Jean-Francois Bizot - 200 Trips from the Counterculture (Thames & Hudson)
By: Christiana Spens
Music and art books are like coffee and cigarettes: they go together. They're like gin and tonic, Jack Daniels and coke, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Music without all the paraphernalia of graphics and colour is like Dazed without Confused. They're like me without you. And you without me. It's like Rock without the Feedback. No, no, no, no, no.
I was feeling this vague sense of visual deprivation one day as I wandered around Fopp with the usual yearning for something new for my senses. I think they were playing Justin Timberlake at the time which only added to the feeling that something was missing from the ambience. There had to be more than this teasing ennui and deceptive provocation. There had to be different future love / sex sounds. I was having a jaded Strokes moment: Is this it?
But I already had that record.
That was when, caught in a faraway glance, I spotted a big fat book with sixties graphics and a picture of a girl sitting in the feathers of an emu, with blue stripes like sky in the background. Was I hallucinating? No, it was a real book.
I moved a little closer, like Alice in Wonderland with the bottle that says, "Drink Me," this book was saying, "Read Me. Now."
My mother had just given me some money to buy food, but this was more important. Because of the cellophane that covered the book, I couldn't flick through for a better look, so I just had to buy it straight and hope for the best. It was all getting a bit like a drug deal, only it didn't feel immoral and it wasn't going to kill me.
So I got back to the car and immediately tore off the cellophane and was not at all disappointed. Inside, as the title promised, were two hundred trips pulled from sixties underground press and counter-cultured illustrations of protest, provocation and pot. Articles exploring the mind-expanding properties of LSD and marijuana, not to mention an article in the Berkley Barb called, "Numb's the Word: Copping the Cocaine Horrors," with a big dark photograph of Freud, referring to his secret cocaine links. It reads, "On the third day we slept. Or at least part of us slept... It was not blood that moved the body, that kept the body in cosmic harmony, that burned the energy of time and space in explosions of omniscience. It was cocaine and all else seemed beside the point." Ooh, trippy.
It's a good book to buy if you kind of want to read a lot of things but know you won't finish anything, if you're feeling like a dilettante and the desire to let your eyes and mind wander, if in other words, you're a little attention-deficit today. Well you can't really get bored of this book. It's like reading a bunch of vintage zines from the time of peace and love, only all the pages are smooth and perfectly reproduced, and the pages won't disintegrate in your fingers. There are excerpts from the French zine "Actuel", The East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, and the San Fransisco Oracle (home of Ginsberg). If you listen to the Beatles and Eagles and Pink Floyd, then this is what they were reading, and writing, and where the dialogue took place. These are the magazines and articles that gave birth to the future generations of 'zines and then web 'zines such as Rockfeedback itself. "200 Trips from the Counterculture" is our genealogy.
Aside from druggy traipses and surrealist graphics, there are pictures of bats advertising the "Hookers' Ball", the chronicling of the little war between the punks and New Wave (sound familiar?) the first discussion about the greenhouse effect (in the sixties they were worried), the Black Civil Rights movement in the US, and even articles hand-written in French, if you're swayed in that direction. The graphics are incredible and altogether the book is endlessly entertaining and provocative. These are postcards from trips that inspired a generation of art, music and literature. They were the pages that illustrated Dylan, Woodstock and LSD.
"How to be a Magician in Your Spare Time," reads one page: well this book tells you how, and more importantly, it tells you why - why we have to keep writing these articles, singing these songs, flying the red flag and making love not war. We didn't eat that night, but it was worth it.
Artists in this article: Jean-Francois Bizot