That is 100% accurate. Singers and musicians like Jimi Hendrix were very influential. Here was a very talented man who put the counter-culture at the front and center. At the time: “Hey, Mr. Businessman. You can’t dress like me.” Of course not. And why would anyone? People who were highly skilled at using clothing to help promote the message had created a highly conformist sub-culture. A friend of mine went from average person to a product of Hippie boot camp. He wore the regulation clothes, had the regulation length hair, the regulation length chain, etc. His Hippie-speak was perfect. And his about-face, his turning away from what he had been taught, meant he had to smoke dope.
I saw him recently, and to my pleasant surprise, he said, “I got married.”
Most of these forces were already at play, and had been for a long time. Every generation has had its version of “rock and roll”. Indeed, the 1950s had its own youth culture as the first Baby Boomers entered adolescence. It’s in the 1950s that you see the first major breakthroughs by black artists who, through white proxies like Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, managed to get their songs on the radio, and by the latter half of the decade black artists like Chuck Berry and Ray Charles had made the first significant leaps from black culture to white culture.
The point of all of this is that trying to pull the 1960s out of its time, of what came immediately before it, is to leave it without context. That allows for these silly claims that the 1960s is where it all went downhill. Well, I don’t even agree there is a downhill, but if there was, then it began in the late 1940s, took a bit of a turn in the late 1950s when, at least in the entertainment industry, the growing popularity of black culture among suburban white kids was all but stamped out with Buddy Holly’s death, Elvis going into the army, and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis ending up on the wrong side of even the broader social norms.
Of course, there were Liverpudlians that had been eagerly buying up every American rock and roll and country record they could get their hands on, who worshiped at the altar that the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis and the other rock and roll and R&B titans had first built, then reintroduced America to the music it had all but lost by 1960. It was happy (and sometimes a little raunchy) music, not saccharine high school dance rubbish, and along with it came a young culture that viewed (often unfairly) the older generation as a dull, uninspired bunch. They didn’t want the 1950s ideal.
Want to see where the 1960s that some here loath so much started. Going watch a Hard Days Night. An entire generation watched that movie, and as Roger Ebert put it, “left the theater and didn’t cut their hair again until the 1970s”.
