The counter-cultural revolution of the Sixties was a great time of spiritual experimentation. Practices such as yoga and transcendental meditation began to be adopted widely among young baby boomers and were championed by many high profile musicians, academics, and celebrities. Hallucinogenic substances were widely ingested and perceived as opening untold vistas of consciousness. There were great hopes among many at the time that the coming “Age of Aquarius” would usher in a sense of utopian enlightenment. As we know now, it didn’t quite turn out like that.
At the vanguard of the Sixties cultural upheaval were, of course, the Beatles. Wildly beloved for their catchy and accessible “rock ‘n roll” ditties, mostly about love and teenage identity formation, their music began to take a more experimental turn with their 1966 album Revolver, which brought the band into new sonic territory. For a sense of this bold new direction, look no further than the Lennon-penned psychedelic masterpiece “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
The
band’s 1967 follow-up, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, marked an even
more radical and avant-garde departure. As the album’s name suggests, by this
time the band was fully immersed in Sixties psychedelia, which embraced a sense
of randomness and dissociation. The fab four even found themselves going to
India to learn transcendental meditation from the famous Maharishi. Later on,
George Harrison would continue on this spiritual trajectory, as evidenced in
his solo offering “My Sweet Lord.”
As
time wore on, some became gradually disillusioned with the false promises of
the counterculture and its utopian ideals of peace and “free love.” After all
the Vietnam War was raging and racial tensions in the United States were at an
all-time high. Few things signalled the end of sixties idealism more than the
eventual break-up of the Beatles. Strained by creative differences and on-going
interpersonal conflicts, the band broke up in 1970. In that year, they released their “final” album Let It Be. Although in actual fact it was recorded in
1969 before the landmark Abbey Road yet was the last album to be released.
The
title track from Let It Be sounds almost like a return from the psychedelic fringes
to a more familiar spiritual ground. As Paul McCartney sings in the opening
lines:
When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness
she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness
she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
On one level this could be understood as a
reference to his own mother Mary, who died when Paul was 14; on another level
it evokes a kind of Marian apparition, with Mary, the mother of Jesus, speaking
“words of wisdom” to a discouraged and plaintive soul. After all, in the Gospel
of Luke, when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she will be bear “the Son,”
her reply is simply “let it be to me according to your word” (Luke
1:38). At the very least the song is a gesture of consolation to all the
heartbroken fans of the Beatles and an invitation for them to simply, “let it
be.”
***
The other most famous British band from the
1960s is the Rolling Stones. In some ways, they were seen to be the
“anti-Beatles”—arrogant, dangerous, and overtly sexual—all the qualities that
drove parents at the time into deep anxiety. Less prone to musical experimentation, the
Stones kept more closely to their original inspiration—the raw rhythm and blues
of the deep American south. Yet, caught up in the same wave of psychedelia as their
musical peers, the Beatles, the Stones released in 1967 an album called Their
Satanic Majesties Request. Poorly received by critics, the album at least
speaks to the fact that the group was in touch with a darker spiritual energy;
a sense that would be born out in the years to come.
Nowhere
is this dark attraction expressed more clearly than in their classic 1968 track
“Sympathy for the Devil.” This song, sung from the point of view of Satan,
testifies to the long history of evil—from the crucifixion of Christ to the
Russian revolution to the recent Kennedy assassinations. In some ways, the song
strikes at the hypocrisy of Sixties idealism. As in the following verse:
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
Cause I'm in need of some restraint
So if you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste
There’s a sense that the world is upside
down. Things are not as they should be. Overturning the established order, even
with the best intentions, can lead to violence and death. Tragically, this
disillusionment and hypocrisy was put clearly on display during the Rolling
Stones ill-fated 1969 concert at California’s Altamont Speedway. An
ill-conceived plan to use the notorious Hell’s Angels as security for the event
culminated in the murder of 18-year old Meredith Hunter.
For some, this was a sure sign that the Sixties and its idealism were truly dead. Others just wanted to let it be.
