The mode of the music changed, the walls of the cities shook, rooms hummed harder, ceilings flew away. In his 1965 poem, ‘Who Be Kind To?’, the preeminent beatnik spokesman Allen Ginsberg envisaged ‘nameless voices crying for kindness in the orchestra, screaming in anguish that bliss come true’. Amidst the hallucinatory shangri-la of 1967’s Summer of Love, the potential of that bliss came to visit under the thin disguise of UFO-ria. Tomorrow’s ‘real life permanent dream’, unable to gestate quite long enough to be fully realized, nonetheless appeared tangible enough within those twelve tumultuous months as to plant blossoms within an entire generation’s worth of young minds. Building upon the achievements of the psychedelic pioneers of 1965-66, the British counterculture took flight, penetrated the mainstream, flew too close to the sun in conglomerate homage to Icarus, before falling into a disorganized and acid-fried retreat which by the decade’s end proved irreversible. Yet, 1967’s hippie high water mark, a desperate bid to enact an Eden of peace, free love and not insubstantial drug use before the encroaching tide of violence could destroy the schemes of the cognoscent bohemian dreamers, changed the society which birthed it in a manner few other subcultures have managed. Not just in the U.K, but across the Western world and beyond, the movement unleashed some of the most compelling music ever recorded. So potent was the power of the new exploratory genre of psychedelia that Rolling Stone’s Langdon Winner recalls this all too brief epoch as ‘the closest Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815’.
