When Adele sings ‘we could have had it all’ she really had no idea of the sentiments it evokes in us baby boomers. Boy did we have it all……and then some. I feel it’s about time I thanked my mother for immaculately timing my conception, I mean who would have wanted to be born in any other time! Growing up I would hear my brother playing his records in his bedroom whilst getting ready for those endless nights of revelry. Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran until along came those lads from Liverpool, The Beatles. The fifties moulded nicely into the sixties and throughout the decade our lives were enriched by an abundance of timeless music. Remembering talent isn’t hard because the reason it stays with you forever is it still sounds as fresh as the day you first heard it.
So much of the ‘love generation’ was to do with the music we were listening to, music to make us feel good, music we shared with one another. And it transcended all genres, you could like some of it or you could like all of it but you rarely liked none of it. Whilst we still had the lyrical genius of Dylan, the rock heroics of Hendrix and Zeppelin we also had the sweet soul music of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett.
Definition says that in general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. As a group, they claimed to be the healthiest, and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. Optimism was the name of the game. Why when everything was going so right could you ever foresee anything going wrong? One feature of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort and the change they were bringing about. They had fun, fun, fun til their daddy took the T Bird away.
Music changed and with it too the next generation, the boomers had boomed and the new breed had different values and a totally different outlook on life. The heady days of the sixties morphed in to a fairly more low key seventies. Nothing could last forever and the summer of love could never be replicated.
So many of those bands from that era stood the test of time and shaped our pop culture. The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Pink Floyd. The true rock stars are the ones who make a difference, who influence people. For ever.
