Playboy's History of Jazz & Rock Hope I Die Before I Get Old

They ran in-to each other on the London subway. Mick Jagger was carrying an armload of records he had just received in the mail from Chess Records in Chicago; Keith Richards was knocked out that Jagger had them. They were amazed that they were both into Chicago blues and Chuck Berry.

They'd known each other growing up in suburban Dartford but hadn't been close friends. But starting in 1960 they began hanging out together, largely on the basis of their mutual interest in urban American blues. One night they found themselves at the Marquee Club in Ealing, where they had gone to see Alexis Korner's Blues Inc. Back then the British blues scene was tiny, and everybody knew everybody else. A special guest was announced, someone they had never heard of. As Richards remembered it--appropriately enough in a Rolling Stone history of rock and roll--"Suddenly it's Elmore James, this cat, man. And it's Brian, man. I said, 'What the fuck?' Playing bar slide guitar! We get into Brian after he's finished Dust My Broom. He's really fantastic and a gas. He's doing the same as we'd been doing, thinking he was the only cat in the world who was doing it."

It was the birth of the Rolling Stones. The band came together around Brian Jones, the blond-banged original leader of the Stones, whose interest in obscure American rhythm and blues set the direction of the band.

The group's lineup shifted for a while before and after its July 1962 debut at the Marquee Club, but had settled into its classic aggregation early in 1963. Drummer Charlie Watts at first had hesitated for financial reasons--he was a designer at an ad agency and drummer for Blues Inc. And Bill Wyman, according to legend, was hired as much for his loud, expensive amp as for his bass-playing abilities or charisma.

After the Beatles had stormed America, the Stones were poised to follow. Eventually, it was called the British Invasion, but it resembled more the U.S. buying England's version of its own music.

By the mid-Sixties the American pop charts were dominated by British rock groups--the Beatles (who started it, of course), the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, even Herman's Hermits for the preteen crowd. With the exception of what was going on at Detroit's Motown and Bob Dylan's creating his own world, the Brits were it.

The Beatles and the Stones simply rediscovered American music of the Fifties. The Beatles were motivated primarily by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Keith Richards would become the heir to Chuck Berry's guitar style, but the Stones were generally influenced more by the urban bluesmen of the Fifties: Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James and Muddy Waters. (It was from the title of one of Muddy's songs that the Stones had taken their name.)

However, both the Stones and the Beatles turned these borrowed roots into something entirely their own, though the Stones finally remained truer to their school than the Beatles did to theirs.

For the Beatles it was only three years from the infectiously insipid I Want to Hold Your Hand to 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, an ambitious integration of songs far removed from the usual Fifties rock themes of teen love and loss--an album generally considered as one of a few perfect ones, along with Miles Davis' 1959 Kind of Blue. And the Stones made the transformation even sooner with their 1965 (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, perhaps the first true Sixties rock anthem. Satisfaction had a great riff and bottom invented by Keith Richards while fussing late one night with his new Gibson fuzz box in a Chicago hotel room. It was a new synthesis for the Stones, taking their bluesy R&B-style rock somewhere cheerfully angst-ridden--not an oxymoron if you were 19 in 1965--into territory darker than the Beatles generally traveled.

Soon the Stones were writing Get Off of My Cloud (their follow-up hit to Satisfaction), 19th Nervous Breakdown--and, in 1968, the paradigmatic Sympathy for the Devil. They had learned profitably to walk the dark side of the street, but seemed to believe in the dark side too. Only later, when the Beatles were sadly separating into oil and water, did John Lennon write such bitter, ironic songs as Happiness Is a Warm Gun, Revolution 9 and Helter Skelter.

For the Beatles' huge American audience the band's initial image was as charming, decent puppies in suits, if in need of haircuts. Only teenage girls could tell the moptops apart. The Rolling Stones, except for Brian Jones, were decidedly uglier than the Beatles. They were Hell's Angels with guitars, in black leather with bad teeth, lower-class and dangerous.

In both cases image differed from reality. The Beatles were actually more working-class than the Stones. Lennon, born in 1940, grew up as a genuine greaser hell-raiser. He was known as one of the most accomplished thieves in Liverpool, with a rough, smart mouth and winkle-picker boots. His sailor father disappeared during Lennon's childhood; his mother died when he was a teenager. With Paul McCartney, Lennon played in a Liverpool group called the Quarrymen, performing mostly skiffle music, a late-Fifties British aberration combining music-hall, pop and folk styles into a music whose description and appeal seems mysterious to most non-Brits. But Lennon and McCartney were listening to rock and roll, too, and were writing songs together as early as 1957. George Harrison, three years younger than Lennon and a year younger than McCartney, joined the group in 1958.

In 1960 the Beatles came into being, first calling themselves Long John & the Silver Beatles.

Lennon had a fast wit that he could use to slash people to shreds. He was enrolled in art school when the Beatles started taking off, both locally at Liverpool's Cavern Club and during long, loud nights at clubs filled with rowdy U.S. servicemen on Hamburg's Reeperbahn. The Beatles soon became a tough bar band, playing crude, hard versions of Fifties American rock--Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran--along with originals written in the same vein by Lennon and McCartney. The point was to make music that could cut through the noise and the smoke.

The songs that Lennon and McCartney wrote were ultimately the reason for their unprecedented success--12 number one hit singles through 1966. At first the chemistry was perfect. Paul McCartney, the cute, sweet Beatle, bubbled over with patches of melodies and snatches of clever lyrics. Ironic John Lennon, with a sparser musical imagination, was the finisher, completing and putting some steel into McCartney's half-formed thoughts.

Together, the two were one genius, as Rubber Soul (1965) attests. Separately, they were just bright and talented. But as their success mushroomed, so did their egos, and on 1968's The Beatles (commonly known as the "White Album") you can pick out the Lennon or McCartney tracks. They were no longer collaborators, but competitors. Along the way, Lennon had gotten even more coolly existential, and had taken up with artist Yoko Ono. McCartney was singing about Rocky Raccoon, his saccharine side unchecked. You can hear this separation starkly in the post-Beatles work of both: none of McCartney's or Lennon's solo work comes close to their best collaborative music. Lennon was deficient in musical ideas, given more frequently to polemic than to rocking. McCartney offered a sweet pastiche of overproduced, forgettable stuff.

