Mary Poppins Rebellious 60s Retrospective 5

After the overwhelming ovation and accolades these exhibits received, Walt Disney secretly pressed forward with his latest and by far most ambitious plan yet, Walt Disney World and EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). Beginning in 1964, Disney began to secretly buy land in Florida for this “Project X.” He wanted enough land so that he would not have to deal with the eyesore that Anaheim had become surrounding Disneyland park, and by 1965 Disney had amassed 27,443 acres—an area equal to twice the size of Manhattan Island. Walt Disney did not live to see this dream fulfilled, because he died of lung cancer in December of 1966, six months before work on Walt Disney World began. Walt Disney wanted to use all of his experience at Disneyland to create an experimental prototype community, essentially using Disney ideas in the arena of urban planning, to tackle the problems of America’s cities. After Walt’s death, these plans were changed and EPCOT was turned into a themed park, and not the prototype city that Disney had envisioned. Eric Sevareid said of Walt Disney:

He was an original, not just an American original, but an original, period. He was a happy accident, one of the happiest this century has experienced. And judging by the way it's behaving, in spite of all Disney tried to tell it about laughter, love, children puppies, and sunrises, the century hardly deserved him. He probably did more to heal or at least soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world. There can’t be many adults in the allegedly civilized parts of the globe who did not inhabit Disney’s mind and imagination at least for a few hours and feel better for the visitation. It may be true, as somebody said, that while there is no highbrow in a lowbrow, there is some highbrow in every lowbrow. But what Disney seemed to know was that while there is very little grown-up in every child, there is a lot of child in every grown-up. To a child, this weary world is brand-new, gift-wrapped. Disney tried to keep it that way for adults. By the conventional wisdom, mighty mice, flying elephants, Snow White and Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy and Dopey—all these were fantasy, escapism from reality. It’s a question of whether they are any less real, any more fantastic than inter-continental missiles, poisoned air, defoliated forests, and scrap iron on the moon. This is the age of fantasy, however you look at it, but Disney’s fantasy wasn’t lethal. People are saying we’ll never see his like again. (Bright, 1987, pp. 188-189)

While Disney’s appeal was to the young and the young at heart, adolescents and young adults were more drawn to the musical scene, which spoke to their restless, rebellious souls.

Moving Music—Folk Revival to Restless Rock and Roll

Many Modes of Expression

The 1960s were a richly diverse decade musically. While rock and roll was undoubtedly the star, other genres made major contributions. At the beginning of the decade Ray Charles revolutionarily combined different genres into his own unique product. He fused soul and pop in his first number one hit, “Georgia on My Mind” (1960). Ironically, Charles was banned from Georgia for a time when he refused to play to a segregated house. “Part of his genius was in taking a song, for example “Take These Chains From My Heart” (1963), that had essentially nothing to do with soul and giving it a soul treatment” (Rielly, 2003, p. 173). He did this with country music as well in his Modern Sounds in Country and Western albums. Charles’s music had a broad appeal and was a moving force in civil rights. Since Charles’s music was created by freely crossing over genre lines, the music’s appeal similarly crossed over racial lines.

The Motown Sound also took off during the 1960s, with such memorable artists as Stevie Wonder, whose 1965 album Uptight topped the pop song, pop album, and R&B charts simultaneously. Other famous Motown artists included Smokey Robinson, The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, The Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Jackson Five.

Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown all left their distinctive soulful marks on the decade, and jazz became more improvisational with the advent of “hard bop” and “free jazz” with such virtuosos as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis:

The next step from hard bop was free jazz, also called quite simply, “the new thing.” A series of 1964 concerts called “the October Revolution” at the Cellar Café in New York City contributed to the spread of the new type of jazz, which included clarinet squeals and saxophone shrieks, a strong sense of the blues, and even more improvisation than hard bop. The result sometimes seemed more chaotic than musical. (Rielly, 2003, p. 180)

Folk staged a comeback in the 1960s. Bob Dylan began singing in Greenwich Village coffee houses in 1961 and wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1962, which became the number two hit in 1963 and was sung by fellow folk artists at the March on Washington. Dylan, along with Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and others combined an idealistic vision of justice and an association with the civil rights movement, their lyrics often talking of freedom. Another all-time classic, “Puff (The Magic Dragon)," Peter Paul and Mary’s children’s song, “narrates a boy’s loss of youthful imagination and capacity for fantasy as he grows into adulthood” (Rielly, 2003, p. 154); although many think that it alluded to smoking marijuana.

The Beach Boys in California surfed the airways with “Surfin’ Safari” in 1962, creating a wave of hits and a genre of its own, which became known as the “California sound.” Chubbie Checker’s "Twist" became a craze in the early 1960s and so did his “Limbo Rock” (1962). On the more mainstream popular side, Burt Bacharach contributed such motion picture soundtrack classics as “Alfie” in 1966, “The Look Of Love” from the James Bond spoof, Casino Royale in 1967, and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” in 1969 from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Although all of these other genres played their parts, the 1960s was definitely the decade of rock and roll.

