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Such Legendary Darkness and Mystery

Throughout my time at Pangbourne, my father Pat had moved more and more into the world of session music for film and TV, the highpoint of his early Pop career having undoubtedly been his leadership of the string section for "All You Need Is Love", when it was broadcast live at the height of the so-called Summer of Love on July 25th 1967.
Filmed especially for the “Our World” programme, it was the first satellite broadcast in history. Among those taking part were legendary swinging sixties figures such as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Marianne Faithful, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon and Donovan.
A year later, he worked on a project that was as much a concept album as any of the Beatles’ records of the same period, Ken Moule's superb "Adam's Rib Suite", which fused elements of Jazz, Pop and Classical music to recount the history of womankind from Eve to Cleo Laine.
Needless to say though, it was infinitely less successful than any comparable record within the Rock genre, Rock being at the vanguard of popular culture in a way that Jazz had once been, but no longer was. However, by the turn of the decade, a reconciliation between the two alienated factions was well under way, with Jazz-Fusion coming from one camp and the more populist Jazz-Rock from the other.
In '75, Pat served as leader for Mike Gibbs' "Only Chrome Waterfall Orchestra", an unsung classic of British Jazz fusion, which was finally released on CD in 1997. Adam's Rib followed it on CD exactly ten years later.
By the time of his involvement with "Adam's Rib", Pat had already moved into the worlds of film and television, and his early TV career included solos for the much-loved British sitcom "Steptoe and Son".
When it came to his early film career, he served as concertmaster for the great Johnny Green on Carol Reed's version of Lionel Bart's "Oliver" in 1968, and for John Williams on “Fiddler on the Roof”, another film masterpiece based on a stage musical, this time directed by Norman Jewison, in ’71.
He’d actually worked with Williams two years earlier on the musical version of James Hilton’s “Goodbye Mr Chips”, directed by Herbert Ross, with a screenplay by no less a luminary of British literature than Terence Rattigan. As he was the author of such quintessentially English tragedies as “The Browning Version” and “The Winslow Boy”, both centring on the English private school system, he was, needless to say, the perfect choice. Sadly, though, for all its virtues, including a lovely score by Leslie Bricusse, "Chips" was not a critical success, although it was nominated for several major awards and has gone on to enjoy something of a following on the internet.
Also in '69, he worked on David Lean's "Ryan's Daughter", a visually beautiful epic set in rural Ireland during the First World War, which was another film that has grown in stature since its initial release. Written by playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt, with music by Maurice Jarre, it was poorly received by the critics, although today, it’s considered by many today to be among Lean’s finest works.
In the meantime, as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, Pat’s close friend Mickie Most was poised to enter the second phase of his glittering Pop career. He’d been briefly involved with the burgeoning Rock movement through his management of the Jeff Beck Group, which had been formed in early ’67 following guitar virtuoso Beck’s departure from the previously mentioned Yardbirds.
However, even at that, Most was thinking Pop rather than Rock, as he sought to make a major star out of Beck, despite the fact that his band’s singer was no less a personality than Rod Stewart, who really was destined for Pop superstardom. Beck, on the other hand, went on to become one of the most versatile guitarists in Rock.
The Jeff Beck Group achieved enormous success on both sides of the Atlantic, thereby foreshadowing the stateside success another Grant-led band, Led Zeppelin, who went on to become the ultimate Rock band, second only to the Rolling Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.
By the time they did, the Rock and Roll revolution had already altered the face of Western society almost beyond recognition. However, in all good conscience, responsibility for this transformation can't be laid solely at the feet of Rock. For, after all, tendencies hostile to the Judaeo-Christian fabric of the West can be traced at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Much of the groundwork had already been done in other words, and that's especially true of the forties and fifties.
It was in these two immediate post-war decades that the Existentialists and the Beats became international icons of revolt, while lesser groups such as the Lettrists of Paris served as scandal-sowing forerunners of the Situationists, believed to have played a major role in fomenting the Paris riots of May ’68.
At the same time, Britain's first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Teddy Boys, and a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before. Movies such as Stanley Kramer’s “The Wild One” and Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” fostered a desire among millions of young Americans to be identified as rebels themselves, reacting against the stifling conformity of Eisenhower era America.
For all that, though, none of these phenomena enjoyed a tithe of the influence of Rock in terms of its effect on the Western soul.

