introit

To begin with, there is no real beginning. You simply cannot talk about the 60s in a linear fashion. The 60s were sort of a natural maelstrom that ebbed and flowed across the western world, leaving the occasional pocket still. You must remember, these were pre-internet days, even pre BBS. Only the Government spoke in acronyms in those days. We reveled in the use of words,resurrecting old ones and coining new ones. What we could not find we invented, what we could not invent we stole, you grok?

And there is not really one generation of the 60s. The people at the beginning were not the same as the ones at the end. How so? For the Catholics among us it was a simple answer, Vatican II. Which in turn had an effect on most of the major Protestant Churches as they struggled to be "relevant".

And of course there was Television. TV in its way probably had an even greater impact on the first generations than the internet did? They called it the great wasteland, and it was. But still we grew up with the Man From UNCLE, Bonanza,The Avengers, Star Trek. I am sure there are thesis still to be written on the effect of those shows on what the 60s became. Still being an acned,voice breaking student, the actors were the people we wanted to grow into in a short time. But they were written to a large part by people slightly older and still caught in the black and white of WWII. And while the shows grew to be 3 dimensional, they still showed us that the Good Guys won. In a world that showed us lynchings and war on the news, we knew we were the good guys. And if the Adult Conspiracy did not solve those issues and the good guys won, then obviously they must be the Bad Guys. And because music (which I will get to) had already made us sort of international brothers and sisters, then All Adults were..Bad Guys. Especially as our brothers and neighbours and cousins went to war and did not come back..or came back strangers.

TV part 2

And those were the dramas. But there was also a type of TV show which alas has pretty well disappeared these days, the variety show. Hootenany started out giving us folk singers..people with talent who also thought. Then there was Shindig and Hullabaloo and the Lloyd Thaxton show which somehow convinced top talents to come on and lip sync. And toward the end there was Midnight Special which gave us live people singing live music. Not to mention a rather odd show called the Kraft Summer Musical show or something such as. A now largely forgotten singer called John Davidson, who was about as far from counter culture as you could get. But with comedy provided by two at the time unknown people..Flip Wilson and George Carlin.

But two shows stick in my memory above all. The first started out as The Talk of the Town, based as it was on an entertainment column. But it soon became known by the name of the writer of that column..Ed Sullivan. And you never,ever knew what sort of show it would be. The Beatles and Russian dancing bears. The Doors and a talking Italian mouse. And Broadway. Ed gave we in the wilderness a steady diet of scenes from Broadway Musicals that nobody has ever repeated.

The second was the Smothers Brothers. Tommy and his brother Dick hardly seemed to be the sort to cause trouble. They played guitar and standup bass. They did very nonpolitical comedy that still stands well today. But their guests were the cream of much of what was happening,especailly in the acoustic end of things. Meanwhile,the writers were constantly fighting with the CBS censors. A fight that the CBS won in the end. But while it lasted it was such a time.