(Credits: Alamy)
In 1967, the sound of pearls being clutched by 1950s conservatives was drowned out by ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. The swinging ‘60s was well and fully underway, and the kids were hopped up on a cocktail of experimental drugs. It was just ten years before that parents were concerned with Elvis Presley’s wobbly knees; now, they had a brave new world of hallucinogens to worry about.
It’s clear that a cultural shift into a world of mind-altering substances brought with it some of the most important music of the 21st century. While music as an industry flew a little too close to the sun in that regards, ultimately taking the lives of artistic icons at frighteningly young ages, the music that was created teetered on the very edge of madness and innovated in the process.
One such artist was of course Jimi Hendrix. Burning bright and dying young, he catapulted genres of psychedelic rock into something fresh and transcendental. His records were bursting with colour and his artistic persona was suitably aloof and experimental. But it wasn’t a finely tuned disposition, he wholeheartedly played the part, using psycho-active experiences to inform his creative process. Something the more clean cut Everly Brothers witnessed first-hand.
Don recalled, “The ‘sixties’60s, boy. I remember meeting Jimi Hendrix one night at the Scene, Steve Paul’s club in New York.” He continued, “And Jimi took me on a tour. Here we were, Steve wearing a bathrobe, the three of us smoking a joint in the back seat of his limo. I was still worried about getting busted, but they didn’t seem to be. We went to the Bitter End, and there was Joni Mitchell, whom I had already fallen in love with via records. My life changed. I wanted to play these places, too. I wanted to be a part of this music scene.”
But what did it take to be a part of this music scene? A dogged sense of creative originality and a steely gut, one not intimidated by the introduction of drugs. Something Don had to quickly develop in the presence of Hendrix. He continued, “It was all very strange. I took LSD – the best, Owsley’s orange sunshine – but I was wearing tuxedos at the same time.”
Adding, “We’d be playing a country show one night, then the Fillmore West the next, with the Sons of Champlin or somebody. Played the Bitter End, too, finally. Met Bob Dylan there one night. We were looking for songs, and he was writing ‘Lay Lady Lay’ at the time. He sang parts of it, and we weren’t quite sure whether he was offering it to us or not. It was one of those awestruck moments. We wound up cutting the song about fifteen years later.”
While the brothers may have been in awe of their contemporaries, as they rubbed shoulders with them in the musky bars of downtown New York, little did they know the admiration they were inspiring back at them. The likes Dylan, McCartney and Paul Simon have all heralded the brothers as standout influences for them, just going to prove the neverending fruitfulness of talent that existed in the 1960s.
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