All through the crisis period of 1969-1972, when the Philippine Republic was collapsing, I faced with the same problems every teenager had. Namely, a crisis of identity. “Who am I?” During that period there were a number of competing centers around which one could form an identity. There was, for example, the political and chess-club environment of the Student Council. Alternatively, there were the portals to the underground, which were even then opening to me. But my own private sanctuary centered around a small circle in the suburb of Pasig, Metro Manila, the home of who I will refer to as the S sisters.
I’d walk in from wherever I’d come from and become immediately immersed in music scene of that extraordinary house. The one rule in the house was that you became American, or a reasonable facsimile thereof for the duration of when you were there. And we listened to Stevie Winwood, Jethro Tull, PF Sloan. Whoever.
Angela S, who was one of the sisters, presided over it all. She was perhaps one of the most attractive women of her generation. Not that she was pretty. But she was damned attractive on account of her intelligence and verve. I didn’t know a single person who didn’t want to marry her.
In and around that circle — now scattered and disbanded by time — people thought about who they wanted to become, in circumstances Dosteovsky would recognize. It was not as easy as one might think. To the malleability of youth was added the uncertainty of the era. Who you would be was a function of what you wanted to become.
It was in many ways, a deadly serious exercise. For men coming of age in those years reached the threshold of consequential decision. They put aside the things of children and became men; and they took their irrevocable steps.
The three videos that follow represent samples of the kind of influences that affected in the identity I eventually assumed. They are not necessarily the actual influences, but represent them. Looking back on these influences over the course of 35 years, it sometimes occurs that the choices were made from the heart; on the basis of a youthful dream. It is not that music influences us. It is more that it gives definite shape to things already decided. And who we become is what our country is: the place where our dreams can live. But never it seems, a place completely divorced from our memories.
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99
As much as I love these songs, it’s gotten harder and harder for me to enjoy this genre, especially at a live performance, because of my perception that the singers and the vast majority of their fans are what we call political “Progressives.” The last time I went to a live performance, the “artist” began making sneery remarks about Bush, Republican,s etc. It ruined the whole evening for me. I’ve turned mostly to Bluegrass, Gospel, and Country instead.
Wretchard,
This reminds me of Andrew Fletcher’s comment in the 1700′s (modern paraphrase): “Let me write the songs of the nation. I don’t care who writes its laws.”
Fletcher was, among other things, observing that the real locus of influence is the arts. Or to put it another way: music persuades while legislation merely enshrines. The exercise of legislative fiat doesn’t change hearts or win loyalty – just ask Ben Nelson how cramming Obamacare down the nation’s collective throat has worked out for him.
Thanks for these thoughts.
Keith
Times change and you’re never the man that you used to be. There are two ways to deal with that fact. One is to edit the record to make the past consistent with the present. The other is to acknowledge the change in yourself, itself a repudiation of the way things were, and to recognize you followed what you would not embrace in experience.
But circumstances themselves change and it is never a good idea to apply the standards of the present to the past. Youth is another country, rendered safe by the fact that we can never return to it. We leave it, if we are wise, as we remember it, and its altered fantasies are no less useful for being somewhat untrue.
But who knows? Wordsworth argues there are truths we know as children which we gradually forget as we become adults.
And according to this idea we are, as we grow older, in fallen estate. Perhaps that is humbug. But even myth is useful; in their time and place foolish dreams were all we had; and they sometimes saved us from worse. Whatever we’ve become as adults stands in part on what we remember ourselves to be.
Sometimes it occurs to me that one of the functions of God, if He exists, is to finally introduce us to ourselves. It may prove to be embarrassing, but who else can pull it off?
Plato knew that music had the power to stir men’s souls. Not wanting any rivals to the cool logic of his ruling Philosopher Kings he proposed banning music, and instituting all the repressive apparatus that would entail. Perhaps he was eased into being able to contemplate that path by being unencumbered by another great distraction, a romantic attraction to women and all the irrationalities and responsibilities that follow from that. It would be so un-PC as to be impossible to pursue that line of inquiry today by any university academic or politician. Even mentioning such a theory would cause unemployment.
Filipinos may be lucky. Unlike most people they get to choose their identities from a banquet. Most people simply take what is prepared for them and live out their lives in quiet desperation. The only people who usually get to choose are immigrants and the elites.
These days immigrants are told that they do not need to change their culture or transfer their loyalties to their new home. Many still do but the perception that the eagerness to become American (or British or French as also happened) that showed in the old couple in “Casablanca” has dissipated will increase nativism and discrimination.
Aristocrats have always inhabited another country where their loyalties were to each other as much as the patch of dirt they happened to own. Patriotic and social rituals were as much to build loyalty to the nation among the elites, and bind them to a sense of obligation to those entrusted to their care, as to instill fervor among the foot soldiers.
Perhaps in the Philippines every man is a king.
