Aug 21, 2023·edited Aug 21, 2023Liked by David V. Stewart
I'm glad another non-boomer is tapped into the spiritual dimension of what happened with late-'60s music--somewhere between cause and effect, IMHO, but hardly worth half a century's adulation unless one thinks of it as the rub-it-in-their-faces spiritual victory party put on by the victors. (Peter Jackson's recent release of the boringly endless Beatles' 1969 "Get Back" sessions would be laughably pitiful had we not, as a culture, already elevated the fab four to watch-every-move demigod status.)
Until recently, I scoffed at Tipper Gore's hand-waving thesis that (in effect) there-be-demons, not only in her era, but in the one which preceded it. Then I researched my first novel, set in 1969. (bit.ly/CWS-p or bit.ly/CWS-e) She was mostly right.
For those with ears to hear, there are clues-upon-clues-upon-clues that a pitched Normandy-scale battle for souls was being played out in late '60s music--a Dresden/Hiroshima bigger than most of its musical stars ever knew (although, IMHO, a bunch, like Led Zep knew *exactly* who they were serving... which Dylan obliquely noted a decade later; but that's a bunny trail for another day.)
My title, "Covered With Snow," borrows a phrase one era artist used--deliberately, I am convinced based on exhaustive research--to juxtapose a Biblical reality (the forgiveness offered in Christ, as word-pictured in Isaiah 1:18) with a spiritual one that artist saw coming unglued around him, in particular, at the time of Nixon's December 1st, 1969 draft lottery.
A good example of the Beatles self-mythologizing is the Pete Best affair. Back in the day it was treated as good and noble what happened to him, even portrayed in movies and books as an "event" where Ringo played at a show protesting what happened to Best and it was turned around because Everybody Clapped and became pro-Ringo. It was even referenced in the Simpsons. This story never happened, and over the years it was proved that Best actually was done dirty and screwed out of money and credit he rightfully deserved. Every interview with the members of the band since have changed tremendously into regret over the way they treated him for a piece of fame.
The other example is, as you mentioned, Cobain. I was a kid in the early 90s and I listened to a lot of music. No one really mentioned Cobain until he died, and no one started wearing those same smiley-faced Nirvana shirts until around 1997 or so--the time when Geffen really starting pushing the myth. Chances are unless you were into the early '90s scene as a teenager, you never listened to Nirvana at all when they were around, and if you did they were just another band that was about to break up (In Utero was not on any level more popular than Nevermind, either) from the era. I never knew anyone who listened to them, and I knew kids who listened to Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Gin Blossoms (a band who also had an important member die but was never mythologized for it), and Green Day. That only changed at the end of the '90s when post-grunge influenced by Cobain started popping up.
Funny thing is, after Cobain, they've never really been able to pull it off since, which really goes to show how much things have changed since Cultural Ground Zero. In another universe we would all be wearing the same Amy Winehouse shirts and re-contextualizing the lame Van Halen III as a masterpiece (like we did with In Utero) instead of the rather normal reaction such deaths received.
It feels as if that spell is broken, and I don't think it will be cast again any time soon.
Also, I should add the odd observation I've had that younger generations discovering old music tend to see the 1950s as old classic rockabilly music and indulge heavily in 1970s to mid-90s rock and related subgenres. Outside of those two periods they do not seem very interested in other music. I found it fascinating that they find 50s rock more interesting than the 60s stuff and kind of leapfrog it in general. It isn't a reaction to Boomers, either. It just seems to be a pattern I've noticed a lot.
I think what you're seeing is a lot of the cream rising to the top in a way that was kind of stifled when Baby Boomer mythology choked everything out. Because the industry is so dead, people are now just digging into sounds they like divorced from any zeitgeist, and the results have been fun to see.
I like Hendrix, the Beatles, the Who, the Stones, the criminally underrated Kinks, Pink Floyd, the Allman Bros., Cream, CCR, Zeppelin, Sabbath and some more, but a) most of the 60s music actually sucked and b) most “sixties” bands put out their best stuff in the 70s anyway. The less hippieish a 60s band was, the better they were. The 70s and 80s were the superior music decades anyway.
Regarding Nirvana, I was there. I liked them. Yet even as a young kid I found it odd that so many friends based their entire life around them. Very strange.
I find the 60s were cleaved in two between the early stuff that leaned closer to 50s music and the later stuff that bled into what came later in the 70s. Outside of the mythmaking we were inundated with in mass media, I don't really think of a defined 60s "sound" as much as an image that became ubiquitous thanks to Hollywood.
