Exhibition Essay

I Want To Take You Higher: Exhibition Essay

It was thirty years ago today...

The year 1967 will forever be remembered as the year of the Summer of Love. It was a remarkable year, a year that transformed our entire culture. It was the year of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, Are You Experienced? and Disraeli Gears. It was the year of “Light My Fire,” “Somebody to Love,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and “For What it’s Worth” ("There’s something that happened here/What it is ain’t exactly clear..."). It was the year that the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, Moby Grape and Country Joe and the Fish all released their debut albums. It was the year of the Human Be-In and the Monterey Pop Festival. It was the year that free-form FM radio hit the airwaves and the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine hit the newsstands.

Nineteen-sixty-seven was also the year that a Beatle—Paul McCartney—publicly admitted taking LSD, and that two Rolling Stones—Mick Jagger and Keith Richards—were jailed on drug charges. And, in fact, drugs—in particular, marijuana and LSD—were one of the key factors fueling this dramatic burst of creativity. It was, as we now know, the psychedelic era.

But drugs were not the only agent of change. The baby-boom generation, born after World War II, had come of age. They were better educated and more financially secure than any generation before or after, and they were determined to make their mark. They spoke out against the war in Vietnam (by 1967, 460,000 U.S. troops were stationed there; 13,000 had already been killed in battle) and in favor of civil rights. The pill had altered sexual mores, and rock and roll, which only a few years earlier had been dismissed as a fad, was now being taken seriously as the voice of this new generation.

No cities reflected these changes more than San Francisco and London. If you were a teenager in 1967, those were the cities that were calling out to you; Scott McKenzie, a Los Angeles folkie, had a Number One hit that year with the song “San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).” And London, with the Beatles in the forefront, was having the same impact in Europe.

The events of 1967 didn’t emerge from a vacuum. The first rumblings of psychedelia were heard as early as 1965, when the Beatles released Rubber Soul, when Ken Kesey began holding Acid Tests near San Francisco, when a Beat-poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall caused a like-minded group of people to coalesce in London, when a San Francisco group called the Charlatans took over as the house band at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. By 1969, psychedelia had permeated much of our culture, from fashion to art to literature. The crowning event of the era—1969’s Woodstock Music and Art Fair—signified to the whole world that a significant cultural shift had taken place.

In many quarters, it is now common to blame all of the social ills of the Nineties on the events of this era. And, indeed, the world had not found nirvana. Drugs, for example, may have been responsible for many of the artistic and cultural developments of the period, but they also took their toll. Some of the generation’s brightest lights, such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jerry Garcia, died premature deaths, at least in part because of their abuse of drugs. Yet this period, unlike the Nineties, was a time of hope, a time of optimism. It was a time when people valued personal freedom and social equality. It was a time when anything seemed possible. People thought they could change the world—and they did.

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I Want to Take You Higher

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I Want to Take You Higher...