What a difference a few years can make. I graduated from high school in California in 1975, and what marked my passage was much more Starship, the Dead, Hot Tuna and the Doobie Brothers. It was music of the counter culture, but I was never really of that counter culture.
I believe that my birth year, 1957, was the first year that didn’t even have to register for the draft. My brother, 1955, did. And that made a difference along with him being old enough to be aware what had happened in Vietnam. Nixon had pretty much completed the withdrawal when I finished junior high in 1971, and I came to political consciousness with the fall of Saigon. That is why I really never considered myself a boomer. By the time I entered the job market, all the jobs had already been taken by the first waves of the boomers. By the time I bought my first house, the prices had already been driven up by the first waves of the boomers. By the time I would have started receiving SS and Medicare, it would already have been depleted by the first waves of the boomers.
And I think we are seeing this now in the occupy movement. The Gen-Xers who got their MBA’s and law degrees in 1990-2005 have a fundamentally different outlook than those getting them now. It is the same as when I graduated from university in 1982 at the height of the recession with unemployment in California at 12% and interest rates at 17%. There were no jobs, but the earlier boomers were already ensconced in the system.
Wretchard, from my viewpoint it appears that you are more American than Australian. I would love to know why a Filipino Harvard graduate ended up there instead of the US.
Today’s problem. Russia seems to be coming around on Syria, now the laggard is China. Why should the World’s Only Superpower be afraid of China?
“Oooooooh we owe them a trillion dollars?”
That’s less than the value of the gold in Fort Knox and the New York Fed combined. What’s a reserve for except for emergencies? This is an emergency. So we pay off our debt to China in solid gold bars!!
LET THEM EAT GOLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I myself have been afflicted with many pangs of nostalgia lately; and having learned the hard way that you can’t really go back in time and make things just as they once were, that the song or movie which has been hallowed by memory does not necessarily elicit the same reaction when you experience it again today, I’ve attempted to set aside my treasury of pristine experiences as a sort of nature preserve within my soul, and my present-day thoughts inevitaby turned towards analyzing the feeling of nostalgia itself. What sort of thing is it, and why does it exist?
There is of course the quite understandable hunger to recapture the happiness and vitality of one’s salad days; but that by itself would only suffice to explain the more buffoonish examples of chasing down the past. It is more characteristic of a mid-lfe crisis, of the 50 year-old accountant with the toupee and Corvette, than of nostalgia proper. Once you add in the mental element of reflection with its educative function, the attempt to understand and justify a life, you involve yourself in the transcendent realities of the spirit, of morality and destiny and a providence that mysteriously obtains over all. This requires us to find a place for nostalgia in the larger picture of human entelechy. With all humble recognition due to the incompleteness of the following account (it focuses mainly on the material side of existence), this is what I’ve come up with so far.
In the first place, nostalgia is an imperative to go back and master, with your adult faculties, those things which first appealed to your heart. You must return and love again your first love (to put a Platonic spin on it), but this time you must do so like a man. There is an obvious survival value in doing so, for nature knows quite well that all beings are maintained in existence by the same factors which first brought them into existence. Whatever thrilled and motivated you in the past is still necessary for your sustenance now, despite the fact that it often must endure many sublimations and variations along the way. The material side of human nature provides the matrix for nostalgia, but as an explanation it is by itself too mechanistic. The love of the past has its spiritual side as well. The prospect of impending death lends urgency to the quest for fulfillment. We feel as if we must justify ourselves before God by showing that we were true lovers of those things which were given to us in primordial goodness. “At least I gave it my all, God; I didn’t drop the ball,” we will say to Him when we come to be judged. That too is part of our destiny. We must love our home and kin and native land, at least within their natural limits; we would have but little respect for anyone who did not do so. But it is only on the strength of those early experiences that we come to have a definite reationship to the world around us. Without them we would be men without countries, we would be natives of nowhere. The urge to be complete in the discharge of our duties, to exhaust the possibilities inherent in us, motivated by the secret knowledge of a final accounting, is what impells us to mastery. We present ourselves to the world with the full rococo grandeur and filigreed expertise of the finished thing. It is as much to say “Here it is, my sacrifice laid on the altar. May it be pleasing and acceptible to the Lord.”
