Some might criticize Adams and say that he's engaging in a dishonest and artistically capricious exploitation of his audience
But surely one listen to "Everything I do, I do it for you" and all is forgiven.
Kiddies, I'll wait for McManus to show up and then we'll tell you a thing or two about the summer of '69.
Adams
"Summer of '69" is a song that I have heard on the radio all my adult life (starting in my late adolescence I believe; but I could not give any kind of confident response to someone asking when it started being played) without ever caring enough to find out who it was by -- and to this day I do not know -- except now I have the idea it is sung by somebody with the last name Adams. Bryan Adams maybe? Is that even the name of a pop star of the late 80's or early 90's?
I think Ben has a good handle on what is lame and artificial about this song. Assuming I am understanding Ben's meaning correctly.
Wikipaedia tells me that not only is there a pop star named Bryan Adams, and not only did he (in 1984, when I was a budding teenager) sing the song under discussion; he also sang the truly execrable "(I'm Gonna) Run to You", compared to which "Summer of '69" is totally venial, in the same year.
Also: Adams would have been 10 in 1969. Did Ben note that in his post? Because it is worth noting.
What's the gold standard for the evocative sad nostalgia song, then? I'd vote for "Fairytale of New York," but this may not be the epitome of the nostalgic so much as the drunkenly maudlin.
the gold standard for evocative sad nostalgia song
That would be "When Irish Eyes are Shining", would it not?
"When Irish Eyes are Shining"
No, Danny Boy. But "When Irish Eyes are Shining" contains the immortal line, "Heeeeeeere's your drunken violent daddy!"
Now that I think of it, for sheer nostalgia in the pure sense of a wistful return to key moments in one's own past, it would be hard to beat Kate Bush's "Moments of Pleasure."
Allegedly, the year is not the referent.
Also, "Boys of Summer" fits the description much better.
Ben hates to do research before he mouths off.
"Seasons in the Sun", hands down. Everyone who hears that song has their life changed irrevocably.
12 -- Now don't start talkin' dirt about John Henley...
If you have to ask I can't explain it to you.
Shorter Boys of Summer. (Not dwarf pr0n.)
(Not dwarf pron.)
Nice disclaimer. The audio on the linked page is awesome.
John Henley was a steel-drivin man.
Dylan Thomas looks more or less how I imagine W. C. Fields looks.
26 -- Why do you need to imagine? Numerous images of W.C.Fields are available.
All you need to know about Bryan Adams.
Bryan Adams survives, I swear, because of Canadian laws about Canadian radios having to play Canadian artists. Same goes for that awful Dion person.
My favorite maudlin song is "2000 Miles." Hard to beat the not-home-for-Xmas genre.
the gold standard for the evocative sad nostalgia song
"C'était le temps des cerises." (Paroles)
The best thing about the summer of '69 was that it wasn't the fucking summer of '68.
2nd Best was the music. The apex of Western civilization. Bitches Brew etc may be better than Silent Way, but Silent Way was the turn.
Just Duane Allman's solo on Boz Scagg's "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" or his work with Herbie Mann
I remember 1970 better, in 1969 there were still people hanging on to dreams & rage, but the grief, resignation, acceptance, withdrawal were in the air.
Dylan, of course, was a year ahead of everybody with Nashville Skyline.
I can't remember her name, the girl with the ironed brown hair. Darla?
Jackson Browne of course made a living off meretricious...hmm...looked the word up and it didn't mean quite what I thought,
meretricious:Plausible but false or insincere
but Browne was the king of sensitive nostalgia.
Ginsberg predicted Browne with his "whole boatload of sensitive bullshit".
I was trying to think of how t explain 1969-70 last night.
2008:Imagine both Obama & Edwards get assassinated, and Giuliani beats HRC in a landslide (remember Wallace had a significant 3rd Party Run), and then President Giuliani invades Iran & sends Josh Marshall & Sausegly to Gitmo, which Congress goes along with in exchange for Nat Healthcare for kids. Maybe also Dems lose both houses while Stevens & Ginsburg retire, to make up for the increased cynicism and lack of history.
Some kept fighting to their credit, but for many it was oddly liberating. Heroin and cocaine became popular.
Ahh, the good ole days.
