What Happened to That America? Part I

Your Head Trucker as a fashion plate of 1959.

Over on YouTube, somebody asked that question under this video that I blogged about the other day:



The person who posted the video responded, "It existed primarily in our televisions." Which is a pretty good answer, but I've not been able to get this exhange out of my head since then.

So here goes with a little meditation on the remembrance of things past. Apparently the questioner is not the only one who wonders about that vanished country: Matthew Yglesias quotes House Speaker John Boehner's complaint that "Barack Obama and congressional Democrats 'are snuffing out the America that I grew up in.'"

Which, of course, is nonsense; the America that Boehner (born 1949) and others remember so nostalgically disappeared long before anybody ever heard of Barack Obama.  I came along about five years after Boehner did, and I too remember that world, which, unlike previous eras, is preserved forever in television shows, documentaries, and even commercials.  At the push of a button, the click of a mouse, we can return there at any time of the day or night, and many people do. 

Some time back, in the middle of an article about country megastar Alan Jackson, the writer mentioned that when Jackson isn't touring or working on a new song in the studio, he likes to relax at his country place near Nashville with simple pastimes, like watching reruns of the Andy Griffith Show.  And I understand my fellow Southerner's fondness for that program; I have some DVD sets of it myself that I watch from time to time, as well as other old shows from the era when Dinah was singing the praises of Chevrolet.  I was there - I remember - even though I was just a young tyke, and of course my perceptions of the world were obscured by my innocence and ignorance of many grown-up matters.

And the nostalgia for that past time is nothing new at all.  By the dawn of the 1970's, I very well recall, there was already a general sense that as a society we had moved into a new and different era, one that in some respects was not nearly as pleasant or attractive. 

Continued below the jump

It was in the summer of 1972 that there was suddenly a surprising revival of 1950's songs and magazine articles about the era - which was startling to me, just out of high school, because at least since the British Invasion of 1964 and the consequent abjuration of Brylcreem and barbers by young men under 30 en masse, the 1950's had seemed so uncool, so awkward, so square, so . . . gross, somehow.  The greasy hair, the clunky clothes, the way-out-of-date cars, all seemed pretty awful to us teens in the early '70's.  And the music was so antique, you know?  Except for a few old songs that happened to be exceptionally good.

Later on, I came to realize that this wave of Fifties nostalgia was sparked by the first Broadway production of Grease - which way down here in the Deep South, we kids didn't know anything about; it wasn't made into a movie until 1978.  And also much later, I came to realize that nostalgia is a recurring process:  the 1950's looked back to the 1920's (with TV shows like The Untouchables and The Roaring Twenties; and I can just remember as a wee lad a teen party at a babysitter's house where people were actually dancing the Charleston); for a brief time in the late 1960's, there was a wave of nostalgia for the 1930's (Bonnie and Clyde seemed to set that off; one of the boys' clubs in my high school had a senior party at a local "old-timey" restaurant where they all dressed in gangster suits and posed for a yearbook picture in front of a 1936 Model A); there were some sporadic throwbacks in the '70s to the Forties, most notably the incredible return of platform shoes, with all kinds of modern twists.

As you can tell, perhaps, I used to have rather sensitive antennae for even the slightest cultural waves, something I lost somewhere in the early '80's after I finally got out of college and went to work at a real job.  It's sort of amusing when I remember that I used to know the exact degree of coolness or in-style-ness of every car, every lapel, every trouser hem, every shirt cuff and hair style - now, I confess, the whole continuum of culture and style since 1980 appears in my mind as one long, indistinguishable blur.  If I see a TV clip from the sixties or seventies, I can usually tell you quite accurately, within a year either way, when it was made, just by noting the clothes and hairstyles.  But from 1980 on - who knows.

It's not entirely my fault, I think; although when one finally gets to be a grown-up, with grown-up responsibilities, one does tend to lose sight of the nonessential things in life.  But it's also true that by 1980, the whole idea of a universal Style, which had usually been taken for granted in the West since at least the Renaissance, had broken down, lapsed into anarchy.  The disco era, with its three-piece suits, wide lapels, blow-dried hair, and platform shoes - which the ex-roommate and I remember so fondly - was the last time I'm aware of that just about everybody conformed to a prevailing style.  After that withered away, as all fashions eventually do, it seemed that Style fragmented into a thousand different pieces; pick any ten people off the street in the eighties, and they might be wearing ten different looks, so it seemed.

