by Frank Randall

Some lifetimes are marked in music rather than time, where the pivotal moments are forever linked to a chance encounter with a particular song. The revelation of hearing Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis on the same cassette copy of Dick Clark 20 Years of Rock and Roll. The summer you spent your birthday card cash on a cutout bin copy of Let It Be, reckoning with the meaning of “A New Phase Beatles Album.” The pressure-packed week your older sister’s boyfriend loaned you both Bridge of Sighs and Are You Experienced and asked you to choose between Trower or Hendrix—because clearly, your answer would reveal the essence of your being.

My senior year in college, I wrangled a part-time gig at the town’s only record store, and the various employees (mostly other students) would take turns providing the soundtrack to our shifts. One employee had a record so rare the store had no copies for sale. It was a far-flung import that had somehow made its way to our shores, and on a good day, she would bring it to work to play. This was a mostly acoustic, introspective music, not quite belonging to any one genre; it used a language unlike any I had heard before, with lyrics sung in a British accent that cut new paths through the sonic landscape. It sounded like it was recorded behind the singer’s bedroom door, where I did my own hopeful strumming. Personal and peculiar—and absolutely essential—it was I Often Dream of Trains by English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. I begged my coworker to let me borrow it for a weekend so I could make my own cassette copy. She agreed, but only after I swore an oath to let no harm come to this precious musical testament.

Nearly forty years and many acclaimed albums, paintings, films, videos, stage digressions, liner notes, and comic strips later, Hitchcock has pulled a marvelous and relentlessly inventive memoir from his creative well. 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, focuses on the unforgettable moment in time when the latest release from the Beatles was the most important thing on earth—next to, of course, the latest release from the keeper of the keys to the universe, Bob Dylan. For an impressionable young person, new music had meaning like never before, and it was changing at an unfathomable, exhilarating speed. As Hitchcock recalls about first hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever”: “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.”

Hitchcock’s journey begins in pre-revolutionary fashion with him passing his teenage Sundays in the family driveway, wheeling a transistor radio around in his little sister’s doll carriage and listening to the latest hits on BBC’s Pick of the Pops. His move from a reasonably normal family home to the private Winchester College boarding school proves as unsettling as one might imagine for a boy of thirteen, but it’s a timely immersion into a new universe for a young introvert ready to embrace new sounds.

Limiting his coming-of-age story to a single year could have produced unreasonably narrow results, but Hitchcock uses this focus to his benefit, introducing us to the academic tradition and psychedelic ether in which his personality coalesced. His observations of key moments are alternatingly transportive (“Incense caresses the air, while John Coltrane’ s saxophone plays from one speaker and Hendrix’s guitar from another”), moving (“Occasionally, I still destroy my favorite things . . . and I still don’t know why”) and revelatory (“And I will become a songwriter. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ hooks me, ‘Desolation Row’ pulls me in, and ‘Visions of Johanna’ . . . more subtle, more engulfing: it becomes me.”).

By late spring, the Holy Grail of Highway 61 Revisited gives way to the long-awaited arrival of the Beatles’ most secretive recordings to date, the era-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hitchcock’s crooked path through boarding school involves the influence of unforgettable schoolmates and tragicomic staffers, unexpected encounters with groundbreaking musician and producer Brian Eno and dream cameos by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and other colorful icons. As in his songs, he makes room for fictional sojourns, where the rules of strict biography are gleefully abandoned in favor of dream play and teenage fantasy—a fitting device to convey the convergence and emergence of young lives in 1967.

Like the best of creative memoirs, Hitchcock’s account helps describe how the simple and strange events in a young life turn out to become culture itself, seeding the history we all assume occurred without the assistance of countless anonymous players. For instance, despite having encountered dozens of references to the notorious Boxing Day broadcast of the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour, here we finally have an eyewitness account that it wasn’t that bad a show after all.

We certainly don’t need a book from every musician wrestling with their status as a “cult artist,” but Hitchcock’s expansive coming-of-age tale effectively combines the intangible magic of the 1960s with actual events that help illuminate his work. For example, Hitchcock has always made room for vividly drawn water creatures in his songs, so to learn that his childhood home had a river running adjacent helps explain the frequent presence of these animals in his lyrics; why not make a song about your pet crayfish? Or the druids that you know dance among the ancient circle of trees on the hill overlooking your school? Or the UFOs that have collected your schoolmate along with his cheese? (Spoiler alert: This last was only a temporary and relatively harmless abduction.)

While often (and fairly) categorized as psychedelia-inspired, Hitchcock’s songs have never been limited to a particular genre. They careen from topical to romantic to surreal, and his knack for inviting absurd characters and fantastic situations into his music is on full display in 1967 as well. His inventive stage banter, rich with humor and showcasing his unique talent for the well-placed non-sequitur, has made his storytelling as delightful as his music over the years, and here it makes a seamless transition to the written page. Like any performer worth his salt, Hitchcock leaves us wanting more when he finally exits the stage of this memoir. He takes care not to burden us with unnecessary verses, nor does he commit the mortal sin of repeating the bridge, closing his micro-history with a strong chorus and tidy epilogue. The appreciative audience sends him off with well-deserved applause, lighters raised, hoping for an encore.

1967 is one of the epochal years that make us who we are, responsible for countless ripples of influence across culture. There are other such years, of course: Some musicians might need to write a book about 1976 with New York City as the setting, or coming of age in Minneapolis in 1984. But Hitchcock is a proud flag-bearer of 1967, revealing that annum to be as unrepeatable and unique as the author himself. In 1967, Hitchcock deftly captures the mercurial spirit of the time, and his luminous prose shows he’s not only a singular maker of music, but has been a secret writer of books all along.