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6.
Hinduism and 1960s Music
A main aperture through which Hinduism
flowed into the sixties was popular music, which adapted the non-Western
harmonics of raga and experimented with the sitar, the long-necked
Indian lute. George Harrison, the Beatles' lead guitarist, was not
the first British musician to experiment with the sitar, but he
deserves principal credit for popularizing it in Anglo-American
rock music. Jangling sitar riffs were a ubiquitous lyrical motif
in late-sixties music. At the opening of songs, the sitar was equivalent
in meaning and effect to the European church bell, summoning the
faithful to worship.
The first Western album of Indian music,
a collaboration between Yehudi Menuhin
and tabla master Ali Akbar Khan, was released in 1955. In the late
fifties, Khan's brother-in-law, Ravi Shankar, gave sitar concerts
in Europe and the US. By
1959, Shankar had influenced jazz compositions by Miles Davis and
John Coltrane. By the mid-sixties, the sitar sound had traveled
far afield into folk circles in Great
Britain,
New
York,
and San
Francisco.
Harrison's interest in India began during production of the Beatles'
second movie, Help! (1965), with its slapstick Hindu subplot. He was intrigued
by the sitar used in an Indian restaurant scene filmed in London. While beach scenes were being filmed in
the Bahamas, the Beatles were approached by a man in
orange robes who handed them a signed copy of his book on yoga.
It was Swami Vishnu-Devananda, the founder of Sivananda Yoga. Intrigued,
Harrison began to study Hinduism. He then traveled
to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar, who
gave him a copy of Yogananda's Autobiography
of a Yogi. It was Harrison who invited Shankar to perform at
the seminal 1967 Monterey Pop Music Festival in California, where the sitar's artistic kinship to
the electric guitar was dramatically demonstrated. (See
the 1969 documentary, Monterey
Pop.) The sitar's cultural impact on the late sixties
paralleled that of the Javanese gamelan on late-nineteenth-century
music. Debussy was fascinated by the gamelan (a percussive instrument
with gong and bells) when he heard it played at the Paris Universal
Exposition in 1889. Through him, the gamelan's Asian harmonics transformed
French and British classical music for the next half century.
In 1967, Patti Boyd Harrison, George's
wife, took the Beatles to a lecture in London by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Beatles
fell under the Maharishi's spell and began to dress in quasi-Hindu
style, with chic Nehru jackets and mod paisley fabrics, which revolutionized
fashion around the world. In 1968, the Beatles flew to India to meditate at the Maharishi's ashram in
Rishikesh. But their flirtation with Hinduism ended abruptly in
bitter disillusion: the Maharishi ruined his saintly reputation
by reportedly making sexual advances to another celebrity pilgrim,
Mia Farrow, who was there with her studious sister Prudence. The
Beatles and the Farrows decamped in high dudgeon. A record of that
adventure is contained in two Beatles songs on the 1968 White
Album: "Dear Prudence" and "Sexy Sadie" ("You made a fool of
everyone"), a transsexual tribute to the Maharishi's seductive charms.
Farrow confirmed the rumored details about the Maharishi's blunder
in her 1998 autobiography, What Falls Away. However, it was thanks to the Beatles' cross-fertilization
of Hinduism with rock that the Swami Satchidananda, seated in white
robes on the stage, would give the prayer invocation that opened
the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival.
In addition to the sitar, or an electric
guitar strung and played to sound like one, the style of "acid rock"
that originated in the San Francisco hippie scene can arguably be considered
to have religious intonations. Acid rock helped promulgate the sixties
concept of cosmic consciousness. Even those (like me) who did not
take drugs were radicalized by the power and expansiveness of that
shimmering music, with its unfixed keys, sonic distortions, ominous
drone, wandering melodic lines, and twangy, floating, evaporating
notes. The leading San Francisco acid-rock bands were Jefferson Airplane,
the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother
and the Holding Company. Psychedelic effects were used in Los Angeles by the Byrds and the Doors and in England by the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, the Jimi Hendrix
Experience, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, the Kinks,
and early Pink Floyd. The drugged mood of this "trippy" style was
revived in British trance music (called "trip-hop") in the early
nineties as a development of the rave scene.
Because it consists of transient instrumental
effects, psychedelic music has received far less attention than
folk and folk-rock with overtly political lyrics, whose manifest
content is easier to analyze. This is yet another factor impeding
general recognition of the sixties' religious legacy. Though the
Beats left their mark in novels and poems, the counterculture was
less interested in constructing self-contained artifacts. The enduring
achievements of the sixties generation were in music, modern dance,
experimental film and video, Pop and Conceptual Art, and performance
art, which swallowed up poetry. Literature is strikingly underrepresented.