Sarah was the Mrs. Dylan who got beaten. I didn't like "Nashville Skyline" at all. In general, I didn't like the mellow country hippies with their mellow country cliches much. I'm actually a country guy in effect (sort of like the young squire who went off to the big city) and like the country, but in a different way than those mellow shits.
Speaking of mellow country hippies, I watched Neil Young Live at Massey Hall '71 last night and found it to be excellent. He sang "Ohio", which he must just have written, and it was very moving. In a non-meretricious way, I suppose I would argue. He was singing a lot of brand-new songs which have lost a bit of their power today through repetition, but it was like listening to them for the first time, sort of. Also: is Bernard Shakey, as both IMDB and Wikipaedia believe, a pseudonym for Neil Young? He was credited with directing the movie, and I was very impressed with the directing, which reminded me a bit of Jonathan Demme's concert films.
37:"Country squire"? I don't remember if many have portrayed my North Country well. "Fargo" is all sunshine. My youth was kinda "Affliction" + "Thunder Road" for a little while. Doing the black-ice back roads at 3 AM in my big old Bel-Air, luger in my boot, black beautys & black jack, 5 lbs of sense in the trunk. Steely Dan & Harry Nilsson & Doobie Bros on the radio.
It was so fucking cold & flat & dark out there, 10 below with the miles & miles of cornfield covered in snow. More like cigarette boats to Miami than moonshine to Kentucky.
I have a Lake Wobegon story that's just like Garrison Keiollor's except that my brother's best friend ends up hanging himself in the town lockup.
There are others, too -- the guy who was making Sarin to poison the County sheriff, the guy who stole the police car and hid it, the people who sabotaged the powerlines.
In Minnesota I was a goody-goody, though. Whatever I may may not have done was on the West Coast.
I'm with 3. If this post was a long-winded way of saying "That song sucks," I've got no argument with it. That said, rock music has nothing on older forms for maudlin nostalgia. "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away" leaves stuff like Bryan Adams in the dust.
Hippies are so sure that they're the only with meaningful memories.
Correct, yoyo. Let's face it, your memories suck.
is Bernard Shakey, as both IMDB and Wikipaedia believe, a pseudonym for Neil Young?
yea, verily.
43:38 is meaningless even to me, and was just a lil attempt at art by the artless.
1968-69 isn't memory but history, with close parallels to oh maybe 1848 and early 20s Europe.
I can't speak for anyone else like Max Sawicky, but I think Stoller & Tim Burke have drawn the wrong lessons from a failed revolution by focussing on the casualties & rubble instead of noticing the stampeding elephant that won the war.
Analogies and mixed metaphors;off-topic and unfunny. Ogged may stop liking me anymore. Better go.
Analogies are like.... something or another, Bob.
The NOW sucks big time, alas.
The thing to do is stop talking your uppers for a while, wait for a rainy evening, and try Peggy Lee's Is That All There Is> at about 3am.
Like Charlie Christian, Peggy Lee (Norma Deloris Egstrom) was from North Dakota.
Not sure if this has been posted already, but there's a great version of it that I much prefer by the snotty pop-punk band mxpx. Faster, and better.
My tape copy of mxpx 'on the cover' was my sophmore year driving to lax practice jam. That whole thing is still awesome. mxpx is my guilty shitty 90's punk band along with rancid thath still gets plaly.
Los Angeles International practice?
36 You Kill Obama and WE WILL BURN SHIT DOWN
You know there's no such entity as "wikipaedia", right, clown?
54,55:Ok, so what is the objection? I was describing the politics of 68-69 and trying to reach kids who couldn't understand and yeah the unspeakable and unthinkable happened. Bobby and MLK got killed. Among many other horrible things.
You can't imagine it? Don't know how you would cope? That is my point. And to a degree you cannot ever imagine, those events were not so extraordinary.
I played video games all 9/11. I'm sure i'd find a way to cope. we aren't burdened with your generation's self-importance
57: The only objection is the overblownness of your delivery. Assuming that the kids of today can't imagine it, you feed into their alleged perception that you're an aging hippie who thinks his generation has a premium on the unimaginable.
See yoyo's rather silly 43.
I was born in 1964.
I'm not sure what the argument in this thread has become, anyway.
I was born in 1964.
No wonder your hand hurts.
