Autobiography pt. 1 - 1949 - 1963

My Musical Life In the Twentieth Century 

1949 - 1969

I    

Live your life, 

Do your time. 

Make corrections.  

Do your time, 

Learn your mind,

Earn your wings

Do the time. 

Make Connections.  

 

I grew up when alienation was it.

No one talked about it. 

No one explained.  

Loose lips sank ships. 

You're too young to understand. 

You're a kid.  Act your age.  Grow up!

  

Age of Anxiety. 

Brando screaming Stellahhh...  

James Dean sucking his thumb 

and crying in the gutter. 

Elvis' shakin' his hips

but only from the waist up.   

Nothing  made sense. 

Nobody connected.  

Everyone was moving.  

Moving away or here or there.  

Fathers and mothers, 

white survivors of WWII.

Few knew how to be real. 

Few knew really what it was. 

What truth looked like on a face.

How it sounded in a voice.  

It was all an act.

Manners.

How it's supposed to be.

How it is.

Do what you're told.

 

Cement sidewalks, 

asphalt streets.

The watered lawn,

the half dead tree.

 

Grandma was for real, 

hugs and laughs and kisses and cookies, 

Saturday Evening Post

on the table by her red leather chair. 

 

From the other side it was do 

what you're supposed to do.

Do what you're told.  

 

Go to church.  

Go to school. 

Do your homework. 

Keep your mouth shut. 

 

    "There are things we're not meant to understand." 

        If the Lord had meant us to….. 

 

Books and TV gave them instructions 

    too impossible or stupid to be ignored.  

So they did what they were told, or tried to….  

    and were blankly disconnected,

even as they blankly smiled and said,

    "We're doing very well!"

  

 There was the Old, 

    there was the New.  

Both were different, 

    not like in the past.

 

    They hadn't all been hypnotized,

           disconnected, didn't know it.   

 

II - Old New  

Inside the oldest neighborhoods 

the newest seeds were sprouting, 

inside the old Victorians 

was chaos quickly spreading 

like urine on a hardwood floor.  

 

Before I walked, I heard a Voice,

in my head, it said,

"...the old was safe, the new is now!"

 

At the grandparents house  

flowed a wide shady street 

with four story trees, 

more shadow than light streaming in 

through the boughs of summer.

 

In the backyard, it was Hoola Hoops, 

Barbi Dolls, Fanner Fifties, TV

Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, 

Our Miss Brooks, Liberace

Coonskin Caps, Paladin, Matt Dillon, 

American Bandstand, 45s and  

Lp records. Rock 'n Roll.

 

III - New!

Forty years before the 1960s, the post-WWI United States was introduced to the seductions of the underworld through the scam of Prohibition, that well-intentioned, strangely malevolent period which turned many young urban Americans into naive law breakers.  The battle against alcohol had been going on since the 1870s.  By the 1910s organized crime was big enough that it could buy politicians the way plutocrats and bankers had been buying them since before the Civil War.  Knowing that women, especially those in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, would support it, the 18th amendment and the Volstead Act were used by cynical politicians to help organized crime spread into every city in America.  

Even though the nation, to this day, has not recovered from the corrupting tendencies of prohibition, whether alcohol or cannabis, it actually did some cultural good by introducing a new generation of young urban people to the speakeasy, the first time women and men could together throw off Victorian repressions by drinking, smoking, dancing, jazz, and fornication.  Prior to this, bars were a males only bastion, prostitutes excepted.  The speakeasy allowed white people to listen and dance to black music, which got the attention of the morals police, and started the trend toward cultural repression that characterized each decade up to the 1960s.  

Victorian moralism confronted the youthful sexuality and hyperbolic energy of the Jazz age.  A new generation of ethnic Americans, children of immigrants and slaves, intent on proving themselves as American as the cowboy or the millionaire, succeeded in creating the most powerful images and sounds that had ever been put on American culture.  People like the Gershwins, Louis Armstrong, Chaplin, Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Bessie Smith, Fanny Brice, Josephine Baker, Jerome Kern, Rogers and Hart, William S. Hart, Cole Porter, Babe Ruth, Lindbergh, Al Jolson, Al Capone, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas, Betty Boop, Mary Pickford, Sophie Tucker, Pablo Picasso, Disney, DeMille, Valentino, Ma Rainey, Alfred North Whitehead, Freud, Einstein, Edward Bernays, Ravel, Copland, Toscanini, W.E.B. DuBois, Lon Chaney, Klu Klux Klan, Lenin, Mussolini, and Molly Bloom, all played a role in making the 1920s one of the most lurid and intoxicating decades in history.  

