1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (34 page)

In mid-October the Who struggle to channel their rage into the
My Generation
album instead of at one another. On November 6, “Get Off My Cloud” becomes the Stones’ second U.S. No. 1 as they push the envelope with drugs and bad behavior.

In the beginning
the Who was vocalist Roger Daltrey’s group, but when Keith Moon joined the band, the maniacal drummer synched with fellow speed freaks Townshend and Entwistle to form a musical combo of such ferocious energy that they threatened to lift off and leave Daltrey in their dust.

Daltrey felt that amphetamines impeded his singing ability. “Once I got off the pill thing, I realized how much the band deteriorated through playing on speed. Musically, it really took a downturn.” He thought drugs were turning the music into noise without tempo. So the pugnacious singer stalked offstage one night in September in Denmark, grabbed the others’ stash of pills, and flushed them down the toilet. Moon freaked out and attacked Daltrey with a tambourine. Daltrey flattened him, gave him a bloody nose—and was thrown out of the band.

Townshend said, “Roger puts this band together then finds the three dwarves that he’s brought in to support him suddenly sort of leaving him behind … Moon was a genius, Entwistle was a genius, I was maybe getting in the vicinity, and Daltrey was just a singer.”
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Daltrey reflected, “It was the first time in my life that I realized I loved something else other than myself … [If I was being] thrown out for being like I was, then I have to change, because the band was more important to me than anything
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 … I thought if I lost the band I was dead. If I didn’t stick with the Who, I would be a sheet metal worker for the rest of my life.”
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They brought him back on probation, warning that, with one more outburst, he would be dismissed for good. He worked on not raising his voice again offstage.

Despite Townshend’s remark that Daltrey was “just a singer,” if it had been Townshend singing the lyrics he wrote, the Who’s front man would have been a high-pitched neurotic instead of a hard-punching, working-class Everyman in cutting-edge clothes and shades. Journalist Nik Cohn wrote that Townshend “used one recurrent framework, he always has done: he cast himself as one teenage boy and this boy was the archetypal Shepherd’s Bush [west London] Mod, a bit dumb, a bit aggressive, a bit baffled … Townshend wasn’t like this Mod hero at all, of course, but Roger Daltrey was. I mean, Daltrey wasn’t stupid but he was no theorizer, he was interested mostly in girls and cars, he wasn’t too articulate, and Townshend used him like a mouthpiece.”
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The duo was a modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac (Townshend) and Christian de Neuvillette (Daltrey), working together to win the Roxanne of fame and validation.

“My Generation” was originally inspired by blues and folk songs such as “Young Man Blues,” by Mose Allison, and “Talkin’ New York,” by Bob Dylan. Daltrey stuttered the first time he tried it, because he hadn’t rehearsed it, but the band had him recreate the stutter for the final version because they thought it evoked the image of a jittery mod on pills, and because John Lee Hooker had a song called “Stuttering Blues.”

The group’s previous single, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” had allowed Townshend and Moon the chance to show their chops. On “My Generation,” Entwistle uncorks one of the few bass solos to make pop radio, working to keep pace with James Brown’s bassist Bernard Odum. Daltrey snarls that since the things that the older generation does look cold, he hopes he dies before he gets old (perhaps influenced by Berkeley Free Speech activist Jack Weinberg’s sound bite to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, “We have a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30.”
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) Then the track explodes into the anarchy of the band’s stage show climaxes.

The Who Sings My Generation
was recorded October 11–15 and released December 3 (the same day as
Rubber Soul
), the finest long-playing debut of the year. Its low-budget, echoey sound actually gives the songs more heft, starting with the atmospheric feedback opening of “Out in the Street.”

“The Kids Are Alright” is an archetypal teen scenario that Townshend’s hero Brian Wilson might have come up with. Other guys are dancing with the singer’s girl, but he tells himself he doesn’t mind; he just needs to get outside. He had some plans for himself and his girl, but she told him her folks wouldn’t let her. Who can say if that’s true or if she just wants to dance with the other guys—all he knows is he has to leave her behind before he goes out of his mind. The lengthy instrumental section was inspired by English baroque composer Henry Purcell’s chamber suite
The Gordian Knot Untied
.
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“Circles (Instant Party)” tells of what happens to the singer after he leaves the dance. He gets wasted to forget his girl and tries to walk home, but he’s so drunk he keeps walking in circles. The song was the embryo of the plot of the Who’s movie about the mod movement,
Quadrophenia
, set in 1965 and shot in 1979.

