PART ONE
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly aginâ
Please get out of the new one
If you canât lend your hand
For the times they are a-changinâ.
BOB DYLAN
In November 1960, John F. Kennedy, aged forty-three, became the youngest president in American history. The sixties, he announced, were a new frontier. That same month, compulsory conscription for all healthy males between eighteen and twenty-one was abolished in Britain. Earlier that year, Britainâs prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had declared that âa wind of changeâ was ending centuries of empire and thus the need to send young men to fight colonial uprisings in Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, Sergeant Elvis Presley, benefiting from the rollback of the American draft, celebrated his demobilization with a string of hits.
In 1960, another civil rights act was inscribed in the U.S. statute books, the Supreme Court ruled Louisianaâs segregation laws unconstitutional, and Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. Penguin Books was cleared of obscenity charges by UK courts for publishing Lady Chatterleyâs Lover. Cassius Clay won an Olympic gold medal, Chubby Checker sang âThe Twist,â and Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns laid the foundations of pop art.
But even as television and radio pursued a conservative, apple pie agenda that prolonged the chart-topping success of Elvis and Sinatraâand a crew of fifties crooners, balladeers, songbirds, folksters, and instrumentalistsâa new generation of singers was emerging in dive bars, coffeehouses, and smoky cellars from California to Detroit, from East Coast campuses and Greenwich Village basements to the industrial heartland cities of Britain.
A band called the Beatles embarked on a forty-eight-night run in a seedy Hamburg club. Robert Zimmerman prepared to drop out of his freshman year at the University of Minnesota and travel to New York City to play in folk music clubs as Bob Dylan. Two boys called Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met on a railway platform in East London and discussed a shared passion for Chicago R&B epitomized by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. And three brothers practiced harmonies that would form the foundation of the Beach Boys. A new frontier beckoned its pioneers.
1
AWAKENINGS
âPeople were coming back from the U.S. with 78s of Fats Waller and Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Thatâs when it happened for me. I was thirteen when I first picked up a guitar.â
ERIC CLAPTON
At the end of World War II, Britain recoiled from warâand its war hero prime minister, Winston Churchill. In 1945, the British elected a Labour government on a progressive agenda of radical social reform. By 1960, for teenagers all over Britain, the threat of the draftâand three years in khaki fighting colonial insurgencies or protecting Cold War frontiersâhad vanished. They needed new uniforms and the beat of a new drum. Foods such as meat, cheese, and sugar had been rationed during the war and well into the fifties, along with âluxuriesâ like materials for clothing. Now prosperity, and the free time that came with it, permitted a new generation to explore its own agenda through music, fashion, and art.
Keith Richards [guitarist and founding member, the Rolling Stones]: Growing up in a postwar England era spurred us on. Weâd heard enough about the war, which was all grown-ups ever seemed to talk about. We wanted to get out of this war mind-set. Weâd all grown up facing the draft. I was thinking, âI just wanna get out the goddamned house. I donât want to go in the army.â
It was dopey. But conscription had ended a couple of years before in 1960. We were all facing this new space and suddenly we didnât have to do that. Your whole life youâd heard, âWhen youâre eighteen youâll be in the army and that will sort you out.â
Suddenly this miracle happened and we didnât have to do the draft. And you are seventeen or eighteen and you have all that testosterone and this amazing spare free time. Woo-hoo! Just go with what I feel like. They lied to me. I donât have to go into the army. I dread to think how my life would have been if Iâd been in the army. We wouldnât be talking right now, I can tell you that. No. Discipline doesnât agree with me.
Eric Clapton [guitarist, Cream; the Yardbirds; Derek & the Dominos]: Postwar England was a very dull place. And thatâs what the sixties is all aboutâan explosion, a reaction to rationing, the hardship, and the tremendous suffering that the nation went through with the Second World War.
I was born at the end of it, and actually I probably recall the sound of doodlebugs [Nazi V-1 âflying bombsâ] going over and stuff like that. But I was very aware of all the constraints that the war had placed on everyone, and how it affected everything.
Vidal Sassoon [pioneering British hairstylist]: Weâd lost the Empire. But the socialists [Labour Party] were great. The National Health Service, education, the rebuilding that was done. It was extraordinary. We were broke, Britain was broke. But the kids were brought up in that mood of rebuilding. We were given council flats [government-built housing projects] and cheap rents. It was the first flat that I ever lived in that had a bathroom. I used to wallow in it.
Georgie Fame [jazz and blues musician, virtuoso keyboard player]: I remember rationing. In the fifties there was no television and no entertainment, and everyone in our street [in Leigh, near Manchester], even in the poorest houses, had a piano. Dad played, everyone played. You heard Rosemary Clooney and Frankie Vaughan on the radio and someone would try and play it.
Our saving grace was if you tuned in to the short waveâeveryone had a radioâyou could get American Forces Radio, and youâd hear Duke Ellington and all the latest American stuff and it was the only way youâd get itârock and roll. We didnât realize it was all about sex. We thought it was about dancing. Dancing was what got our mothers interested.
I was playing in pubs in my hometown when I was fifteen. On my own. People were queuing up. Iâd play Jerry Lee Lewis and everyone would be singing along and having a great time. I didnât get paid. I didnât get tips. I was given half a pint of mild beer.
Bill Wyman [guitarist and founding member, the Rolling Stones]: When I was seventeen, I went to my grandmaâs house in South LondonâI lived there some of the time. She had a six-inch black-and-white TV. I used to watch the sports. And one night watching the Saturday Night at the London Palladium variety show I saw someone on the stage, tears running down his faceâJohnnie Rayâthe most soulful singer before rock and roll. Girls ran to the stage and tore his trousers off him. They mobbed him.
