I can only speak for myself and my experience of the sixties.
The sixties were a revolution. Not a violent overthrowing of the establishment but a revolution that took place in the head. At the time I believed it was shared by many of us. We were rebelling against an establishment that represented values that we could not accept. There was an inbuilt hypocrisy and hierarchical acceptance that I grew to despise. Society was steeped in a puritanical cloud that sucked the joy out of life. The class system pervaded to keep us in our place – fodder for the machine – workers to be exploited – fodder for the guns. The puritanical rules applied to us but not them. The upper classes were awash with licence. We were controlled. Religion was nothing to do with spirituality but used as a moral straitjacket for us, paid lip service to, by them, and was nothing less than a mechanism of power and control. We were being put through the sausage machine of an education system that was designed to discourage questioning and mind expansion and used for control and to grade us for entry into the further machine of careers and employment. The promise was that if you kept your nose clean and worked hard you could earn money, buy a house and car and bring up a family in suburban comfort (while those at the top exploited, cavorted and lived a very different life with mansions, yachts and orgies).
It started with the Beats. Kerouac and Ginsberg pointed the way to a different kind of life. We didn’t have to be consumed by the war-mongering, exploiting, hierarchical machine with its inbuilt racism and misogyny. We weren’t pegs to be placed in holes. Life could be more exciting, colourful and meaningful. Racism, misogyny, exploitation and warmongering were evil. We could build a better world based on sharing, equality, love and spirituality. Life wasn’t about making money and owning things. Friendship, experience and understanding were more important. Life was an adventure.
Music was the unifying force for all of us young, naïve revolutionaries. Music expressed the emotions that we were feeling. The poetic lyrics, with their defiant anti-war, anti-racist sentiments and positive spirituality and love represented the equality and peaceful we were seeking. People like Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Donovan, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Country Joe and the Fish were creating music and expressing values that resonated with what I was thinking and feeling. We were a movement. There was a battlefield of ideals to be fought over.
We, the sixties freaks, were existing in a parallel universe, apart from the ‘straight’ society with a different set of values and aspirations. Naively we believed that our culture of sharing, equality, freedom and non-profit cohabitation would blossom and flourish and might even eventually become mainstream. Little did we know? The wily establishment was already infiltrating its profit-making fingers into the fabric of freakdom. There was money to be made, bands to be bought, fashions to be sold, images to be exploited, music to be made into product. Rebellion became big business before you could blink. As a seventeen/eighteen-year-old rebel, clashing with authorities and parents, living in a bubble of like-minded friends, already immersed in the music scene and Beats, Roy Harper loomed like the epitome of all we were espousing. To suddenly be exposed to the full power of ‘Circle’ and then ‘McGoohan’s Blues’