It’s 1969. Lots of baby boomers are in rebellion: burning flags and bras, escaping to communes, ingesting everything, dressing like hippie freaks, blowing out their eardrums on rock n’ roll and making free love. Easy Rider roars across the pop culture screen.

It was an “easy,” if painful, experience for boomers but a hard one for their parents. Henry Fonda, the venerable father of the film’s co-star, couldn’t even find a plot. “What does the movie mean?” he asked in bewilderment.

There was a plot of sorts: two biker hippie drug dealers make a big score and travel south to retire in Florida. Along the way, the movie tag says “…they went looking for America. And they couldn’t find it.” What they do find is a dysfunctional mixture of hippie communes, small town bigotry, and drugs.

New York Times critic Vincent Canby didn’t like the tone: “Right away, you know that something superior is up, that somebody is making a statement…that it’s going to put down the whole rotten scene. What scene?…Man, I can’t tell you if you don’t know. What I mean to say is, if you don’t groove, you don’t groove.” Canby describes Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as “vacuous, romantic symbols.”

Old Hollywood that produced the 1950s classics was giving way to young avant guard film makers free from censorship codes and traditional ideas. This was a boomer counterculture critique that reflected growing disillusionment with the Establishment, however defined. From the rebellion of Bonnie & Clyde to the detached stupor of The Graduate, from the gritty sex in Midnight Cowboy to the malaise of The Big Chill, here were the themes, dreams and nightmares of the boomer generation. The finale of Easy Rider is a nightmare, both bikers gunned down on the road by “rednecks.”

While the quality of the film may be argued, few deny it was a pop culture landmark. “We blew it,” the most memorable line, is an amorphous sigh of futility—they didn’t find what they were looking for, whatever that was: a place to fit it, acceptance, a meaning in life. The dark, brooding story foretells the “end of innocence” of the hippie era. The 1970s had arrived.

Trivia Factoids

• Jack Nicholson was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for his role an alcoholic Southern ACLU lawyer who springs the boys from jail and then joins the journey. He meets a violent end, as well.
• Co-star and co-writer Dennis Hooper picked up the Cannes Festival First Film Award.
• The sound track was hip, hip, hip—The Band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Steppenwolf.
• According to many sources, the drug scenes used the real stuff.

(from the Best of BoomSpeak circa 2010)

Terry Hamburg wrote the Boomer to You blog about the exciting and revolutionary baby boomer years.

I’m a songwriter. No for real! It’s commonly referred to as AI Slop. A moniker I heartily adopt and endorse.  It’s not for your listening pleasure – it’s for mine.  And I love it.

Others hate my slop – they’ve told me so.

They are the trolls connected to a podcast that encourages AI Slop for their end of show.  They regularly use my slop. And since the have a live “troll room”, feedback is immediate.  But I remain undeterred.

DILLIGAF?

I’m 78. An original Boomer.

Here’s my M.O. I bought an $8/month subscription to Suno.com. That makes me a Pro they say. That alone makes it worth it. I use Google Genesis to write lyrics for me based on my prompts. Fo example: “write a minstrel style song with doo dah doo dah repeatedly about President Trump eliminating The Fed.” Yeah, fun toe tapping tunes.

I copy/paste the lyrics and prompts and suggestions for song style into Suno and blammo in less than a minute I can listen to two versions. Since November, I’ve generated 275 songs. Generated. Not written. I lied just to get your attention.  I’m a song prompter.

But they are my songs. I own the rights. Such bangers as The Doo Dah Deficit, Gangs of G-Land, We Want the Oil We take the Oil, Mogadishu Morning, Jake From State Fart, and much much more!

K-tel records call me. Uh oh, stand by, great song idea.

Mark Van Patten used to write a blog called Going Like Sixty and has been married to the same woman since 1968. Now he’s a songwriter…kind of…sort of.

Someone on Reddit posed the following question:

How Did Older Generations (I read that as Boomers and GenXers, mostly) Have Fun Before The Internet.

Over 9,000 Redditors responded and the following are some of the best, with some editorial comment.

“Waiting for the radio to play your favorite songs so you could record them took a big chunk of time.”

And how about making your own mix tapes…ON CASSETTES!! That you could play IN THE CAR!

“Mostly video games.”

It wasn’t my thing, but I knew a lot of people who were into Dungeons and Dragons back then.

“Being a latchkey kid gave me so much time with my parents’ records. If it weren’t for that time alone with Sam Cooke, I’d be clapping on the first beat like a neanderthal.”

Yep. Playing 45’s with one of those plastic adapter rings so they would fit on the little spindle.

“I have a hope chest full of bad poetry from when I was a teenager. I don’t know what to do with it! I’m genuinely afraid of anyone finding that shit after I die — and frankly, I don’t trust the dump.”