In a secondary and derivative way, but intimately related to what was said above, nostalgia is also the attempt to complete the work of your parents, to show yourself approved in whatever sphere of activity was important to them. I have only recently become consciously aware of this factor operating within myself. For a long time now I have felt compelled, driven really, to become a rock ‘n’ roll encyclopedist, someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous. You know, the hard-bitten guy with the massive record collection; the long and detailed theories about music and the intimate knowledge of the personalities involved; the perpetual outsider and cynic, a hero from the ancient world of rock, challenging the commercial establishment and shepherding the young through this iron age of money and sex and drugs—yeah, I wanted to be that guy. I’ve made numerous attemps in this direction over the years, amassing no inconsiderable degree of knowledge about the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, but the experience always left me feeling unsatisfied and somehow desperate. When I finally got to thinking about why I had settled on this as my way of discharging compassion upon the world, the anwer became all too obvious. My mom had been a rock lover, a Beatles freak, an original hippy, and those stacks of records and smokey, shag-carpeted rooms which formed the furniture of mind, really did comprise the furnature of my youth. She had an impressive knowledge of the whole scene; she even used to tape Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown and write the hit songs down in a notebook. When I was a child my mom often seemed distant, lost in her own world of music, and I guess that I tried to master that field as a way of connecting with her.
This created a sort of pseudo-nostalgia for me, as I came to believe that I had roots back in the glory days of rock. But that was her past, not mine, and that is why it never really felt natural to me. I have long since converted my mother to the ways of conservatism, but the effect she had on my youth is still quite visible. I would use this as an object lesson, and caution all people to make sure that their children are exposed to, and learn to value, the right sort of things. As a parent, you cannot overestimate just how deep an influence you have.
My own “real” past, as a kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, left me with a very different set of experiences. I have often remarked about the fact that my generation seems to have been exposed to just about the darkest sequence of “children’s movies” ever devised. When you think of titles like Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, Legend, Willow, Return to Oz, The Neverending Story—what comes to mind if not the general theme of vulnerable people cast helplessly adrift in a world of dangerous forces? If you add in the urban decay of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the crash-boom wizardy of Star Wars and Back to the Future, and the beat-’em-up action of Bloodsport and Commando, well, that is quite a tableau of exposure. I’m not sure what it all adds up to yet, but I internalized a lot from these movies, which I hope one day to be able to explain in words. As I write this, I am getting too close to painful memories. I cannot afford such a trip right now, but for some reason I just felt like sharing a bit this morning.
I will leave off with a signature item from the soundtrack of my youth, one that hails from Our Host’s adopted country. In it you can perhaps hear the far-staring religion, the love of the hunt and of repose and of long, long thoughts that I think of as the essence of life. This was who I wanted to be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5IU02ptUQI
True self knowledge is a wonderful gift. Too bad it takes so long to come by.
Thanks for the beautiful reminders, Wretchard. The first one especially.
We had been married for one month in 1970 when I left for a military tour at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. She followed four months later, and our first two daughters have Angeles City birth certificates. This year is number 42, and we both have very fond memories of that time past.
A couple of years ago, I discarded an old cassette recording I had made of Marcos’ live speech declaring marshal law. I did not have a clue as to what was actually happening on the other side of the fence. Your short description helps a lot.
When you were in your 20s is always the Good Ole Days.
When I think back now on my first jobs after I got out of college, I can’t believe it.
I walked onto an Air Force base, more than once, and put all their airplanes back in the air, based on my own say-so? And not Cessnas, but jet fighters. Who did I think I was?
I launched rockets. With what I know now about the probability of failure for those darn things, and I thought it then to be completely natural?
I took a bunch of brand new 2nd Lt’s right out of college and told them what to do and how to do it? Who says I even knew myself?
I don’t know if I was brilliant, stupid, brave, or crazy. I marvel now that I did not even think about it much, but I guess it was better that way.
I once read where a pilot flying an A-1 over Laos, circuling over the clouds and waiting to be called down to deliver his ordnance, was reading an adventure novel while he flew. And he thought “Why doesn’t anything exciting ever happen to me?” Then he looked around, thought about what he was doing, and realized how absurd that thought was.
I’ve done that. Read an SF novel while waiting for the countdown to start. And now I wonder what could have been even 10% as interesting as what I was actually doing. Maybe it’s only “adventure” when you sit and relax and read about it a long time later and far, far away. Otherwise, it’s just life.
I listened to the same bands. I guess to an extent we all did. I can remember now obscure bands like Poco, Proco Harem, Beck, Savoire Brown and the list goes on. Each evokes a moment in time. Some gleeful, some depressing, like early songs of the Rolling Stones reminds me of a time when I had a paper route and spent a lot of time sulking. But it was always the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and friendship that lifted my spirits. There was a golden time of my youth when I was becoming a young man and was acquiring the faculties of self that I remember best and each summer emerged with its own theme song or album and to hear it harkens me back to that to time and place. I remember off the top of my head a summer of the grateful dead (box of rain), Fleetwood Mac(Station House), Crosby Stills and Nash, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Stevie Wonder , (Superstitious) and Steely Dan. Yet there was an even early era that I was immersed in on the transistor radio, the early 60’s classics like Hey there Georgey Girl, Misses Jones et al. I was pretty happy as a young kid and my memories of music reflects it. I listen to music infrequently now a days. Some music out right irritates me, but it is the classics that bring up a well spring of good vibes. Vote for Ron Paul, yahoooooo!