Through longevity and a 30-year recording history of hit after hit, the Rolling Stones deserve their billing as the world's greatest rock band. But back in the mid-Sixties, the Stones lived in the shadow of the Beatles and were British rock's bad boys to the seemingly goody-goody Fab Four.

John Lennon was more of a true greaser than Mick Jagger ever was. Jagger grew up middle-class in a London suburb and was a student at the London School of Economics when the Stones started getting together.

Like Lennon and McCartney in Liverpool, Jagger and Richards had been childhood friends. They had been pals when they were seven or eight, but their families moved in different directions and they didn't see each other much until they were teenagers on the subway. In high school, Mick was preparing for college, while Keith was a student at a London art school--but more interested in the blues than he was in Gauguin.

The tiny British blues scene of the time revolved around the two centers of Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, mentors of a passionate group of young British musicians who found something resonant in the music of the American urban ghetto and the country bayou.

The blues had been the wellspring of jazz since the 19th century, born in slave fields and turn-of-the-century Mississippi logging camps. The music endured, through Louis Armstrong with pianist Earl Hines in the Twenties, Charlie Parker in the Forties, rhythm and blues in the early Fifties, the hard bop jazz of the mid-Fifties--and, of course, white folks' blues, rock and roll. Blues--which had a certain sadness that was somehow made cheerful--was behind it all.

And the eventual popularity of the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers and Cream among white suburban teenagers proved that you didn't have to be black to play the blues.

Jagger and Richards started going to see Korner and Davies' Blues Inc. at the rare clubs where the group could find gigs. Bland pop and trad jazz--a neo-Dixieland played, in these cases, by white Englishmen, a fairly frightening thought--were the prevailing music styles in England at the time.

Then came the night they met Brian Jones at the Marquee Club. Instead of starting out as the Beatles did in tough German bars, the Stones' first public performances were in hip art-crowd clubs in London.

The Stones' commitment to their musical roots served them well. The live Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! (1970), for instance, has versions of Jagger-Richards collaborations such as Midnight Rambler, Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil--along with stuff that originally inspired them: the traditional blues, Love In Vain, and two Chuck Berry tunes, Carol and Little Queenie.

When Brian Jones, troubled by drug arrests and being aced out of the band he had founded, was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool on July 3, 1969, Mick Jagger had long since become the front man--if not entirely the leader--of the Stones. Jagger was certainly the most popular with fans, anyway. His pouty wraparound lips and electric-rooster moves, plus the obvious fuck-you gleam in his eye, made him a natural candidate. As he's proved since, Mick was upwardly mobile, a jet-setter and a château-in-the-south-of-France sort of working-class hero.

Not so Keith Richards, who deserves the title of Mr. Rock and Roll if any-one does. He personifies attitude, the live-for-the-moment existentialism that runs through the heart of rock and roll. Richards still smokes unfiltered cigarettes and has had a prodigious appetite for a variety of drugs. And he is the group's true rocker. In recent interviews Richards has talked about the retirement of original bassist Bill Wyman, and about the coming and going of Mick Taylor as lead guitarist in the Seventies: "My gut reaction was that nobody leaves the band, except in a coffin." Richards is still gigging in obscure joints while Mick has his feet up in the sun in France and Mustique. In deference to the cameras, Richards had his lopsided graveyard teeth capped, yet he isn't very good at acting as rich as he actually is. But he's the best guitarist ever to graduate from the Chuck Berry school, and among other rock musicians is generally considered the best rock rhythm guitarist ever, a role underappreciated by fans but crucial to the Stones' sound.

Soon Brits--good, bad and awful--were all over the U.S. pop charts. The year 1964 saw the American chart debuts of the Animals (House of the Rising Sun), Chad and Jeremy, the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, the Kinks (You Really Got Me), Lulu, Peter and Gordon, the Searchers and the Zombies (She's Not There)--to name a few.

Starting in 1964, the Beatles and the Stones dominated the American charts. But the biggest--and best--homegrown American stalwart against the onslaught of British groups in the mid-Sixties was Detroit's Motown. Until 1967 or so Motown almost single-handedly slugged it out with the Brits in the top ten.

The record company was started by Berry Gordy Jr. in 1959. Gordy was then 30 and had grown up in Detroit. He had been a professional boxer and a songwriter, and it was while boxing that he met Jackie Wilson. Wilson was a Golden Gloves champion whose mother had convinced him to drop boxing, finish school and work on his singing. Gordy's own boxing career ended when he was drafted and sent to Korea. When Gordy returned in 1953, he bought the 3-D Record Mart, which specialized in jazz--Gordy's first love--but he lost money and gave up after two years. He then took a job on an assembly line at the Ford plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana to support his wife and young daughter. But in 1957, Jackie Wilson, after four successful years with the Dominoes (he had replaced Clyde McPhatter as lead singer), decided to go solo--with Gordy as his songwriter. Their first collaboration, 1957's Reet Petite, made the charts, as did a few others. Their biggest hit together, Lonely Teardrops, was number one on the R&B charts for seven weeks in 1959--Motown's first year. By the end of the Sixties, Gordy was the wealthiest black businessman in America.

Motown started out, and for many years remained, a family operation. Gordy hired relatives and friends, and often it was difficult to tell the talent from the office staff. Early on, Smokey Robinson, when he wasn't singing lead on recording sessions with the Miracles, played drums on sessions for other groups. Gladys Knight started out doing odd jobs but also sang backup for various groups. Teenaged Diana Ross hung out there, earning an occasional $2 per session for doing handclaps. And, at first, Stevie Wonder was a little kid wandering around the place only because Martha Reeves of the Vandellas babysat for him and brought him along to work.

But Motown was, in many respects, also a factory. Gordy had learned something during his years on the assembly line. As he said to Barbara Walters recently on 20/20, "I noticed the way the beautiful brand-new cars would start out as frames and end up as brand-new cars. And I wanted the same thing for Motown. I wanted an artist to come in the front door as an unknown and go out another door as a recording artist and a star."

The team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, which turned out many Motown hits--most notably for the Supremes--is a good example of Motown's production-line technique. As Sharon Davis says in her book Motown--The History, "Lamont Dozier was responsible for creating the song, with Eddie Holland assisting on lyrics and melody. Brian Holland engineered the song's structure and overall sound."

