Sixties – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

1968

Nostalgia City for this aging Boomer.

The prevailing campus spirit at Berkeley in the mid-Sixties had been Camelot-style liberal, venerating the fallen hero JFK, Michael Row the Boat Ashore, fighting world communism and intending to put a man on the moon. Most students were content within the technocratic state and eager to join its ranks. Cal graduates enlisted in the Peace Corps, not Students for a Democratic Society.

Then, quite suddenly, cool moved from Kennedy-style white Oxford shirts and can-do pragmatism to longhaired forest creatures quoting Kahlil Gibran. Sorority girls wearing madras skirts donned Mexican peasant blouses one day and dangly silver earrings the next. Accessories included funky Volkswagen buses, Cost Plus exotica, and European grand tours on $5 or $10 dollars a day. Berkeley students often seemed to have quite a lot of disposable income, thanks to their uncertain, hopeful, dollar-humping parents.

My advice to the young: take care to get old. He who would understand the world needs the grist of memory for the mill of inquiry.

The Tet Offensive Fifty Years Later

It was around the time of Tet that I received a letter from Uncle Sam ordering me to downtown Los Angeles for my pre-induction physical. I went, and flunked. Due to a birth defect I hear only out of my right ear. I was classified 1-Y, and that was later changed to 4-F.

In any case, I had been awarded a California State Scholarship to attend college that fall. So I was doubly safe from the draft.

But enough about me.

50 Years Later: What Tet Didn't Destroy, Deferments Did

I would add:

There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' — either their own or that of their loved ones — properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions. I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.

There is also this to consider: In the bad old days of the draft people of different stations – to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch — were forced to associate with one another — with some good effects. It is 'broadening' to mingle and have to get along with different sorts of people. And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different lands in trying circumstances. He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.

Summer of Love, Winter of Decline

The down side of the 'sixties.

The counter-culture validated styles of living once considered coarse, delinquent, tragic, or mad. It was said to be about Love. Was that eros, or philia, or agape? One cannot be sure, but the gross hypersexualization of entertainment and culture since suggests eros, down and dirty.

The point is essentially correct, but I would add needed nuance by making a tetrapartite distinction among eros, philia, agape, and sexus. It is true that the word eros puts most in mind of sex, raw and raunchy, down and dirty. And it is true that eros, the love of the lower for the higher, is often mixed with purely sexual desire and sometimes perverted by it. But the love of the spiritually empty for that which might fulfill them is erotic, even when freed of the sexual. The longing love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the love of Wisdom, the love of God are not examples of philia or agape. Philia is friendship, and friendship is between equals. But I am not the equal of Wisdom or Justice or the Good; I merely aspire to be wise, just, and good.

This aspiration for the higher is erotic. But it may be best to introduce a different word to ward off confusion: the aspiration is erothetic. In a decadent, corrupt, sex-saturated society any talk of eros and the erotic is bound to be misunderstood. Erothetic love is love that aspires and seeks to acquire. It is rooted in need and lack, spiritual need and lack.

As for agape, it is the love of the higher for the lower. It is a love that bestows, grants, helps. To put the point in a way that exploits the ambiguity of the genitive construction, the love of God (objective genitive) is erothetic; the love of God (subjective genitive) is agapic. The same goes for the love of Christ. God does not lack anything; nor does he aspire or seek to acquire. The divine plenitude does not allow for aspiration or acquisition.

My point, then, is that eros is not to be condemned; it is not inherently "down and dirty." The love of the Good and the desire to be good, the desire to imitate the Good and participate in it are noble aspirations. (The Christian and Platonic allusions will not be missed by the well-educated, e.g., imitatio Christi, methexis.)

What ought to be condemned is not eros, but sex when it is divorced from such ennobling adjuncts as the erothetic, the philiatic, and the agapic. What ought to be condemned is sex reduced to the 'hydraulic,' to the exchange of bodily fluids for the sake of mere sensuous gratification.¹ This perversion is well-conveyed by the contemporary phrase 'hook-up.' I hook up a hose to a tank to fill it. But we live in a sick society getting sicker with each passing day and I am something of a vox clamantis in deserto. So I don't expect many even to understand what I am saying, let alone agree with it.

