THE YEAR ROCK GOT HEAVY !

By the end of 1969 the psychedelic dream was fading and a new crop of musicians were getting harder and heavier. RICHARD MORTON JACK celebrates the bands whose LPs from that definitive year fetch up to £750 today.

In 1967, psychedelia was all the rage in Britain’s underground. By 1968, blues-rock had started to take over but, when 1969 came around, a darker vibe was starting to seep through. As Deviants leader Mick Farren puts it: “The 1968 student revolt had crashed and burned, leaving little but social secretaries on the make, incompetent wannabe terrorists, and scrag-end psychedelic clubs waiting for the coming of disco.”

In a sense it was inevitable that disillusionment with the so-called hippie dream would set in – it had promised impossible fantasies, with LSD curing society’s ills, different factions spontaneously loving one another and a full-scale political and socio-economic revolution magically occurring. The reality was that tensions between authority figures and the young were simmering as never before. This wasn’t just unwarranted aggression on the part of the police: the establishment was terrified of the perceived threat to the status quo, and there was a sharp increase in hard drug use. Heroin and amphetamines flooded the scene, where once marijuana and LSD had been the preferred substances, and many casualties resulted.

Over in America, the discontentment felt by the young was starting to be expressed, not by protest singers, but by hard rock bands such as The …

by RICHARD MORTON JACK
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