1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (17 page)

Those who did don minis were aided by the rise of pantyhose. Originally, women’s stockings required garters. But during the 1940s, actresses and dancers began wearing stockings sewn to their underwear. In the 1950s, manufacturers began mass-producing similar garments, called “Panti-Legs” or “combination stockings and panty,” and in the 1960s, Spandex made these more comfortable.

The first early miniskirt battles became the female version of the boys’ haircut wars, though the girls had a little more flexibility. High-schoolers could roll up the waistbands to make skirts shorter, and then pull the hem back down to their knees if administrators came around. School officials would sometimes measure the length from the knee with a yardstick, and send home the most brazen transgressors.

The accessory that went hand in hand with the miniskirt was the knee-high vinyl go-go boot, popularized by Barbra Streisand in the August edition of
Vogue.
Designed by the usual suspects of Courrèges, Saint Laurent, and Quant, in the United Kingdom the go-go boot was called the “kinky boot,” since it had originally been worn by dominatrixes in the underground S/M scene.

Dancers on TV music shows such as
Hullaballoo
and
Shindig!
wore go-go boots, as did the singer of the group We Five (“You Were on My Mind”). But they were immortalized by the track Nancy Sinatra recorded on November 19 in collaboration with songwriter-producer Lee Hazlewood. For “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Hazlewood encouraged her to sing like a “14-year-old girl who goes with truck drivers,”
20
and the result was one of the greatest anthems of women’s liberation.

After vowing to use her boots to walk all over the guy, Sinatra followed it up by redeeming Lennon’s “Run for Your Life.” In Lennon’s version of the song, he warns his “little girl” that she’d better toe the line; Sinatra flips the song so she is bullying her “little boy.”

Numerous folk chanteuses repurposed songs by noncommittal men into paeans to their independence. Nico covers Gordon Lightfoot’s “I’m Not Sayin’” to inform a guy that she can’t guarantee she’ll be true. She will try, but he shouldn’t be surprised if he sees her around with someone else. She might not even show up when she promises she will.

Cher used Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” to assure her lover that she didn’t want to confine him or meet his kin. Joan Baez covered Dylan’s “Daddy You’ve Been on My Mind” (originally “Mama”), singing that it didn’t matter to her whom he was waking up with tomorrow; she wasn’t asking him to make commitments. (It is an achingly sad performance, recorded sometime after Baez went to visit Dylan when he was recovering from a stomach illness in an English hospital at the end of May, only to find him accompanied by future wife Sara Lownds.)

Michelle Phillips’s penchant for infidelity inspired husband John to write “Go Where You Wanna Go” for the Mamas and the Papas. The group sings that you have to do what you want to do with whomever you want to do it with. Gale Garnett wrote her own hit, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine,” which won the Grammy for Best Folk Song. In the track, Garnett sings that she’ll stay with the guy for one year—but she’ll never love him, and then she’ll be on her way. Jackie DeShannon wrote “Come Stay with Me” for Marianne Faithfull, in which she promises that her man can remain free if he stays with her. It was another song hinting at the still-edgy concept of premarital cohabitation.

That the men had their own slew of songs reflecting the New Morality was less surprising. Lennon mourns that his woman wouldn’t keep living with him because she had to be free in “Ticket to Ride,” and sings of how a woman “had him” in her apartment in “Norwegian Wood,” then left him there in the morning when she went to work.

In “She Belongs to Me,” Dylan gets on his knees to peek through a keyhole at a woman who’s nobody’s child, beyond the control of the law. Manfred Mann’s cover of Dylan’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” informs the lady that the singer respects her, but she either has to spend the night with him or take off—and it isn’t like he is asking for something she hasn’t given before. The Turtles’ cover of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe” frankly states that the singer isn’t the kind to give his woman flowers or base his existence on her. Dylan’s original was the song that inspired Gordon Lightfoot’s antiromance songs epitomized by “For Lovin’ Me.” And for many, “Like a Rolling Stone” captures both the terror and exhilaration women felt at the dawn of a new age where all the rules had vanished.

