“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)

I guess we can give Harlan Ellison some points for paranoia prescience with this very early vision of an AI dystopia. As such, it reminded me a lot of 19th-century horror, which often seems to believe that simply mentioning something uncanny, such as a ghost, is enough to set the mood. The idea of an AI takeover is barely developed here. It just happened somehow. Computers around the world have become sentient and they really hate people. They have allied into one thing—called “AM”—and wiped out all humanity except for the five featured in this story, who are being tortured and kept alive indefinitely. It’s been going on for 109 years at the time of the story—apparently the machines can somehow confer immortality or at least long life too. Lucky day. They seem to be able to do practically anything they want. The bad news is that the machines hate with molten rage (an Ellison specialty) even if specific reasons are not given here. They just do. The story is basically scenes of torture and terror alternating with world-building explanations and exposition. Ellison brings a lot of energy to his work, which has always been one of the main appeals about it. He may often feel like he’s making shit up, but at least it’s usually interesting shit. At this point I am beginning to think, however, that he might be more of a young person’s writer. He’s not impressive to me now the way he was when I read him in my 20s. I always intended to read more of him then but unfortunately never got around to it. Now his stuff too often feels made up, though certainly he goes deep into his themes and ideas. The thing about this one is that it never goes much further than its striking title and premise. It doesn’t have to, or didn’t. Now it has a lot of stiff competition in the realm of AI dystopia. Start with The Matrix and no doubt whole shelves of SF I don’t know at all. In fact, we might be living in that dystopia any day now. Still, I was glad to get to this story finally.

Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
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Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park” (1967)

[listen up!]

This top 20 hit by the Small Faces (who later became the Faces with Rod Stewart) was preceded in October 1967 by the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s smash #1 “Incense and Peppermints,” together defining a kind of deceptive wide-eyed teenybop style of bubblegum psychedelic. These songs could somehow parade around fearlessly on the AM radio, at least in my market when I was 12. They both, in fact, scared me a little because, if it was not entirely clear what is going on, the feeling is unmistakably illicit, outside the bounds of grownups, an exotic guided adventure. The mood was like little I had heard before and it appealed to me even before I got the sense of the words. The fictional Itchycoo Park in this one is a place you go to rest your eyes in shades of green. Wikipedia has the file on where the name “Itchycoo” might come from. It feels like a real place, this park. Implicitly the song is about a day of skipping school and it’s straightforward from there: “What did you do there? / I got high / What did you feel there? / Well, I cried / But why the tears there? / I’ll tell you why:” Chorus: “It’s all too beautiful” x4. Later the singer invites us to touch the sky with him. I knew “high” meant drugs, mostly likely LSD—I’d read all about it in Life magazine—but I was a kid remote from any scene that could connect me to that part of the song. I just more, like the ducks here, grooved about, was nice and had fun in the sunshine of this song, notably late at night, borne on the cool feelings it conveyed, buoyed by tunefulness and a great vocal performance from Steve Marriott.

Harry Nilsson, “You Can’t Do That” (1967)

[listen up!]

With this Nilsson throwaway, more stunt than song proper and often credited as the world’s first mash-up song, it’s not hard to see how he and it used flattery and songwriting chops to win the Beatles over to Nilsson’s side. They were impressed—in the late ‘60s, when they were still together and even touring, they regularly named Nilsson as their favorite US artist. The truth is I’m not even sure how much I like this song, though I suppose you have to give it to him on some level for pulling it off. Formally a slowed-down cover of the Beatles song found on the UK Hard Day’s Night LP (released in the US on The Beatles’ Second Album), this version of “You Can’t Do That” quickly unmoors itself and wanders into lines from some 18 more (per Wikipedia) Beatles songs—“Daytripper,” “Drive My Car,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “I’m Down,” “Paperback Writer,” “Yesterday,” etc. They’re all there, one or two lines at a time. The original is a John Lennon song in his tough-guy misogynist vein, the best example of which is the lamentable “Run for Your Life” on Rubber Soul. Nilsson’s exercise is the kind of brainy turn that seemed to fit best with Lennon’s sensibilities, though all the Beatles swore by Nilsson too. But Lennon was the one who caroused with Nilsson most, on his 18-month lost weekend in Los Angeles. I’m filing this under novelty. Most Beatles songs have their appeals for me, but this workup is so caught up in its own concept that it’s hard to enjoy for the musical pleasures found in the 18 or whatever Beatles songs it quotes.

Sagittarius, “Hotel Indiscreet” (1967)

[listen up!]

