The Pipesucker Report

Glancing at the Phil Lesh autobiography, he first went psychedelic in the spring of 1964.
1964 was also the year of the Merry Prankster bus trip, stopping at Robert Stone’s place.
Stone had been high in Palo Alto 62-63? Palo Alto was the bleeding edge.

Owsley produced his first batch (300k doses) in May 1965.

1965-66 were the peak acid years. For Lesh the highest was maybe the LA sojourn in summer 1966. By 1967 everybody had come down enough to start making art and money.

Haight-Ashbury was a Spring Break destination in 1967. It was over.

McCartney says he first did LSD in March 1967.

The British did dress better. I doubt that Lesh ever wore a Nehru jacket.

Well, you may regard it as a “pre-parody” of Lucy in the Sky, but frankly I don’t see the resemblance, other than both being part of a vaguely psychedelic stream within popular music. The specifically Indian stylings are likely a tribute to George Harrison, who started with the sitar in 1965’s Rubber Soul and sought out Ravi Shankar in 1966. And LSD had been a topic for every kind of stand-up and sitcom for a couple of years. “Lucy in the Sky” – assuming it to be in fact about LSD – was not new in 1967, except insofar as it was (a) by what were then mainstream artists, and (b) essentially favorable, not condemnatory, ambivalent (cf. White Rabbit on other drugs) or sniggering.

I think few of us at the time actually regarded “Sergeant Pepper” as cutting-edge in its individual songs or cultural outlook. It was the totality of the album experience that rocked the musical world, as for the first time (that anyone could remember) it seemed as if all the songs were somehow related to each other, part of a greater whole. (One of the few times I totally impressed my kid brother was when I brought the original album back from England in 1967, it [the British album] being considered superior to the American version.) But “swinging London” was already past its peak then – as was Frisco, if Mr. McManus is to be believed (and why not?).

Not that I ever got in on the “swinging,” but I was conscious of missing less of it as time went by . . .

Speaking of the Bonzo Dog Band, here are Neil Innes’ tour dates this year:
http://www.neilinnes.org/live.htm

Via the Wikipedia on Eight Miles High:

The song was also responsible for the naming of the musical subgenre raga rock when journalist Sally Kempton, in her review of the single for The Village Voice, first used the term to describe the record’s experimental fusion of eastern and western music. However, although Kempton was the first person to use the term “raga rock” in print, she had actually borrowed it from the promotional press material that accompanied the “Eight Miles High” single.

There was already marketing language for sitar rock.

The story was that the name “Lucy…” wasn’t to be a coded reference (despite the code being so easy); in retrospect I’m inclined to believe it.

Like others, I can’t see any similarity worth mentioning to that song, or much else on Pepper. High soaring harmonies, weird instrumentation, sound effects, loved-up “everybody turn on!” lyrics – if they were thinking of any one song it’d be “Good Vibrations” (released the previous month).

LSD was legal in the UK in 1966. Bob Guccione was working for Playboy then and brought a load in.

“However, although Kempton was the first person to use the term “raga rock” in print, she had actually borrowed it from the promotional press material that accompanied the “Eight Miles High” single.”

That material was written by Derek Taylor. The first try at recording “Eight Miles High” was in December 1965. The lyrics really are all about a plane trip and how wet & grey Liverpool is.

“See My Friends” was influenced by a Bombay stopover the Kinks had when returning from Australia.

I’m amused by the notion that something has to be passé before it can be parodied. I’d have thought it fairly self-evident that the really, really cool thing to do is to rip the piss out of what’s still cutting-edge.

but Jeff Beck’s guitar sounded better so they didn’t release it.

No shit Sherlock.

The flip side is that “I can’t get no satisfaction” and a Moody Blues tune to be named later also only sound good in that situation

I very much doubt “Satisfaction” was recorded on acid in 1965. Sounds like speed to me.

Dwight Macdonald included Samuel Foote’s “The grand panjandrum” in his anthology of parodies on the grounds that it was an excellent parody of Edward Lear, although he acknowledged that Lear hadn’t been born at the time.

I don’t really see the comparison to Norwegian Wood. Love You To, sure.

JH, everything has already happened, especially if you’re dropping acid. And it’s amazing how much of the 60s had already happened anyway, in the late 40s, if you were a beatnik. One might argue, if one were so wonted, that The Dharma Bums is the ne plus ultra of hippydom, and that all happened in 1955.

But the Pantisocrats would have been Dead Heads.

Ligeti preferred the Beatles. I read somewhere that he carried a copy of Sgt. Pepper around at Darmstadt. Because you should never underestimate the power of a melody tied to a memory. There are several photos of Ligeti with a Schubert sonata tucked under his arm.

Had the LSBB been unmistakeably LITSWD-ish, the intriguing possibility that the latter was inspired by the former could have come into play, of course.

But surely the ‘not about LSD’ line is an urban urban-myth myth? Debunking is just as seductive (and as often perverse) as fabulation.

Ahistoricality @27 are you invoking a technical distinction between parody and satire by which parody by definition involves something present or past only?

I think that’s probably about right in substance – though it’s an unintuitive way of putting it. Perhaps better: no-one can intentionally parody something with which they have no causal interaction. Add a collateral hypothesis of unidirectional causation and authorial intention and you have the derived temporal thesis. (That’s ‘intuitive’ in the analytic philosopher’s sense, of course.)

“Baby Gaga” is the perfect name for any young girl! Although “young” is perhaps relative – I was surprised when I discovered that Lady Gaga is actually old enough to legally drink as much as the lyrics to “Just Dance” suggest.

And as far as knowledge of psychedelia in Britain at the time goes, a quick thumb through back issues of “Oz” should make that quite evident.

Not printed in England until 1967. The first few issues didn’t seem to get distributed very far from W11. IT was earlier, but had poor distribution too. Both were very hard to read, no matter what state one was in.