CHAPTER FIVE: Talking ‘bout my generation
‘The ’60s are gone – dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free and the rock and roll never as great.’
US political activist Abbie Hoffman
‘Old hippies don’t die – they just lie low until the laughter stops and their time comes round again.’
British novelist Joseph Gallivan
It was such a very long time ago, and yet for many who experienced it the glory that was the Sixties lingers on like a dim but steady harbour light glimpsed through a pall of fog.
At the individual level the decade bequeathed a generation the hope of perpetual renewal, its ancients approaching their threescore years and ten in the unshakable belief that they had somehow bypassed the dreaded languors of slow-motion, pipe-and-slippers middle age altogether. ‘Hope I die before I get old,’ the Who had chorused – and the ideal solution was not to get old at all.
Sure enough, an improbable gaggle of Sixties rockers can still be seen performing their up- tempo, sexually charged music at bus-pass age. Paul McCartney, who had once regarded 64 as the gateway to decrepitude (‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me?’), was not only composing, singing and recording at 69, but marrying for the third time, too.
Still rocking
• Chuck Berry (born 1926)
• Jerry Lee Lewis (1935)
• Cliff Richard (1940)
• Bob Dylan (1941)
• Paul McCartney (1942)
• Gerry Marsden (1942)
• Ray Davies (1944)
• Van Morrison (1945)
• Wayne Fontana (1945)
The Rolling Stones:
• Charlie Watts (1941)
• Mick Jagger (1943)
• Keith Richards (1943)
• Ronnie Woods (1947)
The Who:
• Roger Daltry (1944)
• Pete Townshend (1945)
At the broader, social level the legacy of the Sixties is more problematic. Certainly the rebel leaders of the time were prone to displays of embarrassing self-indulgence:
• The newly married John Lennon and Yoko Ono invited the media to photograph them in bed every day for a week in the honeymoon suite at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel in March 1969 – a stunt intended to promote world peace.
• Bob Dylan, apparently high on cannabis, laughed his way through the 1966 recording of ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’, with the lyric ‘Everybody must get stoned.’
• The leaders of the student uprising in Paris in 1968 brilliantly condemned the excesses of the West’s industrial-military complex, but found nothing to offer in their place but slogans such as ‘Be realistic – ask for the impossible’ and ‘Take your desires for realities.’
The UK reality was that the liberal spirit of the time took root in legislation introduced by men in suits (Harold Wilson’s Labour government, that is) rather than through the sit-ins, protest songs and ‘happenings’ of the idealistic young. Dreams, as they quickly discovered, would never be enough.
So how much of that spirit survived the decade? Certainly those heady idealists would be given plenty to shake their heads about in the years ahead. Here are just four body blows among many:
Exhibit A: The Kissinger peace prize
When the US diplomat Henry Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize in 1973, the singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer commented mordantly that political satire had become obsolete. Kissinger was given the award for negotiating the end of the Vietnam war, but nobody on the left forgot his role as an exponent of cynical realpolitik while serving as secretary of state under Richard Nixon. The ‘enemy’ had been rewarded.
Exhibit B: No such thing as society
In 1987 the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (in office 1979–1990) gave an interview to Woman’s Own magazine in which she made a comment that defined her political philosophy:
‘I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the government must house me!” And so they’re casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first.’
There had been plenty of individualism in the Sixties, too, but there had also been a keen sense of shared interests – and by the Eighties that social cohesion seemed increasingly under threat.
Exhibit C: Blair’s blame game
In 2004 the cadet Thatcherite and (Labour) prime minister Tony Blair took a fresh swing at the Sixties, blaming it for crime and family breakdown in his own time.
‘A society of different lifestyles,’ he claimed, ‘spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to others.
‘Today people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus. People do not want a return to old prejudices and ugly discrimination, but they do want rules, order and proper behaviour. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge.’
Ah, those feckless young people and that ‘decent law-abiding majority’! It sounded such a throwback to the fusty old 1950s that the sclerotic sinews of the Sixties generation surely flexed in unison, ready to enter the fray all over again.
Exhibit D: God save the Queen
And whatever happened to the end of deference? With all those people scuttling from their cinema seats to avoid having to stand for the national anthem, surely the end of the monarchy was in sight?
Not a chance. This book is published in Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee year, with opinion polls revealing that 70 per cent of the population opposes dropping the Crown in favour of a republic.
Ten films set in the Sixties
• American Graffiti California high-school friends spend a last summer of freedom before going to college.
• Dirty Dancing A romance in which Frances (‘Baby’) joins her family at a holiday camp and falls in love with the dancing teacher.
• Easy Rider Two counterculture bikers travel from LA to New Orleans to discover America.
• Good Morning, Vietnam A zany DJ shakes up the US Armed Services Radio station in Vietnam.
• Hair Adaptation of the 1968 musical in which a Vietnam war draftee goes hippie.
• National Lampoon’s Animal House Comedy in which misfit fraternity members take on their university administration.
• Taking Woodstock Based on a true story about the 1969 festival.
• The Day of the Jackal A professional assassin plots to kill President Charles de Gaulle. Based on Frederick Forsyth’s thriller.
• The Deer Hunter The Vietnam war affects the lives of people in a small American town.
• Thirteen Days Docudrama about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
PCGM
But all has not been lost. When Blair said he wanted no return of the ‘old prejudices and ugly discrimination’ he was conceding one of the abiding benefactions of the Sixties: a more relaxed society in which women have more control over their own bodies; unhappy couples are able to divorce without blame; racial minorities are protected from abuse; homosexuals are unmolested by the law; and the censor has dropped his blue pencil and gone into a welcome retirement.
Today, an over-zealous application of these principles is routinely described by conservative critics as ‘political correctness’, or ‘PC’ – often ratcheted up to ‘political correctness gone mad’. The PCGM tag is applied with such a curl of the lip that it’s clear the speaker would, if he could, do away with the relevant legislation altogether.
He can’t, though. The Sixties have changed things, and changed them for the better.
Researching and writing this book has been almost a guilty pleasure, as if I were entrusted with a bottle of some precious liquid, the merest sniff at its every uncorking conjuring up a flood of pungent memories and images – private scenes, of course, but public events, too.
We are all, no doubt, prone to romanticise our formative years if we had the luck to be happy in them, but please allow me the conceit that the Sixties were, indeed, a little different and rather special. If it were in my power to grant it, I would wish just such an invigorating ambience of hope, self- expression and individual liberty on any youngster about to set out on the tremulous teenage adventure.
The Sixties? Yes, I was there, and I do remember them.