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.\u00c2\u00a0 It was January 23, 1961, the date of President Kennedy’s inauguration.<\/p>\n
There was no school that day.\u00c2\u00a0 There was too big a snowstorm.\u00c2\u00a0 But by the time JFK took the dais, the snow had stopped swirling, the sun was out.\u00c2\u00a0 I remembered the impact upon my mother.\u00c2\u00a0 At that time thirty four years old.\u00c2\u00a0 She felt hope.<\/p>\n
And there was hope in President Kennedy’s speech.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Hope.\u00c2\u00a0 The sixties had it in spades.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, a lot of the discussion focuses on unrest, on protests and assassinations, but really, the sixties were about possibilities.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only economic, but personal.\u00c2\u00a0 You could be who you wanted to be.\u00c2\u00a0 Restrictions evaporated.<\/p>\n
And the lubricant for these possibilities was music.<\/p>\n
The first song after the news was a novelty track, from 1961, which I’d never heard before, featuring the vocals of a baby.\u00c2\u00a0 You see the early sixties did have the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys, but the revolution truly arrived with the Beatles.\u00c2\u00a0 Ironically, just after Kennedy was assassinated.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s when an even younger generation than the one he spoke of in his speech took over.<\/p>\n
There was a British Invasion.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 You see their records had magic.<\/p>\n
Woke up this morning feeling fine I really fell for Herman’s Hermits with their follow-up, "Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter".\u00c2\u00a0 But all these years later, the monster is eclipsed by the progenitor.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s an elation, a happiness in "I’m Into Something Good" that is akin to falling in love.<\/p>\n Herman’s Hermits were not one hit wonders.\u00c2\u00a0 They continued to churn out records that dented the chart.\u00c2\u00a0 I smile whenever I hear "A Must To Avoid" and "There’s A Kind Of Hush", even "No Milk Today".\u00c2\u00a0 But the song I heard today was "Dandy".<\/p>\n There’s an acoustic guitar akin to a Kinks track.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is fitting, since Ray Davies wrote the song.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s Peter Noone’s vocal that’s so entrancing, that takes you right back to that magic decade.<\/p>\n The song starts with the chorus.\u00c2\u00a0 And then hits the verse.\u00c2\u00a0 And that verse, with its descending figure, it touches me somewhere deep in my soul.\u00c2\u00a0 I can see stoops in the U.K.\u00c2\u00a0 I can remember walking to junior high school.\u00c2\u00a0 I think of riding the bus back from Butternut Basin.<\/p>\n And there’s a bridge.\u00c2\u00a0 Such a simple device, but so magical.<\/p>\n But it’s those verses, starting with that chorus…<\/p>\n Oh Dandy, Dandy The kids were all right.\u00c2\u00a0 We had an optimism.\u00c2\u00a0 That wasn’t quashed until the seventies.\u00c2\u00a0 But that sixties spark, it still lives on in the baby boomers.\u00c2\u00a0 We believe we’re never going to get old, certainly not on the inside.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ll always be free, to act on a whim, to follow our inspiration.\u00c2\u00a0 And whatever we do, it will be okay.\u00c2\u00a0 After all, we’re the JFK generation.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 You expect us to give up now?’<\/p>\n But what keeps us going is our music.<\/p>\n Oh, they still make music today.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of it quite good.\u00c2\u00a0 But it doesn’t serve the same purpose.\u00c2\u00a0 Society is not the same.\u00c2\u00a0 The music is not ours, rather it belongs to the machine, ironically ruled with an iron fist by baby boomers.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas the oldsters of yesteryear had no idea what they held in their hands.\u00c2\u00a0 All they knew is these young musicians were the key to riches.\u00c2\u00a0 If they let them follow their muse, the cash register would ring.<\/p>\n Stunningly, the cash register still rings for this forty year old music.\u00c2\u00a0 Because inside the tunes, even if they were cut far from the inspirational leadership of JFK, there’s a joy.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually, a full palette of emotions.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00c2\u00a0 It was January 23, 1961, the date of President Kennedy’s inauguration. There was no school that day.\u00c2\u00a0 There was too big a snowstorm.\u00c2\u00a0 But by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-dandy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/em><\/p>\n
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<\/em><\/p>\n