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course, there was a causal chain between such songs and Jagger
and Lennon's subsequent busts on private premises.
Second, the international emergence of Acid Rock. In 1966
the Beatles could successfully patronize the Byrds. And even in
1968, so the legend runs, Mick Jagger psyched Jim Morrison at a
Doors concert on the West Coast, just by sitting in the front row
and looking at him. But Country Joe, Big Brother, the Mothers,
Steve Miller, Moby Grape, the Dead, the Airplane, the Doors, Love,
bands all with different styles and preoccupations, and individually
none as yet approaching the broadcast energy flow of the Beatles
and the Stones, were all accelerating inexorably. All these bands were
borne up by, and bore up, the Californian life-style, all were un–
compromised and self-confident, all were redrawing the map of
consciousness. Competition! During 1968, the musically most knowl–
edgeable and adventurous kids in America, in England, in France,
in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia, in Germany, turned to West
Coast sound. Small, centrally placed record shops outside America
displayed and sold great quantities of imported albums, at up to 50
percent above normal prices. This movement was underground only
in the sense that Europe broadcasts very little West Coast music
on radio or television.
It
was spreading, fast. The question was:
were the Beatles and the Stones still out front?
The rumor was: no. The Beatles built their palace at 3 Savile
Row, London W.1 , and fooled around unsuccessfully with elec–
tronics and the Apple clothes store. Despite their protestations, the
vibrations to the faithful were: screw you, we're in business. The
Stones' office, five minutes from Savile Row, stayed reassuringly
casual. And both bands were recording. The new albums would tell
the tale.
Both
Sergeant Pepper
and
The Beatles
are enigmatic and am–
biguous. But
Pepper
reverberated, because it connected. Eight months,
now, after its release, there is no doubt that
The Beatles
has dis–
integrated. Tom Wolfe, talking of a Beatles' concert at the Cow
Palace, outside San Francisco, on September 2, 1965 (1965!), saw
it. "They have brought this whole mass of human beings to the
point where they are one, out of their skulls, one psyche, and they
have utter control over them - but they don't know what in the
hell to do with it, they haven't the first idea, and they will lose it."