Townshend writes in his memoirs that while the other three band members carried on rock star love lives after the gigs, he was insecure, afraid of being rejected, and would usually just go home and record demos, behavior that prompted rumors that he was gay.
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Part of him liked the rumors, as he felt the point of mod was creating a new male, nonmacho archetype, the “elegant, disciplined, well-to-do, sharply dressed and sexually indeterminate and dangerously androgynous yobbo”
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[thug]. In fact, a sizable percentage of mods were rent boys (prostitutes), and would often dance by themselves or with other guys instead of girls. Still, the album’s “La-La-La Lies” and “It’s Not True” both take pains to deny the rumors about him and assert that he has a woman who loves him.

The album is rounded out by some James Brown and Bo Diddley covers, plus the insane instrumental barnstormer “The Ox”—like “Wipe Out” on PCP. Moon’s rampage on that track created the gold standard for all subsequent barbarian drummers, from Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker to John Bonham. Certainly no other band combined James Brown, sonic innovation, gender confusion, fashion, Pop Art pretension, and pure mayhem like the Who—though another British group reconfigured the same ingredients in its own inimitable fashion.

*   *   *

One night, the Stones’ manager,
Andrew Oldham, was stoned in his bathtub reading Anthony Burgess’s novella about murderous hooligans,
A Clockwork Orange
. He began to think of ways he could sell the Stones as the
anti
-Beatles. When Oldham was growing up, Elvis Presley was sold as the dirty rebel alternative to the squeaky-clean Pat Boone. Perhaps the Stones could capture the teen demographic that didn’t like the Beatles because their parents accepted them. For those who felt too cool for McCartney’s elfin bobble head, there could be surly Jagger, glowering bug-eyed like a mod vampire in the shadows. “Would You Let Your Sister Go with a Rolling Stone?”—Oldham would later recall that he saw the phrase in front of him like a movie graphic designed by Saul Bass.
Melody Maker
ran it.
The Evening Standard
revised it to “But Would You Let Your Daughter Marry One?” Oldham began planting newspaper stories of kids being suspended for having dirty Stones hair instead of clean, neat Beatles hair. “Are you Beatles or are you Stones?” kids began asking each other. “The Stones are more than just a group, they are a way of life,” ran one of Oldham’s liner notes.

For the back of February’s
The Rolling Stones, Now!
Oldham went into full
Clockwork Orange
mode. “Cast deep in your pockets for the loot to buy this disc of groovies and fancy words. If you don’t have the bread, see that blind man knock him on the head, steal his wallet and lo and behold you have the loot, if you put in the boot, good, another one sold!” Then writer Tom Wolfe out-Oldhamed Oldham with “The Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Stones want to burn your town.”

On March 18, the Stones’ limo pulled up to a filling station in a London borough, and bassist Wyman asked if he could use the bathroom. The attendant said there wasn’t one. Jagger, Jones, and another in their entourage joined Wyman to ask again. The attendant yelled, “Get off my forecourt!” so Jones made faces and danced around singing, “Get off my foreskin!” The group went down a side street ten yards away and pissed against a wall. Oldham made sure the press knew about it, embellishing that Jagger had sneered, “We piss anywhere, man!” The case went to court, and on July 22, Jagger, Jones, and Wyman were fined five pounds for “behavior not becoming young gentlemen.”

The most rebellious activity the musicians could boast was doing drugs, since it was illegal. Thus the airwaves became rife with young white musicians striving to outdo one another by getting on the charts the most blatant references to being high. Aside from the moral arguments, there are numerous theories as to why marijuana was outlawed in the U.S. in 1937. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, federal agencies that fought alcohol were downsized and needed new targets to justify their funding. Industrial giants such as DuPont and Hearst feared hemp as a competitor to their fabric, paper, and oil industries, and lobbied against it. Pot’s illegality could be used against its main consumers at the time: blacks and Mexican farmworkers.