Well, if you look at my #2 it started as a joke, more or less, but the option of making it a serious generational conflict was picked up.
58:Nah, yoyo, ain't my generation's ego. Let me see, IIRC, it is 12-18-12 for 67-69, or 66-68.
So, including race riots, is probably a 9/11 + Americans dead in Iraq every three months for two years.
My father & uncles had another perspective.
55: Bob McM has it right. The Sixties weren't all old folk songs, they were also folk songs in the making. For a trivial example, check out Kent State to understand Frowner's points about provoking/scaring people in uniforms with guns.
What I'm seeing in the various blogs now is nothing more than a continuation of the late night dorm room BS sessions of forty-five years ago, before things really heated up.
30 is right (despite), and helps explain many a dreadfully dull Canadian export, from Amanda Marshall to Shania Twain. On the upside, the rules also make possible acts like the Hip, Sloan and the Kids in the Hall. I suppose *through gritted teeth* Celine Dion is a small price to pay.
I've always found Sister Ray pretty depressing, the more so for having been conceived tongue-in-cheek.
64b:That is what I think, too. The current anti-war movement feels about as serious & passionate as the Ban-the-Bomb movement of the early 60s.
And Kent State was kinda trivial. The exhaustion and despair were so widespread that the spring demonstrations of 1970 were just going thru the motions and there was little protest on midwest campuses by the fall. Maybe Wisconsin.
66: The current anti-war movement feels about as serious & passionate as the Ban-the-Bomb movement of the early 60s.
The current anti-war movement, esp Stateside, is still in recovery after having had its naive hopes of actually stopping the war dashed.
Well, back to Paul Mattick on Keynes over at the MIA. Mattick was an honest-to-god Sparticist in Germany in the early 20s, who emigrated to the US, ran for the hills iin the McCarthy era, but made a huge comeback in the late 60s.
Cause it takes a revolution to end a war.
66: The current anti-war movement
May I ask which areas of the current anti-war movement you mean?
I'm not objecting, but it's relevant.
'Meretricious' comes from meretrix, Latin for 'whore.' An apt word, in that the song is a false, exploitative, commercial music-product.
Is Shania Twain's real name Shania Langhorn Clemens?
69: Nah, I really need to read more than troll, and tomorrow is my annual Wilfred Owen day.
And somebody said "1969" and I got all messed up.
71: I understand. For what it's worth, I mentioned it, or asked, because I do think there are anti-war, or anti-establishment, if you will, movements out there, under the mainstream radar. That sounds stupid, but still. I wouldn't underestimate the extent of the current generation of so-called kids' awareness. I wouldn't overestimate it either.
JE and Bob and BioH have all been good about the isolation and dissonance of those days. I was in Ohio, and the obliviousness of what was going on around me to these larger issues, charitably thought of as a kind of shock but also largely indifference is paramount in my memory. I was much more politically aware than the people around me, but relied on the MSM for most of my news, then as now not a very good thing to do. Alternatives existed but I hadn't hooked up with them, nor even learned how to read between the lines or seek out the good in magazines.
Still, I can remember waking up to the news of both the MLK and RFK assassinations, and being profoundly shocked. That was the year before. By '69 there was anger, numbness and needing to react to Nixon and Agnew, who had a lot of support around me. I knew that was grotesque, but was pretty isolated until I could get away.
I think there must be a lot of sleepwalking in the suburbs among kids today. Here in the city, my daughter knows a lot but has a lot of issues on her plate too. Kids she hangs with the same: politics is big and they go to demonstrations and make gestures at least as much as I did, but don't have any sense of power.
make gestures at least as much as I did, but don't have any sense of power
Control the food, control the people. Control the money, control the food and shelter, control the people. Pretty simple, what happens.
But I'll quit this now.
59: I'm not sure what the argument in this thread has become, anyway.
My observation, not "argument", is that being "anti-war" now seems mostly confined to saying "Ain't it awful" to people who already agree. That's pretty much what goes on on the other side too.
What I'm not picking up is the same sense of emotional engagement the Vietnam War engendered. This one seems more intellectual, with the emotions mostly limited to dislike/hatred of Bush & Co. and the reflexive "Kill then all" on the right. I can't back any of this with science, it's impressionistic stuff picked up in gas stations, at work, on the net, etc.
