When Did 60s Nostalgia Begin?

I remember a lot of stress and anxiety. Watching "The Butler" brought back a lot of bad memories. No nostalgia here.

 

Thats normal! Era's get reduced to a stereotype. I suppose other folks here had high schools days designated as certain decade days. We only had 50's days. (In the early 70's it was the 60's, heck, long hair was just creeping into the region we lived). I never participated, being way too cool, but classmates did; gals with bright red lipstick, horn rimmed glasses, poodle skirts and bobby sox, dudes with slicked back Brylcreamed hair, a (fake) pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in one sleeve of their white 'T' and so on. In the main hall just below the ceiling hung the framed pictures of prior graduating classes. Up through the mid 60's crew cuts with letter jackets and buttoned up collar shirts predominated. I remember pointing that out, but it was of no use. Reality had already lost out to the expectation.

 

The 90's, for several reasons. Gen Xers were beginning to tire on hearing "how amazing the sixties were". I remember the comic book 8-Ball had a short story where a nerdy teen was shown following around a homeless aging hippie who talked about how his generation "stopped a war, got equal rights for chicks and blacks, and at one point, Jesus Christ (Jim Morrison) himself walked the earth again." It was a huge stab at not only the baby boomers, but the gen-xers who idolized that period. I was guilty of being one of those kids, but I never tired of hearing things like: "hey man, I went to England back in 1967 and saw Pink Floyd open for Hendrix for the equivalent of $2!". I still love hearing old concert stories, just like I enjoy telling stories to younger people about seeing Green Day, The Chili Peppers, NIN in small clubs as they were coming up. Not to mention bands like The Red Hot Chili Peppers would cover "Fire" by Hendrix, Jane's Addiction would cover the Grateful Dead's "Ripple", Butthole Surfers covering "Come Together"....etc.

But I also remember movies like Pump Up The Volume with Christian Slater railing against his parents and how he hates the sixties. We noticed that with the 'classic rock' stations that played 'deep cuts' in 'laser stereo' (a hilarious way of saying they play cd's), the playlists got shorter and shorter. I was hearing lots of good music for a time, but then it just got down to Foreigner, Styx, Kansas, plus your same 3 songs from Zeppelin and Floyd that you were VERY sick of. No Krautrock, no Fairport Convention, no Love/Velvet Underground/Stooges (who were like gods to 90's indie rockers), no Sun Ra or Ornette Coleman...we had to tune into college radio or hunt on our own for that stuff. Not to mention the arena/stadium shows with all of its hassles and idiot attendees. I noticed the anti 60's and the classic rock backlash in the mid 90's. It was not cool to talk about those mega bands anymore. Some of it was pride, but some of it was justified.

I wasn't even born in the sixties, but my admiration was not only the music, but the way some people were ahead of their time in their thinking. Fighting for whats right. My parents generation being the first one where interracial friendships were not looked at as 'unusual'. At the same time, with all the great music and swapping of influences in the sixties, the seventies seemed to be very segregated culturally, and the busing politics up North in the US seemed very nasty. Kids my age didn't think about stuff like that, and in the 80's we thought it was a thing of the past until the big skinhead revival of the late 80's (which was funny enough a nostalgia for a sixties British subculture).

 

1/1/1970

 

I felt the same way about Laverne And Shirley. When the gang moved out to California, it was time to return to the now for me.

 

We must be the same age.
When did you first hear about Woodstock? For me it was right after it happened watching The Dick Cavett Show:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dick_Cavett_Show#August_19.2C_1969:_The_Woodstock_Show

 

Ask Sid Vicious, circa 1976.

 

According to who? When Kennedy took office in 1961, it was the NEW Frontier, not 1950s redux. Only people whose knowledge of the 1960s begins and ends with the Beatles would make that claim...

 

I think I generally knew that it had happened around the time it was happening, from brief newspaper reports. The daily newspaper was a big thing at our house. Then my parents' Life magazine issue arrived, with photos from Woodstock.

I watched Dick Cavett then, so I may have seen these shows, but I don't remember them now.

 

Okay, now you are on to something, with the mention of Vince Lombardi.

 

Oh brother.....

 

This.