Sagittarius coproducers and co-honchos Curt Boettcher and Gary Usher are primarily responsible for the Present Tense album that gives “Hotel Indiscreet” a home. The song was also released as a single that went nowhere. Boettcher and Usher are known for sunshine pop verging on a fork in the road: psychedelics in one direction and bubblegum in the other. They worked with the Association, the Millennium, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Tommy Roe, and many others. Sagittarius was their project—they got the recording deal on the strength of a band they had not yet put together, just the two of them at first. They wrote most of the songs but not this one, which is credited to future Bread-man Jimmy Griffin and his songwriting partner Michael Z. Gordon. It might be the best thing on the album, shimmering with bright harmonies, fizzy pop flourishes, soaring heights they seem able to hit at will. It’s easy to hear the Association connections, and the song can also sound like music for a montage in a movie made for TV. Yet it bears an undeniable pop swagger and beauty at the same time. It blows up into rounds of delicious ringing chants and fleet-foot runs up and down the scales. It grows mighty, something to behold, all hooks and cotton-candy sweetness. Most of it’s done with vocals but little extras like a muted cornet keep the mix frothy and delightful. The original single, a b-side, included a spoken-word skit by members of Firesign Theater, which I admit I prefer excised. Yes, it’s silly pop music, but with this level of purity it’s also utterly thrilling. At least it should have been a hit for sure, but maybe the implied adultery in the lyrics did that in.

Belle de Jour (1967)

France / Italy, 100 minutes

Director: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Joseph Kessel, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carriere

Photography: Sacha Vierny

Editor: Louisette Hautecoeur

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Genevieve Page, Pierre Clementi, Iska Khan, Francoise Fabian, Maria Latour, Francisco Rabal, Marcel Charvey

Belle de Jour was sold in 1967 as director and cowriter Luis Buñuel’s “Masterpiece of Erotica.” Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, a young middle-class housewife who seems to be messed up about sex, likely the work once again, per Buñuel, of the Catholic Church. Severine’s sexual interests may or may not lie in taboo directions, BDSM, and degradation, but she has apparently decided her best bet is to present to the world as “frigid”—beautiful, and unattainable. Sha and her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) sleep in separate beds and she repulses all his advances with sighs and sorrow, which he seems to accept with equanimity. He’s a certain model of ideal husband.

Severine finds an outlet for herself, drawn to it almost by forces beyond her will, as a high-end, “classy” prostitute. She works only in the afternoon, hence her prostitute name, Belle de Jour, literally “beauty of the day.” Presumably this is so she can be home in time to prepare her husband’s dinner. This particular operation takes place off the street, in apartments owned by the house madame Anais (Genevieve Page). No menacing pimps seem to be involved and it feels relatively safe. At first Severine resists the actual work—the undressing, showing her body, physical intimacy. Anais is gentle but firm with her, starting her with the more unobjectionable johns. The sex work seems to be what Severine wants or needs and soon she is a regular with two others, Charlotte (Francoise Fabian) and Mathilde (Maria Latour). We see a few scenes of the fetishes their johns are there to see served. It’s Buñuel and not surprisingly they are bizarre and often surreal, with BDSM themes. There’s even a flashback scene of Severine refusing communion. Ah, Buñuel and the Catholic Church! The eternal romance of opposites attracting.

Monkees, “What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round?” (1967)

[listen up!]

This Monkees track, written by “Lewis & Clarke” (the writing credit taken by songwriting team Michael Martin Murphey and Owen Castleman), was selected and sung by Michael Nesmith, furthering the explorations of country and country-rock by which he’d be better known in his solo career. The song’s narrative point of view is not entirely clear and can be confusing. It’s about a young San Antonio man who takes a train down to Mexico—“Just a loudmouth Yankee I went down to Mexico,” it starts. In places the song has not aged well. The singer admits, for example, “I lightly took advantage of a girl who loved me so”—that “lightly” seems to be doing its share of heavy lifting here. Should I stay or should I go? is the question that plagues the siinger, and ultimately (apparently) becomes the source of his greatest regret. Or, or as he somehow movingly bewails it in the chorus, “What am I doing hangin’ ‘round? ... I should be ridin’ on that train to San Antone.” It’s my favorite part of the song and the place where I can most easily ignore the singer’s somewhat loutish behavior, because at that point he is full of regrets that can never be answered for. The question is a bit muddled—at first it seems to be about staying in Mexico too long, but later it seems to be about how long it took him to get back. By which point, sadly, it’s too late, baby, baby it’s too late. “Then she told me that she loved me not with words but with a kiss” is a moment that can never be recovered, seared into this song. That’s all. It feels like that and train whistles in the distance are going to haunt him for the rest of his life.

2. Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) – “A Day in the Life”

[2011 review of “A Day in the Life” here]

My unconventional conventional choice here has become something of a lightning rod for conventionalists and contrarians. Since approximately 1978, Sgt. Pepper’s has been named in multiple places via multiple surveys as the greatest rock album of all time, though support for it has flagged a little in this century. Certainly many also consider it the greatest psychedelic rock album of all time, which is where a contrarian like myself starts to clear his throat. The only songs besides “A Day in the Life” that might qualify as psychedelic—“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (John Lennon being cute about LSD, i.e., Lucy Sky Diamonds, plus the lyrics are trippy), “Within You Without You” (George Harrison droning ineffectively on a sitar for five minutes), and maybe “Fixing a Hole” (by Paul McCartney shortly before composing “Rocky Raccoon”). It is otherwise the omnibus anthology style that arguably started with Revolver and continued through the White Album and Abbey Road, with songs of all genres and semi-genres chockablock side by side. (In that sense, Rubber Soul may be the last cohesive Beatles album.) “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Pepper’s, for example, is a tender, sentimental ballad likely to make the weak cry. Compare Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by McCartney) or Glen Campbell’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.” Let me stipulate I have nothing against crying. I do it all the time. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” written by McCartney when he was 14 and now a tradition to call out for any baby boomer turning that precise age, is more like a nagging earworm, featuring clarinets. There should be polaroids with a birthday cake and grandkids. You’re not dropping acid for that, if you are dropping acid, which I am not necessarily endorsing.