Literary surveys of the sixties overrely on the work of figures
like Norman Mailer, whose brilliant career began in the late forties.
The major critics and theorists of the sixties-Marshall McLuhan,
Leslie Fiedler, Norman O. Brown-also belong to an earlier generation.
Hermann Hesse, whose novels Siddhartha
(1922), about the early life of Buddha, and Steppenwolf
(1927) were sixties cult classics, was born in 1877. Except for
Tom Wolfe's New Journalism, most sixties culture crystallized outside
the book.
The gap in the sixties' artistic and
intellectual legacy partly occurred because too many young people
followed their elementary understanding of Asian religion by making
sensory experience primary. Shunning schedules and routine, they
sought the "eternal Now," dramatized by the otherworldliness of psychedelic rock.
Furthermore, the sexual revolution, which began in 1960 with the
commercial release of Enovid, the first reliable oral contraceptive
in history, finally overwhelmed the sixties' spiritual quest. Beat
interpretations of Asian thought tended to exaggerate its sexual
component. In 1958, Alan Watts criticized "Beat Zen" for its "anything
goes" attitude toward sex. Similarly, hipsters often carelessly
reduced Hinduism to the erotic acrobatics of Tantric yoga or Vatsyayana's
Kama Sutra (c. 250 AD).
But sexual codes have been very strict throughout India's history: at no time was promiscuity endorsed.
The yoni and lingam (monumental stone genitalia in Hindu shrines)
or the voluptuous copulating couples on the facades of Hindu temples
belonged to a fertility cult where sexual intercourse symbolized
the natural cycle of birth and death.
"Make love, not war" was a sixties
rubric. Free love had been endorsed by radical Romantics like Percy
Bysshe Shelley who sought to shatter the bonds of bourgeois marriage.
A cheeky promiscuity was also affected by urban flappers in the
1920s, which was energized by the hyperactive dance rhythms of the
Jazz Age as well as the seditious mood of underground speakeasies.
But free love was never achieved on a massive scale until the 1960s,
when random sexual connection was blithely assigned a spiritual
and redemptive meaning. "Getting it on" meant freeing mind and body
to strike a blow against residual American puritanism. By the hedonistic
seventies, spirituality had been abandoned, a change marked by the
shift in drugs from communal, "mellow" marijuana and visionary LSD to edgy, expensive, hoarded cocaine, which sharpened competition
and enhanced the ego sense of power and mastery. Sexual liberation,
as should now be obvious, had its high costs, which we are still
sorting out: sexual diseases, a soaring divorce rate, and a pandemic
sexualization of media images with uncertain consequences for children.
Self-presentation by early teens, for example, has become strikingly
eroticized, leading to premature sexual pressures and demands.
Feeling trapped by a corporate and
technological society, sixties rebels tried to empower sex as a
quick route to reconnection with nature. The sixties dreamed of
limitless sex without consequence-a bouncy, open-ended, Technicolor
film with a rock soundtrack. Many genuine hippies dropped out of
college to join communes, bake bread, and have babies. Others of
the sixties generation who entered the professions often defied
or delayed the procreative principle that was at the heart of ancient
mystery cult. Two new models of sexual liberation who emerged in
the seventies were the liberated woman, who put career before marriage
and family, and the post-Stonewall gay man, in whose paradise of pleasures
even lesbians were no longer welcome. Reproductive rights, establishing
women's control over their own bodies, was always a major issue
in feminism but over the next quarter century would become an obsessive
preoccupation, determining campaign politics and judicial appointments.
Feminism inextricably identified itself with abortion-with termination
of life rather than fertility. (I am speaking as a militantly pro-choice
feminist.) Feminism's foregrounding of abortion, which caused national
turmoil and limited its outreach as a populist movement, was one
consequence of the loss of sixties cosmic consciousness by the seventies.
For gay men, free love detached from
all reference to nature meant that, by the eighties, their ruling
theorist would be social constructionist Michel Foucault rather
than the nature-revering Whitman or Ginsberg. Despite a seventies
fad for the virile lumberjack look, the erotic ideal in the gay
male world has reverted over time to the ruthless master type of
the Greek beautiful boy, Antinous reborn: the shaved, sculpted,
callipygian ephebe whose perfection is heartbreakingly transient.
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