The Eclipsing of pre-Beatles Rock

We swaggering outsiders were known as lads; and certain music forms had “lad value”, and the music we listened to between about 1969 and ‘72 we called Underground, a term redolent of its shadowy exclusivity.
As well as the out and out Prog of bands such as Yes, Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, it also included Hard Rock, Soft Rock, and the sophisticated Art Rock of acts and artists as diverse as the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Doors.
Rock, then, was split into two categories…Underground…and Commercial…a term we tended to spit out like some kind of curse, as this was pure Pop, whose domain was the despised hit parade featured weekly on the famous British TV program, Top of the Pops.
The Underground, on the other hand, was composed of bands who made music largely for the growing album market. And there were those Rock acts such as Led Zeppelin, who never graced the singles chart despite earning fortunes through concerts and album sales. From about '69, they constituted one of my prime facilitators into the murky depths of the Underground.
The true roots of the Rock Underground was the first wave of the British Blues movement, which, far from proceeding from the Pop revolution initiated by the Beatles, actually preceded it. In fact, it emerged from Britain’s Trad Jazz revival of the late 1940s, although most Trad devotees decried the Blues as simplistic in comparison to Jazz, which of course it was, while by no means forbidding virtuosity.
The most beloved and fearful form of the Blues was the Delta Blues, whose spiritual homeland was the Mississippi Delta, a region lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and stretching all the way from Memphis in the north to Vicksburg in the south.
With lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, she found fertile soil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties. And she did so especially in the affluent south among such passionate young men as Brian Jones from the spa town of Cheltenham in Gloucester, Eric Clapton from Ripley in suburban Surrey, and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.
However, the true Founding Father of the British Blues was none of these Rock and Roll legends, so much as a certain Paris-born musician of Greek and Austrian ancestry by the name of Alexis Korner.
Korner began his musical career in 1949 as a member of Chris Barber's Jazz Band, but his love of the kindred but then lesser known music of the Blues led him to form the band Blues Incorporated in 1961, with singer Long John Baldry, harmonica player Cyril Davies, guitarist Jack Bruce, saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and drummer Charlie Watts.
In addition to those already mentioned, the list of future Rock stars who were drawn to Korner's regular Rythym and Blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club in the early '60s included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ginger Baker, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Paul Pond.
Pond, a tall, elegant Oxford undergraduate with the chiselled good looks of a Greek god, had been Brian Jones' first choice as vocalist for his band the Rollin' Stones, but he turned him down in the belief that the Blues had no future. He later resurfaced as Paul Jones, front man for Manfred Mann, one of the first wave of British Blues bands to achieve mainstream Pop success, along with the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Spencer Davis Group and the Yardbirds.
As to the north, a music form named Beat, which was an effervescent fusion of Rock, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Soul and Classic Pop emerged from several tough industrial towns to ultimately form part of the great Pop revolution of ’63 and ’64. However, by this time, most British people had little idea of the difference between bands from the Beat and Blues genres, as they’d all embraced the Pop ethos to a greater or lesser extent. Having said that, some musicians clung doggedly to their Blues roots, refusing to be classified as Pop, which they viewed as the enemy, tempting them away from the purity of their original vision.
Another essential component of Pop that threatened to subvert Rock’s evolution as an exclusive offshoot of the Blues was melody, the very feature, in fact, that the Beatles had made absolutely central to their music. Moreover, as the Rock revolution proceeded apace throughout the ‘60s, it came to play as important a part in its music as rhythm. And this was significantly down to the Beatles, who, in thrall to the nascent sounds of Motown, a form of a R&B that had been heavily infused with Pop, sought to emulate its exquisite romantic tunefulness. They also imbued their early music with the sentimental sweetness of both Vocal and Latin Jazz and Canzone Napoletana, while all three principal songwriters were admirers of Classical Music as young men.
Thence the Rock explosion, initially known as Pop, emerged from several highly divergent areas.
The exponents of the Blues, who tended to come from fairly comfortable backgrounds backgrounds, were primarily influenced by the Delta and Chicago Blues; while those of Beat, as befitting their more working class origins, were more deeply indebted to Rock and Roll.
And significantly so, seeing as the term Beat was first used in relation to the latter at least as early as 1961. For instance, in "The Big Beat Scene" written in ‘61 by British writer Royston Ellis, Beat is used to describe the music of the first British Pop stars to emerge in the wake of the Rock revolution. What’s more, the term Rock is used as shorthand for Rock and Roll in the selfsame tome…serving as a powerful reminder that the British Rock movement that took the world by storm didn't begin with the Beatles, nor even the Stones.
In fact, by the time of the Beatles first hit record in 1962, Rock had existed in Britain for at least five years, birthing a host of early superstars. Among these, song and dance men Tommy Steele and Joe Brown had brought a music hall element to the music, while Cliff Richard and the Shadows had preceded the Beatles as the quintessential British guitar band. In other words, an entire spectrum of British Rock and Pop music had been established even before the Beatles had recorded their first hit record. Sadly, this is a truth that history has failed to emphasize sufficiently.