To be clear, I have nothing against most of the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s. I thought I might, and have thought so for many years of not listening to it, but, when I started playing it again in recent days, the first thing I realized was how well I know it, from the sequencing to all the words in all the songs. I can even sing with “Within You Without You.” It’s among the first albums I ever bought and it’s thoroughly imprinted on me, so taking the contrarian stance is tricky. I do believe Sgt. Pepper’s has been vastly overrated. But it’s still the Beatles and thus has undeniable appeals for fans like me who came up on them. It’s not the greatest rock album of all time (that’s Highway 61 Revisited or possibly Sandinista) and it’s not the greatest psychedelic album of all time either (that’s—well, why spoil the surprise, right? you've probably figured it out by now anyway). All that said, Sgt. Pepper’s does have arguably the greatest psychedelic song of all time. “A Day in the Life” is so perfect, in fact, I’m convinced the song and its placement as the last heard on the album are what have convinced people that the album is a psychedelic masterpiece when it is really just a workaday Beatles album—if I were going to stack-rank them all I’m pretty sure it would fall in the bottom third.

But it does have “A Day in the Life” and that’s not nothing. So majestic in its ambitions and scope that you would have to classify it as a novelty, comparable perhaps to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (more operatic than psychedelic) or exercises by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Who, all of which came after Sgt. Pepper’s. “A Day in the Life” is also (with “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) a source of the controversy around whether the album is pro-drug and thus a target for censorship. Obviously, in 1967, it was pro-hallucinogens. It’s also in favor of transcendental meditation. While a lot of songs on the album are just goofs (a Beatles tradition of its own, again arguably since Revolver), “A Day in the Life” comes in deadly serious and stays that way, even as the lyrics are deceptively quotidian. McCartney pounds the piano with great authority. Lennon’s words are disorienting. “I heard the news today, oh boy....” They don’t seem to make sense but feel like they should. “He blew his mind out in a car....” Ringo’s fills are subtly perfect. Three verses of this and then, at 1:40, with a wobbly drawn-out “I’d love to turn you on,” it spirals into the first of its two blunt force avant-garde classical orchestra interludes, which frankly were too much for me to handle as a 12-year-old hearing it for the first time on the radio. It felt like my head was exploding and I was going insane for the 35 seconds or so that it lasts. The Paul McCartney section in the middle is a perfect counterbalance to the Lennon and the orchestra. But with “Found my way upstairs and had a smoke / And somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” we are off again to the wilds of the raggedy edges of the brain, in a place the Moody Blues studied well for “Tuesday Afternoon.” Powerful orchestral notes usher us back to Lennon and “I read the news today, oh boy.” One more verse and one more orchestral fever break and then McCartney hits a grand chord on a grand piano and they let is resonate for 45 seconds. Spectacular. What hit you? Another masterpiece.

3. Chambers Brothers, The Time Has Come (1967) – “Time Has Come Today”

The Chambers Brothers were four brothers from Carthage, Mississippi, an unlikely pinpoint source of psychedelia. George, Joseph, Lester, and Willie Chambers started out singing in the choir and eventually ended up in Los Angeles. The brothers were augmented by drummer and cowbell administrator Brian Keenan, an important element of “Time Has Come Today.” The song comes in many versions, most of them edits. The 1966 original, 2:37, is rather different from the more familiar hit but already shows inclinations toward the weird and trippy. The one we know best from 1967 or 1968 comes in three sizes: 3:05, 4:45, and 11:07. The first two were single versions. One of them (or both?) made it to #11 for a few weeks in 1968. The one you really want, of course, is the 11:07, which closes out the second side of The Time Has Come, an album, full disclosure, I don’t otherwise have much need for.

The bonanza of “Time Has Come Today” is all I’m here for and it is exactly what I’m here for. From its double-cowbell cuckoo clock opening it is a wholly disorienting gem: the fuzzed electric guitar crushes, the unfuzzed electric guitar wheedles out simple figures, Keenan hits everything hard, and the song roars into shape with the clarion call, “Time has come today!” The ’60s were full of moments like it, charged with apocalyptic howling at the moon, but don’t let this one get lost in the shuffle. There is also something slyly funny about it, as if it somehow distances itself from the youth generation it otherwise formally exalts in an amiably generic way, eating its cake and having it too—“Young hearts can go their way,” “The rules have changed today (Hey),” “There’s no place to run (Time),” so on so forth—until it finally fully climaxes with all the weight it can muster: “I've been loved and put aside (Time) / I've been crushed by the tumbling tide (Time) / And my soul has been psychedelicized (Time).” It feels like something Foghorn Leghorn would say, erupting into the frame in close-up.

