C. Heath Johnson, Approximately
Originally published November 5, 2012
The year is 1967. The Summer of Love: The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which Rolling Stone called "the most important rock & roll album ever made ... by the greatest rock & roll group of all time," and followed it with Magical Mystery Tour; Jefferson Airplane gave us Surrealistic Pillow and turned on a dime in the fall with their blistering psychedelic second album After Bathing at Baxter's; The Doors stunned the musical status quo with their iconic debut album The Doors and doubled down later that year with Strange Days; and Steppenwolf exploded with "heavy metal thunder" when they delivered the all-time motorcycle anthem Born To Be Wild which featured prominently in "Easy Rider" and on their debut album; a little British trio calling themselves Cream put together a powerhouse album called Disraeli Gears which featured Slowhand himself, Eric Clapton, along with legendary drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce; Jimi Hendrix blasted the continent with Are You Experienced and Axis Bold As Love; The Moody Blues incorporated an orchestra into their ground-breaking concept album Days Of Future Passed; the Monkees offered the world their comic answer to the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" with a goofy TV show and their first album Headquarters; and, oh yes, a moderately talented twenty-six-year-old named Bob Dylan released his eighth album, John Wesley Harding, marking his return to acoustic music and traditional roots after three albums of electric rock music.
All very exciting, eh? A great time to be alive. But wait a minute. Summer of Love- are you kidding? Astronauts Col. Virgil I. Grissom, Col. Edward White II, and Lt. Cmdr. Roger B. Chaffee were killed in a fire during a test launch in January of that year because NASA was racing against the clock to meet President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade; in June Israeli and Arab forces battled in the infamous Six-Day war that ended with Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank where my father-in-law was born; July saw Detroit in flames as seven thousand National Guardsmen had to be brought in to aid police as racial riots broke out in the Motor City that wickedly hot summer, and similar outbreaks in New York City's Spanish Harlem, Rochester, N.Y., Birmingham, Ala., and New Britain, Connecticut all signaled the end to a modern version of Reconstruction; and, oh yes, I almost forgot. America was mired in a little conflict you may have heard about . . . Vietnam.
I am twelve. It's late November, and my family is driving from Somerville, New Jersey, to Winchester, Virginia, for the annual Jones Thanksgiving gathering at my Aunt Jane's house on Cork Street. The cold, low grey skies hint of an early snow. My kid brother David and I are in the backseat of the Green Hornet, Dad's nickname for his forest green Mustang. As I watch the clouds for signs of snowflakes my mind wanders. I think about my girlfriend Amy back home and about San Francisco. I imagine the awkward days ahead visiting with cousins and uncles I hardly know, all of whom are from a far more grown-up realm than I am comfortable in or even know anything about. I visualize the lavish turkey dinner ahead and Granny and spice cake and milk shakes and pulling the trigger on the old Parker double barrel shotgun in a clearing somewhere out in the country. Mom's locked into her own thoughts, out of range, as the stark and frosty landscape whisks by outside her window. Dad's driving with his usual stern and enclosed concentration, and David . . . God knows what's going through his warped little eight-year-old mind.
Yet, above all of my own musings and thoughts, in my head I hear a song: Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower:
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late".
I am twelve. Too young to care about racial riots in Detroit. Too young to know or care anything about the psychedelic hippie movement being born in Height Ashbury and Berkeley. Too young to know or care anything about burning astronauts in Florida, or burning jungles and villagers in Vietnam.
But that's just it. I did know, and I did care.
It was the music. It was all those albums. When we arrived in Winchester, the first thing I did after the required greetings and perfunctory cheek tweaking, was find an excuse to race upstairs and sneak into my cousin Warren's bedroom to see what albums he had collected since the last visit. Thanksgiving of 1967 it was Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, the one with "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love." Grace Slick's soaring vibrato voice exhorting me to "Feed your head! Feed your head!" I may have only been twelve, but I knew what she was telling me to do. It wasn't to drop acid; she wanted the older kids to do that. No, what she was telling me to do was feed my head with the music, and the words in the music.
