(Stop, children! What’s that sound? Robin Pugh Yi contemplates what’s goin’ down with the older generation.)
I have tickets to go to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert with my parents in a couple of weeks.
It’s a family ritual. My husband gets tickets to performances by old hippies like Tom Paxton and Arlo Guthrie. I sigh and ask if he isn’t yet tired of Baby Boomers’ belief that they are inventors and keepers of the Holy Grail of Perpetual Adolescence. How can he maintain a straight face listening to “Hair” lyrics?
Then I go, because he has tickets. And it means a lot to Mom to go with us, enthusiastically sing along, and elbow me when I roll my eyes.
Then, inevitably, something breaks down my guard. Pete Seeger sings “Abiyoyo,” or Judy Collins sings “In My Life,” and I am once again a little girl in the Summer of Love. My parents, my aunts and uncles, their friends are so young, so sweet and earnest and unaware of everything to come. Sincerely trying to teach their children well.
“Sucking in the ’60s”: When did that decade jump the shark?
In those moments, I lose my exasperation with the damage some hippies’ irresponsibility did to so many of their kids. I’m not annoyed by their tendency toward self-absorption or tired of hearing their worn-out songs. One of the wrinkled, Levi’s-wearing performers hits the right note to overwhelm me with maternal tenderness, gratitude and a little sadness for how quickly those beautiful young flower children went gray. I ache with memories of people I’ve lost or am losing; and I cry.
Hippies were our parents or the people who drove our parents crazy, the generation who ritualized teen rebellion. So much of our coming of age was distinguishing ourselves from them, insisting on defining our own youth. Some of us said we hated hippies. Some of us emulated them, wearing the clothes and playing the records they donated to thrift stores. How did you feel about them? How have they influenced your identity and choices?
Please share stories I can think about and distract myself with in hopes of maintaining some dignity when Puff sadly slips into his cave.
— Robin Pugh Yi
I don’t remember if I ever shared this on the blog … Hilarity ensued before the Che Games in May when the San Diego Union-Tribune attributed this quote to me in an article about the forthcoming event:
“There was a strong mod and punk movement, but we all got along. And we all hated hippies.”
What I’d actually tried to say was that our gigs managed to pull together mods and punks … But that we also threw in a bit of a hippie vibe that was way out of favor in 1983. History caught up again in a few years with neo-tribal stuff like Burning Man or whatever, but I felt like our little kiss of patchouli was the real wild card at those events. 🙂
I like hippies! I do the hippie-hippie shake — gently, though, ’cause they’re not as young as they used to be.
As the very beginning of what’s commonly regarded as the start of Gen X (birthday in 1965), I have always felt like us late Boomers and senior Gen Xers are continually sweeping up after the elephant. It’s funny that one of us is president now!
I’m in love with Mary after watching this:
I especially love the way she keeps flipping her hair back as she sings.
What generation are we, anyway? I think that our music scene happened in part because we weren’t really part of any cultural generation.
Pete Seeger was supposed to come and stay at our house when we were living on the Seneca reservation. I was soooooooo bummed it fell through.
>>What generation are we, anyway?
Dave Ellison: If we go by the official U.S. standard, “the United States Census Bureau defines the demographic birth boom as between 1946 and 1964.”
Generation X, a term first used in the U.K. in 1964, has become the shorthand for the post-boom bunch.
We’re kind of straddling both. And to complicate matters further, we were simultaneously part of a San Diego population boom … So even as birth rates were declining nationally, San Diego was filling up with young families.
Kind of a freaky little generational and geographic cusp we occupied!
I LOVE the “we all hated” hippies thing.
I was raised in the most hippie environment possible, went to SD in ’75. Loved all the OB hippie/surfers. Fell in love with a hippie girl in SD from Ann Arbor.
In the blink of an eye we all shaved our heads, wore leather, listened to Sham 69, Pistols, Clash…and “we all hated hippies”!!
It was so stupid in some ways…behind the vinyl stacks of punk, were all the albums we listened to a year before. Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Neil Young…although there was some Iggy and Ziggy stuff in there as well!
>>Anyway, for my friends and me, who were caught in between Woodstock and Lollapalooza, the term hippie was not used to denote a specific subculture, it was used as a catch-all, derogatory term for the deadheads and stoners music and lifestyle caused us to embrace punk and garage music to begin with.
