The Future Was Full of Old Furniture

How the musicians of the 1960s and 1970s raided the cultural attic, found it still alive, and invited everything downstairs

One of the great misconceptions about the psychedelic era is that everybody was trying to escape the past.

Certainly, they dressed as though tomorrow had exploded in a fabric shop. Amplifiers grew enormous. Studios acquired machines capable of making a piano sound submerged in custard. Men who might once have become accountants began appearing on television dressed as celestial highwaymen.

But listen closely.

Underneath all that electrical weather, somebody is reading an old book.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were obsessed with the future, but theirs was a future crowded with ghosts. Victorian circuses, medieval ballads, Edwardian brass bands, French Symbolist poetry, German Expressionism, Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, William Blake, Eastern philosophy, Beat literature, science fiction, Dada, Surrealism, music hall, country blues and ancient folk songs were all invited into the recording studio.

The remarkable thing is that nobody checked their invitations.

Rock music had discovered the cultural attic.

And it began opening trunks.

The past suddenly became usable

This transformation did not emerge from nowhere. One of its foundations was the folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s.

In Britain and America, young musicians were already discovering that old songs were not museum specimens. They could be taken apart, rearranged, electrified, rewritten and made contemporary again. Smithsonian Folkways describes the late 1950s and early 1960s as the height of the Anglo-American folk revival, when traditional music made substantial inroads into popular culture. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger simultaneously preserved centuries-old ballads and wrote new songs in traditional forms.

In America, musicians were doing similar archaeological work. The Friends of Old Time Music concerts in New York between 1961 and 1965 introduced urban audiences to performers including Doc Watson, Roscoe Holcomb and Mississippi John Hurt, musicians connected to traditions that predated rock and roll by decades. The Library of Congress notes that folk-rock itself emerged from this revivalist atmosphere.

So before psychedelia began proclaiming the expansion of consciousness, popular music had already learned something equally revolutionary:

history could be raw material.

The old song did not have to remain old.

Once that door opened, everything came through.

Tea with Sergeant Pepper

Consider Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It is routinely described as futuristic, and technologically it certainly was adventurous. But the imaginative framework is almost comically backward-looking.

According to the Beatles' own history of the album, Paul McCartney's fictional band gradually became an Edwardian-era military band. The album's inspirations included a Victorian circus poster that supplied much of the material for "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!," alongside Hindu teachings, contemporary newspapers, children's drawings, advertising and Pet Sounds. Peter Blake and Jann Haworth then constructed the famous cover as a Pop Art gathering of historical and contemporary figures.

Think about the collision.

Victorian entertainment.

Eastern philosophy.

Pop Art.

Tape manipulation.

Brass bands.

Rock and roll.

A circus advertisement rescued from obscurity becomes part of one of the most technologically elaborate popular records of 1967.

This is not nostalgia in the ordinary sense. Nobody is attempting to recreate 1890.

The Victorians have been sampled before sampling exists.

The past has become a box of components.

The village has electricity

The Kinks were performing a related trick, although Ray Davies approached the attic with greater tenderness.

While other bands seemed determined to leave Earth altogether, Davies became fascinated with disappearing English customs, family memory, village greens, steam trains, pubs, childhood and an imagined older Britain.

The Kinks' official history describes The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society as an album about growing older and the decline of traditional culture. Ray Davies later described its village as imaginary, a place associated with the ending of innocence and youth.

Dave Davies has explained that the album emerged partly from a feeling that, amid the late-1960s impulse to discard the old world, perhaps some things were worth retaining. His formulation was not simply preservation but integration, finding some way for the old and new to coexist.

That distinction matters.

The Kinks were not antiquarians.

They were writing pop songs.

The china cup and the electric guitar occupied the same room.

And this is one of the secret characteristics of the era. Its radicalism was often less interested in destroying cultural memory than in scrambling chronology.

A music-hall gesture could sit beside distorted guitar. A childhood story could become psychedelic. A village green could become conceptual art.

The antique shop had acquired a mixing desk.

Mr. Toad meets the UFO Club

Syd Barrett may provide the loveliest literal example.

Pink Floyd's debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, takes its title directly from chapter seven of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Pink Floyd's official history confirms that the book inspired Barrett while he was writing the album.

This is worth lingering over.

One of the canonical records of British psychedelia, music associated with London's UFO Club, experimental light shows and extended improvisation, walks into the future carrying a children's book first published in 1908.

And somehow it fits perfectly.

Barrett's psychedelia is full of this strange temporal elasticity. Childhood, astronomy, fairy-tale logic and electronic experimentation occupy the same imaginative territory. The point is not that psychedelic musicians wished to become Edwardians. It is that the boundaries separating "children's literature," "serious art," "old-fashioned culture" and "modern pop" were beginning to look wonderfully arbitrary.