But mainly what they were wearing, unless they had to spiff up for a Special Occasion, was blue jeans and tee-shirts and tennis shoes.  Of course, the blue jeans look really got started in the sixties, but even as late as my early college career in the mid-to-late 1970's, I well recall that a significant proportion of young women and men dressed up a bit to go to classes.  Not like Sunday-go-to-church, necessarily; but make-up, pretty skirts or dresses, and even high heels for the girls, while the boys, usually in denim, tended not to wear their grubbies but at least wore a "nice" shirt or sweater over their jeans.  Somewhere in the blurry continuum since, that changed; drive by any high school or college campus now, and it's pretty rare to see any of the student body dressed for anything nicer than a hike in the woods.

Nor is it just the young; OMG let's not even talk about what you see on quite old people nowadays when you walk through Wally World, or anywhere else, for that matter.  That's one thing that has definitely slipped away - the unstated but universally recognized imperative to look relatively decent in public, even when just popping to the store for a loaf of bread and a jug of milk.  To make an effort about your appearance:  long since gone with the wind.  (I confess:  guilty as charged.  But what do you expect from an old graybearded fart?)  And it started way back, when young men let their hair grow out and young women - and older ones too - started wearing pants.

Just to record the fact for posterity:  across the Deep South, at least, it was in the winter of 1969-1970 that women young and old began wearing pants en masse for the first time in recorded Western history.  Pantsuits had been a groovy innovation of the 1960's but were slow to catch on; but in that winter, for some reason, it was as if women all across the South suddenly decided, Why not?  I remember my mother was teaching at an elementary school near a big city that year, and she and the rest of the faculty women had a big confab with the principal over being allowed to wear pantsuits to work.  Simultaneously, I was getting letters from friends at my old high school several hundred miles away, about students going on strike there for the right to wear pantsuits.  The strike was, in fact, a mild-mannered boycott of the cafeteria; football players, in solidarity with their girlfriends, stood guard at the entrance to the serving line, intimidating the few clueless students into going without lunch.  In both schools, the administrators quickly acceded to the women's demands, and overnight, it seemed, women were wearing pants not only to school but to all kinds of jobs, to stores and supermarkets, even to church.  Even women who staunchly denied any feminist sentiments whatsoever, like my own mother (who was in fact quite a feminist but didn't know it), stoutly defended the pantsuit as being much more practical and comfortable for everyday life than dresses.

Why this petticoat revolution, if I may call it that, happened at that particular moment in history - who knows.  It's not that women had never worn pants before; look at reruns of I Love Lucy from deep in the 1950's and you'll see that she often wears pants around the house.  My mom had some leg-hugging Capri pants in the early sixties that she often wore at home, or for a casual jaunt like a picnic.  And she and my aunts also wore shorts in summer for casual get-togethers.  But never to work, and rarely even to the grocery store.

But the abandonment of the skirt was soon enough followed, among the young, by an abandonment of make-up and then of any pretense at what an earlier generation of women would have called "charm."  The let-it-all-hang-out hippie style started later in the South than on the coasts, but it quickly gained a sizeable following.  As late as my senior year, girls in my high school were being penalized for showing up in blue jeans and halter tops - as opposed to a permissible color-coordinated pantsuit.  And boys were harassed about the length of their hair, and whether it fell over their ears or their shirt collars.  Of course, guys across the nation had, as a group, been steadily lengthening their bangs and sidelocks ever since the Beatles first exploded onto our television screens in 1964; but I can still remember the older generation having fits over "that damned long hair," and preachers actually quoting the Bible against it (see 1 Corinthians 11:14) - which is really amusing now, as I look back over pictures of my high school days, and every one of us, even with that "long hair," look quite conservative and even preppy now.  And of course, all sorts of admirable figures down the long centuries of human history have had long hair, from Jesus to George Washington; but the paternal authorities took a mighty dim view of it on us young'uns.  I think it made my father almost physically ill to see the Beatles perform:  "Oh hell, a man shouldn't have to brush his hair out of his eyes like a woman," he would grouse.  My childhood request to grow a Beatle haircut was met with a flat, undebatable No, and most of my friends had the same response from their dads, who faithfully kept to the greased-up, brushed-back Ricky Ricardo look all through the sixties.