Everybody would work on songs all week. On Friday there would be a quality-control meeting where Gordy would decide which songs were good enough to release. He instituted a charm school for his female performers and required everyone to take in-house dance lessons for their stage routines. Gordy was so opposed to substandard work and lateness that he levied fines and had a time clock installed. Songs, performers and session players were shuffled like cards, and Gordy was the dealer. The result was the distinctive Motown Sound, which brought hit after hit throughout the Sixties.

And no wonder. The list of Sixties Motown acts, many of them from (continued on page 136)Jazz & Rock(continued from page 116) Detroit, included the Marvelettes, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, the Contours, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, Kim Weston, the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Spinners, Tammi Terrell, Jr. Walker and the All-Stars, the Four Tops and, supreme among them (in terms of sales, anyway), the Supremes.

Gordy's artists were not always thrilled with his business techniques, and many left Motown bitter. Gordy paid his artists less than other record companies did. He kept some on small weekly allowances even though they made thousands of dollars for the company (he refused to let them see the books). He also played favorites.

The ascension in the Supremes of Diana Ross at the expense of Flo Ballard is the most publicized instance of Gordy's preferences. Ballard had been leader and lead singer when the group signed with Motown as the Primettes in 1961. Gordy didn't like the name, and Ballard picked the Supremes from a list of others she was given. Gordy, who was taken with Ross' feistiness and beauty (so much so that they had a daughter together), made her the group's lead singer, even though her voice was thinner and weaker than Ballard's. The billing changed to Diana Ross & the Supremes. An unhappy Ballard began drinking, gaining weight and not showing up for gigs. She was fired and replaced by Cindy Bird-song in 1967. There followed a failed solo career and a failed marriage, and a protracted lawsuit against Motown, in which she eventually won a settlement but lost most of it. Ballard and her children ended up on welfare, while Diana Ross' wealth and fame kept growing. Flo Ballard died of a heart attack in 1976, at the age of 32.

Another tragic Motown story is that of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Gaye was born in 1939 in Washington, D.C., where his father was a minister. After a brief career in the service, Gaye became part of Harvey Fuqua's doo-wop Moon-glows, recording for Chicago's Chess Records in the late Fifties. In 1960 Fuqua and Gaye both moved to Detroit, and by the next year were associated with Motown, with Fuqua working as a producer. In 1963 Gaye had several hits, two of which, Hitch Hike and Can I Get a Witness, were covered by the Rolling Stones a few years later. (Motown was more of an influence on the Stones and the Beatles than is generally recognized.) In 1965 Gaye did the wonderfully uplifting (How Sweet It Is) To Be Loved by You. Late in 1968 his I Heard It Through the Grapevine (a drastic reworking of Gladys Knight's version from the year before) hit number one, staying there for seven weeks and becoming one of Motown's biggest sellers. But Gaye also had a series of hits singing duets. His first partner was Mary Wells, followed by Kim Weston.

In 1967 Gordy teamed him up with Tammi Terrell, and--as they say in showbiz--it was magic. Gaye and Terrell never became lovers, but you wouldn't know it from listening to 1967's Ain't No Mountain High Enough and Your Precious Love. As writer Geoffrey Stokes put it: "The communication between the two seemed so direct and emotional that romantic listeners felt like eavesdroppers on an intensely passionate private moment." But Terrell began to suffer from terrible headaches. One night in October 1967 she collapsed while performing with Gaye. She was eventually diagnosed as having a brain tumor. After a series of operations, she died in 1970 at the age of 24. Gaye never seemed to recover from Terrell's death. He stopped touring for four years. His career hung in there for much of the Seventies, but his personal life was a wreck. He divorced his longtime wife, Gordy's sister Anna, married and divorced again quickly, and developed a serious drug habit--mainly free-base cocaine. His behavior became increasingly erratic and paranoid. By 1979 the IRS was after him for $2 million in unpaid taxes, and he bailed out for Hawaii, where he lived in a trailer and reportedly attempted suicide. He pulled himself together enough to win his first Grammy in 1983 for Sexual Healing. By then almost everything he made was going to the IRS. He was living in California with his parents, in a house he had bought for them in happier days. He had once again become suicidal. In March 1984 he had to be restrained and a gun was taken from him. On April 1, during an argument in the kitchen, his father shot and killed him.

While Gaye, the Supremes and the rest of Motown were challenging the British hegemony on the American charts in the mid-Sixties, something else was happening here that Mr. Jones wouldn't understand. It would affect rock perhaps even more significantly than the Beatles and the Stones and would, in fact, profoundly influence all those rockers to come.

It was a skinny kid named Robert Allen Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota who renamed himself Bob Dylan after the Welsh poet and who single-handedly altered the subject matter of rock songs.

Born in 1941, Dylan started out in high school trying to be a rocker, but was laughed offstage during a school assembly for doing a horrible version of a Little Richard tune. In Minneapolis he became part of the bohemian scene, where the de rigueur music was folk. Dylan began reinventing himself around the folk scene, doing his best at first to become Woody Guthrie, the Thirties troubadour of the down and out. Guthrie's songs were about social issues, which the rock and roll of the time blissfully was not.

By the time he got to Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961, at the age of 19, he wasn't social outcast Bobby Zimmerman anymore. He quickly became a part of the Village folk crowd, hanging out at the San Remo and other Bleecker Street basket houses--which served coffee and folk music, and were so named because the performers got paid only what was put in baskets passed after each set. He became friends with Dave von Ronk (the preeminent Village folksinger of the time) and Ramblin' Jack Elliott (a longtime friend of Woody Guthrie's who had reinvented himself as a trucker-cow-boy folksinger). Soon Dylan was playing regularly at Gerdes' Folk City.

Producer John Hammond convinced Columbia Records, then run by Mitch Miller (of sing-along-with fame) to sign Dylan. Hammond had instincts and a reputation dating back to the Thirties--his discoveries included Billie Holiday and Count Basic, among many others.

The biographical liner notes to Dylan's second album are almost entirely bullshit, Dylan mythologizing what he would have liked to have been and done; and all but two cuts are traditional, not originals. But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was definitely different from the Kingston Trio, the time's popular, antiseptic folk group.