Divorced from the time period, which most kids who listen to music now will do since Boomers aren't in charge of culture anymore, it's not a very sonically unique period that sticks out when you can go to the 50s for the origins or to the 70s for a more developed sonic pallet. Much as I like the the Sonics, Dick Dale, Tommy James, or Zeppelin, it's difficult for me to think of them as particularly "60s" in identity.
I noticed in the 1990s there was a gap on the radio. Oldies stopped at 1966 and classic rock began in 1970 (or 69, with Zep or Sabbath, but nobody thinks of them as 60s bands) but focused on mid 1970s on. You heard the Beatles with songs like "Help" or "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." You had early Stones only. No Doors, etc. I had to actively seek out what "Hippie" music was and, to my surprise, it wasn't all that different stylistically from what came before and after it. It was transitional, certainly, but not some sudden revolutionary thing.
That tends to be the way things work. Soundgarden is thought of as a 90s band, but they put out several albums in the 1980s. Genesis started in the 1970s, as did Judas Priest. Van Halen started in the 70s but is mostly associated with the look and sound of the 80s. Lots of other examples out there.
The 60s sound is more of a production thing to my ears. Lots of bands have either that early or late 60s sound, like you said. There is no clean distinction between the decades anyway—it’s our way of marking time from the birth of Our Lord. But when I think “60s music” it’s based mostly on how albums were recorded and produced, the drum sound, the chunky tube amps guitarists used, the vocals, etc., and less the compositions themselves (though there are some commonalities).
My mother was an anti-hippie. She couldn't stand them. She claimed that most were rich, spoiled kids who wanted attention. My father got into the art scene, so he did adopt some hippie aesthetics, but later repented of it. He threw away all photographic evidence, which is a little sad because I would have loved to see him in his hippie stage.
Did you know that the myriad musicians who rose out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were a major influence upon the hippie movement) were almost all children of people deeply connected to the military-industrial complex? It's all too interconnected to be plausibly coincidental.
There's a fascinating, in-depth series of articles about it here:
Yeah I've heard of this. My point though is that despite all that, it was a trend quickly abandoned for other ideas after about 3 years of popular prominence.
I'm glad another non-boomer is tapped into the spiritual dimension of what happened with late-'60s music--somewhere between cause and effect, IMHO, but hardly worth half a century's adulation unless one thinks of it as the rub-it-in-their-faces spiritual victory party put on by the victors. (Peter Jackson's recent release of the boringly endless Beatles' 1969 "Get Back" sessions would be laughably pitiful had we not, as a culture, already elevated the fab four to watch-every-move demigod status.)
Until recently, I scoffed at Tipper Gore's hand-waving thesis that (in effect) there-be-demons, not only in her era, but in the one which preceded it. Then I researched my first novel, set in 1969. (bit.ly/CWS-p or bit.ly/CWS-e) She was mostly right.
For those with ears to hear, there are clues-upon-clues-upon-clues that a pitched Normandy-scale battle for souls was being played out in late '60s music--a Dresden/Hiroshima bigger than most of its musical stars ever knew (although, IMHO, a bunch, like Led Zep knew *exactly* who they were serving... which Dylan obliquely noted a decade later; but that's a bunny trail for another day.)
My title, "Covered With Snow," borrows a phrase one era artist used--deliberately, I am convinced based on exhaustive research--to juxtapose a Biblical reality (the forgiveness offered in Christ, as word-pictured in Isaiah 1:18) with a spiritual one that artist saw coming unglued around him, in particular, at the time of Nixon's December 1st, 1969 draft lottery.
A good example of the Beatles self-mythologizing is the Pete Best affair. Back in the day it was treated as good and noble what happened to him, even portrayed in movies and books as an "event" where Ringo played at a show protesting what happened to Best and it was turned around because Everybody Clapped and became pro-Ringo. It was even referenced in the Simpsons. This story never happened, and over the years it was proved that Best actually was done dirty and screwed out of money and credit he rightfully deserved. Every interview with the members of the band since have changed tremendously into regret over the way they treated him for a piece of fame.
The other example is, as you mentioned, Cobain. I was a kid in the early 90s and I listened to a lot of music. No one really mentioned Cobain until he died, and no one started wearing those same smiley-faced Nirvana shirts until around 1997 or so--the time when Geffen really starting pushing the myth. Chances are unless you were into the early '90s scene as a teenager, you never listened to Nirvana at all when they were around, and if you did they were just another band that was about to break up (In Utero was not on any level more popular than Nevermind, either) from the era. I never knew anyone who listened to them, and I knew kids who listened to Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Gin Blossoms (a band who also had an important member die but was never mythologized for it), and Green Day. That only changed at the end of the '90s when post-grunge influenced by Cobain started popping up.
