I absolutely loved this book - best I've read in ages among all genres - and this chapter was one of my favorites along with the Vietnam chapter. I have always thought that while the 6os brought us some needed changes they also set us on a destructive path in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I never thought about the idea that the Oedipal obsession unleashed by Freud was even a bit behind the boomers' constant (and constantly irritating, to me - I was born smack in the middle of the boomer decades and grew up with all this) rebelling-against-whatever-ya-got attitude. We were a traditional Catholic family and yet I well recall a very well-used paperback copy of Spock's Baby and Child Care in our house. So Hal may be on to something here even if it's just a partial explanation for the boomers' unprecedented behavior. Fantastic book, fantastic chapter.
Hal - Immediately after writing this I did go right to Amazon and gave you my only five star review in many years, so I am way ahead of you! As far as the Baby and the Bathwater syndrome, we're living it so desperately now - well, who am I kidding? That baby's long gone. So perhaps I will look into your other tomes - hope you do another "Impossible Histories" sometime.
Thank you so much, Christine! I hope you won't take it amiss if I encourage you to share your opinion with the world, via Amazon or Goodreads or such places. An author lives and dies on word of mouth, and these entities gatekeep our mouth-words.
If you're inspired to read my other books...well, none of them are about history but perhaps all of them are about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Mar 26, 2023·edited Mar 26, 2023Liked by Hal Johnson
Quite an entertaining melange - many thanks. But don’t assume a Free Pass! Kenny Rogers? Dude, he had like 2 or 3 good songs in a too-long career, and got way too much mileage out of some of the most sacharine country clap-trap ever put on vinyl. He doesn’t really belong on any list that includes Bob D or Richie Valens. And Nancy Sinatra? Cute , love the legs and hair, but she’s the very definition of ‘one hit wonder’, last name and all. Only a pop historian making hay on the alt-history beat could ever jnclude her on a list of pop heavyweights. And now that I think about it - that happens every once in awhile, from what I can tell - capping on hippies is beneath you. As with others who apparently weren’t around to witness it, they constituted a highly visible but tiny minority during the high holy days between the ‘67 Summer of Love and Woodstock. They did popularize weed, long hair and some other signifiers of the era, but the vast majority of American youth were clean-cut types at that point, not ‘early adapters’ (to pilfer a telling phrase of more recent vintage). If it hadn’t been for the VN War and their disproportionate participation in the anti-war movement they wouldn’t have seemed so ubiquitous. Remember this: the USA was socially much more conservative then, with large numbers quite reactionary; the most successful 3rd party presidential candidacy of the last 100 years was that of Geaorge Wallace in ‘68. He won several Southern states; electorally no one in his position has come even close since. How about THAT as a basis for further speculation?
I'm a genuine Nancy Sinatra and Kenny Rogers fan, although KR, esp., has some grim singles. But you're right, and I'm aware that, say, Sam the Sham and Smokey Robinson are not *equally talented*. A list like this is inherently unfair because there's no room for counterexamples—my all-time favorite female vocalist, LaLa Brooks, was born in '47, so she just doesn't get mentioned. But in general, when I think of a '60s hitmaker, it turns out to be someone from the Silent Generation.
The outsized impact of the Vietnam War on the mythology of '60s youth culture is in fact the subject of Impossible Histories chapter 19; I don’t know if you’ve got the book at your side, but if you do you should tell me how your impressions tally with mine, and if you don’t I guess wait for the annotations post?
I mostly think you’re right about the relative scarcity of hippies, but I think there’s a danger of getting into a “no true hippie” situation. And yet, it’s true: By the end of the 1960s Reggie Mantle had sideburns, but Archie and the gang didn’t start wearing headbands and fringed vests until the ’70s.
But…a decade or so ago I read What Really Happened to the Class of '65? (by Michael Medved & David Wallechinsky) and I no longer have the book in front of me, but man oh man a lot of the class of ’65 ended up on communes. I’d thought communes were a Doonesbury conceit! No one in my year ended up in a commune! (These were all from one v. rich high school, and not a random sample.)
Probably society was doomed by the early ’60s when people stopped wearing hats.
Mar 27, 2023·edited Mar 27, 2023Liked by Hal Johnson
Truth be told, I was quite late to the free-love party - graduated high school in ‘78 and missed the whole damn thing! But read what I could, and “Whatever Happened to the Class of ‘65?” was an interesting part of the corpus. I still remember some of them. Also skipped through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - a mind bending journey - and a few others. Then re-directed my callow youthself toward being a punker for a few mins and finally settled on ‘terminally unhip roots music enthusiast’ as a fitting groove. Now I tell Ruby ‘Don’t take your love to town, but if you do, don’t forget those long, black boots of yours.’ Seriously though, Wallace would be an interesting subject of wild specualtion...but might still be too hot to touch in this day & age. He was actually competitive in the ‘72 Dem nomination race when he was shot, and had won Florida. Am not a fan - could never be - but his discombobulating presence in the electoral politics of the era is an interesting subject.
("Roots music" can be a broad category, and perhaps I can too far removed from any concept of hipness here in the hinterlands, but certainly for a while I was able to pass off my love of of, say, Harry Smith's Anthology, Woody Guthrie, and the Goodbye Babylon box set as a respectable musical taste, at least in some circles—for a while, Brooklyn hipsters were able to at least grudgingly tolerate any pop culture over 50 years old. But I've never been legitimately hip, just retrograde in my tastes.)
