R.I.P. 2014: the 60s

From 60s music: most recently singer Joe Cocker.  Earler in the year: Jack Bruce (bassist for Cream), guitarist Johnny Winter, Bobby Keys (sax player for the Rolling Stones and a solo artist), Ian McLager (keyboards, the Faces), Glenn Cornick (bass, Jethro Tull), Paul Revere (lead singer, Paul Revere and the Raiders.)  Bobby Womack, Jay Traynor (Jay and the Americans.)

Also lyricist Gerry Goffin (with Carole King) and songwriter Peter Callander.

From the folk world, Pete Seeger, who belongs in every decade from the 30s on, but reemerged with the 60s folk boom, including mentoring Bob Dylan; and (speaking of Dylan) Carla Rotolo, whose enthusiasm got Dylan gigs and a recording contract.  And a girlfriend--her younger sister, Suzy.

A major if recently forgotten figure of the 60s counterculture was Steven Gaskin, whose Monday Night Class at the Family Dog in San Francisco was immense and amazing (I was there for several, including the First Annual Holy Man Jam.)  He later left the city and established The Farm, an experimental community that still exists.  Marking his passing, the Sun Magazine re-published a 1985 interview  and an example of a Monday Night Class.

Movies lost director Mike Nichols (The Graduate) and French director Alain Renais, actor Maximillian Schell ( Academy Award for Judgement at Nuremberg.)

Writers crucial to the decade: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones).

Icons Connecting the Past and Future

In the 1960s it was becoming clear that pop culture was becoming American culture. By now that seems perfectly normal. The media covers pop music and movie stars as our royalty, television shows and movies like the latest artistic and cultural events. Scholars study Beatles lyrics and Doctor Who scripts. The new myths of gods, goddesses and heroes are the scifi and superhero sagas. But that didn't seriously begin to dominate until the 60s.

 Early boomers will remember the roots of this change in the 50s and 60s, especially as icons of those decades and earlier reemerge in the news one last time. The death of Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers reminds us that aspects of pop culture are really refinements of folk culture.

 I've just been rereading William Eastlake's early novels and came upon this sentence: "The secret in creating anything new seems to lie in borrowing all you see and hear about you and adding one small touch." That's often true in music particularly. Linda Ronstadt and Paul Simon talked about the Everly Brothers both in terms of the music they transformed and their effect on the music that followed theirs (like Simon & Garfunkel.) (Ronstadt was even better in this Time Magazine piece--the rest of it requires registration but even the intro paragraph adds something.)

 Adapting folk culture in a different way is seen in the life of Pete Seeger. He only slightly changed folk songs (though his strengthening of the lyrics of "We Shall Overcome" helped it become immortal) but he applied them to contemporary issues with roots in the past, such as civil rights, an end to war and preserving the natural environment. Here's Josh Marshall's remembrance, and one by Bruce Springsteen. 

To put it another way, as Marshall McLuhan did, each new medium (or form) at first adopts a previous medium as its content. So we've seen in our early boomer lifetimes how television took program models from radio and movies, which had earlier adapted them from the stage. As this essay says, the now classic early TV comedians brought sketches and approaches they adapted from the rich stage traditions of vaudeville. This was true of one of the great TV comedians and comic actors of the 1950s who died recently, Sid Caesar. Here's more of what I've written about him on this site, and still more on another.

The death of actor Ralph Waite is an occasion to recall how deeply and for a long time he has been part of establishing a cultural image, first as the young father on The Waltons and most recently as a father and grandfather figure on the TV series NCIS and Bones. I will also remember him for a little known but culturally evocative fantasy film about JFK called Timequest. Here's a biographical obit.

 Finally, the little girl who helped a country and a culture through the dark days of the Depression has passed away. One of Shirley Temple's proudest moments was that in one of those movies, she held the hand of the immortal dancer Bill Robinson--perhaps the first time a white female had touched a black male on the silver screen.  This reminds us of pop culture's role in change, as all of these examples do in different ways.

R.I.P. 2013: the '60s

Among the many lost in 2013 boomers remember from the 1960s: astronaut Scott Carpenter, comedian Jonathan Winters, actress Karen Black, actor Milo O'Shea (Ulysses); Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors; Lou Reed, first of the Velvet Underground; Paul Williams, founder and editor of the pioneer rock magazine Crawdaddy;  singer Richie Havens; Bobby Rogers of Motown's first big group, The Miracles; David Frost, who first attracted American attention by importing his hit series of topical satire from the UK, That Was the Week That Was. 

 Not pictured: actor Tom Laughlin (the Billy Jack movie series), Ray Dolby (Dolby sound), musicians J.J. Cale, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Alvin Lee, Mary Love, Rich Huxley (the Dave Clark Five).  Liberal Catholic writer Andrew Greeley; perennial White House reporter Helen Thomas, documentary filmmaker Ed Pincus; cinematographer Marcello Gotti (Battle of Algiers),  record producer for the Rolling Stones etc. Andy Johns, poet Anselm Hollo, and Syd Bernstein, the promoter who brought the Beatles to America.  