A few observations:
1. I love "Summer of '69". BUt "Boys of Summer" could beat it in a fight; it makes me weep.
2. Bryan Adams originally titled it "Summer of '74" but the record company asked for something more evocative. Also: "standing on your momma's porch" was originally "standing on your momma's corpse" but &c.
3. Keep in mind no draft, when gauging the relative passion of the anti-war movements. The Democratic Party is also not the war party (though not an effective anti-war party); this is also a big difference.
4. "Summer of '69" was the first rock n roll song.
I vote that along with analogies, we ban posts about Israel/Palestine and the 60s.
68
"Cause it takes a revolution to end a war."
It didn't take one to end US involvement in Vietnam and it won't take one to end US involvement in Iraq.
I vote that along with analogies, we ban posts about Israel/Palestine and the 60s
Both are bound to seep in around the edges of other topics, that's really what's happening here. Yes, Emerson made a call for memories, but still.
What's the objection? disenfranchisement? irreconcilable views? Those elements are present on many other topics too.
People care about those topics and it colors their views of everything else.
77: Comparisons to the 60s are instructive.
What's the objection?
Tedium, predictability.
81: B., try to be more informative. Snark is so 90s.
Tedium, predictability
Thank god there are no other subjects, vital to some, where the discussion is likely to have those features.
81: If tedium and predictability are the criteria, let's ban all the feminist stuff, pros and cons, too. There's been nothing new since the Sixties there either, and the most solid scientific finding seems to be, "Men don't like housework".
I feel oddly accomplished having evoked snark from you two.
B. is oppressing Bob and me.
If ewe're going to ban topics, I suggest banning discussions of dates and relationships. I'll drop my no-relationship advocacy if no one ever mentions a date, a relationship or a dispute with a significant other.
68:I pointedly referred to 1848 and early 20s Europe (which usually exludes Russia.) A revolution does not have to be successful to be a revolution.
And of course it wasn't all about the war. The cultural revolution was largely successful.
I deleted a dissertation. Let us just say that the 60s left (check Pt Huron statement) had a host of targets:racism, sexism, militarism, capitalism, theocracry, conformism. To a certain degree, with varying success, all these forces have been concentrated in one political party and one quarter of the country. Like all the Tories herded to Wessex.
This has, until recently, been framed as a success of the right. Only in the last few years has the strategy, conceived in the 60s, become obvious as the deliberate marginalization of conservatism.
The weakest link, economics, will be where the next battle is fought and finally won.
I was laughing at every word of 89. Ogged has no sense of humour.
"and it won't take one to end US involvement in Iraq. "
Yup. 80 dollars a barrel by August, over 100 a year from now. $6+ at the pump. MY & Ezra are not going to be able to add a gas and carbon tax to that. I have already read:"Can we stop fueling the heavy trucks(semis)?" Right. War will not reverse the declining std of living cause it can't make oil cheaper.
We need all our surplus production put into a massive energy conversion. Right now. Cheap energy, not more expensive energy. Revolution. We will grab Wall Street and turn into windmills. Trillions.
88: It's true. You and Bob are the representative white guys of Unfogged.
B. is the threadkiller. I try not to tell her to fuck off. I don't actually like seeing such posturing here, but whatever. Shoot me now, or shoot me later.
And somebody said "1969" and I got all messed up.
Iggy roolz. Bryan Adams and Don Henley drool.
Unfogged is pretty damn white. (As my son said when he reached Tufts, "It's not all white, but it might as well be".) I agree that Bob and I are the representative older crazy leftist guys here, though there are other old guys here.
People today really, really misunderstand what happened 1965-1975, and one symptom of the misunderstanding is writing off "crazy hippies" and "Vietnam veterans" (= "ranting street person"). This blind spot helped engineer liberal consent to the present Iraq War.
One reason for my distance from "identity politics" is that for many I knew it was a way for people to escape from the earlier left into a left with more restricted goals.
The NOW sucks big time
Sexist.
The song isn't about what went on in American culture and history around the summer of 1969; it's about this one dude's memories of his last carefree summer when all his possibilities still seemed wide open, before the cold reality of adulthood hit him. 1969 is just a random pick, in other words; every listener has his own year that fits that description.
I know, I was just derailing the thread. Talking at length about meretriciousness would have been boring.
