Transported

Isn't it funny how a song can transport you back in time?  Whenever I hear "California Dreaming" by the Mamas & Papas or "Somebody to Love" by Jefferson Airplane I'm instantly transported back to the days of hippiedom.

I listened to the radio all the time when I was a teenager, and music was--in many ways--my link between life in Auburn and the outside world.  The outside world was where I felt everything was happening, and my humble life was where I felt nothing was happening.  Probably like many people, during my teenage years I always had a strong feeling that I was missing something somewhere--a sort of restlessness.  Maybe it was that I'm the oldest of my brothers and sisters and really didn't have a role model or a direction in life then--I don't know.  I just know I wanted to be somewhere other than where I was.  I think it was that restlessness that prompted me to join the Air Force (financially it was really my only ticket out) like I did.  I was kept under tight rein at home and was not able to grow my hair long.  By the time I actually could grow my hair out, hardly anybody was doing it any more.  Again, I missed it...

I soaked up everything about that generation that I was exposed to.  I remember once in 7th grade, I was choosing a book from the Scholastic list that we had to pick from.  I looked and looked, but nothing caught my interest (and I was a voracious reader back then!) until my eyes fell upon a pictorial book of Woodstock.  I instantly bought it.  I wanted so bad to had been able to go to Woodstock!  Another thing I read and reread was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.  As a matter of fact, I still have it--in hardback.  That book is another of my favorite things of the 1960s.

Growing up in the 60's was profound in many ways.  I was too young to take part in the hippie movement that was sweeping the nation but not too young to marvel at it.  Everywhere around me were changes of every possible kind you could imagine, as well as many you couldn't imagine.  Things like hair styles, clothing styles, colors, music, peace signs, black light posters, incense--and all of it was "counter" to what the country was up to that point.  The people of my parents' age or older seethed at what the young people of the country were doing to "their" country.  Like pretty much any teenage rebellion issue I think it was part spite and part self-exploration. 

It was a time when all of our media input came from very few sources.  If it was television, it was limited down to a handful of networks that our antennas could receive.  If it was radio, it was AM.  Although FM was starting to come into widespread use, it was still a largely AM world as far as popular music was concerned.  Newspapers were very similar to the ones that still exist, but there were very few influential magazines at that time.

The mantra was "anti" then.  The people of the hippie generation took great delight in being their own person.  They liked to take whatever advice or recommendations that their parents or other authoritative figures gave them and purposely ignoring it and doing their own thing. There was a power in the collective.  They knew that they were the largest demographic of people in the history of the world and they knew they could accomplish great things by banding together and demanding it.  In one decade the country went from one extreme to the other.  The decade of the sixties was responsible for more changes than any other decade in history.

All it takes is to hear my favorite songs from that era and I'm transported right back to it.