For my birthday in 1969 my brother
gave me Abbey Road, the
Beatles next to last album. In the intervening years my children and then my
grandchildren have become Beatles fans. My twenty-one year old daughter (yes, I
have a child that young) has many Beatle tunes on her MP-3.
I became aware of
the Beatles in 1964 when they burst upon the American scene with their
appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. After that I heard their songs again and
again on the radio and especially at work on the ship’s entertainment system.
(I had been in the Navy about ten years by then.) I heard the songs so often I
still know most of the words.
At
that time I was (and still am) a jazz enthusiast but I always loved rhythm and
blues and then its offspring, rock and roll, but I looked askance at the
Beatles. Who were these unkempt upstarts in ill fitting suits who needed a good
barber and a competent tailor? But then the tunes won me over.
In the strictest
sense the Beatles were more British music hall than rock and roll, especially
by the time Abbey Road came
along. “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and “Octopus’s Garden” are more
music hall and novelty than blues or rock and roll. (“Come Together” now
underscores a TV ad.) Earlier albums like the very imaginative White Album,
from which “Helter Skelter” comes (more about that below), and beautiful songs
like “And I Love Her” and “Yesterday” established the Beatles as important 20th
century popular music composers.
Also
in 1969 American Neal Armstrong walked on the moon, giving Americans reasons to
feel patriotic, especially with the anti war and racial turmoil that then
plagued the cities. The year before, 1968, (the year the White Album appeared)
had seen assassinations and riots in Chicago.
1969 was a slight improvement. Even Woodstock,
that demonstration of mass debauchery still celebrated by aging flower
children, was better than the hate America,
anti establishment sloganeering that characterized earlier years of the decade.
If I had to choose between stoned, mud-wallowing hippies and angry, rock
throwing anti war demonstrators, I would take the former.
That
same year my brother, who gave me Abbey Road,
was a recovery swimmer on Apollo 11, the shot that put an American on the moon.
After a couple of deployments to Vietnam
with the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, he went to work on Apollo,
participating in three recoveries, 6, 10, and 11. He then left the Navy and
with two others bought a thirty-six foot ketch and sailed the Caribbean
for a year.
Additionally,
1969 witnessed the murders of Sharon Tate and the LaBianca family, which were
masterminded by psychopath Charles Manson, who claimed to have been inspired by
the White Album’s “Helter Skelter,” the name Manson family prosecutor Vincent
Bugliosi gave his book about the murders and the trial.
Manson’s
fevered reading of “Helter Skelter” made him believe that the current national
turmoil would culminate in a race war between black and white. That didn’t
happen, but the 1960’s greatly accelerated, if they didn’t begin, the moral and
cultural rot that has given the nation increased promiscuity, increased out of
wedlock births, decaying central cities, the decline of respect for marriage
and the family, the dumbing down of education, a popular culture that is an
open sewer, and a President and a White House full of advisors whose ruling
philosophy is informed by the decadent 1960’s.
Except
for Tate/LaBianca 1969 was festive, but forty years later we see the ugly
result of 1960’s nihilism. I doubt the nation will ever recover.
This was originally published in
the Crossville Chronicle, Crossville, Tennessee,
on September 9, 2009
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