Dave Barry on 1960s

“Another area in which my son makes me feel old is fashion. Especially hair fashion. I've always considered myself extremely liberal when it came to hair, because I remember how much I hated the ahir hassles I went through back in the sixties when I had long hair. I'd be walking past a clot of geezers who were sitting in front of a volunteer fire department, hoping somebody's house would catch fire so they could watch the trucks pull out, and one of them would inevitably look at me and say in a tone of voice suggesting that this was the cleverest and most original remark ever thought up by anybody with the possible exception of Mark Twain, "Hey, is that a BOY or a GIRL??" This awesome display of wit never failed to absolutely slay the other geezers, who'd laugh themselves into various stages of coronary seizure ("har har har har hack hack hack hack hawk hawk HAWK SPIT"), and I, being a Flower Child Peace Person in the Summer of Love, would give them the finger. But I would also vow to myself that no matter how old I got, I would never, ever, hassle anybody about his haircut. Of course, back then there was no such thing as "punk."”

“By the eighties, a lot of radio stations, realizing the size of the market out there, had started playing sixties music again. They called it "classic rock," because they knew we'd be upset if they came right out and called it what it is, namely "middle-aged-person-nostalgia-music." It's a very popular format now. You drive through a major urban area and push the "scan" button on your car radio, and you'll probably hear a dozen "classic rock" stations, ten of which will be playing "Doo-wah-diddy-diddy." (The other two will be playing commercials featuring "Doo-wah-diddy-diddy." We hear "classic rock" being played constantly in elevators, department stores, offices, churches, operating rooms, the space shuttle, etc. Almost every sixties group with at least one remaining non-dead member has reunited and bought new dentures and gone on tour, sometimes using special guitars equipped with walkers. And so, because we get to represent the world's largest summer horde, we get to hear Our Music all the time. We're wrapped in a snug, warm coccoon of sixtiesness, and we actually think that we're still With It. Whereas in fact we are nowhere near It. The light leaving from It right now will not reach us for several years.”

“We were there during the legendary sixties, with visions and insights and lava lamps and black lights and sitar music and really dynamite home-grown weed that would get you high in only 178 tokes. We lit candles and sat around listening to John Lennon sing, with genuine passion in his voice, about how he was the egg man, and they were the egg men, and he was the walrus, and by God we knew exactly what he meant. That was the level of hipness that we attained, in My Generation. Oh sure, people tried to put us down, just because we got around. Our parents would come into our bedroom, where we were listening to the opening guitar lick of "Purple Haze" with the stereo cranked up loud enough to be audible on Mars (which is where Jimi Hendrix originated) and they'd hold their hands over their ears and make a face as though they were passing a kidney stone the size of a volleyball and they'd shout: "You call that music? That sounds like somebody strangling a cat. Our parents' idea of swinging music was Frank Sinatra snapping his fingers in front of sixty-seven guys who looked like your dentist playing the trombone. They were totally Out Of It, our parents. Hopeless. They were so square they though that people, other tan Maynard G. Krebs, actually used words like "square." As Bob Dylan, who as so hip that sometimes even he didn't understand what he meant, put it: "Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" That was our parents: Mr. and Mrs. Jones. But not us. We defined hip. We set all kinds of world hipness records, and we were sure they'd never be broken.”