Early 1970s
1970: “All My Children” and “A World Apart”
1971: No new soaps
1972: “Return to Peyton Place”
1973: “The Young and the Restless”
Boomers beat a chaotic, helter-skelter retreat in the early Seventies. The united counterculture front crumbled and most of our leaders jumped overboard or went down with the ship. Those who remained headed straight for cover and took time out to heal the wounds and assess the damage.
When did the sixties end? Hundreds of books touch on this subject, proposing countless theories as to the exact time and cause of death. Some historians claim that it happened as early as the Democratic Convention in 1968, others, as late as President Ford’s pardon of Nixon in 1974. One suggests that it occurred at Woodstock, where Boomers, like lemmings, instinctively realized that the real problem lay in the obscene bulk of their numbers. Or, could it be that the Sixties ended with the Hippie Hell reflections of Manson and Altamont? Did the era die with four students at Kent State, or was it already gone and buried with King and RFK? Perhaps, Nixon’s burglars snatched the Sixties at the Watergate Hotel? The answer is yes… to all of the above and more. Unlike the instant, unexpected violence of an assassin’s bullet, so familiar to Americans at the time, the Sixties suffered a slow, lingering death.
1970 began optimistically… Boomers still believed that they would change the world. A massive, nationwide Earth Day on April 22nd attracted millions in protest of environmental destruction. Nixon, consistent as ever, ignored the event. He watched Patton instead, and became so inspired after repeated viewings of the new film, he expanded the war into Cambodia on April 29th, sending in more than 20,000 US and South Vietnamese troops. College campuses across America erupted in protest on May 2nd, and Nixon again turned a deaf ear to the vocal majority. Two days later, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of unarmed antiwar demonstrators at Kent State, killing four students and wounding nine others. On May 8th, a group of hardhat construction workers rushed in and beat up peace demonstrators marching down Wall Street. Tremendous crowds gathered the next day in every major US city, forcing more than 450 college campuses to shut down. Obviously, the public didn’t understand the first warning, so the government issued a second one to prove that the Kent State slaughter was not just an unfortunate, fluke accident. Mississippi State police opened fire on crowd at Jackson State College on May 15th, killing two more students. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young summed up our feelings soon after with the release of “Ohio”: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/ We’re finally on our own/ This summer I hear the drumming/ Four dead in Ohio/ Gotta get down to it/ Soldiers are cutting us down/ Should have been gone long ago…”
Nixon made his message perfectly clear: nothing short of total revolution would change his master plan. Should Boomers respond with retaliatory violence, or should they retreat? They searched mass-media reflections for an answer. “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” claimed the number one spot on the charts for 1970. The “Paul is dead!” rumors of ‘69 proved to be true after all in April of ‘70, as McCartney marked the end of the Beatles with a solo album, on which he announced that he would, from this point forward, restrict himself to “a silly little love song” (“What’s wrong with that?”). The film and the LP, Let It Be, were released posthumously the following month, about the same time as the Kent State massacre. The final summit meeting of the most influential counterculture spokesmen of the late Sixties felt especially painful, and yet appropriate in the film. The Beatles staged an impromptu farewell concert on the roof of their Hippie Utopia (Apple Corp) and the cops busted it up. The title cut of the album offers some final advise to Boomers: “When I find myself in times of trouble/ Mother Mary comes to me/ Speaking words of wisdom/ Let It Be.” The message continued with, “Get back, get back to where you once belonged”, and “Two of us getting nowhere… on our way back home.” These words belonged to Paul, urging Boomers to retreat. John, on the other hand, not yet ready to surrender, asked for time to analyze the situation: “Everybody had a hard year/ (but) Everybody had a good time/ Everybody had a wet dream/ Everybody saw the sunshine.” He warned: “Christ, you know it ain’t easy/ You know how hard it can be/ The way things are going/ They’re going to crucify me.” Soon after, John, now sure of his direction, encouraged Boomers to continue the good fight in his first solo effort, “Power to the People.”
Many fans at the time blamed poor Yoko for the breakup of the Beatles, but in retrospect we see that this was not the case. Before she entered the picture the group had already become three solo artists plus a drummer. As early as the White Album, George achieved an elevated status with his first A-side release, “Here Comes the Sun”. John headed in a different direction, leaning towards darker, disturbing word imagery: “Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eyes”, while Paul blissfully sang, “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da… la-la-la-la-life goes on.” The clash of styles drove the three song writers apart, and none of them wanted to play as a backup musician for the other two anymore. The demise of the Beatles paralleled that of the counterculture. The time had come for Boomers to go their own way in search of individual truth. But, sometimes the naked truth is ugly. Tom Wolfe proclaimed the Seventies as the Me Decade. Before the era had even begun, Harrison complained, “All through the day I hear, ‘I, Me, Mine, I, me, mine, I, me, mine’.”