The Apocalyptic Rock Fight, Part 3: Revolution, Revival, and Retaliation

Kids Say The Darndest Things...

When the Baby Boomer generation got into its teens, a lot of stuff was either happening or about to happen.

Rock and roll had taken the world by storm;  there was just no way to stop it anymore.  Cars were becoming more a part of the teen scene, even if it was just the newly-minted driver borrowing the family wheels for a Friday night date.  And television was replacing radio as the entertainment medium of choice, at least in the realm of the dramatic arts.  Except for variety shows hosted by people like Dick Clark and Ed Sullivan, music was still more a radio thing--especially if Dad's car had a radio built in!

We were finished in Korea, but Vietnam would be in full swing by the mid-60's.  Freedom Rides, bus boycotts, and lunch counter sit-ins were highlighting uncomfortable questions about the civil rights of people of color.  And the threat of nuclear war loomed just at the edge of everyone's thoughts.  The USSR's first Sputnik was launched into Earth orbit, soon to be followed by American satellites, with President Kennedy pledging to actually send a human to land on the moon.

Scientists were discovering new things all the time, and many older folks were feeling overwhelmed by it all.  But just as it is today, so it was then:  the kids jumped in with both feet.  Young people are quite adaptable, and they took to all the changes around them like ducks to water.  Which might have been okay, except that the young people also had more money, independence, and knowledge than their parents, raised during the austerity of the Great Depression, could ever have dreamed of.

Also, these teens had questions.

Like:  Why are we fighting far-away people who have never hurt us?  Or:  If God created the world and everything in it, where does evolution fit in?  Or even:  Why shouldn't black people be allowed to eat in the same restaurants or use the same bathrooms as white people?

Parents--even churchgoing parents--had no answers to these questions, or at least none that could be intelligently discussed.  The same old boilerplate statements, such as the one for evolution ("Evolution is a lie of the devil")  weren't going to cut it anymore;  it was rather the same as when a kid asks "Why?"  and is told  "Because I said so."  The older the kid gets, the less satisfactory that answer becomes.  The older kid needs more explanation.

But this new world was too big for most parents, and they weren't equipped to move around in it as easily as the younger generation was doing.  And because of the automobile, the teens weren't always under the supervision of the adults anymore.  And when the kids got to college...

You Say You Want A Revolution?

As I have pointed out before, college is a much larger world than the one most kids grow up in.  You are exposed to more opinions, facts, people groups, and societal mores than you've ever seen before.  Suddenly you're reading Marx's Das Kapital and considering its pros and cons, or debating the merits of laissez-faire capitalism (of which Ayn Rand would approve).  You're learning that you don't need to conform to traditional gender roles.  You're learning uncomfortable things about the way our government works, which looks very much like a bunch of old men deciding that young men have to go fight somewhere else to defend our freedom here (yeah, doesn't make sense to me either).  There are all kinds of new forms of art and music.  And check it out--here are some folks who aren't even Christians, and they seem like kind, friendly people!  Faced with all this, it's no wonder many of the collegiates of that era began to think it was time for a change.

And once you mixed in a little botany and chemistry, why, then you had the perfect recipe for revolution...or at least the kids thought so....

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out...

About the mid-60's, LSD began gaining steam as an experimental drug among younger members of American society.  Along with marijuana (which had been illegal since 1937), pills such as amphetamines and barbiturates, cocaine, and heroin, it made for quite a colorful--or should I say psychedelic?--medicine cabinet.

If you believe the media on this subject, drug use exploded during the last half of the 60's, but many of the drugs mentioned either had legal uses or had been criminalized under false pretenses.  Marijuana, for example, was demonized not because of its true effects, but because it was used mainly by Mexican immigrants of the early 1900's.  Use  of pot spread to jazz musicians and aficionados, and because white kids and women liked jazz, the ugly rumor was started (and eagerly spread by the Hearst newspaper chain) that marijuana caused kids to go crazy (Reefer Madness did a lot to legitimize that lie), caused white women to desire dark-skinned men, or dark men to rape white women...or, worse yet (?!?), made "darkies" think they were as good as white men!  The Marihuana Tax Act of '37 was the noxious weed that grew out of this bullshit pile of rumor.

But I digress.  Give me a few deep breaths to lower my BP...

Anyhoo...