The interracial Beat/jazz/folkie scenes and civil rights movements were some of the main places marijuana was disseminated to whites, though even in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village it was scarce. Producer Erik Jacobsen said, “To buy pot then in the Village you had to go to a junkie, to a dealer. John (Sebastian) and I went many times to some incredible tenement building on the Lower East Side which was like dead people on the street. There were junkies, but there were no white potheads—very few. It was before that all happened.”
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Keith Richards writes in his memoir that at the beginning of the year he was mystified how the black musicians on the tour circuit always looked so sharp, while Richards was always so exhausted and ratty looking. A black musician reached into his coat pocket, produced a Benzedrine pill and a joint, and said, “You take one of these, you smoke one of those. But keep it dark!” Richards writes, “I felt like I’d just been let into a secret society. Is it all right if I tell the other guys?”
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It was, but he was told to keep it to themselves. That didn’t last long.

Before 1965, none of the bands had drug songs—except, ironically, Peter, Paul and Mary.
Newsweek
ran an article in 1964 about how the children’s song “Puff the Magic Dragon” could be about marijuana.
Puff
and
drag
—get it? The dragon and his friend Jackie Paper play in the mist with sealing wax, perhaps a reference to the strip of glue on rolling paper. (The heroine of the Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown” would have a father who made sealing wax.)

Then, after “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the top bands all sang about tripping—in “Day Tripper,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and “Sloop John B.” In “Candy Man,” Donovan comes right out and says that he is bummed his dealer has gone to Morocco and can’t get him high anymore.

Breaking the law made people feel edgy and glamorous, the way the Lost Generation had when they drank during Prohibition in the 1920s. More important, many baby boomers came to prefer a mellow high to getting tanked. And drugs gave the bands a new well of inspiration, now that they had all pretty much cleaned out the cupboard of R&B and folk covers. They felt that drugs helped them look outside the box they’d been programmed into by an uptight society. So, just as Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge wrote about his opium trip in “Kubla Khan” 150 years earlier, the ’60s musicians began to erect countless odes to hallucination.

While idealists argued over whether music really could change the world, both liberals and conservatives agreed that the Pied Pipers greatly contributed to increased drug use. In 1966/67, 21 percent of college students had smoked weed, and 6 percent had tried acid. In 1967/68 that number shot to 57 percent for weed and 17 percent for acid.
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Most listeners assumed that the “cloud” in “Get Off of My Cloud” came from a joint. The song is a prime example of how to remake your smash hit the same but different. The “hey-hey” hook from “Satisfaction” was recycled for crowd sing-alongs, and Watts’s instantly recognizable drumbeat set the kids dancing to the proto-Hustle of the Chez Vous Walk (also known as the Marvin Gaye Walk). Richards’s distorted guitar snarls, as if in aggravation at being hounded by the record label to top “Satisfaction” just eight weeks later. Jones simplifies the “Last Time” riff into the stoned shrug of “What, me worry?” Recorded September 6 and released September 25, “Cloud” topped both the U.S. and U.K. pop charts on November 6.

In the song, Jagger just wants to chill, but a guy starts banging on the door trying to sell him detergent—a riff on a recent series of commercials in which a man knocks on housewives’ doors to see if they have his brand. Then Jagger’s neighbor yells at him to turn down the stereo, just as every kid’s parents did. Irate, Jagger drives off and takes a nap in his car, only to wake up with a parking ticket on the windshield—a nod to Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in which he warns listeners to watch their parking meter. The song’s title could have been inspired by Solomon Burke’s hit that year, “Got to Get You Off My Mind,” or by Jones’s gas station incident crack, “Get off my foreskin!”

Jagger’s songs tell stories, unlike most of the Beatles’, and his stories are also decipherable, unlike Dylan’s. As with Dylan, Jagger’s unconventional voice and looks pushed him to become a high-concept lyricist in order to compensate. Jagger also compensated by becoming the heir to Elvis as the most electrifying white performer.

Rolling Stone
magazine asked him decades later, “What did you think was going on inside you at 15 years old that you wanted to go out and roll around on a stage?”