I’m always amazed at the 50 year olds trying to relive their youth by going to see the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, Steve Miller, Pink Floyd and other bands of the late 60’s and 70’s today. They show up to the concert hall with their, $100 ticket and walk past the tables of $25 t-shirts to buy the $8 beer. They crowd into the too narrow aisles and try to squeeze themselves into seats that are way too small. After the first couple of songs they want to sit down because their knees and back are starting to stiffen up from standing too long, but they won’t be able to see the stage because of the people standing in front of them. But that is a good thing because many of the “old bands” have had to replace lead singers, lead guitar players and other band members because of band break ups, old age or death. And if the “original” members are still playing they are in their 60’s that shows the wear and tear of the years, drugs/booze and road.
The boomers seem to remember the “good times” of drinking cheap beer and smoking weed, hangin with friends they haven’t seen in years, thinking about long lost girlfriends and boyfriends. You can travel all throughout the USA and in every city find the “classic rock” station that will constantly play songs from your youth and spark that nice memory. The problem now is that all the songs on these stations have been programmed to play a specific list to meet specific age demographics to reach the target audience to achieve advertising ratings. It’s become what everyone knew it would turn into. A business. I have a hard time listening to music now. The constant repetition has wiped all my memories clean and replaced them with the hope of someone, somewhere that will simply pull out the album, turn it over and play that cool side-B song that I always liked and always wondered why it never made it on the radio. Oh well, maybe that is why I kept all my albums.
And as far as folk music goes… after “A Mighty Wind” I can’t listen to any folk band without laughing at the pretentiousness of their “serious” lyrics and constipated demeanor.
Like ConfederateH #5 I was a child of California in early 70′s (are we all that old around here?). Hot Tuna was a favorite, as well as Jethro Tull, Ten Years After. Really I was a fan of the guitar player: Jorma Kaukonen, Alvin Lee, and Martin Barre. List must include Clapton, Hendrix, Santana, Garcia, Robin Trower, plus a few relative unknowns like Rory Gallagher, Peter Green, Kim Simmons, Steve Hackett, Phil Manzanera, Robert Fripp. This leads me at this point to Joe Bonamassa. If BC’ers are not familiar with this awesome contemporary talent, I highly recommend you spend some time on a Joe B YouTube search. He channels and honors all of the above.
Born in 1970, Class of ’88. The first Youtube clip and the name PF Sloan mean nothing to me, maybe due to the Swiss cheese nature of childhood recall. But Gord’s Gold, The Best of JT, and Stevie Winwood’s Chronicles are among life’s necessities. The three original CDs I have are the same age, bought through the Columbia House 12-for-1 deal years ago. Jim Croce and Fleetwood Mac were in there too.
Anything before autumn of ’75 is lost to me except for some photos, papers, and the rare pop-up memory. I’m not sure where I lived in what year, or with whom. My parents could have pieced my life together for me had I asked them years ago, but I didn’t, and it doesn’t really matter I suppose – I’m pretty sure I have the soundtrack.
I guess I’m weird.
I became a teenager in the 60′s. I still have a fondness for much of that music as dopey and overly earnest as it is. Additionally, I watched a lot of movies. What was broadcast (I assume because they were cheap) were movies from the 30′s & 40′s.
What I remember and still love is the Andrews Sisters singing Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy in Buck Privates, Little Brown Jug in The Glen Miller Story and Fred and Ginger doing Let’s Face the Music and Dance.
I got a lot grief from my peers for my preferences. No matter. I still love it. Frank Sinatra singing Angel Eyes or Judy Garland singing the Man That Got Away still makes my heart ache. When I think of American service men I don’t think of Apocalypse Now. I think of They Were Expendable.
Did the culture mold me or did I seek the culture that fit my personality. Who knows? But ,that’s who I am now.
12. KWB,
I agree with what I take to be the general tone of your comment. To have the ’60s and ’70s constantly replayed for us is indeed growing quite tiresome. That whole cultural scene has lapsed from daily relevance, or at least you would think it should have by now; but it just keeps shuffling along like a zombie, kept alive by continuous blood transfusions from the preternaturally wealthy Boomers’ deep pockets.
One of the strange things to observe about our times is the degree to which certain bands have turned into institutions of the first order. Their longevity, their “market penetration,” the streams of wealth that flow in their wake and the deference paid to them by the other orders of elite society (like academia) is something hitherto unprecedented. We have reached a state of society in which you just cannot avoid the Rolling Stones, for instance. If you do not hear them on the radio (which, after more than 40 years, you still will. Every. Damn. Day) you will find them incorporated into television commercials, movie soundtracks, the print media, referred to in songs by other musicians, so on and so forth. And what’s more, the knowledge of erudite trivia concerning the band gives one a sort of cachet, it sets you off as a “cultured” human being, thereby making the acquisition of such knowledge obligatory for anyone who wants to establish himself as a lettered and serious student of the humanities. I just don’t get the impression that any musical act from the pre-rock past was ever that big before. They have embroidered themselves straight into the warp and weft of our lives. This must have been something like the way that Communist Party propaganda functioned in the Soviet Union. If so, I can well understand the fervent desire to just escape from the mind-numbing tyranny of it all.
