The Pinch of Ridicule

In yesterday's blog, I said that nothing could appear a less promising topic than the movie career of Elvis Presley. Observing that movies in general have always been culturally ambiguous because they blur clear distinctions between art, commerce, and mass communication, I then immediately suggested that the films starring Elvis Presley are an exception to this culturally ambiguous status: they are not considered ambiguous at all, but rather as artless mass entertainment. In its most negative formulation, they are used as an example of Elvis’s tastelessness, made simply for crass commercial reasons: although nothing but tripe, they remain, nonetheless, quite profitable. What I didn't discuss yesterday are the reasons for this widespread cultural perception, and it's not clear to me that the reasons are due to the actual films themselves.

The reasons for this perception are best explored in a remarkable essay written by a former teacher of mine, Linda Ray Pratt, titled "Elvis, or the Ironies of a Southern Identity," which can be found in Kevin Quain, Ed., The Elvis Reader (St. Martin's Press, 1992). In one of the best pieces ever written about Elvis, in the essay, writing as a Southerner herself, she discusses Elvis with the kind of understanding and empathy that those outside the culture often lack. I remember having brief conversations with her about Elvis--this back in the early 1980s, just a few years after his death, probably while she was thinking about the issues that ultimately emerged in this particular essay. She makes so many acute insights that it is impossible to list them all here, but here are a few insights that may help explain why Elvis's films are held in such widespread contempt, even by those who perhaps have never seen but one or two of them, and perhaps even by those who have never seen them at all--to see them would demonstrate a noticeable lapse in taste. Writing about Elvis in the context of Southern culture, she says:

C. Vann Woodward has said that the South's experience is atypical of the American experience, that where the rest of America has known innocence, success, affluence, and an abstract and disconnected sense of place, the South has know guilt, poverty, failure, and a concrete sense of roots and place.... These myths collide in Elvis. His American success story was always acted out within its Southern limitations. No matter how successful Elvis became in terms of fame and money, he remained fundamentally disreputable in the minds of many Americans. Elvis had rooms full of gold records earned by million-copy sales, but his best rock and roll records were not formally honored by the people who control, if not the public taste, the rewarding of public taste.... His movies made millions but could not be defended on artistic grounds. The New York Times view of his fans was "the men favoring leisure suits and sideburns, the women beehive hairdos, purple eyelids and tight stretch pants".... (96-97)

Observing that Elvis "remained an outsider in the American culture that adopted his music," she goes on to say:

Although he was the world's most popular entertainer, to like Elvis a lot was suspect, a lapse of taste.... The inability of Elvis to transcend his lack of reputability despite a history-making success story confirms the Southern sense that the world outside thinks Southerners are freaks, illiterates . . . sexual perverts, lynchers. I cannot call this sense a Southern "paranoia" because ten years outside the South has all too often confirmed the frequency with which non-Southerners express such views. Not even the presidency would free LBJ and Jimmy Carter from the ridicule.... And Elvis was truly different, in all those tacky Southern ways one is supposed to rise above with money and sophistication. (97)

Regarding the deification of the dead Elvis, she observes:

The apotheosis of Elvis demands . . . perfection because his death confirmed the tragic frailty, the violence, the intellectual poverty, the extravagance of emotion, the loneliness, the suffering, the sense of loss. Almost everything about his death, including the enterprising cousin who sold the casket pictures to National Enquirer, dismays, but nothing can detract from Elvis himself.... Greil Marcus wrote in his book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music that Elvis created a beautiful illusion, a fantasy that shut nothing out. The opposite was true. The fascination was the reality always showing through the illusion--the illusion of wealth and the psyche of poverty; the illusion of success and the pinch of ridicule; the illusion of invincibility and the tragedy of frailty; the illusion of complete control and the reality of inner chaos.... Elvis had all the freedom the world can offer and could escape nothing. (103)

Her final, acute insight is painfully true: by saying that Elvis could escape nothing, she means escape Southern mythology, both what he inherited as a Southerner by birth, and what someone from the South is perceived to be by non-Southerners (think: Deliverance). In a sense, his movie career failed because he was never allowed by the general culture to be a movie star. Even Jimmy Carter as president couldn't escape the stigma of being from the South: the mass media was brutal on him, his brother Billy, and even his daughter Amy. Although Dr. Pratt corrects an observation made by Greil Marcus in his essay "Elvis: Presliad," Marcus nonetheless cited portions of the above passage in his scathing review of Albert Goldman's biography Elvis (1981), a biography I've cited on a few occasions. Her essay helps immensely to explain why so many were offended by Goldman's biography of Elvis: his (perhaps unconscious) contempt for the South and for Elvis's Southern identity taints almost every page.