In that period, New York found its cultural voice, and the national focus went from Huck-Finn/country to Great Gatsby/city, the Future Primitive Society, with an iconic bible of images that forever elevated it into a stratospheric urban messianism in which anything seemed possible, both good and bad, and all of it subject to the shifting sands of the "marketplace," the great lie monopoly capitalism used as a form of social hypnosis.  In the 1920's, America chose to see the pursuit of money and the pursuit of happiness as one and the same.   

The Jazz Age was made possible by the phonograph and Louis Armstrong, by prohibition, motion pictures and the automobile, by machine guns and bad booze. Armstrong’s voice was natural, the opposite of the stiff, stagey operatic model which still dominated popular singing styles.  It was a voice of gravel and wind, uniquely modern in its phrasing, so perfectly syncopated it answered the operatic tradition with blues, the sound of the earth, the blowing trumpet, the angel at St. Peters’ Gate, the eruption of volcanic fire heralding a new century.  Above all, it was the sound of truth, of deep connection to the unseen, therefore mysteriously fresh and eternally modern.  

The goal of the age was to create as wide a schism between the repressive mindset of racist 19th century Victorianism and the scientifically confident, shimmying, sexy, new and young Modern Age, where "rational" engagement with the facts of life, as opposed to superstitions and religion, would "insure stability and prosperity."  The art of cabaret was reinvented as a noir bacchanal, an underground celebration of life as alcoholic drug induced blackout.  The law was... whatever you could get away with.  The only real law seemed to be the gun, or the bribe.  One might as well enjoy it while it lasted.   

It was in this decade that key 20th century character personae were developed.  The American hero, the man with the gun, the guy who could hold his liquor and still shoot straight, whether gangster or cowboy, knight or soldier, hero or anti-hero - the dominant male archetype of the era. Countering it was Chaplin’s Little Tramp, the greatest comic spell breaker of all time.  In the face of the grim realities of modern life, Chaplin taught the world to laugh.  He was always the outsider, the tramp, the everyman figure, a character that was almost prophetic in creating the image of the hobo, the traveling man.  The road was his home but the silver screen was his hideout.  

Female stars became goddess archetypes.  The vamp, the innocent young girl, the sexual gravitas of a Garbo, or the exotic proto-hippie Isadora Duncan, all redefined the image of what a woman could be, but always within the confines of male supremacy.  The movies expanded the range of what average people dreamed they could aspire to.  Film became the greatest exponent of mass cultural hypnosis possibly since the pyramids of Egypt.  Some of it was good, most was bad.  But it was a way of unifying the nation by offering up the most charismatic personae ever seen, the movie star, every one of whom inspired all citizens to be more "American."     

Nothing breaks the back of fear like humor.  Entertainment made a life of drudgery and heavy lifting a little more tolerable. The music, often untutored, ethnically diverse, full of energy and youthful sentiment, poured forth unquenchable happiness and desire,  Even in sadness it was happy.   

Issues that confronted the century: race, class, sexuality, all crystalized in this decade, giving the age a reputation for rampant exhibitionism and terrifying repression. But in the media it was novelty first, last, and always; the Shock of the New, as it was famously called.  It was the great age of the newspaper, the magazine, and the birth of the newsreel, and whatever got people to buy was what was pushed. Excess was both desired and feared, and fear, desire and money are the salt/sugar/fat of capitalism.  From the 1920s through the 1960s the idea of the "New" was the dominant cultural umbrella.  If it wasn't new, it wouldn't do.      

In the 1920s the United States was in a new phase of its eternal adolescence, wowing itself with chronic novelty while being amazed, amused, and horrified at what it saw.  It elevated sports to the level of religion, while its worship of the automobile would guarantee a society in which speed, convenience, and style were prime operating principles.  Into this decade were born Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady, who, along with their older compatriots, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti would influence the cultural life of the second half of the twentieth century.  

The Beat movement of the 1950s, was nothing less than an attempt to create a more mature compassionate consciousness for young people, in opposition to the hypnosis of popular commercial culture, which ignored anything controversial or significant.  It was about young white people getting closer to the feel, the reality and rhythms of black culture, jazz, and cannabis.  In this, was a revolution as powerful as any street protest movement, because it literally blended the races, culturally and genetically.  

