“Rock” has always been a pretty amorphous term. Take a gander at the Hot 100 singles from 1969, the very year of Woodstock. We know about “Sugar Sugar,” of course, but there are a LOT of songs on that list that can most charitably be described as “wussy.” For every straight-up rocker like “Honky Tonk Women” (#4, and I think we can all agree that if the Stones did it back then, it was by definition rock’n’roll), there’s one that … isn’t.
Tom Jones is great, I love his stuff, but he’s not going to melt your face with his guitar riffs, and he’s there at #8, right in front of “Build Me Up, Buttercup.” Which is one hell of a catchy tune, and compared to “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet” (#15) it’s practically Slayer, but rock it ain’t. Ray Stevens is at #61, for pete’s sake, with “Guitarzan.” If that hasn’t convinced you that The Sixties were nothing like they show in the movies (and that maybe the Viet Cong deserved to win), I don’t know what would.
Severian, “Entertainers (III): Hair Metal Attains Nirvana”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-08.
January 31, 2021
QotD: Sixties music wasn’t what you think it was
September 23, 2020
QotD: Don’t blame the Boomers for the “Summer of Love” … most of ’em were too young to participate
Now, I’m all for bashing the goddamn Boomers, but let’s be fair (since it matters for historical analysis). There’s a common misconception about the Baby Boom. Here, see if you can spot it:
Did you see it? Look closer, and you’ll see that while 1947(-ish) appears to be the peak year in terms of total births, the vast majority of what we call “Boomers” were born after 1950. Let’s do some simple math. The very oldest Boomers were born in 1946. The Summer of Love was 1967. Even if we assume the Summer of Love came out of nowhere — which is impossible, of course, any movement that large had antecedents going back years, probably decades, but let’s assume — that means that any “Boomers” participating were, at most, barely 22 years old. They were just barely 24 when Woodstock came around. Granted that the youngest are the dumbest, and thus can have outsize influence, they still can’t have been largely, let alone solely, responsible for the idiocy of the hippies.
That’s all on the older crowd, the so-called “Silent Generation” — the ones who were old enough to be aware of World War II, but unable to participate directly.
It’s easy to verify. The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the New Left, was penned by coddled college kids in 1962 — meaning, by kids born, at latest, in about 1942 (its principal author, Tom Hayden, was born in 1939). Here are the Chicago Seven and their dates of birth: Abbie Hoffman (1936), Jerry Rubin (1938), David Dellinger (1915!), Hayden, Rennie Davis (1941),John Froines (1939), and Lee Weiner (1939).
Hoffman, especially, bears scrutiny. Though he’s best remembered as a Yippie — that is, the founder of an ostentatiously youth-oriented movement — he was 31 at its founding. Don’t trust anyone over thirty, right?
1936 to 1946 is only a decade, but it’s crucial. A kid born in 1936 would have vivid memories of World War II and its immediate aftermath — fathers, uncles, and older brothers (and, in more than a few cases, aunts and older sisters) coming home from the service. A kid born in 1946 would have a completely different experience — ask any combat veteran about the first year or two back in the world, versus being home for a decade. Those guys — the kids who saw firsthand the angry young strangers they were supposed to call “Dad” — were the ones who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM), just as it was the almost-but-not-quite frontsoldaten who did the real damage in the Third Reich.
With me? Now hang on to your hats, because here’s where it gets pretty meta: It was the “Silent Generation,” not the Boomers, who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM). That is, the guys who juuuust missed the giant social upheaval that was World War II. The Boomers have done all the damage since The Sixties(TM).
That — The Sixties(TM), which is why I’m using that obnoxious (TM) — is the great social upheaval they juuuust missed. [These people] aren’t old fossils from the flower power years, though many of those fossils are still alive and kicking (including four of the Chicago Seven: Hayden, Davis, Froines, and Weiner). Has anyone heard from Billy Ayers lately? How about Noam Chomsky (born 1928)? I’m sure they have plenty to say … but nobody cares.