Which is why I know that we are headed for profound cultural discontinuity in the near future. The next decade and a half will see most of these actors pass irrevocably from life’s stage, and they will leave behind them a cultural vacuum to be filled by—what? It isn’t going to be filled by modern music, which is a pathetic substitute for classic rock, much of which contained real artistry. My hope is that it will be filled by true religion, but it is also possible that it will be filled by violent statism and other forms of pseudo-spiritual fetishization.
[Regarding the "real artistry" of classic rock: Since I know that I cannot avoid hearing the music in any case, but being loathe to consider myself part of the rock subculture or to try to glean any deeper meaning out of it, I have simply adopted a curator's attitude to the whole subject, judging the music on its technical merits and not on its content. This allows me to issue statements like "Michael McDonald is great singer" without indulging any desire to "take it to the streets."]
Wretchard, thanks for a wonderful, albeit wistfully evocative gem of a post. It has been a welcome respite from thinking about the maelstrom of impending crises and catastrophes enveloping us in our present reality, and even these few brief moments of warmly nostalgic reminiscence of the carefree, naive innocence of youth are greatly appreciated.
For me, as a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1970, during the height of the “Sweet Baby James” album mania, on a visit to my assigned doctor at the Student Infirmary, a Dr. Taylor, I noticed a family picture on his desk which contained James Taylor, his brothers and sister Kate. Small world… /g
Later that year my girlfriend said she wanted to go to a free concert in the old Carmichael Auditorium (where the Heels played basketball before the Dean Dome), so we grabbed a blanket and sat on the floor about mid-court in front of a stool and microphone. The lights dim and Gordon Lightfoot comes wending his way through the crowd on the floor carrying his guitar, sits on the stool about fifteen feet in front of us and proceeds to give us an hour set of musical magic in a setting more like a big basement full of friends gathered to listen to one of their own share his tunes than a “concert”.
The remembrance of these special moments and experiences may indeed be, as Josh referenced, “like tears in the rain”, but their fleeting evanescence only renders them all the more precious.
I have 7000+ songs in my iTunes, and they are all over the place. Classical, jazz, swing, Latin, country (classic and current), R&B, movie soundtracks, rock, alt rock, folk, gospel, roots & bluegrass, and stuff that’s so weird and obscure that it defies recognizable classification. Vladimir Troshin, anyone? Antonio Aguilar? I have about 25 different covers of the song “La Paloma” just because I am strange that way. Hmmm.
I grew up in a family of music lovers at the tail end of lots of siblings, right around the time at which even a lower-middle class family like ours could afford a stereo or cassette player for each kid, in addition to the LR stereo. Result was that everybody was playing their own stuff, all the time, and I was exposed to the entire range. That and my own curiosity, I guess, accounts for the size and weirdness of the iTunes library.
I’m a sucker for music as mood-anything. And, for me, it’s a better time-machine than just about anything else I know of.
That said … I could only get 51 seconds into the first YT clip (see, didn’t even know who the group was & had to look it up) before I had to stop it cuz I was laughing so hard. The cliches-galore lyrics are pure high school poetry class — earnest, saccharine-drenched, idealistic, and self-importantly grandiose — in a way that seems to perfectly capture the way that 1968 must have felt at the time, and the way that ’68 zeitgeist is (hopefully) cringe-inducing to those who have matured since then. (Born in 1970 here, so I can only speak from observation and, I confess, more than a little bit of snickering … sorry, boomers.)
But I did and do like the Gordon Lightfoot & James Taylor songs. The difference between those and The Seekers song is, to me, the specificity of reference. A specific place, a specific season, closely observed and remembered, seems “larger” in artistic reach than the We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For uber-claims of the first song. I dunno. Maybe it’s just my middle-age cynicism sneering at the starry-eyed forward-looking teenaginess of the first song and gravitating instead to backward-looking nostalgia of the other two.
In one of his essays (going off memory here from 20 years back, so forgive the inaccuracies), C.S. Lewis describes his version of “the four ages of man.” He uses the analogy of a bicycle, and our attitudes towards it as we move from youth to old age:
Enchantment – Bicycle = magic. Every experience on the bike to the young child who has first learned to ride, is “Wheeeeeee!!!” All adventure, no responsibility.
Disenchantment – Bicycle = spoiled magic. A few years older, the kid with the bike is now asked to DO STUFF with it that is NOT FUN. Ride to school. Ride to the store. Take a paper route. Dang.
