The vegetables turned
Popular Music History April 7, 2010 Dale Carter
During 1967, the figure of the vegetable in songs by Brian Wilson (with lyricist Van Dyke Parks) and Syd Barrett illuminated aspects of psychedelic consciousness and the link between LSD and Anglo-American popular music. The vegetable also highlighted changes in the relationship between creative artists and the music industry in the mid-1960s. In retrospect, this figure cast into relief the counter-culture's utopian and dystopian dynamics as manifested in these songwriters' personal lives, now rendered as contemporary counter-cultural myth.