In the Stones’ cover of Larry Williams/Sonny Bono’s “She Said Yeah,” Jagger barely has time to wonder where the girl has come from before she’s saying she’ll make love to him. Matt McGuinn wrote “The Pill” about a mother who was forced to stay at home having kid after kid while the father went out and had fun, but now, thanks to the Pill, she is wearing miniskirts and hot pants and making up for lost years with a vengeance. The Who issued one of the first divorce songs, “A Legal Matter,” inspired by the breakup of Roger Daltrey’s marriage. It was a theme that more and more people would be able to relate to.

*   *   *

Free love had existed
as concept for centuries, with proponents ranging from thirteenth-century sects such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, to the eighteenth century’s Mary Wollstonecraft (whose daughter ran off with married poet Percy Shelley and wrote
Frankenstein
), to the Greenwich Village bohemians of the early 1900s. In those earlier times the idea was not so much about rampant promiscuity. Rather, it was about being free to be with whomever you wanted without having to be married.

Now, with the advent of the Pill, and with deadly venereal diseases such as syphilis cured, it was perhaps the first time in history when people could have sex without fearing pregnancy or disease. The repression left over from the Victorian age was no longer needed to rein in either problem, and quickly eroded along with the belief that sex was acceptable only inside heterosexual marriage. But if parents were appalled by their sons’ long hair and antiwar sentiments, they had nervous breakdowns over their daughters’ rejection of the “Madonna/whore” paradigm.

In her book
Girls Like Us
, Sheila Weller writes, “New York’s Paraphernalia—and its designers Betsey Johnson and Michael Mott—took the Mary Quant look one novel stop further (paper dresses, neon dresses), but all of which put forth a look of
sexuality-with-innocence.
” Models such as Edie Sedgwick and Twiggy were “waifish and full of wonder. In concert with the widened availability of the new, slightly lowered-dose birth control pill, this
winsomeness—
the jaunty miniskirts and boots, the big, wide eyes—repelled adjectives like ‘cheap’ and ‘tramp,’ words that seemed relics of a recent but long-ago Dark Age. An act (casual sex among unmarried people) that had always been shameful and tragic now acquired a butterfly-winged lightness.”
21

For women graduating college in the middle of the decade, Weller writes,

Some of your friends were planning post-graduation weddings, while others were secretly rebelling against those first boys they’d had sex with. One day, on a break between classes, a girl of the second sort might pick up a stranger, bring him back to her apartment and crisply sever her long (if indifferently) held belief in love as a prerequisite for sex in one half hour. As she slipped afterward into her lecture hall seat, she would realize,
I can do this.
But
this
wasn’t sex, per se. That
would
have been cheap. What she had done was all about sophistication and risk.
22

In
Do You Believe in Magic?
Anne Gottlieb recounts,

On liberal campuses, 1965 was the year the balance tipped; on conservative and Catholic campuses, 1970–1972. Before that, if a girl slept with guys she was “fast”; after that, if she didn’t she was “frigid” (mid-sixties) or “uptight” (late sixties). What was surprising was not the pressure from men (our mamas done told us about that), but the pressure from other women. “I can remember being a sophomore in a dorm with a group of girls that had already slept with boys, and they really wanted everybody else to do that,” says New York art historian Carolyn Treat Davidson (born 1946).
23

Gottlieb goes on to write that the peer pressure to be sexually liberated was not something all young women were ready for. Nor were all of them prepared for the attention they received by wearing miniskirts, which continued to shrink, soon becoming short shorts and then Quant’s hot pants. Says Gottlieb, “Anne Strieber (1946) recalls, ‘Of course, you had to be fashionable. But it was like walking down the street naked. You had people grabbing at your body all the time, because you were sending out all these signals that you’d never meant to. And we were unprotected.’”

