Spring 2002

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Trying to Know Tomorrow

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TRYING TO KNOW TOMORROW A professor’s love for the language of ’60s rock

by Steven L. Beeber ’85, ’95G

"FOR DYLAN AND THE BEATLES there was a way of seeing the love in things even as they mocked them"; Nicholas Bromell of the UMass English facutly. (photo by Ben Barnhart) REVOLUTION. COUNTERREVOLUTION. REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE. Revolution the single. Revolution the album track. Revolution nine. Turn me on, dead man, turn me on, dead man, turn me on . . . Strange conflicting messages, strange conflicting words. But UMass English professor Nicholas Bromell has been looking at them seriously over the past couple of years – in fact, more seriously than at any time since he was a college student. His findings appear in his recent book, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. At 51, with college-bound children of his own, Bromell seems in a reflective mood. He wants to understand what was unique about the ’60s, if indeed there was something unique. And he wants to express that to the reader – whether the reader was there and didn’t know it, or has always been there in spirit whether really there or not. It is a novel, unusual, yet archetypically ’60s take on experience: viewing a generation of music not through its performers, but through its listeners. Making the audience the focus of the performance, the kids in the seats the real subject. In the funhouse-mirror decade of Dylan and the Stones, of the Beatles and all their minions, none rising higher than the multi-stranded leaves of grass- smokers bringing their multitudes together to smoke as one. One nation under a groove, George Clinton of Funkadelic would call it later. But this was the beginning, the beginning of a community created by song, by chord progressions and bridge breaks as much as by lyrics, lyrics to be decoded, lyrics that were mysterious and multilayered and full of duplicity. THE ’60S ACCORDING TO BROMELL was created by a generation of Americans suddenly feeling that somehow nothing about their childhoods had been real. That in the suburban sprawl created by their parents things may have been safe, but nothing felt genuine. And they were hung up about this – especially as the juncture broke, as veils were lifted. Not just by the revelations of war and politics and all that was ugly within them, but by the presence of chemicals acting on the mind in such a way as to confirm a multiplicity of states. To suggest that sometimes "I think I know, (ah no?) / but maybe yes / I mean it must be high or low / That is you can’t, you know, tune in / but it’s alright / That is I think it’s not too bad." Once members of Bromell’s generation let themselves be taken down by marijuana and LSD – psychedelics both, in his opinion – they perceived more than the multiplicity of the mind, of inner space. In a kind of reversal of mind and object, like Bromell’s reversal of audience and performer, the outer world, too, revealed its complicated nature, its hidden beauty, its duplicity, its corruption, its malleable openness to change and death. For Bromell, an added dimension of this enhanced perception – this perception of duplicity – was a childhood lived within a cloak of secrecy. Born into a middle-class family in Virginia, Bromell was moved suddenly to Greece before he was a year old. The family returned to America when he was four, only to leave again when he was eight – moving first to Jordan, later to Iraq, and finally, after another stay in the U.S., to Cairo and Beirut. Throughout these years he watched his father appear and disappear with relative frequency – going off to meet "a man" here or "a colleague" there, sometimes with his wife and two sons in tow, visiting an apartment in a back ally or a desert ruin or the patio of the St. George’s Hotel, all of it for purposes not clearly stated. ONLY LATER DID BROMELL consciously understand what he’d sensed all along – that his father was a spy. Silence about his father’s work "legitimated many other silences," he writes in his 1992 essay, "Family Secrets." "‘There are certain things we don’t talk about,’ we were told. ‘It would be better if you didn’t mention to your friends where we went this weekend.’ "More than most other children, I think, I grew up seeing the world double. I saw not just the doubleness of adults pretending things to children, but the doubleness of adults pretending things to one another. And knowing no other world, this seemed normal to me." It was for this reason, Bromell writes, that he wasn’t much surprised in the ’60s to learn about the government duplicity that so shocked his friends. Which is my identity, he must have sometimes wondered as he was shuttled between cultures as a boy. When he and his brother returned from Greece the first time, barely able to speak English and walking about holding hands in the traditional manner of Greek schoolchildren, they were "viciously mocked and beaten up," he recalls with an effort to smile. "After that we made a point of forcing ourselves to learn English and to studiously investigate the ways of those around us," says Bromell. "We wanted to fit in, but it took some thinking to figure out how." Among his investigatory tools was popular culture – movies, comics, TV, music. Curiously, it was in Jordan, on an American army base in Iman, that he discovered Elvis Presley. "We’d only just begun to hear about Elvis," says