Unenchantment – Bicycle = pure utility. If the busy grown-up thinks about the bike at all, it is merely as a tool — machine for exercise, something to get one from Point A to Point B when the car breaks down.
Reenchantment – Bicycle = rediscovered magic. Hopefully, at some point, the adult comes back around to riding and feeling the “Wheeeeee!!!”
******
Matt @ 7:
Who told you you could live inside my head?
Dang! That was spooky!
I listen to lots of old music, grew up on Motown, progressed to rock n’ roll, was a Steely Dan fanatic for awhile ( the music was perfect, the lyrics cryptic and edgy..I recently referenced “Don’t Take Me Alive” when a friend went around the psychological bend). Strangely today I like listening most to the Great American Songbook of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, etc.. Before my time, but the enduring charm of a simpler more American era.
Here’s a great song for our pasts that are past:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v7dXA-LWVk&feature=related
COOL! A FREE FOUR DAY FIREWORKS SHOW OVER BUSHEHR!! http://tinyurl.com/7s2xtpy
“The official news agency IRNA said the four-day air defense war games, dubbed “Sarallah,” or “God’s Revenge,” were taking place in the south of the country and involve anti-aircraft batteries, radar, and warplanes. The drill will be held over 73,000 square miles near the port of Bushehr, the site of Iran’s lone nuclear power plant.”
FOUR DAYS OF FIREWORKS TO WASTE ALL THEIR AMMUNITION, THEN…
SUPPRESSION OF ENEMY AIR DEFENSES (SEAD)
OOOOOOOOOOOOOH, JUST WHAT THE EA-6B WAS DESIGNED FOR!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAD
In 1966, the iconic song for my cohort was the Animal’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place . Second only to the sounds of helicopter blades, this song evokes powerful emotions even to this day. I imagine it has the same power as the smell of lilacs in the spring to others.
What is interesting for me is trying to imagine myself listening to that music in the context of Wretchard’s environment of the time. I can’t really do it because I was nowhere near the Islands at that time period.
During that time period I was pretty much in a blue collar environment and for the most part the people I ran with despised those who we identified as hippies and self satisfied privileged kids who could afford to posture and pose and listen to faux folk and movement music. So how music is perceived, I imagine, depends on where you are listening from. The turmoil in Wretchards environment must have been far more real and severe that which was happening in the mainland US.
I’m afraid the theme song of my youth dates from 1966,”They are coming to take me away Ha Ha.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnzHtm1jhL4&feature=player_embedded#!
MSO @ 21:
Wow, I am definitely from a different generation & cohort. The song doesn’t evoke anything with me … draws a complete blank in terms of personal association.
What I do hear in it, rightly or wrongly (just my POV) is a lot of Clifford Odets. Teens in a no-future blue-collar ghetto watching in horror as their parents grow old at middle age from neverending drudge work … and vowing to escape that fate of living death … to flee “somewhere baby,” where “there’s a better life for me and you.”
A rather depressing song when you consider the statistics of how many actually manage to get out and find that “better life.”
And then there are all those complexities of attitudes towards work, and what the manual-laboring men do when they are stuck in those back-breaking drudge jobs. Yes, some end up drinking & hitting the wife and kids. But others manfully, dutifully, day after day, throw themselves on the wire so that their kids will go up and over. … Do the kids realize, eventually? Can any kid at 16, 17, 18 actually say which type of dad they have? Who at that age can tell the hero from the heap, the strong man from the broken man? It seems this takes wisdom, which most people don’t have at 18.
The reason we keep listening to that old stuff is because new pop music generally is not good. Have you listened to the lyrics of the average radio song? These are the generations that grew up in the broken families that the Boomers discarded so readily. The music is the sound of civilizational collapse.
I had a co-worker who once tried to convince me that, no, no, it wasn’t that at all….the creative stuff wasn’t on the radio, it was elsewhere. He proceeded to give me several bootleg copies of serious new bands. I disliked it all except for Johnny Cash’s last album. I agree, there are Searchers, trying to find a truly innovative sound; but in the end, I still don’t see any replacement yet for the blues chromatic scale, the roots music, the folk blending of British peasant and African tribal in America….blues, jazz, bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel, etc.
Perhaps a band like Sigur Ros from Iceland has a unique sound that will point the way ahead. Maybe we’ll turn from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll to something else….something shamanic and visionary. I don’t like it enough yet. The best American music still speaks to the questions of body and soul….the ecstasy of the body, the mysticism of altered consciousness (even if you don’t like illegal drugs), and the power of love. I feel like other musical forms of other nations have never created such a large body of work this powerful. It’s not just the music either….some of the lyricism, in its simple way, is the best poetry of the 20th C. (I’m taking about the less than 1% of it all.) In my opinion, few poets, such as Yeats, Eliot and Neruda ever got to this level of lyricism.
