Personal & Music Posted by Kiera, 24 Aug 2007 06:20 am

Ta-talking ‘bout—my generation: The graying of Rock & Roll

The Baby Boomers. The Rock and Roll Generation. The biggest and most photographically documented generation to date, if only because we’ve been around since the day the technology became affordable to the masses (later generations will catch up).

And we’re going gray.

Like any youth, we thought we’d live and be young forever. Like no other youth before us, our heroes were frozen in time by the lens of the camera. In our mind’s (and the camera’s) eye, Mick Jagger will always be a skinny, tousle-headed kid with huge but normal shaped lips, no matter that he just turned a dissolute 64 and has a mouth that droops nearly down to his sunken chest. 60 year-old David Bowie (who’s held up much better) will always be that gender bending almost elfin fellow with the sly look and the oddly captivating voice we first saw on television 40 years ago.

What inspired me to reflect on this phenomenon? I attended a rock concert featuring three of my favorite bands from MTV’s heyday in the 1980’s. I expected the rockers to be older than I mentally picture them from their iconic music videos. What really stunned me was the age of the audience. Going in, I thought that my husband, (“the D-man”) ,would be among the older looking of the men there. He’s 52, with a very heavy dose of silver in his hair. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were men there that made Johnny Carson look young! Where did our youth go?

Intellectually, I know age is relative. Health, state of mind, and enjoyment of life are the key to living well regardless of your chronological age. But still…we look through our photo albums and see ourselves frozen in time, forever young, forever vibrant, forever beautiful (or not). Why, I wondered as we drove home, was there a sick feeling in my stomach? After all, I should be pleased that my husband was not one of the older looking members of my gener…oh…shit. My generation. My generation?

MY GENERATION!?!?!

My generation is (or at the very least is getting) old. Which means I am getting old. This made me think. (Dangerous, I know). We can’t really be all that old, can we? Brain whirs with some quick mental calculations. That’s when I realized that ol’ liver lips is 64, Bowie is 60, if Elvis were alive he would have just turned a whopping 72, Tina Turner is 68, Deborah Harry is 62, the Wilson sisters from Heart are 53 and 57, Chrissie Hynde is 56, and all of the guys in ZZ Top are 57. Damn.

Mick Jagger, 1960’s mickold.JPG

Where does this leave us? But more importantly, where does this leave ME? Well over the proverbial hill with little or nothing to show for it…at first glance. Okay, I am over “the hill”, but I do have something to show for it. No, I don’t have a fancy education. I dropped out of college to care for my parents when they became ill during my freshman year and continued with that task for nearly 20 years. I don’t have a lot of money or possessions. Because of the expenses of those 20 years as a primary caregiver, I was massively in debt, and finally gave up trying to pay it off two years ago when our lovely elected representatives passed the draconian changes in the bankruptcy laws. I don’t have a permanent job, thanks again to our lovely government’s hardline agenda to first and foremost serve corporate America regardless of the disastrous results. So, what do I have?

True friends. Love. Honesty. Trust. Joy. All of those intangible things that make getting gray not only bearable, but worthwhile. Each one of my carefully dyed gray hairs represents an experience. One that made me the person I am today. A person that is loved for who she is, and what she feels and what she does for others. If you are a member of my generation and can claim nearly as much, then your gray hairs are worth it, too. AND, you are a success.

So be proud as you’re driving in your car - gray head boppin’ to the geezer rock blasting from your stereo. In just a few more years, you’ll have that left turn blinker going non-stop, and it’ll just be clear sailing until the Giant Nuclear Fireball comes to take us all home.

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Responses to “Ta-talking ‘bout—my generation: The graying of Rock & Roll”

  1. on 24 Aug 2007 at 9:09 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    you’ll have that left turn blinker going non-stop

    Two recent driving things are reinforcing my incipient (or current) geezerhood.

    1) In the current car I am driving, my height is such that the top of the steering column obscures the visual blinker. So with only the sound to go by (and with my stereo blasting and my concert-damaged ears), it is turn signal city far more often than I like to admit.

    2) The road up to my house has been washed out these past 3 weeks from a storm. The barricade is no more than 100 yards from my house. However, when you get to the end of my driveway it is obscured by a bend in the road and some foliage. Maybe 3 or 4 times in the past 3 weeks have I had the presence of mind to turn up the back way - every other time (like this morning) it is down to the end and an embarrassed U-turn. (I was probably this absent-minded years ago though.)

  2. on 24 Aug 2007 at 10:19 am 2. Oaktown Girl said …

    JP - just go ahead and turn the blinker on now and be done with it. You’ll save us (esp. your neighbors) all the stress of wondering when it’s going to happen anyway.

    This post makes me think of Homer Simpson in the crowd at a rock concert (was it Grand Funk?) saying, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Don’t stop a-rockin’!!”

