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Psychedelia and Other Colours

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
512 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am01.09.2015Main
In Psychedelia and Other Colours, acclaimed author Rob Chapman explores in crystalline detail the history, precedents and cultural impact of LSD, from the earliest experiments in painting with light and immersive environments to the thriving avant-garde scene that existed in San Francisco even before the Grateful Dead and the Fillmore Auditorium. In the UK, he documents an entirely different history, and one that has never been told before. It has its roots in fairy tales and fairgrounds, the music hall and the dead of Flanders fields, in the Festival of Britain and that peculiarly British strand of surrealism that culminated in the Magical Mystery Tour. Sitars and Sergeant Pepper, surfadelica and the Soft Machine, light shows and love-ins - the mind-expanding effects of acid were to redefine popular culture as we know it. Psychedelia and Other Colours documents these utopian reverberations - and the dark side of their moon - in a perfect portrait.

Rob Chapman is currently the holder of a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at The University of Manchester. He was for a long time a freelance radio broadcaster with the BBC national network and a music journalist. His work has appeared in Mojo ,The Times, The Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Uncut, Word andJockey Slut. He is the author of Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (1992), The Vinyl Junkyard (1996) and the acclaimed biography Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head (2010). His first novel Dusk Music was published in 2008. He lives in Todmorden, Lancashire.mehr
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E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
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Produkt

KlappentextIn Psychedelia and Other Colours, acclaimed author Rob Chapman explores in crystalline detail the history, precedents and cultural impact of LSD, from the earliest experiments in painting with light and immersive environments to the thriving avant-garde scene that existed in San Francisco even before the Grateful Dead and the Fillmore Auditorium. In the UK, he documents an entirely different history, and one that has never been told before. It has its roots in fairy tales and fairgrounds, the music hall and the dead of Flanders fields, in the Festival of Britain and that peculiarly British strand of surrealism that culminated in the Magical Mystery Tour. Sitars and Sergeant Pepper, surfadelica and the Soft Machine, light shows and love-ins - the mind-expanding effects of acid were to redefine popular culture as we know it. Psychedelia and Other Colours documents these utopian reverberations - and the dark side of their moon - in a perfect portrait.

Rob Chapman is currently the holder of a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at The University of Manchester. He was for a long time a freelance radio broadcaster with the BBC national network and a music journalist. His work has appeared in Mojo ,The Times, The Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Uncut, Word andJockey Slut. He is the author of Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (1992), The Vinyl Junkyard (1996) and the acclaimed biography Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head (2010). His first novel Dusk Music was published in 2008. He lives in Todmorden, Lancashire.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571282753
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2015
Erscheinungsdatum01.09.2015
AuflageMain
Seiten512 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse2242 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.1730177
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe




ALL DRESSED UP AND LAUGHING LOUD

An Introduction



All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.

WALTER BENJAMIN3

I think the only remotely interesting drug was acid. I had a slightly peculiar attitude towards it I think. Just about everything about hippydom I hated. I liked the 60s up to about ´65 or ´66. I liked the mod clothes, I liked the look ... I only did it three times myself and found it very interesting ... I remember being very taken by very obvious things like sunsets and the silhouettes of buildings. But beyond that I wasn´t very interested in the drug culture. I could see that the drug culture did not need to be like that. It could have been sharp suits and LSD.

JONATHAN MEADES4


We´re taking the scenic route. I hope you´re OK with that. The world really doesn´t need another book about the psychedelic sixties, not one that tells the same story about the same bunch of people from the same tired old perspectives at any rate. Very early on in proceedings, when I was still undecided about whether or not to try and solicit new information from those who were there at the time, I was watching the DVD extras for Magic Trip, the 2011 documentary about Ken Kesey´s fabled bus ride across America. Co-director Alex Gibney mentioned that he had originally intended to include new interviews with the surviving Merry Pranksters, but when he came to synch up the memories to the footage, he found them, as he put it, too rehearsed´. It´s that over-rehearsed version of the story that I want to avoid here. And besides, there´s another tale that needs to be told. Several others, in fact.

The book´s subtitle - And Other Colours´ - gives me carte blanche to go the scenic route. It´s my creative licence, my get-out-of-jail-free card (or at least on bail), but it´s also an acknowledgement that psychedelia didn´t just appear out of nowhere or exist in a vacuum. Part of my reluctance to go the well-trod route stems from my dissatisfaction with the increasingly crass way in which pop history is presented in the media. Pop documentaries on TV and radio (and most interviews in what is left of the quality music press) seem to have settled on an agreed history of the past. Guided by market-driven editorial edicts regarding who the significant artists are, who the permissible cult figures are and what the important events are, they present a non-negotiable narrative of epochs, icons and myths which becomes as self-fulfilling as it is tiresomely repetitious. This book is about many things but it´s not about creating or consolidating orthodoxies. As grandiose and fanciful as it´s going to look in print, I´m more interested in how this stuff might play out a century or two after we´re all gone, when reputation and cultural baggage count for nothing and all that´s left for future historiographers to haggle over is our memory essence and the residue of vibrating air. I´m also interested in what led up to all this - the first two hundred years of psychedelia, if you will. My 1960s might therefore be a little more elongated and expansive than the one you´re used to. You might also find certain reputations inverted and others inflated beyond what you´ve previously encountered, but please remember there are no in-groups and out-groups here. Everyone is in.

