The vegetables turned
sifting the psychedelic subsoil of Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i1.57Keywords:
Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, psychedelic, counter-cultureAbstract
This article offers a comparative analysis of aspects of the careers of two celebrated 1960s popular musicians, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. Through formal and contextual readings of selected songs, it argues that during 1967, in the hands of Barrett, Wilson and his lyricist Van Dyke Parks, the incongruous, semantically complex figure of the vegetable came to illuminate aspects of psychedelic consciousness and – part by design, part by accident – the link between LSD and Anglo-American popular music. It threw light, too, on the scope and limits of changes in the relationship between creative artists and the Anglo-American popular music industry in the mid-1960s. Finally, and in retrospect, the figure of the vegetable cast into relief the counter-culture’s utopian and dystopian dynamics as manifested in these song-writers’ personal lives, now rendered as contemporary counter-cultural myth.
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Gaines, Steven. 1988. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. London: Grafton Books.
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Macan, Edward. 1997. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Shenk, Louis. 1999. ‘Smile: A Children’s Song’. http://thesmileshop.net/index.php/SMiLE:_A_ Children%27s_Song (accessed 18 March 2009).
Siegel, Jules. 1997. ‘Goodbye Surfing, Hello God! The Religious Conversion of Brian Wilson’. In Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys Reader, ed. Kingsley Abbott, 51–63. London: Helter Skelter.
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Vosse, Michael. 1969. ‘Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress: Michael Vosse Talks about Smile’. Fusion 8 (Boston), 14 April.
Walley, David. 1996. No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa, updated ed. New York: Da Capo Press.
Watkinson, Mike, and Pete Anderson. 2006. Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett and the Dawn of Pink Floyd, new rev. edition. London: Omnibus.
White, Tim. 1994. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt.
Whiteley, Sheila. 1992. The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. London: Routledge.
—1997. ‘Altered Sounds’. In Psychedelia Britannica: Hallucinogenic Drugs in Britain, ed. Antonio Melechi, 121–42. London: Turnaround.
Willis, Tim. 2002. Madcap: The Half-Life of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s Lost Genius. London: Short Books.
Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold. 1991. Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins.
Zappa, Frank, and Peter Occhiogrosso. 1989. The Real Frank Zappa Book. London: Picador.
Aronson, Bernard, and Humphrey Osmond, eds. 1970. Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Badman, Keith. 2004. The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America’s Greatest Band on Stage and in the Studio. London: Backbeat Books.
Beard, David. 2004. ‘Brian Wilson Rewrites American History’. Endless Summer Quarterly 17.4: 4–6.
—2005. ‘Van Dyke Parks: Have You Seen the Grand Coulee Dam’. Endless Summer Quarterly 18.1: 3–9.
Blake, Mark. 2007. Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. London: Aurum.
Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle. 2002. ‘Introduction’. In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, eds Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 5–14. New York and London: Routledge.
Brown, Ethan. 2005. ‘Influences: Brian Wilson’. New York. http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/ music/pop/12377/ (accessed 11 February 2008).
Brown, Norman O. 1966. Love’s Body. New York: Vintage.
Bussman, Jane, et al. 2008. ‘The 50 Craziest Pop Stars Ever’. Blender. http://www.blender. com/guide/articles.aspx?ID=2515 (accessed 8 December 2008).
Carlin, Peter Ames. 2006. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. London: Rodale.
Cavanagh, John. 2003. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. New York: Continuum.
DeRogatis, Jim. 1996. Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Music from the 1960s to the 1990s. London: Fourth Estate.
Dobkin de Rios, Marlene, and Oscar Janiger. 2003. LSD, Spirituality and the Creative Process. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.
Duffield-Stoll, Anne Q. 1994. Zzyzx: History of an Oasis, California Desert Studies Consortium, #65. Northridge, CA: Santa Susana Press.
Ebertin, Elsbeth, Reinhold Ebertin and Georg Hoffmann. 1971. Fixed Stars and their Interpretation. Tempe, Arizona: American Federation of Astrologers.