Jonathan Winters

Karen Black

Milo O'Shea

Lou Reed

Ray Manzarek of The Doors

Paul Williams, ed. of Crawdaddy

Richie Havens

David Frost (That Was the Week That Was)

Bobby Rogers of The Miracles

Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
 By Jonathan Cott
 Yale University Press

 Born in 1933, she was an academic and an academic's wife when she heard "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets on the radio, and changed her life. By the mid 1960s she was the devastatingly beautiful American writer who first brought high culture smarts to popular culture manifestations, and among other things helped give birth to a boomer generation of rock critics like me, and everybody who wrote for Rolling Stone.

 So she was a natural for an extensive Rolling Stone interview published in 1979. It's hard to imagine now an analogue to Susan Sontag who would be the subject of such a treatment today. But even with her accomplishments to that date--the groundbreaking collection of essays Against Interpretation, the equally original On Photography and Illness As A Metaphor, with thoughts and a point of view responding to her own confrontations with cancer and the medical system--many important accomplishments were ahead of her, notably her activities in Sarajevo during the Balkan warfare (where she directed a production of Waiting for Godot with a background of gunfire outside the theatre), her book Regarding the Pain of Others and her novel In America which won the National Book Award in 2000. Revelations about her bisexuality--including her own admission-- also emerged some years after this interview.

 Jonathan Cott conducted the interview, in which literary allusions are as likely in the questions as in the answers. About a third of it appeared in Rolling Stone, and though there is conversation in the book that is less interesting, having the whole interview published is certainly worthwhile. Sontag (Cott writes) enjoyed the interview process and the best exchanges show how engaged both participants were.

 Sontag remained a champion of modernism and of a 1960s sensibility in the best sense. She battled back against the revisionism and reaction already underway just as the counterrevolution of the 80s began. "The idea is that everything that was hoped for and attempted in the sixties basically hasn't worked out and couldn't work out. But who says it won't work? Who says there's something wrong with people dropping out? I think the world should be safe for marginal people. One of the primary things that a good society should be about is to allow people to be marginal." 

Cott also contributes a brief introduction which quotes from Sontag's writing, including this startling gem: "There is no possibility of culture without true altruism." That's what we needed and got from Sontag--bold, against the grain, forthright and well-stated. And that's what we miss.

Boomer Elder: Steinbeck's 1960 America

John Steinbeck was one of the first authors (as opposed to the first poems or stories) of literary reputation I read independently, and probably the very first. I read some of the volume of his six shorter novels that was on my mother's bookshelves (the same book I now have on mine) and I vividly remember reading his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent in the Readers Digest Condensed Books version.  But the first actual book I  remember is Travels with Charley: In Search of America (Viking Press.)It was first published in 1962 when I was in high school, and I read a library copy of it then. A few years later I bought the paperback, read that and kept among the books that traveled with me for decades.

 Steinbeck set out with his dog Charley, driving a truck topped by a custom-made "little house built like the cabin of a small boat" for his living quarters. He named the vehicle Rocinante. He equipped it with more than it seems it could hold, including guns and fishing gear partly for a cover story. (I recall being particularly impressed by the typewriter and reams of typing paper.) Most of the gear turned out to be superfluous, which he admits with the self-deprecating humor that characterizes the book.

 It was a journey of ten thousand miles through 34 states over several months, with a few breaks to visit family and meet up with his wife along the way. He made the now obligatory decision for such books to stay off the interstates. His stated purpose was to become reacquainted with the country he once knew but hadn't seen in decades.

 He began after Labor Day in 1960, at the age of 58. He'd been "rather seriously ill" the winter before, he admitted, but even if the trip was taxing beyond his capabilities, he faced that possibility with bravado. "And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity. If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway. I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theatre as well as bad living."  His son later put it in starker terms: Steinbeck knew he was dying, and wanted to see the country one last time.

The year Travels with Charley was published, Steinbeck somewhat unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The award caused controversy, with charges that it was not merited--similar to the furor when Sinclair Lewis became the first American writer to win the prize. Steinbeck mentions Lewis in this book, noting his few meetings with him in Lewis' declining years, when he was still scorned in his hometown. Apparently paraphrasing Lewis, he wrote: "The only good writer was a dead writer. Then he couldn't surprise anyone any more, couldn't hurt anyone anymore."

Steinbeck mentions him as he passes Sauk Center, Minnesota, with its sign, "Birthplace of Sinclair Lewis." "Brings in some tourists," Steinbeck observes."He's a good writer now." Steinbeck died just six years later, at the age of 66, having published little of consequence and no fiction since this book. More than 50 years later, several of his novels remain integral to the mythology of America. He brings in some tourists to Salinas, California. He's a good writer now.

