“When Sgt. Pepper was released in June, it was a major cultural event,” Ian MacDonald writes in Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and The Sixties. “Young and old alike were entranced.”
MacDonald describes a listening party that EMI record label boss Sir Joseph Lockwood attended with a clutch of wealthy older women, who were so thrilled by the album “that they sat on the floor after dinner singing extracts from it.” In America, many radio stations played only tracks from Sgt. Pepper. “An almost religious awe surrounded the LP,” he writes, quoting Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane who said “Something enveloped the whole world at that time and it just exploded into a renaissance.” MacDonald added that the sound of Sgt. Pepper, “in particular its use of various forms of echo and reverb—remains the most authentic aural simulation of the psychedelic experience ever created.” The album distilled the essence of 1967 “as it was felt by vast numbers across the Western world who had never taken drugs in their lives. If such a thing as a cultural ‘contact high’ is possible, it happened here.” Sgt. Pepper “may not have created the psychic atmosphere of the time but, as a near-perfect reflection of it, this famous record magnified and radiated it around the world.
In his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Robyn Hitchcock’s assembled a lovely, evocative, characteristically quirky portal back to that heady time. He wrote 1967 on his phone during sleepless hours between midnight and dawn at the home he shares with his wife, the singer-songwriter Emma Swift, in Nashville, his supportive cats Ringo and Tubby nearby. From the first word to the last he’s graphically in touch with the “contact high” that MacDonald describes, flitting in his memory from one signal event to another as 1966 turns over to ‘67.
Hitchcock writes in the present tense, an unusual move in autobiography yet crucial here: the odd flashback aside, we experience nearly everything as the teenage Hitchcock does, leaving his comfortable if emotionally fraught home for Winchester College, a Victorian-era boarding school sixty miles from London. All of the weirdness, sorrow, and bliss he experiences there are as tactile for the reader as it was—as it is—for the writer/rememberer. Occasionally, Hitchcock alludes to experiences, both good and bad, that his years at boarding school will provide him in his adult years, but those are furtive—forward glances. The real action in 1967 occurs moment by moment as Hitchcock, his days soundtracked by exploding, multi-colored pop music and new ideas, works his way, skeptically and shyly, from teenager to adult.
Midway through the book, commenting on Bob Dylan’s preternatural alertness to life’s dark mysteries, Hitchcock observes that “surreal awareness is where compassion of a kind can grow.” Kindness is shot through Hitchcock’s memories of certain family members—his sister and a patient and hip Granny, in particular, though not his emotionally distant mother—and many of his teachers, eccentrics in the classic English manner whom Hitchcock studied with a teenager’s blend of ironic distance and instinctive sympathy. In one poignant passage, he imagines two of his “betters,” Miss Duplock, a desolate medical aide, and Hodges, a phys ed instructor—both loners, both Winchester lifers—as a romantic pair separated by the War and other melodramas, both pouring out their hearts to each other in letters, which Hitchcock imagines for us. Dotted throughout 1967 are small illustrations, presumably made by the author, of balloons with faces of many of the figures from the book. The balloons allude to a tradition with his mates at school, but are also moving images for the light-as-air presence of memory itself; let go of those recollections and they’re off forever into the ether.
After graduating, Hitchcock moved to Cambridge in 1974 and concentrated on writing songs. He emerged from a folkie phase and banged around in a couple of bands, one of which became the Soft Boys. They released three albums of acclaimed neo-psychedelic, post-punk pop, A Can of Bees (1979), Underwater Moonlight (1980), and Invisible Hits (1983, a compilation of stray and unreleased tracks). The band briefly reunited in the early aughts and released the album Nextdoorland in 2002. After the Soft Boys broke up in the early 1980s, Hitchcock embarked on a highly productive, highly idiosyncratic career; since releasing Black Snake Diamond Role in 1981 he’s issued more than forty albums, often backed by his bands the Egyptians or the Venus 3. He’s long been characterized as a musician toiling in the deep waters where the Dylan, Lennon, and (Syd) Barrett Rivers meet, his albums filtering those visionary writers’ playfully trippy melodies, their sometimes odd and inscrutable wordplay, and their hallucinatory humor.
