The sales of my new 60s book are looking very healthy. Thank you everyone for the support!
It gives me a buzz to think that so many of you are buying it. I hope you find it as good a read and enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
I’m really looking forward to the reviews!
My 60s: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9798253680780: Books
Thank you again!
London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and all points in between.
My Sixties
The Spirit Lives
Not the sixties you’ve seen before.
This is the underground.
The real story.
Music, movement, philosophy.
A life lived through gigs, travel, friendships—and the edges of experience.
Part memoir, part autobiography, part raw collection of memories, this is a personal journey through a defining decade. Told through photographs, anecdotes, and reflections, it captures the spirit as it was lived—not as it’s been packaged since.
No Carnaby Street. No pop gloss.
Just the underground scene as I knew it.
From Kerouac to Zen, Kesey to Leary.
From IT and OZ to Dylan, Hendrix, and Pink Floyd.
From Hyde Park free festivals to Roy Harper and Abbey Road.
This is the sixties from the inside.
My Sixties
The Spirit Lives
Not the sixties you’ve seen before.
This is the underground.
The real story.
Music, movement, philosophy.
A life lived through gigs, travel, friendships—and the edges of experience.
Part memoir, part autobiography, part raw collection of memories, this is a personal journey through a defining decade. Told through photographs, anecdotes, and reflections, it captures the spirit as it was lived—not as it’s been packaged since.
No Carnaby Street. No pop gloss.
Just the underground scene as I knew it.
From Kerouac to Zen, Kesey to Leary.
From IT and OZ to Dylan, Hendrix, and Pink Floyd.
From Hyde Park free festivals to Roy Harper and Abbey Road.
This is the sixties from the inside.
I thought it would be fun to write a candid autobiography of my life in the sixties – the music, girls, drugs, love and anecdotes. Snakes, rats, travel, clubs, bands, festivals and friends. The whole London scene.
It wasn’t Carnaby Street or swinging London; it was Middle Earth, Les Cousins, Eel Pie Island and free festivals; the counterculture and underground..
My 60s eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
It all came flooding back. They were wrong. I was there and I do remember!
Out now in paperback and kindle – the hardback follows shortly.
The Beginning
Back in the heady days of 1966/67 I was free. I did what I wanted. Reckless and like a sponge, absorbing everything. At seventeen/eighteen I was technically at school – although my head was elsewhere. I was thoroughly immersed in girls, Kerouac, music and the burgeoning underground scene. No time for studies. As a volatile idealistic young fool it seemed like there was a whole world to be discovered – literature, poetry, drama, art, politics, philosophy, spirituality, love and sex. Wow! Heady days! Talk about rapid development. My brain was firing electricity like nobody’s business. They could have connected me up to the grid. Days spent sitting around with mates, smoking and listening to music and talking madly as a stream of madness came pouring out. The world was flooding in and barely being processed before excitedly gushing out. My head was exploding.
School were none too pleased with my hair, beard and coloured clothes. Who cared? Drop out! I spent a lot of time at home.
Music was the medium. I devoured albums. I’d been nurtured on the Beatles and Stones, Dylan, Pretty Things, Yardbirds, Kinks and Who but I was discovering more obscure stuff by the minute. We excitedly shared out discoveries. Jackson C Frank, Woody Guthrie and Bert Jansch were never off my turntable.
At the age of sixteen, in 1965, I bought a motorbike and was mobile. At seventeen I bought a car and could turn up places warm and dry. And what places there were to go back then. Amazing gigs. Eel Pie Island, Middle Earth, the Marquis, Fishmongers Arms, Three Horseshoes, Bunjis and the Toby Jug. There were a host of people to see. In 67 Pink Floyd was creating mesmerising madness at Middle Earth, Hendrix and Cream were playing clubs, the old Blues guys were touring (I got to see Son House, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Bukka White, Skip James and loads more). There were free gigs in Hyde Park. Edgar Broughton was ousting demons Arthur Brown Had a weird thing going with the god of hellfire. The Incredible String Band had no difficulty being incredible.
The West Coast bands were taking off – Frank Zappa, Country Joe and the Fish, Doors and Captain Beefheart. Free, Traffic, Jethro Tull and the Bonzos were playing most nights. We bounced about to Fleetwood Mac. We bopped to John Mayall. Every night they were available and the entrance fee was between 10p and 25p. 25p for Pink Floyd and Blossom Toes at Eel Pie Island! Just imagine. I later paid 25p to see Led Zep at the Toby Jug. I was skint but I could afford it.
We had one long endless party. The camaraderie between us long hair beatnik freaks was amazing. Everywhere you went it was joints and new friends. Grok? We shared a philosophy. It was decidedly anti-establishment and ridiculously idealistic, but it was magical. We had our own separate society based around sharing.