But rather than fixate on the mote in our neighbor's eye, perhaps we ought to examine the sources and motivations for our own perceptions, in this case why Elvis's films are widely considered jokes, even by those who may have never seen them, or seen very few. To extrapolate a bit on Linda Ray Pratt's essay, we might say that those perceptions may largely be determined by factors that have nothing to do with the films themselves.

The Harder They Fall

Movies are so familiar to us that they are widely considered nothing more than “entertainment.” Naïvely, we assume that movies are easier to understand than literature--literature being regarded as "serious," and therefore "art." The fact is, movies are entertaining . . . and they are also complex. As a result, they are culturally ambiguous, because they blur simplistic distinctions between art, entertainment, and mass communication.

Strangely, though, movies starring Elvis Presley are the exception to this culturally ambiguous status of the movies: they are not considered ambiguous at all, but rather as artless, and therefore mass (as in “mind-numbing”) entertainment. In its most negative formulation, they are used as an example of Elvis’s (or the Colonel’s) tastelessness, made because of his (or the Colonel’s) desire for the “fast buck.” Because they are considered tasteless, they are, therefore, as a consequence, benign, an exception to much of the writing about Hollywood that focuses on Hollywood’s (bad) influence on American life and values. Elvis's films are nostalgic, innocuous (formulaic), and therefore harmless (non-controversial).

As a topic, therefore, nothing could appear less promising than the movie career of Elvis Presley. But, as Robert Ray writes, the

situation probably has less to do with Elvis’s own contributions to his movies that with the films themselves, most of them specious, formulaic representations of what the pre-rock generation of producers, writers, and directors who made them thought was “youth culture.” (“The Riddle of Elvis-the-Actor,” p. 102)

Of course, the general criticism of Elvis’s movies is largely directed at the films he made in the 1960s, after his stint in the U. S. Army: G.I. Blues (1960) through A Change of Habit (1969). So, for the sake of convenience, let’s consider the four films Elvis made in the 1950s: Love Me Tender (1956), Loving You (1957), Jailhouse Rock (1957), and King Creole (1958). The year 1956, of course, marks the year Elvis emerged as a powerful cultural force—in America and elsewhere (think of John Lennon’s remark, “Before Elvis there was nothing”).

Jean-Luc Godard’s one explicit film about the influence of American culture on the rest of world is Masculine-Feminine (1966), the famous film exploring the lives of "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." But long before Masculine-Feminine, there was, of course, Breathless (1960). Regarding Breathless, I’ve always wondered why, given Michel Poiccard’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s) apparent age (Belmondo was 26 at the time the film was made, although he looks younger), he idolized Bogart, when the more obvious figure, it seems to me, should have been Elvis. (Belmondo was born in 1933, Elvis in 1935.)

For many critics, the key scene in Breathless that is structured to reveal how Michel Poiccard imitates the character (“image”) of Humphrey Bogart is the moment when he encounters Bogart’s face on a movie poster. Here, Poiccard approaches the large poster:

The poster in which Bogart’s image appears is the French poster of The Harder They Fall (1956), Bogey’s last film (he was to die in January 1957), set in the boxing world. After studying the poster, Poiccard moves to his left, to study a display of 8x10 movie stills:

In particular, he studies an image of Bogart . . .


. . . captivated by it, the cigarette hanging from his lips just as the cigarette does from Bogey's in the large movie poster. Meanwhile, he continues to study Bogey's image:

. . . as Bogey returns his gaze . . .