  3. on 24 Aug 2007 at 10:53 am 3. JP Stormcrow said …

    This post makes me think of Homer Simpson in the crowd at a rock concert (was it Grand Funk?) saying, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Don’t stop a-rockin’!!”

    I suspect that you are remembering the Homerpalooza episode. I think Grand Funk (and “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain**) in the car. That then led to going to a rock concert.

    The whole graying of rock thing has been in my face recently. Just went to this Hippiefest (which came to Fresno recently) where I heard Leslie West do “Mississippi Queen” and am deeply regretting having missed what sounds like a great Patti Smith concert since she is 60 and I fear it may have been my last opportunity. (Plus she did a lot of covers from back in the day from her most recent album - which this thread is motivating me to go buy it - track list:
    “Are You Experienced?” (Jimi Hendrix)
    “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (Tears for Fears)
    “Helpless” (Neil Young)
    “Gimme Shelter” (Rolling Stones)
    “Within You Without You” (The Beatles)
    “White Rabbit” (Jefferson Airplane)
    “Changing of the Guards” (Bob Dylan)
    “The Boy in the Bubble” (Paul Simon)
    “Soul Kitchen” (The Doors)
    “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana)
    “Midnight Rider” (The Allman Brothers Band)
    “Pastime Paradise” (Stevie Wonder)
    “Everybody Hurts” (R.E.M.) (exclusive Target stores-only bonus track) [JP - this last is a little weird.]

    We really need spyder back for this thread.

  4. on 24 Aug 2007 at 11:00 am 4. Seattle said …

    I’ve developed several reminder verbalizations….the family favorite is: “If I had a brain, I’d remember what I was doing…” followed closely by, “If I had a brain I’d remember why I walked into (pick a room)…” Then there’s (sung) “If I only had a brain…” At work on the phones I like to entertain coworkers by whining about the number of applications I have to pick from on my computer task bar, accompanied by some variation of “If I had a brain, I’d know why I’m staring at this screen right now…” You get the idea. And I’m officially at the very tail end of the baby boom.

  5. on 24 Aug 2007 at 11:24 am 5. Oaktown Girl said …

    This “baby boom generation” thing is so frustrating for those of us on the tail end of it because the official final year designating “baby boom” is 1964 (sometimes listed as 1963). What this means in reality is that we have about three very distinct generations in there as far as what was going on in music and politics during one’s high school years. And they don’t all lump together in this neat, tidy little bow.

    Plus, there’s the folks who inevitably cross-over between 2 of these sub-generations. (More later. “Work” getting in the way).

  6. on 24 Aug 2007 at 12:19 pm 6. christian h. said …

    Especially as the tempo of cultural, social and political change was very fast during the sixties and seventies - lumping together someone who finished high school in ‘62 or so and someone who did in ‘66 is just nonsense. I’m reading this history of the New Communist movement right now (Revolution in the Air by Max Elbaum), and it seems often two or three years age difference would make for a completely different outlook (politically, and among similarly radical people - but I imagine it must have been similar culturally, and in the general population).

  7. on 24 Aug 2007 at 12:47 pm 7. Seattle said …

    I’ve never understood how you could lump everybody born from 1945 to 1965 in the same group. I’m the youngest of all my cousins on my mother’s side because she had my sister and I in her 30’s when all her siblings were reproducing in their late teens and early 20’s. So my cousins-same baby boom generation-were adults having their own children when i was still a small child. We and therefor our children are odd age out.

  8. on 24 Aug 2007 at 1:17 pm 8. Oaktown Girl said …

    lumping together someone who finished high school in ‘62 or so and someone who did in ‘66 is just nonsense

    Yes, but even greater nonsense between ‘62 and ‘82 (my graduation year).

    I’ve never understood how you could lump everybody born from 1945 to 1965 in the same group.

    It makes for a tidy marketing package, I guess. Plus, our lazy and profit-centered corporate media is big on making sweeping generalizations and slapping labels on things without any real analysis (for that would cost too much, you see). Another example: “The Greatest Generation”.

  9. on 24 Aug 2007 at 3:25 pm 9. Bill Benzon said …

    So, what’s the earliest event that is of both world historical significance and of personal significance to you? For me it is the launching of Sputnik in 1957. I was just a month or two shy of 10 years old at the time, but I still remember going out in the yard and having my father point out the speck in the sky that was Sputnik — whether or not he got it right, or I picked out the speck he was pointing to, who knows . . .

    But I was very much roped in by the space-positive propaganda pumped out by Walt Disney (I now have the DVD of those TV shows) and spent hours upon hours drawing pictures of space ships and robots and stuff. I’d been deeply impressed, for example, with Forbidden Plant, with Robbie the Robot (1956 — I’ve got the DVD). So, when the Russians put Sputnik up there, I was imaginitively ready.