Eric Stewart [guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist, the Mindbenders; 10cc]: I was supposed to go into architecture at Salford Tech. I went there for about four weeks. I was sixteen, a working-class boy living right in the center of Manchester in a two-up-two-down with an outside loo. [Small, two-bedroom homes with only a living room and a kitchen on the ground floor and a toilet in the backyard were the standard post-Victorian housing built for British blue-collar factory workers.]
We had a pianoâa front-room piano. Most families had one. My father played piano fantastically: classic, blues, jazzâthere was always music in the house from him and from the radio, and about that time I was getting into Jerry Lee Lewis. I was buying records, but the main influence was a family across the road called Allen.
One of the three sons was a merchant seaman. He was probably eighteen and he was doing the Atlantic route, and heâd come back to Liverpool and Manchester with these 45sâlittle discs of American rock and roll from Presley and Buddy Hollyâand we used to play them. I had a little record player, a Dancette [a portable suitcase-size record player], and Iâd play these records that werenât on sale anywhere. Not a lot of this music was being played on TV or radio. It was only available through foreign radio. None was being played on the BBC. You couldnât put a Buddy Holly record on the BBC. You had to be Frank Sinatra, Matt Monro, or Helen Shapiroâsomeone presentable. âHow Much Is That Doggie in the Windowâ and âI Saw a Mouse.â People were buying that stuff.
Justin de Villeneuve [British sixties entrepreneur]: Iâd spent the war as an evacuee in J.B. Priestleyâs house, a grand manor house north of London, but it had full staff, cooks, and nannies in uniforms. [Children were sent to the country for safety when Hitlerâs Luftwaffe began blitzing civilian London]. Priestley [an author and broadcaster] wrote Churchillâs speeches. I was born Nigel Jonathan Davies. Near Hackney. I am a genuine Cockney [only those born within hearing of the St. Mary-le-Bow church bells in the old City of London are regarded as âgenuineâ Cockneys]. So when I got back to London after the war, in 1945, it was, âOh my god, little two-up and two-down houses.â The lavatory was in the garden. And the houses were gas lit. No electricity and always the smell of leaking gas. That was what hit me when I first went backâafter having silver and bone china on the table. I knew things were going to be different. I wanted something different. We all did.
Sir Frank Lowe [advertising agency pioneer and owner]: I feel that our parents emerged from the war exhausted. It was impossible for us, the children, to know what it was likeâa whole nation at war. My father came back and hardly talked about the war at all. They were totally exhausted. Britain went through a miserable time after the war. I think my whole generation said, âFuck it! There must be something better.â
I was brought up in a pub in Manchester not far from Old Trafford [Manchester Unitedâs soccer stadium]. I was brought up by my grandmother. My mother had gone off when I was two to be an opera singer at the Sadlerâs Wells [a theater in London] in the chorus and my dad was in the RAF [Royal Air Force], so I was left with Granny. I left school at seventeen and I decided I canât live with Granny in Manchester for the rest of my life, so I wrote off for a number of jobs and I was offered twoâone was called a âjunior reporterâ but it was really being the tea boy, and it was up in Scotland, and the other was an errand boy at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Berkeley Square in London.
On balance I thought that Berkeley Square was more acceptable than Aberdeen. So in 1958 [or] â9, I took the job as errand boy at four pounds fifteen shillings a week plus luncheon vouchers [a subsidized meal plan], which we all got in those days. I delivered the post [mail] to everybody, and in those days advertising was a bit like Mad Men. The ads werenât any good but the people were having a whale of a time with the models coming in, and the receptionists all had Gucci handbags with scarves tied âround them. The account executives were all officers out of the army and it seemed like most of them came into the office in the morning in their dinner jackets having just left Annabelleâs nightclub [an elitist private membersâ club in Berkeley Square] at five or six a.m. It was a curious world.
Mary Quant [British fashion designer]: I grew up knowing what I wanted to do. I used to wear the clothes handed down to me from my cousin. I was always focused on fashion. I used to go to dancing classes as a little girl. I was in one of those classes and I heard the music next door and there was this girl tap dancing, and she was everything I wanted to be.
This girl was all in black. She wore black opaque tights and ten inches of pleated skirt, with white ankle socks over the black tights and tap dancing shoes with an ankle strap with a buckle on top. I wanted to look like that. She was about two years older than me. I must have been seven. She also had a bucket hair cutâa rudimentary Vidal Sassoon. That was always the image in my head. I used to cut up the bedspreadâI used to cut up everythingâand so I started to design clothes. I never wanted to do anything else.
Jackie Collins [British author]: I was brought up in a showbiz family. [Collins was the youngest daughter of Joseph Collins, a theatrical agent whose clients included the Beatles, Shirley Bassey, and Tom Jones]. My father was a chauvinist and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I was a school dropout. I was always a rebel, older than my age, and thought I knew a lot more about everything than anyone else.
I had to be independent. My parents didnât wrap me in cotton wool [werenât overprotective]âthey kind of ignored me. My sister Joan was already in Hollywood, and I was acting and Iâd traveled a lot. There were no boundaries, so if I didnât get caught I could do whatever I wantedâI was the original wild child.
Justin de Villeneuve: I left school at fourteen and worked for a wine merchant. Why did I do that?âI was friends with Reggie and Ronnie Kray, the East End villains [Londonâs most notorious gangsters]. I spent my youth in Tottenham Royal, a dance hall, and the big influence was clothing. All my friends were gangsters. They were the smart guys. The gangsters would always bring out a big roll of money. They had bespoke suits and handmade shirts and I aspired to that...