Then, at about 2:37, the time of the 1966 original, the song shifts into its freak-out. Time slows to a crawl (time). The heavy effects come up. Producer David Rubinson also worked with Moby Grape, the United States of America, Skip Spence, and Herbie Hancock, among others, so he knew his way around a psychedelic soundboard even if “Time” was relatively early in his career. As the tempo starts from a near dead stop and gradually builds, the echoing, phasing effects set in like bats swarming a cave. The fuzz guitar man, either Joseph or Willie, soars in with a workmanlike solo buoyed by a band in ecstatic unity. At 5:40, somewhat famously, he breaks into the tune of “Little Drummer Boy.” All bets now seem to be off as the groove locks in. At 6:50 someone can’t stand it anymore and starts screaming. This jumbo jet is banking in for a landing. Maniacal laughter and a chaotic scene follow. It very possibly inspired the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Eric Burdon & the Animals even as it was perhaps inspired itself by the Royal Guardsmen. It descends upon us like a storm. Crazy sounds like small mammals and what you might imagine plants making if we could hear them creep into the underside. Are we in some Satanic Garden of Eden? Howling and sirens. At 9:05 the main theme returns. They like the line “my soul has been psychedelicized” so much they do it again. And I like it so much I don’t mind either. The ending may be about one minute too long, but hey, they might get burned up by the sun, but they had their fun. In sum: A masterpiece.

11. Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced (1967)

[2006 review here, 2012 review of “Third Stone From the Sun” here]

Hearing “Purple Haze” on the radio as a kid headed for 7th grade in the fall—only occasionally, usually late at night, because remember the single only made it to #65—scared me and intrigued me. It took me a few years to gird up and give the album a listen, by way of a friend. At that time the issue under discussion was Jimi Hendrix’s somewhat strained or restrained or even muffled vocals, which some reviewers called a detriment. The guitar playing and (surprisingly for me) the songwriting too were obvious. We both agreed his singing was a strength, not a weakness, and I still think so. I accepted the working-hard-but-hardly-working rhythm section at face value, the two Brits Hendrix took with him back to the States (bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell) for a tour opening for the Monkees, which altogether speaks volumes about the nascent state of “rock” music in 1967. Redding and Mitchell may or may not have been poorly recorded here, but mostly it’s that their talents are over-swamped by Hendrix. They were competent but little more. I’m not sure what I was expecting at the time, in relation to my favored Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zeppelin, but certainly Are You Experienced exists for me now as a bouquet or cornucopia of all that psychedelia led by electric guitar could be.

It opens with a strategy often turned to here, the primitive attack of “Purple Haze” as blunt as a tomahawk, spiraling out at will from there like galaxies. In a word, trippy. Hitting you hard often seems to be the intent, springing spinning rainbow globes in the brain for stunning seconds. Many a suspended open space of near silence is squelched on this album by bumptious power chords. I must say that claiming songs that are about drugs are not about drugs is something people did in the ‘60s. Perhaps it was finally retired by Spacemen 3? Hendrix was no exception. He explained he had intended “Purple Haze” as a science fiction narrative inspired by a Philip Jose Farmer novel. He was frustrated the song would be too long with all the verses. OK, maybe. I can’t hear anything now but “’scuse me while I kiss this guy.” Later availability of LSD tabs dubbed “Purple Haze” (or anyway buyers hoped it was LSD) speaks to how the song was taken by a significant cohort of fans.

Most of my favorites were on the other side—the glorious near seven minutes of the space-rock epic “Third Stone From the Sun” along with the introspective and strangely moving “The Wind Cries Mary.” But the first side had high points I didn’t want to miss either. “Manic Depression,” “Love or Confusion,” and “May This Be Love” are inspiring workups in a vein out of a vein. “I Don’t Live Today” has a spook factor for the obvious reasons, with nice droning undertones on a guitar string. I like the sequencing of following “Love or Confusion” with “May This Be Love,” although that reminds me there is another issue with this album between markedly different US and UK versions. “Love or Confusion” and then “May This Be Love” don’t follow one another on the UK edition and that album also includes “Red House,” which is sorely missed on the US edition, now that I know about it. We got “Hey Joe” instead, which is not “Red House” (available in the US then only on 1968’s Smash Hits). “Hey Joe” and “Foxey Lady” are the low points of the album for me, which is otherwise an outstanding set. The second side also includes the big-time fun rave-up of “Fire” as well as the album-closing title song. Which, like the album-opening “Purple Haze,” is formally disclaimed (explicitly in “Are You Experienced”) as a song about drugs. Yeah, OK, whatever. Please, just let me stand next to your fire.