  10. on 24 Aug 2007 at 3:42 pm 10. Kiera PSI said …

    It would have to be the assassination of JFK. I was not yet three years old. His son was three days older than I.

    One of my earliest memories was watching the whole thing on TV, not really understanding what was happening, and then having my mommy come home crying (she’d heard it announced over the loudspeaker at the department store she’d been shopping in). My daddy was out working in the yard and didn’t know what had happened until mommy came home.

    Later, during the funeral, they pointed out JFK Jr. during the famous footage of him saluting, and explained to me that everyone was so sad because “that little boy’s daddy is dead and is never going to come home again”. That was very traumatic to a not quite three year old, as you can imagine. I had separation anxiety every time my daddy walked out the door for many, many moons thereafter.

  11. on 24 Aug 2007 at 5:04 pm 11. James Killus said …

    Sometimes I feel like being wispy
    And once in a while I feel like being dry
    But we’re doomed and we’re drowned by this feeling we surround
    So I hope that I get old before I die
    Ohhhhh
    It’s a long, long rope they use to hang you soon I hope
    And I wonder why this hasn’t happened
    Why why why
    And I think about the dirt that I’ll be wearing for a shirt
    And I hope that I get old before I die

    –They Might Be Giants

    For some reason, most people seem to fasten on the music of a particular time of their adolescence, generally sometime between late high school and and whatever transition marks “adulthood,” graduating from college, leaving the military, starting a family, a career, or whatever. Some fraction of those then go through life insisting that it was the bestest music evah, and everything went downhill afterwards. So there are boomers who defended the MC5 now ragging on hip hop to their kids (or grandkids). And mistakenly calling it “rap,” BTW.

    Then there are those damn media memories. I’ve had to twice contend with people at my college reunions trying to foist “The Big Chill,” and the music therefrom, on us at some function or another. Which pisses me off because 1) that was music my class heard in high school not college, 2) the movie, being stolen from “The Return of the Secaucus 7″ was about people who had been much more active in anti-war movement politics than the vast majority of my tech school chums, and 3) these characters were wish fullfillment fantasies, super-successful lawyers, businessmen, writers, disk jockies; hell, one of them was a TV star. My college class had its share of succesful businessmen, but the rest of it was hogwash.

    This is partly how Elvis, Jagger, Dylan, and the Beatles were hijacked by Boomers, despite all of them being born before the Baby Boom actually, you know, happened. Projection and Identification have a lot to answer for.

    The difference between the leading and trailing edge of the BB carries a world of difference in how easy it was to find a place in the world. The eldest get the best pickings, the youngest get the leavings. No wonder they’re so pissed.

    So anyway, I think I’ve going to go listen to some Cab Calloway and Jack Teagarden, probably mixed in with some Crystal Method and Kaki King. But I might put in some of London Calling, because, well eternal can come at any time, as I am reminded from time to time.

  12. on 24 Aug 2007 at 7:27 pm 12. Oaktown Girl said …

    James: Mmmm. That’s some tasty good rant. And I couldn’t agree more.

    The difference between the leading and trailing edge of the BB carries a world of difference in how easy it was to find a place in the world. The eldest get the best pickings, the youngest get the leavings. No wonder they’re so pissed.

    Damn straight. When I was in college in the mid-80’s and we were staging major protests, the older folks (40+) keep trying to foist 1960’s music icons on us (to be performers at our demonstrations) during the organizing meetings. It was as if for them all music stopped in 1970, and no more was being made. Ironically, the mid-80’s was an absolute Golden Age in the Bay Area for bands (music groups) of all genres (even as the popular music on commercial radio largely sucked), and for night clubs featuring live music.

    Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has a wonderful strip about the no-man’s-land people our age group are in as far as the media is concerned (I tried to find it online, but no luck). We’re not 60’s boomers, nor are we that next famous media fabrication, Generation X.

    For those who may be unfamiliar with his wonderful work, here’s a link to an archive (2003-present) of Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon, This Modern World.

  13. on 24 Aug 2007 at 8:07 pm 13. christian h. said …

    They tried to tell you what music acts to get for protests?? How weird is that? When we had a student strike for better university funding in Germany in 1997 (I think) we had these guys in the students government who had started their undergraduate career in the seventies (no joke!) - professional students, if you will (there was no tuition at the time). They also tried to control the whole thing.

  14. on 24 Aug 2007 at 8:24 pm 14. Oaktown Girl said …

    They tried to tell you what music acts to get for protests?? How weird is that?

    Not weird at all once you think about who we were dealing with: people who felt that any and all protest/direct political action must certainly revolve around them. Because, after all, they invented it, you know.

    Add to that, they’d become adults and middle-aged in the “Me” decade of the 70’s. (There’s a kernel of truth to that label. In the 80’s, that kernel took steroids).

