Breaking Free of Convention
Robyn Hitchcock’s 1967
By Charlie Bertsch
Robyn Hitchcock’s new project, 1967, provides a badly needed alternative to the nostalgia tours typically favoured by ageing rock musicians.
Instead of rehashing his own catalogue for diehard fans, he decided to revisit the music that inspired him as a teenager.
Not only did Hitchcock write a memoir about that period, focused on the records he discovered in 1967 when he was attending Winchester College, a storied English public school. He also put together a companion album covering ten of his favourites, along with two original compositions that look back to a year of cultural surprises.
Considering that the English singer-songwriter is already over seventy, it’s remarkable how convincingly he inhabits the mindset of his immature self. Again and again, he manages to rekindle the excitement of hearing music for the first time.
Equally noteworthy is Hitchcock’s facility for revealing something new about the songs he covers, no matter how well a serious aficionado might know them.
By stripping away the lush, layered production of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” he draws attention to the song’s enigmatic lyrics and elegiac delicacy.
The biggest flex is the album’s closing number, one of the most rarely covered famous songs in rock and roll, The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” which he transforms from its original disjointed state – John or Paul – into something quietly cohesive.
As good as the album 1967 is, though, it’s the book that impresses most.
“Then something earth-shattering bursts out of the radio,” Hitchcock writes, capturing the opening bars of a song so well that I identify it before the book does: “SKRON-SKREEK-SKRONK-SKREEK: WHA-DA-DA-FANG, DA-DA-DA-FANG”. It’s “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix, which contains “a guitar solo such as my radio was never designed to reproduce.”
The idea that popular culture was suddenly outstripping the technological and mental capacities of the young people discovering it recurs throughout 1967.
Robyn and his friends love the psychedelic revolution even though they remain sexually and pharmaceutically innocent, implying that the hormonal upheaval of adolescence makes it comprehensible without the help of hallucinogens.
Although this goes against the stereotype of that era, it’s my favourite thing about the book.
The music Hitchcock describes moved me immensely when I was in the middle of my teens, despite my not even having drunk alcohol yet, much less tried other mind-altering substances.
Perhaps that’s because I was conceived during the Summer of Love, when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was topping the album charts, and “All You Need Is Love” was the number-one single.
This may seem like a silly notion, particularly since my parents were the antithesis of hip. However, one of 1967’s virtues is to invite this kind of thinking.
What matters isn’t whether someone has been “experienced,” as Hendrix famously put it, but whether that person is open to new experiences.
Early in the book, before Hitchcock has arrived at 1967, he describes a visit to his maternal grandmother’s home near the Forest of Dean. Far away from the bustle of newly Swinging London, this seemingly backward part of the West Country functions throughout the narrative as an antidote to pretence:
I’m not aware of this but she has only six months to live. She may be more aware of this than I am. She’s sitting back in a maroon armchair listening to a Bob Dylan record that I am playing her. Her eyes are closed and she’s tapping one of her bony knees with her think fingers.
Whether it’s this woman’s proximity to extinction or a simplicity that Hitchcock’s culturally sophisticated parents struggle to access, she finds a way to tune into her awkward grandson’s wavelength.
Without having to make an overt analogy, this passage succinctly communicates the fact that 1967 is the work of a man who is far closer to the grave than the cradle, not unlike the future self that Paul McCartney imagines on Sgt. Pepper’s “When I’m 64.”
At one point in the book, Robyn and his friends are discussing members of the Winchester staff who have been seemingly been around forever: “How old, for example, can you be and continue to have sex: can elderly couples still manage it?”
This is a fine example of a rhetorical strategy Hitchcock uses to great effect, fashioning a kind of dramatic irony in which the author possesses knowledge that his younger self lacked.
“Old people don’t necessarily notice they’re old,” replies his friend Martz. “To them it’s probably quite normal.”
But one thing that surely does make them aware is returning to the culture of their youth from the perspective of a wisened elder, the way 1967 does:
I was a different creature then. If I go back far enough it seems as though my life happened to somebody else. I recognise the names I’m writing down, the times and the places I lived in, but I don’t recognise the person who actually did the living.
Ultimately, what makes this project so compelling isn’t the way Robyn Hitchcock exalts 1967 but the way he uses the fabled year’s energy to illuminate the rest of his life.
Children who grew up with the Harry Potter series will find the book a bracing corrective to J.K. Rowling’s rewriting of history.
Although Hitchcock clearly loved his time at Winchester, he also recognises the troubling role that traditional English public schools like it played in sustaining a power structure out of step with the modern world, one impossible to reconcile with the centuries of peaceful coeducation Rowling conjures.
Winchester, for example, only began enrolling girls in 2002.
“Oddly enough,” Hitchcock writes, “it’s not until 1967 that homosexuality is legalised in the UK – odd because the men who oversee our legislation have been having sex with each other in our private schools for centuries. Whether they remain gay or not, members of the British ruling class largely start out that way.”
As this passage makes clear, Hitchcock doesn’t shy away from self-critique.
He knows that he led a life of privilege, one that shaped his relationship with the culture of his youth.
Probably the most exciting portion of the book for hardcore music fans is when he attends a makeshift “happening” in a medieval basement on campus.
The enigmatic figure presiding over this affair, in which a reel-to-reel tape is played backwards to the accompaniment of a tuneless violin, is none other than Brian Eno, who was then an undergraduate at the nearby Winchester School of Art.
“We are witnessing a ceremony: it’s uncertain what exactly the ceremony means, but Eno is definitely its high priest.”
The sober young Hitchcock isn’t sure what to make of all this.
“Part of me thinks it’s a pretentious charade – probably the part of me that comes from Forest of Dean.”
But Eno’s response to a question from the audience still resonates over the rest of 1967.
“We must ask ourselves, do definitions help. . . or are they just another hang-up, you know?”
What makes Robyn Hitchcock’s 1967 so great is that he doesn’t get bogged down trying to fit the project into a pre-established category.
Yes, the book is a memoir of sorts. But it also works as music criticism, as does the companion album. Yet many of the best passages don’t concern Hitchcock himself or the music that changed his life.
In the end, maybe it makes the most sense to treat 1967 itself as a happening, a tribute to one of those rare periods in history when a whole lot of people embraced the possibility of breaking free of convention.
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Photograph courtesy of arbyreed. Published under a Creative Commons license.