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The music of the sixties, especially protest music, has ruined all other rock music for me. The era was a time of innovation unlike any other in rock & roll history and I was an impressionable teenager then, overwhelmed by the unique and powerful sounds. It was as if gods tied lightning bolts together and wrestled them apart through thunderous clouds. It was the magic of coming alive once and for always. So much so that everything I hear now seems derivative, either language-wise, thematically, or melody-wise. The only other time in music that I can compare it to as a touchstone is the bebop jazz era that preceded it by a decade or so. Interestingly, both groups of musicians working in both genres rose to fame considered as outlaws in the music world by their contemporaries. It was almost impossible to hear the music on or in conventional venues during their perspective eras.
Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana, John Mayhall, Roger McGuin, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakefield, Leslie West, Keith Richards, Duane Allman, Johnny and Edgar Winters, not to mention the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were doing things with guitars and keyboards and the new synthisizers that the great jazz innovators of the fifties had attempted with horns and pianos (i.e. Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Parker, Mingus, etc.). I still listen to the unprecedented and iconic riffs, finding something I missed every time. It’s almost like reading great poetry over and over again. The same thing is true of Dylan’s imagistic lyrics and the vocal harmonies of the Beatles and Crosby, Still, & Nash.
Along with that is the emotional resonance created by some of the great songs. I can hear the opening notes of Street Fighting Man, Master of War, Eight Miles High, Fortunate Son, or a dozen other songs and be transported instantaneously to a march or a sit in where I was making some anti-war speech and the crowd was roaring. At a time when sex was as casual as shaking hands—just a way to say hello—I can hear Guinevere or Suite Judy Blue Eyes, Girl from the North Country, Spanish Harlem Incident, A Case of You, and be making love to Mary O'Donnell on a blanket at Bear Creek in upstate New York, or Black Magic Woman and be slipping off Roceria’s black lace panties in Mazalan, Mexico. I can hear Strawberry Fields Forever and suddenly be coming down off my first acid trip at 3am over a plate of half-cooked scrambled eggs in a booth at the Big O all-night diner in Owensboro, Kentucky. I can’t listen to Reflections by the Supremes or Paint It Black by the Stones or Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf without finding my way through a maze of jungle somewhere near the DMZ in Vietnam. I can’t hear Whipping Post without remembering Cathy leaving me over for a mediocre musician who had an unlimited supply of good dope and forgiving her because I might have done the same thing.
The very fact that this music was interwoven with the social and cultural revolution that was my history, the time in my life when I worked hardest at finding my own identity, makes it iconic to me. Unlike classical music, or jazz, when I hear this music I remember who I am and why I am and how I got to be this person I am, a Misdemeanor Oulaw. And as I approach my seventh decade of life I’m finally getting to the point that I like who I am…consequently, I will continue to despise Clear Channel radio and the banal imitators that pollute the airwaves pretending the noise they make is somehow original. I’ll climb into my time machine constructed from vinyl and fueled with Rye whiskey (my doctor lets me have one drink every now and then). Once settled behind the wheel, Van Morrison and I may travel Into the Mystic or maybe I’ll Take the Highway with the Marshall Tucker Band. Regardless, my journey will be as free and joyful as it was forty years ago. I guess that’s why they call this music “classic.” And, why I write so often about that time with respect.
Jim McGarrah's poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of four books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down (2003), When the Stars Go Dark (2009), Breakfast at Denny's (2013), and The Truth About Mangoes (2016), a critically acclaimed memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the 2010 Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and the sequel entitled The End of an Era. His nonfiction books, Off Track and Misdemeanor Outlaw, were published by Blue Heron Book Works of Allentown, PA. Jim is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and a founding editor of RopeWalk Press, as well as the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.
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