Ray: Actually, that is true … The sniffing about “hippies” wasn’t really historically rooted — it was a (somewhat inchoate) statement about complacency … And yes, something to rebel against.
I don’t remember being being around hippies. My parents were in their 30’s in the sixties and didn’t latch onto the hippie experience, except for my dad growing a beard, wearing beads and riding a motorcycle. The only rock album my parents had (Neil Sedaka doesn’t count) was Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence. I was 5 in 1970, so I missed it.
I felt the need to consider myself not a hippie, although I had long hair, used drugs and had a somewhat utopian outlook. But I think people were more cynical by the eighties.
It’s interesting that we were in the middle of a San Diego population boom. Certainly there were a lot of young people around. But I felt like there wasn’t much countercultural stuff going on besides our little music scenes. If felt like if you wanted to be part of different kind of scene than hanging out in sports bars at the beach, you had to make it happen yourself.
Mine were so young. By the time they were the age I am now, I had already moved out. Considering that has reframed some of my memories.
I was always close to my parents. But as I grew up, I was sometimes bothered by how foolish some of their choices had been. That bothered me less when I got old enough to have some perspective about things people do in their 20s. Plus, whatever else was going on, I never had any doubt that they we all loved each other and would be there for each other. I took it for granted as a kid, of course. I’m more grateful now.
This is their 47th year together.
>>>Generation X… has become the shorthand for the post-boom bunch.
That term became a “marketing demographic”…named after the novel Generation X (which was named after the punk band)… but the term is usually applied to people who are a minimum of 4 or 5 years younger than us …the generation that the movie Reality Bites was supposed to be about. The novel, though, is really about people who are slightly older than I am.
I just think that people my age have a different set of cultural references than people who are even a few years older OR younger. When talking about things like music, I’ve had more than one person tell me that I was from a different generation than them, even though they were just three or four years younger!
>>the term is usually applied to people who are a minimum of 4 or 5 years younger than us …the generation that the movie Reality Bites was supposed to be about.
Dave: You’re right … It is a marketing phrase. I mean, what the hell is “Generation Y”? According to Wikipedia,
Wow … That’s really helpful! Sheesh. 🙂
I think the reality is, besides a catchy name, the Baby Boom did represent an actual swell in births sparked by post-war prosperity and just a lot more guys coming home and starting families. So there is some objectivity, at least to the start of that generation … End date seems fuzzier … And the rest of it — I’m not a demographer, but we didn’t have a nice world war or something to mark the start of any of these X, Y, Z things.
I’m with you and Ray that I don’t feel particularly connected to a generation — maybe the Blank Generation! 🙂
I think our “Kennedy assassination” was the day we realized too many of our parents were getting divorced. It dawned on us at different times in different ways. We didn’t necessarily talk about it, but I think that did much to define us as a generation.
BTW, does anybody here really give a crap about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this weekend? 🙂
Ray and I were kicking around options for creating a post to acknowledge it … But (while I’m sort of getting into reliving the timeline from the moon landing to the Manson murders to Woodstock to whatever because it helps me get a more accurate sense of the pace of these headlines) … Hey, it was a rock concert we were all too young to attend.
Actually, my parents and I were stuck in traffic outside Woodstock … We had a little weekend house up in Sullivan County, and they decided to drive by to see what was up. So if gridlock counts, I was there!
I think boomers have done more than enough to celebrate this anniversary.
Woodstock had some stellar moments. It also involved John Sebastian whining and rasping out “I had a dream” and Wavy Gravy being annoying in his special unique way. And romanticizing substance use in a way some of their kids are still paying for.
Stellar Woodstock moment:
That is, bar none, the worst piano break Ive ever heard.
They showed Woodstock on Palledia (HD music channel) last night. I came in during the interview with the 50-something Portasan cleaner. It’s actually one of the more interesting “timeless” parts of the documentary. Something so blue collar and unassuming about the guy, proud of his job, telling the cameraman about the son that’s attending the concert and the son that’s over in the DMZ. You couldn’t make that guy up. Just as we walks off camera a 20 something smoking grass pops out of one of the Portasans and offers the cameraman a toke. A true documentary film moment….remember before they staged everything and just let the freaking cameras roll.
