There once was a sun shining cloudless day that spanned a decade (or so it seemed). Much has been written about this period of time, an idealized landscape has been created that paints a picture of forever candyfloss, and the young floating up to heaven on purple coloured wings! It hardly needs to be said, that the reality of these times was quite different. Frank Zappa wrote about the ‘weekend hippie’, going home to mum and dad on Sunday night! Bob Dylan sang of ‘Mr Jones’ who knew ‘something was happening’ but didn’t know what it was.
In reality this very special time was still lived out within the old class system of merry old England, the middle class and upper-middle-class ruling over, ‘The Scene’. The privileged middle classes having “parties in Chelsea flats mixing with kinky cats”. The lower working class, just pawns in the game, dreading the Monday morning return to work, being spat at as they cleaned toilets, swept roads and followed the fab charts on beat up transistor radios. History records that decade as a time when the music was generation lead. To some extent, this is a fair analysis, because the music industry for a while could not control what was happening.
Out of that time, some very special things happened, an awakening if you like. Lennon’s “Dreamers” could feel and experience that dream for a while, but for the working classes, it was to be the only dream that they would ever have!
It was a time when people were finding out that they didn’t ‘have to be’ anything! Happiness and freedom were more important than job security and a pension?
And so, the great myth of the 1960s was born, lived out its corrupted dream for a while, blessed thousands, but, betrayed millions. For some the myths and the dream goes on, but not for me, no longer for me.