Marty After Dark - Almost Live...From New York

Entries in 1967 (1)

Wednesday

Mar302011

March 30, 2011

Tonight I’m going to write about my favorite summer of all time, the summer of 1967. But before that, I’ve decided to go to 1967 Broadway. No, I don’t have a time machine, I mean the actual address and see what’s there and take a few photos. Alright Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 1967!

Here we are, let's go find 1967 Broadway and see what it is today.

We're close, here's 1965 Broadway, it's the next door down, let's see what 1967 looks like in 2011.

A Pottery Barn. A little disappointing, but then we are on the Upper West Side. Let's see what the address looks like.

They don't have the address up! What a fucking gyp! Oh well, I'm going home to write my story and then we'll get a glimpse of 1967.

1967

I’ve always loved the summer, especially when I was a kid. School was out and you had three glorious months of freedom and warmth. My favorite summer of all time was the summer of 1967. I was nine-years-old.

The experience I remember the best about the summer of 1967 was that our family took a vacation to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was a great vacation. I remember swimming in the ocean for the first time and running on the white sandy beach outside of our hotel room. The skies were blue, the air was sweet and warm and I didn’t have a care in the world. We were in Florida for a week and while we were there my brother Jim celebrated his 11th birthday on Sunday, June 11th. We had a little party in one of the hotel rooms we were staying at and he opened his gifts. I can only remember one of his birthday presents, but it was a doozy.

It was the last gift he opened and it was slim and square, the size of a record album. We both knew what it was before he tore the wrapping paper off. On June 1st, 1967, The Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” and it was the only thing he wanted for his birthday. I was just as excited as he was. The Beatles were our favorite group and we had heard that this was the best thing they had ever done. We had already heard snippets of songs on the car radio and they sounded magical. It soon became the soundtrack for what history would call the “Summer of Love.”
There was no record player in the hotel room, so we had to be content with just looking at the album cover. But there was enough on that cover for us to absorb and study till we got home. The front was a psychedelic collage of faces, wax figures, marijuana plants, a doll with a note to The Rolling Stones on it and The Beatles themselves in the center of all of it wearing colorful, military outfits. A big bass drum was emblazoned with the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band logo. They had moustaches and instead of guitars they were clutching horns and strange instruments. The wax figures were the old “mop-top” Beatles looking like they were at their own funeral and in a way they were. Some of the faces we recognized on the cover were Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Bob Dylan and Tony Curtis. The note to the Rolling Stones said, “Welcome the Rolling Stones, Good Guys.” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested earlier in the year on drug charges. The times they were indeed changing.
The back of the album cover had all the lyrics printed on a backdrop of red and a portrait of The Beatles decked out in their Sgt. Pepper gear. We read the lyrics to songs we couldn’t yet listen to. There was Billy Shears who got high with a little help from his friends. We were introduced to Lucy in the sky with diamonds, a girl with kaleidoscope eyes. There was a benefit for Mr. Kite and the Hendersons would all be there. Lovely Rita was a meter maid who wore a cap and the bag across her shoulders made her look a little like a military man. In the last song, “A Day in the Life,” we learned that The Beatles would love to “turn us on.” I guess they didn’t know that they already had.

As soon as we got back home from our vacation, we took the album out of the sleeve and put it on our parents fake wooden stereo console and put the needle on the vinyl. The act we’d known for all those years and all the other characters from Pepperland came to life and we played it over and over.
About a week after we got home from Florida, the Monterey Pop Festival happened. It was the first rock and roll festival and it lasted for three days in June of 1967. I remember looking at photos of it in Life and Time magazine and wishing I could’ve been there. Images I remember from the Monterey Pop Festival include Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire, The Who smashing their instruments, Mama Cass in the crowd gaping wide-eyed at Janis Joplin on stage belting out a tune like no one had heard before, Mickey Dolenz dressed up as an indian and kids dancing with their faces painted, long hair flowing and openly smoking pot. I was pissed that I was only nine-years-old and wasn’t able to go, but I remember looking at those photos and being filled with optimism and hope that when I got older, everything would be different. Everything would be better.
All summer long we played Sgt. Pepper and it was the best summer of my life. I’ve never felt so hopeful and anxious for the future to come and I know I’ll never feel like that again in my life.
1967 drifted into 1968 with rallying cries from those under thirty for a revolution that never happened. In 1969 Woodstock morphed into Altamont and the hippie dream turned into a Helter Skelter nightmare.
On May 4th, 1970 at a protest rally over the Amercian Invasion of Cambodia at Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen sprayed 67 rounds of ammunition at the protesters and killed four of them and wounded nine others. One would go on to suffer permanent paralysis. By then I was twelve-years-old and watching that on the nightly news sent a chill right down my soon to be teenaged spine. It drained any optimism out of me that was left over from that magical summer of 1967. The really sad thing is the fact that two of the students that were shot to death weren’t even involved with the protest. They were just walking from one class to another and got caught in the line of fire. I realized then that the future had bullets and if you didn’t do what you were told or if you had the balls to question authority, you might take one right between the eyes. Millionaire rock stars singing about revolution seemed a little naive and silly all of a sudden.
Nobody can really say for sure when the ‘60’s ended. Most people acknowledge sometime in the early ‘70’s. Writer Hunter S. Thompson eulogized the ‘60’s free spirit vibe in his nerve-jangled novel, “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.” I think it’s one of his finest pieces of writing, here it is:
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket...booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)...but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda...You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

—Hunter S. Thompson from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

There will never be another summer like the summer of 1967. It came and went like a cool breeze and it didn’t last long enough. I’m sure happy I got to live through it and in some small way be a part of it. The song is over, but the memory lives on in an unending fadeout groove.
Further reading: Wikipedia, Internet Sgt. Pepper’s, NPR and the NY Times.