    They also tried to control the whole thing.
    Yup.

  15. on 25 Aug 2007 at 12:17 am 15. Spyke said …

    Bill Benzon said …
    “So, what’s the earliest event that is of both world historical significance and of personal significance to you?”

    I find this to be a very interesting question really.
    Partially, because as earlier posters have pointed put - the “baby boom generation” really comprises probably 3 real generations at least.
    And partially, because this afternoon, during a get-together w/ some work colleagues, I had to explain what a pull-top can was to adults who were born in 1986?!?
    Born in ’86 - are you f’ing kidding me?!?

    I am from the very end of the “baby boom” - 1964.
    My earliest really historically significant recollection was of Reagan getting shot. And I remember at the time thinking quite clearly, great - the previous gen. got Kennedy, & what do I get? Fuckin’ Reagan! And they didn’t even kill him!

    Is that wrong of me? ;-)

  16. on 25 Aug 2007 at 12:45 am 16. The Velvet Fog said …

    In the long run - I don’t think that what separates us, (BB) from them (everyone younger), is going to be the stuff we remember, like tv shows now in living color, rotary phones, lp’s, the USSR or leaded gas.

    I think that what’s really going to be noticeable are the lack of concepts that kids today can’t possibly understand. 
Like what things were like before the internet. 
When you actually had to go to a library to find a real, actual book to provide documented, and verifiable proof of what you were trying to claim.

    We are now at a point were any chowder-head can claim something on a web-page, and after 5-10 other chowder-heads mention the first erroneous site, the claim becomes fact.

    The next few years should prove to be interesting. Of course, the idea of living in interesting times, is a curse which I finally, fully understand.

  17. on 25 Aug 2007 at 5:19 am 17. JP Stormcrow said …

    I think I posted another version of this here once before, but this is the thread it belongs with. (And of course these are not boomers by any definition … consider this a preview of 20-30 years into the future.)

  18. on 25 Aug 2007 at 5:56 am 18. JP Stormcrow said …

    My image had always been that I was towards the end of the “real” boom having been born in 1954. But I think you can see why they use the 1946-64 definition from this graph: (it might be a little hard to read the legend for us semi-oldsters - 1950 is right above the right-facing arrow and it counts by decades.)

    And yes the generational memories etc. are going to be quite diverse over that time span - when viewed up close at least. I think taking a longer perspective they shared early childhoods during times of growth and relative optimism about the country and world. (I know Vietnam is a little wrinkle in that …)

    One of my favorite boomer quotes is from SF music icon Chet Helms. Told by Joan Didion in the preface to The White Album - which along with her Slouching Towards Bethlehem are required boomer reading.

    one of only three significant pieces of data in the world today was the large population under 25 and that they got 20 billion irresponsible dollars to spend.

    … be sure to put some flowers in your hair.

  19. on 25 Aug 2007 at 10:44 am 19. Oaktown Girl said …

    Great. The sound function seems to be down on YouTube. At first I thought the fact that I couldn’t hear anything in that video JP posted was part of the geezer joke - going deaf.

    Spyke and Velvet Fog - interesting thoughts…which I’ll get to chime in on when I get back. (Gotta run - just wasted a bunch of time on JP’s YouTube video trying to get the damn sound to work!).

  20. on 25 Aug 2007 at 11:54 am 20. christian h. said …

    I gotta take some issue with what Velvet Fog says - I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon, change. Or difference in understanding between ages. I usually feel old whenever I realize that the freshmen I teach have no recollection of the cold war. I guess most people live in interesting times sometime in their lives.
    By the way, I’m definitely post-baby boom (’73), and I didn’t really know about the internet until a couple years into my time at university.

  21. on 25 Aug 2007 at 1:32 pm 21. JP Stormcrow said …

    Great. The sound function seems to be down on YouTube

    Be sure you are playing far enough in, there is no sound until they get into the studio.

    The earliest “world historical event” I recall was the Kennedy-Nixon election. My best friend and “rival” at school ran around pushing Kennedy (his parents were Democratic Party officials), so I cluelessly pushed for Nixon based on nothing other than a perverse contrarian streak.

    The assassination was the next thing that really rang home. My mother greeted me at the door in tears and said something like: “Well, they killed him, they got him.” The only non-specific “him” I could conjure up was my father, so it was quite the moment unti we got that straightened out. The magnitude of the event was heightened a few days later when I was alone watching the coverage on TV when Ruby shot Oswald. I recall really feeling the need for some grownup to come in and shore up my naive American exceptionalism. (That the US had “never started a war” and “never lost a war” was a staple of our playground historical banter - a view you can still experience today on any number of right-wing blogs.) Instead I got my mother gruffly rejecting my recitation of the standard media line of “Well it was wrong that Ruby shot Oswald, but Oswald only got what was coming to him.”

