And the jukebox kept on playin’
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band— “Summer Rain,” by Johnny Rivers
My favorite classic rock D.J. is Jim Ladd of 95.5, KLOS FM. He has one of the classic radio voices and, like me, is a big Doors fan. (I try only to listen to classical music and some jazz, but sometimes “slip” and listen to that old time rock and roll I grew up with.)
Yesterday night he was finishing up a five-part series on 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love” in 1967, a time when the air was filled with pot smoke, acid heads, and psychedelic music. I like people who take things to their logical conclusions. And Jim does that because, for him, it’s always 1967 and the children have flowers in their hair.
Last night Jim was talking about how the drugs and the Pill eased sexual morals, so girls didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant, marriage was a hang-up, and everybody spent the 1967 frolicking and fornicating and hallucinating among the daffodils.
He didn’t mention it, but a bigger reason for the changes of the 1960s was that both major religions in America were underging crises. Protestantism was shifting its locus of power and demographcs from the mainstream denominations to the evangelical and fundamentalist denominations. And Catholicism was undergoing the crisis following Vatican II that only now is receding (thank God); next week Pope Benedict XVI will lift the ban on the old Latin Mass, giving us an alternative to the 1969 Hippy Mass we’ve had to put up with in too many parishes.
I’m sympathetic with Jim’s nostalgia, as I have quite a bit for the America of the early 1960s, before everything went strange.
But time marches on. As Max Frost sings in “Shape of Things to Come” from my favorite hippy movie, “Wild in the Streets” of 1968 (in which a young Jim Morrison-type singer becomes U.S. president at 24 and puts the oldsters on LSD):
There’s a new sun
Risin’ up angry in the sky
And there’s a new voice
Cryin’ “We’re not afraid to die!”
Let the old world make believe
It’s blind and deaf and dumb
But nothing can change the shape of things to come
Those words apply the the ethos of 1967, too. The Pill didn’t always work as advertise, so to deal with that abortion was legalized in 1973 by an unconstitutional U.S. Supreme Court edict. Since then, 45 million babies have been slaughtered, more than the entire population of California. In the 1980s, AIDS struck. In the 1990s, flower-power President Clinton abused a young girl not even alive in 1967 and was impeached for lying about it. And now, in the 2000s, the Socialist Security and Medicare systems are going bankrupt because all those abortions meant the Boomers didn’t have enough kids to pay the taxes to sustain the systems.
Nowadays, people make fun of the ’60s belief that “free love” and heavy drug use had no consequences. An example is the Austin Powers movies.
When the Boomers get old, there won’t be enough money to care for us. We’ll be dumped out of the hospital into a local ditch and left to die while listing on our iPods to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper:
I read the news today oh, boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, i just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the house of lords
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