In among all the endless mayhem of gigs, parties, girls and friends I discovered this little basement club on Greek Street in the midst of all the night-time strip clubs and cafes, called Les Cousins. It was like a little refuge, a family, a dark dingy basement in which a bunch of hairy guys and colourful girls sat and concentrated, rapt and serious, entranced by the new sounds and poetry of the acoustic scene dubbed contemporary folk. Not sure where that came from. These were a bunch of new incredible songwriters who happened to play acoustically and usually about contemporary issues, topical dramas, real life. Just my thing – serious, deep, extraordinary, brilliant. I spent many a night there basking in the likes of John Martyn, Al Stewart and Jackson C Frank. Magical days. I wish I’d kept my membership card!
One night I rolled up, parked my motorbike on the pavement, bounced down the stairs into the fetid cellar and got a seat at a table near the front. I’d come for Bert Jansch and John Renbourn – two of my favourites. Sandwiched in between them was this manic guy with long blond hair a moustache and acoustic guitar. He giggled a lot and spouted whatever came into his head. I can’t remember what but it all hit me like a hail of bullets. He was mirroring my thoughts. He sang three songs. One was Goldfish and I think another was Blackpool. He blew me away. The guitarwork, the poetry but most of all that mind! That was it – short and sweet!
I’d discovered Roy Harper!
Interesting to see that the film The Complete Unknown covers the same ground as my two books on Dylan (except, of course, my books tell the real story).
Bob Dylan 1962 to 1970 On Track Extract
His act involved Chaplin-esque routines, carefully orchestrated ploys, tuning and fiddling with his guitar and harmonica, all with casual glances and asides, designed to draw the audience in. From the very start, it was apparent that Bob, despite his shyness and boyish looks, possessed a great stage presence. Not only that, but he was already beginning to write his own material and what songs they were!
There were a large number of factors that fed into this burgeoning songwriting. The exposure to a wide range of music – being able to watch, at close hand, experienced musicians applying their stage skills (most of whom recognised his talent and encouraged him), the befriending of Dave Van Ronk, who carried huge clout, and his love affair with Suze Rotolo. This young Dylan was avidly listening to a range of music, reading poetry and literature, ransacking the libraries and record collections of all and sundry.
Suze was hugely instrumental in the development of his social sensitivities and outlook. She came from a dyed-in-the-wool communist family and already, as a young girl, had been involved in the civil rights movement.
The early sixties were the time of civil rights, the bomb, the cold war and the beginnings of the war in Vietnam. This was the McCarthy era with its hounding of communists and unAmerican activities. The Beat generation had instigated dissent and now the folk scene, mainly due to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, was the seat of left-wing social change, a movement that was going to blossom and shape the whole sixties underground movement. Suze was steeped in it. Bob absorbed it so that it permeated much of his writing.
Between 1961 and 1963, prompted by Suze and the folk scene in general, Dylan wrote many of his most famous socially motivated songs, songs that laid the groundwork for the sixties philosophy. His wordmanship was constantly developing and reaching new heights. Unfortunately, it saddled Dylan with being the voice of a generation, an epithet loaded on him by the media that not only irritated him no end but one which heaped tension on his shoulders.
With his manager – the great behemoth Albert Grossman, a recording contract with Colombia Records, his adoption by Joan Baez and promotion through Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan set off on a meteoric trajectory to become a massive international star and in so doing, boosted folk music and poetic songwriting into another sphere. Inevitably, the result of such fame brought adulation, crowds of screaming fans, hangers-on and a need for safety and security that locked Bob into a bubble, away from his freewheelin’ days around Greenwich Village.
After the breakdown of his relationship with Suze, maybe in response to being saddled with the limiting description of being a ‘protest’ singer, Bob moved away from writing songs of social import into writing songs of a more introspective nature influenced by the French symbolist poets Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine. Later, Dylan fell under the spell of the Beat poets, principally Allen Ginsberg, and began writing more complex surreal landscapes.
The ‘folk period’ had produced a fine debut album followed by three classic acoustic albums. Ironically, even as his fame peaked he was tiring of the limitations of his acoustic songs, feeling staid and dissatisfied. He felt everything was predictable and was on the verge of completely abandoning his career: ‘I guess I was going to quit singing. I was drained. I was playing a lot of songs I did not want to play.’ ‘I was getting very bored with that.’ ‘It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.’
In 1964, The Beatles broke big in the USA and then the likes of The Byrds and Manfred Mann took rock ‘n’ roll versions of his songs into the charts. The Animals took the traditional ‘House of the Rising Sun’ to number one. It sparked something in Bob and rekindled his love of rock. He, with the help of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and then The Hawks, later to become The Band, turned electric.
