1963: The Year of the Revolution: How Youth Changed the World with Music, Fashion, and Art

INTRODUCTION

It remains a unique and prophetic coincidence—one that has gone unnoticed for more than fifty years. On January 13, 1963, in Birmingham, England, an attractive young boy band recorded its first appearance on British national television, dazzling viewers with an exuberant tune called Please Please Me. That same night, viewers found a more cerebral experience on the BBC, then the only other TV channel in Britain, when an unknown, tousle-haired American musician made his broadcast debut by intoning a hymn entitled Blowin’ in the Wind.

Neither the Beatles nor Bob Dylan could have known it, but within the year their voices would enthrall millions of ears around the world. The Beatles would become the poster boys for a revolution, and Dylan would become its prophet.

In 1963, the world was undergoing extraordinary social upheaval triggered by postwar prosperity and adolescent defiance; the tectonic plates of class, money, and power were colliding, and socioreligious rules were crumbling.

It was the year that the Cold War protagonists sought a truce, the race into space shifted up a gear, feminists and civil rights activists flexed their political muscles, a bimbo/spy scandal engulfed the British government, and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination stunned the world. But as the front pages of history were being printed, there was one scoop slipping by virtually unnoticed: the world was witnessing a youthquake.

In January 1963, teenagers were picking up musical instruments, cameras, paintbrushes, pens, and scissors to challenge conformity. A band calling itself the Rolling Stones auditioned a new bass guitarist and drummer. Eric Clapton, Stevie Nicks, David Bowie, and Elton John were picking at strings and fiddling with keys. On the West Coast, a band aptly named the Beach Boys gained notoriety on Los Angeles radio stations, while in Detroit a girl group changed its name to the Supremes and reached toward the limelight.

In London, an anarchic Irishman pursued a piratical approach to breaking the music industry’s middle-of-the-road stranglehold on the airwaves; after buying a fishing trawler, he anchored it in international waters so he could broadcast the kind of music he liked without license or interference. A designer called Mary Quant cut six inches—or more—off a hem, and an ambitious hairdresser named Vidal Sassoon adapted the principles of architecture to a look that complemented her miniskirted models.

In just one year, the landscape of our lives, loves, and looks changed forever. Musicians, fashion designers, writers, journalists, and artists challenged the established order, forcing cultural elders not only to share political and commercial power with a new elite but to seek its endorsement as well. The social, cultural, political, and technological blueprint for a new world was being drawn and updated daily. And for the first time in history, young people were directing the redesign.

It had been half a century in the making. A generation born of one devastating war at the century’s outset had handed the world over to a generation shaped by a different war. By halftime in the twentieth century, the world was ready for a game changer. Returning servicemen both traumatized and empowered by war, and women who had gone from doing domestic chores to machining bombs, wanted something better for themselves and for their children. People demanded that their appetites, expectations, and rights receive consideration. Many formerly compliant or corralled individuals once respectful of authority and a regular wage began rejecting rigid cultural, social, and political divides.

The baby boomers were growing up in a time of postwar prosperity: rebuilding the world had fueled economic expansion. Wealth rained down in paychecks that bought automobiles, televisions, frocks, and fridges. And plate-size pieces of vinyl called records could produce music on affordable home-based boxes that soon replaced pianos and radios as the primary source of domestic entertainment.

At the threshold of the sixties, the baby boomers were waiting in the wings of history. Their stage had been built; 1963 was the opening night.

Television broadcast a world in flux to their homes, democratizing knowledge and public opinion; it both chronicled and accelerated the shift. In 1963, the baby boomers witnessed Martin Luther King have a dream and the civil rights movement gather speed at the march on Washington while Mississippi burned. They watched the handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, declare "Ich bin ein Berliner," double NASA’s budget to send men to the moon, and bring the world back from the brink of nuclear war—only to die in an open-top car in Dallas.

They watched the birth of nations as the flag of imperialism was lowered and European empires disintegrated. The first TV program was broadcast by satellite, the first polio vaccine was made freely available. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and something called simply the pill was made widely available by prescription to married women. But young single girls needed only to wear a gold ring on their ring finger and lie to a doctor to obtain a packet of contraceptive pills that gave them the power to experiment with their bodies free from the fear of unwanted pregnancy.