 

IV - Beat! 1949 - 1959

By the mid-Fifties, half of America had sunk into a deep messianic delusion, a narcissistic hypnosis, a recalibration of the same old right wing nationalist, racist, cultural repression, made to look modern.  Good white families supposedly lived in the suburbs, the father working a 9 to 5 job while the mother was a homemaker.  The children were supposedly cooperative, happy and well behaved.  Through men like Billy Graham and Walt Disney, peace, prosperity, and trust in authority became the guiding principles of social stability, while around the world the CIA "protected" American business and strategic interests with coups, wars, and assassinations.  Television gave the American Dream of peace and prosperity through happiness and shopping a mythic potency that seemed to be real for many white middle class families. It was a principle propaganda tool to prove that the American way of life was superior to the Soviet or any other model.  

Meanwhile, the creative subversives who were making movies and music for teenagers offered up iconic sex objects such as James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Bridgette Bardot to stand for the newly coined "teenage" demographic.  Presley and the early Rock ‘n Rollers appealed to younger teenagers with rebellious fantasies, while Kerouac and Ginsberg’s Beatnik image appealed to college aged twenty somethings with advanced rebellious fantasies.  Add to that the enormous creativity of black artists like Ray Charles, Sam Cook, and Nat Cole, who had defined "hipness" from the beginning, it was obvious, from the outside, that American culture was bursting with vitality and fresh creativity.  To a lot of American teenagers, however, it seemed repressive and restrictive.  To people of color it was an existential struggle for basic human rights.  Out of the Fifties and Sixties would come the new archetypes that would shape cultural evolution for the rest of the Twentieth Century. 

As the '50s turned into the '60s the second revolution in technology since the 1920s was making itself felt.  In the music business the invention of the LP record in 1948 turned into the stereo LP of the early 1960s.  There had never been as much access to different types of music.  The rise of small record companies, gave the big companies, Columbia, RCA, Decca, "farm teams" to recruit new talent deserving of national distribution. This is what happened with Elvis Presley and Sun records when RCA bought Presley's contract in late 1955.  It was an age where music, the LP record, was new, and musical style didn't matter to AM radio as much as hit singles.     

Suburban California 1950s  

The suburbs of San Jose, California, I where I spent the first eight years of my life, could have been any suburb in America. There was nothing about it to distinguish it from any other, except its location, sixty miles south of San Francisco.  It was made of small, quickly constructed homes put up before or during the War.  Everyone who bought homes in the neighborhood were typical representatives of their generation.  My father had been an officer in the Navy during the War, running a motor pool in Panama.  My mother worked in a cannery while she went to college.  They met at local church in 1946, dated for a year and got married.   They were both college graduates, teachers, until my Dad realized he couldn’t make a living on a teacher’s salary, so he went into business for himself, starting a small forge shop with his father and some friends.  I was born on Sunday, October 23, 1949.  

Most of the family comedies on TV were located in comfortable suburbs or small towns, where everything was clean and white, and everyone was “normal.” The street I grew up on was a working class version of the Ozzie and Harriet tv show.  One of the characteristics of early suburbia was the attempt to create a community feeling by giving the neighborhoods tight two lane streets, narrower than the larger four lane thoroughfares which bordered each neighborhood.  This slowed traffic and made the house across the street seem closer.  It was great for kids, and the one element common to all such neighborhoods in the 1950’s was an abundance of children.  There were kids everywhere, too many for the school systems.  The lady next door had a daycare center in her home.  There was another one up the block. There were always 15 to 25 kids playing in her backyard, waiting for their parents to pick them up.  The houses were fairly small, with uniform lawns and a remnant of large shady walnut trees.  A lot of mothers worked.   

Everyone I went to school with seemed to be in the same economic bracket, although I was too young to know anything about economic class or race. Later I found out that there were a lot of different economic brackets going on, only everyone was trying their best to look middle class. There were no black families, only one Mexican family up the block. When the lady across the street got the first TV with a “big” 15 inch screen, we all were invited to her house to watch the Mickey Mouse Club.  And when we all watched it together, we became the kids on the TV.  We were not just like them, we turned into them, and thought everyone in the world was the same as us.  When they waved good-bye at the show's end, we all waved back, and sang along to the song, as if we were all in a live theater.  In the television living room we were all Mouseketeers together. There was no difference. We were all part of one big happy neighborhood of white working class people who wanted to be middle class.  It was the most powerful hypnosis I ever experienced in my young life. I think I was five or six years old.   