15. Doors, The Doors (1967)

[2010 review of “Light My Fire” here]

Decades after the fact, the Doors remain controversial. To a significant number of people, they—specifically the singer, Jim Morrison—are preening, drunken buffoons. I recently happened to see some quotes on social media by David Crosby before he died, deriding the Doors hard. Good grief, man. David Crosby! He should talk. Even Jim DeRogatis, in his wide-ranging psychedelic rock compendium Turn On Your Mind, dismisses the Doors as non-psychedelic. On one level I see the point. They were a bit silly and perhaps too mindful of the top 40 charts, if that’s your issue (“Light My Fire,” #1 ’67; “People Are Strange,” #12 ‘67; “Love Me Two Times,” #25 ’67; “The Unknown Soldier,” #39 ’68; “Hello, I Love You,” #1 ’68; “Touch Me” #3 69; “Love Her Madly,” #11 ’71; “Riders on the Storm,” #14 ‘71). Later they turned convincingly more to bluesy fare, but this debut LP harks much to the source of their name—The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s 1954 memoir of psychedelic experience. The album opens with the rousing “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” which makes you want to, and it closes with 12 minutes of something called “The End,” a wandering exercise that dramatizes the Oedipal situation with a thudding foot and other stuff too. “The End” may not be the kind of thing you’ll be tempted to play on repeat. But I bet you like the way it kicks off the movie Apocalypse Now. In between, the album is a smorgasbord of little happy surprises. The seven-minute “Light My Fire” is moving toward if not already in the category of songs, with “Stairway to Heaven,” “Maggie May,” and their own “Riders on the Storm,” that we have likely heard as much we need to by now. But try this long version of “Light My Fire” one more time. Sit and listen to it. You don’t have to do it a second time, but you might be surprised how much is still there in terms of mood, tone, and explosive movement. I also love their version here—and especially that they thought to do it at all—of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar),” the Brecht/Weill song from one or another of their operettas. Among other things it emphasizes that the mood-altering substance of choice by the Doors (certainly Morrison) appears to be basically booze and sex. They’re not mine, at least, for sex, not the way the cover of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” means it. But fair enough. I’m more by way of the mainstream psychedelic camp of weed and acid. It doesn’t mean I can’t get with what’s being put down here and find my mind blown on the way.

20. Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow (1967) – “Somebody to Love,” “White Rabbit”

[2010 review of “White Rabbit” here.]

In high school daze we all seemed to have Jefferson Airplane albums and among us we had close to a complete collection. I owned After Bathing at Baxter’s and Crown of Creation—also Volunteers, which I never cared much for. Someone even had Bless Its Pointed Little Head, and a few had Surrealistic Pillow, which even then seemed to be considered best by the general consensus. I admit I spent most of my life doubting that until I arrived at this project and put in some time listening systematically. I loved Creation and Baxter’s, and I still swear by them, but what they don’t have are the songs “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” They are a certain ne plus ultra of psychedelic pop chart artistry. Yes, the turn to Ravel’s Bolero in “White Rabbit” is arch but the drama is carried off well. It burns and scratches and builds like a drug trip. Grace Slick never sounded better; she wrote it and she sings the hell out of it. Both are under three minutes. “White Rabbit” is closer to two and a half. It was the only song that could have worked in the bathtub scene in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the book, not the movie). It’s a sensible way to die, if you have to die—at the climax of “White Rabbit.” I would even listen to arguments that everything you want to hear in psychedelic music is captured in “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” But in other news, Surrealistic Pillow otherwise has merely the quixotic and typical virtues and problems associated with a band with multiple songwriters with multiple agendas. Grace Slick wrote “White Rabbit.” Her former brother-in-law Darby Slick wrote “Somebody to Love” when they were both in the Great Society, a forerunner to Jefferson Airplane. Marty Balin is involved in five songs on Surrealistic Pillow, Paul Kantner in two, Jorma Kaukonen two, and Skip Spence chips in one. They’re not bad, sincere ballads mixed up with various folky strains and goofs, but the songs on Crown of Creation are better. There is also, on a 2003 reissue of Surrealistic Pillow, a very nice six-minute blues workup written by Kaukonen, “In the Morning,” which is not to be missed and would have been a good album closer on the original release.

Trout Fishing in America (1967)

I have always thought of this slender Richard Brautigan volume as a novel proper, but Wikipedia calls it a novella, which is fair. It’s not even 200 pages in mass market size. It was written in 1961 but it has a decided summer of love twang—strange, funny, absurdist, deceptively light-hearted. I loved this stuff when I was 18 but sadly it has lost a lot of its charm. It's still a lively little read, remarkable for something with virtually no narrative thread. I liked Brautigan’s native confidence that he could write anything that entered his head and I loved his loopy indulgent metaphors and various flights. I’m still OK with them, but his biography does cast some pall over it now. He committed suicide at the age of 49 and by all reports was a miserable man. A lot of his attitudes toward women are already notably antiquated, not so much toxic as wince-worthy but sometimes toxic. Ultimately he is still daffy and gentle enough that I’m willing to give him a pass, being dead and all. I have some sense that In Watermelon Sugar may presently be his best-liked novel (and/or story collection and/or poetry collection), but Trout Fishing was always up there. In fact, insofar as Brautigan was ever taken seriously, Trout Fishing in America usually went to the head of the class. “Trout fishing in America” means many different things here, including places and people’s names, but one of them is trout fishing in America. Brautigan is plainly aware and enamored of Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain too, and he is working consciously in their traditions—combining the humor of Twain with Hemingway’s nouns-and-verbs rhythms and stoic low-energy depression. Brautigan also knows trout fishing the sporting activity, injecting it with veracity as needed into the ongoing surreal twists. Trout Fishing is dreamy and weird, sometimes petty and foolish, more often making things work on their own terms. I still like the spirit but rereading it all these years later did not do much for me. It’s just not as inspired as Brautigan seemed to think it was and many of his recurring poetic devices—such as a statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco—are evocative but a little lame and underdeveloped. But he may be winning over new readers and that’s good to hear. I see him discussed on booktube. He lives on for Harry Styles who wrote a song about watermelon sugar and he lives on for the kid in 1994 who legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. For me, Brautigan is a sad figure with an elfin side that can win you over if you have a big enough heart, not that I always do. His humor can be sharp and precise. Worth a look.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

