cod-seriousness.[18]
Of course, after 1968 the art world struck back with a vengeance and scooped up The Beatles into its own world as first fully exemplified by Wilfred Mellers’ “Twilight Of The Gods”. Nor were any of the other changes more than transitory. The counter-culture was never realized in any real way – ‘culture’ struck back. However that sense McDonald describes of “being on the verge of a breakthrough” most certainly survived. In many ways, the allure of the 1960s is that of unfinished business.
I’ve described a number of different ways in which The Beatles intersected with “the spirit of the times” in the 1960s but I haven’t focused much on the music. I’ve already mentioned the early celebratory material. We can follow the band’s progression following that fateful introduction to pot, the increasing introspection in songs such as “Baby’s In Black”, “Help”, “Ticket To Ride”. We can the integration of counter-cultural concepts into their work as early as “Rubber Soul” with songs such as “Nowhere Man”, “Think” and “The Word”. “Revolver” is permeated with counter-cultural concepts, rejection of materialism “And You Bird Can Sing” (“Taxman” on the other hand, is most a likely a celebration of materialism!), consideration of Eastern spiritual philosophy “Love To You”. “Eleanor Rigby” starkly illustrates the trend towards secularization. “I Want To Tell You”, “Go To Get You Into My Life” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” all explore aspects of drug taking. “I’m Only Sleeping” celebrates a life outside of 9-to-5 deadlines, “Yellow Submarine” a fun-loving sense of community. Even a simple song of happiness like “Good Day Sunshine” suggests a return to the garden of Eden.
The garden of Eden – “Strawberry Fields”. “Penny Lane” is just an alternate view. The entire “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” album radiates a sense of festivity into public life whereby people could fuck freely and guiltlessly, dance wildly and wear fancy dress all the time.
But all good things come to an end, and 1967’s “Summer of Love”, far from being a new beginning, was in many the last grand hurrah of the great positive sentiments of the 1960s. By 1968, Nuttall has acknowledged
“…drugs, whilst accelerating our (counter-cultural) strategy, could create a vacuum as desolate as any H-bomb crater… It’s clearly necessary now to get a firm hold of the fact that the nature of vision is human not chemical.[19]”
The Beatles, after chasing enlightenment with the Maharishi, were forced to confront the reality that their gestalt has collapsed, and, that far from having an internally generated telepathic understanding, the glue that really held them together was Brian Epstein. Thus we saw the members moving away from each other into their personal concerns, and Lennon’s rapid replacement of The Beatles’ unity with that of his bond to Yoko Ono. Only McCartney seemed truly committed to sustaining the group, and eventually even his patience and resolve are finally overwhelmed. The Utopian fancies of the mid-sixties were replaced by riots and a crushing reaction from the authorities. The counter-cultural dream collapsed into the death, dismemberment and madness of Haight-Ashbury, murder at Altamont, the deaths of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison.
Thus the swansong of The Beatles, “Abbey Road”, takes on an unreal quality. This is the only Beatles album that is out of its time because it is in essence at attempt to recapture what has already past. In being so, it is also prophetic – much of rock music since has also been obsessed with what has past. So we see all the retro-movements, some so retro that they seem to be retro-retro. The rock and roll revival of the 1970s, the Paisley-psychedelic revival of the 1980s, the Brit-pop revival of the 1990s etc. etc.
But, unlike McDonald, I do not see either an end to creative rock music or the unfinished business of the 1960s. One only has to look below the surface of today’s music making to see a bubbling ferment of activity, now spreading digitally and by-passing the existing machinery of commercial exploitation, and just waiting for the right moment to spring into full glorious life. Whether it will happen tomorrow or in a following decade is hard to predict, but it will happen. The next wave is coming – “Surf’s Up!”
I’ll stop here.
References not quoted in footnotes:
James J. Farrell, The Spirit Of The Sixties Routledge 1997
John Yinger, Countercultures The Free Press 1982
Wilfred Mellers Twilight Of The Gods Schirmer 1973
David P. Szatmary Rockin’ In Time Prentice Hall 2000
[1] The Beach Boys, Surf’s Up from the album, Surf’s Up, 1970 Capitol CD 72435-25692-2-9
[2] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 20
[3] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 5
[4] Anne Charters, ed., The Portable Sixties Reader, Penguin Books 2003 pp. vii-xii
[5] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 23, pp 27-29.
[6] McDonald, p. 25
[7] Ian McDonald, New Musical Express, March 1973 (quoted on the sleeve of “The Faust Tapes” Virgin Records VC 5o1
[8] Marwick, Arthur – British Society Since 1945, Penguin Books 1996 pp. 120-131.
[9] Marwick, p. 132
[10] Allen Kozinn, The Beatles Phaidon p. 74
[11] Jann Wenner, Lennon Remembers, Penguin Books 1972 pp. 12-14.
[12] John Lennon, God from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band Capitol CDP 7 46770
[13] Nick Bromell, tomorrow never knows University of Chicago Press 2000, pp. 60-61. Whether this was the most consequential moment in American popular culture, as Bromell asserts, is debatable. I would suggest that The Beatles touching down at Kennedy Airport on February 7, 1964, was the stone that made the biggest and most ripples.
[14] See Lenny Bruce Pills and Shit: The Drug Scene reproduced in Anne Charters, ed., The Portable Sixties Reader, Penguin Books 2003 pp. 377-388 for a hilariously succinct summary of 60s attitudes to pot.
[15] See Philip Norman, Shout! Simon and Schuster 1981, pp 263-267 for a full account of these incidents.
[16] Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture Paladin Publishing, 1970 pp. 238-239. This manifesto is just one reason why anyone who wants to know anything about the 1960s should be compelled to read Bomb Culture.
[17] Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head, Pimlico 1995, p. 4
[18] Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture Paladin Publishing, 1970 p. 123
[19] Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture Paladin Publishing, 1970 p. 241
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