The V&A's history of the late-1960s counterculture describes precisely this kind of cross-pollination. Psychedelic clubs such as UFO and the Roundhouse combined rock music with light shows, avant-garde cinema and dance; Beat philosophy and non-Western religious traditions circulated through the same underground.

A rock concert was ceasing to be merely a place where songs were played.

It could become an environment.

Meanwhile, in New York, Baudelaire plugs into an amplifier

The American version was different.

There was considerably less village green.

There was considerably more black leather.

Lou Reed had studied literature at Syracuse University under the poet Delmore Schwartz. Reed later wrote movingly about Schwartz's influence and remembered studying James Joyce with him. Poetry Foundation accounts also document Reed's deep reading in writers including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke and Artaud.

Then Reed met John Cale.

Cale arrived carrying another branch of twentieth-century culture: experimental composition. Before the Velvet Underground, he had worked in the orbit of La Monte Young and the musical avant-garde. A Library of Congress history of The Velvet Underground & Nico describes the extraordinary mixture inside the band, Reed's literature and street songwriting colliding with Cale's training and avant-garde experimentation.

Then Andy Warhol entered.

At the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the Velvet Underground played while Warhol's films were projected across the room, dancers performed, lights flashed and multiple media competed for the audience's attention. The Warhol Museum describes performances involving several simultaneous film projections, strobes, dancers, slides and live music.

Suddenly we have:

French poetry entering rock songwriting.

Minimalist composition entering garage music.

Pop Art entering album design.

Avant-garde cinema entering the nightclub.

The downtown art gallery has developed a rhythm section.

This was not "high culture" politely lending prestige to rock.

Rock was swallowing the distinction.

The library acquires a synthesizer

By the early 1970s, this habit had become almost second nature.

David Bowie provides an especially visible case because his influences seem to have arrived carrying luggage from several centuries simultaneously.

The Victoria and Albert Museum's research for David Bowie Is traces his creative references through Surrealism, Brechtian theatre, German Expressionism, mime, West End musicals and Japanese Kabuki. It also documents his use of William Burroughs' cut-up technique in composing lyrics.

Then there is science fiction.

"Space Oddity," released in 1969, was inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. A few years later, Bowie would turn the extraterrestrial into a rock star with Ziggy Stardust.

Again the interesting thing is not merely the number of influences.

It is their incompatibility.

Brecht and science fiction.

Kabuki and rock and roll.

Burroughs and pop singles.

Expressionist theatre and electric guitar.

One might reasonably expect the machine to explode.

Instead it produces Bowie.

Psychedelia was an archive pretending to be a spaceship

This is what makes that period endlessly fascinating.

The culture advertised itself as new.

Sometimes aggressively new.

NEW SOUND.

NEW GENERATION.

NEW CONSCIOUSNESS.

THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED.

Yet open the machinery and there is William Blake sitting beside a tape loop.

There is a medieval ballad sharing a cigarette with an electric guitarist.

There is a Victorian circus performer wandering through Abbey Road.

There is Kenneth Grahame floating through psychedelic London.

There is Baudelaire in the back of a New York taxi.

There is Andy Warhol turning a rock performance into moving visual collage.

There is Eastern philosophy entering Western popular music at precisely the moment recording studios are becoming technological laboratories.

The great creative gesture was not purity.

It was permission.

A pop musician could be interested in anything.

Nothing was automatically too old, too strange, too childish, too academic, too foreign, too obscure or too unfashionable to become useful.

That attitude may be the real psychedelic inheritance.

Not the paisley.

Not the sitar placed decoratively on the shelf.

Not even the substances.

The deeper inheritance was the conviction that culture had no sensible walls.

Please, come in

Which brings us back to the wonderfully modest phrase:

entertain an idea.

To entertain an idea does not necessarily mean believing it.

It means allowing it into the room.

Give it a chair.

Pour tea.

See what it has brought.

The musicians of the 1960s and early 1970s became exceptionally good hosts.

Folk traditions arrived carrying ancient songs. Modernist poets arrived carrying fractured language. Surrealism brought peculiar dreams. Pop Art brought soup cans and celebrities. Eastern philosophy brought unfamiliar cosmologies. Science fiction brought spaceships. Victorian culture brought circuses, uniforms, childhood books and ghosts.

Rock and roll looked around the crowded parlor and said:

All right. Does anybody here know three chords?

And from that impossible dinner party came some of the strangest, funniest, most beautiful popular music ever recorded.

Perhaps that is why records from this period can still feel oddly spacious.

They contain rooms behind rooms.

Open one door and there is 1967.

Open another and there is 1908.

Another leads to Paris.

Another to Greenwich Village.

Another to an English village that never quite existed.

Another to outer space.

The future, it turns out, was never empty.

It was furnished with everything we had ever dreamed before.