Dylan quickly became a favorite of the true folkies who wouldn't be caught dead owning a Kingston Trio record, but the rock audience didn't catch on right away. Peter, Paul and Mary had two big hits with Dylan songs in 1963, Blowin' in the Wind and Don't Think Twice, It's Alright. And in 1965 the Byrds, which included David Crosby, made their name as mellowed-out interpreters of Dylan with Mr. Tambourine Man, a single on which they used electric instruments to play folk music, helping to create yet another strain of the music: folk rock.

Simon and Garfunkel leaned more toward folk than rock, but their music was a hit with the rock audience. Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon met as schoolkids and teamed up in New York when they were still teenagers, as Tom & Jerry. They had an Everly Brothers soundalike single on Big Records called Hey, Schoolgirl, which made number 49 on the charts. But despite subsequent releases, Hey, Schoolgirl was it for Tom & Jerry. After high school Garfunkel went to Columbia University to study architecture and math, and Simon went to Queens College as an English major. But Simon kept hustling, putting out singles and playing Village folk clubs. By 1964 Simon was in London and part of the folk scene there, joined briefly for some gigs by Garfunkel, who was on summer vacation from college. That year, using their own names, they had their first Columbia album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, which included a version of Dylan's The Times They Are A'Changin'. It bombed and they split again. Enter producer Tom Wilson. Without consulting either of them, he remixed Sounds of Silence from that first album, adding drums and an electric guitar. The refried single was a hit, as were Simon and Garfunkel. Their next album, named for and including the new version of Sounds of Silence, went to 21 on the charts in 1966. Homeward Bound from that album was perhaps the first intellectual angst-ridden song about life on the road. Simon and Garfunkel were more precious, more like tragic sophomores reading romantic poetry, than Dylan, who was a kick-ass amphetamine folkie.

Dylan wasn't much noticed by the rock audience until the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he too went electric. The god of folk had embraced the devil rock and roll. Purist folkies called him Judas, but rock audiences started listening--as did other established rock groups, including the Beatles and the Stones.

Dylan had chosen the Hawks as his new backup group (they used to back up rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins) after seeing them perform in New Jersey in 1965. Hawkins' evolving backup group had eclipsed him. In 1959 Levon Helm became the Hawks' drummer. In 1960 they hired a 16-year-old roadie, Robbie Robertson, who became the bass player and then switched to guitar when the lead guitarist split for Nashville. In 1963 Hawkins released a version of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love, with Robertson playing killer guitar, but it didn't sell well. By then, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko were the rest of the Hawks. After their stint backing Dylan, they would emerge in 1968 as the Band, as important a group in its way as Dylan himself.

Dylan changed the game, the way Charlie Parker had changed jazz in the Forties. Dylan may have been the genius of Sixties rock. His songs forever altered the landscape and expanded the subject matter of rock. They were often about apocalypse now, the lyrics fractured and enigmatic, some at first seeming like disconnected speed raps. But they spoke directly in street poetry to what was going on in the lives of his audience. Blowin' in the Wind, of course, became an anthem for civil rights volunteers working (and sometimes getting killed) in the South. And 1965's speedy Subterranean Homesick Blues--"I'm on the pavement, thinking 'bout the government"--summed up those jumpy, nervous times, especially for guys of draft age. On Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 he sang: "Everybody must get stoned," just as marijuana use was becoming popular among rock audiences. Even at his most apocalyptic and surreal, Dylan was funny, too. Highway 61 starts with "God said to Abraham, kill me a son/Abe says, Man, you must be puttin' me on" and gets better from there.

You didn't hear stuff like that in rock before Dylan.

The changes that rock went through during the second half of the Sixties reflected the drastic changes American society was undergoing. The end of Fifties innocence came when John Kennedy was shot in November 1963.

Things were still relatively hopeful when Lyndon Johnson followed Kennedy as president. Johnson was an old-style populist. He could slip and slide with the slipperiest of them, but his proclaimed Great Society emphasized education for the poor. Johnson was more aggressive about enforcing existing civil rights legislation than any president before him. But then there was Vietnam. Johnson could have pulled out the "advisors" Kennedy had sent in. But by July 1965 there were 125,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. And the numbers just kept going up. This conflict against communism in a distant southeast Asian country was killing off members of the rock audience, and that audience wasn't crazy about it. Real angst came into rock.

Take 1965 alone. Johnson ordered the first air strikes against North Vietnam. In Selma, Alabama 25,000 demonstrators marched for civil rights. Alan Freed, who coined the term rock and roll and whose career crashed and burned over a payola scandal, died at 42 from overdrinking. And David Miller was arrested by the FBI for burning his draft card, the first person so charged.

So began 1966, with My Generation on the U.S. charts ("Hope I die before I get old"). The Who had been around almost as long as the Beatles and the Stones, but took longer to make it in the States. On their first American tour, in 1967, they opened for Herman's Hermits.

The Who personified the second wave of Sixties rock, which sometimes had as much to do with costumes as with music. The Who were Mods. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey had the hippest and most expensive wardrobes in rock. Their witty, self-deprecating name was emblematic of the ironic detachment they brought to their music. It was loud and sardonic, full of black humor, noise, anger. Townshend ritually smashed his guitar against the amps at the end of every show. It was performance art--killing the thing you love and being able to afford to do it. But it was also really noisy and looked like a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, something entirely different was going on in San Francisco, where a truly mutant form of rock led to groups called the Grateful Dead, Quick-silver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and many with even weirder names and less talent, most mercifully forgotten now. (Anybody remember the Peanut Butter Conspiracy? Moby Grape?)

The new San Francisco music was called acid rock, after the lysergic acid that inspired it. LSD had been around since the Forties, when it was developed by Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. Harvard scientist Timothy Leary experimented with the drug's positive effects on the terminally ill. The Defense Department was interested in military applications for LSD.

Thanks in large part to Augustus Stanley Owsley III, a renegade chemist who made California's purest acid (dolloped onto sugar cubes), LSD made its cultural debut at the 1965 Acid Tests held by the Merry Pranksters, featuring the Grateful Dead. It was a shifting crowd led by Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs that Tom Wolfe mythologized in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his 1968 book. "Never trust a Prankster" was their motto. The "acid tests" were events that combined emerging San Francisco rock groups and the first light shows, with audiences partaking of punch laced with LSD, the better to appreciate both lights and music.