While Hitchcock was writing his memoir, he grabbed an acoustic guitar and with Davey Lane (piano) and Charlie Francis (keyboards and “sound effects”) recorded a handful of cover songs—each originally released in 1967—plus one original. Three months after the publication of the book, Hitchcock released a companion album titled 1967: Vacations in the Past on Tiny Ghost Records, the label he co-owns with Swift. “For me, [the year] 1967 was the portal between childhood and the adult world,” he remarks in the album’s liner notes, “where these songs flickered in the air to greet me like hummingbirds. They're full of saturated colour and melancholy, just as I was charged with hormones and regret as one part of me said goodbye to the other.” He added, “Perhaps I peaked then—at the supernova of boyhood—the black hole of the grownup world awaited me with its dwarf-star mentality, all beige and hell and compromise.”
With some help from old mate and ex-Soft Boy Kimberley Rew (slide/electric guitars and backing vocals), Rew’s wife and music partner Lee Cave-Berry (backing vocals), and Kelley Stoltz (sitar), Hitchcock recorded the album among three studios, revisiting his past on aural terms. The songs he chose are for the most part well known. Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale,” The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park,” Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play,” Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” For the inevitable Hendrix track, Hitchcock avoided a big hit and selected “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp,” an August ’67 single released in the U.K. that first appeared in the U.S. as the B-side of “All Along the Watchtower” in 1968 and then on Electric Ladyland that same year. From Traffic’s debut album Mr. Fantasy he covered an album track (“No Face, No Name, No Number”). From Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band he bravely tackles “A Day in the Life.” Other slightly more obscure songs include The Move’s “I Can Hear The Grass Grow,” Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle,” and The Incredible String Band’s “Way Back in the 1960s.” Common to all of the songs is the intoxicating reckoning with a new era charging forward in smiling, colorful waves. (The astounding couplet “There is no other day / Let’s try it another way” from “See Emily Play” graphically evokes the boldness of the times.) Hitchcock’s sole original, presumably written for the project, provides the album with its intriguing subtitle.
“An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
So wrote George Orwell. Hitchcock’s nodding along, surely. Like nearly every memoir, 1967 is about family as much as it’s about anything else, as it’s nearly impossible to write about one’s life without some reckoning of how that life was shaped by family dynamics. Though Hitchcock’s parents were relatively well off, unspoken pain worked its way through the dailiness. “There was a lot of space to play in, to dream things up,” he writes. “The dreams weren’t always comforting, but what is? My father was working off his nightmares, and I was working on mine.” In addition to his father’s grave war wound and his mother’s curious distance, Hitchcock discloses that he is on the autistic spectrum (high-functioning Asperger’s), and one can only wonder about the challenges that that posed for him growing up in his era. He admits to suffering from the occasional, unbidden, nearly uncontrollable compulsion to destroy his own possessions, including, in one instance, his beloved guitars. This dark tendency of his is mentioned only in passing, as a kind of curiosity, and it muddies the waters.
I thought about Orwell’s essay “Such, Such were the Joys…” while reading 1967. Published after Orwell’s death for fear of libel, the essay is a blistering—some have said exaggerated—account of his years at the St. Cyprian’s preparatory school, which he attended between the ages of eight and thirteen. Hitchcock’s memories of Winchester are nowhere near as unhappy as Orwell’s were of his boarding school, yet Orwell’s dry recollections of the English education system and critique of social class are a kind of transparency that lays atop 1967.
“A child may be a mass of egoism and rebelliousness,” Orwell wrote, “but it has no accumulated experience to give it confidence in its own judgements. On the whole it will accept what it is told, and it will believe in the most fantastic way in the knowledge and powers of the adults surrounding it.” In the essay’s famous concluding lines, Orwell wrote that if he were to return to the school as an adult, he would feel “what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!” Hitchcock’s memories of Winchester are generally affectionate, in part because he remains an early teen, when the world dazzles every day with some new head-lifting experience. But he, too, felt keenly the gap between his teachers’ benighted, entrenched superiority and his own growing, confident sense of his environment.
What does it mean to revisit your past in a song? Nostalgia’s at play, certainly, but so is a desire less to return to something—a place, a person, a time—than to inhabit it wholly again, to be transported from yesterday back to today in dimensional ways. Hitchcock gets inside of the songs that meant so much to him in 1967, and can be both the boy who heard them for the first time and the man who knows them and carries them so well.
