The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties

by James Riley

'A history that makes perfect sense when the sky is falling down.' - The Sunday Times

Beneath the psychedelic utopianism of the sixties lay a dark seam of apocalyptic thinking that seemed to rupture into violence and despair by 1969.

Literary and cultural historian James Riley descends into this underworld and traces the historical and conspiratorial threads connecting art, film, poetry, politics, murder and revolt. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Manson Family and Roman Polanski, ley-line hunters and Illuminati believers, Aldous Huxley, Joan Didion and the Beat poets, radical protest movements and occult groups all come together in Riley's gripping narrative.

Steeped in the hopes, dreams and anxieties of the late 1960s and early '70s, The Bad Trip tells the strange stories of some of the period's most compelling figures as they approached the end of an era and imagined new worlds ahead.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Drugs

402 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2019

Reviews

[Caroline Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this, but it suffers from major woman blindness.

Were the only two women who did anything in the 60s Joan Didion & Yoko Ono? It is perhaps partially that the subject matter was a time period when women were discrimated against and therefore minor in film writing/directing, art and novels, but while other parts of 60s protest like the civil rights and anti war movements are discussed, it is as if the women's movement didn't happen. There surely must be a woman that could get a mention in all the works about the 60s that were written or filmed after. He mentions quite a few very obscure to me novels by men, written post 1980 but set in the 60s, absolutely none by women.

[Dee Mcgee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Difficult read. Jumps from one thing to another and back again.

[James Bellorini · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb evocation of the darker closing years of the 60s and their impact in our historical appraisal of that period. Riley gives us a cast of some of the cultural, societal, and creative beings that populated that era. In doing so, he shows us how the hope and optimism of the mid-60s and the Summer of Love with its radical reappraisal is who we were and how we loved became mired in violence, anger, and dissolution. Despite its framing point being the horrific Tate-Labianca murders, this is not another expose of Manson and his Family, but an erudite and fascinating trek through why the dream of peace and love crumbled at the hands of humanity’s own lack of imagination, darker desires, and what seems to be an inevitable breakdown. But the book manages to remain hopeful that a few of the brighter threads of what were sown in those years are still playing out.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a textbook that reads like a road trip. A metanarrative that shows in really well researched detail that the late sixties was a time of intense experimentation. The rose spectacle tinted view we generally get of hippies and flower power is true but beneath that and running alongside of this narrative is the more interesting world inhabited by the likes of Kenneth Anger, Paul Whitehead and the darker musings of a cast of really interesting artists musicians, philosophers, film makers etc. This book presents the sixties as a darker place than you might think. However, what emerged and still has relevance, especially in today's climate of the rising far right, Trump and Brexit etc is worthy of re-examination. The book attempts to give new meaning to a decade crammed with new thinking and experiment and as such is a valuable text.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book’s title promises a sweeping cultural historical analysis of the dark side of the hippie counterculture, but delivers something too narrowly focused on Charles Manson and the family, Peter Whitehead, and LSD. I was hoping for something deeper and broader to answer my nagging question about what happened in 1968-69 to explain the appearance of Black Sabbath, and dark songs and music from Iggy Pop and the Stooges, The Beatles, The Who, Love, Neil Young, and even Donovan…
It wasn’t simply Vietnam, drugs, and crazy murderers.

[Will Ellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and colourful look at the counterculture of the sixties. The analysis of visual media and music from the time provides an interesting psychoanalytic lens with which to explore “the decade of the sixties”, particularly as a nostalgic concept that we have applied ex-post. My criticism lies in the fact that almost no women or queer people are discussed throughout the book, and though there does exist literature that discusses this, Riley’s review of the decade feels somewhat incomplete without it.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why do these images keep returning? If the late sixties continue to be linked on the one hand to groundless nostalgia and to terrible personal tragedy on the other, why do we keep on reviving them? In part, the answer lies in the mood of Fire in the Water and what Peter Whitehead realised, even as early as 1974: that the future projected by the decade was not going to arrive.

[Rob Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bringing together some familiar and some less familiar voices from the tail end of the 60s, Riley forges thrilling connections between events, films, ideas and people that ushered in the supposed end of counter-cultural dream of the long decade.

[Will Chittick]

Great roadmap to the moments that defined the end of the 60's