For a majority of men, it was an overwhelmingly positive development that many women felt the desire to have casual sex to prove to themselves they were free from outdated cultural programming. But, Gottlieb reflects, “Looking back, the gap between the ‘sexual revolution’ and feminism—from about 1965 to 1970—was a bad time for women, despite some good times.”
24

And not just because confusion reigned in the bedroom. Women were discovering that men who fought for peace and racial equality didn’t necessarily believe in sexual equality. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael cracked, “What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone.” Even though female activists had been inspired by the war for civil rights, they began to realize they needed their own movement.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was formed on July 2 to carry out the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but in September, the commission decided it was acceptable to segregate job advertisements into “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female.” The decision raised the ire of Betty Friedan, author of
The Feminine Mystique
. The following year, she would spearhead the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW), to combat sexual discrimination, serving as president alongside former EEOC commissioner Aileen Hernandez as vice president. It was the first new feminist organization in half a century, but by the end of the decade the women’s liberation movement would be in full swing.

III

SUMMER

10

The King of Pop Art and the Girl of the Year

On July 17, Pop artist Andy Warhol’s film
Beauty No. 2
premieres and the
New York Times
proclaims its actress Edie Sedgwick a star.

Pop Art was
both
a cheeky middle finger to pretension and a way to find beauty in the consumer-industrial society we were drowned in, whether we liked it or not. Roy Lichtenstein reproduced the panels of romance comic books with the newsprint dots plainly visible. Thought balloons expressed the soap opera angst of his troubled women. James Rosenquist applied his skill at painting billboards to the massive
F-111
collage of A-bombs, hair dryers, babies, airplanes, and spaghetti. Ed Ruscha depicted a burning Standard Oil gas station from a low cinematic angle and rendered it epic. Wallace Berman made a collage of Muhammad Ali, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones dubbed
Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag
.

Andy Warhol surpassed his rivals by turning his own persona into a cartoon. With silver wig, shades, black leather jacket, striped T-shirt, and nail polish, he transformed from a balding mid-thirties nerd into a Pop (art) star who would eventually guest on
The Love Boat.
When he did interviews, he’d come on both fey and moronic. He’d make the questioner squirm with his airy, monosyllabic answers, partly because he really was shy, partly because it was some sort of Zen koan, partly because it was the pre-punk aggression of being deliberately vapid, pretty vacant—the ultimate put-on. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he said, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
1
He sent an impersonator out on the college lecture circuit.

The post-beatniks and folkies and proto-hippies all hewed the party line against mainstream Middle America. Pete Seeger dismissed the “little boxes” of suburbia that all looked just the same. But Warhol rebelled against the rebels by saying he
liked
plastic. Warhol tossed off the aphorism “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” for the program of one of his exhibits, yet it prophesized the rise of reality TV and YouTube. He made no bones about wanting money and fame, all the things the Village folkies crucified Dylan for chasing. The 1960s were the peak for strident, self-righteous artists to proclaim art as a tool to stop the war and end racism (and thus save the world). Warhol was the ultimate counterprogramming. He denied that “depth” and “substance” were worth pursuing. With his rejection of hippie idealism, he was the forefather of punk.

Warhol had used assistants when he manufactured ads in the 1950s, and continued to use them as he moved into painting, as indeed many masters had over the centuries. Like Berry Gordy with Motown, he appreciated the efficiency of the assembly line. His assistants would make his silkscreens and lithographs by day in his loft space on Forty-Seventh street while Warhol popped Obetrols (a 1960s version of Adderall) and kept the R&B hit “Sally Goes Round the Roses” on constant repeat, like Tom Sawyer convincing others to whitewash his fences for him. Naming his loft the Factory was another rejection of bohemia orthodoxy, as he embraced capitalism’s ability to mass-produce product.

He painted the Factory silver and lined it with aluminum foil to go with his wig. By night, it became a legendary salon to rival that of Gertrude Stein, who in the 1920s opened her Paris apartment to artists such as Picasso and Hemingway. Warhol’s place had a much more liberal open-door policy. His guests ranged from the rich and glamorous to skid row outcasts. In the former category were rock stars such as the Stones and models such as Anita Pallenberg; wealthy debutantes and European socialites; free-thinking bohemians, movie stars, and gay icons such as Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Rudolf Nureyev, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg. On the seedy side were the porn stars, drag queens, speed freaks, junkies, gay hustlers, and general weirdos.