I assumed things were fine, because that's what my parents and everyone else told me. Everything was always "just fine," except for my nose bleeds, chronic twitching and blinking, stiff necks, nightmares, probably as a result of the polio that paralyzed my mother from the neck down when I was two and my sister was six months old.  After an absence of a year, my mother recovered everything but the use of her legs.  She was disabled for the rest of her life, either a wheelchair or crutches.  My sister and I were also disabled, in a way, from a years absence from our mother.  

I learned later I had a mild case of Tourettes syndrome (who knows what it was really) which caused chronic involuntary twitching.  I also had a tendency to disassociate from reality and go into my own world, hearing the Voice in my head.  This was a voice of someone very old, but it was also me.  I never experienced it as "God" or anything like that, only as myself very ancient and wise. It didn't tell me things as much as gave me permission to trust its direction.  I then started to think things out for myself.  I began to have conversations with myself.  Later, when I got hooked on music everything changed again.  I developed radio brain (hearing music all the time in my mind) from the age of five or six.  It has been a chronic condition ever since.  I assumed that was normal too. 

There’s never anything “normal” about anyone.  

WWII Generation Fathers  

Cub Scout assemblies were held for the parents in the grammar school cafeteria. I remember it being very well attended and I remember all the fathers taking it very seriously.  My Dad complained that the adults wanted to run the show too much.  He thought it was like the military, and didn’t like the hyper-authoritarian management style of the parents of his generation.   I was lucky enough to have a father who, though he was tough (a college boxer), had a childhood running free in the forests of Mt. Shasta.  He thought kids should be left to play without adults supervising everything they did.  My experience in Cub Scouts lasted about six weeks.

World War II fathers were mostly well meaning but it seemed like a lot of them had practically been raised by the military.  Certainly for some of them, the military was as close to family as they ever got.  It made a lot of them highly intolerant of anyone who acted or looked different.  Teenagers were the most difficult group for these WWII guys, especially the teenage hipsters and rock ‘n rollers.  I remember watching one guy screech his car to a stop in front of his own house as he was pulling out of his driveway.  He jumped out with a tire iron and chased off a couple of teenage Gene Vincent wannabes who were laying around on his front lawn smoking cigarettes.  If they hadn’t run away he would have beat them senseless.  

This is how some of the WWII guys were.  They were privately violent. They were tough guys.  Some were nice enough, but some were wound up tight.  They meant business and never apologized. It was like living in a world where every dad was a cop.  And, because they were ex-WWII vets, I assumed that they liked living in houses that were all lined up.  Cookie cutter houses in lines, the suburbs. A place defined by the boredom it induced. Without pharma drugs and booze, it can drive a natural person insane. 

Musical Discoveries 1952 - 1959 

I had a little 45 rpm record player from the age of 12 months.  My mother taught me how to put records on the turntable, so I could listen to what I liked.  I remember the song Little Toot was a favorite.  When I was four my parents got a television set.  A little thing, maybe twelve inches square.  One night I heard a sound that gave me chills.  It was music playing on the new TV.  I got up and snuck down the hall to hear it better.  My mom saw me, and told me to go back to bed.  When I begged to hear it my Dad picked me up and carried me back to my room, even gave me a spanking.  I got upset and cried, and it must have made an impression.  A few months later my folks got a piano. 

I couldn’t get the music I’d heard that night out of my head.  I found out later they were watching the “George Gershwin Story” and it was Rhapsody In Blue that had given me chills.  I fell in love with music. I loved everything I heard, was amazed and fascinated by it.  

There was not much music in the house because my mother was a reader and liked it quiet.  I first heard rock ‘n roll at my grandmother’s house.  Grandma was a happy, funny woman who loved kids.  She was always making cookies, watching late afternoon television, and laughing.  A sweet sense of humor.  In 1957, I walked into the living room, and she and my cousin were watching American Bandstand.  They were playing “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.  Then Dick Clark announced a new song by Little Richard.  “Keep a Knocking but you Can’t Come In.” It made me laugh.  I loved the sound. I was instantly hooked. 