There was a cosmic, folkie, social protest aspect to much of this San Francisco rock, as exemplified by Country Joe and the Fish singing:

Well, it's one two three,

What are we fightin' for?

Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,

Next stop is Vietnam.

The melody to Fixin' to Die Rag is a direct steal from Muskrat Ramble, a turn-of-the-century Scott Joplin ragtime.

The Jefferson Airplane were also influenced by folk music but owed more to the hard rock music that was developing. They were less directly political than Country Joe. But they were shooting for the cosmic, even if lead singer Grace Slick had been a model and had grown up in comfortable suburban circumstances. The Airplane first started coming together in the summer of 1965, but Slick was in a competing San Francisco group called the Great Society, and didn't join the Airplane until 1966 when its original singer left to have a baby. Slick brought with her two songs she had sung with the Great Society--White Rabbit and Somebody to Love, which became monster hits for the Airplane.

And then there was Janis Joplin. Born in 1943 in the oil town of Port Arthur, Texas, Janis at the age of 20 had hitchhiked to San Francisco and found gigs singing around North Beach clubs, sometimes with future Jefferson Airplane member Jorma Kaukonen. She joined Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966 and soon, of course, she was much bigger than Big Brother.

"People think I'm a hippie," she once said. "But I'm not a hippie, I'm a beatnik. Hippies think everything is going to be wonderful, and beatniks know it's not."

Joplin fronted a rock band but sang Texas blues with an urgency and desperation that could take a piece of your heart. She would scream three or four notes at a time when she hit the top, and sometimes would go up from there. Nobody before or since could do anything like it.

She and Big Brother were the hit of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, which was a lot more musically successful than the wildly mythologized Woodstock Festival that followed two years later.

The real surprise of Monterey Pop was Otis Redding, who reclaimed Respect from Aretha Franklin (her recorded version was much more successful than his, though Otis wrote the song). But Redding will always be remembered for (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay. It was recorded with co-writer Steve Cropper (of Booker T. & the M.G.s) at Stax/Volt in Memphis, home of the Memphis Sound, yet another evolving strain of rock--a blend of R&B and white Southern rock noted for its use of horn sections. The Dock of the Bay recording session took place just three days before Redding died, at 26, in an airplane crash near Madison, Wisconsin in December 1967. It became his first number one single.

There are a million would-be Claptons out there, but not many have even tried to imitate the wizardry of Jimi Hendrix since his death in London in 1970. Like Monk or Mingus or Coltrane, he was a planet unto himself. His guitar playing was deeply rooted in the blues, but he was often visiting Andromeda at the same time.

He was born in Seattle in 1942, his mother a full-blooded Cherokee. He got his first guitar at the age of 12, and being left-handed, turned it upside down and learned to play it backward--which may explain his preference for the bass side of the instrument. While Clapton was soaring on the fast, high notes, Hendrix was exploring the powers of the lower strings for contrast. Clapton owes more to melodic B.B. King, while Hendrix comes from the deeper, more atavistic music of John Lee Hooker. Hendrix sounds like a primitive Mississippi blues man on acid. During performances, he played his guitar with his teeth and occasionally set fire to it.

After getting a 1961 medical discharge from the paratroopers because of back trouble, Hendrix changed his stage name to Jimmy James and apprenticed in bands fronted by Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Jackie Wilson. By 1965 he had formed his own group, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. In 1966 he went to London, where his career really took off. He went back to his own name and formed the three-piece Jimi Hendrix Experience with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding. Eric Clapton was forming his own power trio, Cream, with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker around the same time. The first single the Experience released, late in 1966, was a cover of the Leaves' Hey Joe that made the U.K. charts in early 1967. The Experience first backed the Who at a Savile Theater concert, and then were booked on a tour of England--on a bill that included Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck. Then came Purple Haze--a tune that seemed as if it might be about drugs--and Jimi's June 1967 return to the U.S. for the Monterey Pop Festival, after which he was recognized as one of the most original stars in rock.

But ultimately, the San Francisco scene's most important group was the Grateful Dead. Along with the Rolling Stones they have proved to be the Olympic marathoners of the Sixties groups--and like the Stones, the Dead are not nostalgia artists by any means. The band can still fill Madison Square Garden for six nights running. They've been together so long and have such a repertoire they can play four-hour sets every night for a week and not repeat themselves. The tribal loyalty they inspire is unique in pop music. And for every graying hippie in the crowd, some in three-piece suits with beepers on their belts, there are batches of high school and college-age kids in headbands and tie-dyed T-shirts.

Among the first dates was the three-day Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall in January 1966, featuring most of the good bands in San Francisco. The Dead were then still the Warlocks, having been Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions before that. Guitarist Jerry Garcia had been a folkie growing up in Palo Alto in the shadow of Stanford. He and Robert Hunter--the Dead's ghost member, who has written the lyrics to some of the Dead's most memorable stuff--were in a bluegrass band together as teenagers. Garcia was a good enough banjo picker and guitarist to make a little money giving lessons. In 1965 the group turned into the Warlocks, playing rock and R&B tinged with folk. The band members included alcoholic blues fan Ron "Pigpen" McKernan on organ and harmonica (he died eight years later at the age of 27); bassist Phil Lesh; and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, who splits the Dead's musical direction with Hunter and Garcia.

As Garcia once said, the Dead are more of a commune than a musical group--though these days a multimillionaire commune.

The Warlocks started hanging out with Kesey's crowd. Practically everybody was taking acid. At one party Garcia was flipping through the Oxford English Dictionary. His eyes landed on two words, and the group was now the Grateful Dead. They got a financial and electronic boost from boy acid magnate Stanley Owsley, who designed and paid for a sound system cranked up to their new louder ideas.

Their eponymous first album, recorded in May 1967 in three days, was pretty straightforward--folk and blues rock. The second, 1968's Anthem of the Sun, a double album, took six months of studio time to record. Anthem was mainly acid rock at its most acidy. If you weren't tripping along with them, much of it was no fun to listen to--like John Coltrane's late music, when he too began taking acid before his death in 1967.

