Back to the Future: The All-Too Brief Heyday of the ‘60s Revival Scene
If you were edgy in the ‘80s (but leery of punk or goth) there was an alternative: The ‘60s revival. For a brief moment, the mods and trippers and beat freaks ruled; then they vanished. What happened?
As a teenager in Reagan-era Washington, D.C., I craved escape. Escape from the ‘80s; escape from the synthetic sounds of Top 40; escape from a world that seemed hellbent on self-destruction. It was the midst of the Cold War, the whump-whump-whump of military helicopters just part of the landscape. But I knew with all the surety of a sullen 13-year-old that this was madness, that there was something—maybe a lot—we weren’t being told.
I wanted out.
I knew what punk was, more or less. I’d already discovered the incendiary albums in my half-sister’s record shelves—Rocket to Russia, Another Music In a Different Kitchen, The Clash (the U.K. version, obviously) and Never Mind the Bollocks—and they gave me hope. But punk somehow felt too visible, too exposed. I wasn’t ready to wear black leather and chains, or—more pressing—risk getting punched in the face by skinheads.
So when I discovered the ‘60s revival scene, a puzzle piece clicked into place. I already loved the early Who, Kinks, and Yardbirds. When I learned there was a whole world of kids like me—drawn to the sounds of snarling fuzz pedals and pounding drums—the shock paddles finally clamped to my chest, jolting me to life.
All around me was an astonishingly vibrant scene, with disaffected youth (and many adults) (re)discovering and (re)creating the sounds of pre-psychedelic power pop, acid-tinged garage, and straight-up R&B revivalism—sometimes all within the same song. I ran headfirst through that door and never really looked back. But then, just a few short years later, the doorway more or less disappeared, subsumed in the endless churn of youth culture. What happened? Where did it go?
When I saw what Sam Knee had written—that the ‘60s seem closer now than they did back then—something clicked into place, and I knew I had to learn more. The mainspring and curator behind the absurdly compelling Scene In Between books and Instagram account, Sam documents the less-traveled byways of punk and the underground with understated wit and keen curiosity. I sat down with him recently over Zoom; here are some choice bits from the conversation.
Seth: If you didn’t want to be a punk or a hardcore kid in the ‘80s, there was this alternative known as “garage” or “‘60s punk.” But then it sort of faded away. Why?
Sam: Yeah, it was quite brief. I think in America the ‘60s scene was sort of bubbling up in ’79 bands like the Crawdaddys in San Diego and the Chesterfield Kings in New York. These are more purist “influenced by the ‘60s and nothing else” type bands. That didn’t really happen here so militantly initially.
You had the mod revival of ’79. But those bands were more power pop, really, more like a strand of post punk, so you didn’t really get the vibe of that garage or beat group kind of reenactment really come in until bands like the Milkshakes in the early ‘80s. I think people were less about being completely puritanical about it at first, that came slightly later as the scenes became smaller and more intense and more focused.
The mod revival here was really big, and it was quite sprawling. It kind of encapsulated all kinds of things at the time. And that was very brief, too, you know; it was like a two year thing, really.
Seth: Do you know Tony Fletcher? He has a memoir called Boy About Town—which centers on his interaction with the Jam—and it’s totally fascinating (and a great read!). In it he talks about the ’79 revival, at least its epicenter in London, lasting like a couple of months, not even a year.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. You know, I’m also suburban. Maybe I’m a couple of years younger as well. I mean, I heard about the mod revival via Top of the Pops and seeing the Jam and the Purple Hearts and the Chords, they were all in the Top 40, you know. So it was quite an overground scene, and the press were all over it because it was the next big thing after punk. They were waiting for the next youth wave, right? So when that came along they were all over it—simultaneously with the whole Two-Tone thing. They both had obviously ‘60s roots, and a similar kind of image. But by ’81 the press had given up on it. They were fixed on, like, New Romantics by then, or whatever else was coming, like punk’s second wave and the rockabilly revival at that point.
It’s quite hard to envisage that really ever happening again now. I think [from about] ’80 or ’81 to say ’85 it was the most intense section of youth culture in the UK. It was so sprawling and kids would, like, pledge allegiance to wherever they decided to land upon. And you couldn’t really waver, you know.
Seth: I was always drawn to punk, but the ‘60s punk scene had this sense of secrecy that really captivated me.
Sam: Yeah, there was all kinds of probably different reasons. [The ‘60s scene] was much more subtle. And the second wave of punk here was so coarse, you know. It became such a generic form, all of the Discharge clones and the Crass clones. The endless black-and-white sleeves and, you know, the Cold War and nuclear war, moaning about Thatcher and unemployment. And it was just like, my god, who writes these lyrics? They’ve all got the same lyric sheet or something.
