From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Tue Dec 24 2002 - 19:23:21 MST
My question about the sixties was from an offline
discussion I was having last week with Damien
Broderick. He replied thus, which I post with
his permission.
Altho I take issue with his comment on ABBA (one
of my all time favorite rock groups), from these
powerful passages it is clear to me why it is
Damien makes his living as a writer while I slave
away at a crummy 9 to 5.
The following passages are from his book Transmitters:
====
Damien wrote thus:
Here are two portions (parodic, however, in intention)
from BRIGHT, my revised version of TRANSMITTERS (which
I think you own):
====
JANUARY FIRST NINETEEN SEVENTY
The clocks are being smashed.
We are a generation in revolt. The old
rhythms are breaking up, ocean froth before a tidal wave.
Now is not then. The clocks are shuddering
and shattering. This world of us is not the world of them.
We are a generation in revolt against the
sickly wistfulness of bullshit sentiment, against
the evasions that stifle honesty and rage, against the
dull grey smog of dull robot clothes and grey lifeless
clothes on stiff dummy bones.
And yes, indeed, we are in revolt against that
one bright feverish flame at the center of the dull
grey world we were born into, the lunatic nuclear
flame which is waiting to burn us out.
It is in the last ten years that we have
become who we are.
We are the generation walking cool on our own
feet into the Seventies but we were formed by the Sixties.
That ferocious decade which has just closed was the
time when we found ourselves, created in our own bodies
and our own styles a rhythm shaking the worn-out world.
And it is the music of the Sixties that is our
rhythm and our style, our voice, our voyage of discovery:
us shaping ourselves.
Where we have been already points to where we
are going. And where we are going--if we keep our nerve,
if we keep our cool, if we keep our truth, if they do
not destroy us first--is into the Revolution of Joy.
The music of the Sixties is our history.
It is the mad, wild, fierce truth of Dylan,
and his lyricism.
The music of the Sixties is the dream fantasia
of psychedelic West Coast America, the surf pulse and
the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, the blatant
savage adrenaline of Jimi Hendrix, the nimble black
Tamla Motown beat, the White Negro voyage of Presley.
Above all the music of the Sixties is the
evolution of the Beatles: the honest sexy excitement
of their first songs, the nervy innovations of
Sgt. Pepper, their hungry curiosity for new ways
to speak and sing and their glad embrace of ancient
raga from that crowded Indian manscape which previous
generations had despised and crucified, the search for
reality and beauty no matter the color of its skin,
the discovery of the naked human body, that taming
of the devouring computer to the musician's soul-
plucking, sledgehammer art, the welding of East and
West and Peace and Love in the strange wonderful
harmonies, so vile and so hideous to older ears
and eyes, of John and Yoko...
It is our poetry, scarring the sky and tearing
apart the placid paralysis of the air, coming on
strong and heavy with all the good and bad vibrations,
all of them.
The music of the Sixties, if it does not fail,
if we do not let it out of our hands, is an arrow into
the history of the Seventies.
====
DECEMBER EIGHTH NINETEEN EIGHTY
The 1960s died on the 8th day of the twelfth
month of 1980 when, outside his New York home, five
bullets were pumped into the body of John Lennon by
the music critic Ronald Reagan, who was later released
after questioning by police.
The 1970s died much earlier, on the 19th day
of the eighth month of 1969 when half a million children
pitched their sad loony tents in a field outside Woodstock,
in upstate New York. A recorded interview was later
released to the media.
It was the worst of times, it was the worst
of times. Picture a skinhead bootboy with razorblades
at his toes and safety pins through the flesh of
his cheeks, stamping on his own face forever.
No. Picture four scrubbed and patched middleaged
Swedes rampant on a field of armwaving eight year olds
argent, droning the theme of the decade:
"Money money money."
No no no. Picture Linda Ronstadt and Governor
Jerry Brown on undecorated sheets in a single bed,
Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta flicking and
sliding in the mirror above their heads on squares
of pure light.
No. Alice Cooper eating a live chicken. KISS
in their six year old fantasy greasepaint and ten
thousand decibels. Sid Vicious in spoiled brat psychopathic
rage working out the punk dreams of his generation in the
murdered flesh of a convenient woman.
The seventies was waking into the hungover
spoils of the party. Everyone had died during the night.
Jim Morrison was dead in whiskey, caught by the snake.
Hendrix was dead, all his flashing crying chords jangled.
Joplin was dead, swallowed up and chewed into lard and blood.
Presley was dead, fat and banal, in alcohol and spangled spansules.
Marc Bolan was dead, gnawed by Tyrannosaur's jaws.
The Beatles were dead, John by an assassin's gun, Paul by his own hand.
Abba were born dead.
Disco was a corpse plugged into a fibrillator.
Like old pre-industrial gods, the remnants of the
pantheon took themselves into eclipse and changed their wigs,
were reborn, shook it again in the video clips: David Bowie
falling in endless rebirth, Lou Reed transformed, Carly Simon,
Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Brown; Heavy Metal clashing by night,
Tangerine Dreaming their remote electronic buzz; and Dylan was
Born Again.
Robert Zimmerman was Born Again.
The music of the Seventies was a pike gaffed into
the belly of the Eighties.
========
Damien
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