As I exited onto 26th Street, after buying Dannon coffee yogurt and Caffeine Free Diet Coke at Ralphs, I heard the Real Time Newsreel on XM’s 60s on 6.  It was January 23, 1961, the date of President Kennedy’s inauguration.

There was no school that day.  There was too big a snowstorm.  But by the time JFK took the dais, the snow had stopped swirling, the sun was out.  I remembered the impact upon my mother.  At that time thirty four years old.  She felt hope.

And there was hope in President Kennedy’s speech.  They didn’t use the "Ask not what you can do for your country" excerpt, but a different part, one wherein JFK spoke of a switch in power, to a generation born in the twentieth century, which had experienced two world wars.

Hope.  The sixties had it in spades.  Oh, a lot of the discussion focuses on unrest, on protests and assassinations, but really, the sixties were about possibilities.  Not only economic, but personal.  You could be who you wanted to be.  Restrictions evaporated.

And the lubricant for these possibilities was music.

The first song after the news was a novelty track, from 1961, which I’d never heard before, featuring the vocals of a baby.  You see the early sixties did have the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys, but the revolution truly arrived with the Beatles.  Ironically, just after Kennedy was assassinated.  That’s when an even younger generation than the one he spoke of in his speech took over.

There was a British Invasion.  And so many of those bands are revered to this day, like the Beatles and the Stones, but those now seen as quaint were not back then.  You see their records had magic.

Woke up this morning feeling fine
There’s something special on my mind
Last night I met a new girl in the neighborhood, whoa yeah
Something tells me I’m into something good

I really fell for Herman’s Hermits with their follow-up, "Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter".  But all these years later, the monster is eclipsed by the progenitor.  There’s an elation, a happiness in "I’m Into Something Good" that is akin to falling in love.

Herman’s Hermits were not one hit wonders.  They continued to churn out records that dented the chart.  I smile whenever I hear "A Must To Avoid" and "There’s A Kind Of Hush", even "No Milk Today".  But the song I heard today was "Dandy".

There’s an acoustic guitar akin to a Kinks track.  Which is fitting, since Ray Davies wrote the song.  But it’s Peter Noone’s vocal that’s so entrancing, that takes you right back to that magic decade.

The song starts with the chorus.  And then hits the verse.  And that verse, with its descending figure, it touches me somewhere deep in my soul.  I can see stoops in the U.K.  I can remember walking to junior high school.  I think of riding the bus back from Butternut Basin.

And there’s a bridge.  Such a simple device, but so magical.

But it’s those verses, starting with that chorus…

Oh Dandy, Dandy
When you gonna give up
Are you feelin’ old now
You always will be free
And you need no sympathy
A bachelor you will stay
And Dandy you’re all right
You’re all right
You’re all right

The kids were all right.  We had an optimism.  That wasn’t quashed until the seventies.  But that sixties spark, it still lives on in the baby boomers.  We believe we’re never going to get old, certainly not on the inside.  We’ll always be free, to act on a whim, to follow our inspiration.  And whatever we do, it will be okay.  After all, we’re the JFK generation.  We did drugs, we dropped out, we stopped a war and held a rock festival with 600,000 attendees, demonstrating that we truly were a generation unto ourselves.  You expect us to give up now?’

But what keeps us going is our music.

Oh, they still make music today.  Some of it quite good.  But it doesn’t serve the same purpose.  Society is not the same.  The music is not ours, rather it belongs to the machine, ironically ruled with an iron fist by baby boomers.  Whereas the oldsters of yesteryear had no idea what they held in their hands.  All they knew is these young musicians were the key to riches.  If they let them follow their muse, the cash register would ring.

Stunningly, the cash register still rings for this forty year old music.  Because inside the tunes, even if they were cut far from the inspirational leadership of JFK, there’s a joy.  Actually, a full palette of emotions.  If you wanted to know what was going on in the sixties you didn’t watch TV, or read a book, you had to tune into the radio, you had to listen to the records.