All humans have a formative year. It’s most often a teen one, an annum during which a person discovers and then latches onto passions that can become lifelong pursuits, during which the elasticity of childhood hardens into the individual identities we wear for life.
For Robyn Hitchcock, the surrealist British singer-songwriter, that year was 1967. It was a pivotal time in both music and life for Hitchcock. While the sounds of the hippie revolution blossomed outside, 13-year-old Hitchcock encountered the hierarchical and homoerotic world of a 600-year-old boarding school, Winchester College. Here, the child grew into a young man who navigated through academia, adolescence, and his often-offish classmates to a soundtrack of Dylan, the Beatles, the Kinks, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, and more. By the close of this formative year, he is set on his goals for life: to become a singer-songwriter like his idol Bob Dylan and to stay high for eternity.
The always-in-motion Hitchcock’s latest creation is a memoir dedicated to this seminal sliver of his life – 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left.
For those not in the know, Robyn Hitchcock is one of the true eccentrics of British music, a songwriter who has revealed the beauty in the absurdity of life for five decades. He first rose to fame with the influential art-rockers the Soft Boys in the mid-‘70s before going solo in the early ‘80s, producing over two dozen acclaimed albums, including Elements of Light (1981), Ole Tarantula (2006), and Storefront Hitchcock (2000), the soundtrack to a down-n-dirty concert film by Jonathan Demme. His songs have been covered by artists including R.E.M, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega. He has also saluted his chief songwriting inspirations, Bob Dylan and Syd Barrett, by covering their work on tribute albums and tours.
Robyn Hitchcock’s memoir begins with a paragraph that brings to mind the great Italian novelist Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. He observes that although he shares the same body and memories as the subject of this book, it feels like it is a life lived by someone else.
Hitchcock’s saga commences when he is dropped off at boarding school in 1966. He can attend this pricey school due to the success of his grandfather’s business on his mother’s side. His mother is one of the first women to graduate from Cambridge; his father is an injured veteran who “paints his nightmares” in the evenings. The family’s home in Weybridge, Surrey, is near those of three of the Beatles. He will be leaving the freedom and luxury of the family home in the so-called “Stockbroker’s Belt” for the regiment of boarding school.
As a 13-year-old newbie, he is on the bottom rung of the ladder at school. He is charged with duties like waking the older students and sweeping the floors, tasks he does to the revelatory strains of Dylan’s new releases, “Like A Rolling Stone“, “Desolation Row“, and the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. He listens to Dylan with his dying grandmother and is introduced to another big influence, the Incredible String Band, when his mother gifts him their self-titled debut.
Robyn Hitchcock works to navigate the two camps of students, the jock-minded “meatheads” and the beatnik/hipster “grooves”. These groups will battle to see who controls the house gramophone, whether it will be spinning a diet of the Beach Boys or “Strawberry Fields”. Aside from what spins on the dorm record player, Hitchcock will be influenced by the hymns he hears in daily religious services. They will be “like pieces of ancient weaponry surfacing in a plowed field” – melodic inspirations that will emerge in his future songs.
In February 1967, his life course was set when his parents gave him his first guitar. More revelations will come when he hears Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” for the first time while visiting a literal pig pen on his family’s property. In the spring of 1967, he meets a truly forward-thinking hipster, a young Brian Eno. The future God of Ambient is at Winchester College, producing a “happening” by playing a Dylan record backward with live violin accompaniment. A second Eno “happening” involves setting free hundreds of balloons with messages, a performance art piece entitled “Postcards to Infinity”. Eno’s artsy presence starkly contrasts some of Hitchcock’s classmates on G-Block – a cast with snazzy nicknames like Mudfellow, Horse, Blotto, and Martz.
When the semester ends in June, Hitchcock’s musical worldview goes technicolor when he hears Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne“. By this time, he has learned to tune his guitar and plays along with the flipside, “Candy and a Currant Bun“. His musical style will be further cemented when he hears the Incredible String Band’s Summer of Love release, The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion. This music is “saturated with joy” and “a simultaneous celebration and lament on life.” He listens to Dylan because he believes he knows the meaning of life. And he can’t enjoy the Monkees simply because, for the most part, “they don’t write their own songs.”
With the autumn semester, he revels in the sounds of the Kinks’ “Autumn Almanac” and the Velvet Underground and spends long hours studying album covers. At Hang Ups, the first rock poster shop in London, he will meet the man who designed the cover for Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love. More records are milestones for inspiration – Dylan’s “Vision of Johanna” and Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play“. He hears the rumor that the mighty Dylan is down in Nashville recording and has a daydream where he meets the Great White Wonder to ask him the meaning of life.
The year will end when Hitchcock is home for Christmas. On Boxing Day, 26 December, they will gather around the tube to watch the new Beatles film, Magical Mystery Tour. While the black-and-white broadcast is a bit of a letdown, Hitchcock brings color to the occasion by wearing an orange kaftan. They love the music, and his mother is enamored with the famous scene where John Lennon ladles out a mountain of spaghetti with a gravedigger’s shovel.
1967 makes Hitchcock “the me I’ll be for the rest of my life.” He provides a quick epilogue when he catches up with some of his classmates decades later and how he loses his “psychic virginity” when he first gets stoned in 1968.
Robyn Hitchcock concludes, “That stopped clock of 1967 ticks on in me. And it’s given me a job for life.”
Sal Cataldi interviews Robyn Hitchcock on Wednesday, 10 July at 10 am CST (US), on his radio show, “Reading Is Funktamental” on WGXC-90.7 FM. The episode will be archived on the show page here.