These topics are deep and rich. If you want to gain some insight into them you need to begin at the beginning, or at least at the 'Athenian' beginning, as opposed to the 'Hierosolymic' beginning, with the 'divine' Plato and his Symposium. Then work your way through the history of thought, philosophical and theological. One good guide in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros.

But to have the time and energy for this you will have limit your consumption of media dreck, not to mention your tweeting, facebooking, and what all else.

NOTES

¹ Of course, sexual intercourse involving one or more humans is never a mere exchange of bodily fluids. Even among sub-human animals, sexual intercourse is never purely hydraulic in nature: sentience is involved and various emotions. Filling my gas tank in the usual manner would be an example of a purely hydraulic exchange. Insofar as humans approach the hydraulic in their 'love'-making, humans degrade themselves. This degradation is a free act possible only because humans are spiritual animals. An animal consumed by lust cannot degrade himself, but a man can. We could say that when a man tries to become less than an animal he proves that he is more than one.

Do You Remember the ‘Sixties?

According to the old joke, if you do, you weren't there. This is worth a look.

Filed under: 'Sixties

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Monterey Pop Festival, June 16-18, 1967

It transpired 50 summers ago, this June, the grand daddy of rock festivals, two years before Woodstock, in what became known as the Summer of Love. Your humble correspondent was on the scene. Some high school friends and I drove up from Los Angeles along Pacific Coast Highway. I can still call up olfactory memories of patchouli, sandalwood incense, not to mention the aroma of what was variously known as cannabis sativa, marijuana, reefer, tea, Miss Green, Mary Jane, pot, weed, grass, pacalolo (Hawaiian term), loco weed, and just plain dope. But my friends and I, students at an all-boys Catholic high school that enforced a strict dress code, were fairly straight: we partook of no orgies, smoked no dope, and slept in a motel. The wild stuff came later in our lives, when we were better able to handle it.

I have in my hand the program book of the Festival, in mint condition. Do I hear $1,000? On the first page there is a quotation from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice:

How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank! Here we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night, become the touches of sweet harmony.

Ah yes, I remember it well, the "sweet harmony" of the whining feedback of Jimi Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster plugged into his towering Marshall amps and the "soft stillness" of the The Who smashing their instruments to pieces. Not to be outdone, Jimi lit his Strat on fire with lighter fluid. The image is burned into my memory. It shocked my working-class frugality. I used to baby my Fender Mustang and I once got mad at a girl for placing a coke can on my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp.

On the last page of the programme book, a more fitting quotation: the lyrics of Dylan's The Times They Are A'Changin', perhaps the numero uno '60s anthem to youth and social ferment. (Click on the link; great piano version. Live 1964 guitar version.) Were the utopian fantasies of the '60s just a load of rubbish? Mostly, but not entirely. "Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been."

Tunes and Footage:

The Who, My Generation. I hope I die before I get old."

Mamas and Papas, California Dreamin'

Mamas and Papas, I Call Your Name

Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love

Janis Joplin, Down on Me

Otis Redding, Try a Little Tenderness

Scott MacKenzie, San Francisco

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fred Neil

Remember Fred Neil? One of the luminaries of the '60s folk scene, he didn't do much musically thereafter. Neil is probably best remembered for having penned 'Everybody's Talkin' which was made famous by Harry Nilsson as the theme of Midnight Cowboy. Here is Neil's version. Nilsson's rendition.

Another of my Fred Neil favorites is "Other Side of This Life." Here is Peter, Paul, and Mary's version.

And it's been a long long time since I last enjoyed That's the Bag I'm In.