I just thought: “This is so unconvincing.” I couldn’t get into it at all, actually. And those people were everywhere, I don’t even consider that to be underground by that point, you know, even where I grew up—in South Bend—they were everywhere, those sort of Exploited punks, and it was all off the peg. You know, you could go into a shop and buy all that stuff. It was really just lacking any imagination.
“My sister borrow[ed] a copy of Psychedelic Jungle; I heard it coming from her room. I just couldn’t…I couldn’t believe it.”
I was searching for something that connected with me. So when I discovered the ‘60s stuff…The Cramps initially were my way in, and that was purely by chance, my sister borrowing a copy of Psychedelic Jungle. That’d just come out in ’81 so I heard it coming from her room. I just couldn’t…I couldn’t believe it. This was definitely, this is where I wanted to be instantly, you know, just that sort of fuzzy kind of dirge and that lethargy and singing about “Green Fuz”…I thought this was a fantastic vibe. Kid Congo looked amazing. They all did! And then from there, I discovered [other] bands. But from the Cramps, and from the Gun Glub to a lesser degree, I started to realize that half their repertoire were cover versions….
Seth: More than half!
Sam: More than half, yeah. And then just from reading interviews with them, they’d namedrop Pebbles and [other] compilations. And I sort of slowly found out what it was all about. I loved everything about it, you know?
Seth: Something that fascinates me endlessly is that the punks one or two generations above me in Washington, D.C. were all turned on by the Cramps. That was the starting point for them. Which is ironic, given that D.C. was known (rightly or not) as a kind of militant hardcore straightedge scene. I’ve asked Ian MacKaye about this in the past, and he said:
“We were young punks who didn’t drink or do drugs, which made us freaks in that era. Seeing The Cramps, especially for those of us who were going to their first punk gigs, really hammered home that these guys were freaks and, thus, we were in the right place.”
Sam: Yeah, they were the way in. But like I said, it took me a while to find them. I’d spend quite a lot of time on my own riding around on my bike and just sort of becoming obsessed about the ‘60s and watching old films on telly, you know. And there was by that point they were showing reruns of the Prisoner, and Ready Steady Go! on Channel Four which had just launched, I think, in ’82 or ’83. Literally just riding around, sort of looking at old shops and street signs and just trying to find the ‘60s, you know, because that’s only, like, 15 years before, you know?
The ‘60s are closer now than they were then…
Seth: Years ago, I had a conversation with a guy who runs a vintage shop here in Portland. He told me that when he was in his youth in the early ‘70s, he and his friends would go around to estate sales—or they’d literally find stuff out on the sidewalk—and they’d buy sacks of Edwardian clothes and wear them around. That just happened to be the generation dying off in that moment. So in 1985 I was haunting thrift stores finding clothes from the ‘60s, because that’s what was being tossed out. But in this there’s this sort of tension. You know, I could get a guitar from the ‘60s for $100, or I could find ’60s clothes, but I couldn’t find any information. Now you can find the information, but you can’t find the stuff.
Sam: And if you do, it’s obviously just collector’s prices, you know, ridiculous. Then it was like…it was the pre-vintage world, wasn’t it? There was no sort of monetary value to anything like that, really. I mean beyond a few rare Beatles records, most records from the ‘60s were completely available still for nothing; clothing had no value at all. And the only people that were interested in it were young people in the subcultures. There were no businessmen thinking: “Oh, this will make me a lot of money, like rare Levi’s.” It was quite strange, really.
Seth: In the overculture, pop culture seems to have a 20-year cycle; I think of the ‘50s revival in the ‘70s, and the ‘60s revival of the ‘80s—films like The Big Chill, Good Morning, Vietnam and so on. Which brings me to something you said that I find so provocative: That in some ways, the ‘60s are closer now than they were then.
Sam: Yes, it seemed like lifetimes away. I think that’s just youth. Time just does move a lot slower; you are just absorbing so much in such an intense way. I was so focused on it that certain days I thought maybe I can even go to the ‘60s, you know. Absolutely, must be like a door or something. I’m so close to everything. But [that was] maybe spending too much time on my own, possibly, and then just reading sleeve notes to Pebbles or something!
I mean, there was a period between about ’84 and like ’87 where the ‘60s crossed over into the indie scene, which was obviously much bigger than the sort of militant ‘60s scene, and [which] kind of overlapped with the mainstream. So you had bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain, and all those earlier Creation bands, the first Primal Scream singles, they had a quite strong ‘60s sort of visual aesthetic. And the music was quite steeped in sort of girl groups and Velvet Underground sort of feedback and all that kind of thing.
There was a moment in the mid ‘80s where it almost all converged, and if you were a militant ‘60s type, you could also then be quite acceptable within the indie scene and vice versa. So there was a cross-pollination that lasted about two or three years. And then by about ’87 it started to splinter off again with the introduction of E (ecstasy) culture coming in.
