Given that Robyn Hitchcock hails from a day where content may not always match the label, his succinctness of title is here pitch perfect. 1967: Vacations in the Past is a set of songs, all of which came to fruition during the (first) summer of love. Hitchcock formulated the selection to bookend his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. The jacket copy states, “In January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for his green Dalek sponge and his family’s comforting au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he’s mutated into a 6 ft 2-inch rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really stoned and move to Nashville.”
Along the subsequent way, he has become an individual and idiosyncratic voice, as near instantly recognizable for his quirky worldview as for his never more English vocals, despite spending much of his career, and much his success, in the US. (And yes, he subsequently lives in East Nashville, answering on of his ambitions.) Starting off with college radio favorites, the Soft Boys, and then moving forward through and into Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, he now has a solo career, lasting throughout most of this century. He’s never shy of performing cover versions, especially in a live setting, complementing his own prodigious output. Why, not two weeks ago we were considering his Dylan set, Robyn Sings.
The joy of 1967 is that you don’t have to be familiar with Hitchcock’s memoir (although you might wish to be, I recommend it). It stands perfectly as a stand alone, a snapshot of what the 14 year old boy might have been daydreaming to, on the radio. And you don’t really have to have been there yourself either, the selection, by and large, tendis more toward the big hitters of the year, most of which left a long and illustrious footprint. But I bet you never heard ’em much like this!
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