Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

First published inSounds, 21 May 1977

There is no need to ask where John Peel was in the summer of love. Anybody with enough brain-cells left to recall the era will know that it was Peel who provided the soundtrack. Peel’s programme “The Perfumed Garden”, broadcast on the pirate station Radio London, was the chrome-plated megaphone of destiny for the anthems, spaced-out idealism and trippy fantasies which were thrown hotch-potch into the melting pot of the “psychedelic revolution,” nourishing countless febrile, drug-addled imaginations in joss-stick fragranced bedsits and suburban bedrooms up and down the country.

Peel was well-qualified to be at the helm. As a disc-jockey at San Bernadino—a nerve-jarring 30-minute drive down the freeway from Los Angeles—he had been in at the ground floor of hippiedom. He had smoked exhilarating substances and incorporated the Doors, Love, and Paul Butterfield album cuts into his radio programme as one of the progenitors of what would come to be known as “FM Programming”; he had seen Capt. Beefheart at the Whiskey A Go Go, and sat in on the recording sessions for the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, and—true to the spirit of the times—he had eventually been forced to flee from California with the police on his tail as a result of allegedly having sexual relations with a girl under 18: an “offence” which counts as statutory rape.

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