I’ve got some fiction somewhere that I thought the New Yorker would want to publish.

“Lie about where the Victoria’s Secret catalog is.”

Hmmm. Boys were perusing any number of catalogs in the late 50s.

“Hanging around outside with my best friend was pretty much what I did every day, and it was bliss. Yes, there were times when I was incredibly bored out of my mind, but it never lasted.”

And you could be gone all day without anyone freaking out about it.

“Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll…without the sex and drugs. But definitely lots of rock ‘n’ roll. Also, riding bikes, camping, and summer jobs. I only saw my room when I was sleeping or it was raining outside.”

And our parents were quite happy to have us out of the house – for hours at a time. The closest we came to anything bordering on technology was a little transistor radio that you could sneak under the covers and listen to music from far away places or Jean Shepherd on WOR in Chicago.

Go back in time and I’m sure every boomer could come up with a list of activities that filled all our waking hours, and never once did we have to worry about whether we had WI-FI service.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon.

It would be hard to think of a more universal touchstone for baby boomers than the Howdy Doody Show. Say kids, what time is it? It’s Howdy Doody time!!!

There came a time when just about every local TV station had a kids show (the one I remember was Ranger Andy), but Howdy Doody got there first. And the show didn’t just entertain us boomers — it sold TV sets, cereal, lunch boxes and a lot of other products. Advertisers definitely took notice.

It all started with New York radio NBC affiliate WEAF, where Big Brother Bob Smith was the voice of a ranch hand on a show called The Triple B Ranch. He would greet the audience by saying “Oh, ho, ho, howdy doody.” Just the kind of nonsensical wordplay children love to hear, and love to repeat.

It was a short leap from there to the Howdy Doody Show and a whole cast of characters who lived in Doodyville. That named seemed rather benign when I was 7 or 8 years old, but in retrospect it sounds like a weird place to live. Buffalo Bob talked to the marionettes as if they were real, so even though we could see the strings on the puppets as plain as day, we began to think of them as real people. And what a collection of characters– Phineas T. Bluster with his flying eyebrows on separate strings, along with Flub-a-Dub and Dilly Dally. And the live characters were just as interesting. Chief Thunderthud of Kawabonga fame and Princess Summerfall Winterspring were pretty captivating. Clarabell Hornblow provided some of the slapstick and was played by Bob Keeshan, who most of you should remember later became Captain Kangaroo! He sprayed seltzer on everyone and we all laughed like the chuckleheads that we were.

I had forgotten that the show originally came on in the early evening, but I do remember that it came on just after Gabby Hayes. When the show came to an end in 1960, it was after airing 2,343 programs. It had its educational moments and teaching opportunities, but mostly I remember the slapstick, some goofy songs and the spraying seltzer, along with an unexplainable yearning for Princess Summerfall Winterspring (I began to think of her as pretty hot looking just as I hit puberty).

Who didn’t want to be in the Peanut Gallery bleachers when the Princess was in town? I guess when I was more interested in the Princess than the puppets, my Doodyville days were over, but I still remember them fondly.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

Just a few bars of Mr. Soul and I get instant flashback in the time machine to somewhere around 1967. My allegiances were split between the Motown Sound and the new music that was coming out of San Francisco. But Buffalo Springfield took everyone by surprise. They only made 3 studio albums before everyone went their separate ways…and don’t forget that Buffalo Springfield begat Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, plus Poco, and then Loggins and Messina.

Despite the briefness of their time on the scene, they sure had a long lasting impact on musical genres. Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay were all singers, songwriters and guitarists from the folk and country traditions, but they melded this background and their talents into a new kind of rock sound that no one had ever heard before. The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, Jackson Browne and the Eagles all have acknowledged their debt to the band’s influences on their work.

Neil Young may have been the most interesting lyricist, but Stephen Stills played great guitar, and Furay had perhaps the most pleasing vocal sound. Maybe it was the timing of trying to break through at the same time the Beatles were dominating rock music, but for some reason people did not truly appreciate the Buffalo Springfield sound until the band broke up. It’s one of the few cases where a band got more airplay after their demise than in their prime. Still, they deserve the credit for practically inventing folk-rock and country-rock.

Going back to listen to some of their prime material, such as For What It’s Worth, Expecting to Fly, Bluebird and Kind Woman, you can foretell that everyone is going to go their separate ways, but it does not in any way diminish the pleasure you can get from listening to ground-breaking musicians like these.

There’s somethin’ happening here,
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
There’s a man with a gun over there,
Tellin’ me I gotta beware.
I think it’s time we stop,
Hey, what’s that sound,
Everybody look what’s going down.

For What It’s Worth, Stephen Stills, 1966

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.