And youth had its own history to make. In the fifties, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry had founded the religion, but it was Dylan and the Beatles who became its messiahs in 1963.

In just one year, the sixties were conceived and carried to term. A sixteen-year-old piano student called Reginald Kenneth Dwight was a pupil at London’s esteemed Royal College of Music, practicing Chopin during the day and belting out his own songs in London pubs and clubs at night; he would soon be known as Elton John. And a boy called Eric Clapton got kicked out of art school and joined a band.

Riding their coattails were an American soldier called Jimi Hendrix, who had just been discharged—dishonorably—from the 101st Airborne, and a UCLA film student named Jim Morrison who had begun writing songs. Carly Simon started singing in 1963. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards cut their first record. After his performances in New York clubs received mediocre reviews, Paul Simon traveled to England to rethink his music. Nineteen sixty-three was the university, the apprenticeship, the breakout year of the immortal icons who have occupied the universe of fame ever since.

In 1963, young men and women swelled the ranks of aspiring musicians. A young girl named Barbara Hulanicki couldn’t find anything to wear, so she borrowed her sister’s nickname to brand a shop called Biba. Women stopped wearing garter belts and stockings because Mary Quant miniskirts were so revealing, thereby creating a market for pantyhose. Young guns like David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, and R. B. Kitaj experimented beyond their art school nature classes.

This amorphous new aristocracy rose mainly from the working- and lower-middle classes to represent the baby boomers’ ideals and aspirations—and their heroes were duly anointed. Music, fashion, and the arts challenged, defied and even transcended class, politics, and religion, and in doing so began to redefine humanity.

No longer were family, formal education, an old school tie, or the long climb up a career ladder the only routes to success. Horizons expanded as fast as vinyl could be pressed and airtime filled. Hot on the heels of music and fashion came film, books, and art. Young people shed convention to express themselves in a subversive riot; they stormed the barricades of a bemused, reactionary old order that thought laws, conventions, and cops could be deployed to corral the counterculture.

In that first wave, in 1963, a young Andy Warhol moved into a firehouse on New York’s East Eighty-seventh Street to stretch the boundaries of the art world, and a young David Hockney invented his own palette. Coca-Cola unveiled the first diet drink, Tab, to cash in on the changing shape of women, now more Jackie Kennedy and Jean Shrimpton than Marilyn Monroe. A clothing company called Levi’s recognized a trend and launched its preshrunk jeans, Timothy Leary was fired by Harvard and began his Millbrook experiment; the Monterey and Newport folk festivals created a new template for the mass celebration of youth.

In film and publishing, the barnacles of suppression were being scraped from the hull of free expression. The Hays Code, which monitored the content of movies with buckets of cold water, began to unravel under the pressure of filmmakers prepared to fight for their art. Jean-Luc Goddard’s Contempt and Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce ignored the poised red pen of censorship, and the overtly sexual British romp Tom Jones won four Oscars. Most important, an actress bared her breasts for the first time in the mainstream cinema and dared the censors to stop her or Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Thus the fate of the prim and proper Hays Code was sealed.

Publishing had recognized the time was ripe to confront authority and assert its own. Fanny Hill, the pornographic novel written in a debtor’s prison when George Washington was still a seventeen-year-old frontier surveyor, was published in the United States and the UK for the first time, breaching obscenity laws and directly challenging lawmakers.

All this happened in 1963, facts in a timeline that this book draws together for an indisputable declaration—this one year changed our world.

Our contributors are the people who lived it. We learned that the Beatles were refused entry to a northern England nightclub in the winter of 1963 because they wore leather jackets. One year later they were headlining for an audience of seventy-three million in America. We discovered that a bunch of kids who’d formed a band called the Dave Clark Five to sing at bar mitzvahs and raise money for a soccer game had begun 1963 belting out songs in a north London dance hall for twenty-five pounds a week. Little more than two years later, they were invited aboard Air Force One to shake hands with President Lyndon B. Johnson: the most powerful man in the world wanted their autographs.