The reclusive Neil died in 2001 at the age of 64. Biography here.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan, Traditionalist

The Left owns Dylan as little as it owns dissent. Every Dylanologist will want to read Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard piece, AWOL from the Summer of Love. It begins like this:

In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the Catskills, in the nineteenth-century painters’ retreat of Woodstock. He was a “protest singer,” to use a term that was then new. His lyrics—profound, tender, garrulous—sounded like they were indicting the country for racism (“where black is the color where none is the number”), or prophesying civil war (“you don’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows”), or inviting young people to smoke dope (“everybody must get stoned”). Fans and would-be acolytes were soon roaming the town on weekends, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Eccentric-looking by the standards of the day, they infuriated local residents. Nothing good was going to come of it. One of the town’s more heavily armed reactionaries would later recall:

[A] friend of mine had given me a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols, and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around, but it was awful to think about what could be done with those things. . . . Creeps thumping their boots across our roof could even take me to court if any of them fell off. . . . I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life and the fact that I was not to piss them off or they could press charges really didn’t appeal to me.

The folk singer was Bob Dylan. The reactionary old coot with all the guns . . . well, that was Bob Dylan, too. At age 25, he was growing uncomfortable with the role conferred on him by the music he’d written at age 20. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he would later write in his memoir Chronicles.

And it ends like this:

If Dylan was the voice of a generation, it was not of the generation we think. He belonged to the generation before the one that idolized him, as did The Band. For them, the pre-baby boom frameworks of meaning were all still in place, undeconstructed and deployable in art. One of history’s secrets is that revolutionaries’ appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew. They secure their greatness less by revealing new virtues than by rendering the ones that made them great impracticable henceforth. There is no reason this should be any less true of Dylan. His virtues are not so much of the world he left us with as of the world he helped usher out.

Some selections from The Bootleg Series, #11:

Quinn the Eskimo

Lo and Behold!

One Too Many Mornings

Million Dollar Bash (Take 2)

You Ain't Going Nowhere (Take 2)

The Auld Triangle

Punch Bros. version

Too Much of Nothing (Take 2)

Say to Valerie, say hello to Marion
Give them all my salary on the waters of oblivion.

You Win Again

An old Hank Williams number

Jerry Lee Lewis version

Rock Salt and Nails

Joan Baez's unsurpassable and definitive version

A Fool Such as I

Hank Snow's 1952 version

Just a couple of years before the motorcycle accident:

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

Some, like Jesse Jackson, are still stuck inside of Selma with the Oxford Blues again.

Oxford Town is both topical and timeless. It is about the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962. But neither Meredith nor Ole Miss are mentioned. This allows the song to float free of the events of the day and assume its rightful place in the audio aether of Americana.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Anti-Drug Songs

Sex, drugs, and rock & roll without the drugs. In memory of the recently late Paul Revere of Paul Revere and the Raiders, a '60s outfit with a garage-band sound I never much liked, which had a hit with the anti-drug Kicks with which I shall kick off tonight's offerings.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

An equally powerful version by Janis Joplin

Hoyt Axton, The Pusher

Dave Van Ronk, Cocaine Blues

Velvet Underground, Heroin

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Dubiously classified as drug songs:

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Puff the Magic Dragon

Doors, The Crystal Ship

Tim Hardin, Red Balloon. Small Faces version. Hardin died of a heroin overdose in late December, 1980.

Donovan, Mellow Yellow. Supposedly about cigarettes filled with dried banana peels. I tried one of these mellow yellow joints in Hollywood, Cal, in '67. It had no psychoactive effect I could discern.

Beatles, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Supposedly about LSD.

UPDATE 10/19: Jeff Hodges thinks I should have included Neil Young, Tonight's the Night. He's right.

Dennis Monokroussos:

No “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton?! That’s a huge and surprising omission, unless you don’t take it to be either pro- or anti-drug. Clapton himself calls it anti-drug, so perhaps a Sunday supplement should ensue. On the kudos side, I’m glad that you labeled “Puff” and “Lucy” as only dubiously classified as drug songs, as both songs’ authors have vehemently and repeatedly protested their songs’ innocence.

My title indicates that my focus is on anti-drug sons. J. J. Cale's tune "Cocaine" is pretty clearly pro-drug, as witness the lyrics:

If you wanna hang out you've got to take her out; cocaine.
If you wanna get down, down on the ground; cocaine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; cocaine.