Hitchcock talk-sings the words to the album opener “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” turning Keith Reid’s infamous story of a drunken night gone awry into an Edgar Allen Poe narrative poem, all Gothic and whisper. (It’s similar vocal style he’ll use on “San Francisco.”) He sounds awestruck by the song’s beauty and strangeness still. The mournful Hammond organ line played by Matthew Fisher on the original is transposed here as a simple but devastatingly lovely acoustic guitar line, and Hitchcock’s breathy vocals, sweetened by a female singer in the later verses, carry the song’s changes as if the melody’s made of something ancient and rare; he’s careful not to drop it. Hendrix’s “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” is another thing altogether. Jimi’s essential complaint—“loneliness is such a drag”—is pushed around on the original recording by Experience bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, making Hendrix’s expressions of loss and exhaustion on the long road sound angry and wounded. Hitchcock and Rew’s guitars approximate Hendrix’s wah-wah righteousness—they arrive from somewhere, watery and wavy—but absent a tumbling rhythm section, Hitchcock’s song ends up sounding more like Cosmic Country than electric psychedelia. He quiets things down, and in a reverb-bathed voice that echoes burned-out mid-1970s Iggy Pop (think “I Got Nothin’” from Kill City) he sings with wicked pride, the exhaustion heroic rather than defeating. The voice, like a record, is scratchy, but the singer’s got a gleam in his eye.
Unsurprisingly, Dylan was Hitchcock’s favorite teacher in absentia when he was a young student at Winchester. “It’s pretty clear to me that Dylan knows the meaning of life if anybody does,” he marvels in the memoir. “He has momentum, direction, intuition—wisdom. My elders and betters—teachers and parents, people who drive cars and look compromised—they have experience and they call the shots: they decide where you live and where you go, and until recently they told you when to go to bed, too.” Yet these older generation folk “haven’t seen to the bottom of the barrel the way Dylan has: they haven’t glimpsed the fundamental pointlessness of everything. Or if they have, they can’t acknowledge it.”
Hitchcock manages to avoid covering Dylan on the album, yet he does sing about him in one song. “Way Back in the 1960s” is the closing track on the Incredible String Band’s second album The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, an ironic tune that looks forward and backward simultaneously. The band sings about the year 1967 from the vantage point of nearly a century in the future, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron sitting on some futuristic front porch with their acoustic guitars looking back at a radical era. As Rob Young describes it in Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, the song “imagined the revolution already long in the past, and its perpetrators left befuddled by subsequent developments.” Calling it “a piece of reverse sci-fi,” Young finds the song “hilarious, prescient and cheekily derisive of the group’s contemporary audience.”
The singer, now in his nineties, was “a young man back in the 1960s” before “wild World War Three / when England went missing and we moved to Paraguayee.” He confesses to no longer understanding the younger generation, but he’s content enough because he can still find beans and bacon in “real food tins” down at the “new antique food store.” He had been a musician as a young man, and made millions, and there was “one fellow singing in those days / And he was quite good, and I mean to say that / His name was Bob Dylan.” Hitchcock has fun with the fun song, with the Dylan line in particular, rushing through it after Williamson like it’s a punch line. Hitchcock’s whimsical music has often been compared to the String Band’s, and he seems to enjoy the self-referential vibe of a band singing in 1967 about an unknown future in which a man stands singing that very song.
Describing the cover of The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion in the memoir, Hitchcock writes how it “sums up everything I love about how 1967 is going so far. The saturated joy of it, the intricacy: everything seems to be turning into something else when you look at it closely; which, for me, is what defines psychedelia.” He adds, “My heart pulses like a minnow.”
Music is everywhere in the book, on turntables in the Winchester dorm and dusty common rooms (and once, in a tiny hiding place under the floor), on the radio, in Hitchcock’s knocked-out heart and mind. Music rises to the surface of the book as it does in Hitchcock’s alert perceptions, stray lines, a melody hook, or a galvanizing voice catching his attention and inspiring him to believe that these artists—there’s a new one every week, it seems—are singing about the meaning of life in a language that Hitchcock only half comprehends.
