This Way To The Sixties: John Lennon's Death Five Years After
By Paul Cameron Brown
It was a red letter day and all within a decade, the sixties.
Psychadelic and all because the Electric Circus opened up
Walking Yonge Street in the December cold, aging
"hippies", the word itself a joke, reminisced:
National Guardsmen, for one, doing post-mortems on
their rifle butts, record covers carrying the first life-
sized zippers and mashed up rubber dolls; Cher Bono
getting up nerve and a career to name her child
Chastity but walking off with a card.
By the end of the decade they were asking questions.
We had landed on the moon per schedule but who
would have believed in the efficacy of Rock or the
efficency of napham before Vietnam? Frosted hair.
Body paint. The sixties produced a lot of it. With one
bullet, the Beatles, the secular saviours, were
breaking up. Before they had finished reuniting the
world. Before the history of music could be written.
Before John Lennon, did we dare trust ourselves,
World leaders, gurus?
That was the meaning of the assassination.
History won't budge an inch for neophytes, The
Clockwork Orange was instructive but didn't go far
enough. Frodo wouldn't live in Yorkville today if
given a chance.
Now for the most poignant mental lapse of the Candle
carriers, mourners and mock biers with frozen
flowers. Simply the reminder half the population
didn't share his vision. Veterans grumbled. The press
paid more attention to this solitary event than
Armistice Day. Schoolchildren tittered. What was
that? The so-called generation gap seemed poised on
that comment. Then John's comment the Beatles were
more popular than Jesus Christ
Donovan didn't survive tunes like Epistle to Dippy.
Lennon won't survive the Elvis Beatle syndrome.
The lights are going out on the sixties,
The eighties are austere.
Cherry cokes are the memory of a laugh.
The Purple Onion only causes perplexion like Charlie
Brown's Great Pumpkin.
Forget about words like "catalyst".
Lennon was the conflageration.
Graffiti after him has renewed licence.