London: Tightly Knit, Decadent And Explosively Creative, The Scene Was Too Good To Last

>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.

In 1967, the rock & roll scene in London was scattering in several directions at once. The stars - the Who, the Stones, the Animals - could be found at clubs like the Marquee and the Bag O'Nails, often watching an expatriate American, a left-handed former paratrooper named Jimi Hendrix. But in a basement on Tottenham Court Road, in an Irish bar called the Blarney Club, some-thing else was happening. On weekends, the dingy space became the UFO Club, the focal point for an emerging psychedelic community, with all-night light shows and experimental-film screenings. A new band known as Pink Floyd had played the club's opening at the end of 1966, the first of their nine shows there. "Everything was accelerating that spring: new drugs, clothes, music and clubs," writes producer Joe Boyd--who ran the UFO Club--in his new memoir, White Bicycles. "The psychedelic underground and the pop scene were starting to overlap. . . . Everyone was high--on chemicals or adrenaline or both. You really did believe in that moment that moment that 'when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake.'''

London in 1967 witnessed the birth, of course, of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But it was also the year of The Who Sell Out, of Something Else by the Kinks, of "Sunshine of Your Love," Pink Floyd's first recordings and Hendrix's Are You Experienced? as well as Axis: Bold as Love.

Yet there were also ominous signs of the days that Eric Burdon of the Animals refers to as "the endarkenment." There was a series of rock-star drug busts, most notoriously the raid on Keith Richards' Redlands estate in February that resulted in the jailing of both Richards and Mick Jagger. And in August, while the Beatles were still soaring from the triumph of Sgt. Pepper, their manager, Brian Epstein, was found dead at his London home.

"Like any scene, it grew and grew until it reached a critical mass, which both made it big and destroyed it at the same time," says Boyd. "In the bull's-eye of culture, it's very hard to maintain stasis."

Andrew Loog Oldham, the former manager of the Rolling Stones, looks back on the time more harshly. "For many, 1967 marked the beginning of the Sixties, and for just as many the end," he says. "The psychedelic community was very suspicious of those who had been at the start of the game - everybody was just as self-serving, only a lot more stoned."

>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.