What a decade for a daydream (The best time of your life.)

Member Name: duncantorr

Product:	The best time of your life.
Date:	14/11/08 (536 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Despite being around in the 60s, I can remember them

Disadvantages: How old does that make me?

There is, on another opinionating website, a topic category called "10 things that remind me of the 60s", for which this piece was originally written.

Were the 60s the best time of my life? Hard to say, and I won't bore you with debating the case for other candidate periods, but the 60s certainly left a warm glow in my memory, and it doesn't take much to fan the embers into flame once more.

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There are many things that remind me of the 60s: smells (e.g. Old Holborn tobacco - which I used to smoke), tastes (e.g. stout-and-mild - which I used to drink, don't ask me why), fashions (e.g. mini-skirts - no, I didn't wear them, which in no way diminished my interest in those who did), the poetry, novels, plays and films of the time. But it is a decade that is characterised above all by its music, so in choosing the 10 things that remind me of the 60s, I am going to opt for 10 of the popular tunes of the time.

Moreover, I'm going to take one tune from each year. The resultant examples will, I think, exemplify the fact that however much we think of the 60s as a discrete era, it was like all decades part of a continuum, rooted in the preceding period and growing on into the next. What we now remember as the defining flavour, values and style of the 60s emerged only gradually as the years passed, and by the end were already evolving into something else.


* 1960 *

~ It's Now or Never - Elvis Presley ~

Chosen narrowly over Chubby Checker's The Twist (surely the last time that dance-steps were choreographed for the public, rather than people simply stepping up and strutting their stuff in their own way) and the Drifters' Save the Last Dance for Me (surely the last time that the formal notion of a saveable "last dance" was aired, rather than recognising that dancing might give way to serious snogging during the course of the party, and that no one would know when, or where, it would end).

Like them, It's Now or Never was definitely left over from the 50s, in every sense - in musical style, in being one of Elvis's last great hits, but above all in a purely personal memory it provokes from my wife, whose mother apparently warned her when she heard the lyrics "If a man tells you his love won't wait he's not to be trusted". These were days when sex was regarded as something that only men pursued while good girls resisted. It was still possible to be turned down on the apparently sincere grounds that "I'd love to but you won't respect me if I do". I didn't understand what "respect" meant in this context then and I still don't - I would have respected them much more if they'd taken the opposite decision - but it seemed to mean something to them. Whatever it was, the notion died out during the course of the 60s, and I for one do not regret its passing.

Fortunately, it seemed to mean less in Sweden than in Britain, and I spent a very pleasant month that summer on an exchange visit to town near Malmo. For most of the year I was cooped up much less pleasantly at boarding school, an institution seemingly left over from a previous century, let alone a previous decade. The emphasis there on the three Rs - Rules, Repression, Religion - should have made rebels of even the most pliable of teenagers, though it was astonishing how many remained pliable and were thus trapped in the spirit of an earlier era.

In the wider world, though, a different spirit was stirring. Kennedy was being elected in America, though we in Britain were still stuck with stick-in-the-mud Macmillan. Even here the jury in the Lady Chatterley trial could laugh out of court the prosecution's plea to their propriety ("Would you want your wife or servants to read this book?") and do the indecently decent thing. No longer did we need to pass round the dog-eared contraband copy of Frank Harris surreptitiously at school. And a new literature (Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac) was infiltrating its way in from the States, sparking and inflaming new ideas.


* 1961 *

~ Take Five - Dave Brubeck Quartet ~

Well, I had to find room for some Jazz somewhere, and this track achieved the near-impossible for Jazz and climbed high in the popular charts. Jazz, especially "cool" modern Jazz was enjoying a brief vogue, especially with me. Ironically, Brubeck was something of a social conformist, but Jazz generally was associated with avant garde intellectualism, bohemianism, contempt for respectability, even drugs. Exponents like Parker, Monk and Davis had irresistible appeal.

How did I manage to stay at school through 1961? With the help of friends, both there and those in the neighbourhood who gave us refuge; with the help of weekends, for hitch-hiking, for parties, for sampling the smoky cellar coffee bars that were springing up in London (The Heaven and Hell and The Gyre and Gimble particularly stick in the mind); with the help of humour (thank you, Mad Magazine and Private Eye, which first appeared in 1961); with the help of hope, because I knew if I could stay on till I reached university it might all prove to be worthwhile.

Musically, an honourable mention to Roger Miller's King of the Road - not to be taken seriously perhaps, but notable for glorifying an unconventional life. The glorification of the unconventional was very much the spirit to which I aspired, and a spirit with which the 60s were beginning to be imbued. A storm of protest was gathering: the civil rights movement in the States, the Aldermaston marches nearer home. However, I never went on the latter, despite being assured by friends that they were great for getting laid, something that was usually high on my agenda. Despite my rebelliousness, I was always conscious that we were safer, and freer to be rebels, in a well-defended west than we would be in any other likely circumstances.


* 1962 *

~ Song to Woody - Bob Dylan ~

"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home..." 1962 was the year when Bob Dylan - an iconic 60s figure if there ever was one - burst into public consciousness, and this was the song of his that echoes in my mind as I remember that summer when, between school and university, I spent time discovering the States. I could go on for pages about that journey of (self-)discovery, so I won't.