Bromell, who was then about eight. "Even then I knew he was something I had to know about. "We went to see King Creole at the base, and when the lights went down, there he was, looking like a juvenile delinquent, but vulnerable, singing this a cappella version of Crawdaddy that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before." Today Bromell realizes what it was about the music and Elvis’s image that was so accessible to him: It offered a way both to join American culture and remain apart from it, to belong and yet remain outside. Apart yet a part. It was the same with the Beatles, when they emerged a few years later. "There was something about them that was so fresh and new," Bromell says. "A difference in style, sound, and attitude that was like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when it suddenly goes from black-and-white to technicolor. And it appealed to me greatly, just as it did to everyone else." Bromell sees the paradoxical idea of the "group of loners" – all alienated, all attached to an alienated group – as an ingredient of the rock experience that transcends personal history. This was especially true in the ’60s, when music was seen as part of a counterculture. Musicians and audience working together to create a movement against prevailing norms. A movement reflecting the reality they saw, a reality passed over by the society in which they found themselves. "We all sensed that where we were wasn’t where we were supposed to be, where we wanted to be," he says. "We wanted something different and better. Something that was more fit to our visions. And the music was supposed to tell us how to get there. "The music was more than just entertainment – it was a blueprint, a guidepost, a lamp lighting the way. We invested it with almost cosmic importance. And like us – perhaps because of us – the musicians did too." Bromell still enjoys listening to the way the winds blew then, calling Dylan and the Beatles the supreme interpreters of the era’s spirit and thought. "For Dylan and the Beatles there was a way of seeing the love in things even as they mocked them," he says. "To expose the failings of society, yet to offer an alternative that was constructive rather than destructive. That was what I think really defined that period. People having the ability to believe and hope despite what they saw around them. "There were possibilities then. More so than later. And more so than now I think." BROMELL DOESN’T ENDORSE drug use, and in fact bemoans its prevalence today. Still, he feels psychedelics were to a degree essential to the socio-psychological shifts of the ’60s. Without them, he says, many of those questioning consensus reality would have continued along its paths. "Music and psychedelics allowed the young to have it both ways," Bromell writes. "They took kids out of the conventional world structured by parents, away from the expectant gaze of others, but instead of delivering them into a void of loneliness they dropped them in a world radiant with connections and community, saturated with significance." This is the experience Bromell speaks to in his book – the experience of kids like himself who had suddenly discovered another world, a world no longer vague but in focus, a world of music and reality seen from the flipside, a universe of tangerine trees and marmalade skies at which you had only to turn to see. "There was something very instructional about the music of the ’60s," Bromell says. "Something that went hand in hand with the use of psychedelics. It was an experience. An immersion in the thing. A concentrated effort that went beyond entertainment to a form of language created by many for each other and the future they were beginning to envision. "I’m not saying that you couldn’t do it without drugs. In fact, many during that time – including the leading purveyors of the new attitude, the Beatles themselves – realized relatively quickly that psychedelics were not the experience itself, merely one door to it. "The main point is, millions of people in America and across the world suddenly understood to some extent what Emerson and Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists had been talking about. They saw that there were other ways to see, that the standard one was not the only one. That ultimately was the greatest lesson of the ’60s." More than meets the eye. More than the ear first hears. This was the hallmark of the ’60s ethos, says Bromell. This was what led students to sit together in stoned silence in the middle of the day, listening to hours’ worth of albums. This was what led them to protest the dark side of their government, the fact of secrets, of democracies undermined, of political tricks played. Of being lied to. For Bromell, of course, the experience was complicated by being the son of a CIA agent. "I’m not ashamed of what my father did," he says today. "I’m not necessarily proud of it either. But I do think it made me aware that things are rarely simple or pure." And this awareness, he thinks, informed not only his take on the ’60s, but the way he’s tried to carry the best of that time into the present. "I often felt like a stranger in my own land back then," says Bromell. "Now I realize it doesn’t have to end there. My father was a man of secrets. But I’m a communicator. I’m a teacher. And that means I’m supposed to tell the truth."

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TRYING TO KNOW TOMORROW

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS:an excerpt

TRYING: Larger image