Nostalgia time again. Scott McKenzie, famous for the 1967 anthem "San Francisco" penned by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, is dead at 73. Gen-Xer Mick LaSalle gets it right in his commentary:
The thing about that song is that . . . however naive and even sanctimonious it might be, it is so clearly a true expression of a mindset, of a vision, of a moment in time, of a generation, of an aspiration that, even if it is singing about a San Francisco that never happened and a dream that never came true and never really had a chance of coming true, and that had only a scant relationship with reality . . . it’s a precious thing. It’s a document of a moment, but more than that, a perfect poetic expression of that moment.
It was not MY youth, but I can recognize in that song and in the purity of McKenzie’s vocal something that is as unmistakably honest, in its way, as Gershwin playing the piano, or Fred Astaire dancing, or Artie Shaw playing the clarinet. It is youth finding itself in the world and saying the most beautiful thing it can think of saying at that particular moment. You can’t laugh that away. You have to treasure that. Really, you have to love it.
Speaking of the Mamas and Papas, here are some of my favorites: Dedicated to the One I Love (1967), a cover almost as good as the Shirelles original. But it is hard to touch the Shirelles.
Twelve Thirty. Creeque Alley. California Dreamin'.
And then there's Eric Burdon and the Animals, San Franciscan Nights from '67.
The so-called Summer of Love transpired 45 years ago. (My reminiscences of the Monterey Pop Festival of that same summer of '67 are reported here.) Ted Nugent, the guru of kill and grill, and a rocker singularly without musical merit in my humble opinion, offers some rather intemperate reflections in a WSJ piece, The Summer of Drugs. Excerpts:
The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of
hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.
[. . .]
While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what it truly was.
Although I am not inclined to disagree too strenuously with Nugent's indictment, especially when it comes to drug-fueled self-destruction, Nugent misses much that was positive in those days. For one thing, there was the amazing musical creativity of the period, as represented by Dylan and the Beatles above all. This in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music. Has there been anything before or since in popular music that has come up the level of the best of Dylan?
The '60s also offered welcome relief from the dreary materialism and social conformism of the '50s. My generation saw through the emptiness of a life devoted to social oneupsmanship, status-seeking, and the piling up of consumer goods. We were an idealistic generation. We wanted something more out of life than job security in suburbia. (Frank Zappa: "Do your job, do it right! Life's a ball, TV tonight!")
We were seekers and questers, though there is no denying that some of us were suckers for charlatans and pied pipers like Timothy Leary. We questioned the half-hearted pieties and platitudes and hypocrisies of our elders. Some of the questioning was puerile and dangerously utopian, but at least we were questioning. We wanted life and we wanted it in abundance in rebellion against the deadness we perceived around us. We experimented with psychedelics to open the doors of perception, not to get loaded.
We were a destructive generation as well, a fact documented in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. But the picture Nugent paints is onesided. Here is Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" which was one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Or give a listen to the Youngblood's Let's Get Together. This song captures the positive spirit of the '60s, a spirit not much in evidence nowadays.
