My parents gave me this poster for Christmas in 1967. God, it was the most fantastic thing. It was fab! It was groovy! My father managed to knock together a frame for it, and Flower Power went up on the wall over my bed.
I was twelve, and the pink and mauve floral wallpaper chosen by my mother a few years earlier had been all but obliterated with pin-ups of The Beatles and The Stones, and Go-Set posters of local boy pop stars with neat fringes across their eyebrows, and names like Normie and Ronnie and Johnny.
Crimson And Clover/it’s All so Beautiful/Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds/Good Vibrations/The Rain, the Park... Are you going to San Francisco...Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair....
Sadly, unfairly I wasn’t going to SanFrancisco, or Woodstock, or any of those mythical yearned-for places. I was going down to Ringwood station to catch the train to boring old school. I was going to Eastland shopping centre with Mum. I was stuck in the suburbs, doing my homework on Sunday afternoon while Dad mowed the lawn. Going over to my girlfriends’ place to giggle and write fan letters and read Dolly magazines.
My friends and I heard about the Summer Of Love. A year or so later, in 1968 or 1969, my father went to San Francisco for a ‘business trip’ How unjust! San Francisco - wasted on my square of a father. He asked what I’d like him to bring back. I asked for some hippy beads from Haight Ashbury.
Dad came back from the States, bead-less, and announced with some satisfaction that the whole ‘Haight Ashbury thing was all completely washed up and passe.
But something extraordinary really was happening in America, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just that I was a teenager at the time. There really was a celebratory throwing off of the shackles of repressive middle class values. Ripples of revolution reached us through the music . Righteous rage and rebellion, flowers and colours and sex and drugs and flowing hair and Dancin’ In The Street. And also in amongst it, the deep longing for peace and love and an end to racial discrimination and war...Love, Love, Love, said the young ones.
Make Love Not War: My parents said Darling, you shouldn’t wear that badge, it could make boys think you were, you know....
Last night I watched a DVD doco about The Doors, which is what has prompted all this reminiscence.
Light My Fire, People Are Strange, Hello I love you, won’t you tell me your name..
That broody spooky sexy druggy excitement - how irresistible it all was to me and my friends back then. Though our rock heroes - Jimi, Janis and Jim were all dead before we finished school.
Forty years on, I’m snuggled on the sofa in my pyjamas on Saturday night. Nostalgic about my distant youth. My own son is out, having a sleep over at his friend’s place after soccer. No doubt they’re on Youtube, or iTunes, getting their generation’s version ...
Seems Jim Morrison’s parents had no understanding of their precocious brat of a son. His father was a naval officer. He was serving in Vietnam while his drug-addled offspring gyrated in front of thousands of hysterical girls, while ranting about love and peace and threatening to undo his pants. It looked like he would have done it too, if police and the other band members hadn’t hauled him off stage in the nick of time.
Jim said that America was “ in love with violence”. Watching those images from the 1960's, you could only agree with him. The assassination of JFK, then the assassination of Martin Luther King. The shocking killing by state police of four protesting students on campus at Kent State University. The awful blow of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. And all of this against the background of race riots in the U.S, and America’s war in Vietnam.
3 comments:
How can one forget all that! And still we can fight for the same values. I even think that we are aging wiser because we were nurtured on that and we have been made stronger, thanks to those values.
We have even showed that we could be more responsible and more caring than they were – with Vietnam, and helping Pinochet and so and so. We have been more responsible and caring in our day to day doings and makings.
The things I cannot understand are the Tea Parties, and the Putins, and Berlusconis, and the like. Where were they?
And you tell all that so nicely, with such honesty. A real woman of that unique generation, and very much young and alive.
Thanks for your positive angle. I actually cut a bit out at the end b/c it was too long, reflecting on how the colourful & progressive community I live in today is a well-distilled product of the upheavals of that time 40 years ago.
& I'm glad that we seem to share the same politics!
Interesting post. People are still protesting in the streets and being shot at. Love is needed indeed.
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