1963
“The Doctors” and “General Hospital”
How did we miss the obvious media reflections and not recognize the detour sign in the road dead ahead? Network schedulers brazenly predicted catastrophe: “Breaking Point” followed “The Outer Limits”. New soap opera titles, optimistic since JFK took office, suddenly hinted where fate would soon take us: to “General Hospital”, with “The Doctors”. Even the pop charts supplied us with easy clues as of the impending pain. (“Don’t you know it’s”) “The End of the World” (“? It ended when I lost you.”) topped the charts for seven straight weeks in 1963 and “Can’t Get Used to Losing You” climbed to #7.
Other thoughts preoccupied young Boomer boys at the time, and the Beach Boys hung ten on those brain waves. Where did kids want to be? “Surfing USA”. And, whom did they want to be there with? “Surfer Girl”. And, how did they want to get there? In a “Little Deuce Coupe”. The oldest group of Boomers would be seniors in the fall of 1963, and from this point every high school in America was totally ours for the next eighteen years. The Beach Boys urged kids to “Be True to Your School”. Surfing, girls in bikinis, fast cars and no more War Babies to kick us around. Cool.
Teen Heaven was located just a few miles west of Hollywood, and the camera crews rushed west on Sunset Boulevard to record the scene for posterity. “Beach Party” swept in as the first wave in a flood of endless summer, celluloid silliness, with eternal virgins like Frankie Avalon and ex-Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello.
But, summer isn’t really endless, and pioneer Boomers graduated from high school. Now what? A job? College? The Army? Boomers experienced a reality check, and for the first time in their young lives, fun alone fell short. Could there be more to life?
Folk music predates the record industry. On occasion the sound paid brief visits to the pop charts (i.e. “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio in 1958). Peter, Paul and Mary released “Puff the Magic Dragon” in 1963, a coming-of-age story of a boy outgrowing his imaginary playmate. (Parents later charged that “Puff” symbolized marijuana smoke). Younger Boomers loved Puff and bought the album for the story of the lovable Dragon. First Wavers related to Little Jackie in the song, because they, too, teetered on the edge of adulthood, and they picked up the LP as well. War Babies added the album to their Folk collection because they still owned the genre (at this point). Together we heard Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowing in the Wind”. The single became the first real protest song to ever make AM Top 40. P, P & M and Joan Baez invited the 22-year-old Bob Dylan onto stage at the Newport Folk Festival in July to join them in singing his composition. Dylan instantly became a major force in the Folk scene.
Dylan was the first official spokesman for the Boomer generation. With biting wit and youthful impatience, Bob lashed out at the social injustices of the adult world of which Boomers were about to enter. In 1963, Dylan protested against war in “Masters of War”, “With God on Our Side” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, and against racial hatred in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”. Bob even provided us with our first (of many) Boomer Anthem, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land/ And, don’t criticize what you can’t understand/ Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/ Your old road is rapidly aging/ Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand/ For the times they are a-changing.”
Remember the War Baby Anthem, penned by Chuck Berry, back in the Dark Ages: “Hail, hail, Rock & Roll/ Deliver me from days of old”? Teens wanted no part of the adult world with their stupid rules in the Fifties. Dylan’s message in the Boomer Anthem of 1963 warned, “Look out, Mom and Pop, because we’re going to change your outdated rules.” Did Bob boast with the arrogance of youth, or was he responding to JFK’s “…ask what you can do for your country”?
Always ready to cash in on a hot fad, television jumped on the Folk bandwagon with “Hootenanny”. Would this new music show bring social protest to network television? Well, with certain restrictions… they didn’t allow songs protesting politics, religion, discrimination, war, class struggle, urban decay or any sponsor’s products. Acne and Communists were fair game. Hootenanny upheld McCarthy’s old blacklist of artists which banned most of the giants of Folk, such as Pete Seegar and the Weavers. The new generation of Folk superstars, including Dylan and Baez, boycotted in response. Thus, the only protest associated with “Hootenanny” during its brief existence focused on the policies of the show. The program did, however, inspire many Boomers to turn off their TVs in disgust, and go in search of authentic Folk music, which in turn began their habit of buying albums, rather than 45s. (Peter, Paul and Mary had the number two and three selling LPs for 1963.)
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The public (and JFK) loved James Bond, and the tube offered us “Espionage”. Even the title of the new quiz show for the season had a spy flavor to it, in “Password.”
We soared back into the Space Race in 1962 when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. The event received a tremendous amount of television coverage and Kennedy promised to take us higher. NASA launched “Telstar 1”, the first communications satellite, and that brought up an interesting question: “Who or what would we be communicating with?” Television responded quickly with an answer… “My Favorite Martian”. This alien crash-landed on Earth, took the clever alias of “Uncle Martin” and moved in with a newspaper reporter, who, of course, agreed to cover up the biggest news story of the millenium.