The cigarette, of course, is a signifier closely associated with American culture, particularly the American G.I. during WWII (and Bogey in Casablanca). The scene concludes with Poiccard's imitation of Bogey's characteristic gesture, the thumb raking across the upper lip, indicating contemplation, and, occasionally, indecisiveness:

The standard interpretation of this scene is that we are to understand Michel Poiccard consciously models his life on the figure of movie star Humphrey Bogart—he wishes to live a life like his (or at least, his life in American films noir). For some critics, Michel Poiccard’s criminal behavior serves as a sort of Godardian self-inscription, given that Godard, apparently, was a delinquent as a youth. But what happens to this sequence if we substitute the more obvious (at the time) figure of American cultural influence, movie star Elvis Presley in this sequence? Poiccard approaches the marquee . . .


. . . but instead of the poster of The Harder They Fall, it's the poster of Jailhouse Rock:

There's no cigarette of course, and there isn't the large image of Bogart's older, chiseled face, but there is the image of Elvis as both jailbird and as seductive sex symbol. In this revised sequence, Poiccard moves to his left, just as in the original . . .

. . . but instead of Bogey's image, it is Elvis's image from Jailhouse Rock:
He studies the image as before . . .

. . . while Elvis returns his gaze . . .

Without the cigarette, Poiccard's (Belmondo's) facial expression seems remarkably closer to Elvis's than it does Bogart's:

Of course, this imaginary sequence would conclude without the expressive gesture of the thumb across the lip to suggest the implicit identification Poiccard has with Bogey, and hence the loss of all the meanings compressed into the image of Bogart.The question is how and in what way the sequence is altered by the substitution of one American icon with another.

The gesture of the thumb across the lip recurs at different times in Breathless, but what if, instead of the lip gesture, Poiccard/Belmondo imitates, say, Elvis's gesture (sans hat) of flipping the head backwards to clear the hair from his eyes? He can't, because Poiccard is an anti-hero inspired by the characters of an older Hollywood than the Hollywood in which Elvis arrived for his first film in 1956. The fact is, Michel Poiccard is a doomed Hollywood anti-hero, but a charmingly nostalgic one. Elvis wasn't appropriate for Breathless because, ironically, he was too contemporary (a fear realized by the ambiguous figure of Patricia Franchini/Jean Seberg, the hip, promiscuous American girl who is also the film's femme fatale). The charm of Michel Poiccard is that he remains a comfortably familiar figure, even for French audiences. The irony is that in 1959, when Breathless was being made, Elvis, on leave from the U. S. Army, visited Paris. I like to imagine that in those cinéma-vérité scenes shot on the Champs-Élysées, Elvis was one of those figures standing in the background. Robert Ray argues that Elvis's style of acting would have been appropriate for Godardian cinema, imagining him, for instance, in a sequel to Masculine-Feminine. The idea is not as silly as it sounds: imagine the possibilities of Elvis starring in a Godard film. It would have been something to see.

George Carlin, 1937-2008

I heard the news this morning that comedian George Carlin died yesterday of heart failure at the age of 71. Although popularly associated with the so-called liberal "counterculture" of the 1960s and 1970s, it seems to me that comedians of the satirical sort like George Carlin always have to be fundamentally conservative, a theory born out by comments made by his friends in this obituary. The wicked humor of comedians like Carlin is premised on an acute understanding of his culture's fundamental hypocrisy. Example: his response to the question posed to him about the Super Bowl halftime show ending with Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction." Said Carlin: "On that Super Bowl broadcast of Janet Jackson's there was also a commercial about a 4-hour erection. A lot of people were saying about Janet Jackson, 'How do I explain to my kids? We're a little family, we watched it together ...' And, well, what did you say about the other thing? These are convenient targets." I couldn't have said it better, George: every weekday on the evening news one can hear repeated advertisements for drugs that might help solve "erectile dysfunction," but nary a word is raised in protest by the vast and so easily outraged middle-class, that great defender of bourgeoisie values and genteel sexual morality.

The greatest comedians have always been keenly aware of language, and hence it is entirely appropriate that George Carlin is perhaps most famous for his "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV" routine, a sketch not so much about proscribed words--that is, obscenity--as it is about the Orwellian nature of the media to control both thought and reality. Carlin said he learned a lot about his craft by observing comedian Lenny Bruce, a comedian continually harassed by the authorities over charges of "obscenity" whose routines were also frequently premised on an examination of language; in this sense "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV" owes much to Bruce's influence.

