Monterey led to 'The 00's Summer of Procrastination'

June 16^th – I think one of the things that sadden me most about the ‘then and now’ syndrome that we will all, in our advancing years (should we be granted the opportunity to do so…growing old is better than the alternative, remember) one thing we’ll all go through is the difference in belief.

Nope, this is not a religious polemic, honest, my religious convictions are reserved for face-to-face chats. What I’m writing about is the core beliefs of, predominantly, the younger generation, of which I was one once; I wasn’t born this age and a cynical moaning old git to boot, I grew into it. The fact that it now fits me like a second skin is just proof a chameleon can change its spots (now there’s a mixed metaphor for you). Neither am I running the old, my time was better than your time routine either. Each generation and age range has its own idiosyncrasies, hopes and ruinations; the tune may alter but the song remains the same (mixed metaphor two).

On this day in 1967 the first Monterey International Pop Festival in California was held. The bill was filled with what are now, in hindsight, the leading proponents of what can be classed as the beginning of the Summer of Love. The line-up included The Who, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix and The Animals to name but a few and it was The Animals that immortalised the event on their album, The Twain Shall Meet, released in 1968 with a track called…Monterey. But that’s not what I want to write about; this isn’t me running the old, my bands were better than your bands routine.

Whatever ‘we’ as a collective think about the Summer of Love or Flower Power or any of those other epithets that were posted on behalf of the psychedelic generation, both by newspapers to trivialise the movement and by politicians to discredit it, the one overriding fact that cannot be removed and that I still, now, at my advanced years feel in my breast is the we really believed that we could change things, and for the better. Now, whether we could in any way shape or form have actually done that is irrelevant, what counted was the fact that we believed we could, and that’s what frightened governments shitless.

Privately, the behaviour of JFK and MLK may have been questionable but there is no doubt their beliefs and speeches contained the elements of what Flower Power stood for. That war was indeed not the answer. That at some time you would have to sit down and talk to people that, in truth, you weren’t at all comfortable with and hear them say things that you weren’t at all comfortable in hearing, but that this was the only way forward; the flower in the gun barrel wasn’t just a cheap shot. At the beginning of the 14/18 war and throughout the four years of its slaughter people were vilified in the streets, tarred and feathered, shot by firing squad, beaten, humiliated for refusing to join the merry men in the trenches. Throughout the 55/75 Vietnam War people openly defied their government’s draft for them to join the merry men in the jungles and were supported and applauded for it. Ban the Bomb became a cause that could be won and was, to a greater extent, and at one and the same time the first real changes began to show in the equality of the sexes. We really believed that we could change things, and for the better; believed it.

Then came the Thatcher years and union disbandment, the three-day-week engineered by capitalist Britain to bring the working classes to heel and, in the final analysis, it took Bush and Blair to finally fuck this belief over, to rape it – as they say – like a lion on a lamb but in a bad way. Now, I talk to folk who are of the same age as I was back then and that’s the main difference; they no longer believe they can change anything; not even their political minds; and this isn’t me running the old, my politicians were better than your politicians routine. The dilemma is that the parties are indistinguishable from one another, now it’s all about style over substance and to follow the reasoning is to follow the money, so all that will become available is more of the same. What’s to vote for there?