So: Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Hendrix, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, the Incredible String Band—the groups all line up dutifully and look the familiar part in 1967, but because we’re hearing them for the first time along with Hitchcock, all of the Classic Rock, of-the-era dust is blown away, a magic trick of sorts that Hitchcock performs (both in the book and, on its strongest tracks, the album). We’re left with, and we share, the vibrations of strange, psychedelic newness pulsing through Hitchcock and his mates, some of whom are dubious about it all, more of whom are as enraptured as he is. (Brian Eno, with his blue sunglasses worn indoors at “Happenings” and his receding hairline, also makes a few mind-bending cameos in 1967, but because he’s remained peculiar to this day, we don’t need him refreshed for us.)
Throughout, Hitchcock’s rightly suspicious of his own memories, yet he intrinsically trusts them too, the great paradox of the memoirist. “Oh, what can you remember?” he writes early in the book. “It bends itself to suit you, as much as it can: the facts are sleeping in the cellar of memory. You can fish them up, dormant mackerel of the soul; to swim once again in the pond of your consciousness; but somebody else is going to recall those mackerel differently from you.” Elsewhere, in one of several italicized “break in” passages in which he writes from the present, Hitchcock admits that “looking back from the other end of life I feel amazed and a tad envious: who the fuck was I, this teenage creature?”, adding humorously, “I’m in this narrative from a time so remote that it might as well be a historical novel.”
Music was literally in the air. In one of my favorite passages, Hitchcock describes a disused pigsty on his parents’ land where Hitchcock, his sister, and their friends “wheeled the radio in its pram.” If enough kids were around they’d play hide-and-seek. “When it rained we took shelter under the one remaining pigsty roof; hearing the Beatles sing ‘From Me to You’ still transports me back to that dark, musty pig boudoir.” Memoir ignites when an ordinary detail, recollected and filtered through desire and curiosity, becomes something larger. The image of the radio in that stroller! Just a fact of charming mid-60s British country life, of course, but also wonderfully charged, the infant Beatles, minded and wheeled about by two blissed-out, maturing kids, poised to grow into adulthood and change the world. (Robyn hid a stack of dirty magazines in that pigsty, too, but that’s a story for another memoir.)
“The longer you’ve known a song, the deeper it resonates with you,” Hitchcock observed in a note posted to his Bandcamp site a few months back.
When I think about the music that I heard when I was 13 and 14, I’m struck by how many got inside me and have stayed there. “Heart of Glass” and “Call Me” (Blondie), “I Want You to Want Me” (Cheap Trick), “My Sharona” (The Knack), “Tragedy” (Bee Gees), “Sultans of Swing” (Dire Straits), “Highway to Hell” (AC/DC), “September” (Earth, Wind & Fire), “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (Queen), “Brass in Pocket” (The Pretenders), “Refugee” (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers): all great songs that renew themselves with, if not each, than with every third or fourth listen, all of these years later reorienting the spaces I’m in. And those were the well-known songs that everyone sang, or at least had an opinion about; also making noise at the time were bands that it would take me some time to catch up with—the Jam, the Clash, XTC, Motörhead, Squeeze, the Ramones, et al. Some songs from that era’s Top 100 serve more as sonic signposts to a long gone past, songs that I didn’t love or much notice but that, like the weather, surrounded and informed me anyway. Also like the weather, they eventually blew away, leaving behind only traces.
Hitchcock ends 1967 with a bit of Boomer defensiveness, acknowledging that kids “reaching adolescence in the age of Harry Styles surely feel as intensely as we did,” yet also wondering “if they feel as intense about the music made now as we did about its hippie ancestors.” I marvel, as millions have and still do, about the blinding speed with which pop, R&B, and folk music evolved in the mid-60s, each week delivering a stack of new singles and albums that, as they say in the U.K., pinned back listeners’ ears, soundtracking new and thrilling ways of perceiving the world and ourselves, rendering old media lifeless. Hitchcock writes, marvelously, that Hendrix played guitar solos “such as my radio was never designed to reproduce.”
“The psychic shiver which Sgt. Pepper sent through the word was nothing less than a cinematic dissolve from one Zeitgeist to another,” MacDonald wrote in Revolution in the Head. Thirteen year-old Hitchcock, having listened to “Strawberry Fields Forever” for the first time, gazing, mystified, at the 45 as it rotates on a turntable in a common room, reflects, “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.” That observation—so simple, so revealing—is the heartbeat of 1967.