98:Yup.
99:I don't know. Definitions:"Vulgar display of emotion or plausible but insincere expression of sentimentality" could be fun on Memorial Day for iconoclastic and antisocial types. Wilfred tends to make me mean.
Watched Nicholas Cage in Lords of War last week, and again this week. People, if they can get away with it, will kill each other for laughing wrong, or heck, just because they can. Don't need tribalism or ideologies or nations. But those authoritarian social structures that keep us in line...wow, a dilemma!
People today really, really misunderstand what happened 1965-1975, and one symptom of the misunderstanding is writing off "crazy hippies" and "Vietnam veterans" (= "ranting street person"). This blind spot helped engineer liberal consent to the present Iraq War.
The 60s -- the hippie 'movement' -- have been rewritten as an embarrassment, exemplified by people's distaste for, say, Hair. I continue to fail to understand this, how the reframing was done, and how otherwise intelligent people have been snowed into buying it.
I sometimes think that the prevailing notion of sophistication these days involves a deep fear of actually believing in anything (this would have been the hippies' sin), lest one be made fun of. Call it a backlash against sincerity.
I have a marvelous anthology called The Rhetoric of No. It is, alas, presented as some sort of high school or college textbook, providing questions for discussion at the close of each selection. But it runs from Thoreau to Rachel Carson to Mencken to MLK to Hunter Thompson. I find it soothing.
Around 1980 friend of mine who was in grad school said that there was an enormous effort being made to recruit "opinion leaders" such as academics and journalists into the neo-con, neo-liberal, interventionist camp. It involved stuff like free conferences in spiffy locations with good food. The antiwar consensus coming out of the Vietnam war was the specific target, though there were also purely conservative efforts pushing privatization, low taxes, etc., etc.
Along with this came stuff like cushy fellowships and speaker's fees for academics and journalists (via think tanks, etc.)
It all seemed a bit surreptitous -- some people did join groups and become overt, but a lot of people just seemed to buy the point of view without open affiliation.
Oh. You think it's been just the much-discussed neo-con takeover, some actually 30 years in the making? Funding of think-tanks, control of the media, shaping of public opinion.
I have no idea why I hadn't put that together. Still, there seems something missing in the equation. The people here on this blog, for example, highly educated, don't for the most part buy the lower-taxes, any government is bad government, privatization is god line. Yet I see an eschewing of what might be derided as wide-eyed idealism, and a view of activism motivated by sheer anger and refusal as somehow vulgar.
There are some class issues here.
I'm getting tired; my hand is on ice; I'm still missing whatever's missing, but I suspect that it needs some sociology, man. What I said before: control the people by controlling the money, the food and shelter. The shift in question was not engineered just by manipulating public opinion.
There's also been a pop culture ani-hippie reaction, starting maybe with National Lampoon and PJ O'Rourke back in ~1970. There was a bit of a rightwing streak in some punks, and the 80s bands were pretty determinedly apolitical. Springsteen and U2 seemed to have deliberately separated themselves from actual politics, and Springsteen only demurred mildly when Born in the USA was used in the 1980 Reagan campaign.
A pet idea of mine I don't talk about much: around 1972 and afterwards, feminist and gay-liberation leftists went the personal/cultural route very vigorously separated themselves from the old global anti-war socialist leftism. I understand the reasons for their resentment of the macho politicos, but a lot of them ended up in a bad (apolitical or centrist) place.
around 1972 and afterwards, feminist and gay-liberation leftists went the personal/cultural route very vigorously separated themselves from the old global anti-war socialist leftism. I understand the reasons for their resentment of the macho politicos, but a lot of them ended up in a bad (apolitical or centrist) place.
Ooh, this is interesting and seems plausible on the surface. Extrapolate?
Although my immediate thought is, was this feminist/gay leftists separating themselves, or was it the movements getting broad support among apolitical/centrist women/gay folks who were never going to become part of the socialist left but were quite happy to take on some of the identity-based issues to make their own bourgeois/centrist lives more equitable?
I'm really thinking mostly about people I know. This is oral history, not an overview.
I remember very well how abusive of women (and often homophobic) the hippie / new left leaders could be. They had enormous egos and a pretty self-centered take on sexual liberation.