For a while, it seemed as if everybody had to produce an acid album--or music that sounded acid-inspired, anyway. Writer Gene Sculatti summarized this change:

What began as the British Invasion in 1964 had mutated by 1965 into folk rock. In 1967, San Francisco acid rock supplanted folk rock. By the end of the year, on the heels of Sgt. Pepper and countless similar ambitions on the part of every functioning rock group, the pop music audience was thought to be involved in some epochal creative explosion, unprecedented and unparalleled. Albums were being hailed as cultural landmarks and their newfound prominence was believed to signal the long awaited emergence of popular music into the realm of serious art.

One of the first, and the best of the lot, was the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, released in June 1967. Sgt. Pepper didn't veer as far off musically into the ether as other bands' works, but the influence of LSD was obvious. Sgt. Pepper was a concept album that somehow worked as a whole instead of as a collection of disconnected songs. It was much more ambitious and cosmic than what the Beatles had done before. The Stones' answer to Sgt. Pepper came in December 1967 with Their Satanic Majesties Request, which was overblown and not nearly so good (it mainly proved that the Stones should stick to R&B). And if you are at one with the universe, what is time? The Byrds stretched their 1967 hit, Eight Miles High, eight miles long on their 1970 Untitled LP. Three-minute storyteller Chuck Berry responded with the LP Concerto in B Goode, on which he double-tracked himself for 18 minutes and 40 seconds on the all-instrumental title tune. The liner notes described the concerto as "a brilliant blend of blues and country and acid rock." It wasn't. And then there was Vanilla Fudge, which sounded like Motown on quaaludes. Blue Cheer, an abysmal San Francisco power trio, made up in loud what it lacked in talent. And who could forget that landmark 1966 album by the Blues Magoos, Psychedelic Lollipop?

Even the Beach Boys were going cosmic. Their early garage-band sound on 1962's Surfin' had evolved into the technical wizardry of Good Vibrations in 1966, a single that took Brian Wilson six months and 17 different sessions to produce--and was worth it. Late in 1967 the Beach Boys met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Paris. Like some of the Beatles, the Beach Boys were under the spell of the yogi's transcendental meditation. In May 1968 the Beach Boys took the maharishi on tour with them. In July they released the LP Friends, which reflected their newly found TM wisdom. Friends sold fewer copies than any other Beach Boys album. They were no longer singing about Rhonda or little deuce coupes on their records, and their songs, while sometimes just as sweetly dumb as some of their early hits, started to show a social awareness. It's hard to imagine the early Beach Boys writing songs called Student Demonstration Time and Lookin' at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song). Both titles were on the 1971 LP Surf's Up, which also contained an antipollution cut called Don't Go Near the Water and one of those well-intentioned dumb ones, the ecological A Day in the Life of a Tree.

And in 1973 came the ambitious California saga on the Holland album, a lengthy rock history of California that included quotes from poet Robinson Jeffers, mention of Steinbeck and Monterey Pop. It ended with a classic Beach Boys riff about cool, clear water. It wasn't bad. They refused to become just another oldies act. Despite some epic internal problems (centering on Brian Wilson's unfortunate weirdness but by no means caused by him alone), they hung in and became accepted by the counterculture. The Beach Boys even played Bill Graham's Fillmore East with the Grateful Dead in 1971.

Frank Zappa was a southern Californian who started out advanced. From the beginning he made truly weird and truly brilliant music without any help from his chemically enhanced friends. Born in 1940, he grew up in the Mojave Desert, where one of his high school pals was Don Van Vliet, later known as Captain Beefheart. The two played together in bands variously called the Black-Outs and the Soots.

After graduation in 1958, Zappa found a couple of gigs writing soundtracks for B movies, and was arrested in 1964 for cutting for $100 what one writer intriguingly described as "a mock-pornographic tape for a vice-squad officer posing as a used-car salesman."

The Mothers of Invention were an amalgam of several bands Zappa had been gigging around with, and thanks both to his talent and to his self-promotional abilities, Zappa got the Mothers signed to MGM's Verve label--largely known for its jazz and R&B. In 1966 the double LP Freak Out was released. Zappa was out there. Even without drugs--and Zappa was never a druggie, no matter how strange his music got--Freak Out and its even better follow-up, released just months later, Absolutely Free, were truly weird and wonderful. The list of nearly 200 influences on Freak Out includes Little Walter, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Lenny Bruce, Molly Bee, Roland Kirk, James Joyce, Bob Dylan, Edgard Varèse, Slim Harpo, Eber-hard Kronhausen, Charles Mingus, Howlin' Wolf and Sabu the Jungle Boy. It was a dadaist collage of avant-garde music and R&B with a satiric streak regarding the straight, complacent middle class that was a delight if you were the right age and part of that middle class but trying desperately to get out of it. How could you not love Who Are the Brain Police?, Plastic People, The Duke of Prunes, Call Any Vegetable ("vegetables dream of responding to you"), America Drinks and Goes Home or Brown Shoes Don't Make If?

Zappa loved his greasy Fifties R&B, but probably more than any other so-called rock performer had absorbed what was going on in the experimental free jazz of the Sixties, though the Mothers could also really rock when they felt like it. Zappa proved to be a better-than-average rock guitarist on 1969's Hot Rats, on which he plays with bassist Jack Bruce, former member of Cream. Hot Rats also featured as guest artists French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and Zappa's old pal Don Van Vliet, whose recording career as Captain Beefheart made Zappa's stuff seem absolutely normal by comparison. Beefheart's double LP Trout Mask Replica, released in October 1969, is perhaps the definitive weird Sixties album--weird with definite artistic purpose and success, that is. The music might best be described as dadaist blues. Not so overtly comic as much of Zappa's music, but more ambitiously strange and strangely compelling, Trout Mask Replica sold only a handful of copies at the time but has since become a cultural landmark, even if it's more theoretically admired than actually listened to.

But if you want truly Los Angeles weird in the late Sixties, look to Jim Morrison and the Doors. Although Morrison died in a bathtub in Paris in 1971 at the age of 27, his passion and dedication to the creative derangement of the senses--even if it means self-destruction--lives. Inspired while a student at UCLA's film school, Morrison may have captured in his music the scary euphoria of the late Sixties better than anyone else.