Of course my sister’s sitting there with me and she comments “Maybe it’s my age (mid 40’s) but I’m more interested in the farmer’s field and how are they gonna clean up that mess”.
Of course another man you couldn’t make up, Sly Stone was working it that night. Still my favorite moment in that “3 days of Peace and Love”…..SOUL! boom chakalakalaka boom chakalakalaka
and please let this clip clear out the putrid stench of Patchouli and Brylcreem …..I smell something FUNKY
>“Maybe it’s my age (mid 40’s) but I’m more interested in the farmer’s field and how are they gonna clean up that mess”.
Yup. There are moments when you realize you have become a grownup. One of mine was the day I asked that question.
>>That is, bar none, the worst piano break Ive ever heard.
LOL … How many people in that audience of half a million were on hallucinogenics? I just can’t stop laughing about the effect that performance would have on all those exposed synapses!
(Was Sha Na Na a gay in-joke? It’s a little hard to tell from this historical remove, but they sure look like precursors to the Village People … )
It’s so weird that a ’50s “tribute” band was booked at Woodstock. It shows that the ’60s were still a lot about the ’50s, and that the ’70s is when a lot of ’60s stuff happened. Know what I mean??
As far as the gay in-joke…for sure. But…it’s show business!! No surprise there!
>If that’s an archetype for ’60s rebellion, it looks pretty patronizing and insufferable to me.
I think you just summarized the impetus for our generation’s adolescent rebellion.
And why Hair’s 1948 vs. 1968 exchange annoys me.
Oh, wow. I just finally got a chance to see the videos people posted on this thread. Matt, I was at that Pete Seeger show- on the right, rear of the orchestra, tears streaming down my face at the end of that performance of that song. Thanks for posting that.
Actually- that was the very moment when this whole pattern started for me.
I like you, Matt.
Oooooh! San Diego connection for this thread … Sam Hinton, contemporary and friend of Pete Seeger’s, a rollickin’ folk singer and former UCSD oceanography professor, apparently still going strong at 92.
Sam put together the early-admissions program that got me into UCSD too young, and he played my bar mitzvah! 🙂 I learned a lot of his songs when I was just learning guitar.
This still makes me chuckle, although the intervening years have certainly shown that there are lots worse things to be than a well-intentioned liberal. (Kind of like the Dead Kennedys going after Jerry Brown in “California Uber Alles”!)
I don’t think I’d have had the patience for Woodstock. By three bands I’m usually done. My favorite part of the movie is when Santana plays Soul Sacrifice, featuring 20 year old Michael Shrieve doing an amazing drum solo (wandering drum solos drive me nuts, but this is a good one).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLDalZ4-53g
on our way to go fight the war in viet nam for what would be my father’s last time…..the whole family stopped in for a nice visit to san francisco.
this was like 1967 and my pops was savvy enough to know the place to see was haight-ashbury. i was only 10 but could easily sense something unique about all these flowery-bearded people and such exquisite ladies in all their rainbow tie-dyed outfits and jeans……man i was in awe of the entire spectacle and vibration.
2 years later when i came back, there was a part of me which was convinced i was going to be a hippie……but first i had to avenge my father’s death.
i got over that bloodthirst fairly quickly….my hair grew to enormous lengths….i smoked my first joint when i was 12…i was wearing maroon bell-bottom hip-huggers and mocs listening to spooky tooth savoy brown and blind faith by 14. i saw steppenwolf live that year….led zeppelin….iron butterfly. inagaddadavida baby…you know i love you.
i was too young to really be one but damned i gave it a pretty good shot.
oh…those were corduroy bell-bottoms…btw.
Clay wasn’t the only one inspired early by San Fran:
“Johnny Ramone was nice to me. He was shooting dope, but he never tried to get me to do it. He was John Cummings then, and I thought he was cool. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket. A black leather jacket. When I first started hanging out with him, Johnny was real nice to me. I don’t know why. He liked me for some reason. I guess because he knew I could play guitar.
