"Ain't got no class,/ Ain't got no mother,/ Ain't got no father,/ Ain't got no culture." The generation that let down its Hair in 1968 and sang those lyrics gave birth to forms that still shape popular music, literature, film and television. Laugh-In begot Saturday Night Live. Julia paved the way for The Cosby Show. 2001: A Space Odyssey has metamorphosed into Star Wars. Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix spawned Heavy Metal. Big Bird wanders down Sesame Street, still a hippie innocent, a naive, ever hopeful thing with feathers.
Hair alone, on Broadway and through its many "tribes," or traveling companies, launched an army of performers who went on to mold the culture of the past two decades. Among them: the proto-punker Meat Loaf, Donna Summer, the Disco Queen of the late '70s, and Diane Keaton, who neatly embodied the postrevolutionary woman in Annie Hall. All ancestries link up in 1968.
Swept away were the infallibility of the Establishment, the virtues of sobriety and conformity, as well as Fred and Ginger, Lucy and Ricky, Mom and apple pie. The American empire was no longer propelled by imperial visionaries but rather by doubting, probing, experimenting empiricists. Assessing the message of The Graduate, film critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "Life, today, in our world, is not worth living unless one can prove it day by day, by values that ring true day by day." The Graduate was the top-grossing film of 1968.
In his novel Couples, John Updike was also tearing down facades, capturing the heavy breathing of the Protestant middle-class and other suburban satyrs and nymphs. "Adultery lit her from within," he wrote of one character, "like the ashen mantle of a lamp, or as if an entire house of gauzy hangings and partitions were ignited but refused to be consumed and, rather, billowed and glowed, its structure incandescent." Overwritten, perhaps, but in 1968 sex was a particularly American theme. As another Updike character said, "We're trying to break back into ((hedonism)). It's not easy."
Amid the tearing down, Freedom, Love and Peace were set up as idols. The worshipers were themselves semidivine: the new noble savages rhapsodized by the Who, the Stones, the denizens of Haight-Ashbury. As Steppenwolf sang in 1968, "Like a true nature child/ We were born, born to be wild/ We have climbed so high/ Never want to die."
But die they did, even the most brilliant among them. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. Burnt-out martyrs to the cause, done in by drugs and alcohol. The nobility of their nihilism is, today, a nightmare, the dark side of the force set free in the '60s. The paeans to the generation's liberties echo dolorously, as Love has truly become as strong as Death. "Sometimes," ( Eric Clapton said recently, "you need to hear some harmonic softeners, some quiet, to kind of quench the fire and calm yourself." But the fire cannot be fully extinguished. Though they abhor its destructiveness, those who lived through 1968 are still hooked on the energy, prisoners of their old freedoms. They may now feel safe, but they are sorry. For they were born, born to be wild.