"We have many good books on the events and movements and ideas of the sixties, most of which agree that the music was important in expressing the spirit and energy of the times. Bromell wants to do something elseto put the music of the sixties at the center of the story. Moreover, he doesn't focus on the musicians who created it . . . or on critics' responses. Instead, he seeks to recapture what he calls "the primal scene" of listening to rock music. . . . Nick Bromell's Tomorrow Never Knows brings us closer to the heart of what we call the sixties than any other book I know."Jon Wiener, The Nation "Music historians and social historians understate the interrelations among drugs, rock and roll, and the sixties, in part because most are thoroughly daunted by them as writers and thinkers. Nick Bromell renders them like he's been there and understands them like he's thought long and hard about them afterward. Tomorrow Never Knows reads like the best journalistic criticism both stylistically and interpretivelyit's vivid, credible, and original."Robert Christgau "Tomorrow Never Knows brings to life the high points of the countercultural experience: the discovery of various drug highs, the radical shift in consciousness that these induced, the communal experience of music as binding and meaningful, the guiding, almost priestly role of musicians such as The Beatles, Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, and the realization that the psyche's dark side could not be escaped by getting stoned."Mark Kidel, Times Higher Education Supplement |
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An excerpt from Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s Nick Bromell
"Something's Happening Here" On August 30, 1964, a Sunday, Manhattan lay swathed in the heat of a summer afternoon. In their air-conditioned luxury suite high above the intersection of Park Avenue and 59th Street, the Beatles could hear the faint screams of fans who had gathered reverently on the sidewalks around the Delmonico Hotel, hoping to catch a glimpse of Paul, George, John, or Ringo peering from behind a curtain. Those screams had rung in the Beatles' ears for seven months as the cresting wave of Beatlemania rose higher and higher with no end yet in sight. In April the top five places in Billboard Magazine's Top One Hundred chart were Beatles songs. On August 12, the film A Hard Day's Night had opened in more than 500 theaters nationwide, earning more than $1.3 million its first week and making Beatlemania a performance for millions of fans to watch and join vicariously. In late August, the Beatles had five singles on the American charts and were winding up a triumphal coast-to-coast concert tour of the United States. Now, as they rested from their performance at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium the night before, they talked to their guest, Bob Dylan, who had driven down from Woodstock to see them. Without fanfare, Dylan pulled a couple of joints from his pocket, put a match to the twisted end of one, and passed it over. For the first time ever, the Beatles were about to get high.
But changed them how? The largest and wealthiest and best-educated generational cohort in American history stood on the brink of maturity with rock music pounding in its veins and power at its fingertips. The blues, albeit in diluted form, gave much of this power. (Of the twelve songs the Beatles routinely played on this concert tour, five were unmistakably blues-based: "Twist and Shout," "You Can't Do That," "Roll Over Beethoven," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "Long Tall Sally.") But now these millions of kids were about to lay their hands on another power, a power the historian of the '60s approaches with some trepidation because two dominant cultural attitudes toward psychedelics work in tandem to repress serious thinking about them. On the one hand, there is fear and distrust: psychedelics are lumped together with all other drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, and amphetamines. All are the same and all are evil. On the other hand, there is a bemused and knowing sophistication: psychedelics are merely psychochemical entertainment. They're just fun. Groovy, man. The truth lies somewhere between these two takes. Psychedelics are powerful. Psychedelics are distinctive. As research in the fields of psychopharmacology, religion, and anthropology makes perfectly clear, psychedelics do something no other drugs can, and that mysterious something lies very close to the human sense of wonder that is formalized in the world's religions. When psychedelics are taken out of specific cultural practices and rituals and disseminated indiscriminately to adolescents coming of age in a modern (or postmodern) world, consequences will follow. Half the difficulty of understanding those consequences is to get past today's prevailing attitudes of fear and dismissal and to take seriously the experiences of getting high and tripping. No history of the '60s or of rock music in the '60s can afford to evade this swampy issue. At the same time, no historian of the period can afford to risk venturing into it without making clear at the outset that discussion does not mean endorsement or, worse, a foggy nostalgia. ![]()
Meanwhile, and perhaps not coincidentally, Beatlemania raged on around the Delmonico. That morning's paper described the "more than 1,000 teen-age girls" who "stood behind police barricades on the east side of the avenue shrieking like starlings as a deployment of 40 foot patrolmen and a dozen mounted policemen struggled to keep order." The Times review of the Beatles' Saturday evening concern at Forest Hills, echoed the refrain: An overflow audience of more than 15,000 persons, mostly teen-age girls, shrieked their approval. They continued their frenzied, nearly hysterical screaming as the quartet sang a number of their fabulously successful hits. It was virtually impossible to hear the singing over the shrieking, which often reached the threshold of pain.The not-yet-hip Times reporter (Robert Shelton) went on to fret that the Beatles have created a monster in their audience. If they have any concern for anything but the money they are earning, they had better concern themselves with controlling their audience before this contrived hysteria reaches uncontrollable proportions. Those shrieks were a sign that something "uncontrollable"some "monster"was about to terrorize the nation. So was the pungent smoke curling up from the joint Dylan had just lit inside a New York luxury hotel. Something was happening here . . . but no one knew exactly what. The American middle class, soon to be dubbed "Mr. Jones" by Dylan, was complacently confident in itself, its power, and its future, for there seemed to be no limit to what its America could achieve. It had won two wars and put a man in space. The gross national product had averaged 5 per cent annual growth for more than thirteen years, and the real income of the average American worker had risen steadily for more than a decade. Clearly, things were getting better all the time. Compared to his counterpart in the mid-1950s, Mr. Jones could afford to welcome change, but only because he was certain that the rational, technical, disinterested minds of business, government, and academy could control the scope and force of that change.
