Music Magazine Classic Rock Special: Legends of the 60s Fourth Edition Back Issue

“The past is a foreign country,” someone once wrote. “They do things differently there.” If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, the 60s weren’t so much a foreign country as a mythological universe: a world populated by legendary characters and unbelievable events. Men walked on the moon. America fought a war in Vietnam. There was the Civil Rights Struggle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay Of Pigs, the Manson Family murders, the Profumo Affair, Chappaquiddick – and England actually won the World Cup. JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Che Guevara were all assassinated. Eddie Cochran, Marilyn Monroe, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Lenny Bruce and Brian Jones never made it out alive. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were dead within a year of the decade ending. Skirts got shorter, bras were burnt, drugs were pretty much compulsory and sex was invented. (“Sexual intercourse began,” wrote poet Philip Larkin, “In nineteen sixtythree... Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”) And then there was the soundtrack. Motown, Stax, Chess, Atlantic soul, Phil Spector, bubblegum pop, girl groups, surf music, skiffle, Northern soul, Mod, funk, folk… Even if rock music hadn’t been invented, we would still be looking at the 60s with slack-jawed wonder. But this was rock’s hey-day. From its birth in the mid-60s to the end of the decade, rock music exploded in every way possible – a ravenous, ambitious and infectious strain of music that spread like a dose of clap in a hippie commune. It was such an astonishing burst of creativity that it’s possible to argue that, by the end of the 60s, rock had already done everything it ever really would do. Blues rock, heavy rock, heavy metal, punk rock, prog rock, psychedelia, country rock, music festivals – they all started in the 60s.