Culturally this is no small matter. Moreover, natural laws of cultural survival are at stake as well.
It’s not that bunch of old farts simply think their music tastes were more civilized. You should make a study of every generation and compare, only not about the music itself, but the way it impacted, maybe even defined the generation who listened to it.
I was a college sophomore when “Born Free” was released. It was a best selling book, and was about the great wildlife parks of Africa, which Americans had had a romance with into my dad’s pre-World War II generation.
I worked at our university book store and a small blonde student, dressed hippie-ish, and definitely not from Kentucky, came in and thumbing through the LP’s asked be about John Barry, who did the music to “Born Free”. I had known Barry through the James Bond films, and because of that music I planned to see “Born Free”. I loved living the way they did, near a national game park.
I probably saw every major film he every composed…”The Wong Box”, “The Chase” “Lion in Winter”, “Monte Walsh”, “Robin and Marian” and (still my favorite still now) “Out of Africa”. His music helped make super-stars out of those films’ stars.
And “Born Free” was among his first, for it defined a part of the 1965 Baby-Boomers’ soul that simply is gone these days.
About that hippie-girl in the book-store, after talking to her, I told her the film was in town and it wasn’t a long walk, if she wanted to see it. (No, I didn’t have a car, and my bicycle-built-for-two was in the shop.)
Kirsten was a city girl, near Boston I think, and I think she had never heard the story. It was a about a female lion cub, named Elsa, that had been taken in and adopted by Joy Adamson, the wife of a national game park in Kenya. She and her husband decided to raise Elsa and then release her back into the wild, bringing the world’s attention to preservation of animal life in Africa. It was a nationwide best-seller, when I was in high school.(Both she and her husband were later murdered by poachers.)
Kirsten was visibly moved by the film, and we talked about it on the half-mile walk back to my apartment, where we sat down and had a adult beverage and talked some more.
So, we went the next night. It was finals week going into Christmas, and she said she was going home for the holidays. A couple of weeks later I got a note from her, only in San Francisco telling me she’d decided to go out there with a friend, and I never heard from her again.
She may have had a “wide-screen” religious experience, I can’t say, but my generation was that way. But I still think of that sweet little innocent who was illuminated and just had to go the Coast. And that film lit the spark. I hope mushrooms didn’t change her perspective about the world. But after I left university and the Army, I spent the next 30 years climbing mountain trails and sleeping on hard ground, and “the film music” of our generation had a lot to do with those expeditions.
This film captured “being born free” to millions of young Americans in ways that it seems is no longer available to younger Millennials and GenZ’s, and maybe even some GenXers, all because they live in a 6″ tech bubble. My generation has simply seen and felt more than modern kids, and we need to find a way to reverse that, including washing a few mouths out soap.
IF you’re a Baby-Boomer and YOU HAVE A REMEMBRANCE of how music of the 60s-70s affected you, and that inner glow has somehow shaped you into a wider-eyed, less vain individual than from the narcissism of the Millennials and GenZ generations, send me a note along with the song, and I’ll add a section right here, with full credit. Please write your own 500-word piece to accompany it, and I’ll keep these remembrances front page through the next year, and maybe even into the next. We have to provide those generations with options they don’t even know are out there.
Just let me know the version of the song you like best; and I’ll find a video-track. (email: Tektrans@msn.com, or this site.)
Our mission:
There’s a whole lot of me-me-meism out there, and we’re being told by intellectual luminaries such as David (Li’l Davey) Hogg that their intellectual perspectives will control the political landscape by 2024.
No culture, no political control. That was the way the Nazis tried it.
Think about it.