But while Lenny Bruce was clearly an influence on him, Carlin always said his idol growing up was comic Danny Kaye. Years ago on the radio I heard an interview with George Carlin in which he talked about how as a kid he very much adored and admired Danny Kaye, perhaps the preeminent comedian of his era. He said as a teenager he stood for hours in the rain outside a theater where Kaye was to appear, wanting to meet the great maestro in person and hoping to get his autograph. When Danny Kaye appeared, chauffeured to the spot in his grand automobile, Carlin (and others) rushed out to greet him--but the great comedian pushed by them and strolled silently on into the building, ignoring them and not saying a word, as if they were invisible. George Carlin's child-like silliness--a strength, actually--and his characteristic facial contortions no doubt owed a lot to Danny Kaye, but I think his iconoclasm, and the powerful hatred of hypocrisy so evident in his best comedy, came from that moment when he was so coldly pushed aside by his idol.

Because of that second or two of callousness, one of the best American comedians of his generation came into being. In any case, he and his idol are both equal now.

Elvis & His Guru

Improbably, this morning’s Los Angeles Times contained an article on the resurgence of interest in spiritualist Manley Palmer Hall (1901-1990), mentioning that a clip from the one film in which Hall made an appearance--the astrological murder mystery When Were You Born? (1938)--was shown as part of an “Occult L.A.” film program curated by Erik Davis. “Occult L.A.” was a program devoted to exploring what is, apparently, an ongoing fascination with the occult that has a long history in, and around, Los Angeles. Although skeptical at first, I decided there may be some merit to the idea that Los Angeles is peculiar in its obsession with the occult, if for no other reason than the way these occult ideas were transmitted by means of Larry Geller (pictured above, with Elvis), whom Elvis met in Los Angeles in 1964 when Geller became his hairdresser. Regarding the so-called “high priest” of the occult Manley Palmer Hall—subject to a newly published biography by L. A. Times staff writer Louis Sahagun—the article avers that “even Elvis was a fan, sending Priscilla Presley to one of the world renowned orator’s lectures because he was afraid of getting mobbed himself.”

There may be some truth to this anecdote. Elvis’ interest in Manley Palmer Hall’s writings dates from 1964 or after, when he fell under the influence of Larry Geller, who introduced Elvis to any number of occult writings over the next few years. According to Albert Goldman, in his controversial biography Elvis (1981), Larry Geller introduced Elvis to the following books, among others:

Vera Stanley Adler, The Initiation of the World
David Anrias, Through the Eyes of the Masters
Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Healing
McDonald McBain, Beyond the Himalayas
Anne Besant, The Masters
H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine; The Voice of Silence
Paul Brunton, The Wisdom of the Overself
Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness
Joel Goldsmith, The Infinite Way
Manley Palmer Hall, The Mystical Christ; The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Max Heindel, The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception
C. W. Leadbetter, The Inner Life
The Leaves of Morya's Garden
Nicholas Roerich, Flame in Chalice
Dane Rudhyar, The Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East
Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Urantia Book

As Goldman points out, most of these books pre-date Elvis's birth by many years, many of them dating back to the days before and after World War I, when books on spiritualism were tremendously popular. Indeed, Manley Palmer Hall arrived in Los Angeles in 1919, the year after the first World War ended, and soon his career as a student of esoteric and occult religions began. In fact, books on spiritualism were received so enthusiastically around this time period that T. S. Eliot used it in The Wasteland (1922) as a symbol of degradation of myth and ritual in the modern world.

Elvis read these books with great care, writes Goldman, as was evident

from the appearance of his copies, dog-eared, travel-stained, heavily underscored on almost every page. Elvis committed many of the key passages to memory and would recite them aloud while Larry Geller held the book like a stage prompter.... The particular tradition of spiritualism from which stem most of the writings to which Elvis Presley devoted himself for the balance of his life was established in the 1870s in New York City by the notorious and fascinating Madame Blavatsky.... one little volume puporting to be translations by Blavatsky of the most ancient runes of Tibet, The Voice of Silence, was such a favorite of Elvis's that he sometimes read from it onstage and was inspired by it to name his own gospel group, Voice. (Avon paperback edition, 1982, p. 436)

An autodidact, Elvis became especially fascinated by a book titled The Impersonal Life (1917) which carries the name Joseph Benner as its author, although the author purports merely to be the amanuensis of the Divine Being--in other words, the vehicle through which God speaks. According to Goldman, Elvis gave away "hundreds of copies of this book, like an eager evangelist distributing a favorite tract" (p. 439).