By the autumn I was up at Oxford, which was in a state of subdued ferment. In many ways it was the timeless Oxford of Max Beerbohm or Evelyn Waugh, the Oxford of cloistered charm, of high-domed dons sipping sherry and high-spirited blue-bloods swilling champagne. In sharp contrast to these relics of a bygone age it was easy to spot those with whom I was likely to establish a rapport. Much as I dislike stereotyping by appearance, jeans and long hair among men and a readiness to respond to a man in jeans and long hair among women were normally sufficient clues in those days that we might get along.

The Cuban Missile Crisis that autumn also provided a ready topic of conversation to help sort the like-minded from the unalike. Curiously, I never felt it would escalate into war, which only proves how unduly optimistic is my outlook. Documents subsequently released show how close we came to the brink, and how like the war-room scenes in Dr Strangelove was the reality, with General Curtis LeMay, who subsequently ran for Vice-President on the same ticket as white supremacist George Wallace, playing the part played by George C Scott in the film.

But I lived to end the year as I had spent so much of it, travelling, hitch-hiking to Scarborough across blizzard-swept moors to visit a girlfriend who later became my first and last fiancée, but never my wife.


* 1963 *

~ All my trials - Joan Baez ~

What, not the Beatles? The Beatles did indeed break through in 1963, but I'm saving them till later. They didn't have much impact on me in the early years, with their cute little suits and haircuts, nor did the Beach Boys, who were sweeping America with fare like Surfin' USA. The older generation may have been horrified, which is after all what older generations are for, but it all seemed to me a bit trendy and therefore conventional.

Dylan was still my musical muse, but since I've nominated him once, Joan Baez will be an apt substitute. She had a penchant for singing the Dylan songs that I least admired, like Blowing in the Wind and We Shall Overcome (We Shall Undergo always seemed to me to be a more realistic expectation). But this haunting number with its poignant lyrics stays with me as exemplifying the fact that we had social consciences as well as hedonistic tendencies.

In the Autumn Kennedy was shot and, yes, since you ask, I can remember what I was doing when I heard the news. An American Rhodes Scholar of my acquaintance burst into my room declaring: "I can't believe all this shit they're saying about the President."

"Which shit is that?" I enquired, mild but inquisitive as always.

"That he's been shot. I can't believe it."

"Seems all too likely to me," I said. "He wouldn't be the first. We know America's a violent society, we know he's got a lot of enemies, so what do expect?"

Possibly I put it a bit strongly, but he never spoke to me again, obviously believing I was anti-American, something I have never been. I did however see him once on TV in the States many years later, a 2-star general in charge of one of America's foremost military academies.


* 1964 *

~ I can't explain - The Who ~

The pace of cultural change among the young was hotting up, and spinning off in differing directions. One day a girl I knew from London, Gina, whom I would have numbered firmly among the pot-smoking peace-and-love crowd, appeared in my room at Oxford with a crew-cut young man in tow, Jules, who announced that he was a Mod. Since I was too stoned to read the papers much of the time, this was the first time I had heard the word.

Against most of the odds, Jules and I became good friends. Later, I even went to visit him in prison. He was usually high ("blocked" was the term, as opposed to "stoned" for pot) on amphetamines - "purple hearts" - the Mod drug of choice. He also dabbled in dealing. This and petty theft were his downfall. He was, though, mortified when the Mods took to battling Rockers in seaside resorts through the summer. I remember him, blocked as usual, shaking his head and repeating "We're dressers and dancers, not fighters. How did this happen?"
How did a lot of things happen in the 60s? Like The Who, I can't explain.

In the autumn, Harold Wilson won the General Election for Labour. It seems strange that this plump, pipe-puffing, professional politician should have provoked so much enthusiasm among the rebellious young until you remember what had gone before.


* 1965 *

~ Out of Time - The Rolling Stones ~

You can't leave The Rolling Stones out of a review of the 60s, and this seems as good a year as any to include them. It was too, in a sense, a year out of time, a pause while the rapid changes of the first half of the decade were digested, of taking stock before moving on.
In the States, LBJ had been re-elected by a landslide and whilst the Vietnam war was escalating, it had not yet become a running sore on the American psyche. In China, the Cultural Revolution had not yet begun. At Oxford, despite my total lack of scholarly commitment, I managed to persuade the authorities to let me stay on for a post-graduate year.

Before going back up, I spent the summer in Brighton, helping an old school-friend who had gone to Sussex University keep his flat going through the long vacation. Brighton was a great place to be, but again the divergences in what I wanted to think of as a common purpose were brought home to me. My leanings were essentially anarchistic; I distrusted all political power, and yearned for tolerance of everything by everybody. Among students here, the hard left were gaining ground, intrinsically intolerant, preaching the ruthless use of political power. I had as much reason, maybe much more, to fear them as I ever had to hate the old conservatives. It was then that I learned that I was not, and perhaps had never been, a socialist.