But Johnny wasn’t interested in knowing my brother, Joey Ramone. Joey was calling himself Jeff Starship then and hanging out with weird people from the Village. My brother was a real hippie in those days. He used to walk around with no shoes on, and he went to San Francisco, and he hung out with real hippies. That’s why John wasn’t interested in knowing my brother at all. Joey was just a weirdo hippie. And John hated hippies.”
(Mickey Leigh, Joey Ramone’s brother, on “Please Kill Me”)
Matt-We had to have met as children. My parents used to take me to hear Sam Hinton at coffee houses. Loved him! There were generally so few kids at those things, it’s almost impossible to imagine we wouldn’t have sung along together to “Froggy went a Courtin'” and shared granola cookies at some point. Do you remember going to a Sam Hinton/Guy Carawan show when you were about 4?
I do remember that cafe. But not that show. Which I would most definitely have remembered if I’d been there. I remember Pete Seeger and Joan Baez shows at the SDSU amphitheatre when we were 11-13, several funky folk matinees at UCSD, and a lot of patchouli-infused coffee houses. If you were a 12-year-old son of hippies in my vicinity, I would have displayed the classic stare-hard-when-he’s-not-looking, then blush and glance away in denial when there appears to be threat of eye contact.
>>I do remember that cafe. But not that show.
Robin: If there’d been a girl our age in that little room when Williamson was getting his virginity-bustin’ groove on, I’d simply have slid down very quietly under the table!
Wasn’t the most squirmy thing I ever sat through with my parents, but the age and the intimacy and the fact that Williamson apologized from the stage, in advance, to me and Rives definitely put it high on the list.
These recent bluegrass-tinged arrangements of my dad’s Indian translations seem apropos the genre.
>Robin: If there’d been a girl our age in that little room when Williamson was getting his virginity-bustin’ groove on
For that particular event, I might have literally died of embarrassment. My heart might have seized up never to beat again. (Good God, just hearing a boy discuss that brilliant hit “Under Cover Angel” was unforgettable torment.) Or, knowing what was on the horizon, I might have jumped up in unabashed horror and run away screaming.
Some other event with ordinary hippy crooning about war and injustice would have inspired stare-avoid-repeat.
Your dad’s words work well with banjo music.
>>For that particular event, I might have literally died of embarrassment. My heart might have seized up never to beat again.
Nancy and I used to threaten the girls that we’d all go to a naturist resort if they didn’t straighten up and fly right.
Sometimes I’m a little wistful that I just can’t embarrass like I did as a kid! My shamelessness sometimes feels like a loss. 🙂
OK, Grace Slick just won some major points with me for this quote:
“Woodstock is well known because this country is so hyped on amount. It was big. Half a million people doesn’t necessarily mean something is good. It just means it’s big.”
I like that observation a LOT!
>>>Just as we walks off camera a 20 something smoking grass pops out of one of the Portasans and offers the cameraman a toke. A true documentary film moment….remember before they staged everything and just let the freaking cameras roll.
That is also my favorite part of the movie. I saw it on tv about 20 years ago… the way I remember it, the hippie asks the cameraman what he’s going to call the movie. The cameraman (obviously knowing how stoned the guy is) replies “Portasan.” The hippie, of course, has no idea he’s putting him on.
>>>Was Sha Na Na a gay in-joke? It’s a little hard to tell from this historical remove, but they sure look like precursors to the Village People
I didn’t occur to me before seeing that that Sha Na Na were gay, but it seems pretty obvious from this clip.
“… But think about how many underage clubs we went to and played at. Seemed like there were new ones springing up all the time.”
Right-as soon as the SDPD closed one down, another popped up.
Update: Mary couldn’t make Robin’s concert ’cause of cancer treatments. I feel sad. I hope Robin’s mom (and the rest of the family) has fun anyway.
It was lovely. Paul looks about 50 and strong. Peter is stooped and frail. Neither of their voices has faded in 5 decades. The bassist is on oxygen. Tom Paxton came out for the encores. I think this is their last tour. I held up through “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Wedding Song,” and a couple other emotional songs. I thought maybe the spell was broken. Maybe the afternoon at the county fair, or three weeks of crazy intense work, or confessing on Che immunized me to my usual emotional reaction. I never expected “Leaving on a Jet Plane” to get me, even though Peter asked the audience to sing Mary’s part and think of her. Then, singing, “Kiss me and smile for me. Tell me that you’ll wait for me. Hold me like you’ll never let me go,” in a sea of paisley and Greek fisherman’s hat-wearing old hippies, I lost it again.
i can certainly understand that.
then losing it can be the best thing we got going for us at times.