Note that the word "spiritualism" as I'm using it does not mean formal religion (orthodoxy). To be "spiritual" does not mean "religious" in the orthodox sense. If you have the occasion to listen to some of Elvis' later live recordings, pay attention for his references to the ideas in these old and sundry books.

Incidentally, Erik Davis' "Occult L.A." program apparently screened an extremely rare film by Curtis Harrington that I'd never heard of, titled Wormwood Star (1956), an early short by Harrington featuring the poetry and painting of occultist Marjorie Cameron, who appeared in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and, later, in Harrington's fine film Night Tide (1961), featuring Dennis Hopper.

(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66

Just as television in the 1960s helped popularize science fiction, by means of shows such as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Star Trek, so too did television help popularize the road story. Last time I wrote about the world’s first acid road trip that took place in 1964, undertaken by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and how Tom Wolfe’s first, New Journalistic accounts of that journey, eventually published in 1968 as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, subsequently influenced the Beatles’ film, Magical Mystery Tour, which aired on British television in December of 1967.

But before the Merry Pranksters began their road trip, there appeared on TV a show titled Route 66, a weekly series about two itinerant non-conformists traveling around the country—this almost a decade before Easy Rider (1969), also a road story featuring two itinerant non-conformists journeying across America. Starring Martin Milner as Tod Stiles and George Maharis as Buz Murdock, Route 66 ran from 7 October 1960 to 20 March 1964, ending its run just about three months to the day before the Merry Pranksters set out in a 1939 school bus on their cross-country acid road trip on 14 June 1964. Celebrating both liberal values and the value Americans call the open road, Route 66 was the first television show that was filmed on location in an entirely different geographical place each week. Writes Katie Mills:

The visual excitement of Route 66’s innovative car cinematography, combined with its narrative attention to progressive politics and marginalized communities, helped position Route 66 as a thematic and aesthetic link between the Beats and the “New Frontier” envisioned by presidential candidate Kennedy.... When Route 66 went off the air in 1964, the format of the road story was squarely part of popular culture, already generating yet another phase of remapping in the hot rod and biker films shown at the drive-in theaters. (pp. 69 & 84)

While the Pranksters’ road journey foregrounded drug consumption in the form of LSD—their exploits contributing to the popularization of the pun on the word “trip” to suggest both sorts of activities, travel and the ingestion of acid—Route 66 was not without occasional allusions to drugs. In the second season episode, “Birdcage on My Foot” (13 October 1961), Buz (George Maharis) admits to having been once a drug addict, and later on in the second season, in the episode titled “A Thin White Line” (8 December 1961), Tod (Martin Milner) is given LSD (or something like it) at a party. Although inspired by the huge success of Jack Kerouac’s Beat road trip, On the Road (1957) (although a show which Kerouac purportedly hated), no television show set on the road since has been so successful or enjoyed such longevity, perhaps due in part to the huge historic interest in Route 66 itself.

In October of 2007, Infinity/Roxbury Entertainment released Volume One of Route 66's first season, a box set consisting of 15 episodes spread over four DVDs. This initial release was followed in February 2008 by Volume Two, likewise consisting of 15 episodes on four DVDs. The splitting of a single TV season into two volumes is an awkward, unhappy arrangement in the first place, but Infinity/Roxbury's releases had additional problems in the form of poor source materials in some cases and, in the instance of episode 11, "A Fury Slinging Flame" (first airing on 30 December 1960), included on disc 3 of Volume One, a severely truncated print source. However, according to a report published by David Lambert just last week, due to the harsh feedback of disgruntled fans, Infinity/Roxbury has announced plans to re-issue the first season in one volume with all of the episodes remastered, presumably derived from better source materials as well. A complete series of reports on the fiasco surrounding Season One can be found here, while an examination of the problem with the transfers, with frame grabs, can be found here. In preparing this blog I came across an interesting interview with George Maharis that can be found here, which dispels many of the (false) rumors surrounding his and Martin Milner's working relationship and also the real reason behind why he left the show.

Despite the mediocre transfers found on the two volumes of Season One of Route 66, recently I thoroughly enjoyed renewing my relationship with the show and watched the entire first season in sequence. A fine show, it is indeed an illustration of "classic TV."