The second album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience came out less than seven months after the debut, and only about 10 months before Electric Ladyland, which may explain some things about it. Most of the songs feel to me like they needed a little more time in the oven, which suggests it may have been a bit of a rush job after the commercial success of the stunning Are You Experienced. Give principal wunderkid Hendrix a little more time and his own head in the studio with the space of a double-LP and watch what he does. Still, if Axis suffers from a type of sophomore slump, it is not really to be missed even for casual Hendrix fans. It features possibly my single favorite song by him, the loopy and playful “If 6 Was 9,” which is obvious and murky all at once. Axis also contains what might be single favorite songs of others, such as “Spanish Castle Magic” or “Little Wing.” The latter, a tender guitar-picker’s ballad, has been covered early and often by Eric Clapton—it’s on Layla and remains a staple of Clapton’s live act. Just because Eric Clapton is a fool is no reason to hold anything against “Little Wing”—Gil Evans, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the Corrs are other acts that have taken it on. With the LP as such coming into its own circa 1967, the EP format was largely out of favor. But in retrospect it’s probably what Axis should have been. Take all the time and effort used on these 13 songs and apply it to only five or six of them and you might have had a much better product overall. It’s a thought experiment anyway. Breaking it down, the opening shorty, “EXP,” starts as a radio theater skit that isn’t very funny, but then turns into 80 seconds of a feedback exercise, one of the earliest of its kind, raw and ferocious. Then “Up From the Skies” works a slick bluesy groove—Hendrix seemed to toss these off effortlessly. It’s fair of course to class him as a psychedelic artist but he was always an innovating natural when he played blues. “Spanish Castle Magic” is where I start to notice the general underdevelopment of most of these songs and most of the second side is lost to me as a mush. All (or most of) these songs have their points—great guitar play always. But often something about them, the lyrics maybe or the song structure, bridge or chorus, feels like they need another look, a little more time to think about them, paring away potential musical darlings to get them into sharper focus. I’m not really complaining—after Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland, everything in Hendrix’s career would have been gravy, even if he were still alive. But let’s not drift into thinking about what might have been.

The Ticket That Exploded (1967)

This concludes the Nova (and/or Cut-Up) trilogy by William S. Burroughs. Or actually “concludes” is the wrong word as The Ticket That Exploded may be read first, second, or third in the trilogy, per Burroughs, with The Soft Machine and Nova Express. Your choice. A Grove paperback edition I’ve had lying around for years implies that The Wild Boys fits in somehow too. The vague air of put-on that suffuses all this is of a piece with many of Burroughs’s adventures in publishing and his career as a bad-boy beat, including a star turn in the movie Drugstore Cowboy. There are many tantalizing clues, within and across the novels associated with this trilogy, of a greater, grander scheme. They are all—and Naked Lunch too—sourced at least in part to a massive so-called “Word Hoard” manuscript—circa 2,000 pages of text—from which the language was spindled, folded, and mutilated. The Ticket That Exploded, unlike the others, has no table of contents and the chapter separations are not as distinct. That blows my theory that the novels in the trilogy are actually collections of stories. But you can still read Ticket that way if you want, because it makes no sense as a novel and even less as an anti-novel pretending to be a novel. Sooner or later reading Burroughs I glaze over, which leads me to saying such things. My patience is tried. It’s like meditating, trying to observe thoughts without participating in them. Somehow, through all the murk (not to mention the gay porn), it can be very funny, surprising and cunning. But nuggets are all there is to it as far as I can see.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

"The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be" (1967)

Gahan Wilson was known more for being a cartoonist than a writer, though he always traveled in fantasy and horror circles, even as a cartoonist, at which he was unique, instantly recognizable, and often great. Sometimes a good horror story is less inspired and more efficient. This one is both, and also has great extremes, rooted self-consciously in Lewis Carroll, that strange literary figure. While I am more ambivalent about Carroll’s work—reading him has always been slightly disappointing for me—Wilson clearly spent some time inhabiting it. The story is remarkable, disconcerting and unearthly. At the same time it’s also somehow very ‘60s. This drunken seaside picnic scene could be equally a sun-drenched Pepsi commercial. The best contrast in a story full of great ones might be the mysterious charisma of the two unlikely figures trudging the beach, a kind of Mutt and Jeff dressed for a Lewis Carroll masquerade. The sodden morning-after jaded ad executives and their blowsy fashionable women out of a Fellini picture—another nice ‘60s touch—simply fall in love with these two, the Walrus and the Carpenter, and will follow them anywhere. It’s chilling in its hilarious casualness. The notes of cruelty, such as the saw the Carpenter carries, are so subtle you think it might be your imagination. Other revelations of violence are shocking and grotesque and too real. The ghost of Janet Leigh in Psycho haunts this story. Wilson also might have been pulling vibrations out of the air in other ways—or perhaps John Lennon had a subscription to Playboy where this story first appeared in May 1967—because the Walrus in this story has obvious affinities with the slightly sinister Walrus in the Beatles song. The story feels like a drug trip gone wrong, more like “Helter Skelter” in that way. It would be interesting to know more about what the Beatles knew or thought about Wilson—certainly it’s likely Lennon admired him as a cartoonist, if indeed he were not emulating Wilson in certain ways. The story also has the kind of ‘60s-style downbeat ending seen in pictures like Easy Rider and Night of the Living Dead. You could almost reverse-engineer “The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be” out of everything we know about the ‘60s. A great one. And now that I think about it, you could probably do something equally remarkable with Dr. Seuss if you put your mind to it.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