[For those in] the ‘60s scene and the rockabilly scene and all those sort of pure scenes there’s nowhere to go, they just revolve in their own little shell. When it’s time to get out you just have to bail out, you know, there’s no kind of middle ground.
There’s no room for phasing into something else. The most obvious route then was going: “Oh, we like, you know, Detroit ’69!” That seems to be, like, the clearest [path] without completely losing all cred, you know? A lot of those bands coincided with the whole Sub Pop sort of phenomenon taking off.
Seth: Well in the 80s there’s this incredibly vibrant sort of petri dish of all these different subcultures and scenes. Then two things happen: One is grunge / Nirvana, in which the music industry very suddenly starts paying attention to the underground. The other is the internet. I think about all these bands you reference, like the Chesterfield Kings or the Crawdaddys, and how they never really made the leap to the internet. Very few people are writing about them, no one’s sort of chronicling them and they’re sort of fading into history….
Sam: I think it’s self-induced on their part. Those bands, you know, they’re so militant that I think broader society finds that quite off-putting really, where bands come along and they’re just saying: “We’re this, and that’s it!” And it’s quite unwelcoming in a way, isn’t it? I think that militancy only appeals to a certain amount of people.
You know, we’d go and see bands like Spacemen 3 and stuff like that. Incredible, you know? But when they broke up and started morphing into these other groups, I was like: “Oh, this is shit in comparison. They’ve lost it, you know.” But then the people I used to know were like: “Well, no, it’s still good…it’s just different. You know, this is where they’re going now.” I’ve got my own sort of tunnel vision, whereas I think most people haven’t. They kind of tend to go with the flow.
The Ties that Bind: Music as Community Catalyst
Seth: Of course, music is such a powerful marker of identity. I was just in D.C. researching my next book, and going out to shows is still so vital there. Many people in many places have a few friends from deep childhood, but to have an entire community with this sort of collective memory—like I remember what happened at this show, or when this record came out, or where that protest was when the police came—that’s really powerful. The connections still center around the music, but the music is really just the sort of like the Pavlov’s bell to remind us what it meant.
Sam: Yeah, that’s the thing that sort of binds us, isn’t it? I think it starts with more the punk generation, really. Older generations, they seem like once it happened, that’s kind of it. The ones that I meet, anyway, they’re always surprised to meet anybody that’s interested in that kind of thing. I guess they’re the pre-internet kind of generations of people that were young and their youth belonged in their youth, and then they got married at 21 and had kids, and it was literally over. They look back [and] it’s purely nostalgia, and that’s it.
When I was a teenager and getting into ‘60s culture, I would pick the brains of anyone who had lived through it. Like, what was it like? I still do that! But it’s funny. For people who lived through that era, I think for the most part it was just what was happening outside your door.
Seth: And the idea that 30+ years in the future some geeky kid is asking them: “Did you ever hear the Seeds? Did you see the Doors?” What? Who cares? Why are you asking?
Sam: Especially since leaving London I’ve been advertising to buy up old records. So I’ve been going to a lot of people’s houses and chatting. And quite often they’re in their 70s. And nine times out of ten when I talk to them about—“Oh wow, you’ve got a Pretty Things EP! You ever see them?”—literally I’m the first person that’s asked them that, probably since that time. They’re like: Why are you asking that? What does it mean to you? Whereas that kind of archeology side of things is more something that’s come from our generation. It wasn’t around then for the actual people living in the ‘60s, it was all yet to come. They were just living at that moment. And then when it passed, it passed, and it’s been down to more of our generation to actually dig it all up again. And try and find out the true stories behind it.
Seth: Speaking of which, what are you working on now?
Sam: It’ll be another volume of the Scene In Between series. The fashions and gear of the American garage band phenomenon. So, 1965 to ’67. It’s quite a tight window. I’m looking for photos, basically. So if anyone, if anyone’s granddads or parents were in bands in America in the mid ‘60s. They don’t have to ever have put out a record or anything; I’m looking just for photo documentation of groups rehearsing or playing gigs or anything really, you know, especially if they have that look.
I’m looking for bands that have that more casual, more Stones-ey type look, as opposed to matching suits. I’m looking for bands that modeled themselves on the Yardbirds, or Brian Jones, that post-Beatlemania and pre-psychedelia look. It’s more of an Ivy League look, with sort of longer hair, and more of a casual nonchalance about the whole thing, you know. Photos are quite rare; they’re quite hard to find. But when you do start amassing them and put them together, you do start to get a picture of it, and it actually becomes quite amazing, you know.
I remember in 7th grade at GDS we had a turntable in our homeroom class, and Dante brought in Cramps and Ramones records and we'd all listen to them at lunch. This would have been @ '79 or '80. Formative times!