My mother had been reading about how rock ‘n roll was a bad influence, and she decided it was too lowbrow.  She told us she wouldn’t allow “jungle music” in the house.  It worked out for the best.  Nothing creates desire like deprivation. 

When I was seven I started taking violin lessons in school.  I loved the smell of resin, but that’s about it.  I could never get use to the sound, or the way you had to hold the thing.  It gave me a stiff neck.  But I did like the piano.  At the end of the school year I gave up violin and asked for piano lessons.  My sister was taking piano, so we had to share the instrument.  It worked for a couple of years, but by the time I was eleven I was dominating the piano time.  My poor sister finally gave up because I wouldn’t get off. 

I got hooked on music.  I got so obsessed it dominated my imagination.  By the time I was thirteen I was practicing piano three hours a day, five days a week and five hours a day on weekends.  The only books I read were on music history.  Music history led me into an interest in general history.  From there I got interested in exploring literature and art, but always through the lens of music.  

I turned ten in 1959, and we moved across town to a newer, middle class suburban neighborhood.  Big ranch style homes, wider streets, longer blocks.  The place was typical of Bay Area California suburbs of the era.  The development had been a cherry orchard owned by a Japanese family.  We moved in as the development was being built.  Our house was next to the developer's place on the corner; ours was the model show house, so it was finished first.  I remember playing war with a couple of friends in the uprooted cherry trees all bulldozed into big piles.  For that first summer, it was like being on the edge of something wild.  At least there was real dirt and a little bit of the untamed.  That lasted through the summer, until school started.  Then the fence went up.  My folks put in a swimming pool.  The back yard was now just another California suburban vision of idyllic blandness.  No nature, just chlorine rich, clear water.  

 

V - Now! 1959 - 1962

The ‘60s would prove itself a decade of unchecked suburban development for California.  From farmland and orchard, to lawn and pavement and sidewalks in just a few years.  San Jose seemed to be turning into the Burbank of Northern California.  Massive suburban sprawl. By 1965 my neighborhood was pretty much built, except for the landscaping of the park up the street.  This was about as clean, safe, and bland a place to grow up in as one could imagine. Clean, neat, and new.  It was so predictably nondescript, so devoid of anything except sameness, it made media, all media - books, newspapers, magazines, radio, records, TV, movies - that much more potent a force in my life. The local environment had no character at all.  Everything was boxy, dry and boring, with bland pastel colors, light blue, yellow, green and beige, everything meant to be muted and quiet. Tiny new trees. Small new bushes. New mowed lawns.  It was bright and white.   

You saw no one on the streets, except briefly when school let out and kids walked home, and no one knew or saw each other very much. Houses looked clean and kept up, but everyone stayed inside. It was more than a little creepy.  It was wrong.  Something was very much not right about living like this.  I didn’t know why, but I gradually began to realize that the suburbs were, for me, alienation incarnate, unsustainable and unholy.  I slowly began to realize that there was no connection to anything, to community, to the land, to dirt, in the suburbs. It was, in fact designed to subdue and control nature, to make it into an artificial construct, steam cleaned, groomed and sanitized.  With the monotony of a cemetery, all houses lining up, row upon row, street upon boring street of the same thing.  Only a military mind would design streets like this.  To me, it was, and still is, the loneliest place in the world.  And this is where most Americans wanted to live.   

Every few weeks my mother would take my sister and me to the library. We'd made the trip to the library a bi-monthly ritual since I was seven.  Mom read 5 to 10 books a week, so I learned it was good to check out all the books I could.  

I'd been taking piano lessons from an elderly woman, a Miss Penner, who taught in the old traditional way.  She was the piano teacher my sister had started with.  She used graded children's books, and for a year or two it was alright.  But by the time I was ten, I was begging to do "real" music.  I needed another teacher.  The move near Campbell made Miss Penner a drive across town.  There was a piano teacher bike riding distance from my house, a few blocks over, who proved to be much better for me, until I turned sixteen.  Mrs. Rawson was good at pointing me to the great composers, to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and Brahms.  I even learned Rhapsody in Blue when I was thirteen with her encouragement.  But, I didn't share my own piano compositions with her.