Because of the questions their elders either could not or would not answer for them, and because they were learning that the things they had been taught could not always be trusted, many of the college-age kids decided to find a new way of life on their own.  They were helped along by such "fly-high" teachers as Timothy Leary (who first spoke the "turn on, tune in, drop out" catchphrase at San Francisco's Human Be-In, held in 1967 in Golden Gate Park), Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson; musical groups such as Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and the Grateful Dead; and alternative religionists such as Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, both of whom founded American spin-offs of Hinduism (the Hare Krishna movement and Transcendental Meditation, respectively) which are still operating today.

There were any number of expressions of this "new rebellion"--communes, nomadism, protests (nuclear war was, quite rightly, seen as insane by people of all ages, and Vietnam was unpopular even before the Pentagon Papers were leaked), and music festivals (Woodstock wasn't the only one--it just got more media attention).  The young people, along with some older folks who were also sick and tired of the status quo, wanted change.  But what kind of change?  Should it all be burned to the ground to make way for something new?  Should small changes be introduced into the existing system, making way for larger changes later?  Should people just abandon the cities (symbolic of the ugly, polluted, corrupt status quo) and go back to living off the land?  No one really agreed, even within supposedly like-minded groups, and a lot of those groups failed to have any impact at all and eventually fell apart.

Meanwhile, Back In the Studio...

The counterculture spawned an incredibly diverse array of musical forms.  The Doors, the Airplane and the Dead were the vanguard of the "psychedelic" movement.  My best description of this music is that they already recorded the drug trip in their songs, so all you have to do is listen and ride along!

Folk music was already a staple of the hippie movement, but Bob Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, and Peter, Paul and Mary offered a pot-laced twist to the mix.

Heavy metal, with its pounding guitar riffs and wailing vocals, had its roots in some of the "bad-boy" blues of the 30's;  bands like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, the Jeff Beck Group, and later lights such as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, embodied both the sound and the lyrical double entendres of those early (alas, often uncredited) blues pioneers.

Then there was art rock, also known as progressive rock, with such groups as the Moody Blues, Yes, the Nice (whose keyboardist eventually became one-third of Emerson, Lake and Palmer), and King Crimson (ditto for their vocalist).  These groups were strongly influenced by classical music, and the resulting sound was more ornate.  There was a lot of chemical influence as well, but again, they already took the trip so you don't have to!

Call Out the National Guard!

Needless to say, all this experimentation--societal, chemical, and musical--alarmed the people in power.  The FBI gathered data on various groups, most of whom were not worth the time or the money;  the police began cracking down on the "freaks,"  who, in turn, returned insult for insult by referring to the cops as "fuzz" and "pigs";  and the Church?  Well, some of them got their own weird ideas...

More on that later.

(Note:  I am indebted to Amy Hart's paper,  "Religious Communities in 1960s America,"  for much of the "Anyhoo..." segment in this post.  Find the complete paper here:

https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=forum

Something Stupid!

Saturday Morning...

Here I am, writing in my blog when I ought to be at work.

So, why is that?  Did I get fired?  Am I sick?  Am I playing hooky?

Nope.  None of the above.

The reason I'm at home on my computer, sipping a hazelnut latte and writing in this blog, is because somebody did something stupid.

Breaking News!

We've had some new construction going on nearby for a few months now.  They've got the building mostly up, the parking lot asphalted, the enclosure for the Dumpster built...and this week, they started laying some underground power lines.  This morning, they'd gotten to right in front of our building when one or more of the diggers hit a gas line.  Not a minor one, either--one of the biggies.  The fire department showed up, inspected, and finally told us to clear out.  Which we did.  According to the firemen, somebody's going to have to come from the city to make the repair, after which we have to wait for the gas in the air to dissipate.  They'll notify us when it's safe to come back.

Now, I've had minor gas leaks in my home before, primarily due to changes the gas company has made from time to time--such as replacing a gas main or installing a higher-pressure meter.  I am quite familiar with the smell of mercaptan.  But the little whiffs I've encountered were nothing compared to the miasma I walked through as I left the store at my fastest walking speed.  It's not a good atmosphere for lighting a cigarette,  I can tell you.

Aren't Builders Supposed To Call First?

Here's the thing.  When a project like this is going on, all the utility companies are supposed to be notified ahead of time, so they can mark where all their lines are and how deeply they're buried.  I never saw any of those bright paint arrows on the ground, at least not where they dug this morning.  No marker flags, either.  So somebody screwed up, and badly.

Meanwhile, our store loses business, and the workers lose wages.  All because somebody didn't call before they dug.

Oh, well...

I don't get paid for this mini-vacation.  I'll be behind on all my tasks when I get back today (provided there are no complications that prevent us from returning).

But oh, well...at least I had a great story to tell on my blog.  Happy 2020. everybody!