This Thrilling New Art Form

The Beatles are seen by some as the inventors of modern guitar Pop. While this is of course untrue, they are without doubt the best known and most successful Pop group in history. It was they who consolidated and perfected British Pop, thereby laying the foundation for the entire Rock revolution.
Yet, while they began very much as a Pop group, in time, they resisted being typecast as mere Pop, and could be said to have ultimately promoted a type of Rock with Pop elements which was yet no less removed from pure Pop than the Blues-based Rock of their chief rivals the Rolling Stones.
As I’ve already stated, the overwhelming melodicism of their music was founded on a vast variety of genres including Classical, Jazz, Folk, Classic Pop, Country and Western, Rock and Roll, Soul, R&B, Motown and the Blues. While this might lead one to conclude that it was largely through their influence that Rock became the ultimate musical smorgasbord, a veritable Babel of musical styles, this was only partly true, as I’ve already made clear.
Yet, during their brief few years of existence, they informed the development of Rock to a greater degree than any other group or solo singer, and that includes the Rolling Stones. The Stones' uncompromisingly primal rhythmic proto-Rock went on to form the basis of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, and yet even these have to a greater or lesser extent benefited from the unrelenting melodic inventiveness of the Beatles.
In addition to those already mentioned, another of its chief sources was the Brill Building Sound, which thrived in that brief period between Elvis's induction into the US Army and the onset of Beatlemania. During this era, the music's initial threat was neutralised by its co-option by teenage idols who while heavily influenced by Elvis visually, had nowhere near the same devastating effect on the moral establishment.
Brill Building was named after the very building in New York City where many of its songwriters were housed and which since the '30s had been a centre for Pop music, a term allegedly coined as early as 1926.
Its music could be described as traditional Pop informed by the Rock and Roll revolution, and so partaking of Rock rhythms as much as the sophisticated song writing techniques of the Classic, which is to say pre-Rock, Pop of the Great American Songbook.
It exerted a colossal if largely unsung influence on the evolution of Pop in the sixties, and as if to confirm this fact, the greatest of the sixties groups the Beatles covered songs by Brill Building composers Goffin and King and Bacharach and David in the early more wholesome phase of their career.
Yet, while the Beatles remain indelibly associated with modern Pop, by the totemic year of 1966, they were as much a Rock as a Pop group and their lyrics had started to acquire a marked intellectual dimension.
This was in no small part attributable to Bob Dylan, a consciously intellectual figure who in the fallow years immediately preceding the British Invasion had mined the ancient American art of Folk Music for inspiration. By so doing, he’d gained an international reputation as a poet-minstrel in the Protest tradition.
Pop as a whole had acquired a gravitas by the mid 1960s which was strikingly at odds with the innocent and sentimental music of the early Beatles. Yet, the Beatles outgrew the Beat era with ease, even while Beat itself was rendered obsolete by the depredations of Rock.
This thrilling new art form developed not just as a result of Dylan's influence as the first great poet of Rock, but an increasing musical complexity, possibly allied to a greater spiritual darkness. And while the Beatles led the field in terms of the former, the latter could be said to have arisen from a tougher element introduced into the music. This came courtesy of such Blues-based outfits as the Stones, the Kinks, the Pretty Things, the Yardbirds and the Who, and the term Rock was somehow perfect in describing their powerful primal sound. However, when this moved in to supplant Pop as the term of choice, it's impossible to say.
One thing is certain is that as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form. I'd go so far as to say that it was a way of life almost from the outset, a philosophy, even a religion, and as such, one of its prime tenets was rebellion against the traditional Judaeo-Christian values of the West. Thence, it’s not surprising that its spiritual homelands were America and the United Kingdom, given that these were the nations most associated historically with the rise of Evangelical Christianity.
Despite having been inextricably linked to Pop since its inception, Rock is clearly more than just another form of popular music, and while it has very little ability left to shock, Western society has been altered - possibly beyond all hope of recovery - by Rock and the social revolution it once spearheaded.

