PART 5
In September of 1968 I started the 7th grade. Meanwhile "the 60s" was sort of an off-stage, but all-pervasive, presence that was gradually seeping into the bubble of our self-enclosed junior high school world. One day Doug, one of the taller hipper kids in our class, brought in an album by a band named the Fugs for show-and-tell. The Fugs were about the dirtiest, hairiest, freakiest critters any of us kids had ever seen. If I remember right, there was a little flip-book that came with the album and you could flip the pages and watch a little movie of the Fugs stripping off their clothes all the way down to their pubic hairs. When our homeroom teacher Mr. Pitz got a load of that Fugs album, well, ole Doug was suspended for two whole weeks. Doug would be the first, but most definitely not the last, casualty of the Culture War that was "the 60s" in our 7th grade classe.
It was the age of "turbulence, upheavel, and political dissent." And we 7th graders did our part, fighting and protesting and winning the right to wear blue jeans to class. "The people united will never be forced to wear corny plaid trousers!" So there. Another crucial issue was hair length. And we fought with our parents over every inch over the ear, as if some kind of Battle Line was being drawn. Which it was.
The summer between 7th and 8th grade, Doug was the only one from our class to go to the big Woodstock hippie festival. He came back with tales of grooviness, and his hair was frizzed out into kind of a Hendrix white-boy afro. Shortly after that, Doug dropped out of school, amidst vague rumors that he was living in some kind of psychedelic shack and seeing colors.
After Woodstock everything seemed to change. The Swinging Sixties poured out of every television, radio and magazine. It was The Thing. The Style. The Fad. "Laugh-in" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Hair." It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Hippie was in. Everybody was excited about Something. Though from our 8th grade vantage point we weren't sure what. Mostly it seeped into our lives through rocknroll albums. We searched the Sgt Pepper album cover with magnifying glasses for "clues" and pondered the mysteries of "Inna-Gadda-Da-Vidda." My friend Hoffy had all the latest psychedelic albums by Cream, Hendrix, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin, and a big poster of Peter Fonda riding his chopper from the movie "Easy Rider." I was really into buying 45s of what they called "psychedelic bubblegum" music,which I guess was trippy drug music marketed for that crucial pre-teen audience, stuff like "Crimson and CLover" by Tommy James & the Shondells, and "Green Tambourine" by the Lemon Pipers, and "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf. Even the bubblegum band the Monkees went psychedelic. I think the first full-length album I bought was "Women Women" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. The second album was the White Album by the Beatles. I think the third was Led Zeppelin 3. And the fourth was "I'm Getting Closer to My Ho-o-o-ome" by Grand Funk Railroad (everybody sing). You know what they say: "When the music changes, the old culture collapses along with it." For music is the heartbeat of humanity, is it not? Anyway, the Beatles looked weird yet again on the starkly black-and-white White Album, as if all the color had been drained from their psychedelic faces. And there was a new witchy-looing character named Yoko Ono who had been added to the soup. The Yoko Ono doll would go down as the "Edsel" of the Beatles toys.
Some of the cool kids in my class formed a rock band and they played at an 8th grade dance in the gym. The one song I remember was a sludgy version of "Come Together," the Beatles big hit of that year, a song John Lennon had originally written as the campaign song for Timothy Leary when he ran for Governor of California in 1968. And all of us kids danced to it.
So the grooviness that was "the 60s" was beginning to hit with full force. But there were dissenting voices on the horizon. One day, this guest lecturer came to our classroom, this drab looking woman in a gray Salvation Army type dress buttoned up to her chin. She had come to warn us about The Dangers of Drugs. And she had charts and graphs and she spoke in ominious tones about "drug parties," some involving kids as young as high school age, where they smoked "marihauna cigarettes" and took tabs of LSD and other pills. It might seem like fun at first she said, but pretty soon you'd end up staring into the sun until you went blind or jumping off a building thinking you could fly, and that sure didn't sound like fun. Eventually you'd end up living somewhere in the ghetto in a seedy hotel room with nothing but a matress and you'd wear a guinea t-shirt and sweat all the time and have "tombstone eyes." And it would all start with one of those "marihuana cigarettes" which she said "looked just like a regular cigarette except they were twisted at the ends." So I made a mental note of being on the look-out for funny-looking cigarettes that were twisted on the end.
Well sir, 8th grade finally came to an end, and we, the Doomed Class of 1970 got to choose which three songs we would sing at the big graduation ceremony. So all of us wise-ass imps stuffed the ballot box so we could sing the famous "Fish Cheer" from the Woodstock album with the famous "Whats that spell? FUCK!!!" intro, and "The Lemon Song" by Led Zeppelin with the line "I want to squeeze your lemons til the juice runs down your leg." We thought that it would be hilarious, all of us clean-cut 13-year-old kids in our best Sunday suits belting out "The Fish Cheer" and "The Lemon Song" to an audience of our adoring parents. But the principal got wind of our plot and nixed that one in the bud. The fucking fascist. Instead we ended up singing that great hippie peace-and-love anthem "C'mon People Now" by Jesse Colin and the Youngbloods. I loved that song, and I'd get goosebumps as we rehearsed it, all 300 of us kids from the Doomed Class of 1970, belting it our at the top of their lungs, while a couple of the cool kids in our class who were in bands backed us up on electric guitar, bass and drums. "We are but a moments sunlight/ fading in the grass/ C'mon people now smile on your brother/ everybody get together try and love one another right now/ ri-ight now/ RI-I-IGHT NOWWWWW!"
Yeah.