Vinyl Relics: If Only For A Moment by Blossom Toes
- Farmer John
The Trip and the High-Water Mark of ‘67
The Trip and the High-Water Mark of ‘67
The Trip
Directed by Roger Corman, 1967
The year 1967 has always fascinated me; it was a moment of creative explosion. It saw the release of era defining music such as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Surrealistic Pillow and self-titled album by The Doors, music that has shaped my worldview. It was the year of the “Summer of Love,” a cultural moment where, in the midst of the most turbulent decade of the 20th century, there was an idealistic sense that peace, love and mind- expanding drugs could provide a beacon of hope, guiding society towards a more enlightened existence.
In his groundbreaking 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, author Hunter S. Thompson compared this moment in time to “riding the crest of a beautiful wave” (Thompson: 1971: p68). Music journalist Danny Goldberg called it “the lost chord,” a counterculture ideal that “lasted briefly but penetrated deeply into the minds and hearts of those who could hear it” (Goldberg: 2017: p14), believing that this particular year could only be understood through disparate, contradictory narratives that harmonised at a single moment.
One of these lesser known narratives from 1967 is The Trip, a film that perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist of this time. The film begins with its protagonist Paul Groves (played by Peter Fonda), a television commercial director, visiting his friend John to be guided through his first LSD trip. The Trip aims to capture the sense of a single hallucinatory experience, fluctuating between gothic horror, absurdist comedy and psychedelic sexploitation, whilst attempting to be sincere with its subject matter. What makes the film unique, in comparison with other films exploring this theme, is the way it favours capturing the sensory experience over linear narrative, and does not judge or punish the characters for participating in this activity.
The character of John (played by Bruce Dern) is clearly inspired by countercultural icon Timothy Leary. During the film, John attempts to document Paul’s experience, much like Aldous Huxley’s proto-psychedelic text The Doors of Perception (1954), or Leary’s own The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964). This fictionalised version of Leary is not depicted as a cult leader as in the film The Love- Ins (1967), but as a social scientist, which feels subtly radical for its time. The film’s director, Roger Corman, read Leary’s work and took the drug prior to filming. He described this experience in detail:
“I came up with an interesting concept while I was lying on the ground. I believed that simply touching the ground you could create art in your mind and it would be transferred to the mind of anyone who was touching the earth anywhere in the world. You could have an audience larger than a television audience.” (Corman, cited by McGee: 1988: p63).
American International Pictures
This envisioning of mass media points to a clear comparison between the character of Paul and Corman himself. Often accused of being an overtly commercial director, Corman made the protagonist a director of commercials. Both Paul and Corman’s frustration at the commerciality of their work is represented in a hallucination scene where Paul sits in an electric chair while being interrogated by Max (played by Dennis Hopper). Max asks Paul “What is the first word that comes into your mind about TV commercials?” and a voice can be heard responding “Lies.”
The film recycles visual motifs from Corman’s film adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe, validating the Paul- Corman connection, as the character’s visions are a distorted reflection of the filmmaker’s previous work (Morris: 1985: p73). Interestingly, this film was written by actor Jack Nicholson who would go on to write Head (1968), a subversive, psychedelic film where pop band The Monkees deconstruct and critique their own place in popular culture, stating they are “a manufactured image with no philosophies”. Only one year after The Trip, it was clear that hippy culture had been appropriated by corporate America, its aesthetics becoming “symbols which soon became overused, distorted, co-opted, and thus, understandably, satirized” (Goldberg: 2017: p.7). Commerciality as a byproduct of a society that the counterculture was trying to change, a theme explored further in Michelangelo Antonioni’s underrated Zabriskie Point (1970).
American International Pictures
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper would go on to make Easy Rider (1969), a far better known film than The Trip, but has none of the idealism of 1967, not Golberg’s “lost chord” but the last chord. A bittersweet end of a moment, the final line “We blew it” summing up a generation made cynical by the ongoing war in Vietnam, the assassination of various political leaders and the slow realisation that peace, love and mind- expanding drugs might not be able to save a society that lacked a sense of direction or purpose. Hunter S. Thompson called 1967 “the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back” (Thompson: 1971: p68).
his is what The Trip represents for me, the high water mark, a time capsule of a very specific idealistic moment, that could not have been created a year before or a year after. In Steven Soderbergh’s film The Limey (1999) Peter Fonda plays ageing record producer Terry Valentine, a speculative future version of Paul Groves, that perfectly summarises this:
“Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up. When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the sixties. No. It wasn’t that either. It was just ’66 and early ’67. That’s all there was.”
– Dominic Pillai
American International Pictures
References:
Goldberg, Danny, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, Akashic Books, first edition, 2017
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, Chatto & Windus, first edition, 1954
Leary, Timothy, Metzner, Ralph & Alpert, Richard, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, University Books, first edition, 1964
McGee, Mark Thomas, Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts, Mcfarland & Company Inc, first edition, 1988
Morris, Gary, Roger Corman, Twayne Publishers, first edition, 1985
Thompson, Hunter S, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Random House, first edition, 1971
Films:
The Trip, 1967, Dir: Roger Corman
The Love-Ins, 1967, Dir: Arthur Dreifuss
Head, 1968, Dir: Bob Rafelson
Easy Rider, 1969, Dir: Dennis Hopper
Zabriskie Point, 1970, Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni
The Limey, 1999, Dir: Steven Soderbergh
Dominic Pillai is a writer, filmmaker, sound artist and art curator. His work has been showcased at Cannes Film Festival, Tate Liverpool and BBC 6 Music. Trained as a visual anthropologist, Dominic is interested in exploring the arts from a cultural lens.
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