My appreciation for the 60s is mostly the Music. And Music should stand on it's own- completely divorced from everything else. It's not a Baby Boomers' Fading Youth thing.
Yes, it seemed that there was perhaps more interest in art and social change, but it was a few who led that charge. I would say that in America, the 60s were still all about conformity and outmoded social mores. There was a desire to change them. Some succeeded, some did not.

 

Decades, periods, or eras are rarely defined by exact dates or a calendar pattern. Historians as well as popular consensus often defines these by cultural aspects and definable cultural changes. Colloquially, decades don't fit neatly between a December 31st and a January 1st. To me, the early 60's were culturally "the '50's." One of my co-workers (who is 60) in fact uttered nearly the same exact thing in the office recently when a discussion was going on about America of the early 60's. The fact is the Kennedy assassination in '63, the rise of Civil Right struggles, the arrival of the Beatles / British invasion, and the start of Vietnam all collided at an intersection in just over a years span of time; catalysts for both the rapid and wide reaching cultural change in American life.

 

I'm 59 and this sounds just about right to me. And the 60's didn't really end until 1972 or thereabouts.

 

I'm going to keep referring to decades by the calendar method, otherwise, there is no common nostalgia between us and we are susceptible to whatever revisionist commentators throw out there.

 

You can define the parameters any way you wish to! My kids are now in the computer tech field. We all remember the rise of home computers and the explosion of the internet in the latter half of the 1990's. I bring this up because one of the boys was saying he's already meeting people to young to have experienced the era and insist this didn't occur until the present century.

 

I'm not surprised by that at all. Most people out there are not good with the details, frankly.....in time or place. Vague generalizations replace actual facts. Infotainment is seen as journalism.

 

With all due respect when most speak of 60's nostalgia they are talking about an era not hard and fast calendar dates.
It's not revisionist thinking. "The Sixties" in quotation marks did not start 1/1/60 and end 12/31/69 ... at least for a lot of us who were there.

 

Just as people are more comfortable defining life, events, and movements by clean, easy-to-grasp bright line or even artificial standards, or, the 'facts' as they determine them to be, and so on. Different strokes as they say.....

 

This is all very interesting. My friend (a few years older) showed me a '90s movie called "The Stoned Age," which ostensibly takes place in the late '70s. But the movie takes some liberties and is ambiguous about the exact time/year. After we watched it, we both agreed that in our minds, it took place in 1981, which still very much had the aroma of '70s about it.

On the flip side, the '90s for me very much began by 1991, when I was 10/11. I think a '90s sensibility probably started to creep in by 1989, with the end of the Reagan era.

 

I grew up in the 60's and one of things I really miss is how eclectic AM radio was... it wouldn't be odd to hear Frank Sinatra, followed by Jimi Hendrix, followed by Johnny Cash, followed by Steppenwolf, followed by Glen Campbell... etc, etc... it was a smorgasbord of Pop and it sure exposed listeners to a wide range of styles and artists. My transistor radio was a magical thing...

 

People looked more like 60s "hippies" in the early 70s. Hair was longer in the 70s. And I lived in Southern California when the decade turned from 1969 to 1970.

And older bothers and pilot dads being dead or POWs in Vietnam was familiar for me in the neighborhood I grew up in during the early 70s. The 60s slid right on into the 70s. Easy Rider foreshadowed the end of the idealized 60s back in 1969.

At least with the 50s and 60s, we tend to define the decade by its latter years. And I blame Sha Na Na for distorting our view of the 50s.

 

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. That thinning of variety murdered much potential, imho, and introduced the specter of Inevitable Public Boredom and Devaluation and Contempt relating to the Established Music Industry.

Well, if I were King of the Forest the term 'rock' would be banned for a while until it shrank down to size. I much prefer the term 'Popular Music' as it embraces all--probably not catchy enough, that term--have to make it SEXY: popsic, popusic, pusic, pic, poc...POC!!! POCK!! There we go! Rhymes with Rock but without all the generic banality the subsuming of all of popular music under that Ole Rock Rubric has unleashed on a nodding-off world. Let's see now: needs its own set of clichés, hmmm. More than three chords!! Not necessarily adolescent!! 75% not in need of Testosterone Cred!! Video not required!! Not an 'Advancement'!!!

Damn, public embracing of this spirit of variety might actually bring genuine attention to some music folks out there who really deserve it. Might even encourage some folks to break molds. Ya never know. Sure am glad I thought of all this.

Been a long day.