Record Club

Mom joined the RCA record club when we moved, and got a selection of five free records and a new stereo record player.  Stereo was the new thing in music.  The record player was a very inexpensive model, but it was good enough to start with.  The records I remember were a five album collection of the Beethoven Five Piano Concerti by Rubenstein and Krips, Haydn's Surprise Symphony, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake,  a compilation album of greatest RCA Victor Hit songs from the years 1916 to 1950, and a record called Piano Roll Discoveries, a recording of piano rolls from the 1920s played on a perfectly restored player piano.  The featured work here was a young George Gershwin playing Rhapsody in Blue.  This became an important record for me. 

I remember listening to the Beethoven piano concertos over and over again while playing with toy Revolutionary War soldiers.  I would set up little paper maché diaramas molded into battle scenes, place my soldiers, the British against the Americans, while playing Beethoven.  To my ten year old mind it was a connection to history, but I also memorized all the concertos. I played them so much, they would play in my head whether the music was on or not.     

At age eleven I composed my first piece, based on Debussy, something I never finished.  I had become a fan of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, and because of him, I saw myself as a composer.  I decided one night that I would devote my whole life to music.  It was like a prayer, but also a fantasy world I could float in, a persona I could inhabit.  I could pretend to be a great composer, full of possibilities, and practice, practice, practice.   

From music, my interests broadened to history. One book had a chapter on Charles Ives.  I’d never heard of him before. I was old enough to ride my bike to the big shopping mall which had a classic 1950s record store. This record store was the last of the old style shops, with single ear headphones to listen to 45s, and listening booths where you could demo LPs.  While browsing the record bins, I saw Bernstein's 1951 Columbia recording of Ives' second symphony.  

I played the Bernstein record and another Ives piece by Howard Hansen and the Eastman Rochester Orchestra, called Three Places in New England.  I could feel my life changing as I listened to it.  Ives instantly became my primary model for what kind of a composer I wanted to be.  He was tough and eccentric; an American original, like Mark Twain, or Walt Whitman.        

His music brought the clamorous, clashing and noisy outdoor world of boys and men into the genteel Victorian drawing room music of his mother and aunts.  The conflict between these two worlds was what made his music so radically different that it had to wait until the 1950s to gain recognition.  But in 1963 Ives became my interior alter ego.  I composed a piano improvisation which was a noisy Ivesian fantasy on a hymn tune.  My mother was impressed enough to have me play for the women’s auxiliary at her church.  I shocked a number of older ladies, who were not expecting arms and elbows bashing on a baby grand. 

Essential Background: the '60s

America was becoming a nation of media tribes.  There were, as yet, not many, but they were large.  There was the teenage AM radio and record market, a huge demographic that was nation wide.  FM radio, practically unknown in 1961, would, by the end of the decade, dominate music radio and begin to turn AM into a sports and talk radio environment.  There was the television community, which was so huge it encompassed nearly the whole population. But there were also the media communities of cinema, theater, print and urban club and coffee house culture.  

The Beat movement was essentially a celebration of the coffee house: jazz, poetry, wine, cannabis, amphetamines, and the paperback book. The underground pull of Greenwich Village stimulated bohemians in other cities, such as San Francisco to adopt a lifestyle that was an expression of rebellion against the establishment.  The national media turned the image of the Beatnik into a kitsch stereotype.  But the influence of the Beat movement made its way into film, music, and television.    

The folk revival of the early 1960s took the patina of the Beats and merged it with the Progressive labor movement of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.  It was mostly an urban liberal student scene, starting at universities such as Cambridge, Berkeley, and Stanford, but the heart of it was in Greenwich Village.  It was here that young folk singers with commercial ambitions flocked to compete for popular visibility.  It was in Greenwich Village that Pete Seeger, the Clancy Brothers, Dave van Ronk, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and scores of others made the revival into a cultural movement.   

Bob Dylan's influence was seminal.  He was arguably the musical equivalent of Martin Luther King, in that he helped "integrate" folk and rock music, bringing a new maturity and energy to both lyrics and sound.  By the time Dylan, the Beatles, and the Stones had penetrated Top 40 radio play, music became the dominant cultural indicator of the youth market.  By 1966 radio itself was beginning to split into different audiences,  FM and AM; people who liked albums and longer tracks (college students, young adults) listening to FM, and people who bought singles (teenagers) going for AM.  The truth, however, was that for while, AM radio was all that was available in cars.  FM was for home listening, probably until 1969 or so.  So people listened one way in their cars, and another way at home.  