  22. on 25 Aug 2007 at 1:43 pm 22. Bill Benzon said …

    Also, Oaktown, you may have to turn the speaker on (lower right, next to “Menu”).

    I love them Zimmers. I discovered YouTube early last summer. I remember seeing Geriatric1927 rise to the top of the YouTube hit parade in about a week or two. I mean, how is it that an old geezer born in 1927 becomes a hit on a medium mostly used by those under 30? Obviously alot has to do with how he — Peter is his name — presented himself. Early in his first video you see a picture of a young man straddling a motorcycle even as you hear some old-timey blues on the sound track. Yeah, old-time, but the blues. And the picture, of couse, was Peter as a young man.

    So he knew how to presesnt himself as cool. But, he wouldn’t have been so popular if all those young people didn’t have a need for a benevolent grandad figure, and he did that just fine. Tells about his life as best he can recall and not a bit of condescension.

    Anyhow, he’s somewhere in that Zimmers thing.

  23. on 25 Aug 2007 at 2:05 pm 23. JP Stormcrow said …


    The comic is a poorly scanned and photoshopped one fron Dan O’Neill’s great Odd Bodkins series which ran in the SF Chronicle in the late ’60s. The intro panel which did not scan reads:

    Dear peers,
    will you still need me —-
    will you still feed me —–
    when I’m 64.

  24. on 25 Aug 2007 at 2:17 pm 24. Bill Benzon said …

    Introducing the concept of a Buddha-call:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDxkiu0eAzk

  25. on 25 Aug 2007 at 3:20 pm 25. Oaktown Girl said …

    Spyke -because this afternoon, during a get-together w/ some work colleagues, I had to explain what a pull-top can was to adults who were born in 1986?!?
    Born in ’86 - are you f’ing kidding me?!?

    Amen and Praise Gojira! I was in an antique shop just last weekend and some items there got me thinking about older styles of drink cans, and then thinking about how many “kids” have no idea what those might be.

    Fuckin’ Reagan! And they didn’t even kill him!
    Is that wrong of me?

    No. Besides, if there were such thing as a loudspeaker that could broadcast all the thoughts people had floating around in there head, we’d never stop shaking our fingers at each other. Or, we’d all be a hell of a lot less judgmental.

    Velvet Fog - I think that what’s really going to be noticeable are the lack of concepts that kids today can’t possibly understand. 
Like what things were like before the internet.

    Perhaps, but those aren’t the things that concern me as much as them growing up without concepts like living wages for the working class, and that working 2 or more jobs to stay afloat is not how things are supposed to be. That topic has been on my list of things to write about here. (I’m OK if someone wants to beat me to it. I hate writing).

    YouTube - I’m getting sound now. Don’t know what happened before. All my sound buttons were turn up, I tried jumping to the middle of the video, I tried other video, and squat. I had begun to think it was my computer, but I was getting sound on Google videos when I ran a test check there. Oh well.

    Bill - I just played that “Buddha” link. It was kind of funny until it got rather sad, yes?

  26. on 25 Aug 2007 at 9:18 pm 26. James Killus said …

    I thought JPs graph looked a little funny, then I realized that it had an expanded axis, which emphasizes changes. This graph shows both the total number of births and the birth rate:

    One interesting thing is the difference in phase between the number of births and the birth rate. This is because there were so many Boomer births that it had an effect on the calculated birth rate, which dropped more quickly than births because so much of the population was below reproductive age. Then, of course, the Boomers delayed having kids until around 1980, where you get the “Echo Boom,” or, as I called it at the time, the “Great American Spawn-off.”

    I think that the attempts by old 60s radicals to manage later prtotests, etc. has implications that are less generational but in a sense more sinister. There were “left-wing authoritarians” involved in the anti-war movement and the “New Left,” as it was called. Any so-called “double high” authoritarian during that time period was going to go where the action was and the action was in the “counterculture.” As time passed, some stayed frozen in time and continued trying to peddle the same material, sometimes in New Age designer clothes, but basically the same dope. Others, being more (shudder) adaptable became “neo-cons.”

    Of course for every extreme case there are many more who are less extreme, so just multiply by a few million to get a glimpse of how people’s knees jerk. The old hits can bring a nostalgic tear to even those who have moved on. But god, who wants to listen all day to an oldies station?

    Ah, and one other thing. Every generation is a “Me Generation,” just like American Exceptionalism isn’t that exceptional.

  27. on 25 Aug 2007 at 10:09 pm 27. Bill Benzon said …

    Oaktown, yes, it’s rather sad. Still, I can’t help wondering whether or not the Dali Lama is available for Buddha calls. & imagining Yellow Pages ads for Buddha calls.