The songs that Hitchcock covers provide a soundtrack to the memoir. With “Vacations in the Past,” Hitchcock has written a theme song of sorts, a quietly meditative, haunted thing. His late-night musings on loss and love are scored for strummed acoustic guitars and a sitar (the latter played with melodic delicacy by Stoltz; “Raga on, my love” goes the song’s pretty refrain). The singer, bemused and charmed by the accumulation of years, chooses to holiday in the past, taking directions from the ghost that he’s become. The song sounds, and feels, deeply personal (“I take my rejections in my stride”) and because it’s written by Hitchcock, a surrealist extraordinaire who’s always seemed in his best songs to be in touch with a trippy, benevolent vision of the chaotic world, the imagery slips beyond the rational. And so we get “an octopus on speed” with its “tentacles akimbo” as an image for the singer’s “insatiable need for you, my love.” The last, stunning verse—
It comes for you at twilight, and evaporates at dawn
I’m waiting here in limbo for my true love to be born
—calls to mind the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” which Hitchcock also covers in a relatively straightforward manner on the album, faithful to Ray Davies’s relaxed pleasures at viewing the lovely dusk scene on the Thames River in London. The song was purportedly deeply personal to Davies; when he was thirteen—Hitchcock’s age in the memoir—he recovered from a serious illness at St. Thomas’s Hospital where kind nurses would roll him out on the balcony to gaze at the river. He’s also said that song imagined a fantasy life for his sister and her husband. (He once described “Waterloo Sunset” as akin to his private diary being made available for the public.) I can see why Hitchcock wanted to sing this very English song, the melody so lovely, the setting sun so evocative of a day closing down as beauty buoys it up for those few precious moments.
As if by a law of nature, 1967: Vacations in the Past closes with a cover of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s epic of the ordinary. Hitchcock condenses the vastness of the original recording, with its madly discordant, crescendo-ing orchestral passages, into a quiet acoustic soundscape. His version begins with the sound of a scratchy record, no doubt evoking his rapturous listening sessions as a lad at Winchester. As he sings the famous opening lines he sounds startlingly like Lennon, not for the first time in his career. Dave Lane’s piano is upfront, complementing the song’s melody and Hitchcock’s strumming. Two minutes in, he reaches the song’s celebrated middle, McCartney’s diary-like scenes of a suburban bus ride, and he enters and departs with chord progressions that match the original’s, in obviously less grand and yet more intimate ways. Hitchcock has turned the Beatles’ penetrating psychedelic drama into something that feels personal.
The infamous final chord lands—a modest clang of acoustic guitar, keyboards, and sitar—and is held for nearly a minute as the sound of backward mumbling rises, pans across the soundscape, and repeats on a loop, a nod to the “locked groove” of maniacal laughter at the end of Sgt. Pepper, put out of its misery only when the needle was lifted. Hitchcock gives us that ending, too. Meanwhile the sun sets outside the tall windows at Winchester College dorms.
Though he pals around with his sister and his friends, Hitchcock cuts a bit of a loner figure in the memoir, I guess because while reading we’re solidly encased (one of Hitchcock’s favorite words) in his solitary, reflective POV, and also: when you’re thirteen, fourteen you begin to define yourself in opposition to others.
Two passages resonate:
“I wish I had a girlfriend. I wish I had a friend, really. I’m a teenager and I’ll stay one for the rest of my life.”
“Regardless, I’m grateful that the stopped clock of 1967 ticks on in me—it’s given me a job for life.”
In the memoir Hitchcock navigates the distance between those two poles—loneliness at one end, gratitude at the other. In his liner notes to 1967: Vacations in the Past, he signs off with Hitchcockian panache: “We all crash eventually, but at least some of us take off first: if we are left only with sullen cravings and a sense of loss, well, so be it. 1967 is a phantom heart that glows inside me, lighting me up like a lamp on a good day, ‘So long, Mum! Thank you, Dad! I'm off to infinity! Please leave my dinner in the oven’.”
Joe Bonomo's most recent books are No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing and Field Recordings from the Inside: Essays. Find him at No Such Thing As Was and on Bluesky at @joebonomo.bsky.social.
Photo credit: Joe Bonomo