Edges of the City Vol. IV, Now From 1967

By 1967 the Summer of Love story was used as much needed distraction to keep the hated Vietnam War off  people's minds.  Both turned out to be equally disturbing to "normal" Americans.  The WWII generation, by now, were completely baffled at what the media said was happening to the country they had fought to defend.  

The economy was booming, there was Peace and Love in the air while draftees were shipped off to Vietnam to fight an unjust war for corporations and global hegemony.  And then there were these long haired, dirty looking, young people talking "peace and love."  The over 40 generation did not like what it saw.  The term "counter culture" was used to describe the fact that LSD was dramatically changing some people's way of living.  At the same time, the authorities too often saw chaos and immorality, and were determined to stop it.  By the fall of the year, the Haight Ashbury was like the aftermath of a drunken party.  

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Organized crime had moved in.  Heroin and speed were the new top drugs, replacing lsd and pot.  By winter Mayer Alioto used police state tactics to sweep the streets at night.  The Haight Ashbury turned into a kind of war zone.  By the Spring of 1968, it was a different place.  

Part IV, "Now From 1967," starts in the spring of that year and loosely follows a Joycean trajectory of 15 or 16 sections, (Ulysses - give or take), being a song cycle of contrasting styles and sounds, depicting a year in which eclecticism grew into a cultural fad, and the concept album was turned into a commercial "art form." Songwriters and singers, groups and superstars were now to be called "artists."  Selfconscious pretense was a way of getting publicity, and as the Rock scene achieved more success, the soul corruption of  the stage turned the music from something meaningful into just another type of entertainment.  By the 1970s, the era that led to the Summer of Love was as distant as the Beat generation was to the Hippies of the '60s.  Times were changing, and far too fast.         

Edges of the City is a four cd concept series in which past and present merge in an exploration of the parallels and contradictions between the years 1964-1967, and 2004-2007.  These two periods stand as bookends in the ongoing saga of the post-WWII “Baby Boomer” generation, one of the most conflicted generational cycles in American history.   It is a look back, from a personal perspective, to a utopian experiment that resonates to this day.

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