It’s not retreads from The Sixties(TM) out there doing this stuff. It’s the people who wish they’d been around for the Summer of Love that are doing it. It’s the people who just know they would’ve ended the Vietnam War, if only they hadn’t been in junior high at the time. This is their Woodstock, not least because they only heard about the original when they arrived for freshman orientation in 1976.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
August 24, 2016
QotD: The Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers
Looking back, I think my parents had more fun than I did.
That’s not how it was supposed to be. My parents belonged to the Greatest Generation; they grew up in hard times. My mom was born in Colorado in an actual sod hut, which is the kind of structure you see in old black-and-white photographs featuring poor, gaunt, prairie-dwelling people standing in front of what is either a small house or a large cow pie, staring grimly at the camera with the look of people who are thinking that their only hope of survival might be to eat the photographer. A sod hut is basically a house made out of compressed dirt. If you were to thoroughly vacuum one, it would cease to exist.
My mom, like my dad, and millions of other members of the Greatest Generation, had to contend with real adversity: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, hunger, poverty, disease, World War II, extremely low-fi 78 r.p.m. records and telephones that — incredible as it sounds today — could not even shoot video.
They managed to overcome those hardships and take America to unprecedented levels of productivity and power, which is why they truly are a great generation. But they aren’t generally considered to be a fun generation. That was supposed to be their children — my generation, the baby boomers.
We grew up in a far easier time, a time when sod was strictly for lawns. We came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, the era of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. We were cool, we were hip, we were groovy, man. We mocked the suit-wearing Establishment squares grubbing for money in their 9-to-5 jobs. We lived in communes. We went to Woodstock. We wore bell-bottom trousers, and we did not wear them ironically.
Dave Barry, “The Greatest (Party) Generation”, Wall Street Journal, 2015-02-26.
September 1, 2009
Woodstock: not so much remembered, as hallucinated
I wasn’t at Woodstock. I didn’t want to be at Woodstock. I wasn’t even consciously aware of Woodstock until long after it happened. I have my excuses: I was not quite nine years old at the time, for a start. I point this out not because of any wanna-be-boomer longings, but because Jon (my former virtual landlord) frequently accuses me of being a hippie, or at least wanting to be one.
P.J. O’Rourke, however, has a different excuse:
I was slightly disappointed to be missing Woodstock until the nightly news reported that it had turned into a catastrophic, drug-addled, rain-drenched disaster area lacking food, water, shelter, and Port-A-Potties. Then I was furious to be missing Woodstock.
What this says about 21-year-old boys I needn’t tell anyone who has been, dated, or raised one. Furthermore, Sunflower’s suicide attempt was the result of a fight with her mother about a department store charge plate bill for a $128 peasant blouse and had nothing to do with Sunflower’s desperate romantic feelings for me.
To top it off, a few years later I became a Republican.
What with one thing and another, I was always touchy on the subject of Woodstock. I’m over it now, thanks to various books celebrating the 40th anniversary of too many people in bad haircuts going to an upstate New York dairy farm for no good reason. I’ve counted three of these books so far. Since counting to three was as much as most Woodstock attendees could manage on goof butts and silly pills, three is where I stop.
This is actually from a review of three books about the Woodstock phenomenon (or cultural disaster, take your pick):
The Road to Woodstock is “by” Michael Lang, one of the two original promoters, “with” Holly George-Warren who is coeditor of The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and thus, presumably, knows the alphabet. I have no idea how much of the book Lang wrote, but he doesn’t seem to have read it. He is described therein by a pair of ex-business partners as having “a face that is, by turns, evil, wanton, fey, impish, and innocent.” This is more than I would let ex-business partners of mine say about me in my book.
And yet, if you reverse the order of the adjectives, you get the progress of the sixties, perfectly delineated.
It was not, by the way, a decade: The sixties were a strange episode of about 80 months’ duration that started when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia (roughly the 1966-67 school year) and came to a screeching halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began.
