Some songs I associate with specific times and places. One note from the Swedish disco group ABBA takes me right back to my disco dancing days when we were all dancing queens.
The most evocative collection of singing that I have and rely on to recall a favorite era in my life, a time of enormous growth, is all the albums I’ve saved, and sometimes even replaced, from the 1960s. The rock music of that time captures my sense of those days with all their turbulence and delights.
The plaintive ballads of the Grateful Dead are still sweet to listen to. The harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young invoke American folk music and country western tunes. And those British bad boys, the Rolling Stones, take off in another direction with their raucous and violent lyrics and guitars and drums. Their song Gimme Shelter with its wild thumping beat has practically become my anthem over the years. “Oh, the storm is threatening my very life today.”
Then there are the romantic and psychedelic imaginations of the Moody Blues and Steve Miller and the Doors. The Moody Blues are just dreamy like many of the idle, dreamy days I spent back then (and now) conjuring up another world. Steve Miller and his band sang goofy songs about the Last Wombat in Mecca with his Texas twang. But it was Jim
Morrison of the Doors who was the most remarkable poet of ‘60s rock after Bob Dylan. “Strange days have found us; Strange days have tracked us down,” he wrote. “We shall go on playing or find a new town.” All powered by magical drugs and a bit of genius.
A lot of the music of that era came out of the politics of the time—the movement against the war in Viet Nam, civil rights struggles, early environmentalism, and the once and future youth revolution. We were going to remake the world and in many ways did and the starting point was the music. I don’t know how many anti-war rallies I took part in that began with Country Joe and The Fish singing I Feel like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag that told mothers and fathers that they could be the first on their block to bring their son home in a box and other sarcastic lyrics protesting the war.
I was a great fan of Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of those San Francisco bands that combined blues and country and lots of politics with a catchy rock beat. There’s a song of theirs popular in 1968 that I find myself humming more and more now. It was youthful protest then but poses the question of what are you going to do about me. We have to do something, the refrain goes, about pollution, media lies, war, lousy jobs, violence, injustice. “I feel like a stranger in the land where I was born,” they sang, and I still feel that 40 years later.
Jefferson Airplane sang a mix of ballads about protest and the revolution that never happened. But we thought it would. In 1970, a lot of people hoped or feared that revolution was exactly what we were about to face. So the Airplane (their name is of course a reference to drug use) called for revolution in its Volunteers of America rant right after they sang that we could all be together. We didn’t worry about contradictions back then. Unfortunately, their call to revolution came closer to the end of the movement than at the beginning of it.
I’m not waiting for the revolution any more. But I do still listen to this music. I listen to remember those times and the urgency of our calls for peace and justice. I also listen because the music is just plain good. The musicians and singers were top notch and they pulled together so many musical styles like jazz, rock, blues, country and sheer poetry. These songs are part of my history and I do not walk away from my history.
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