I absolutely loved this book - best I've read in ages among all genres - and this chapter was one of my favorites along with the Vietnam chapter. I have always thought that while the 6os brought us some needed changes they also set us on a destructive path in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I never thought about the idea that the Oedipal obsession unleashed by Freud was even a bit behind the boomers' constant (and constantly irritating, to me - I was born smack in the middle of the boomer decades and grew up with all this) rebelling-against-whatever-ya-got attitude. We were a traditional Catholic family and yet I well recall a very well-used paperback copy of Spock's Baby and Child Care in our house. So Hal may be on to something here even if it's just a partial explanation for the boomers' unprecedented behavior. Fantastic book, fantastic chapter.
Hal - Immediately after writing this I did go right to Amazon and gave you my only five star review in many years, so I am way ahead of you! As far as the Baby and the Bathwater syndrome, we're living it so desperately now - well, who am I kidding? That baby's long gone. So perhaps I will look into your other tomes - hope you do another "Impossible Histories" sometime.
Thank you so much, Christine! I hope you won't take it amiss if I encourage you to share your opinion with the world, via Amazon or Goodreads or such places. An author lives and dies on word of mouth, and these entities gatekeep our mouth-words.
If you're inspired to read my other books...well, none of them are about history but perhaps all of them are about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Quite an entertaining melange - many thanks. But don’t assume a Free Pass! Kenny Rogers? Dude, he had like 2 or 3 good songs in a too-long career, and got way too much mileage out of some of the most sacharine country clap-trap ever put on vinyl. He doesn’t really belong on any list that includes Bob D or Richie Valens. And Nancy Sinatra? Cute , love the legs and hair, but she’s the very definition of ‘one hit wonder’, last name and all. Only a pop historian making hay on the alt-history beat could ever jnclude her on a list of pop heavyweights. And now that I think about it - that happens every once in awhile, from what I can tell - capping on hippies is beneath you. As with others who apparently weren’t around to witness it, they constituted a highly visible but tiny minority during the high holy days between the ‘67 Summer of Love and Woodstock. They did popularize weed, long hair and some other signifiers of the era, but the vast majority of American youth were clean-cut types at that point, not ‘early adapters’ (to pilfer a telling phrase of more recent vintage). If it hadn’t been for the VN War and their disproportionate participation in the anti-war movement they wouldn’t have seemed so ubiquitous. Remember this: the USA was socially much more conservative then, with large numbers quite reactionary; the most successful 3rd party presidential candidacy of the last 100 years was that of Geaorge Wallace in ‘68. He won several Southern states; electorally no one in his position has come even close since. How about THAT as a basis for further speculation?
I'm a genuine Nancy Sinatra and Kenny Rogers fan, although KR, esp., has some grim singles. But you're right, and I'm aware that, say, Sam the Sham and Smokey Robinson are not *equally talented*. A list like this is inherently unfair because there's no room for counterexamples—my all-time favorite female vocalist, LaLa Brooks, was born in '47, so she just doesn't get mentioned. But in general, when I think of a '60s hitmaker, it turns out to be someone from the Silent Generation.
The outsized impact of the Vietnam War on the mythology of '60s youth culture is in fact the subject of Impossible Histories chapter 19; I don’t know if you’ve got the book at your side, but if you do you should tell me how your impressions tally with mine, and if you don’t I guess wait for the annotations post?
I mostly think you’re right about the relative scarcity of hippies, but I think there’s a danger of getting into a “no true hippie” situation. And yet, it’s true: By the end of the 1960s Reggie Mantle had sideburns, but Archie and the gang didn’t start wearing headbands and fringed vests until the ’70s.
But…a decade or so ago I read What Really Happened to the Class of '65? (by Michael Medved & David Wallechinsky) and I no longer have the book in front of me, but man oh man a lot of the class of ’65 ended up on communes. I’d thought communes were a Doonesbury conceit! No one in my year ended up in a commune! (These were all from one v. rich high school, and not a random sample.)
Probably society was doomed by the early ’60s when people stopped wearing hats.
Truth be told, I was quite late to the free-love party - graduated high school in ‘78 and missed the whole damn thing! But read what I could, and “Whatever Happened to the Class of ‘65?” was an interesting part of the corpus. I still remember some of them. Also skipped through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - a mind bending journey - and a few others. Then re-directed my callow youthself toward being a punker for a few mins and finally settled on ‘terminally unhip roots music enthusiast’ as a fitting groove. Now I tell Ruby ‘Don’t take your love to town, but if you do, don’t forget those long, black boots of yours.’ Seriously though, Wallace would be an interesting subject of wild specualtion...but might still be too hot to touch in this day & age. He was actually competitive in the ‘72 Dem nomination race when he was shot, and had won Florida. Am not a fan - could never be - but his discombobulating presence in the electoral politics of the era is an interesting subject.
("Roots music" can be a broad category, and perhaps I can too far removed from any concept of hipness here in the hinterlands, but certainly for a while I was able to pass off my love of of, say, Harry Smith's Anthology, Woody Guthrie, and the Goodbye Babylon box set as a respectable musical taste, at least in some circles—for a while, Brooklyn hipsters were able to at least grudgingly tolerate any pop culture over 50 years old. But I've never been legitimately hip, just retrograde in my tastes.)