Like many baby boomers, Madison author Christopher Hill looks back wistfully at the music of the 1960s.
“There was an atmosphere of expectation and energy when it was all new,” the 64-year-old says about music created by the likes of the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. “There was an ideology that accompanied this music; it was music from the front lines of cultural change. That kind of got lost over time. The music holds up, but that original atmosphere didn’t survive. Rock became a commodity in the ’70s.”
Hill, a former editor at Magna Publications who has written about music for International Musician, Chicago magazine and Downbeat, recaptures the era’s origins with Into the Mystic: The Visionary and Ecstatic Roots of 1960s Rock and Roll (Park Street Press), published this month.
“The book is me, putting into concrete form, the way I interpreted this music for many years,” Hill says. “In a way, it was more that half-done when I started writing.”
Into the Mystic takes its name from a Van Morrison song, but not one from 1968’s Astral Weeks album, to which Hill dedicates an entire chapter. The book explores the roots of gospel music, which gave way to the blues and the British Invasion, and explains the influence of the European folk traditions, medieval troubadours and the African diaspora on the revolutionary music of the ’60s.
Hill says one of the most revealing tidbits he uncovered in his research was a comment Paul McCartney made in an interview, stating he and John Lennon wanted to write more “comedy songs.”
“What did that mean, exactly?” Hill asks. “The Beatles were going to move away from writing about romance, look at London and write commentary on what was happening — the same way comedians look for material.” The music of The Beatles evolved from bouncy and playful to more serious and psychedelic by the end of the ‘60s.
That idea of making statements with both the head and the heart is critical in today’s post-Trump world, as it was in the ’60s, says Hill. “It’s important for people involved in political resistance and movements of justice to realize that the individual songs and albums were not neutral; they were used as part of creating change in the world,” he says. “There should be a colorful, fantastic, absurd side to the revolution — a revolution of the mind — as well as a political side. They complement each other. And to accomplish change, you need both of them.”
