Did the 1960s Really Happen? (Part Two)

pjmedia.com ^ | 1/19/2015 | Kathy Shaidle

[Stevenc131]

In spite of the summer of love in ‘67 and Woodstock a couple of years later, a lot of what people think of as 60s culture (or counterculture) happened in the 70s. There were a lot more long hair, pot smoking young people in the 70s than the 60s. By 1975 our local mall (rural area) had a head shop near the main entrance and the DuBey’s bookstore in the mall was displaying books on how to grow pot.

[sefarkas]

Muscle Shoals Swampers

[ChildOfThe60s]

The 1960s never really happened. It is all in your imagination.

LOL. Couldn't have said it better.

Seriously, it happened alright. I think how we view it in the rear view mirror depends a lot on how old we were, where we were & what we were doing.

My father retired from the Marine Corps in 1965 (we were living on PI at the time). He served his last overseas duty as an "adviser" in SVN 63-64. He came home and said "stay out of Nam, it's going to be a disaster. A war with military decisions made by idiot politicians". He despised Westmoreland, McNamara and of course LBJ.

I graduated HS in 1970 and I suppose what I recall the most clearly of the late 60s is the never ending sexual frustration of adolescence. That and taking way too many risks with pot and alcohol.

[dmz]

I think the Manson family was closer to the real “Hippy” than what I saw on TV.

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Uh, no.

Leave it to Beaver was closer to the hippie thing than was the Manson family.

[dmz]

Charles Manson was seen as the poster-boy for hippiedom, amongst my peers.

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Which has about as much truth to it as, say, the My Lai incident being the norm for US soldiers.

[joethedrummer]

Most of the 60’s for average Americans was much like the 50’s.

The hippies and peaceniks were a SMALL fringe, social outcasts who were messed up people doing drugs. And they were only in the spotlight at the tail end of the 60’s.

Haight-Ashbury is ONE small town - not mainstream America. George Harrison visited there, expecting a hippy utopia. He admitted it was congregated by lost, misguided, unwashed kids who didn’t have a clue about life or what was going on.

Since then, our media has so glorified things. It’s sad for me to see the 20-something’s all wishing it were the 60’s again. They’re becoming sad, misguided, spoiled dolts because of it.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Yes and graphically shown on TV every night at 6PM. It was like Ground Hog Day especially if you had friends and/or relatives over there which almost everyone did. Endless. I’m glad you are here to mention it.

[fieldmarshaldj]

I miss Sam Kinison.

[buckeye49]

One of my cousins married a fellow. back then who insisted right away
that they have a kid so he would not be drafted. They did, and that boy who kept him out of Vietnam did 2 tours in Iraq!!

[GOPJ]

You're right - much of the cultural change was based on illusions... nothing more than propaganda. It still worked...

It's the same thing George Soros is attempting to do with his money - buying the illusion the young are behind his horrible filthy communist ideas. The good news is Americans are catching on to all the ways democrats and their thuggy multimillionaires lie to us...

[dmz]

I scorned rock&roll and was an elitist jazz aficionado.

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But even jazz went through some pretty horrible times in the 60s. Jazz and the 60s started out great, but by the end of said 60s Miles Davis had screwed up nearly the entire generation of young lions with fusion (Miles and a few others), and there was also that god awful free jazz thing. It took jazz until the mid to late 80s to recover (and I do thank Wynton Marsalis for some of the recovery).

The rock (that was still mostly pop) of the first part of the 60s was clearly still being produced by the same folks who were producing the recordings of the crooners - awful strings and horn arrangements.

Of course the above is painting with a broad brush.

I think it was in the 70s that the promise of good rock came into its own.

[greene66]

But that’s how it was viewed out in much of mid-america. The Manson family butchery, Art Linkletter’s daughter dying from an LSD trip, the Weather Underground... the whole hippie mess being an ugly, nightmarish mix of anti-Americanism and cultural degradation.

[dmz]

And to this day we continue to paint the vast middle with the miniscule extremes ... right and left.

manson is to hippies what eric robert rudolph is to the prolife movement.

obviously, neither are representative of the thing they are said to represent.

[Cymbaline]

This is going to break your heart, but much of the music you heard in the ’60s and early ’70s wasn’t recorded by the people you saw on the album covers. It was done by me and the musicians you see on these walls.

Sorry if you were listening to the wrong music. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Deep Purple and Jeff Beck were for real.

[Chainmail]

Looks like the gene for “selfless courage” jumped a generation.

[rktman]

LOL! Lucky me, I listened to a bunch of real and unreal music back then.

[af_vet_1981]

This is going to break your heart, but much of the music you heard in the ’60s and early ’70s wasn’t recorded by the people you saw on the album covers. It was done by me and the musicians you see on these walls. … Many of these kids didn’t have the chops and were little more than garage bands. … At concerts, people hear with their eyes. Teens cut groups slack in concert, but not when they bought their records.

It seems to me Kathy's critique excludes the live music performances which, while not always the most commercially successful, still resound today thanks to archives. As such, they can be compared with both contemporary and newer performances to see if they stand the test of time. She might even agree with my ear for music in some cases while not in others. The way this article attempts short shrift of the music of the 60s is not credible. The sounds of the 60s and early 70s really happened.