Of course, we boys, notwithstanding the regular-as-clockwork, every-two-weeks (I kid you not) trips to the barber, stealthily succeeded by degrees in lengthening our do's, mainly at first by going for the Surfer Bang look - which alas, always eluded me, since my own forelocks had a maddening two-way wave right in front that always left a most unfashionable gap across my forehead.  But nothing daunted, I like most of my generation, faithfully carried a comb in my back pocket everywhere I went, and also like many of them, was constantly combing out that damn bang and fixing my part after every stray breeze or exertion.  By the time I was in high school, the really cool guys had even begun to let their hair - horrors! - grow a little bit over their collar in back, and allowed their sideburns to get as low as the bottom of their earlobes - oh my.  Which gained them a lot of dirty looks, if not actual reprimands, from what is now called, somewhat grandiosely, the Greatest Generation.  It was actually a matter of some scandal to the school authorities during my junior year of high school that at a football game, a little fringe of blonde, curly hair on one of our star players could been seen peeking out from the back of his helmet.

As I said, we were always a little behind the curve, fashionwise, compared to the trendsetters on the coasts.  It was not until the summer of 1971 - forty years ago right now - that I ever saw a guy with hair long enough to tie back in a pony tail.  That was on a bus boy at a restaurant near the Atlanta airport - a really avant-garde, big-city look for that place and time - I figured he had to be from up north somewhere.  (Also for the record, while I'm on this topic - people now tend to equate bell bottoms with the sixties; but while girls started adopting them for hip casual wear circa 1967, it wasn't until the winter of 1969-70, again for some unknown reason, that guys started wearing them too.  And they quickly went from being avante-garde to being de rigeur, in a modified, just-wide-enough-to-be-fashionable version we called "flares," which were the uniform of the day in everything from blue jeans to dress pants.)  But as with the pantsuits I mentioned above, it wasn't long before a certain segment of the population started taking hair as far as they could go, and men's fashions got more extreme too, going to their logical conclusions.  All of this was the predictable rubber-band reaction to the extremely narrow-line, buttoned-down, crew-cut look of the early sixties:  the swing of the pendulum, which is always ticking back and forth.

In the spring of '72, the first platform shoes for men appeared in shoe stores:  quite modest things, with maybe a half-inch sole and a one-inch heel.  But oh man, did they look sporty - even if they did seem a little, um, effeminate.  (I lusted for a pair, nonetheless; and pretty soon, so did all the straight guys.)  In the fall of that year, the first "baggies" appeared, first for women, followed quickly by the same for guys.  These are what whippersnappers now call disco pants, but we just called them baggies:  a good bit wider at the cuff than flares - I seem to recall 22 inches as the fashionable circumference - with a very wide cuff, at least 2 inches (cuffs on mens' pants had mostly disappeared by the late sixties, except for grandpa types).  And preferably beltless, if you could find them, which wasn't easy, and had the good fortune to have a washboard waist.  We wore them as tight as possible, naturally.  Totally cool and sooo fucking sexy, with our high-heeled platform shoes (which kept getting taller and taller).  I tell you what.

By the spring of 1973 - think Tony Orlando - fashionble young men's hair had reached the shoulder (a very hot look, I still think, with a beard or stache to boot).  By the winter of 1974-75, it reached its maximum length, for those who were willing and able to go that extreme, of being nearly down to the waistline in back - but you had to have perfectly straight hair to achieve that.  It took several years for me to get my hair just down to my shoulders, being so full of waves and curls in all the wrong places.  I can't tell you how many times women strangers would stop me, in the grocery store or wherever, and say with exasperation - "That hair is just wasted on a boy!"  I really wanted to tell them there was nothing on me going to waste, but being a polite young Southerner, I just grinned and kept quiet.