We interviewed the remarkable woman, who, in 1963, equipped with little more than looks and a libido, found herself partying with aristocrats and politicians and at the center of a sex scandal—the Profumo Affair—that brought down the British government. She found herself hounded by Scotland Yard and dragged before Britain’s High Court. Confronted by the loftiest powers in the realm, this seventeen-year-old arrived at the courthouse decked out in her finest, hair coiffed, and waved to the rubbernecking crowds with chutzpah that only the youth of the day could conjure.

Lord Astor, one of the most senior peers of the realm, denied that he’d slept with her. But when confronted with his denial in court, she slapped down one of the most preeminent trial lawyers of the day with a simple, disdainful response: Well, he would, wouldn’t he? The phrase soon passed into popular culture. And hers was just one voice among a multitude that would prompt Vogue’s editor in chief, Diana Vreeland, to label 1963 the year of the youthquake.

Scores of household names who have achieved global recognition gave us their time and support. The inspirational Vidal Sassoon, knowing he had only days left to live, entertained us at lunch in his home high up on Mulholland Drive. Looking out over the citadel of fame that is Hollywood, he shared his own memories of 1963 in what was to be his last interview. Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Lynne, and Carly Simon, towering talents who shy from publicity, recognized the need for a book that put their youth into perspective and generously contributed their time to this project.

It’s said that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there. Our contributors’ stories expose this received wisdom as no more than a trite reference to the drug culture that emerged as a consequence of 1963 and the youthquake.

This is the oral history of that year, told by the men and women who, with guitars, cameras, pens, brushes, scissors—and even mere notoriety—endowed youth with universal and democratic membership in a new meritocracy. In 1963, youth no longer waited, cap in hand, for an invite to the best tables—they simply built their own banquet hall.

PART ONE

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is

Rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’.

BOB DYLAN

In November 1960, John F. Kennedy, aged forty-three, became the youngest president in American history. The sixties, he announced, were a new frontier. That same month, compulsory conscription for all healthy males between eighteen and twenty-one was abolished in Britain. Earlier that year, Britain’s prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had declared that a wind of change was ending centuries of empire and thus the need to send young men to fight colonial uprisings in Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, Sergeant Elvis Presley, benefiting from the rollback of the American draft, celebrated his demobilization with a string of hits.

In 1960, another civil rights act was inscribed in the U.S. statute books, the Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s segregation laws unconstitutional, and Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. Penguin Books was cleared of obscenity charges by UK courts for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Cassius Clay won an Olympic gold medal, Chubby Checker sang The Twist, and Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns laid the foundations of pop art.

But even as television and radio pursued a conservative, apple pie agenda that prolonged the chart-topping success of Elvis and Sinatra—and a crew of fifties crooners, balladeers, songbirds, folksters, and instrumentalists—a new generation of singers was emerging in dive bars, coffeehouses, and smoky cellars from California to Detroit, from East Coast campuses and Greenwich Village basements to the industrial heartland cities of Britain.

A band called the Beatles embarked on a forty-eight-night run in a seedy Hamburg club. Robert Zimmerman prepared to drop out of his freshman year at the University of Minnesota and travel to New York City to play in folk music clubs as Bob Dylan. Two boys called Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met on a railway platform in East London and discussed a shared passion for Chicago R&B epitomized by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. And three brothers practiced harmonies that would form the foundation of the Beach Boys. A new frontier beckoned its pioneers.

1

AWAKENINGS

People were coming back from the U.S. with 78s of Fats Waller and Little Richard and Chuck Berry. That’s when it happened for me. I was thirteen when I first picked up a guitar.

ERIC CLAPTON

At the end of World War II, Britain recoiled from war—and its war hero prime minister, Winston Churchill. In 1945, the British elected a Labour government on a progressive agenda of radical social reform. By 1960, for teenagers all over Britain, the threat of the draft—and three years in khaki fighting colonial insurgencies or protecting Cold War frontiers—had vanished. They needed new uniforms and the beat of a new drum. Foods such as meat, cheese, and sugar had been rationed during the war and well into the fifties, along with luxuries like materials for clothing. Now prosperity, and the free time that came with it, permitted a new generation to explore its own agenda through music, fashion, and art.

