1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

“A bright, nostalgic look at the exhilaration of 1967, this book—illustrated throughout with Hitchcock’s surreal sketches—will appeal to not only the author’s many fans but also anyone interested in the music and culture from the golden age of psychedelia. Wistfully reflective reading.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Memoirists rarely begin their work with a stroke of genuine inspiration, and Robyn Hitchcock’s ingenious idea to limit his account of his life to the titular year gives this sharp, funny, finely written book an unusually keen, wistful intensity without sacrificing its sense of the breathtaking sweep of time. I absolutely adored every line of 1967 and every moment I spent reading it.” —Michael Chabon, author of Telegraph Avenue

1967: HOW I GOT THERE AND WHY I NEVER LEFT explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive-compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen—just as Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes.

When he arrives in January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family’s loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he’s mutated into a 6’2? tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really high and fly to Nashville.

In between—as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside—Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester, threading a path through teachers with arrested development, some oafish peers, and a sullen old maid—a very English freak show. On the way he befriends a cadre of bat-winged teenage prodigies and meets their local guru, the young Brian Eno.

At the end of 1967, all the ingredients are in place that will make Robyn Hitchcock a songwriter for life. But then again, does 1967 ever really end?

Author Biography

Robyn Hitchcock is a rock ‘n’ roll surrealist. Born in London in 1953, he describes his songs as “pictures you can listen to.” As much a child of Dalí, de Chirico, and J.G. Ballard as of his 1960s musical heroes, he is a master of the absurd, reveling in the beauty of the unexpected. His first publicly visible band, the Soft Boys (1976-81), has remained an influential art-rock touchstone for generations of musicians. Hitchcock has floated at a tangent to the mainstream for nearly five decades, and his songs have been performed by R.E.M., the Replacements, Neko Case, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Lou Barlow, Grant-Lee Phillips, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead, among others. He came of age in the 1960s while he attended Winchester College, an eccentric boarding school in the south of England. This is the subject of 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, which is both a popular memoir and an album. Hitchcock splits his time between London and Nashville, TN, with his wife Emma Swift and two cats, Ringo and Tubby.