Ironically, the Beatles’ last live concert took place in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August of 1966, just as a wave of psychedelia overwhelmed the music industry. Instead of fighting the trend, and attempting to pull the Boomer audience back to a safer ground of good-time Rock, (where the band ruled as heavyweight champ) the Beatles decided to go with the flow. They created a sound more psychedelic than anything originating out of San Francisco. The lads spent more than 700 hours recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (as opposed to only twelve hours on their first album), and all of their hard word produced what many critics consider as the most important LP of our generation. The album is without question the most accurate reflection of the era and it revolutionized the music industry. Sgt. Pepper stunned their fans. Kids stopped dancing and then sat down to listen. Many Top 40 AM stations interrupted their normal programming, and, for the first time ever, played an album in its entirety over and over again. Radio stations had no choice. Teens insisted. No singles could be pulled for release because the album presented a cohesive opus with a theme. None of the cuts fit Top 40 formulas, and the songs confused AM stations and record companies. Music critics finally admitted that Rock & Roll might indeed be a legitimate art form. Rapt teens listened to “She’s leaving home after living alone for so many years”, and then, the Beatles added hope: “Does it worry you to be alone?/ No, I get by… I get high… I’m going to try with a little help from my friends.” One didn’t have to be a genius to reduce the title of the next cut, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, to the initials LSD. Brian Epstein begged his boys to stay away from controversial material but he no longer controlled them. The Beatles belonged to the counterculture (and vice versa).
As might be expected, Rock Hysteria raised its ugly head again. The press renamed Haight-Ashbury, “LSDisneyland”, and a local bus line offered visitors a tour of “The only foreign country on American soil”. Time, Newsweek, Look, Life and major newspapers droned on about runaways, delinquency, bad trips, VD and teen orgies.
London’s Evening Standard asked John Lennon for his views on organized religion in February of 1966. John honestly and accurately commented on the decline of the churches’ influence on modern society, and casually remarked, “It’s sad, but, we’re more popular than Jesus now.” The remark went unnoticed in England, but five months later on the eve of the Beatles’ American tour, ugly headlines screamed, “Beatles Claim to be Bigger Than Christ!” A wave of anti-Beatles demonstrations spread across the South and clergymen, God-fearing AM stations and the KKK organized bonfires of their records. 35 radio stations banned their music, from New York to Salt Lake City. Pastor Thurmond Babbs of Cleveland threatened to excommunicate anyone who attended a Beatles concert. The audience threw trash and firecrackers at the band on stage in Memphis, as the Klansmen held a demonstration just outside the doors.
Paul McCartney announced in 1967 that SPLHCB did indeed drop a tab of acid from time to time. Even Brian Epstein admitted to experimenting a bit, but quickly added, “That was before LSD was declared illegal.” That statement was the final straw for many American parents. They had considered the Beatles as a safe alternative to bad boy groups like the Rolling Stones, but now, apparently even the Fab Four had been corrupted by the devil’s music.
Hollywood dusted off the Rock Hysteria genre and popped out Riot on the Sunset Strip (shades of High School Confidential), in which a cop’s daughter gets drugged and raped by LA hippies. The picture flopped.
Dick Clark called psychedelic music “the death of Rock & Roll”. Law enforcement agencies in every major city in America cracked down on teenage runaways, underage prostitutes, loiterers, panhandlers and dopers, but too late. Unlike wimpy teenagers from the First Golden Age of R&R in the Fifties, Boomers had an international communication network to rely on. The War Babies’ Army had been only half as big, and Boomer teens felt a special kinship, with Lyndon and his dirty little war as the common enemies. Boomer rebels were not without a cause.
#
Hollywood couldn’t afford any more flops like Riot on the Sunset Strip. If the kids wanted outlaws, misfits, rebels and antiheroes, so be it. The studios offered Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde, a good-hearted, bungling bank robber, thought of himself as a modern day Robin Hood, but was actually a cold-blooded killer who couldn’t get it up. When he finally does make it with Bonnie, the audience feels that Clyde now has a substitute for violence, and the two fugitives will probably give up their life of crime and settle down to raise a family. But in Hollywood, the bad guys must always pay for their sins, and thus a few hundred rounds from the good guys riddle the two outlaws just before the closing credits roll.