Through the years, I've discovered or created a time of bliss, a time that seems to me to be flowing with positive creative energy, a time before my generation. Through intense personal and historical research, I came to the conclusion that 1967 is the year. The year of what? The year I like and am obsessed with, and because I'm obsessed with it, I think 1967 was the year the human race was very close to reaching a utopia.
I'm not going to throw historical facts and figures like a junior high textbook. Just by talking with my friends, I noticed that my obsession with one particular year is one ingredient that makes me appear peculiar. What I am hoping this essay will do is act as some kind of personal discovery, and you have the privilege to join me on this voyage into a past I have never lived.
First of all, I know 1967 was not a utopia with all the race riots and the Vietnam War happening. I haven't even considered how the rest of the world was outside of the United States and England during that time. Aside from that, popular culture seems to suggest that it was a highly creative and vivacious year, although popular culture usually wears the mask of merriment. To me and some other individuals (even some who lived it), 1967 was bliss.
Let me dig into my past to my first exposure to 1967 material: a television show called The Monkees. After I came home from kindergarten and had lunch, my mom put me in her room hoping that I would take a nap and that the TV would lull me to la-la land. She tuned the television to WFLD-TV which played re-runs in the early afternoons. My mom must have been clueless that TV stimulated me because Sesame Street kept me very attentive and entertained. I concluded that since my mom let me watch such an invigorating show as Sesame Street that the re-runs would also be as stimulating. Most of them were okay, but not as intense as what PBS had for me. The only show that kept me entertained and on the edge of my parent's bed was watching The Monkees. I enjoyed their sometimes bizarre humor and their sometimes psychedelic music. When my mom found out that I loved the show, she gave me her Monkees' albums and consequently I was exposed to more 1967 material.
After each Monkees episode, I ran to my room and acted out the entire show including the music for the background. Because the Monkees were a large part of my childhood bliss, they've been forever absorbed into my mind as a happy item. After kindergarten, I no longer had the opportunity to enjoy the Monkees on screen up until recently. My alternative was indulging in their albums, but after a while I became bored hearing the same stuff over and over. Since spending most of my early years constantly exposed to their albums and other albums my parents gave me from that time period, my exposure to the popular music of the 1980s was very limited.
Coming home from school in the Eighties was rather ritualistic. The after-school cartoons kept my attention until my dad came home from his 9 - 5 job. My mom, who didn't work after I was born until 1986, had dinner simmering on the stove around 4:00; so watching the last few shows were even more stimulating while I smelled something like stroganoff or chicken ala king permeating through the house.
At dinner time, the cartoons gave way to the pre-prime time TV shows. Most of them were not stimulating, they just kept me in the glazed-eye zombie state. Shows like The Brady Bunch and Laverne & Shirley caught my eyes, but froze my brain. Luckily the networks change their schedules yearly, and I found a show that finally activated my brain, Star Trek, another show from 1967. After only a few days, the show had me hooked and I gladly took up the label of "Trekkie." Star Trek became the king of TV shows for me, since I could see more of it than the Monkees. But as the years went by, my interest in the show started to wane. Luckily by that time it was 1987 and the creators of the show seized my attention again by starting up Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that's another story.
1987 also happened to be the year I started to open my ear to popular music of the modern era. The little exposure I had to popular music before was from my parents collection of the Police, Peter Gabriel, and the almighty Thriller album. Beyond those groups/album, I had no direct exposure to Eighties' pop/rock. Sometimes on long car trips, my parents tuned to a pop/rock station, and now every time I hear the big hits of the Eighties, it reminds of me of long car trips and headaches from squinting from the bright sunlight coming through the car window. Because of this, I am an outcast of my generation, not enjoying the likes of Prince or the B-52s.
When I realized that my friends were listening to the new tunes, I specifically remember Run DMC's "Walk This Way" and the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian", I thought I was missing out on something. I tried to catch the wavelength of popular culture, but I didn't know the right radio stations to listen to, and I had the crazy inkling of MTV having no connection with popular culture. Looking back, I am grateful for avoiding the MTV executive force.
Entering my junior high years, I wandered cluelessly as a rookie of popular culture. Seventh and eighth grade, being a follower of the mainstream, were my dark years. I was so far behind in fashion and music sense, no one bothered to coach me. Fellow classmates chose to mock my desperation to be like them.
As chronology and numerology have it, ninth grade soon supervened and offered me an alternative to popular culture. I discovered a subculture; I dare not call it a counter-culture because I may offend the baby boomer generation and those who despise them.
Instead of following the mainstream preps, I followed the self-proclaimed hippies. Still feeling awkward about not being able to pick up the material aspects of these hippies, I kept myself separate from their clique. The only interaction I had with the subculture was with Angela Woosley who sat next to me in Spanish class, and Becky Cooper, who lived three houses away from me. They both enjoyed the deviant acts of marijuana consumption and orgy participation. I didn't believe them all the time, but I found their behavior captivating. I also made sure to keep my distance since I was a nice Lutheran boy, and wanted to find myself "philosophically" with these "deviant" women.
They re-introduced me to the Beatles, and I thank Angela and Becky for that. I listened to them long ago, but I didn't like them because I believed they suppressed the Monkees. Instead of heavily consuming drugs and enjoying sex, I consumed the Beatles. Within a year, the ambiance of the Beatles and Beatlemania was well-established into my brain thanks to the psychological term "obsession". I now could really "feel" what music (and fashion) I liked; I preferred the Beatles from the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour era. Both albums were recorded and released in 1967, but my mind still hadn't clicked on that ambrosial year.
