5 years of super-compressed history

They had the rare ability to be just what
we needed, when we needed it.

They kept evolving to what we wanted to be,
to make the music we wanted to hear, 6
months to a year before we could possibly
have known it.

Long hair, drugs, peace and love -- it's
difficult to imagine the 60s without
The Beatles. They took us from the fun
loving and simple early 60s to the wilder
mod 60s to the radical hippy late 60s.

Always one step ahead of us, but always
leading us toward where we wanted to be.

Looking back, what they did on this level
is a miracle, considering the fast rate of
change of the times. We went from a time
-- early in 1964 -- that was essentially
the 1950s. To the extreme social upheaval
of 1969-1971.

A Rip van Winkle who fell asleep in January
1964 and woke up again in 1969 could
easily have thought they had slept for 100
years instead of 5 -- or that long-haired
alien invaders had taken over the planet.

The social -- and musical changes -- were
that vast.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more
I think you could make a case that all the
ups and downs and changes from 1969 to now
have their roots in those 5 years. Even
the economic differences between now and
then were foreshadowed by the go-go years
on Wall Street and the crash that started
around 1969.

The protests set the stage for Watergate and
our eventual military withdrawal from Vietnam,
including abandoning the Shah of Iran to
Muslim fanatics and all the fuels the terrorism
we face. The political lines we have today
have been changed and redefined, but still
primarily in terms of what happened in those
5 years -- from Women's Liberation to the
Stonewall riots that set the stage for Gay
Rights, from the Civil Rights Act of 1964
passed by the Civil Rights movement to
Black Power to the first affirmative action
that began around 1969. From drugs as something
done only by ghetto inhabitants or beatniks
to the use of psychedelics and coke and even
heroin by white upper and middle class kids.

Sounds like a book I ought to write someday.

Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain