Record Store Day 2017

Robyn Hitchcock at The Groove on Record Store Day, 4/22/2017

 Photo: Steve Cross

For a widely traveled musician who’s known equally well for intricate acoustic fingerpicking and for shouting “I wanna destroy you!” over screaming electric guitars — even one who’s adept at gathering insight on what squirms inside each of us — a memoir is an ambitious task. Robyn Hitchcock doubled down, emphasizing the profound role of music in his life with his book 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left and its companion album 1967: Vacations in the Past. The LP, which consists of 11 covers and one new original, is an ardent ode to the world of psychedelic sounds that shaped him as a teenager in the U.K., originally recorded by artists like The Small Faces, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks and (of course) The Beatles. The book is a work of beautifully organic prose explaining his life during the titular year, as the shyly precocious artist learned to grow into who he was to become. Beyond a cover album and an autobiography, it’s two different ways for Hitchcock to examine himself as well as an influential period for musical culture.