because the sixties didn't just end with the '60s
“DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 30!” That was one of the mottos we had in the ’60s and it was provided by Jerry Rubin. When he made that statement in 1967, there is a good chance that he knew exactly the kind of effect that it would have. [Continue reading]
ONCE AN ALIENATED, overly creative teenage misfit, Lew Shiner has been a critically successful writer for more than thirty years. His novel Glimpses won the World Fantasy Award in 1994 for Best Novel. He has also been one of my favorite writers since I was turned on to his novels twenty-some years ago. [Continue reading]
I FOUND THIS DISCUSSION about aspects of The Sixties in the comments section in an article titled “How we made: Donovan’s Sunshine Superman” by Dave Simpson for The Guardian (May 2, 2016). There are many participants in the back-and-forth conversations in the thread, but I will focus on just two commenters, BarbKay and Katch33. [Continue reading]
COMING SOON TO A SCREEN NEAR YOU! The Tell It Like It Was A-Go-Go featuring Trini Lopez, Johnny Rivers, and Billy Lee Riley! Yeah, that’s a joke for those of us old enough to remember the live albums from those artists recorded at the Whiskey A-Go-Go in Los Angeles. [Continue reading]
WHEN THE SINGLE The Ballad Of The Green Berets was released in January 1966, I was 14-years-old (“one hundred men will test today”). Being a good, patriotic American lad, I went out and bought it on the same trip to the record store that I picked up the Byrds’ latest record, Set You Free This Time / It Won’t Be Wrong (“but only three win the green beret”). [Continue reading]
ON JANUARY 29, 1966, one of the strangest hit records in popular music made its debut on the Cash Box Top 100 chart. It was a simple, folk-like song that sounded like it should have been played over the closing credits of a movie, not played round-the-clock on Top 40 radio stations across the country. [Continue reading]
SELECTING TEN NOVELS that sum up the era we refer to as “the Sixties” would be a task worthy of a minor Greek demi-deity. And by the Sixties, I am referring to the whole peace-love-do-your-own-thing counterculture: pot and acid and consciousness expansion and free love—lots and lots of free love—and rock & roll and Zap Comix and you know the rest. [Continue reading]
LOOK AT THIS PHOTO! Is there an image anywhere that says “The Sixties” better than a longishly-haired young man peacefully placing a flower in the barrel of a bayoneted rifle pointing in his direction? This photo was taken in 1967 when few males outside of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco had grown their hair very long. [Continue reading]
THIS IS A CONCEPT SITE—and anyone who was into rock in the ’60s or is a record collector now knows something about ‘concept albums’—whose purpose is to present articles, essays, and pictorials about “the Sixties,” accentuating the positive about the people, music, books, movies, art, and events that occurred then and which live on in fact or spirit decades later. [Continue reading]