It seems to take about 40 years or so for historical cycles to come full circle.  1964-1967 in San Francisco was the flowering of a spontaneous celebratory community dedicated to the ideals of peace, love and creativity.  The Hippies absorbed what the Beat movement started and added their own chemical twist by popularizing psychedelic drugs.  Although it was obvious that the Haight scene was too good to be true, it lasted long enough to gain national awareness.  It was doomed to be killed by the power of its own charisma.  But for those few seasons, from winter 1964 to the fall of 1967, it grew into the most radical cultural interpolation that had been seen in America since the 1920s.  The acid stoked brilliance of this community of like-minded freaks had created two new archetypes, deeply American, iconoclastic, and original: the Beatnik and the Hippie.  

Long hair on young men, inspired by the Beatles, by television, cowboys, Dylan, Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsberg, and by older brothers and sisters, grew to be a defining symbol, a statement of who you were and what you stood for.  You gained entry into a community consciously separated into two types: those who had taken LSD and those who hadn’t.  You were “straight,” meaning you had never taken it, or you "knew what was happening."  (The title of Hendrix’s album, Are You Experienced? said it all.)  

Young hippie dropouts wanted a different type of life, different than the straight middle or working class people who did as they were told, and were dutiful and brainwashed by the pleasant anxiety of the American way of life.  People who had responsibilities, who had to make a living did not easily accept such a free artistic spirit. So the hippie scene was really an expression of an independent youth counter-culture, made up mostly of white students and middle and upper class dropouts, a number of real bohemians, musicians, con men, and hustlers out to take advantage of the scene, and a growing number of poor runaways, alienated and vulnerable.  It was the first expression of the Baby Boom generation, and because anyone wearing any kind of colorful  clothing, or longer than usual hair could pass as flamboyant and novel, the media began to notice.  

Nothing radicalized young men as quickly as did the Viet Nam war and the involuntary servitude of the draft, a system which guaranteed fresh bodies for the military industrial meat grinder.  University of California at Berkeley had long been the leader in protest, starting with the Free Speech movement of the early ‘60s.  By 1967 the East Bay, Berkeley and Oakland, had taken a different stance from the dope smoking, acid soaked, peace and love life style of the San Francisco Haight Ashbury scene.  Together, the two communities tended to co-mingle more than radical political groups would admit, but they did represent two distinct strains of American youth striving to change a cultural and political system they saw as hell-bent on world domination. 

VI. High School: 1963 - 1964

The high school I attended was a split level single story affair, looking like an early version of a typical California corporate campus, not bad for the time, and typical of California suburban culture of the 1950s and '60s.  It had been built in 1957, so it was a relatively new campus, therefore devoid of large shade trees.  On the morning of November 22, 1963, I was taking an Algebra test when a student walked in and quickly gave a note to the teacher - who read it, turned white, and looked very disturbed, almost in tears.  After taking it in, he stood up and stopped the test, announcing that President Kennedy had been shot.  A bell rang very soon after that, and we all went to our next class, for me P.E.  As I was walking across the quad, I heard a trumpet from the band room echoing off the walls, playing Taps.  After we'd suited up and finished calisthenics the coach told us to run around the field three times.  In the middle of the first lap he blew his whistle and brought us in.  School ended before lunch.  Everyone went home early.  

It was bleak and cloudy that day, a gathering storm. Didn't matter, we stayed in and watched tv the whole weekend.  This event became one of the greatest signposts of my life.  It is far more significant for me than the 1945 death of FDR was for my parents generation, or than the 9/11 attacks were to younger generations.  It was intensely personal. Little did we know how much of a portent the murder of JFK was, that it would come to symbolize the beginning of a different America from that time on.  

Nothing like this had ever happened before - an entire nation watching an epic drama play out on television.  There were no other shows on the whole weekend, and no commercials, only memorial concerts for the dead President.  But if you kept the TV on the whole time, it was a transformational experience.  Things were never the same after that.  There was something different about America, something that could never be reclaimed.  It was over.  Our safe, secure American dream had been murdered.  American reality was much darker and sinister.  And still, no one was telling the truth.    

After Kennedy’s funeral things got very somber.  It was a time to keep your head down.  I’d just turned 14.  My folks let me stay up until midnight on Fridays, even though they went to bed around 10:30.  I always tuned into to the tail end of Route 66.  It had the coolest theme song.  After that came the Twilight Zone, and then Jack Paar, a group of programs which was, for me, the best programming of the week.  However, this December was darker and sadder - a bleak month.     

 

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