Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [145]
Having both taught in the USA at the peak of the anti-Vietnam movement in 1967 and watched the Paris events in 1968, I wrote an equally uncomprehending article on ‘Revolution and Sex’ in 1969. If there was any correlation between the two, I pointed out, it was negative: rulers kept slaves and the poor quiet by encouraging sexual freedom among them and, I might have added, remembering Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, drugs. As a historian I knew that all revolutions have their free-for-all libertarian aspect, but ‘taken by themselves cultural revolt and cultural dissidence are symptoms, not revolutionary forces’. ‘The more prominent such things are’ – as obviously in the USA – ‘the more confident can we be that the big things are not happening’.7 But what if the ‘big things’ were to be not the overthrow of capitalism, or even of some oppressive or corrupt political regimes, but precisely the destruction of traditional patterns of relations between people and personal behaviour within existing society? What if we were just wrong in seeing the rebels of the 1960s as another phase or variant of the left? In that case it was not a botched attempt at one kind of revolution, but the effective ratification of another: the one that abolished traditional politics, and in the end the politics of the traditional left, by the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Looking back after thirty-odd years it is easy to see that I misunderstood the historic significance of the 1960s.
One reason for this was that I had been immersed since 1955 in the small and mostly nocturnal universe of jazz musicians. The world I lived in after hours in the second half of the fifties had already seemed to anticipate much of the spirit of the 1960s. This was an error. It was quite different. If there is anything that symbolizes the 1960s it is rock music, which began its world conquest in the second half of the 1950s and immediately opened a profound gap between the pre- and post-1955 generations.
It was impossible not to be aware of this gap, as when my wife and I, in Berkeley and San Francisco for a few days at the height of the ‘flower-power’ year of 1967, visited a former au pair of Andy and Julia in Haight-Ashbury, where she was then discovering herself. It was obviously marvellous for the girl, usually as level-headed a Netherlander as you could hope for, and fun to watch, but how could it be our scene? We were taken to the Fillmore, the giant ballroom throbbing with strobe lights and excessive amplification. I cannot even remember what Bay Area groups we heard – the only act that made any sense to me that night was one of the Motown girl groups – was it the Marvelettes or the Supremes? – which swung in the familiar way of black r&b. Perhaps this is not surprising. To enjoy that year in San Francisco one really had to be permanently high on something, preferably acid, and we were not. Indeed, by virtue of our age, we were a textbook illustration of the phrase ‘If you can remember anything of the 1960s, you were not part of them.’
Nor could the jazz world, with the rarest exceptions, understand rock. It reacted to rock music with the same sort of contempt as it had traditionally reacted to the Mickey Mouse music of the old pit and commercial bands. Perhaps even with greater contempt, since the men who played the most boring of barmitzvah gigs were at least professionals. Conversely, within a few years rock almost killed jazz. The generational gap between those for whom the Rolling Stones were gods and those