Rock and Roll Reigns Supreme

The 1960s produced a depth and diversity of music like no other decade, building on the past, it reached new musical heights, and although Nat King Cole sung “Unforgettable” in 1964, the most unforgettable sound of the 1960s was definitely rock music:

By the end of the 1960s rock had replaced folk music as the principle antiestablishment music. Rock music had come to epitomize revolution, in its often sexual lyrics, hard driving power, associations with drugs, even in its tragedies, such as the early deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. It represented a rejection of the culture of one’s parents and a breakdown in the established order. (Rielly, 2003, p. 172)

Although rock and roll began in the 1950s it soared to new heights on the wings of the British invasion, led by The Beatles. Already popular in Britain after releasing “Love me Do” in 1962, The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sold more than a million copies before it was released. When The Beatles made their Ed Sullivan Show appearance in 1964, Beatlemania swept the United States. This was the start of the British Invasion since “a multitude of other British groups followed The Beatles's path to America, bringing with them also the “peacock” look, with textured vests, paisley shirts, and very wide ties” (Rielly, 2003, p. xi). Such groups included The Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, Gerry And The Pacemakers, and the Dave Clark Five.

The Beatles had twelve records in the “Top 100” during 1964, and they had an even more amazing impact on Western culture, in addition to their music, because their explorations into drugs, different cultures, and religions profoundly influenced the entire 1960s generation. In 1967, the psychedelic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album debuted, and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” poetically described a psychedelic trip. That same year, Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit,” with similar drug allusions, took off and their album Surrealistic Pillow was a smashing success. The Grateful Dead combined folk and rhythm and blues along with psychedelic rock. Prior to adopting the Grateful Dead moniker, they performed at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, where participants took LSD to enhance their experiences. Although The Grateful Dead’s albums were popular, they were most well known for their concerts and ever-loyal fans, called “Dead Heads,” who followed them from concert to concert.

The Rolling Stones’s music was more unsettling than that of The Beatles, and appealed to the more oppositional elements. The Rolling Stones were “deliberately pitched as an ‘anti-Beatles group” and “projected an image of sex, drugs, violence and occultism” (Rielly, 2003, p. 165). Their music, “derived ultimately from the earthiest versions of rhythm and blues, also differed from the Beatles’s Liverpool or Mersey sound, which evolved out of the rock and roll music of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers” (p. 165). The Stones’s first record “Come On” (1963) was followed in 1965 by the paradigmatic: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and they appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1967 with “Lets Spend The Night Together,” toning down the lyrics slightly for the more conservative prime-time television audience.

Television, wanting to cash in on all of this success, created their own made for TV rock group, the Monkees. The Monkees television show ran from 1966-1968 and featured the "fabricated four’s" the wacky antics. The group made several albums, and some of their songs are still played on the radio today. According to Rielly (2003) “one of the unsuccessful aspirants for a role was future mass murderer Charles Manson” (p. 165), although others claim this to be an urban myth.

Simon and Garfunkel, in addition to creating the soundtrack for The Graduate, had many other famous albums including Scarborough Fair and The Sounds of Silence. Synchronisitically, Sounds of Silence came out the same year, 1966, that the Supreme Court issued its Miranda decision regarding the right of criminal defendants to remain silent.

Although 1967 ushered in the “Summer of Love” at the Monterey International Pop Festival, it was not long before the darker side of rock and roll took its toll. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Doors epitomized the darker side of Rock and Roll:

The combination of extraordinary talent, drugs and an early tragic death made Hendrix for many people a symbol of the promses, confusions, and excesses of the 1960s. Jans Joplin's life followed a parallel path of stardom to early death . . . .

The Doors, for example burst onto the scene in the late 1960s to become a symbol of that decde's combination of enormous talent and tragic lack of self discipline . . . . The Doors performed at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go Club in the mid-1960s but eventually were fiered for their sexual comments on stage. At the time the group was heavily into drugs, a preoccupation that Morrison would follow until his early death in 1971. (Rielly, 2003, pp. 167, 170)

Jimi, Janis, and Jim Morrison of the Doors all flew too close to the fire and ended up engulfed in it, their young creative lives cut tragically short. Just after the end of the decade, Jimi and Janis died within two weeks of each other in the fall of 1970 due to drug overdoses and Morrison died in the summer of 1971 of heart failure.

Rock’s trajectory seemed to mirror that of the decade, what began with idealism and hope, and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” innocence, turned out to be much deeper and darker, and more rebellious. Jennings and Brewster (1998), in discussing rock music note:

Rock soon began to articulate that separate sensibility that youth wished to express, a worldview that rejected the values of the establishment and embraced a new “consciousness,” open to mystery and mysticism, spontaneity and fun, sensuality, and, in direct affront to the emphasis on private satisfactions that typified the Fifties, the virtues of communal spirit. The civil rights movement had already established the power or camaraderie in the interest of change. With song like “All You Need Is Love,” the Beatles helped youth, too, conclude that the route to happiness lay in seeking a little help from their friends. Their friends sometimes included drugs . . . (p. 293)

Sex, Drugs . . .

As previously mentioned, the advent of the birth control pill and its widespread availability enabled the Sexual Revolution to take off, and the view of sex in the 1960s was radically different than in previous decades, with the freer attitudes toward sex being reflected in the movies and clothing of the times. The slogan “make love, not war” arose in protest to the Vietnam war. Alternate lifestyles were experimented with, including communal living, and the “free love movement” advocated physical pleasure without the imposition of tradition restrictions.

In the 1960s, capitalizing on the success of Playboy Magazine in the 1950s, Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago, with scantily clad bunnies serving cocktails, complete with form-fitting outfits including bunny ears and puffy tails. In 1964, Whisky-A-Go-Go, the first discotheque, opened in Los Angeles, and that same year, the Condor Club, a topless bar in San Francisco featured topless bikini clad go-go girls, dancing in cages. Sports Illustrated came out with their first swimsuit edition, sans the topless model.

Continued on page 6