Love's Forever Changes (2003)

Andrew Hultkrans's 33-1/3 book is only the second in the entire series, which is presently up to some 157 titles, so among other things it must be regarded as a pioneering effort. Hultkrans, a Brooklyn-based writer at large and one-time editor of Bookforum, focuses more on the context of Arthur Lee and Love's classic album in tumultuous late-'60s Los Angeles, basically all library-style research—lots of quotes from books, virtually none from original interviews. It's one way to do it and not a bad way either. But too often this one reads like an industrious term paper, although at least we are spared the heavy footnoting of other 33-1/3 volumes. The Love album is a famously tough nut to crack. My experience with it is much like Hultkrans: drawn to it (late) by its reputation, underwhelmed, until finally finding a way in, when it becomes indelible. Hultkrans says the only other album he's had a similar experience with is Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That insight comes early and the good news and bad news is that it's one of the most original in the whole thing. There is definitely some kind of psychic connection between those two albums. Anyway, most of the book is focused on California in the late '60s, mostly Los Angeles, and don't think we're going to get out of this without hearing about Charles Manson. It only makes sense, even beyond time and place, because it appears someone with a glancing involvement with Love was later associated with Manson. Joan Didion naturally gets some attention too, as the reigning Los Angeles essay poet of dread, but the person Hultkrans turns to most often is political activist Todd Gitlin. I think we may have the perspective now to see that the overly familiar and much ballyhooed underside of the hippie experience—Charles Manson and Altamont, with a side dish of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—has been grossly exaggerated as equal to the values of peace, love, civil rights, and respect for the environment. Yes, stuff like the Weathermen happened. And actually a book about Forever Changes is not a bad place to bring it all up again and air it out. Even so, Arthur Lee was alive in 2003 and we miss hearing from him here, understanding that he was an exceedingly tough interview to get. It's hard to say whether that would have improved the book but it might have helped put the focus more where it belongs. It is more intensely trained on context, and in many ways unfortunately the band and the album too are relegated to the background. You can't blame Hultkrans because Forever Changes is a notoriously difficult album to nail down properly anyway. But the result in this 33-1/3 entry is a bit like the joke about losing your keys in the alley but looking for them under the streetlight because the light is better there.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Mouchette (1967)

France, 81 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Georges Bernanos, Robert Bresson

Photography: Ghislain Cloquet

Music: Jean Wiener

Editor: Raymond Lamy

Models: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Marie Cardinal, Paul Hebert, Jean Vimenet, Marie Susini

The internet is not particularly helping me with the title of this picture by director and cowriter Robert Bresson. Mouchette, a favorite of Kelly Reichardt and Andrei Tarkovsky (not to mention the Criterion company), has surprisingly few "also known as" versions of the title listed on IMDb. Bresson, or someone, was not budging on this one. So Google Translate says it means "handkerchief" in French while other dictionaries describe an architectural feature. "Mouchet" means "speckle" and "mouche" means "fly" (noun), which both seem closer to the intent here. Wikipedia weighs in with "little fly." It appears thus to be an affectionate (and/or demeaning) name, like "sweetie" or "kiddo," for the main character, a girl of about 14 (though played by a 19-year-old, Nadine Nortier). Mouchette and her family come from an impoverished and abusive background in the French countryside and this movie is the story of her life—sad, grim, and short (I think—the ending is ambiguous of course).

In keeping with Bresson's aesthetic, Nortier and most of the other players are amateurs who basically appeared only in this picture (though Jean-Luc Godard may have borrowed a couple of them for Weekend, another movie from 1967, and Jean-Claude Guilbert is also in the 1966 Au hasard Balthazar). I respect this aesthetic as an aspect of naturalism, even when it's Jack Webb deploying it, but I'm not sure the desired effect always comes through. Professionals may come with artifice but they also tend to have theatrical skills. Bresson's use of amateurs is further undermined by an evident requirement of being beautiful. This frankly baffles me as in effect it only piles on the artifice, which I thought he was against. Bunuel's Los Olvidados, for example, with its mix of grotesques as well as natural beauties, works much better as naturalism.

