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Notes 58.1 (2001) 105-107



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Book Review

Tomorrow Never Knows:
Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s

Sixties Rock:
Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions


Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. By Nick Bromell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [225 p. ISBN 0-226-07553-2. $22.50.]

Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions. By Michael Hicks. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. [x, 162 p. ISBN 0-252-02427-3 (cloth); 0-252-06915-3 (pbk.). $26.95 (cloth); $16.95 (pbk.).]

"Will we ever know what really happened in the '60s?" (p. 2). Thus Nick Bromell opens his new book Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. Viewing the decade as a short, extremely disruptive period that has yet to be fully integrated into our collective historical consciousness, Bromell intends the book "to connect the sixties more persuasively to our sense of the present" (p. 6). Rather than approaching those years from what he considers the two "orthodox" perspectives (political and polemical), he examines how they signaled a new way of looking at the world, focusing particularly on the role played by rock music and psychedelics in this shift of perspective. Tomorrow Never Knows is thus not a coherent history of sixties rock, nor, for the most part, does it offer a close analysis of the sounds themselves, although the [End Page 105] Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and a few others figure prominently. Rather, Bromell is chiefly interested in the ideas conveyed through the music.

Drawing on the work of sociologists such as George Mead and David Riesman, Bromell argues that a fundamental condition of living in Western society in the twentieth century is what Mead calls the "social self," Riesman the "other-directed personality," that is, a self that fears loneliness yet seeks it out, hoping to find in solitude a more solid sense of identity. Blacks face the additional challenge of an identity that is always being invaded by white stereotypes of "blackness." Bromell asserts that blacks have grappled with the resulting "double consciousness," which leads to an identity as both insider and outsider simultaneously; this dual identity, moreover, is expressed through the blues, with its dualities such as call and response between soloist and group and perpetual melodic and rhythmic variation over a fixed chord structure. Accepting Susanne Langer's argument that musical form mirrors the form of its creators' emotions, Bromell asserts that the blues became a powerful vehicle through which the insider/outsider duality could be expressed and explored. He argues further that white teenagers of the fifties picked up on early, blues-based rock 'n' roll not only because it was hip, but because they felt a deep emotional resonance with a music in which they saw reflected their own struggles with loneliness and double consciousness.

When psychedelics entered the picture during the mid-sixties, they reinforced the feeling of double consciousness among young people by exposing the degree to which the individual self and the collective self (i.e., culture) are mere social constructs. By itself, rock music had been a powerful vehicle for working through the loss of self; psychedelics became an even more potent vehicle for delivering one inward, not to loneliness and alienation, but to a world "radiant with connections and community, saturated with significance" (p. 75). Together, rock and psychedelics created a powerful synergy.

Of course, many before Bromell have argued that the sixties were actually more a quasi-religious response to alienation and meaninglessness than a political phenomenon, and it is perhaps here that Bromell makes his most valuable observation: the sixties were deeply political, he says, but not in the ordinary Left/Right sense. Sixties radicals were driven by a conviction, gleaned from their use of psychedelics, that "stability" is illusory, "culture" fundamentally false; the real politics of the sixties, Bromell suggests, was not liberalism, but anarchism. That is the reason why, over thirty-five years later, liberals and conservatives alike are uncomfortable with many aspects of...

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