And all this, mind you, was before the disco craze got going.  Yes, before.  I was there - I know.  By the spring of '75, baggies with cuffs had just about disappeared from stores, though pants were still widely flared at the bottom.  And disco didn't start until that year.  Whatever the music scene might have been in the bright lights and big cities, down here in the Southland all we knew was what we heard on the radio.  The early seventies, I am very sorry to say, were for the most part a pretty drab period for pop music.  There were some good acts - the moody, folksy types like James Taylor and Carole King - the, what would you call it, post-psychedelic Santana - the machine-tooled Chicago - sultry, sexy divas (not a word we used then) like Cher and Linda Rondstadt - along with a lot of just dreck.  I won't name names, because somebody, somewhere loves those bands and singers I'm thinking of, no doubt - but much of it just sounded dreary, unsingable and totally undanceable.  It was at this point in time that I started - long, long before anybody else did - prowling the pawn shops and thrift stores for old mid-sixties albums that still sounded good to me, upbeat, bright tunes - including a lot of Motown - that were just feel-good sounds, not overwrought personal expressions of the drug culture or the alienated.

For me, disco came as a welcome relief from that tuneless, directionless era.  The first hint of disco I ever heard was a lone record in the fall of 1974 by - and I have to stop and go look this up now - George McRae called "Rock Your Baby."  It was clearly in the Soul Music tradition, but with a light, persistent beat on the cymbals (or so I've always imagined, but I'm not a percussionist) that made you sit up and take notice of a New Sound.  It wasn't until the following year, 1975, though, that the Bee Gees - masters of reinvention all through their careers - came out with "Jive Talkin'," which was again part of that wonderful, hypnotic New Sound.  Even though now, on the far other side of the era, it doesn't sound much like disco at all - still, at the time, it was great to hear something that made you actually want to get up and dance. 

And around the same time, KC and the Sunshine Band burst on the scene with one great disco tune after another like "Get Down Tonight," "That's the Way - uh huh, uh huh - I Like It," and what is maybe the all-time greatest, most funnest dance tune ever, "Shake Your Booty."  In December of '76 I had the great pleasure of seeing them in concert, fronted by Rick Dees ("Disco Duck," which was pretty funny at the time) and also by Kool and the Gang, who got the crowd worked up in a real good disco fever.  But when KC and the boys appeared, and those four horns swung into action, glinting in the spotlights, oh man - that was electrifying, and they kept the energy going for what seemed like hours, on and on and on.  I was 21 then, at an age where I could happily dance my ass off all night long.  It was a good time to be young, maybe the last good time, I don't know.  I feel sorry for any young person who hasn't been able to feel that kind of sheer joy in being young and in tune with the moment and the music, without having to sink to the depths of vulgarity and degradation to get there.

Of course before long I was a total convert to the New Sound.  Which just figures, don't it guys?  Deep in my closeted, clueless, churchified life here in the depths of Dixie, I had no fucking clue it was all so G-A-Y.  None; never even crossed my mind, I was just enjoying the music and the dancing.  It wasn't till I came out, five years later, that my friends explained to me how disco had arisen in the gay clubs up north.  Wouldn't you just know?  Unfortunately, by that point, disco - again, how can you explain the twists and turns of fashion, whether in music or apparel? - was just fading away and becoming uncool.  A great pity, I thought, being newly liberated, so to speak, and finally able to actually dance with GUYS for the first time. 

But even in the last innings of the game there, I got in some good hits.  Wink.  Even though with my Texan size 13-and-a-half feet (I kid you not), I never considered myself a good dancer.  Still, as I used to say about, um, other things - ahem - whatever I may have lacked in technique, I made up for with enthusiasm.

Grin.


Jeezus Kerr-ist, you know you are definitely a boring old geezer for sure when you start telling longwinded, pointless stories that don't have a fucking thing to do with the thought you started with.  I'm going to give this meditation a rest for now and continue with it tomorrow - and hopefully get back on track.  I think what I'm trying to show, first of all, is that the times and the culture are always changing; that see-the-USA-in-your-Chevrolet America some people long for would have disappeared anyway, no matter what happened politically or socially in this country.  It's a mistake to try to hold on to the past, which like a river is always flowing away, and always changing from future to present to past. 

You can't go home again; only in your dreams.  And I'll leave you with that thought until next time I pick up this thread.  But meanwhile, enjoy these blasts from my past, when "bliss it was to be alive, and to be young was very heaven."  Later, guys.