* 1966 *

~ Daydream - Lovin' Spoonful ~

Despite the preceding paragraph, when Labour won again, it was the last time that the result of a British General election has met with my unmixed satisfaction. Ditto, the outcome of the World Cup.

Before then, though, there was my last sunny Spring at Oxford to enjoy, to which the corny old Lovin' Spoonful provided the perfect accompaniment.

"And even if time ain't really on my side...." What to do next? My qualifications wouldn't enable me to swan around in academia any longer. I'd arrived there with a top scholarship and high expectations placed on me, but I simply hadn't worked hard enough; indeed, I'd hardly worked at all. As one tutor told me with a raised eyebrow: "the skill of your skatework is insufficient to disguise the thinness of your ice."

I now regard the closing of the academic option as a blessing, since it brought me out into the real world, or what passes for it. In those days large employers went and interviewed prospective graduate recruits in situ, a process known as the "milk round". My girlfriend, who was serious about a career in marketing in a way that I was not, went one morning for an interview with a big media company. I was due to go in the afternoon. In between, we met in a pub for lunch.

"What did they ask you?" I enquired.

"They asked me to define Marketing," she told me, "and I gave them the textbook answer. Then they said: 'You haven't mentioned profit.' "

An hour later I was in the interview room. "Define Marketing," they said.

"As I see it, it's all about profit."

And so began my career.


* 1967 *

~ Yellow Submarine - Beatles ~

Work turned out not to be so bad after all. Sheer good fortune had led me into an industry and a company that was full of lively open-minded young people, who played hard as well as worked. Apart from which, most of my friends from elsewhere had gravitated to London too.
After a year in Camden Town, my girlfriend I found a house in a condemned terrace near Chelsea Embankment that was being offered on a short-term lease pending demolition. Together with some friends snapped it up. The area was slightly trendy for my taste, but nevertheless an epicentre for parties and all kinds of mind-expanding activity. It was the place to be, "and to be young was very Heaven!"

By this time, psychedelic extravagance was no longer at the leading edge of fashion, but the popular norm, as the success of Yellow Submarine exemplified. Awful things were doubtless going on elsewhere in the world - in Vietnam and China for example - but we barely noticed.


* 1968 *

~ Hello, I Love You - Doors ~

How did I come to see the Doors live at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse? Sheer accident. An ex-Oxford friend who had been living in the States came back to England and stayed in our house for a while. He bought a huge yank convertible in a car auction and we cruised around the London sunshine showing off its two-tone paintwork, chrome and rust to anyone foolish enough to be impressed by it. We took it up to Chalk Farm, to sample Marine Ices' delicious fare, and noticed the poster advertising the Doors' forthcoming visit. I had hardly heard of them, but anyone from America knew all about them and we snapped up some tickets on the spot.

More serious stuff still insisted on going on elsewhere. A colleague who frequently visited Paris brought back news of the événements - the student uprising brutally suppressed by the CRS. In Chicago, Major Daley's police were dealing almost as harshly with anti-Vietnam protesters at the Democrat Party Convention. This helped pave the way for the election of the odious Nixon, whose rejection by the electorate eight years earlier had heralded the opening of the 60s as we know them.

For some reason that still escapes me, I gave up smoking - of both kinds - in 1968. Maybe I sensed the decade was drawing to an end.


* 1969 *

~ Ruby, Don't take your love to town - Kenny Rogers ~

Generally, I'm better at looking back than at looking forward and I claim no especial insight into the likely course of future events. Nevertheless, the moment I heard "Ruby" I knew that America had lost the war in Vietnam. It was just one of the things that were reaching their conclusion.

Having started out by saying that the division of time into decades is essentially arbitrary, I have to admit that there was a great deal of finality about 1969. The psychedelic colours were beginning to fade, the tawdry side of the flamboyant fashions beginning to show. "Time, that tires of everyone, had corroded all the locks, thrown away the key to fun," as Auden put it, writing about something completely different.

As the year drew to a close, my life changed too. We were, as we knew would happen, thrown out of our house at the World's End. Having been rehoused, my then girlfriend and I were together only another month or two. There are some companies in which it is a sacking offence to be having an affair with a colleague. In the company for which I worked it was almost an offence not to, and I was. Early in 1970 I married the colleague rather than the flat-mate, rather, I think, to the surprise of both. That, however, is another decade, and another story.


*

Those were the days, then, the 60s as I remember them. Carefree, indolent, irresponsible perhaps. But if we believed in making love rather than war, then I still think we had our priorities in the right order. Of course, we were all innocents abroad, which still seems to me better than being guilty. On a purely personal level, I had a great time and the more so as the decade progressed. I believe the same was true of many of my contemporaries.

The human world is always in transition, for better or worse, perhaps seldom solely for better or for worse at any given moment. I do believe, though, that most of the changes that took place at that time were for the better. The 60s saw the reform and relaxation of laws on censorship, homosexuality, prostitution and abortion, together with the abolition of capital and corporal punishment. The society in which we lived in Britain was freer and more tolerant, as well as more colourful and creative, at the end of the decade than at its outset. And I think that, like me, most people were happier as a result.



© First published in its original form under the name torr on Ciao UK, July 22nd 2004.

Summary: A carefree era with happy memories