Sixties Kicks

Director's Note by Linda Whitney

Sixties Kicks is part 2 of an ongoing exploration of American popular music form the 1960s that began with Sixties Chicks in the summer of 2009. The variety, quantity and quality of music from the decade merits more than one or even two shows and presents a great opportunity to revisit the culture, politics, and social context of the day and how this extraordinarily turbulent decade still resonates in the 21st century.

...OFF TO LOOK FOR AMERICA

Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce coined the term "American Century" in an exuberant editorial in 1941 before the twentieth century was even half over. He envisioned a world remade in the image of America when it was still unclear exactly what that image would amount to. Today "American Century" inspires a kind of moral vertigo as we contemplate the hubris of having an era named for us. Ever a zealous proponent of all things American, Luce was prescient in his assertion that the United States would take charge of the 20th century. Most of its manifold creations, explosions, accomplishments and terrors can, indeed, be traced to American ingenuity.

Twenty-one years after Luce editorialized on the "triumphal purpose of freedom", the 1962 Seattle World's Fair would be named the Century 21 Exposition. With 38 years to the new millennium remaining, the fair was framed up to fill visitors with confidence that the next century would fully realize the contemporary promise of better living through technology. We thought then that by now we would have conquered all pesky inconveniences and limitations to comfort on earth and gone on to dominate the universe.

We made it to the moon by 1969, but we have not returned since 1972, and we've only sent expensive and sophisticated probes beyond. We have turned away from the stars and toward luminous slabs of electronic polymer where we process, document, display, exploit and trivialize all experience. The Space Age became the Age of Cyberspace.

Seattle was also home to a 7 year old boy named Bill Gates III in 1962. Nothing the Exposition had on offer could prepare the world for how that geeky kid would grow up and revolutionize information management, access, and transmission. Around the time that a teenage Gates was learning to program a General Electric computer, the US Department of Defense was solving the problems of moving packets of data back and forth simultaneously. The foundations of the internet were in place when Bill was ready, fifteen years later.

Today Century 21's spherical acrylic glass elevator, the "Bubbleator", serves as a greenhouse in a Des Moines, Washington, backyard, while it's owner likely surfs the net indoors on a PC. Bill Gates would be the first person in history to get unimaginably rich solely through extraordinary intelligence as applied to computer science, and not as a captain of industry. Henry Luce passed on in 1967, but as our new millennium began, his publication, Time magazine, would name Gates one of the 100 most influential people of the American Century.

While the Seattle World's Fair was making it's way to a comfortable profit in 1962, another singular event took place: the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". In the book she made environmental biology accessible and explained the unintended consequences of pesticide use, especially dichlorodiphenyltrichoroethane (DDT). This popular toxin came into wide application after World War II because it had proven so successful in controlling the insects that spread malaria and typhus among civilians and troops overseas. DDT gave man the winning edge over the bugs with whom he'd been competing for grain and produce for about 10,000 years. The bill for this victory was coming due in the form of devastated wild bird populations and the weakening of the rungs of the ladder of life.

"Silent Spring" made a permanent dent in the complacent national psyche and had sold 100,000 copies by the end of 1962. While 100 times that number had attended the Seattle Fair, Carson's volume would have far more impact on the actual course of the 20th century. By 1972, DDT would be banned in most of the industrialized world. (The chemical continues to be used to control disease vectors in some countries and can be found in human tissues and breast milk just about everywhere, as can a plethora of other chemicals and synthetic residues.) The book also empowered Wisconsin senator, Gaylord Nelson, to push forward the establishment of Earth Day in 1970. President Nixon would sign the Environmental Protection Agency into law that year as well.

With a positioning statement that declared the exposition to be "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment", the 1974 World's Fair would be called Expo '74 and take place in Spokane, Washington. NASA's Apollo project had fired off its last lunar mission two years before and we began to understand that earth just might be the only environment we'll ever have. But for all the good intensions, as I write this, an environmental catastrophe is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico making this quote from Carson exceptionally poignant:

"The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery - not over nature but of ourselves".

The 79 million American kids born between 1946 and 1964 would come to adulthood in a world where that challenge to override desire and take responsibility would present itself frequently and ferociously. In addition to a dawning environmental awareness, the 1960s were convulsed by assassinations, riots, a despised war, excesses, advances and social experiments. It was also fueled by more wealth than the American middle class had ever known, resulting in greater freedoms, higher education, rising divorce rates, and mounting angst. It was conditioning for the new millennium.

Just as the imagination of Bill Gates built an empire in the realm of artificially extended human intelligence, the environmental observations of Rachel Carson opened up the ongoing dialog (shouting match?) on ecological crisis and influenced the arc of her country's policies. While Henry Luce and The Century 21 Exposition touted a simple and fanciful future, Gates and Carson would be part of the complicated real thing.

It's in that profound chasm between desire and responsibility, between the fanciful and the real, that rock'n'roll resonates. The popular music of the 1960s was a new American sound, fueled by high-test musical traditions and ignited by a unique national experience. It was the expression of the immediate need to adapt to the pain of enormous transformations. It is the murmur, shout, wail and howl of the first generation with the means to make that kind of noise, and the first to feel empowered to do so.

Our exploration of 60s rock is not intended solely as a reminiscence, but as a renaissance. A rebirth. A great deal of the love, hope and charity we felt then can still be renewed by a song, and a great deal of the noisy rockin' rage against the greedy machine demands to be heard once more.