Keith Richards [guitarist and founding member, the Rolling Stones]: Growing up in a postwar England era spurred us on. We’d heard enough about the war, which was all grown-ups ever seemed to talk about. We wanted to get out of this war mind-set. We’d all grown up facing the draft. I was thinking, I just wanna get out the goddamned house. I don’t want to go in the army.

It was dopey. But conscription had ended a couple of years before in 1960. We were all facing this new space and suddenly we didn’t have to do that. Your whole life you’d heard, When you’re eighteen you’ll be in the army and that will sort you out.

Suddenly this miracle happened and we didn’t have to do the draft. And you are seventeen or eighteen and you have all that testosterone and this amazing spare free time. Woo-hoo! Just go with what I feel like. They lied to me. I don’t have to go into the army. I dread to think how my life would have been if I’d been in the army. We wouldn’t be talking right now, I can tell you that. No. Discipline doesn’t agree with me.

Eric Clapton [guitarist, Cream; the Yardbirds; Derek & the Dominos]: Postwar England was a very dull place. And that’s what the sixties is all about—an explosion, a reaction to rationing, the hardship, and the tremendous suffering that the nation went through with the Second World War.

I was born at the end of it, and actually I probably recall the sound of doodlebugs [Nazi V-1 flying bombs] going over and stuff like that. But I was very aware of all the constraints that the war had placed on everyone, and how it affected everything.

Vidal Sassoon [pioneering British hairstylist]: We’d lost the Empire. But the socialists [Labour Party] were great. The National Health Service, education, the rebuilding that was done. It was extraordinary. We were broke, Britain was broke. But the kids were brought up in that mood of rebuilding. We were given council flats [government-built housing projects] and cheap rents. It was the first flat that I ever lived in that had a bathroom. I used to wallow in it.

Georgie Fame [jazz and blues musician, virtuoso keyboard player]: I remember rationing. In the fifties there was no television and no entertainment, and everyone in our street [in Leigh, near Manchester], even in the poorest houses, had a piano. Dad played, everyone played. You heard Rosemary Clooney and Frankie Vaughan on the radio and someone would try and play it.

Our saving grace was if you tuned in to the short wave—everyone had a radio—you could get American Forces Radio, and you’d hear Duke Ellington and all the latest American stuff and it was the only way you’d get it—rock and roll. We didn’t realize it was all about sex. We thought it was about dancing. Dancing was what got our mothers interested.

I was playing in pubs in my hometown when I was fifteen. On my own. People were queuing up. I’d play Jerry Lee Lewis and everyone would be singing along and having a great time. I didn’t get paid. I didn’t get tips. I was given half a pint of mild beer.

Bill Wyman [guitarist and founding member, the Rolling Stones]: When I was seventeen, I went to my grandma’s house in South London—I lived there some of the time. She had a six-inch black-and-white TV. I used to watch the sports. And one night watching the Saturday Night at the London Palladium variety show I saw someone on the stage, tears running down his face—Johnnie Ray—the most soulful singer before rock and roll. Girls ran to the stage and tore his trousers off him. They mobbed him.

Eric Stewart [guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist, the Mindbenders; 10cc]: I was supposed to go into architecture at Salford Tech. I went there for about four weeks. I was sixteen, a working-class boy living right in the center of Manchester in a two-up-two-down with an outside loo. [Small, two-bedroom homes with only a living room and a kitchen on the ground floor and a toilet in the backyard were the standard post-Victorian housing built for British blue-collar factory workers.]

We had a piano—a front-room piano. Most families had one. My father played piano fantastically: classic, blues, jazz—there was always music in the house from him and from the radio, and about that time I was getting into Jerry Lee Lewis. I was buying records, but the main influence was a family across the road called Allen.