On the other hand, I have a nice classic rock collection of music on my iPod, and I can hardly stand it anymore. Unless you go back to classical music, world folk or religious music, there’s really nowhere else to go. Problem for me is, having listened to wonderful live performances of classical music, I can’t go back to CD or mp3 recordings…it’s just not the same thing. I have to listen to jazz recordings, wishing I could see the real thing.
I dunno, I keep trying to compose a message here but it gets all maudlin and TMI. The CDs loaded into my car probably average about 1980 original recording dates, but even Jack-FM which is mostly oldies, features a lot of stuff newer than that. I’ve been scanning some old b&w snapshots I last recall looking at 50 years ago, on the floor, with my father, in front of the tiny b&w tv … is that even POSSIBLE? WHEN did I get that old? Was that really on this planet, in this universe?
What a fascinating thread. I consider myself fortunate to be anchored in classical music — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Verdi, Puccini. But my tastes go all over the place, from Fred Astaire and “The American Songbook” of Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, Cole Porter, to Willie Nelson, to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, back to Django Reinhart, the Andrew Sisters, over to Gene Autrey and on to Marty Robbins, and then all the way to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and doubling back to Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, and on to Diana Krall, and so forth.
What we tried to do with our kids was recognize that no matter what we did at home, they were going to be exposed to all sorts of trash outside our house. So we tried to fill them with as much good stuff as we could. We took them to every possible Broadway play and off-Broadway play that had music in it, saturated them with music from the 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s, and took them to opera and concerts — even four years to a summer Shakespearean Festival. To our delight THEY requested to go back to the Shakespearean Festival a fifth year.
As for me, I reflect on the anthems of my high school, college, and medical school days with a mixture of smiles and incredulity. Did I really like that stuff? Did I really believe in all that crap? I guess I did. I’m not quite sure what to make of it today, but this thread did shake loose many memories.
2. Keith Lowery
I think you are referring to this Andrew Fletcher:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Fletcher_(politician)
7-8 decades before Lexington and Concord, he had radical notions about replacing royal troops with local militias, and was accused of having “republican” sentiments.
Well, I guess I’m not as sophisticated as y’all, because I hadn’t heard “I know I’ll never find another you” in a while, so I downloaded it into my iTunes thanks to wretchard’s post. And to still further self deprecate, I am one of those 50+ guys edging into concert halls and arenas to hear my favorite bands, this time around with my son. Our last such was this summer past where we saw Kansas, Styx and Yes. It was a helluva performance, and I stood the whole time (and sang, and screamed myself hoarse) And my final act of self-flagellation will be to confess that I find some modern music very appealing. Much of it is crap to be sure, but there are artists out there, perhaps in larger numbers than ever before. I could post many many bands with deep lyrics and soaring melodies, indeed, I’d love to post my playlist! However, I’ll leave you with one small example, so you can see just how depraved I really am.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dINzhwpbjoE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5jfFzYUZUk&feature=related
http://lyrics.wikia.com/Spock%27s_Beard:Jaws_Of_Heaven
Oh, how droll.
@23 — A rather depressing song when you consider the statistics of how many actually manage to get out and find that “better life.”
Nineteen years old, twenty pounds under weight, down into your bones tired, hungry, thirsty, white shriveled saturated skin, white leather boots, slip sliding through slick red clayish mud, bland cold food, wet toilet paper, rotting clothes with exposed knees, the smell of rotting vegetation and human fertilizer, sleeping cold in the mud, and days of overwhelming boredom relieved only by moments of abject terror. We had to get out of that place and for far too many, it was the last thing they ever did.
feh! Edit didn’t take apparently.
Second part of the video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5jfFzYUZUk&feature=related
As a 25 year old sailor, my impression of Manila in 1969 was of a vibrant tropical city that in a lot of ways was like Chicago in the 1920′s, everybody was packing guns and knives. There was a booth as you entered a restaurant with a sign “Ladies & Gentlemen, please check your weapons” and behind the attendant was a wall of pegs holding enough fire power to over throw a small county. It was crazy and still a little sane, gaudy jeepneys zipping around. At a restaurant in Makati I heard an operatic trained soprano sing long sad lyric Tagalog songs that were like Puccini areas. There was music everywhere, all kinds of music. There were at least half a dozen English daily papers that were highly partisan and many more in Tagalog plus even Spanish and Chinese dailies. More than a little bit like “The Front Page” which as set in 1928 Chicago.
How can it be that no one mentioned the [ir]Revren[t]d Frank Zappa? It seemed to me many threads past that the BCers have a common age cohort. We are survivors. The best is yet to come…
Interesting choice of musical talent to illustrate this fascinating article.
Australian
Canadian
American
The Anglosphere.