And so did something else. On the bestseller list that week were two books about white racism (Crisis in Black and White and Mississippi: The Closed Society) and two exposés of the massive federal and corporate espionage presence in American life (The Invisible Government and The Naked Society). Echoing David Riesman's worries about the disappearance of privacy and the erosion of self in America, the author of The Naked Society wrote that "it is increasingly assumed that the past and present of all of usvirtually every aspect of our livesmust be an open book; and that all such information about us can be not only put into files but merchandised freely. Business empires are being built on this merchandising of information about people's private lives. The expectation that one has a right to be let alonethe whole idea that privacy is a right worth cherishingseems to be evaporating among large segments of our population." As these tiny doubts about the American way of life seeped into the consciousness of the American white middle class, they were shockingly reinforced by a sudden renewal of African American rage which, after two decades of relative quiescence, flared up again in cities up and down the East Coast. Suddenly Mr. Jones found it more difficult to ignore that the entire postwar boom had simply swept around, or papered over, the conditions of millions of blacks hemmed in by white racism. The liberal, technocratic approach to national problems had had little impact on the historical legacy of slavery or on the contemporary fact of white racism. Meanwhile, the word "Vietnam" was appearing with increasing frequency in the news, sometimes accompanied by yet more doubts: was this a winnable war? was it a rational war? On August 28, 1964, with only 17,000 U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam at a cost of just $2 million a day, the war was still just a faraway skirmish with recalcitrant peasants duped by their Communist rulers. But in an article titled "New Crisis in Vietnam Poses Large Questions for U.S.," the Times that Sunday worried that the awesome, and perhaps invincible, problem of inspiring a disintegrating society to pursue with determination a patriotic defensive war is facing the United States in Vietnam. . . . The underlying fact that has been brought home to U.S. policy-makers this week with the latest Saigon political crisis was that successful war can hardly be fought in the vacuum of a society that no longer seems to care about winning and that, out of the frustration of many war years, seems to be turning on itself in fratricidal fury. This was the Americaconfident, stable, risk-taking, with tiny fissures of doubt opening here and therein which the Beatles, for the first time, got high. In which McCartney, according to a firsthand account of the afternoon, "seems to have had an out-of-body experience"; he "declared that he was 'really thinking' for the first time and ordered road manager Mal Evans to write down everything he said." Really thinking meant what? This is a question about the effects of psychedelics, but it is also a question about the needs of the young people who found in them something (what is exactly the question) that would help them get by. "There's no question," remembers writer Annie Gottlieb, "that the shift from alcohol to grass and acid manifested an enormous break in sensibility between us and our parents." But what exactly was the nature of this new sensibility? What explains the difference between Frank Sinatra singing subtle and sophisticated lyrics by Cole Porter and Bob Dylan delivering this caustic attack (in the form of a thirteen-bar blues) on the hapless Mr. Jones? You raise up your hand ![]() Something was happening here . . . but what? ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Author's note: A full account of this meeting can be found in Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, The Love You Make (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), pp. 157-158. The authors put the date of the meeting as August 28, but by my calculationbased on the Beatles' performing scheduleit is more likely to have occurred on Sunday, August 30. Certainly it took place some time that weekend. [Web editor's note: You can read the Brown and Gaines account on the web. Another lengthy accountaccuracy unknownis by journalist Al Aronowitz, who includes himself in Dylan's entourage that day.]
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