  Travels with Charley is a personal account, the tale of a voyage which includes observations of what and who Steinbeck encountered. The traveler's mood, his penchant for getting lost, spates of bad weather and the illness and treatment of his dog, are just about the only dramatic elements. But some of his observations do suggest how America has changed, and how it is the same (or at least on the same track) as in 1960. Steinbeck bemoans the disappearance of local speech, of the local in general, small towns or even the city of Seattle (though he gives more credit than some to corresponding improvements in living standards.) He is emotionally bothered by "the frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth" of Seattle: "Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning...I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction." This was not yet the popular theme that it became, for several decades at least if no longer.

 On the other hand, while in our time commentators bristle at ostentatious Texas politicians suggesting that the state might secede from the Union, Steinbeck observes in 1960, "Texas is the only state that came into the Union by treaty. It retains the right to secede at will. We have heard them threaten to secede so often that I formed an enthusiastic organization --The American Friends for Texas Secession. This stops the subject cold. They want to be able to secede but they don't want anyone to want them to."

 Steinbeck was traveling during the 1960 presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. This is a pivotal campaign in American history (and very absorbing to me at the time) but Steinbeck (a JFK supporter) found few people who would venture an opinion about it. A certain atomic age foreboding was also present, at least in Steinbeck's mood.

 Some of Steinbeck's masculine insistence and style may strike readers today as a little too Hemingwayesque and anachronistic, but his misgivings about the effects of the march of modernity on the country he loved, especially the natural world, still resonate. He notes that cities are already ringed with trash--"In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index." There is some deft description of what various parts of the country were physically like in 1960.

I find that the innocent wonder of my first reading at 15 or so sets unrealistic expectations for the actual book, but there are some fine sentences, and the sense of the man and his times that was worth revisiting, or let's say, visiting by the person and reader I am now, older than he was then.

 Perhaps the most poignant passages for me this time were his descriptions of having a couple of curious wolves in his gunsights, knowing that--according to the standards of the time--he should shoot them because they are considered "vermin"--but losing the impulse to kill them, and choosing to spare them. To the extent that he left a couple of cans of dog food behind for them. There is an elegiac quality that emerges now and then, that seems best expressed in this account. There is a sense of approaching the end, when his strongest desire is to leave as much life behind as he can. And I expect there's something of the impulse I feel as the years go by: live and let live, gracefully and with mercy.

 In the years since the book came out it has apparently inspired similar journeys (apart from the many taken for literary purposes), and this attempt to retrace the journey exactly by Bill Steigerwald, who claims that Steinbeck fudged or fictionalized various aspects of it. Steigerwald is unduly harsh about it, deriving much of his debunking from a timeline which may well have been different and rearranged in composition. Some rearranging is actually pretty normal. Spalding Gray used to call himself a "poetic journalist," and most autobiographical writing either purposely, necessarily, unconsciously or artfully changes what happened and in what order. The travel and the book are related but separate journeys.

R.I.P. 60s-70s Arts & Entertainment

Among those we lost in 2012 were these important figures in the culture of the 60s and 70s: Don Cornelius, creator and host of TV's Soul Train.  Robin Gibb of the BeeGees, a group that expanded the Beatles-style music of the 60s and created a whole new phenomenon in the disco era of the 70s.  Ravi Shankar, classical Indian musicians who became known in the U.S. in the 60s and beloved ever since.  Dave Brubeck, jazz pianist and composer,pictured here with the quartet that made Time Out, the biggest selling hit jazz album of the 1960s.  Davy Jones of the 60s TV and recording group The Monkees.  Donna Summer, the female voice of the disco 70s. Levon Helm, drummer and singer for The Band, the group formed in the late 60s that became prominent in the 70s as well.  Peter Bergman, member of the unique 1960s comedy quartet, Firesign Theatre, whose first four albums became a surreal soundtrack of the decade.

Not pictured: singer and songwriter Scott ("If You're Going to San Francisco...") MacKenzie, film critics Andrew Sarris (of the auteur theory) and Judith Crist, actors Larry Hagman and Phyllis Diller, writer and director Nora Ephron, art critic Hilton Kramer, British actor Victor Spinetti (Help!),singers Etta James and Andy Williams, artist LeRoi Neiman.  May they rest in peace and their work live on.

R.I.P. 1960s-70s The Big Stage

Among those we lost in 2012 who influenced the shape of the 1960s and 1970s: Barry Commoner, whose 1971 best selling The Closing Circle helped make ecology the topic of the decade.  Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon.  Alexander Cockburn, journalist and gadfly beginning in the 60s and 70s.  George McGovern, carrying on the Kennedy legacy in the 60s and making a brave and honorable run for the presidency on an anti-war platform in 1972.  Gore Vidal, whose voice in books, on TV and elsewhere made him one of the 60s prime public intellectuals.  Russell Means, activist at Wounded Knee in 1973, Native American advocate and actor in succeeding decades.  Mike Wallace, TV journalist who began to make his mark in the 1960s.  Helen Gurley Brown, whose Sex and the Single Girl in 1961 and editorship of Cosmopolitan magazine helped shape the sexual and women's revolutions of the 60s and 70s.