  28. on 25 Aug 2007 at 10:11 pm 28. Oaktown Girl said …

    Interesting stuff, James. And why don’t you write us a post about those lefties gone bad…very bad. You’ve brought it up a few times before. I’d like to hear the expanded version.

    as I called it at the time, the “Great American Spawn-off.”

    I like it!

    And while every generation might be the “Me” generation, only the 70’s was the proclaimed “Me” decade - even while it was going on, not retrospectively. It was novel because never before had society been so brazenly forthright about everybody being all about themselves. To be so publicly and shamelessly self-centered was largely unheard of. Not that everyone was - far from it - but that’s where a lot of the marketing and various “movements” were focused: My relationship with Jesus. My quest for enlightenment. My needs being fulfilled. My stuff.

    Now, of course,”Me” is not novel at all. These days, not being out for just yourself is the novel concept. In many circles, if you’re not about “I got mine”, then you’re just considered a “sucker”. My 23 year old intern uses a lovely phrase, I’m not sure I have the words exactly, but it goes something like this: “In life, you either take first, or take a number. And I ain’t taking no number.”

  29. on 25 Aug 2007 at 11:01 pm 29. The Velvet Fog said …

    christian h.
    I may not have expressed myself very well.
    I’m not so worried about generational differences in understanding - that’s why I said that I don’t think what separates us is really going to be the stuff we remember.

    What I was trying to say is that with the internet we have constant, easy access to info - some of which is good, most of which is garbage.
    This access can be a great thing with info that is accurate, but potentially damaging otherwise.
    We have a media that doesn’t bother to fact check things - just push stories onto the ‘Net. Once the wrong info is out there, it starts getting cited by people, and can quickly become “fact”.

    This is an interesting ArsTechnica article I read about the challenges of scientific integrity and plagiarism.

    i don’t know if that explains it any better, but that’s what I meant by interesting times. Instant access to bad info - not wether or not some kid remembers watching “Knight Rider”. ;-)

  30. on 25 Aug 2007 at 11:41 pm 30. Oaktown Girl said …

    Hi Velvet Fog -
    Your link wasn’t working, so I took the liberty of fixing it. But it’s late and I’m tired (not enough sleep last night), so I’m going to have to wait until tomorrow to read it.

    But in any event, if your Knight Rider remark hasn’t inspired at least one Hasselhoff link, photo, or witty comment by the time I get back here tomorrow, then you people out there are just not on your game, (and it being a Sunday’s no excuse!)

  31. on 26 Aug 2007 at 7:34 am 31. christian h. said …

    Elitist crap! Yet, one of my favorite shows as a kid.

  32. on 26 Aug 2007 at 7:40 am 32. christian h. said …

    This might be the explanation why New Left veterans were worried about using contemporary music in 80’s protests.

    On my way to the Trunk now… don’t worry, no need to send the goons.

  33. on 26 Aug 2007 at 10:58 am 33. JP Stormcrow said …

    This might be the explanation why New Left veterans were worried about using contemporary music in 80’s protests.

    Come now, surely you recall the pivotal place that We Built This City on Rock and Roll played in motivating the hordes of protesters against the Reagan/Bush adventures in Nicaragua. … or wait was that in some alternate history SF book?

  34. on 26 Aug 2007 at 11:29 am 34. James Killus said …

    The “Me Decade” was a Tom Wolfe coinage. He offered anecdotal evidence only, and it was basically from one social class. I will bet that the same article could have been written at any time in the last century.

    The “Greatest Generation” was about as self-centered as they come, demanding, for instance, that every war since WWII be just like WWII, just as noble, demanding the same “sacrifices,” though rarely the same degree of government control over their lives and fortunes as WWII did. Oh, and they also demanded that each war be “won” as thoroughly as WWII, with, one assumes the same degree of massive devastation to both enemies and allies, leaving the U.S. as the undisputed leader of the world. When that complete dominance was challenged, as when the USSR developed nuclear weapons, the greatest generation reacted with a paranoid frenzy.

    Call me judgmental, but I tend to think of paranoia as being very self-centered and self-aggrandizing, and not in a good way.

    New Lefties gone bad? Oh dear, what a project that would be. That’s not a posting; that’s a book deal.

  35. on 26 Aug 2007 at 11:34 am 35. JP Stormcrow said …

    I thought JP’s graph looked a little funny, then I realized that it had an expanded axis, which emphasizes changes.

    Yes, that was a bit of dodgy visual rhetoric. Couldn’t find one like yours in the moment. Per my “irresponsible dollars” comment, I do think that one of the glues of the “generation” (and which ties into the “Me” thing), is how the bubble has so many economic consequences - and even though as James said, every generation is a Me Generation, the Boomers had the numbers to push their Me-ism further. In fact (and this advice still holds), you probably have a whole successful investment strategy wrapped up in the phrase “Just Follow the Boomers”. (or their money.)

