The 1960s

I try not to get all nostalgic for the era in which I grew up.  There was a lot that was wrong (segregation, unthinking acceptance of authority, the draft) and a lot went wrong with consequences today: Vietnam's waste of lives and money engendered a fierce hatred of America in the generation now in power; the combination of birth control and too many choruses of "Disco Inferno" and "Disco Duck"* produced a generation of young women for whom unrecognized STDs made in vitro fertilization necessary, and the beginnings of the AIDS crisis)

* Listen to "Disco Duck" on a stereo with good left-right separation and you can tell some of the background singers are not singing "Disco Duck," but it rhymes, and in that era, such a direct request by a young man might have gotten his face slapped, or an STD.

I was wandering through YouTube yesterday, which is almost as dangerous as letting me loose in a university library, and I found this gem.



So squeaky clean and the guys are wearing suits!  Hippie counterculture had not made it down under yet.

And this very bittersweet ballad:


Pop music had not yet been replaced by the youth-obsessed rock and roll culture.