Bob Dylan 1962 to 1970 On Track (Decades) : Opher Goodwin: Amazon.co.uk: Books
Talkin’ Cuban Crisis (Phil Ochs)
After a sombre warning of tyrannical control we need a light-hearted interlude; what better than a little skit about a nuclear holocaust?
This is a standard talking blues a la Woody Guthrie. The guitars strike out a cheerful pace with Danny embellishing Phil’s strumming with picked runs to create a light and breezy feel. Phil sings over the top in a chirpy manner, oozing with cheer. After all it’s only the end of civilisation.
This is a classic example of how to take the most serious situation, such as a potential nuclear exchange and the start of World War 3, and turn it into a jolly, comical skit while making a series of profound observations.
In October 1962, during the height of the Cold War, the USA and Russia went to the very brink. Surveillance showed that Cuba had been building sites for nuclear missiles that could destroy the USA. The Russians were about to bring their missiles. The threat was obvious. The Republicans wanted to blow Cuba to bits, invade and drive the communists out, thus removing the threat. Kennedy chose to blockade Cuba and prevent the Russians bring their missiles. The Russian fleet, bringing the missiles, were warned that if they crossed the blockade it would be an act of war and they would be sunk. The Russians declared that the blockade was an act of war and that the US had missiles in Turkey on the Russian border. There was no difference.
I remember being in school with our transistor radios on. We really thought that we would not return home and that the world would be destroyed in a nuclear conflict. The tension rose as the Russian ships continued to steam towards Cuba and looked as if they would not heed the warning. In the even the hotline between Russia and America must have nearly melted and a last minute deal was reached. The Cuban missile bases would be taken down and the US would remove its missiles from Turkey. The Russian ships turned back. We started breathing again.
The song is full of hilarious observations, the advert for pepsodent toothpaste in the middle of a crisis being one; a knock at the shallowness of culture and the greed that underpins it. It highlighted the long-standing differing attitudes between the Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans take a tough frontiers-like no nonsense stance; if something offends – blow it up! The Democrats take a more nuanced view and are not so gung-ho. The end line with Kruschev saying: ‘better red than dead’ was a reversal of the US attitude to communism of; ‘better dead than red.’
Phil Ochs On Track: Every Album, Every Song: Amazon.co.uk: Opher Goodwin: 9781789523263: Books
I thought it was about time I did a little marketing. I’m producing all these books and it would be nice to have some readers for my words.
These are a couple of books about the Sixties experience. One is a bit factual and the other a novel.
These are the Amazon UK links:
Times and Tales of a Sixties Freak
Goofin’ with the Cosmic Freaks
Beat Generation
The Beat generation was where it all started. They were 50s generation that began the process of rejecting the American Dream and looking for some alternative zen. Wasted and beat wading through the streets of America, talking Black jive, digging cool Jazz, smoking dope, taking peyote, careering through the highways of probability, scrawling poems on the inside of the skull.
Kerouac invented stream of consciousness and became the principle recorder of what was going on – raising the status of the hipness of black culture with its wild jazz and existential attitude. Seeing the horrors of American society, its conformity, war lust and seeking a crazy journey through zen into the cosmos beyond, in search of meaning, questioning existence. Kerouac whose tales of fire watching on mountain tops while seeking sartori and bumming round on boxcars or else storming around in cadillacs with crazy amphetamined lunatics, goofing on jazz, buzzing on marijuana and rockin’ in Mexican brothels, painted a new canvas of possibility for a whole generation. From the dull picture of conformity and the drabness of a lifetime of mind numbing work to a colourful alternative of wildness and crazy. Life could be as exciting and meaningful as the wailing saxophone solo of some black jazz musician who was reaching down to his very soul for inspiration as he blew. After Jack we all knew that there could be a different beat to life. That there was fire and craziness was fine, and there was a possibility of some greater rhythm behind reality, a rhythm that you could seek and connect to. From the constraints of his catholic upbringing he reached out to Zen. It’s true that he later fell back to the security of his mother, Catholicism and alcohol and died rejecting the son he had brought into the world. But that’s just sad.
A friend gave me a copy of ‘On the Road’ and I read it when I was eighteen. I wanted a car to roll around those back roads of Mexico. I wanted to ball around on speed, smoke marijuana in the heat, fuck and laugh with Mexican senoritas in bawdy bordellos, get pissed and yell and whoop to loud, loud jazz. The technicality of not actually greatly liking jazz was irrelevant. I was in love with the idea of it and what it represented.
Then Dharma Bums captivated me. I immediately wanted to get into Zen like Japhy. I wanted to ball around on boxcars, climb mountains, seek solitude and write poetry. I wanted to crack that code of life. Fuuuuuck!!!