One of the three sons was a merchant seaman. He was probably eighteen and he was doing the Atlantic route, and he’d come back to Liverpool and Manchester with these 45s—little discs of American rock and roll from Presley and Buddy Holly—and we used to play them. I had a little record player, a Dancette [a portable suitcase-size record player], and I’d play these records that weren’t on sale anywhere. Not a lot of this music was being played on TV or radio. It was only available through foreign radio. None was being played on the BBC. You couldn’t put a Buddy Holly record on the BBC. You had to be Frank Sinatra, Matt Monro, or Helen Shapiro—someone presentable. How Much Is That Doggie in the Window and I Saw a Mouse. People were buying that stuff.

Justin de Villeneuve [British sixties entrepreneur]: I’d spent the war as an evacuee in J.B. Priestley’s house, a grand manor house north of London, but it had full staff, cooks, and nannies in uniforms. [Children were sent to the country for safety when Hitler’s Luftwaffe began blitzing civilian London]. Priestley [an author and broadcaster] wrote Churchill’s speeches. I was born Nigel Jonathan Davies. Near Hackney. I am a genuine Cockney [only those born within hearing of the St. Mary-le-Bow church bells in the old City of London are regarded as genuine Cockneys]. So when I got back to London after the war, in 1945, it was, Oh my god, little two-up and two-down houses. The lavatory was in the garden. And the houses were gas lit. No electricity and always the smell of leaking gas. That was what hit me when I first went back—after having silver and bone china on the table. I knew things were going to be different. I wanted something different. We all did.

Sir Frank Lowe [advertising agency pioneer and owner]: I feel that our parents emerged from the war exhausted. It was impossible for us, the children, to know what it was like—a whole nation at war. My father came back and hardly talked about the war at all. They were totally exhausted. Britain went through a miserable time after the war. I think my whole generation said, Fuck it! There must be something better.

I was brought up in a pub in Manchester not far from Old Trafford [Manchester United’s soccer stadium]. I was brought up by my grandmother. My mother had gone off when I was two to be an opera singer at the Sadler’s Wells [a theater in London] in the chorus and my dad was in the RAF [Royal Air Force], so I was left with Granny. I left school at seventeen and I decided I can’t live with Granny in Manchester for the rest of my life, so I wrote off for a number of jobs and I was offered two—one was called a junior reporter but it was really being the tea boy, and it was up in Scotland, and the other was an errand boy at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Berkeley Square in London.

On balance I thought that Berkeley Square was more acceptable than Aberdeen. So in 1958 [or] ’9, I took the job as errand boy at four pounds fifteen shillings a week plus luncheon vouchers [a subsidized meal plan], which we all got in those days. I delivered the post [mail] to everybody, and in those days advertising was a bit like Mad Men. The ads weren’t any good but the people were having a whale of a time with the models coming in, and the receptionists all had Gucci handbags with scarves tied ’round them. The account executives were all officers out of the army and it seemed like most of them came into the office in the morning in their dinner jackets having just left Annabelle’s nightclub [an elitist private members’ club in Berkeley Square] at five or six a.m. It was a curious world.

Mary Quant [British fashion designer]: I grew up knowing what I wanted to do. I used to wear the clothes handed down to me from my cousin. I was always focused on fashion. I used to go to dancing classes as a little girl. I was in one of those classes and I heard the music next door and there was this girl tap dancing, and she was everything I wanted to be.

This girl was all in black. She wore black opaque tights and ten inches of pleated skirt, with white ankle socks over the black tights and tap dancing shoes with an ankle strap with a buckle on top. I wanted to look like that. She was about two years older than me. I must have been seven. She also had a bucket hair cut—a rudimentary Vidal Sassoon. That was always the image in my head. I used to cut up the bedspread—I used to cut up everything—and so I started to design clothes. I never wanted to do anything else.

Jackie Collins [British author]: I was brought up in a showbiz family. [Collins was the youngest daughter of Joseph Collins, a theatrical agent whose clients included the Beatles, Shirley Bassey, and Tom Jones]. My father was a chauvinist and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I was a school dropout. I was always a rebel, older than my age, and thought I knew a lot more about everything than anyone else.

I had to be independent. My parents didn’t wrap me in cotton wool [weren’t overprotective]—they kind of ignored me. My sister Joan was already in Hollywood, and I was acting and I’d traveled