I´m not one for regurgitating endless biographical details about band line-ups and the record labels they were on. You can find that kind of information in any number of well-researched (and sometimes not-so-well-researched) sources, if cataloguing is your thing. I´m fascinated by genealogy, but it´s the genealogy of ideas that interests me here.

Similarly, if you weigh a book simply by its absences I can save you a lot of time right now. Countless groups - from Blue Cheer to Blues Magoos, from the Misunderstood to Skip Bifferty - don´t get the attention that you might think they deserve in a book of some quarter of a million words. Leaving them out agonised me as much as it will you. My first draft contained half as many words again, and the stuff I sketched out or thought about, or envisaged including but didn´t, is unquantifiable. In the process of writing Psychedelia and Other Colours I listened to thousands of hours of music, and hundreds of worthy endeavours didn´t make the final cut. So if you get to the end of the concluding chapter and find yourself thinking, Hasn´t he heard Lazerander Filchy by 49th Parallel or Cover Me Babe by the Sunshine Trolley?´, well, yes, I have, and countless others like them. In fact, I listened to so much music that in the end it all became pleasingly, almost perversely generic. I began to appreciate psychedelia for its similarities as much as its differences. My listening aesthetic was rarely guided by records that were outstanding or exceptional, although many of them clearly are. As often as not I have mentioned them because they were typical - typical of the commercial tendencies of their time, typical of the marketing strategies that promoted them, typical of the mainstream they all swam in. In such transcendent moments music became codified patterns of noise, free of all extraneous detail. The moment I realised I was probably in too deep with this approach came early one Saturday morning as I was driving to the shops. Heroes and Villains´ came on the radio and in my half-awake state I initially failed to recognise a record I´d heard a thousand times before. Instead, in those thirty seconds or so before cognition kicked in, I heard the extraordinary sound of a barbershop quartet on acid, much like Brian Wilson must have heard it on that first morning of creation. So, before you castigate me for not mentioning your favourite track off Minnesota Garage Punk Rarities Volume 23, please bear all this in mind.

For most publishers, including this one, the house style for indicating ellipses is three dots (...). I´d like you to imagine three dots on virtually every other page of this book as I stripped my grand ensemble´ to its essence and left several themes unattended. At the outset I naively thought that there would be an opportunity to venture far beyond the Anglo-American model and to look at psychedelia´s various global manifestations. When he was researching The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe originally envisaged that the book would end with the moon landing. When he was a thousand pages into his draft and had only reached John Glenn´s 1962 orbiting of the Earth, his wife commented, They´re not going to the moon, honey. Not in this book anyway.´ Getting to the moon in this book proved relatively easy, given the subject matter. Getting to Turkey, Brazil, Japan and Nigeria, on the other hand, proved to be impossible. Another book. Another lifetime.

On the subject of psychedelic music my subjectivity will be clear. On the subject of psychedelic drugs my philosophy might best be summarised as Neither a proselyte nor a prohibitionist be.´ This is neither a book for drug bores nor drug banishers (he says hopefully). Much of what Jonathan Meades says above resonates with me; it didn´t need to be like that is pretty much my watchword too. I was never much inclined towards the Cheech & Chong and Furry Freak Brothers end of things or the uniform (and uniformity) that went with all that. But either way, please try and keep an open mind. As the late lamented Trish Keenan of Broadcast once sang, It´s not for everyone.´ And if you don´t agree with the categories I have constructed in order to make sense of the landscape, then create your own and may they serve you well. Better they serve you than the other way round. Ultimately, music is, I believe, a forum for our imaginations, not for fixed readings or what Alan Watts calls keenly callipered minds´. It ceases to belong to the artists the minute they present it to the world.

I had more to tell you but a person from Porlock called upon some urgent business an hour or so ago and the rest, I discover, is now just a blur.
Spending Some Time with Paradise People: Thanks and Acknowledgements

To Lee Brackstone and Dave Watkins, my editorial overlords at Faber, for keeping me off the straight and narrow. To my agent Sarah Such for helping bring all this to fruition. To Ian Bahrami for meticulous copy-editing. To Rob Young and Audun Vinger Johanssen for allowing me to dress-rehearse some of these thoughts at the By: Larm festival in Oslo in 2014. Likewise Deborah Carmichael at Michigan State University for the invitation to appear at the PCA/ACA annual conference in Boston in 2012, when this book was still just a kaleidoscopic gleam in my eye and a folder full of scribble.

Figuring that anecdotage and reminiscence wasn´t really the way to go I carried out very few new interviews for this book, but I did incorporate and expand upon material from articles I have previously written on the Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Marc Bolan, the Zombies, Procol Harum, Brian Jones, the Beach Boys, the Blossom Toes and Syd Barrett. Anyone who feels short-changed by the brief chapter on Pink Floyd is directed to my 2010 Syd Barrett biography A Very Irregular Head. Offcuts and an altogether better class of afterthought from the material gathered for that book also found a place here, for which I thank Peter Baker, Barry Miles, Pete Brown, Sebastian Boyle, Libby Gausden, Andrew Rawlinson, Anthony Stern, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon and the irascible,...


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