  36. on 26 Aug 2007 at 11:34 am 36. christian h. said …

    New Lefties gone bad? Oh dear, what a project that would be. That’s not a posting; that’s a book deal.

    In defense of many veterans of the New Left: this could probably be said about any social or political movement (regardless of your definition of “bad”, which I suspect may not the same for James and me).

  37. on 26 Aug 2007 at 12:21 pm 37. James Killus said …

    In defense of many veterans of the New Left: this could probably be said about any social or political movement (regardless of your definition of “bad”, which I suspect may not the same for James and me).

    As I tried to emphasize in my earlier (#26) posting, every social or political movement with any power will be catnip to authoritarian-style leaders. I can think of no exceptions. The question, of course, is how the general participants respond to such authoritarianism, and that depends on both the individuals and the nature of the times.

    The individuals who flashed through my mind when I thought of “New Lefties gone bad” included Phil Ochs and Abby Hoffman (suicide), Rennie Davis (spokesman for Guru Maharaj Ji), Jerry Rubin (EST graduate and entrepreneur), P. J. O’Roark (too weird to rank), and David Horowitz (complete asshole). Dennis Miller is too young to have been a real “New Left” guy, but he has made up for it through sheer assholery.

    Of course, many of those at the forefront of the Neocon Movement were Old Lefties such as Norman Podhoretz, who were reacting to the New Left and the counterculture in general. I’ve always had a suspicion that it had to do with their being too old to join the orgy.

  38. on 26 Aug 2007 at 1:41 pm 38. Oaktown Girl said …

    James, I was only talking about the lefties-gone-Neocon you’ve alluded to more than once here. You still may want a book deal, but I still want my post.

    christian - your YouTube in #32 makes a specious argument (as I’m sure you know, since you’ve appropriately pre-Trunked yourself before I could do it myself). You can find just as much worthless musical drivel in 60’s music. The main difference I can see is that socially conscious music received only a fraction of the airplay in the 80’s as it did in the 60’s. As I stated previously way back in #12 - popular music on commercial radio largely sucked.

    But you can come out of the trunk now, since you came through with the Knight Rider clip. Ha! I get smile on my face thinking about you watching that “elitist crap”! I’ve actually never seen the show. I’ll have to go back and check the years when it was on. Obviously, I wasn’t a kid, but I’m sure the bigger factor was that I’m not into cars.

  39. on 26 Aug 2007 at 2:19 pm 39. christian h. said …

    Oaktown Girl, indeed, I was trying to rag on the “the eighties music sucked so much” - claim that seems to be received wisdom by now. Though I have to admit I wouldn’t know as I basically listened to classical music only growing up - culturally reactionary household. I had to watch those bad TV shows when the parents were out. Probably explains my infatuation with pop culture now I’m all grown up and stuff. Let that be a lesson to parents everywhere!

  40. on 26 Aug 2007 at 2:29 pm 40. christian h. said …

    There are not that many Neocons that used to be members of the New Left, I think. Horrorwitz is the only one coming to mind in the US. Most of the others were busy supporting the Vietnam war while avoiding it personally.

    In Germany, at least, most of the former Maoists and Anarchists and Trots and such are now on the liberal left, as one might expect.

    And of course one shouldn’t forget that the number of actual activists was always small - these were among the most politically active members of their generation, so I would expect them to be overrepresented in politics now, no matter which direction they went.

  41. on 26 Aug 2007 at 4:38 pm 41. James Killus said …

    The other important influence on neoconservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism–a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism but that eludes Ehrman. Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohlstetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.

    – Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution, John B. Judis From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995

    christian, the crew that is now called “neocons” tended to be either Old Left or the students of same, and they didn’t get along well with the New Left remnants in the 1960s, when the nucleus of that rotten pearl was formed.

    There aren’t many “Road to Damascus” conversions in any case, Horowitz, O’Roark, and Miller (the latter two being entertainers, after all; come to think of it, Horowitz might qualify, given a broad enough view of “entertaining”) notwithstanding.

    In my view, what happened to the New Left was almost complete fragmentation, with the various radical factions (feminism, environmentalism, animal rights activism, black consciousness, the anti-nuclear movement, consumer protection, anti-globalism, etc.) spending the subsequent decades talking past each other, in loud voices, while becoming more and more marginalized with each succesive schism. And I see no reason to expect that the future will be any different. Each and every one of these groups seems more determined to go off into a snit and savage potential allies than to actually deal with the authoritarian right wing.

    Or, to put it another way, I don’t think the anti-war movement shortened the Vietnam War by a single day. And I expect that fine record to continue into the far future.

