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Click here to watch a Retro Minute of some of our favorite '60s moments.

Not long ago I spied an old classmate across a crowded food court. We chatted briefly, amicably. But I couldn’t get over how spent and drained he looked, with the kinds of deep, sagging pockets beneath his eyes envied by only the most degenerate of gamblers.

 

This guy used to be bad news. I’ve lost track of all the people who were either felled by his calloused knuckles or who wisely declined his standing invitation to meet behind the school. He had fire then; you could actually watch the flames tickle his retina right before he shoved some sorry fool through his own rib cage.

 

He was past that now, the fury long quelled, with a scrawny teenaged boy at his right, flicking and jabbing the business. “Damn,” I thought as I watched the kid work. “Twenty years ago you would’ve been licking this guy’s shadow, begging him not to break your legs. You’ve no idea this man’s history before he was your father.”

 

Of course, the kid wouldn’t care. God knows, I didn’t when I was his age. When we’re young, we don’t give much consideration to life before we existed. It was a nebulous past we didn’t experience, so it didn’t matter. But as we get older, sometimes we regard the pre-us with curiosity and awe.



When I was about 14, misty-eyed hippies began celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love. So naturally I became obsessed with the ’60s. I read everything I could wrap my hands around. I soaked myself in its soundtrack, bathed in its navel-gazing documentaries. I wanted to know everything, so I consulted those in my immediate circle who lived it firsthand: my parents and grandparents. They had great stories (the one my grandmother tells of the day John F. Kennedy was shot is particularly chilling; it involves a bowling alley and its subsequent stillness as the news came over the public address), but we soon reached an impasse when the decade they remembered didn’t quite match the one I wanted to see: THE SIXTIES, with all the import, pomp, and weight such significant history deserves.

  

Even my dad, who lived those heady times to their absolute hilt (get this: Buffalo Springfield played one of his high school dances!), had his limits. “We can’t see it the same way,” he’d say, exasperated. “It’s exotic to you, because you weren’t there. You get the highlight reel. For me, it was just everyday life. It’s not all social upheaval and assassinations; there was also, ‘Wow, what am I gonna do this afternoon?’ or ‘I wonder if she’ll call’ or even something as mundane as showing up for my shift at Sears.” But it didn’t matter. I envied them their Kennedys, their Martins, their Malcolms, their Woodstocks, their Chicago 7s, their psychedelics, their sit-ins, their love-ins, their status as that cultural zenith before the worm turned.

 

 What I envied most of all was the palpable thrill of the First, as in that first listen, when a standard we now take for granted (see: anything off Freedom Rock or classic FM) was brand-new. I’d kill to hear something like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” or the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For The Devil” in the context of their time, instead of as dramatic period stings in cinematic visions of hellhole Vietnam, or introduced via the parched pops of creaky vinyl. How would I have reacted to the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, or the Who without the bulk of their catalogs already at my command? I can imagine it, perhaps, but I’ll never actually know.

 

But I’m pretty sure I could have whipped my dad’s butt.

 

Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth” (Live 1967):

 

Rolling Stones, “Sympathy For The Devil” (Live 1968):

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