Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s [Paperback]

Nicholas Knowles Bromell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Back in the '60s, "there was something weirdly rigorous and instructive in the act of getting stoned and listening to music as if it mattered," Bromell opines. To support that assertion, he deconstructs the era's rock music, especially that of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix. Contemporary fans may be mystified by Bromell's discourse, but boomers, those veteran navel-gazers, will appreciate his parsing and peeling of the decade's ditties like so many glass onions, and much of his spiel will ring true to Woodstock Nation survivors. After all, what's hearing Hendrix without psychedelic experience? Bromell's excellent pop-cultural history also sounds a wake-up call for parents who experimented with psychedelics then but support zero tolerance now. The best discussion of '60s rock culture since Joel Selvin's Summer of Love (1994), it suffers only from shortchanging black '60s musicians other than Hendrix, such as George Clinton, the Temptations, and the Chambers and Isley Brothers, who will have to wait for another incisive '60s sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll tome to tell their stories. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"[A] short, passionate study written from inside the history it tells." - Greil Marcus, salon; "Music historians and social historians understate the interrelations among drugs, rock and roll, and the sixties, in part because most are thoroughly daunted by them as writers and thinkers. Nick Bromell renders them like he's been there and understands them like he's thought long and hard about them afterward. Tomorrow Never Knows reads like the best journalistic criticism both stylistically and interpretively - it's vivid, credible, and original." - Robert Christgau; "Tomorrow Never Knows brings us closer to the heart of what we call the sixties than any other book I know." - Jon Wiener, The Nation; "Bromell is aware of the underside of drug use, but he makes a convincing case that... the Sixties produced a way of seeing the world that succeeding generations can learn from." - Rolling Stone

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 234 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (April 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226075621
• ISBN-13: 978-0226075624
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #967,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Now I know how it felt, you know what I mean, December 16, 2000

By 

Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Hardcover)

I came across this book in the bookstore of the Student Union at my university, and I'm so glad I did. I have devoted a lot of time to the study of the music of the '60s, and I've learned a lot of facts of the times. However, I've always been lacking in the etiquette of that decade (i was born in 1980 about 7 months before Lennon was assassinated). Well, I have to say that this book has changed some of that. It gives such a rich feeling of what it was like to be a teenager in the 1960s in middle class white America. But the best factor about this book is that it lacks nostalgia--it isn't a happy-dappy weren't-the-old-days-grand portrait. What you get is a *feeling* of what it was like (as well as a lot of good and original analysis of the music of the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Band, and more). Now when I hear Dylan wailing, "How does it feeeel?" I can give a much better answer than I ever could have before reading this book.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Postmodernism Prevails, February 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Hardcover)

This book is extraordinary at capturing the issues of adolesence in America, and how this intrinsically marginalized group has braved the challenge of being both insiders (adults) and outsiders (kids) with the assistance of drugs and rock in roll. In many ways I think that we idealize the 60's for their rebelliousness, the freedom of the times. But freedom has a price as is revealed in Bromell's Chapter', Ëvil¨is ¨live Spelled Backwards.' To question society, to question oneself, and the system is disettling, it is dangerous, there are no answers and how does one deal with that reality? Bromell captures these contradictions and complexities in a postmodern interdisciplinary style that is frighteningly penetrating. I may not be a child of the sixties, but his writing is so profound I think that it exceeds the limits of time.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful writing and important contributions, October 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Hardcover)

Nick Bromell is a poet -essayist who has turned, over the the years, in a fermentation like that which creates fine wine, into a writer of society and history. Our society, our history as a people.

He was there in the national days of our youth, while the revolution churned and our own young hormones called out to the wind, in the 1960s. He was East Coast, I was West Coast, but we met somewhere in the middle of the world and I watched as he took in the cataclysmic world around us with a trenchant and absorbing point of view. We became friends.

In the intervening decades, he became a University professor and teacher of English in New England, and I moved out into the bitter deserts of the West to be a lawyer and legal historian. Over the years the warm grace and humor of his thinking still sometimes has called me like a literate breeze blowing through the traces of my memory; a cold and clear creek moving through dark sands toward a koranic garden hidden in my dusty, hardscabble feelings.

Now he has written a book about the sixties and their true legacy to us. Three things I must say. First, his writing continues to be beautiful, elegant and incisive. Second, he has made an important and rare contribution to the field of modern American studies. Third, his book is a valuable insight into one of the most important North American issues of our day. That insight is the genesis of the drug ethos in the rock-and-roll wing of the American counterculture -- of which millions of current social, business, and political American leaders were then part.

It is a book unlike so many others of the genre, one that looks freshly and unflinchingly at the facts and is brutal in its honesty about a side of life that was often an intrinsic part of growing up then, but often is a part of tragedy and tears now. There is so much that was and remains misunderstood about the movement of the sixties and seventies. I know only one other book by an actual participant of the time that attempts to be honest about what happened -- Emmett Grogan's Ringolevio. But that work was marred by obvious exaggeration and obscurantism, and it was not literary. Bromell's book is objective, clear, and balanced, and it should be read by everyone with an interest in where we were, and how we got here.