1968 - Mark Kurlansky [106]
In 1968 Life called the new rock music “the first music born in the age of instant communication.” In June 1967 the Beatles had performed the first live international concert broadcast by satellite.
Life called the rock music of 1968 “an eclectic cornucopia.” The year 1968 was a time of ballads with carefully crafted lyrics and a clear melody line. Peace activist and performer Joan Baez, at twenty-seven, was still playing to huge crowds, singing ballad versions of Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the poetic Leonard Cohen, and fellow folk protester Phil Ochs. The Cubans imitated her ballad style, and from there the soft and lyrical protest ballad spread through the entire Spanish-speaking world. Even the Basques began singing Baez-type ballads in their outlawed ancient language. Simon & Garfunkel, who had struggled in the early sixties because their style had more to do with Renaissance madrigals than rock and roll, reached new heights of popularity with their April 1968 album, Bookends. With songs such as “America” about the search for the country’s soul, the album is considered by some fans to be their best. Crosby, Stills, & Nash and Neil Young sang ballads with a country sound, as did Creedence Clear-water Revival, though their instrumentals were highly amplified with electric instruments. Joni Mitchell, a twenty-four-year-old Canadian with long blond hair and a crystalline voice, became a star in the United States in 1968 with her ballads. Jerry Jeff Walker sang the sad story of Bojangles, a street performer. Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for the Who, complained that music was getting too serious. Since popular music was being targeted more than ever before to youth, it might have been expected to be more playful. “There’s no bloody youth in music today,” said Townshend.
There was a surprising mobility among music genres. After sixteen years with a jazz quartet, Dave Brubeck broke up his group and began composing classical music. Three British musicians—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker—strayed from blues and jazz into rock music, calling themselves Cream. The group was greatly admired by the New York Philharmonic’s conductor Leonard Bernstein, who at age fifty gave up full-time conducting at the end of the 1968 season. He was particularly taken with Ginger Baker, saying, “I mean, they’ve got a drummer who can really keep time.”
The new record albums came with increasingly elaborate covers, many double flapped, their curiously costumed and staged photos set in swirling, throbbing graphics. The album covers were in fact designed for young people smoking marijuana or “dropping acid” to seemingly spend hours examining. Under the influence of drugs, everything appeared to be a double entendre with deep hidden meanings. A fairly straightforward film such as 1967’s The Graduate, about a young man uncertain of his future in a world of shallow values, seemed laden with far deeper messages. Beatles songs were examined like Tennyson’s poems. Who was Eleanor Rigby? The Man with the Balloons, Marco Ferreri’s Italian film starring Marcello Mastroianni, tells the story of a disillusioned man with a bunch of balloons. He decides to find the breaking point of the balloons and discovers that each balloon is different. End of movie. Do you get it? The meaning of it all? It was this insistence