Synopses & Reviews
"
Tomorrow Never Knows brings us closer to the heart of what we call the sixties than any other book I know."-Jon Wiener,
The NationTomorrow Never Knows takes us back to the primal scene of the 1960s and asks: what happened when young people got high and listened to rock music as if it really mattered-as if it offered sustenance, not just escape and entertainment? What did they hear in the music of Dylan, Hendrix, or the Beatles? Bromell's pursuit of these questions radically revises our understanding of rock, psychedelics, and their relation to the politics of the 60s, exploring the period's controversial legacy and the reasons why being "experienced" has been an essential part of American youth culture to the present day.
Synopsis
Tomorrow Never Knows takes us back to the primal scene of the 1960s and asks: what happened when young people got high and listened to rock as if it really mattered--as if it offered meaning and sustenance, not just escape and entertainment? What did young people hear in the music of Dylan, Hendrix, or the Beatles? Bromell's pursuit of these questions radically revises our understanding of rock, psychedelics, and their relation to the politics of the 60s, exploring the period's controversial legacy, and the reasons why being experienced has been an essential part of American youth culture to the present day.
About the Author
Nick Bromell is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Living to Music"- Remembering Rock and Psychedelics in the '60s
1. "Something That Never Happened Before"- The Early Beatles and the Sense of an Ending
2. "Heartbreak Hotel"- At the Crossroads of White Loneliness and the Blues
3. "Something's Happening Here"- The Fusion of Rock and Psychedelics
4. "I Was Alone, I Took a Ride"- Revolver, Revolution, Technology
5. "Never Do See Any Other Way"- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
6. "Evil" Is "Live" Spelled Backwards- The Radical Self in Highway 61 Revisited and The White Album
Afterword: "Our Incompleteness and Our Choices"- Forgetting the '60s and Remembering Them
Appendix 1. Music, Form, and Meaning
Appendix 2. The Form and Work of the Blues
Notes
Index