The sixties – were you really there?

Statements like: "If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren't really there,"* never fail to make me a bit queasy. While I usually shrug them off with “that’s one way of looking at it, however glassy-eyed”, it’s the sort of comment that reminds me of one unfortunate legacy of youth, about how quickly things take place in a catalyzed (hormonal etc.) reaction. And before you know it, it’s over and the world looks quite different. It also reminds me of the time when the significance of words like “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto” from The Wizard of Oz, or “mad as a hatter” had yet to mean much.

Another reason the statement makes me queasy is perhaps because it reminds me of the many ways in which people seem bent on protecting territory by avoiding dialogue, or committing any constructive memory to oblivion. Others do it by hiding behind some dubious professional role or institutional status - like the doctor who claims a right to diagnose anything and anyone regardless of context. Like the one man/woman posse bent on taking the law into their own hands, we seem to forget that an individual who is called upon to witness and chooses to plead the 5th amendment, does so only to spare the details of self-incrimination. Better to testify, now.

Need I be queasy when I recognize how many post-war baby boomers we were who formed the critical mass of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture, easily a million. While the term globalization had yet to permeate widespread consciousness, many of our parents had lifted our sights to the horizons of the Far East during the war. Thus the sixties weren’t just a reaction to the political and social conservativism of our parents generation. We were also familiar with the new wave of post-war Asian immigrants, with the first movements toward ethnic civil rights, as well as with the expressions of the local beat generation in art and literature. The sixties in the Bay Area were (note plural conjugation) the result of a complex of inter-related cultural and political trends, catalyzed by the war in Vietnam and nuclear testing in the South Pacific. We - hundreds of thousands of baby boomers who attended the world renowned universities and colleges in the Bay Area - were uniquely positioned to observe, empirically test and endorse, many of the freedoms of personal expression expounded by our local artists and through the Free Speech movement. And by virtue of our numbers we could deviate en masse from the conventional norms and political conservatism that had been characteristic of mainstream America. When less energy is required to activate, as in any catalyzed reaction, the reaction rate is that much faster. Many were consumed in the process.

While we were voracious cultural consumers, not all of us put everything into our mouths. Perhaps I become a bit queasy when I am reminded of the rotten fruit, moldy bread and mushrooms, and see all the bottles of jug wine and the sugar cubes. I can still breathe in the marijuana and hashish along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and in the Haight in San Francisco. Not all of us listened day and night to all the music, though we did listen. I was there, for example, at a Bob Dylan concert off Broadway, and remember Joan Baez in the row in front of me. I can still hear the psychedelic sound of Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit”, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, playing for free in the park during my lunch hour. I can also recall the ambiance at La Pena on Shattuck in Berkeley when Malvina Reynolds (Little Boxes) sang. I was there too, with lifted hands swaying to Aretha in her encore with Ray Charles at the Fillmore West. And as an usher at the Hyatt Regency, I was even privileged to listen to a rare Mahalia Jackson concert, for free, just a few years before her death. Yes, many of us were there and remember, even musical experiences, because we weren’t stoned out of our minds.

Many of us locals knew where the fault line went, because we had grown up in earthquake territory. Grandma and Grandpa lived in the Haight too, and went to mass regularly at Saint Agnes. We were young, naïve perhaps, but our survival instinct told us to watch where we put our foot. We knew already then that we were mortal human beings, just stepping out into the world.

While our episodic memory may be failing us now, it is said that our semantic memory is at its peak between the ages of 55 and 65, which puts mine at an all-time high. And so as I read through my old diaries, I’m finding that it’s easy to recall “the gist” of many of the happenings that I have described in more detail there. Like I wrote in my blog just a couple of weeks ago: “Remember we boomers have been around long enough to make a lot of connections.”


To be continued….

* Said by Paul Kantner, lead guitarist and singer in Jefferson Airplane, a San Francisco-based rock band, that had its hey dey between 1965 and 1970.