The Solemnity of the Hippie Twilight

My Pangbourne years were spent during a time when the Rock revolution was at its zenith...but it would be false, indeed absurd, to suggest that it was a unique historical event devoid of precedents and precursors.
In fact, the Counterculture of the 1960s was merely the latest in a long line of seditious undergrounds that can be traced at least as far back as the 18th Century. In other words, its foundation had already been laid, not least during the preceding two decades, which saw such phenomena as the Lettrists and the Beat Generation flourish like beautiful yet dangerous plants amidst the drab conformity of their surroundings.
Few today are aware of the existence of the Lettrists, that scandalous band of agitators who thrived in post-war Paris under the leadership of Isidore Isou, but their contemporaries the Beats continue to enjoy an exceptionally high profile. This may be the result of Paris ceding her time-honoured role as the world epicentre of the avant garde to New York City in the late 1940s.
It had been a little earlier in the decade...around 1943, in fact...that a disparate group of would-be poets and authors of Bohemian inclination had coalesced around a brilliant angel-faced young Columbia University undergraduate by the name of Lucien Carr.
The first to gravitate towards Carr was a fellow Columbia student from nearby New Jersey by the name of Allen Ginsberg. Through Carr, Ginsberg was introduced to Arthur Rimbaud, the quintessential bad boy poet.
Rimbaud’s rage to frenziedly defy every constraint of the bourgeois canon has exerted an influence on the evolution of the adversary culture of the post-war West that is perhaps second to none. His terrible yet beautiful freeform verse went on to powerfully influence Ginsberg’s own poetic vision, and via the Beats, Rock and Roll poets as diverse as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Richard Hell, Patti Smith and Pete Doherty.
Also through Carr, the bookish-looking poet met the boyfriend of future Beat biographer Edie Parker, who was another of Carr's Columbia friends. This was Jean-Jacques Kerouac, known as Jack.
Until recently, Kerouac, the self-styled “shy Canuck” from a close-knit French Canadian family from Lowell, Massachusetts, had been a Football player of enormous promise. However, soon after gaining a scholarship to Columbia, things had started to go awry for him. First, he cracked his tibia during a game, and then repeatedly clashed with the coach Lou Little whom he accused of benching him to excess.
The upshot was that he left Columbia in his sophomore year, and ended up drifting in New York City, where he met the two men - both through Lucien Carr - with whom he went on to form the nucleus of the Beat Generation. These were the aforesaid Ginsberg, and a friend of Carr's from St Louis, the patrician William Seward Burroughs.
In 1957, Kerouac emerged as the movement's undisputed leader with the publication of his second novel “On the Road”. This was a fictionalised account of the cross-country wanderings he undertook between 1947 and 1950 with his close friend Neil Cassady, famously named Dean Moriarty in the novel.
Cassady was the son of an alcoholic whose early life had included the early loss of his mother, a childhood spent on Denver's skid row, a spell in reform school, and eleven months imprisonment for theft. Little wonder, therefore, that he served as muse to Kerouac who was the genius behind Beat's defining work, while Cassady provided the inspiration as the Beat par excellence.
Oddly perhaps, Lucien Carr himself never went on to write anything of note, preferring to father a family and pursue a long career with the venerable news agency United Press International, while it fell to his son Caleb to be the novelist of the family.
That said, his place in history is secure. In fact, "Lou was the glue”, to quote his friend Allen Ginsberg, of the movement which more than any other, provided the inspiration for the Counterculture of the 1960s. In fact it was about ’64, the year the Beatles conquered America, when she began to shift imperceptibly into the Hippie movement.
It was in that very year that a certain Colorado farmer's son and former Stanford University student called Ken Kesey set off on a famous cross-country trip from California to New York. He did so on an old school bus painted with psychedelic colours called Furthur, and in the company of a miscellaneous band of bohemians known as the Merry Pranksters. They included one Neil Cassady, who did much of the driving, former Marine Corps captain Ken Babbs and sound engineer Sandy Lehmann-Haupt…and went on to be supplemented by such legendary figures as Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner and Carolyn Adams, known as Mountain Girl.
Once in the Big Apple, they met up with the New York Beats including Jack Kerouac who, deeply patriotic and a devout Catholic at heart, was allegedly repelled by the Pranksters' outlandish dress and appearance. Consequently, he took no part in the coming psychedelic revolution, unlike Allen Ginsberg, who embraced it wholeheartedly.
The first of the infamous Acid Tests occurred a short time later in 1965, and during these LSD-fuelled events, there'd be slide and/or light shows and experiments with cutting edge sound technology. At the same time, house band the Grateful Dead would regale the crowds with strange new sounds that anticipated the coming of Acid Rock.
However, the Hippies didn’t enter the mainstream until 1967, when they became an international obsession, and it was in that very year that I harried my mother into making me a beautiful paisley shirt of blue and gold, which I went on to wear with a peaked Dylan cap and purple corduroy jeans. However, by the start of the seventies, my infatuation with the flash-dressing hippies of ’67 had soured into a passion for actual social revolution, whose apologists I viewed with the most reverend awe.
As for the Commercial chart Pop of the early '70s...it was the music from a world I no longer saw as existing other than as a source of the utmost contempt. Yet, it was one that produced a band whose front man was no less a personage than Alexis Korner, one-time Founding father of the British Blues. This was CCS, short for Collective Consciousness Society.
Masterminded by Pat Halling's close friends Mickey Most and John Cameron, CCS had several big hits in the early ‘70s, but Most’s true glory days as a Pop producer lay just a little way ahead in the future. This was in the Glam Rock era, which came as a crazed painted carnival in the wake of the grim solemnity of the Hippie twilight.
Yet, while the counterculture failed to change the world on the surface, in fact, it merely returned to the Underground to patiently wait for a time when it might not just infiltrate the mainstream, but become the very mainstream itself.

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