If you got bad news, you wanna kick them blues; cocaine.
When your day is done and you wanna run; cocaine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; cocaine.

If your thing is gone and you wanna ride on; cocaine.
Don't forget this fact, you can't get it back; cocaine.
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie; cocaine.

True, Clapton has claimed that the song is anti-drug, but the claim is simply not credible. Generally speaking, artists' opinions about their works are not to be given much credence. Dylan is an example of one who has spoken nonsense about the meaning of his own songs.

Just read the above lyrics. The meaning is clear. You need cocaine to 'hang out' and to 'get down.' The second phrase means to party, to have sex, to have a good time, to jump up and dance. It does not mean to bring yourself down either physically or mentally. But then why "down on the ground"? Because it rhymes, and this is just a popular song the lyrics of which were scribbled in a couple of minutes. To write a song like this you start with a chord progression and a guitar riff and then find some words to go along with them.

And then we are told that cocaine "don't lie"; she takes you away from the phony workaday world of the uncool and puts you in touch with reality. And in her embrace there is an escape from bad news and a cure for the blues. If you've lost your 'mojo' and its on the sag and your 'thing' is gone, you can get it back with this stuff. And "she don't lie!"

There is simply no way this song could be interpreted as anti-drug. It is pretty clearly, though not obviously, pro-drug.

Clapton ought to 'man up' and admit it. Arguing that it is anti-drug would be like arguing that the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together is a stern warning against premarital sex, or that their Under My Thumb is a feminist anthem.

That's why I didn't include Clapton's "Cocaine" on my list of anti-drug songs.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Magic ’60s

These tunes go out to Sally Shoaf. It was great to see you again after 50 years, Sally.

I'm So Glad to join you, My Best Friend, as we follow Mr. Tambourine Man on an Embryonic Journey to hear the Chimes of Freedom as we Break on Through to the Other Side .

The Seductive Sophistry of Alan Watts

Here. (An entertaining video clip, not too long, that sums up his main doctrine.)

Alan Watts was a significant contributor to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Just as many in those days were 'turned on' to philosophy by Ayn Rand, others such as myself were pushed toward philosophy by, among other things, Alan Watts and his writings. But early on I realized that there was much of the pied piper and sophist about him. He once aptly described himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as opposed to an academic philosopher. Entertaining he was indeed.

I heard him speak in the last year of his life on 17 January 1973. He appeared to be well into his cups that evening, though in control. Alcohol may have been a major contributor to his early death at age 58 on 16 November 1973. (See Wikipedia) What follows is a journal entry of mine written 18 January 1973.

………………..

I attended a lecture by Alan Watts last night at El Camino Junior College. Extremely provocative and entertaining. A good comparing and contrasting of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Chinese views.

At random: One must give up the desire to be secure, the desire to control. Ego as totally illusory entity which is really nothing but a composite of one's image of oneself and certain muscular tensions which arise with attempts to achieve, grasp, and hold on. The self as opposed to the ego is God, God who forgot who he was. The world (cosmos) as God's dream. Thus the self-same Godhead reposes in each individual. There is no spiritual individuality. And therefore, it seems, no possibility of relation.

Consider the I-Thou relation. It presupposes two distinct but relatable entities. If there is only one homogeneous substance, how can there be relation? But perhaps I'm misinterpreting the Wattsian-Hindu view by thinking of the Hindu deity as substance rather than as function, process. Watts himself denies the existence of substance. Last night he made the well-known point as to the linguistic origin of the notion of substance. [This is of course not a "well-known point."]

Denial of the ego — i.e. its relegation to the sphere of illusion — would seem to go hand in hand with denial of substance. [Good point, young man!] Watts seems very close to as pseudo-scientific metaphysics. He posits a continuum of vibrations with the frequency of the vibrations determining tangible, physical qualities. Yet he also says that "We will always find smaller particles"; that "We're doing it"; that the fundamental reality science suppsedly uncovwers is a mental, a theoretical construct.

Thus, simultaneously, a reliance on a scientific pseudo-metaphysics AND the discrediting of the scientific view of reality.