Farber, David. 2002. ‘The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation: Drugs in the Sixties Counterculture’. In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, eds Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 17–40. New York and London: Routledge.
Gaines, Steven. 1988. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. London: Grafton Books.
Gendron, Bernard. 2002. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Green, Jonathon. 1998. Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–1971. London: Pimlico.
—1999. All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture. London: Pimlico.
Hicks, Michael. 2000. Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions. Urbana: University of Chicago Press.
Jones, Cliff. 1996. ‘Wish You Were Here’. Mojo 34: 46–7.
Katz, David S. 2003. The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. London: Jonathan Cape.
Kent, Nick. 2004. The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.
Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson.
Laing, R. D. 1974. The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lama Workshop. Timeline of Early Psychedelia. http://www.lysergia.com/LamaWorkshop/ lamaEarlyPsychedelia.htm (accessed 13 March 2009).
Lambert, Philip. 2007. Inside the Music of Brian Wilson. London: Continuum.
Leaf, David. 1978. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
Leary, Timothy. 1970. The Politics of Ecstasy. London: Paladin.
Macan, Edward. 1997. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mott, Cam. 2005. ‘Michael Vosse: The Divine Possibilities of Laughter’. Endless Summer Quarterly 18.1: 12–17.
Negus, Keith. 1996. Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. London: Polity.
Palacios, Julian. 1998. Lost in the Woods: Syd Barrett and the Pink Floyd. Basingstoke: Boxtree.
Parker, David. 2001. Random Precision: Recording the Music of Syd Barrett, 1965–1974. London: Cherry Red.
Paytress, Mark. 1988. ‘Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett’. Record Collector 104: 3–8.
Priore, Domenic, ed. 1995. Look, Listen, Vibrate, Smile. San Francisco: Last Gasp.
Priore, Domenic. 2005. Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece. London: Sanctuary.
Rasmussen, Cecilia. 2002. ‘Zzyzx: An Unlikely Home of Huxterism and Magical Cures’. Los Angeles Times, 16 June. Home edition, B4.
Robbins, Paul Jay. 2003. Interview by author. 30 September. West Hollywood, California.
Robson, Vivian E. 1969. The Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology. London: The Aquarian Press.
Sandall, Robert. 1994. ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’. Mojo 6: 90–7.
Shenk, Louis. 1999. ‘Smile: A Children’s Song’. http://thesmileshop.net/index.php/SMiLE:_A_ Children%27s_Song (accessed 18 March 2009).
Siegel, Jules. 1997. ‘Goodbye Surfing, Hello God! The Religious Conversion of Brian Wilson’. In Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys Reader, ed. Kingsley Abbott, 51–63. London: Helter Skelter.
Tyson, Donald, ed. 1985. Three Books of Occult Philosophy Written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn.
Vosse, Michael. 1969. ‘Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress: Michael Vosse Talks about Smile’. Fusion 8 (Boston), 14 April.
Walley, David. 1996. No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa, updated ed. New York: Da Capo Press.
Watkinson, Mike, and Pete Anderson. 2006. Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett and the Dawn of Pink Floyd, new rev. edition. London: Omnibus.
White, Tim. 1994. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt.
Whiteley, Sheila. 1992. The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. London: Routledge.
—1997. ‘Altered Sounds’. In Psychedelia Britannica: Hallucinogenic Drugs in Britain, ed. Antonio Melechi, 121–42. London: Turnaround.
Willis, Tim. 2002. Madcap: The Half-Life of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s Lost Genius. London: Short Books.
Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold. 1991. Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins.
Zappa, Frank, and Peter Occhiogrosso. 1989. The Real Frank Zappa Book. London: Picador.
Published
2010-04-07
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Carter, D. (2010). The vegetables turned: sifting the psychedelic subsoil of Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett. Popular Music History, 4(1), 57-75. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i1.57