Funny thing is, after Cobain, they've never really been able to pull it off since, which really goes to show how much things have changed since Cultural Ground Zero. In another universe we would all be wearing the same Amy Winehouse shirts and re-contextualizing the lame Van Halen III as a masterpiece (like we did with In Utero) instead of the rather normal reaction such deaths received.
It feels as if that spell is broken, and I don't think it will be cast again any time soon.
Also, I should add the odd observation I've had that younger generations discovering old music tend to see the 1950s as old classic rockabilly music and indulge heavily in 1970s to mid-90s rock and related subgenres. Outside of those two periods they do not seem very interested in other music. I found it fascinating that they find 50s rock more interesting than the 60s stuff and kind of leapfrog it in general. It isn't a reaction to Boomers, either. It just seems to be a pattern I've noticed a lot.
I think what you're seeing is a lot of the cream rising to the top in a way that was kind of stifled when Baby Boomer mythology choked everything out. Because the industry is so dead, people are now just digging into sounds they like divorced from any zeitgeist, and the results have been fun to see.
I like Hendrix, the Beatles, the Who, the Stones, the criminally underrated Kinks, Pink Floyd, the Allman Bros., Cream, CCR, Zeppelin, Sabbath and some more, but a) most of the 60s music actually sucked and b) most “sixties” bands put out their best stuff in the 70s anyway. The less hippieish a 60s band was, the better they were. The 70s and 80s were the superior music decades anyway.
Regarding Nirvana, I was there. I liked them. Yet even as a young kid I found it odd that so many friends based their entire life around them. Very strange.
I find the 60s were cleaved in two between the early stuff that leaned closer to 50s music and the later stuff that bled into what came later in the 70s. Outside of the mythmaking we were inundated with in mass media, I don't really think of a defined 60s "sound" as much as an image that became ubiquitous thanks to Hollywood.
Divorced from the time period, which most kids who listen to music now will do since Boomers aren't in charge of culture anymore, it's not a very sonically unique period that sticks out when you can go to the 50s for the origins or to the 70s for a more developed sonic pallet. Much as I like the the Sonics, Dick Dale, Tommy James, or Zeppelin, it's difficult for me to think of them as particularly "60s" in identity.
I noticed in the 1990s there was a gap on the radio. Oldies stopped at 1966 and classic rock began in 1970 (or 69, with Zep or Sabbath, but nobody thinks of them as 60s bands) but focused on mid 1970s on. You heard the Beatles with songs like "Help" or "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." You had early Stones only. No Doors, etc. I had to actively seek out what "Hippie" music was and, to my surprise, it wasn't all that different stylistically from what came before and after it. It was transitional, certainly, but not some sudden revolutionary thing.
That tends to be the way things work. Soundgarden is thought of as a 90s band, but they put out several albums in the 1980s. Genesis started in the 1970s, as did Judas Priest. Van Halen started in the 70s but is mostly associated with the look and sound of the 80s. Lots of other examples out there.
You nailed it David. The distinctions we use are mainly for marketing purposes only. Reminds me of bookstore shelves and how they use genre.
The 60s sound is more of a production thing to my ears. Lots of bands have either that early or late 60s sound, like you said. There is no clean distinction between the decades anyway—it’s our way of marking time from the birth of Our Lord. But when I think “60s music” it’s based mostly on how albums were recorded and produced, the drum sound, the chunky tube amps guitarists used, the vocals, etc., and less the compositions themselves (though there are some commonalities).
My mother was an anti-hippie. She couldn't stand them. She claimed that most were rich, spoiled kids who wanted attention. My father got into the art scene, so he did adopt some hippie aesthetics, but later repented of it. He threw away all photographic evidence, which is a little sad because I would have loved to see him in his hippie stage.
("I always wore shoes and bathed" - my dad).
My mom was an art major originally but gave it up because of post-modernism, not exactly a hippie thing.
My dad just always hated them. Him and every other boomer male in my family.
Did you know that the myriad musicians who rose out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were a major influence upon the hippie movement) were almost all children of people deeply connected to the military-industrial complex? It's all too interconnected to be plausibly coincidental.
There's a fascinating, in-depth series of articles about it here:
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/
Yeah I've heard of this. My point though is that despite all that, it was a trend quickly abandoned for other ideas after about 3 years of popular prominence.