The Summer of ’69

A lot happened that fabulous and far-off summer of '69, now 45 years past. I won't bore you with any autobiographical tidbits, and of course some of you remember the moon landing; but that was also the summer when Ted Kennedy's car killed Mary Jo Kopechne.

His car killed more people than any of my guns.

I now hand off to Malcolm Pollack.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jim Fixx Remembered

It was 30 years ago tomorrow, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan. Now for some 'running' tunes.

Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty

Eagles, The Long Run

Beatles, Run for Your Life

Del Shannon, Runaway. Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway." Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".

Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free

Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Johnny Preston, Running Bear

Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue

Roy Orbison, Running Scared

Crystals, They Do Run Run

Addendum (7/20)

I should have mentioned it last night. Today, 20 July, is not only the 30th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 49th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia:

The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind … The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "^[66]^[67]

Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful … He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."^[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else …' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."^[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".^[69]

Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio. It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that? I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice. I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records. The fanaticism faded with the '60s. But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: British Invasion, A – C

This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the so-called British Invasion of 1964 – 1966. Here is one reasonably complete list of 'invaders.' Tonight, selections from A through C.

Animals, We Gotta Get Out of This Place

Animals, Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Beatles, You Can't Do That

Beatles, It Won't Be Long

Cilla Black, You're My World. Remember her? Few popular songs capture the delightful delusionality of romantic love as this one.

Cilla Black, Anyone Who Had a Heart

Chad and Jeremy, A Summer Song

Chad and Jeremy, Yesterday's Gone

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Songs from Inside Llewyn Davis

The Llewyn Davis character in the brilliant Coen Bros. film suggests, I don't say represents, Dave van Ronk. So let's start with some tunes (not necessarily the renditions) from the movie done by the Mayor of MacDougal Street.

Hang me, Oh Hang Me

Green, Green Rocky Road

Dink's Song. Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac version. Punch Bros. live version. Carolyn Hester. Odetta. Dylan.

Tom Paxton, The Last Thing on My Mind

Justin Timberlake, et al. Five Hundred Miles. PPM version. Journeymen version.

Please Mr. Kennedy clip

Friday Cat Blogging: Inside Llewyn Davis

To Scottsdale this drizzly dreary dark December morning to see the Coen Bros. latest on its opening hereabouts, Inside Llewyn Davis. A tale of two kitties is a sub-motif that symbolizes the self-destructive folksinger's troubles, but it would take a couple more viewings for me to figure it out.

The film gripped me and held me its entire running length, but then I lived through that era and I know the music and its major and minor players. Figuring out the the cinematic references and allusions is part of the fun. Tom Paxton, Albert Grossmann, Jim and Jean, The Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan . . . they are all there — or are they?

A distinction is made between purely fictional objects (native objects) and immigrant objects: historical individuals that have been imported into fiction from reality. Many of the characters in the Coen Bros. film seem to belong to a third category. They are not wholly unreal like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or lightly fictionalized individuals like many of the characters in Kerouac's novels, but fictional surrogates of real-life individuals. For example, there is a character who suggests Tom Paxton, but could not be said unambiguously to represent him, pace Dave van Ronk's ex-wife who writes, in a critical review, "The character who represents Tom Paxton has a pasted-on smile and is a smug person who doesn't at all resemble the smart, funny, witty Tom Paxton who was our best man when we married."

Ann Hornaday's Washington Post review ends brilliantly:

In many ways, “Inside Llewyn Davis” plays like a waking nightmare of creeping anxiety and dread, as the era’s grandmaster of brazen self-invention arrives unseen in New York while Llewyn’s self-defeating near-misses pile up like so much street-sullied snow. But this soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.

The era's grandmaster of brazen self-invention is of course Bob Dylan, who blew into town that bitter winter of '61 and who in a few short years brought about a sort of Hegelian Aufhebung of the folk era: its simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and transmogrification into the heart of the '60s as represented by the trilogy of Dylan at his most incandescent: Bringing it It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde.

It's all Over Now, Baby Blue from the the first-mentioned album perhaps sounds the theme of cultural shift.