“The Man can’t bust our music,” an advertisement in the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb proclaimed, in November, 1968. The accompanying image showed seven presumed radicals huddled in a jail cell. “The Establishment’s against adventure,” the text continued. “And the arousing experience that comes with listening to today’s music.” The advertiser was Columbia Records, and, surprisingly, its attempt to cash in on the youth movement hinged on selling not “The White Album” or “Electric Ladyland” but experimental classical fare, such as Charles Ives’s “Concord” Sonata, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Mikrophonies,” and an album titled “In C,” by a then unknown figure named Terry Riley. “They’re ear stretching,” the ad copy enthused. “And The Man can’t stop you from listening.”

The counterculture

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