But pretty quickly the "politics is the personal" went all the way to something like separatist nationalism, with nothing much to say about American foreign policy or social equality. Also, successful career women were given a pass on what their careers were -- people who would have their doubts about male bankers or colonels wouldn't question women in those fields. Eventually female or gay success within the world as it is became regarded as revolutionary or whatever.
Aound 1972 everyone had to bail out, though, one way or another, because things had gotten too crazy and peoples lives were going out of control.
108: Very true, John, IME. You should also remember that although there were many "hippies" on the left, many hard core hippies were extremely right wing from the get go, even if it wasn't immediately obvious because they wore funny clothes and smoked grass.
There were an awful lot of pseudo-feudal authoritarians, high on Tolkein and such like who were easy meat for the early Xian conservatives (I remember seeing a bunch of longhairs on television in about 1972 saying how "Christian Conservatism" was the practical outlook which best reflected their views. And there were authoritarian "anarchists" (OK, Jo Freeman was writing about the women's movement, but what she said applied across the board), who were wide open to the Rajnishis and such.
The idea the the hippies were homogenously progressive was always BS. A lot of people were against the draft in America, sure, but often that was only a question of their own asses.
I mean, both: gain more broad support, pitch yourself there in order to maintain and strengthen the support, sacrifice some of your prior ideals.
Ha! Sounds familiar, so familiar, in fact, that the task would be to figure out how to address it.
108: Oh, it's all oral history with me. I think you've got a good point, but then there's also the DeBeauvoir version of feminism, which is pretty bourgeois too. I wonder if the history you're seeing is particular to feminism/gay lib (and if so, what the relationship between centrism and specifically sex-defined groups is) or if it's just a more general aspect of what happens to fringe elements?
107 -- Somewhat tangential question, B, when would you say was/is the high point for the cultural influence of feminism? Early 70's? Late 70's?, Early 90's?, Now?
I go back and forth between thinking that the backlash has worked, and that feminism has been losing power over the last generation, but I also recognize that a lot of postions that used to be controversially feminist are now mainstream and becoming entrenched.
Yet it feels odd to say that feminism is a stronger cultural force now than it ever has been.
I feel like the answer to this question relates to the question of what happened to the anti-war left from the 60's/70's.
Also, another serious question, what was the influence of the oil shocks of the 70's on the left? On one hand you would think that the failures of capitalism would strengthen the left, on the other hand, I think of them as turning points in the culture having a lot more economic fear, which has hurt the left in odd ways.
Crap, I dunno. Probably mid-to-late-70s, but I'm only basing that on pop culture impressions, having been about 10 at the time. Everything went to hell once Reagan came on the scene.
Everything went to hell once Reagan came on the scene.
That seems like an endorsement of the backlash theory.
I like the backlash theory. I know there was some criticism of her research at the time, but on the whole I think she's right.
I wasn't arguing.
I read backlash sometime in 93, and it's one of those books that has so strongly influenced my sense of cultural history that I no longer agree or disagree with it because I can't imagine not having that as part of my interpretation of the 80's.
On one hand you would think that the failures of capitalism would strengthen the left, on the other hand, I think of them as turning points in the culture having a lot more economic fear, which has hurt the left in odd ways.
The culture having a lot more economic fear.
Sorry, I'm harping on this.
We need the lawyers among us to work in this area, because that's all the power the left-oriented have, I believe. From what I read here, however, the lawyers (and, well, also those in the financial industry) are concerned with drawing down fifty million thousand dollars per week in income, to a degree that precludes them from participation in the debate.
god do you guys really not know this?
the point was put to Bryan Adams in an interview in (I think) the Guardian a couple of years ago that he would have been ten years old in 1969. He explained that the song wasn't about 1969, it was about love. The interviewer pressed the question. Adams looked at her wolfishly and said "no ... it's about love ... it's 'The Summer of 69", not 'The Summer of 1969'"
in related news, shouting requests for this song, "run to you" or the theme from Robin Hood; Prince of Thieves, are apparently all good ways to get thrown out of a Ryan Adams concert.
good ways to get thrown out of a Ryan Adams concert
Valuable information.
D^2, as I explained, I was trying to avoid talking about Bryan Adams, or Ryan either. I also tried to divert the discussion to "Seasons in the Sun", but that ploy was unsuccessful.
