ABSTRACT
A science fiction novelist and founding member of the Underground Press Syndicate, Chester Anderson (1932-1991) was also an integral presence in the 1960s San Francisco countercultural scene. Anderson’s essays appeared in many places, including the San Francisco Oracle, whose twelve-issue run from 1966-1968 established the paper as the leading publication of the Haight-Ashbury District (the home of groups like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead). The descriptions he sets forth in his “Notes for the New Geology” are a far cry from what rock ’n’ roll had signified a mere decade before and hint at a broad generational shift. Anderson evokes a dizzying array of “principles” that situate rock as more than just music; it is a cultural, participatory phenomenon, intimately linked with psychedelic drugs, tribal rituals, and the “aesthetic of discovery.” Most of all he sees rock as the greatest realization of Marshall McLuhan’s 1960s media age, a synaesthetic technological experience that renders obsolete the “typeheads” (those still rooted in the power of “the word”) of an older era.1 Anderson also evokes what at first glance may seem to be an unusual comparison between rock and Baroque music. Yet as musicologist Richard Middleton has noted, there is a “high syntactic correlation” between rock and Baroque that does not apply as strongly to other historical art music periods.2 Both use rather formulaic and repetitive harmonic progressions, “strongly marked beats,” and fairly limited formal ideas. Procol Harum made this connection explicit in 1967 with their Top 10 hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which derived its harmonic and melodic material from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, “Sleepers Awake.”