The Doors took their name from an Aldous Huxley book, The Doors of Perception, his philosophical response to a mescaline experience in the early Fifties. During his trip, Huxley discovered the cosmic aspects of his tweed trousers, among other revelations. But the Doors went beyond that.

The late Sixties were the first time in American pop music that the subject matter was intimately connected with what was happening in the world. Rock wasn't just music or fashion. For a short time before the economic exploitation of rock was in high gear, rock music actually voiced the desires and ideals of a generation with a directness unprecedented in popular music. And it did so without necessarily being as overtly political as Country Joe. Also, you could dance to it. It was the politics of the young, with a good beat. Norwegian Wood, on the Beatles' Rubber Soul, was political too, in that the song assumed the acceptability of two young, unmarried people casually sleeping together. The serious left felt gravely betrayed when the Beatles later sang, "I don't want no revolution." Had their fame and wealth made them reactionaries? Fans at the time discussed the politics of these songs as much as they boogied to them. These fans proudly called themselves freaks. Sociologists called them the counterculture. Hippies truly believed they could change the world, and had songs on the radio to prove they were right. Naturally the greatest proportion of the audience was just getting high, nodding their heads in profound agreement and reaching for the Cheez-Its. Flowers in your hair and feeling groovy--you could do worse. But the flower-power idealism lasted only a couple of butterfly summers.

The summer of 1967 was called the summer of love. The rise of flower power--"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair"--said a lot about how predominantly white rock music had become, both in terms of performers and audiences. Rock had long been primarily for white audiences, of course, but there had always been a good proportion of black artists providing it as well. But as the Sixties wore on, the percentage of top-ten singles made by black musicians kept dropping. Toward the end of the decade, some established Motown artists couldn't make the charts as routinely as they had in the past.

And 1967 certainly wasn't the summer of love in black ghettos around the country. Advances in civil rights had raised the hopes of black Americans. But starting in 1965, when little promised social change had been accomplished, these hopes turned into frustration and the anger turned into rioting. The six-day Watts riot in 1965 was the first. "There were more disturbances in 1966," wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "but the worst summer of violence occurred in 1967, when racial unrest hit more than 100 cities across the country. The largest riots took place in Newark and Detroit, with the violence in Detroit lasting a full week and resulting in 43 deaths and more than 7000 arrests."

In the summer of 1967 Sam and Dave recorded Soul Man. It was an indication of where black music was going--away from rock, with its increasingly arty pretensions, toward soul. The term had been around to describe the music of such early-Sixties jazzmen as organist Jimmy Smith. But by the late Sixties it had come to signify something else--a further evolution of gospel-influenced rhythm and blues, aimed primarily at a black audience. As co-writer Samuel Moore of Sam and Dave told an interviewer in 1988, Soul Man came from a time "when blacks were rioting and burning. The password was always soul. Even though it was a time of upheaval, there was also a unity among blacks because we had a common cause in fighting for freedom, justice and equality. I thought Soul Man was what it was all about."

Peace and love didn't last long even among white rock audiences. The euphoria of psychedelia--and psychedelic rock--started crashing in 1968. The Doors had been right when they sang, "Girl, we couldn't get much higher." Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, and much of Chicago's West Side burned in subsequent rioting. Senator Bobby Kennedy was killed in June--and then came the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August.

The Democrats had convened to nominate Hubert Humphrey as their presidential candidate--and had put a hawkish plank in their platform regarding Vietnam. A bunch of longhaired freaks decided to camp out in Lincoln Park to stage a countercultural parody of the convention, organized (such as it was) by the Yippies. There was even a bandstand featuring the MC5, a White Panther band from Detroit. But Mayor Richard J. Daley didn't see the humor in it--nor in the more serious protests going on in front of the Conrad Hilton hotel--and tried to shut down the whole thing. "The police are not here to create disorder," said the malaprop Mayor Daley; "the police are here to preserve disorder." Squad cars and tear gas drove the Yippies out of Lincoln Park. They were chased down Wells Street, beaten by police. They headed for the Hilton to join the protest march (which was led by Dick Gregory and others) to the Amphitheater at 43rd and Halsted, the convention site. But neither group made it. The National Guard had been brought in; national TV offered wall-to-wall coverage of generations and lifestyles in conflict. "The whole world is watching," the protesters chanted, and it was. The picture of the hippie slipping a flower into the barrel of a young National Guardsman's gun summed up the weirdness of the time. Even the most spaced-out hippies began to realize it was still ugly out there, and getting uglier.

The legendary Woodstock Festival held on Max Yasgur's Bethel, New York farm in August 1969 was the end of a brief era. It wasn't "the dawning of the age of Aquarius," as they were singing in the popular Broadway musical Hair. (That it was a hit was a sign that the counterculture had ended.) Woodstock was a one-of-a-kind event, an unprecedented tribal gathering. It rained, everyone took acid in the mud and peace and love reigned in a pasture in upstate New York for three days. No matter that the music produced by most bands--including some superlative performers--was mediocre compared with their best live shows, or that the huge crowd also produced a monstrous traffic jam. Hardly anyone who was there seemed to mind. Woodstock was groovy.

Unfortunately, Altamont was more in keeping with the spirit of the times. It took place four months later, in December 1969, and it was ugly. The Rolling Stones were concluding a U.S. tour. Even though they were singing Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man (which had been a hit single a month after the Chicago convention), the Stones were living the luxurious life of the rock star and charging high ticket prices for their concerts. So, fearful of being perceived as sellouts, they decided to give a free concert somewhere near San Francisco. They chose the Altamont Speedway south of the city. Probably in emulation of the Grateful Dead, who were part of the lineup of acts, the Stones hired Hell's Angels for their security crew, which proved to be not such a good idea. With film crews catching it all, the Hell's Angels bullied the crowd and the performers alike. When a young black man near the stage pulled a gun during the Stones' set, the bikers stabbed him to death. For a while, the Stones kept on playing in the best bar-band, bar-fight tradition, with Jagger interrupting songs to plead with the crowd to cool out. But it was a bad trip. The Stones fled the scene by helicopter.