"There must be some way out of here" said the joker to the thief
"There's too much confusion", I can't get no relief."
My Dad hated rock music, hated long hair, and would never have allowed music like Jefferson Airplane or The Doors to be played in his house. It was eventually, but not in 1967. I don't think he even knew who Bob Dylan was, though surely he had heard the name. In any case, the siren pull was too powerful, my willpower too weak, and so that Thanksgiving I snuck out of my Aunt Jane's house one cold afternoon and ventured down to the local record store. With my allowance money in hand I bought my very first 45 single, the song that pulled on my mind and my heart, the song that filled my imagination with trippy fantasies of Amy and me someday being married and living the utopian life on an emerald green hill in the meadows my heroes in San Francisco and London alluded to in their anthems and jams. The record was "Daydream Believer" by the Monkees. I couldn't wait to get home and play it on the little portable record player in my bedroom when my Dad wasn't home, and to maybe try to introduce my mom to the idea of pop music, since she was by far the more open-minded of the two of them. I stuffed it under the clothes in my suitcase and congratulated myself for joining forces with the hippies, for my foray into Rebellion. For risking punishment for the sake of music and social consciousness. Or, in the case of "Daydream Believer," for investing my allowance and my ears in Love.
When I was fourteen I had long hair and owned all the albums that are still considered 60s classics today, as well as quite a few that weren't. My Dad knew, but through negotiation we had by then reached something of an unbalanced compromise: I could own and play the records, but I had to keep the volume down, and Dad was not to be subjected to the bohemian lyrics and jungle rhythms (Oh, if only he had ever taken the time to sit and listen to The Doors' The Soft Parade or the Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil with me! Alas, the closest we ever came to a mutual understanding was Jesus Christ Superstar and a few of the Beatles' lighter numbers). Ever.
By the time I was sixteen the blissful, naive dream of Woodstock had come and gone, and the Stones' Altamont disaster had shocked an entire generation out of its sleepy stoned stupor. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison were dead. The 60s were over, and so was my fantasy of tie-dye utopia. Shell-shocked and disheartened, I wandered the streets of my mind all hours of the day and night, fearlessly. One freezing night in January I tried to run away from home, only to discover that all I was doing was trying to escape myself. I had no direction home, no money, no food to eat, not even a place to stay the night. After only a few hours, I gave up and turned around and slinked sadly back home, back to myself. And there was Bob Dylan again, telling me personally what he had already said to the Woodstock nation:
Nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
I know what you're thinking: sixteen. Sophos moros: "wise baby." Too young to know, to wild to care. But I did know, and I did care. It was the music, still the music. The music more than ever. I adopted multiple personalities- Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, and later, even Alice Cooper. I was pushing my way past authority at every level and in every direction: parents, teachers, and in my mind, governments. Arguing that big corporations were sucking the life out of America and that the Army was taking the life out of America, I was loud and aggressive, outspoken, demanding, critical. I did and said outrageous things, sometimes because my pen or my mouth got away from me and I lost control of my own vehicle, but more often because I had a calculated purpose in mind. Inside, though, I was still the same scared and insecure little boy I had always been, just wanting to be loved and trying desperately to figure out who I was and why I was here.
In each successive decade, the search continued, and in its various forms and incarnations, so did the rebellion. At thirty I was supposed to feel like an adult, but I didn't. At forty I was supposed to have it all figured out, but I didn't. At fifty I thought it was too late to start all over, but it wasn't.
Unlike Bob Dylan, who at 71, sang the other night, "I used to care, but things have changed," I still do care. Like Dylan, I am still writing, still trying to figure out who I am, still crashing into people's lives, trying to understand the few solid and lasting relationships that remain, remembering from time to time all the others and wondering why they played out. My words may not be as rhythmic and catchy as Bob's, and I don't have his poetic genius, but I can say this much at least about myself: I'm not Jim Morrison, or Mick Jagger, or even Bob Dylan, approximately. I'm C. Heath Johnson.