  42. on 26 Aug 2007 at 10:52 pm 42. Spyke said …

    I know that he’s not the same guy, but whenever someone mentions David Horowitz, I always think of “Fight Back with David Horowitz” from the mid-seventies. ;-)

    James Killus -
    “In my view, what happened to the New Left was almost complete fragmentation… Each and every one of these groups seems more determined to go off into a snit and savage potential allies than to actually deal with the authoritarian right wing.”

    Unfortunately, I have to completely agree with you.

  43. on 27 Aug 2007 at 9:46 am 43. James Killus said …

    I have a friend whose brother is an academic at U. of Oregon, Portland. His name is David Horowitz, and boy, does he have a cross to bear. Periodically some clueless student decides that he’s the other DH and sends him nasty emails, spray paints his office door or some such. This despite his “impeccable left wing credentials” as my friend is wont to say.

  44. on 31 Aug 2007 at 5:29 pm 44. spyder said …

    We really need spyder back for this thread.

    Ugh??? What???? I can’t quite hear you, you know. All this rock-n-roll blasting around me, and my hearing so susceptible to the din of shrieking electric guitars.

    Patti Smith you say? Boulder, CO on the night of August 8th at the Boulder Theater, after leaving the Ozarks and jammming into Colorado for the SCI final tour RedRocks shows. Stunning unbelievable musical performance. Damn fine band too.

    So, what’s the earliest event that is of both world historical significance and of personal significance to you?
    A bus came by and i got on, that’s when it all began, with cowboy neal at the wheel and a trip to never-ever land. March 1966 in Los Angeles, CA. That moment changed all of my previous conceptualizations of historically significant events.

    I’m still riding that bus, what a remarkable collection of folks out there with us on the highways.

    As for the original thread notion, as a BB born in 1947, i feel inordinately blessed to have been able to live the life i have lived helping to spend some of those miscellaneous billions of disposable wealth on frivolity and mirth. Life is still pretty damn grand, and it is invigorating to feel that i can still tour with rock-n-roll at my age, and stay up with the utes. But i do confess that the kids are playing some amazing music and deserve all the attention and appreciation and respect regardless of how often they are producing derivities of derivations of the derived semi-originals. A dj/mixmaster who can mash Coltrane with Rage Against the Machine over some ambient sound wall of Laszlo Hortobagyi memesis, is someone who has my undivided attention.

    Then again so did the re-energized “mostly original (three of the five)” New Riders of the Purple Sage last Friday night when they played a truly outstanding set and then brought out the terminally-ill Marmaduke to sing Portland Woman. John stayed on stage (watched over by his wonderful wife Alanna and very cool mother {ninety years old and rocking})and sang harmonies on Panama Red and Wild Horses. Buddy Cage reminded everyone that they were experiencing something that would likely never happen again. Only a couple of dozen or so gray-haired old hippies dancing in front of the stage truly understood what he meant; the other two+ thousand heard some damn fine music.

    Tonight i get the Friends of Dean Martinez playing the soundtrack live in the theater while they film “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” shows on the ’silver’ screen. Sunday is the annual Giant Sand and all its offshoots, side projects, and manifestations party. Damn i love rock-n-roll.

  45. on 31 Aug 2007 at 5:37 pm 45. spyder said …

    Afterthought:

    Next week i will have some time to craft a proper thread about my experience in the Ozarks at a festival in the middle of nowhere featuring bands we thought the folks might like: SCI, Los Lobos, the Wailers, the Roots, the Greyboy Allstars, Infected Mushroom, Bassnectar, Del McCoury, JJ Grey and Mofro, Buckwheat Zydeco, David Lindley, Drew Emmitt, Chris Berry and Panjea— It became an experience of a lifetime, beyond the pale, insane across all the membranes. It was rock-n-roll lived in every way.

  46. on 31 Aug 2007 at 5:48 pm 46. christian h. said …

    Hey, welcome back to spyder! We missed you. I’ll hold you to the thread promise.

  47. on 07 Sep 2007 at 12:30 pm 47. spyder said …

    Talking bout the generation being THE GENERATION if you be in that generation, this is the latest list of Top TEN CD sales at the local “hip” Tucson retail outlet for music
    Top Ten in Music
    CD City’s top sales for the week ending Sept. 2, 2007

    1. The Traveling Wilburys The Traveling Wilburys (Rhino/Wea)
    2. Héctor Lavoe El Cantante: The Originals (Fania)
    3. Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin: Remasters (Wea)
    4. Trouble Simple Mind Condition (Escapi)
    5. The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol)
    6. The Doors The Best of the Doors (Rhino/Wea)
    7. The Beatles Abbey Road (Capitol)
    8. Héctor Lavoe La Voz (Fania)
    9. Loudness Soldier of Fortune (Wounded Bird)
    10. Dickey Betts The Very Best of Dickey Betts: 1973-1988 (Raven)

    How is it possible that so many are so interested in music created by people 35 -40 years ago, and/or by guys who are (would be if alive) in their 60s+???