No coincidence, methinks…
I probably tell too much about myself if I say that my foundational music albums were:
#1 Pink Floyd: Wish you were Here
And #2: Rush: 2112
okay, #3: The Who: Who’s Next?
love me some Baba O’Riley.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2KRpRMSu4g
I always get lost in my mind when the violin kicks in at the 4 minute mark.
p.s. : Note to Orphaned Son of Liberty: Spock’s Beard is teh awesome!!!
p.p.s.: honorable mention to Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends!
Aristocrats have always inhabited another country where their loyalties were to each other as much as the patch of dirt they happened to own. Patriotic and social rituals were as much to build loyalty to the nation among the elites, and bind them to a sense of obligation to those entrusted to their care, as to instill fervor among the foot soldiers.
True that the aristocrats inhabit their own country – they are “citizens of the world” so that they don’t have to be citizens of the place they live and don’t have to be loyal to the hoi poloi down the street.
But patriotic rituals, Nationalism if you will, wasn’t very good for the nobility. It was great for the King, but pretty bad for the Dukes and Comtes and various non-royal aristocrats. Prior to the rise of Nationalism, the greater nobles were free agents, selling their loyalties to various Kings and Princes in pursuit of their on aggrandizement. Feudalism tied the serfs and lesser nobles to their lord directly, and when he changed sides, they were expected to go with him.
But once the idea of Nationhood took hold, the serfs weren’t so willing to change sides. They thought of themselves as English or French or what-not, and if the local Lord-of-the-Manor decided to go over to the side of the English King, his French subjects would revolt. The big change was that loyalty began to matter going up the chain as well as down.
Which is why the modern neo-nobility want’s to destroy Nationalism, so they can shed their loyalty to place and return to being unfettered citizens of the world.
It’s interesting that Wretchard and his companions back then choose – at least temporarily – an American nationality. America isn’t just a place or government, but an idea. In some ways it’s the mirror image of the Citizen of the World, only instead of the Dukes escaping their obligation to the local serfs, it’s the serfs escaping their obligation to the local power structure. Some of them did it by getting on a boat and going to America. Others did it for a few hours at a time, listening to music and taking a break from the grind.
JMH 35,
My point is that the patriotic rituals were not all invented by the elites to control the herd. Many of them were invented to control the elites and train them to at least project a show of loyalty to the community. Often this worked and they did internalize a sense of Duty. Mottoes like “God and Country” are carved in stone at many schools. The youth of the Gentry and Oxbridge graduates did serve as junior officers in the trenches of WW-I. They inspected their troops feet, a ritual that Paul Fussel described in “The Great War and Modern Memory” as building an almost religious bond between the men of different classes, and then walked in front of them into the machine gun fire.
The current plague of hipster douche-bags is not reason to despair. People are capable of being better. We have produced better and still do.
The last clip threw me back to the spring of 1968. My first wife and I rode our Honda CB 350 fifty miles to go to a free weekend concert at the Stephen Foster Memorial park in north-east Florida. There we heard a lot of local bands but the highlight of the weekend was James Taylor. I remember being haunted by Going to Carolina and Fire and Rain…
Speaking of rain, it rained the whole weekend and we were totally soaked since we were camping out. But then again, my lady was “moved” by thunderstorms and the lovin’ was good enough to make me ignore the weather.
Almost all of my teenaged friends are gone now, from cancer, traffic accidents, war and diabetes. Parents, grandparents and country kin have all passed on. There are few of my old army buddies that I would even want to hang out with if I even knew where to reach them. My first wife has long since gone her own way. Sometimes I feel like one of those weird sea creatures that occasionally wash up on shore and scientists scratch their heads over it.
But there is still the occasional old song that comes on the radio that reminds me of good and bad times. I have a lovely lady who cares about me, and God is good to me. Life has lovliness to sell.
Youtube is one of the great gifts of the internet age.
Thanks so much for the wonderful trip back in time by The Seekers, one of my favorites. I love their version of “Waltzing Matilda”.
As a young woman attending college in Western Massachusetts in that era, I heard Gordon Lightfoot in his salad days, and also concerts by the two Taylor siblings, Livingston and Kate.
Livingston had a wonderful set, just an acoustic guitar and accompanied by a wonderful bassist, Walter Robinson, who went on to do children’s and religious music. It was a concert at Smith College when it was still an institute for serious young women who were interested in men, if you get my drift.
The Free Five-College busses had stopped running after the concert, and it was a snowy winter night. Along with my friends, we had no other option but to hitch a ride back to Amherst, then we could walk over the Notch to South Hadley. The road was awash with concert-goers with their thumbs out, so I did my imitation of a 1940s movie, and hitched up my skirt to show some leg.
A van careened to a stop, and the riders inside (young men) laughingly threw open the door to give us a ride, stating in amazement that they weren’t going to stop for anyone until they saw me with my skirt hitched up!
Oh to be young again….