In my sophomore and junior years at high school, I thought 1969 was the key year because of the history-making events of Woodstock and the moon landing. Everytime I had a class trip to the library I would find a history book or encyclopedia, find the stuff on '69, and show it off to my friends saying, "Wasn't that a great time?" Some nodded, some shrugged their shoulders, but they all thought I had a mental disorder, fixated on the Sixties.
I spent the latter half of my high school years experimenting with my own music and fashion choice. While my classmates watched MTV and read Rolling Stone, I perused the city library every week diving into the popular culture of the late Sixties to look for inspirational material. The psychedelic and OpArt posters grabbed my attention, but I had no idea where to get them. The same went for the clothing, especially the Nehru jacket. I'm still in an endless search for the Nehru, but it's not as intense as it was in 1994. But of all the materials of the Sixties, I found that the music was the easiest to obtain.
One of the library books had listed, among many other things, the top ten songs of each Sixties music category such as surf, Motown, and psychedelic. A more obsessive and anal-retentive thing I did was scrutinizing the Billboard charts of the late Sixties. My parents thought I was a studious boy going to the library so often, but I ended up reading every non-fiction and information book on the time period ranging from 1965 to 1975. This did not help my social life.
My entire high school years were dominated by the music I collected and analyzed. I preferred plunging into my music that talking with friends. Although I denied back then, my Walkman and my stereo system were my best friends. It was easier to deal with music than friends, because if I didn't like what I heard, the option of disposal was an accepted thing to do. Through this time period, I made such rash decisions as adopting Jefferson Airplane, dumping Elton John, getting rid of my entire collection of early Genesis CDs, and buying almost all the Pink Floyd albums.
Beloit College came into my life and told me classic rock sucked, and I knew I would be socially lost among the higher educated crowd. I knew nothing about new/alternative music. The latest CD I had was U2's Zooropa, but U2 fell into the category of popular/sell-out music which the college seemed to condemn. It then came upon me to reflect on my collection of music with this question: what makes this music appealing to me? What was the formula behind it all? The timing of this question couldn't have been more perfect, when I found my collection unsatisfying listening to mundane music like Pink Floyd's Animals and Genesis' Selling England by the Pound. I had to abandon my loyalty to groups like those.
It was time for me to get to the source of all external things that made me happy in my life. So I made a mental list of them at their peak, and for the first time I will make a brief written one.
- The Beatles, 1964-70
- The Monkees, 1966-69
- Star Trek, 1966-67
- Green Bay Packers, 1966-68
- Mexican food, (no time line)
Disregarding my favorite ethnic dish, I used mathematics to finding the meaning of my life. Ah, what irony of a creative writing major to use math to discover himself. As the title of the piece shows, the number 1,967 is the answer to my life.
Chapter One - My Truth
Let me just tell you 1967 is the best year that ever existed. To prove it to myself, I spent many a day at the college library looking through every page of Life magazines from January 6th to the double-issue of December 22nd, 1967.
Chapter Two - My Reasons
According to history, the Sixties was a time of revolution and the formations of utopias. I think the United States of America was at it's closest to a utopia in 1967. The key element of the utopia was LSD, but I'm not about to glorify "better living through chemicals." On the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco were hundreds of followers to Timothy Leary's slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Everyone was happy and a hippie. Things were just great and it seemed that utopia was here to stay in Western California until the weather changed. 1968 arrived bringing bad news such as the dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War (which seemed near an end in '67), the Chicago riots, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. All this bad news convinced the "real" hippies that the United States was nowhere near a utopia, and they headed for the backwoods to stay away from the media circus, leaving the "plastic people" advertising their culture. By 1969, popular culture finally packaged the "hippie" and anyone could be one without risking their conservative social life. They were no longer associated with revolutionary and utopian ideas. The American corporate world said one could be a hippie by simply buying incense, beads, lava lamps, strobe lights, kaleidoscopes, body paint, and anything Marsha Brady had. Popular culture killed the hippie by linking their "style" with the concept called "trendy." Counter culture became popular culture.
It is well known how America was before 1967: surfing, quartets in three-piece suits, the Four Seasons, hoola-hoops, Gunsmoke and Bonanza, black-and-white TV, and James Bond. I haven't pinned down the exact day or even the month, but I know that 1967 was the turning point of many things. For example, color television finally dominated black-and-white programming. Since the electric family hypnotist started going color, the whole "world" went color. The black-and-white Revolver Beatles album of 1966 gave way to the colorful splendor of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The fashions turned away from the jet-age suit and turned towards tie-dyed psychedelic glamor.
Declared the city of the decade in 1965 by Time magazine, swinging London aged in 1967 grew a handsome beard, the Spontaneous Underground. Every British band and all the lucky visiting American bands were inspired by this alternative and artistic splendor of liquid-light shows and LSD experiences. The lack of direct communication and the help of vivid imaginations spawned this spectacle by the artists of London hoping to create the San Francisco scene in the Old World. Both London and San Francisco had such a tremendous impact on the middle-class consumers, that for the first time in America, popular culture had to compete for attention. The result being a year of high experimentalism. The combination of utopian visions and experimentalism made 1967 what I believe to be the most creative and progressive year ever in modern times.
Chapter Three - So What?
By tapping into the positive and creative energies of 1967 via literature, music, and art of the time, I use it to help me in my own creative endeavors. Besides manipulating 30 year old material to my advantage, I also surround myself in it for utter absorption. There's lots of 1967 material out there that I haven't consumed, and I haven't been disappointed yet by 1967 from rock to jazz, from science-fiction to modern art, from clothing to celebrities. It's just a hobby that I hope will never cease.
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