Will That ‘Groovy Kind Of Love’ ‘Fade’ With The ‘Love Generation’?

It was the Saturday before Christmas and my wife and I were having our annual neighborhood meeting. Old friends and new acquaintances dropped by with cookies and fruitcakes to share a little Christmas cheer with us. The living room table was filling up with these little red and green candy favors and liquid Christmas favors. But my wife and I had already received the best gift any parent could have. All three children were at home. They came back for Christmas from all over America and the world. From Australia (now happily Boston), Ohio and California.

I looked around at these three young adults; 20, 24 and 27 years old, chatting with some of their friends, as well as with our old friends and neighbors. Two generations in the same room; chatting, nibbling and laughing. And… everyone listening quite happily to the same music.

As an old rocker and musician, this intrigued me, so I started listening a little more carefully.

I noticed that unconsciously both generations were tapping their feet or humming or even unconsciously muttering a word or two from the lyrics here and there.
All of these songs were familiar; the words, the music, the lyrics – to a room full of people ranging in age from 10 to their late 60s. I walked into the living room to pick up the station call letters to identify the format. It was what we used to call when I was working in the radio industry, a MOR (middle of the road) station.

These are stations that specialize in playing music that will be familiar to and enjoyed by the widest range of audience possible. So what was this music that spanned half a century and is now familiar and loved by children, parents, and even grandparents alike?
As Bob Seegar used to sing, it’s that ‘old time rock & roll’. They are groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Eric Clapton… even Sonny & Cher!

And mind you, this was not an ‘oldies’ station. This was ‘middle of the road’. Music for everyone.

I started to think. How did the music that epitomized feelings of rebellion and unbridled love evolve from the music that separated my generation from my parents’, and become the music that my children still love today?

To be brutally honest, as my 20-year-old son Chris tells me, “Dad, everything your generation did becomes the standard whether you like it or not, because there are so many of you.”
True enough. Remember that funny graph we were shown when we were kids? The one they described as an ‘elephant moving through a python’ because each new phase we Boomer kids enter would disproportionately explode in population and influence for all generations before, or any generation after!

Is that good or bad?

Well, probably both. We certainly raise collective consciousness about things like racial injustice, war, and poverty. But ironically, probably one of the most far-reaching consequences that the Baby Boomer (my/our generation) will have on the social fabric of generations to come, will be the twin revolution/evolution we had in the two elements that make up the world. of youth go ’round. Music and sex.

Yes, I know I left out the third part of the 1960 triumvirate of ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll’. But frankly, I think if you were to ask anyone who lived through the liberated 60s to pick the two most important of those three, there would be no contest. It would be Rock & Roll and sex all the time. And to any of my fellow Boomers who are clicking their tongues (hmmm, is that a Freudian slip?) and/or shaking their heads, I just have one question. What were you doing during the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967?

I thought so.

Anyway… as I listened to the music and thought about the early Beatles or the Stones or, well, Loving Spoonful… I realized that in addition to changing the way we saw the world during the time of JFK , LBJ, John, Paul, George and Ringo. Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin; the central theme running through the music was not necessarily the revolution and protest flags of social change that everyone has come to associate with that period. Uh-uh, the real message delivered in almost every song was… LOVE.

How many songs from the 60s had the word Love in the title? Even more revealing, how many songs didn’t have at least the word Love in the lyrics?!

All you need is love, love me, she loves you, good love, you’ve lost that feeling of love, and so on. And that’s just a small sample of titles with the word love. Like I said, I dare you to find a hit ‘Love Generation’ song where the word ‘Love’ doesn’t appear at least once in the title or lyrics. Try it, you will be surprised.

Quite different to many of today’s bands like Jet who sing about a ‘cold hard bitch’. Great melody but not, well… terribly romantic. I mean, could you imagine that as a snuggle feeling like ‘all we need is love’?

Oh yeah, come over here and ‘lay your head on my shoulder’ my sweet little… ‘cold hard bitch’? Ummm – no, I just don’t think that will do it.

Has the sexual part of love that 40 years ago was depicted as running through a field of flowers full of psychedelic colors, faded and become opaque around the edges? Or has the wonderful world of sexual liberation that we pioneered now become as mundane as a casual handshake?

And yes, before you say it, I’m not going to deny that we were the generation that defended ‘Free Love’. Although paraphrasing Janis Joplin, “nothing, honey, it’s not free.”
But even though we broke all taboos against sex before marriage, there was still the feeling, or for the more cynical among us, at least the pretense, that the person with whom you shared that lumpy mattress or that hard apartment floor It was someone you loved. . Even if it was just for that night. Or as Stephen Stills so ably summed it up; “If you can’t be with the person you love, then love the person you are with.” And we did.

So I guess that brings me to my final point. Will the ‘wonderful kind of goofy, maudlin, intense love that the love generation created in books and movies, but especially in music that came out of the psychedelic ’60s, with those wide-eyed, idealistic, innocent flower children fade away? very open who grew up with all that spiritual, metaphysical and physical love?
Will the naive but sweet confidence of the ‘Love Generation’ fade like the ‘dead flowers’ of Rolling Stone? Or will a generation of ‘cold hard bitches’ see sex as just a casual handshake or just another competitive game, an extension of football or lacrosse?

Or will they eventually want something more, and perhaps return to that ‘wonderful kind of love’ filled with incense and flowers?

Stay tuned.