 California Dreamin'
California Beaches
However much rock might attract ideas of revolution, put on a California beach it seemed merely part of a fun'n health program. Even the exiled London bus, a hostage to the demand for "authentic" British culture, helped surfers to ride the waves, not make them.
It was to California that the focus of musical attention shifted in the middle of the decade. The state had a laid-back image, at a time when ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary was extolling the virtues of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, but this was only partly responsible. The tradition of racially integrated audiences on the West Coast had produced a rich ndercurrent of musical culture, out of which emerged the only “indigenous” music that could rival British beat in its ability to inject nw life into popular music.
The relaxed, celebratory nature of “surf music”, as purveyed by bands such as the Beach Boys, seemed deplorably hedonistic beside the tense concern of the “folkies” in New York's Greenwich Village, but surf music, like British beat, demonstrated the vitality of the country's musical traditions, and the rich possibilities still within them for the development of distinctive styles. One important feature of the West Coast scene was the role of the record producer. The work of Phil Spector in particular gave the producer unprecendented significance, and created a core of session musicians with a wealth of hard-earned experience. These factors, and the West Coast's film and entertainment industry (and its dollars) all encouraged the westward migration of American musicians.
The emergence and fate of the counter-culture in California's two major cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and its spread across much of the nation, has been much discussed. Music as consistently to the forefront of this complex of esthetic, political and social aspirations, where mysticism rubbed shoulders with revolution, where a sharply focused anti-materialism was allied with a much fuzzier, drug-induced belief in the ease of “self-discovery”. And although the counter culture asserted its dislike of commerce, the involvement of music, musicians and record companies soon compromised this stance.
Los Angeles provided the first venue for the familiar encounter between music and business in its new guise. Through a little slow to begin, the city's record companies soon recognized the market potential of “ folk rock”, following the success in 1965 of the Byrds' distinctive studio-sound version of Dylan's Tambourine Man. In late 1965 Variety magazine coined a celebrated headline, “Folk+Rock+Protest = Dollars”. The trend was epitomized by the contrived “protest” of the chart-topping single Eve of Destruction by Barry MacGuire in 1965.
Record companies eagerly followed such successes and musicians could begin to look for what they had admired in the Beatles, that combination of creative independence and financial reward. But Los Angeles moguls had other strings to their bows; before long they marketed the Monkees- a family version of the Beatles for television consumption. Concurrent with rock's growing sense of maturity and independence, the Monkees' fame was a reminder of the continuing importance of the teenage pop market.
Farther up the coast, meanwhile, San Francisco maintained a certain disdain for the material culture that so exercised Los Angeles. The absence of record-company involvement in the music scene there permitted San Francisco's music to develop along its own, less market-conscious lines. Crucially, in the words of critic Dave Laing: “The San Francisco musicians worked from a sense that they were part of something more significant than an entertainment industry.”In dances and, especially, in multi-media light shows, music's sense of community was joined to psychedelia, the visual and aural experiences paralleling those obtained from the newly popular (and still legal, until 1967) drug, LSD.
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1960 - 1973