In some fundamental ways, I find that generation’s aging process more poignant than our own … I think it’s got something to do with a widespread and enduring belief in their own exceptionalism.
Watching that give way to the inevitable is wistful.
(I’d’ve been misting up with you, Robin.) 🙂
And their belief in their own perpetual youth. Attempting a 16-year-old swagger with arthritic hips is… let’s go with “quixotic.”
Here’s Robin’s favorite song!
And the 1979 film version, with Treat Williams as the insufferable hippie!
Wow, I’m really blue about this … Robin really brought us something nice with this post, and I’m glad she got to send those good vibes to Mary along with her mom and all the other old hippies.
Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary dead at 72
AP
DANBURY, Conn. – Mary Travers, one-third of the hugely popular 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died.
The band’s publicist, Heather Lylis, says Travers died at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut on Wednesday. She was 72 and had battled leukemia for several years.
Well, damn. First I was really happy to see Robin posting something… then I was excited to comment about PPM, whom I loved… and now I’m just sad to hear that Mary’s gone after her long fight.
Robin, I hope you did get to see them…
Hippies.
A swath of muddy feet across the livingrooms of my childhood.
I hated their crap at 6 years-old!
I’ll bracket them with Small Faces, at one end, and Disco at the other -- forgiving Traffic and the Doobie Brothers for their mix-up in the whole hirsute, bead-and-fringe business.
Sorry baby. I’m with the Panthers.
Or…
If I can’t wear a necktie and gabardine, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution!
brown
Sorry if you haven’t heard this Matt,although I suspect you have.I heard mention of it during my morning NPR listening/coffe making ritual:
Sam Hinton
31 March 1917 -- 10 September 2009
Sam Hinton passed away at 4:30 Thursday afternoon.
He is survived by his son and daughter, his sister Anne,
his two granddaughters, his great-grandson, many nieces and nephews,
and all the millions of people to whom he brought joy throughout his life.
>> Sam Hinton
31 March 1917 -- 10 September 2009
Bobby: Awwww, no, I hadn’t heard — thanks. I’m sad … Man was 92, but y’know, still sad when one of the good guys goes. :-/
Did I jinx him?!
Ringo Starr’s birthday last week inspired two thoughts:
1. It sounds like a really painful show to me:
Not without therapy.
2. I b’lieve this makes Ringo the first notable rock star born in the ’40s to cross the 70 mark.
There are a few outliers who were born in the ’30s — I’m thinking Ray Manzarek, Grace Slick and 73-year-old Bill Wyman.
However, the prospect of everyone from Bob Dylan to Keith Richards to Brian Wilson turning the big 7-0 opens the floodgates for true existential angst by aging Boomers just a hair younger than their idols. It will be loud and not very pretty. And I don’t want to be left holding the bedpan!
Woots!
A phenom I learned about when I was editorial director for the set of online brands that included Cycle World: Motorcycle owners are getting old.
In the ’90s and aughts, a bunch of guys were able to buy the bikes they’d coveted as kids, including the Harleys described in this CNN story … Now they’re getting too old to ride them!
“Harley’s core customer is a middle-aged white American male, a group that will contract in the coming decade. As one blogger wrote, ‘The 60-70-year old riders have trouble lifting a leg over the seat because of arthritis. And finger joints hurt with the cold air and engine vibration.’ ”
Ridin’ down the highway … On a rubber donut … Gotta stop for pee breaks … At every fuggin’ rest stop …
Happy 70th, John Lennon. Weird concept.
From “White America Has Lost Its Mind” in the Village Voice:
“Bewildered by the number of Cialis ads you see on television showing those flabby couples sitting in bathtubs? Or the way that older women are suddenly “cougars” and “MILFs” and . . . oh, yeah, you remember, boomers are getting old, but still want to think they can get the sheets sweaty. See? Boomers and their fixations and fears explain nearly everything. . . . “