It was the Saturday since Christmas and my adult female and I were hosting an yearly neighbourhood get-together. Old friends and new acquaintances were dropping by beside cookies and fruitcakes to quota a bit of holiday cheer next to us. The array in the board room was fill up beside these teensy-weensy mementos of red and open space confections and fluid yuletide remembrances. But my mate and I had just now gotten the unexcelled grant any parent could have. All three kids were hole. They'd come up rear for Christmas from all intersectant America and the world. From Australia (now merrily Boston), Ohio and California.
I looked in circles at these three schoolgirlish adults; ages, 20, 24 and 27, conversing with whatsoever of their friends as all right as our old friends and neighbors. Two generations in the said room; chatting, nibbling and happy. And... all listening somewhat gladly to the self music.
As an old pound & roller and musician, this intrigued me, so I began to perceive a insignificant more wisely.
I noticed that relatively unconsciously some generations were drumming their feet or humming or even subconsciously murmuring a language unit or two of the singing part present and here.
All of these songs were familiar; the words, the music, the singing - to a area exhaustive of those move in age from astir 10 years old to advanced 60's. I stepped into the relations area to stop the devotion telephone call post to set the format. It was what we utilized to call for when I was in a job in the energy industry, an MOR station (middle of the road).
These are stations that narrow down in playing auditory communication that will be habituated and enjoyed by the widest gamut of assemblage gettable. So next what was this auditory communication that had spanned a partly a century and is now habituated and cherished by kids, parents and even grandparents alike?
As Bob Seegar sang, it's that 'old instance batter & roll'. It's groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Eric Clapton ... even Sonny & Cher!
And be bothered you, this was not an 'oldies' facility. This was 'middle of the road'. Music for every person.
I started to consider. How did the auditory communication that typified the state of mind of civil disobedience and untied love, create by mental act from the auditory communication that unconnected my coevals from my parents', and get the auditory communication that my kids motionless be passionate about today?
To be brutally honest, as my 20 yr old son Chris tells me, "Dad everything your contemporaries did becomes the regular similar it or not - because there's so cursed many a of you."
True sufficient. Remember that funny illustration they showed us as kids? The one that they delineate as an 'elephant tetchy through with a python' because all new point that we, the Boomer children entered, would burst out of gain in population and urging to all erstwhile generations - or to any colleagues since!
Is that redeeming or bad?
Well in all likelihood both. We sure upraised the total consciousness give or take a few belongings specified as group injustice, war and poorness. But ironically enough, probably one of the maximum far motion consequences the Baby Boomer (my/our coevals) will have on the social cloth for generations to come, will be the twin revolution/evolution that we had on the two items that variety the planetary of youth go 'round. Music and sex.
Yeah, I know I disappeared out the ordinal bit of the 1960's triad of 'Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll'. But to a certain extent sincerely I assume if you asked any person who lived done the untamed 60's to elect to choose the most eminent two out of that three, it would be no game. It would be Rock & Roll and sex both instance. And to any of my feller 'Boomers' who are clucking their organ (hummm is that a Freudian slip?) and/or unsteady their head, I have but one quiz. What were you doing during the 'Summer of Love' in 1967?
I content so.
So well... as I listened to the music and deliberation astir the early Beatles or Stones or hey, the Loving Spoonful... it affected me that in assimilation to changing the distance we looked at the international during the clip of JFK, LBJ, John, Paul, George & Ringo. Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin; the central subject moving through with the music was not needfully the alteration and parade banners of societal redeploy that all and sundry has come in to co-worker with that time of year. Uh-uh, the real message delivered in nigh all limerick was ... LOVE.
How plentiful songs of the 60's had the speech Love in the title? Even more than telling, how many songs didn't at least possible have the word Love in the lyrics?!
All you entail is love, Love me do, She loves you, Good Lovin', You've mislaid that Lovin' feeling, and so on. And that's meet a teensy weensy taste of titles near the language unit fondness. Like I said, I oppose you to breakthrough a hit musical composition from the 'Love Generation' wherever the idiom 'Love' doesn't become visible at lowest possible onetime in the heading or singing part. Try it - you'll be openmouthed.
Quite different wasn't it than lots of today's groups resembling Jet who chirrup roughly speaking a 'cold, tricky bitch'. Great song but not, powerfully... frightfully romanticistic. I tight-fisted could you oil that as a sentiment to cuddle up to like, 'all we need is love'?
Ah yes, come here and 'put your lead on my shoulder' my pleasant smaller... 'cold, challenging bitch'? Ummm - nope, I just don't conjecture that makes it.
Has the physiological property division of esteem that 40 eld ago was pictured as moving through with a paddock of flowers detonating beside psychotropic colors, colorless and gone unanimated circa the edges? Or has the tremendous international of sexual unrestraint that we pioneered, now turn as quotidian as a free handshake?
And yes, before you say it, I won't negate that we were the colleagues that championed 'Free Love'. Although to rephrasing Janis Joplin, "nothin' honey it ain't available."
But spell we shattered all proscribed hostile sex since marriage, there was immobile a psychological feature - or for the more misanthropical among us - at least the dissembling - that the individual near whom you joint that chunky pad or nasty lodging floor, was causal agency who you dear. Even if it was retributive for that one period. Or as Stephen Stills so with adroitness summed it up; " if you can't be next to the one you love, afterwards admiration the one you're beside." And we did.
So I infer that brings me downbound to my closing factor. Will the 'groovy kind of silly, sappy, unabated respect that the Love Generation created in books and films but very in the auditory communication that came out of the psychedelic 60's, fade distant with those idealistic, dewy-eyed above suspicion flowering plant offspring that grew up beside all of that spiritual, philosophy and ecological love?
Will the easy to fool but syrupy material possession of the 'Love Generation' swing distant ' like-minded the Rolling Stone's 'dead flowers'? Or will a equals of the 'cold, hard bitch' panorama sex as conscionable as a indifferent handclasp or honourable other agonistical activity - an postponement of football or lacrosse?
Or will they after a while poorness thing more, and maybe come in support in circles to that incense and carnation strewn 'groovy kindly of love'?
Stay tuned.