Then Ginsberg, subject of obscenity charges for scrawling graphic homosexual imagery in Howl. Howl – the first poem that brought me back to poetry after school had destroyed it. And Ginsberg, an American Jew, writing great clouts of tirade against the monolithic state of America, the futility of civilisation, and the bankrupt souls of Western culture; Ginsberg, an outsider, daring to point fingers and show us an alternative way to live.
I was watching the best minds of my generation in the process of being destroyed. Where was the excitement? The possibility? The exploration of life, the soul and reality? They were being bored to death! We were being stifled before we had learnt to see. We were being locked in straitjackets, blinkered and taught what to think. Religion, education, society, careers, and our place. Suddenly there was a poem that was shrieking out loud about it. They were holding me down with a pillow over my face and suffocating the questioning out of me. Then along came Ginsberg and you were not alone in living under some fiery firmament that didn’t make sense. That the cosy church services did not make sense of. That it was a possibility to investigate reality and go crazy. That craziness was more sane than the insanity of this cosiness. The pillow was lifted and you could breathe a heady mix of uncharted stimulation. It was all up for grabs. You were well off the highway heading down the trails to the wilderness.
Ginsberg rescued poetry. It was again something that you could relate to purposefully. It spoke to my generation again. It wasn’t something you had to learn by rote and recite at request or suffer a detention.
And what of Burroughs who shot his wife through the head playing William Tell with an apple and wrote the naked Lunch and Junkie on an exploration through junk, peyote and yage. So far outside the cosy security of what my life seemed to have mapped out for me. Here were the squalid dreams, hallucinations and existence of a junkie. It was a totally different perspective on reality. Maybe not one you’d choose to pursue but one that had as equal a validity as anything else. That was what was important. We had broken out of the grey room. There was a universe out there and nobody understood it. Not only that but nobody seemed at all interested in exploring it. Everything was too safe! Yet there was no safety. The only thing you could be certain of was that you were going to die. At least these outsiders were fundamentally involved with grappling with the issues.
The eyes were opened to Corso, Ferlinghetti, Snyder and hundreds more. So where were our poets? Where were our equivalent of the American Beat Poets? Surely there had to be some British maniacs? Some British explorers of the soul and advocators of craziness? But Horrozitz, Pete Brown and Roy Harper were still a way off in the future and Adrian Henry and McGough were not far out enough to really compete.
Crazy outsiders and social misfits, explorers and seekers after different ways. That’s what was essential. Those were the credentials. Straight society might have its preoccupation with money, status and power through orthodox careers, status symbols, and your place in society, but we were looking to play a different game with entirely different rules. To play this game you could not use your present hand of cards. Those numbers did not add up. This was a hand of hip jokers. These cards won regardless of the others hand. Social position? Wealth? That wasn’t where it was at. The world was turned upside down. You aspired to be a black minstrel telling it as it was or a beat poet riding the blinds and seeking sartori, wild music, wild women and crazy stonedness in equal measures. The rules had changed.
The smokey Jazz cellars developed into the early 60s Folk scene. The hip talk, the dope and poetry were allied to Civil Rights, Anti-war and Socialism.
Dylan was adopted by Allen Ginsberg, who can be seen in the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues clip. The philosophy of beatness and Zen spilt through into the lyrics and life-styles. Dylan epitomised this. In his early incarnations he was a commentator on social, racial and political issues. He raised awareness of the senseless brutality and futility of war, of the racist suppression of blacks and the vagaries of the class system and social justice. In a slightly later incarnation he was a hip surrealist poet, amphetamine crazy, spouting and snarling Beat poems over a pounding, weaving background of strident rock.
In Britain poets like Roy Harper developed from Jazz poetry to acoustic guitar and contemporary acoustic word pictures. I wouldn’t even dare to insult it by calling it Folk. It may have come out of the Folk scene. It may have used the Folk scene. But this was a new thing. Dylan, Harper and hundreds of others were melding together poetry inspired by the Beats and modern day issues into a new type of music.
In New York Beats like Ed Sanders took it into street theatre and formed the Fugs. They staged happenings, like trying to levitate the pentagon. They took political stances. They used satire and send-up. They were sexually explicit. More importantly they were completely crazy and were not in the business of producing product for mass consumption and exploitation. What was more important was to express what you felt, connect with other like-minded people, have fun, and change the world in the process.
Out of the Beats grew the 60s underground, a linear progression. Not a fashion but a complete rejection of the social values and attitudes that straight society adhered to. Fuck the rat race. Life could have room to fuck, chill out, create, feel, express, love one another, seek mystical communion, experience reality and get stoned. It was alright. Fuck the Puritanism. It was time for new, more liberal rules.
If anybody is interested in this book I’ll put up the link.
That is the coffee table size.
I’ll do a new publishing at a smaller size which might work out cheaper! I know you’ll be dying to get your hands on it and can’t wait though.