The Summer of Corporate Love

Chances are you don't watch it, but there is a TV program on Sunday called CBS Sunday Morning, that for my money is better than 60 Minutes. The biggest difference is that the morning program is buried in Sunday morning TV wasteland, while the big-time news show is on at the perfect time for a big-time news show.

This morning, there was a story about the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, of which I have vague memories, mostly because I was 9 years old and not yet into psychedelic drugs, and partly because my father had died in May of that year, and for me it was summer, but there was precious little love.

The focus of the Sunday Morning piece was the nostalgia that is brought about by the so-called Summer of Love. I say so-called because for most of those involved it it, the Summer of Love was 1966. The following year was the summer that the media latched onto it and made it the cultural event that it has become. That's where I come in.

Most of us in the Blogosphere bemoan the idea that big media latches onto something and jerks it off until it becomes cliche. Every little event that is capable of selling advertising is sold, every big time sporting event is moved to prime-time and every popular concept is copied until it disappears into its own nonsense. It's nice to know that sometimes it isn't just modern culture that does such things.

Scott Mckenzie did a song (written by John Phillips) called "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" and thousands of people did what the song said. Shortly thereafter, big media (including 60 Minutes) did stories about the hippie counter-culture and the race was on.

America's version of "The Hippie" was the kid giving the peace sign, encrusted in flowers and tie-dyed T-shirt, while the reality, as you can imagine, was quite different. Nevertheless, the summer of 1967 marked the end of the hippie movement. It would survive in fits and starts through such media creations as Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and The Monkees TV shows, but, for those in on the ground floor of the movement, the thrill was gone, and as happens now, big business had sucked the will out of the people who founded something that was supposed to change the world. What they found was that the world does not want to be changed, and if they want to live differently, the fewer people who know about it, the better.

For me, as a nine-year old, my view of the world was skewed by both television and what the "squares" [adults] told me. Music was always the glue, and as such, it remains. Glue bonds. As they said in this morning's program, the real geniuses of the time spent their energy creating music. People like John Phillips, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Grateful Dead and countless others who tried ... albeit unsuccessfully ... to change the world. What they would find is that the world is a big place controlled by people who wish to shape ideas in such a way that they can earn money from them. This works in opposition to those in the business of earning money from things that they perceive as ground-breaking or ... God forbid ... popular.

It isn't so much different than what happens now, some 40 years later. Popular TV shows, music, movies or pop-culture are imitated until their energy is sapped and the original idea is rendered inert. That is why I've always been comfortable with bands like Umphrey's McGee and Gov't Mule and TV shows that are not that popular. Leave me alone, and I'll wallow in my happiness. If you don't like it, mores the better. Once big business and corporate media gets hold of something it becomes mass-market peace signs and mass-produced tie-dyed T-shirts. Spare me.

You might think that modern life is much different than the life of your parents or (egad) your grandparents, but trust me, it is not.