"What Do You Do in San Francisco?" (1967)

One of the interesting points about this story by Raymond Carver is that it's hard to say who it is about. The first-person narrator, a mailman, declares up-front, "This has nothing to do with me." He tells us all about himself. Then there is the couple he's formally concerned with, the Marstons, whom he refers to as beatniks. The narrator's name is Henry Robinson. He's divorced and hasn't, he mentions, seen his children in 20 years. The Marstons have moved to the small town of Arcata in Northern California, and Robinson, their mailman, spends the story trying to figure them out. They are young, apparently unemployed (Robinson presses suggestions for work, but they ignore him), and they have three young kids, two girls and a boy. Robinson decides almost right away he doesn't like the woman, and in fact, as the story goes along (and it's not that long), he soon has a very strong dislike of her. Which approximately mirrors our dislike of him. He's clearly a dick even though he tries to act like an easygoing sort of happy regular fellow. The most glaring questions here are about Robinson's former life, just as his are about the Marstons'—not so much his divorce as why he hasn't seen his own children in so long. My sense is he's just kind of an emotional deadbeat who can't live up to his responsibilities, even as he judges the Marstons. He casually washes his hands of any responsibility he doesn't care to acknowledge. It's possible he's precluded from seeing his kids for some legal reason, but he's also the kind of guy who would bring that up as excuse in his own defense. Anyway, he tracks the lives of the Marstons as much as a mailman can (which turns out to be a fair amount) and reports the details in this story. Eventually, in his telling, Robinson's hunch about the Marston woman is right, as she runs away with another man, leaving the children behind. The story has Carver's abrupt tone and shifts in focus, as if coming from a place of constant distraction, a remarkable sketch of the modern mind coping with confusion. The pseudo-spying aspect is entertaining and the revelations are often startling, almost but not quite adding up to something in a way that feels like typical life. The strange sloppiness of the title may be speaking to that turmoil of distraction. The question that occurs in the story (emphasis mine) is "What did you do in San Francisco?"—a passing remark in a casual conversation. Small talk. Why is it the title and why is it changed? I don't know, but I like a lot of things about this one.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

USA, 111 minutes

Director: Arthur Penn

Writers: David Newman, Robert Benton, Robert Towne

Photography: Burnett Guffey

Music: Charles Strouse

Editor: Dede Allen

Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, Dub Taylor, Denver Pyle, Gene Wilder, Evans Evans

The ending of Bonnie and Clyde is about as iconic to the '60s as the shower scene in Psycho, and equally short in terms of running time—a scant few minutes (with many, many cuts in the edit). Bonnie and Clyde, coming much further into the decade, may have been in the better position to self-consciously attempt a statement about the times, with its outlaw heroes, desperate little guys, gang violence, police power and corruption, etc. Plus its star, Warren Beatty, looks like a Kennedy, similarly assassinated by gunfire, though the Zapruder film has no cuts. Bonnie and Clyde is a strange beast, living among other strange beasts of 1967 Hollywood. Mark Harris's well-regarded Pictures at a Revolution looked closely at the five Best Picture Oscar nominees of that year, a motley assortment with various heavy significations, looking in all directions at once seemingly: Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Doolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night.

Bonnie and Clyde is plainly the New Hollywood art film of the class (though In the Heat of the Night has some pretensions in that direction too). But it also has unusual bifurcations. It's an art film full of naturalistic violence and banjo music. The crime capers are both farce and tragedy. It's a period piece that is more about the period in which it was made (as they always are). The star of the movie, Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, was also the producer, but not the director. In fact, generally speaking, one of the most amazing things about Bonnie and Clyde is the sheer tonnage of talent assembled, working less collaboratively but more side by side, like artisans at a crafts mall.

The Graduate (1967)

USA, 106 minutes

Director: Mike Nichols

Writers: Calder Willingham, Buck Henry, Charles Webb

Photography: Robert Surtees

Music: Simon & Garfunkel

Editor: Sam O'Steen

Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross, William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, Buck Henry, Norman Fell, Alice Ghostley, Richard Dreyfuss, Mike Farrell, Elaine May

The Graduate was a hit movie everyone conspired to designate a symbol of its unique times, released at Christmas following the Summer of Love and heading into 1968. But for a movie that appeared to have a lot of "relevance," that prized quality of the '60s, The Graduate makes a lot of basic mistakes. It casts Dustin Hoffman as a California kid but he barely has a speck of California in him. Vietnam and a civil rights struggle do not exist in this movie, though the sexual revolution is covered quite adequately (a religious relative of mine, in California no less, once turned off the TV in outrage because this movie was playing). And the basic premise—a young man falls in love with the daughter of the married woman who gives him his sexual awakening—is fairly distasteful when looked at it in isolation, like some inverted, degraded version of a classical Greek drama. It's not tragic, it's tawdry.

But I'm not sure these filmmakers, notably director Mike Nichols, really made mistakes because, after all, it's a comedy they set out to make here. It's absurd like comedy in fundamental ways. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) may be going through coming-of-age rites of passage but he never seems to learn the first name of his paramour (Anne Bancroft), calling her "Mrs. Robinson" right through to the end, even when they are in bed together. His parents' idea of a gift for his 21st birthday is a scuba diving outfit ... to use in the swimming pool. And Ben is not even capable of getting a room at a hotel without going through ridiculous slapstick-level gyrations. His luggage is in the car but he doesn't need a porter. It's only a toothbrush. My guess is it's primarily the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack that confuses people.