World's First Acid Road Trip

A couple of blog entries ago, I wrote on the waning of the Populuxe era and the early days of the psychedelic era, discovering the transitional linkage between the two eras in the image of the New York World's Fair that opened in April 1964. The New York World's Fair, the mediocre reception of which marked the end of the Populuxe era (1954-1964), was also the final destination of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who started out on the world's first acid road trip headed for New York on 14 June 1964. The linkage between these two events was unexpected but revealing, providing us a convenient means to date the beginning of "a new era."

As Katie Mills has observed in her fine book, The Road Story and the Rebel (2006), it was a consequence of the Merry Pranksters' cross-country excursion that the word trip "took on a double meaning that was part of the era's playfulness with language--to travel as well as to take LSD or blow one's mind. In the Prankster's league, the two became one" (86). For novelist Ken Kesey--by 1964 famous as a result of the publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and the about-to-be published Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)--part of the explicit purpose of the bus (to be entirely accurate, a 1939 school bus) trip was to make the record of a transformative journey, which is why the Pranksters took along with them film cameras and tape recorders. As Mills observes, "One goal of the Pranksters' road trip was to expand their expressive possibilities by making a film while on the road, to push further than the novel in order to break through to new expressive and artistic forms" (85). Of course, this film, which Tom Wolfe refers to as The Merry Pranksters Search for the Kool Place, was never completed, despite Ken Kesey spending years (and many thousands of dollars) trying to finish it. Hence, the only record we have of the Pranksters' journey is in the form of Tom Wolfe's New Journalistic account, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). But... fortunately for both scholars and for posterity, footage of the Pranksters' trip has been released on video through Zane Kesey's (Ken Kesey's son's) website, key-z.com. What this footage reveals is the remarkably accurate account of the journey Tom Wolfe made in his book.

In my previous blog on the subject, I made mention of the possible influence the Merry Pranksters' bus trip had on the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, first aired (in black & white, for some strange reason) on British television in December 1967. As Tom Wolfe observed in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Pranksters had serious artistic ambitions in mind with their film. The Merry Pranksters, according to Wolfe, wished to make

the world's first acid film, taken under conditions of total spontaneity barreling through the heartlands of America, recording all now, in the moment. The current fantasy was . . . a total breakthrough in terms of expression . . . but also something that would amaze and delight many multitudes, a movie that could be shown commercially as well as in the esoteric world of the heads. (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bantam, 1981, p. 122)

But Wolfe also notes, sixty-seven pages later in the same book:

Early in 1967, the Beatles got a fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and piled into it with thirty-nine friends and drove and wove across the British countryside, zonked out of their gourds. They were going to . . . make a movie. Not an ordinary movie, but a totally spontaneous movie, using hand-held cameras, shooting the experience as it happened--off the top of the head!--cavorting, rapping on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaos--a daydream! A black art! A chaos! They finished up with miles and miles of film . . . which they saw as a total breakthrough in terms of expression but also as a commercial display. . . . (Wolfe, Acid Test, p. 189)

As Katie Mills observes, by means of the deliberate redundancy in the diction between these two passages, Wolfe explicitly links The Merry Pranksters Search for the Kool Place with the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. Although no indubitable connection between the two films has been definitively established, Bob Neaverson, in The Beatles Movies (first published 1997), suggests that Paul McCartney, flying home from America in April 1967, very easily could have read Tom Wolfe's first articles on the Merry Pranksters' bus trip, published in the World Journal Tribune in January and February 1967 (not to be confused with the book publication of Wolfe's account, which was August 1968). Magical Mystery Tour was filmed in September 1967. There are no hard feelings, apparently: according to Mills, the Pranksters "like to claim credit for this inspiration--they seem genuinely happy for the Beatles' success with what may well have been their idea" (103).

The idea? The world's first acid road trip. That Magical Mystery Tour was widely panned by the critics when it first aired on December 26, 1967, reaffirms an insight I made a few blogs ago on why early psychedelic albums failed--the audience didn't yet exist. The psychedelic aesthetic, largely non-narrative, more lyrical and abstract, and prone to making startling, sometimes surreal juxtapositions, had to be learned. Taste is not innate; it has to be developed.