Copyright Steven A Brown and Carla Johnson
January 4, 2012
Kalamazoo, Michigan
If I could dig down deep in my heart
Feelings would flood on the page
Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya
Would ya think the boy's insane? He's insane.
I know it's only rock 'n' roll (but I like it)
~ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
Music plays the soundtrack of our lives. What's playing during your formative years will play in your head for the rest of your life because it is the music that made you.
At the dawn of the Cold War, the torch songs that concluded World War II gave way to music with a little more bounce and optimism; we had won the war. I know this because I lived it. Music came from LP and 45 records played on the phonograph or via the air waves of radio. I sat in front of our full-sized radio, listened to music, and colored in my coloring books. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Mario Lanza dominated the air waves.
It was an opportune time for a revolution. Like other teenagers in any decade, our hormones began to rage, and we wanted to break away from parental control and discover our own identity. Along came Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and the other pioneers of the enduring music now known as Classic Rock.
Unless you were a teenage American girl as this revolution ensued, I don't know how you'd have any idea how it felt to live it. Our pulses raced as we cruised around listening to the soundtrack of a new world on our radios. Exuberance overrode the subterranean layers of fear we felt - fear of the establishment, fear of the fabricated Cold War enemies lurking in every shadow of every moonlit night, fear of The Bomb, fear of the raw power of the sexuality the music carried along with fear of the scandal of pregnancy (prior to The Pill and legal abortion), fear of our own power to change the world knowing we fully intended to do it.
Come hell or high water, we would ride the back beat of rock 'n' roll into an explosive - and already exploding - future.
Sitting at my computer checking my e-mail this morning, I caught the strains of The Rolling Stones' "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll." The sound came from the TV. Whether it was a commercial or programming, I have no idea. But I realized as I more felt than heard it that rock has been and always will be the soundtrack of my life. It created the demographic called The Baby Boomers, and like it or not, for a while at least, we changed the world.
Elvis Presley would have been 77 years old last Sunday.
Cyranos says hearing this song on a car radio was privotal in his life:
6 comments:
...but I like it! :-)
Yeah, me too, Dave.
Drat. Dave beat me to it. *grin*
Music changed my life so very, very much. Once upon a time (make it 1967) I was hanging with my buddy Pat, and his mom needed to go to the store. Ok, a ride downtown, cool enough. Into the station wagon we piled. On the way down to the store Pat's mom said, and I quote, "lets go laugh at the hippies" as she turned to take the beachfront road. It was a watershed moment in my life, it really was. She was radiating all of the contempt and mockery and ignorant bigotries the cold war establishment was known for, radiating them like WLS AM set to full emergency jamming mode… 100,000 watts baby, pure clear channel mockery. Along the beach we went, with her rubbernecking and poo-pooing the girls in their modest bikinis of the day, the long haired surfer boys (she looked longer at them than the girls, but go figure, she knew prime beef when she saw it). And then it happened, and I've never really been the same since.
Do you remember the Moody Blues? Their first incredible offering, Days of Future Passed? We passed in front of the little beach front cottages, got stopped in traffic right in front of this one where a pair of long haired lads were soaking up the sun with a decent size set of speakers, one in each window to put some music into the world. They were listening to "Forever Afternoon, Tuesday." It took exactly three seconds and I changed my mind about the entire world. Phooey on the attitude coming from behind the steering wheel, I want to live where they do, in those magical images riding such enchanting sound, I want to live in the sunshine with these pretty people so calm and so comfortable and so, so human.
Yup, worked out really well for me, but I don’t think Pat's mom got what she wanted. *chuckle* Matter of fact, I think it blew up right in her face.
Do I remember that group and that song, Cyranos? I was alive then, heh heh. Yep, The Establishment does itself in. Happens every generation.
I posted the Moody Blues singing your soundtrack for you!
Thanks CJ. I still occasionally have the Moodies ovver (on) for a cup of tea, and nostalgia :-)
That's very healthy, C.
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