The souring of countercultural idealism turned into the days of rage, the trial of the Chicago Seven, and the amateur terrorism of the Weathermen--their name taken from a Dylan song. Attempts to bring down the system were ardent if wrongheaded, but ultimately they didn't make a dent. Despite all the protests, the Vietnam war kept dragging on. On May 4, 1970, during a demonstration at Kent State in Ohio, four students were killed by jittery young National Guardsmen. Ten days later, Mississippi law-enforcement officers fired into a crowd of bottle-and-rock throwing demonstrators at Jackson State, killing two and injuring 12. The perception was that the government was killing its young who wouldn't stay in line. Repression was the name of the day, and by 1972, Nixon was tightening the screws.

This meltdown of the utopian dreams of the Sixties was reflected in rock in two distinct ways--in the evolution of heavy metal and the emergence of country rock. The first involved pushing the pedal to the metal even louder and more angrily, while the other retreated into a simpler musical territory.

Heavy metal was epitomized by Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page formed Zeppelin in 1968 out of the remains of his New Yardbirds--which he had formed out of the remains of the old Yardbirds. Page's new band was inspired by the success of Cream, whose most prominent member, Eric Clapton, was also an alumnus of the Yardbirds.

The Yardbirds never became that big in the U.S., but they were the progenitors of heavy metal. In 1963 Clapton had been hired when the original lead guitarist quit to go back to college, just after the group replaced the Rolling Stones as the house band at London's Crawdaddy Club. Clapton didn't last long. He didn't like the group's shift from blues to pop and moved on to John Mayall's Blues-breakers--which for a while had Jack Bruce on bass--before drummer Ginger Baker came up with the idea to form a trio. Clapton's replacement in the Yard-birds was Jeff Beck, who, after leaving the group in March 1967, formed another ur-metal band, the Jeff Beck Group, which included Stone-to-be Ron Wood on guitar and whiskey-voiced Rod Stewart on vocals. Jimmy Page, who had left an extremely successful gig as a studio musician to join the group, ultimately took over as lead guitarist.

While it lasted, Cream was the monster group of them all. The band's first album, 1966's Fresh Cream, created a buzz in the underground press. The album proved to be considerably more restrained and arty than the group was during its first U.S. tour in April 1967. Clapton is God had been a common London graffito even before Cream. His extended solos were often transcendent, as the live tracks from 1968's Wheels of Fire indicate. Cream's live version of the old Robert Johnson song Crossroads from Wheels is a quintessential example of how the band changed the blues into something new. Cream was assimilating some of the ideas going around in the free jazz of the Sixties--group improvisation, for one thing. Each member took long pyrotechnic solos, but on tracks such as Crossroads, the whole band performed aggressive group improvisation. It's no wonder Cream lasted so briefly, existing as a group only from July 1966 to November 1968.

Clapton went off to his superstar noodling with Stevie Winwood in the forgettable Blind Faith. But Led Zeppelin took the kind of rock that Cream had been making even further, and would become the heavy metal band of the Seventies.

Many American rockers, led yet again by Bob Dylan, began to get into the country-music side of rock. Country rock had come about in the Fifties in the music of Chuck Berry, Elvis (before he went Hollywood) and Buddy Holly as a fusion of rhythm and blues and country.

Dylan had been out of commission for a while because of a 1966 motorcycle accident on a hill a couple of miles from his house near Woodstock. While rock was rapidly changing around him, he sat recuperating in the country. Early in 1967 Dylan talked the Band into joining him. In West Saugerties they rented a bright-pink aluminum-sided house they named Big Pink, where they put in a basement studio and recorded the much-bootlegged Basement Tapes sessions.

In 1968 Dylan gave a hint of things to come on his John Wesley Harding album, which was considerably different from the 1966 double LP Blonde on Blonde. The pre-accident songs on Blonde on Blonde signaled the end of Dylan's Village poet period. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, Leopardskin Pillbox Hat and Just Like a Woman were on it, plus the epic Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and Visions of Johanna, which is like a Kerouac story of Village life. But the postaccident songs on John Wesley Harding were simple, shorter, less apocalyptic. The sound was countrified. Which figured, since Dylan had used several Nashville studio musicians--Charlie McCoy, Kenny Buttrey and Pete Drake--on the sessions.

The Band's first album, named after their house, hit the charts in August 1968. It contained three Dylan songs, a haunting version of the Fifties Lefty Frizell hit Long Black Veil and several originals--including The Weight, which, legend has it, had lyrics written in 20 minutes by Robbie Robertson as he sat in a recording-studio stairwell. Toronto-born Robertson may have been the brains of the Band, but their music owed a lot to the Southern country influence of drummer Levon Helm, who had grown up in Arkansas. (The other band members were Canadian.) Robertson seemed to write songs specifically for Helm. Helm sang lead on The Weight, which was soulful enough to be covered by Aretha Franklin, the Temptations and the Supremes. The Band's eponymous second album hit the charts in October 1969. It offered further proof of the bedrock Americana of their music, which could most obviously be heard in The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, a Civil War lament from the losing side, again sung by Helm.

But it was Dylan's spring 1969 Nashville Skyline that prefigured the turn toward country that many rock bands would take in the early Seventies. With that turn would come the rise of Southern cracker guitar rock--the most shining example of which would be the All-man Brothers. Nashville Skyline was so Nashville it barely sounded like rock. In case anyone missed the point, it began with a brave if shaky duet between Dylan and Johnny Cash on Girl From the North Country.

By 1970, it seemed like time to hunker down on a farm and try to escape the storm. Sheepskin coats, Wells Fargo belt buckles and Frye cowboy boots replaced the mod Sixties look. Even the Grateful Dead, the quintessential acidhead band, returned to their folk-country roots on the 1970 Workingman's Dead, but it was country rock with an acid wink.

The change in music in the early Seventies also was reflected in the rock-star mortality rate. The pleasurable excesses of the Sixties had killed off some of the most important members of the late Sixties scene. Many lived fast, died young and left a good-looking corpse. By 1972 the dead included Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and many others. On their last album together, the Beatles sang about getting back to where they once belonged. But they were dead as a group and broke up in 1970. In a way, Sixties rock was born and buried with them.

Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked. --Bob Dylan

Remember what the dormouse said, feed your head, feed your head.--The Jefferson Airplane

Sometimes the light's all shining on me, other times i can barely see. Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been. --The Grateful Dead

It was a skinny kid named Robert Allen Zimmerman who singlehandedly altered the subject matter of rock.