This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.
The San Francisco scene. Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History, written by a participant turned journalist, and the fullest single account of the neighbourhood’s rise and collapse. Joel Selvin, Summer of Love, the scene’s bands, ballrooms and business, reported at length. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (the contemporaneous account of Kesey, the Pranksters and the Acid Tests, to be read as the brilliant new journalism it is rather than as a transcript: Wolfe reconstructed scenes and interior states this book declines to). Bill Graham Presents, Bill Graham with Robert Greenfield, the promoter’s own oral-history memoir, interested testimony from the man with the ledgers.
London. Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, a founder of UFO remembering it with unusual scepticism about his own era’s mythology. Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971, oral history of the Free School, International Times and UFO circles, with all of oral history’s usual caveats. Nick Mason, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, the drummer’s account, drier and more reliable on money than most band memoirs.
The machines. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, the tape logs, session by session, and the nearest thing this era has to an invoice-grade source. Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Recording the Beatles, the definitive technical description of the Abbey Road equipment, staff structure and techniques in Movement Two. Geoff Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere, the engineer’s memoir, vivid and contested: several EMI colleagues have publicly disputed its distribution of credit, and it is used here for texture, not for arbitration. George Martin, All You Need Is Ears and his later accounts, the source for the Strawberry Fields Forever join and the salary history in the money movement.
Los Angeles and the Beach Boys. The session documentation assembled around the Pet Sounds and Smile reissues, including participant interviews in their accompanying notes. Brian Wilson’s two memoirs disagree with each other and the first was later disavowed by its subject; both are treated here as interested accounts, and the Smile chapter prefers the session records and the recollections of the musicians present.
Texas. Paul Drummond, Eye Mind, the standard history of the 13th Floor Elevators and International Artists, drawing on the surviving members’ testimony about the label arrangements described in the money movement.
The Grateful Dead’s books. Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip, the band’s authorised biographer, and the source for the Warner debt figures and the Lenny Hart embezzlement as this book gives them.
Hendrix. Charles R. Cross, Room Full of Mirrors, and the accounts of Electric Lady’s construction given over the years by its architect John Storyk and its engineers. Chas Chandler’s version of the early financing and his departure comes from his interviews; nobody else’s version fully agrees, which the text notes.
Festivals. Joel Makower, Woodstock: The Oral History, and the organisers’ own memoirs, interested accounts of a weekend everyone present has been re-narrating for fifty years. The Maysles brothers’ film Gimme Shelter is the primary document of Altamont, and the contemporaneous reporting in Rolling Stone remains the fullest account of that day and of Powder Ridge the following summer.
The press of the period. Rolling Stone from November 1967; International Times, the San Francisco Oracle and the underground papers; Billboard, Cash Box and Melody Maker for the trade’s view; the FM and format history in the trade press around the FCC non-duplication rule.
The business. The mechanics in Movement Four (recoupment, packaging deductions, the writer’s and publisher’s shares) are standard industry practice of the period, set out most clearly in Donald Passman’s All You Need to Know About the Music Business, which describes a later era; the specific figures in this book are the reported figures of the time and are flagged as such. Brian Southall and Rupert Perry, Northern Songs, the fullest account of the 1969 takeover. The Moby Grape and Jefferson Airplane litigation is a matter of court record, reported over decades in the trade and California press.
Where figures are disputed (Owsley’s production totals, every festival attendance number, the cost of Good Vibrations, the size of the era’s advances, who first said psychedelic rock, nearly everything about Smile) the text says so rather than choosing. This era’s testimony is uniquely unreliable, for reasons the corrections chapter sets out, and the disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.
