Newport 1965
(Or Dylan Goes Electric)
This was the dream concert
folk was at its peak
Pete Seeger, Joan Baez,
Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary
Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash,
Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia
But the prize, the dream was
to see Dylan play Blowin’ In the Wind
acoustically.
The folkie purists were shocked,
the dream had died.
Dylan played Maggie’s Farm with an
electric guitar and their world came
to an end.
The Beatles, song stylists
so far ahead of their time
Their music, to harmony
what poetry is to rhyme
Gen X or the
MTV generation.
See a big growth in the
Dept. of education.
A generation of latchkey
Kids home alone.
Rocky hits the box office,
With Sylvester Stallone.
New music with attitude,
The intro to Punk Rock.
Women working,
punching a time clock.
They heard Heavy Metal
Being born.
They witnessed the troops
In Desert Storm.
The first generation to play
Video games.
They watched the Challenger
explode into flames.
Another great movie the
Breakfast Club.
They were the era for
The War on Drugs.
They saw the emergence of
The AIDS epidemic.
They remember terrorism
at the Munich Olympics.
No more Berlin Wall to separate
the east and west sides.
They remember Jim Jones,
And his mass suicide.
They can come off
As a little cynical.
On social issues they
Are more liberal.
The Exxon oil spill,
They tried to lie.
The divorce rate hits,
An all-time high.
They had cable TV to
keep them company.
They experienced a
Single-parent family.
Turbo1904 ?
teen magazine was popular in 1965 when I was thirteen
mom had Better Homes and Garden, Redbook and Women’s Day.
it was only right that my identical twin and I would have Teen.
mom’s magazines were about housekeeping; ours were about fashion.
we all wanted to grow up and become Sally Field or Tina Turner.
the Beatles shocked our parents on the Ed Sullivan Show.
folk singer mama cass’s voice and looks were known to all of us.
we were listening to the Beach Boys sing about California girls.
Los Angeles teen movie stars showed off mop-tops and Twiggy cuts.
daisies and yellow happy faces were sprinkled lavishly throughout.
subtle hints were showing us what to wear.
hip huggers and bell bottoms were in; plaids were out.
teen Magazine teamed up with Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.
together they taught us a bunch of dance moves.
the Loco-motion, watusi and smashed potato to name three.
our super models were Twiggy and we loved Sonny and Cher.
.
now we knew how to dress, how to dance and what to eat.
our favorite teens were advertising things we needed to be groovy.
we were eager to follow their lead, not having our own identity yet.
Anti-Poem— “Going To See Honey Sanchez”
gloria and me we take a yellow taxi from canoga park
we go to see honey sanchez at the olympic on grand
she be the dragon lady on skates she and terri lynch
both of them girls be tough as nails in their ripe beauty
both wearing thunderbird white riding fire and blood
lighting up the banked track against the texas outlaws
gloria keep telling shirley hardman she be dead wrong
stop your mean ways shirley girl stop beating on honey
baby she say to me could I get her a soda and peanuts
the crowd be all noisy tonight and I can smell hot dogs
the people here they be rowdy and angry they scream
cuss words eating greasy onion rings and drinking beer
my gloria she be saying only one skater be her top hero
I says who and she smiles and say it be honey sanchez—
skater dragon lady at 18th and grand in her ripe beauty
each conifer branch
bright with strands of silver blink -
white christmas crooning
11/18/2021
HMS
I’m Henry the Eighth I am
Henry the Eighth I am I am!
I remember singing this
At the top of my lungs
at church camp when I was twelve
Thank you Herman’s Hermits
My camp mate, Clarisse had introduced me
To Peter Noone, and the other Hermits.
Herman’s Hermits they called themselves
I had no idea how I survived without
knowing about them
When I hear “Tell me Baby,
Mrs. Brown you have a lovely daughter,
Dream on,” and “Listen people”
I begin to drive a bit faster,
Turning back into the teenager I used to be.
I’m Henry the Eighth I am,
Henry the Eighth, I am, I am…..
Singing this immediately changes me
back into a preteenager, and makes me smile.
Down where the sun never shows
the wind never blows
the rain never goes,
where patent air pumped clean and fresh
slowly circulates.
In the blue-green neon light
a lone Jamaican, sad for the sun,
swish-swishes with a bristle-tufted broom
down the long bright corridors of tiles.
Gone are Betjeman's bronze electroliers,
gone like the trolleybus and EMBANKMENT tram;
gone are the sepia prints of Rayners Lane.
Sixty feet below Green Park
shop-girl, businessman and clerk
are swallowed whole by silver glow-worm trains
that burrow through the city in the dark.
In high school, I had a Falcon made by Ford.
That was just about all that we could afford.
It was from the fleet of Ma Bell.
They drove it a lot, I could tell.
Graduating high school, it was my reward.
It came from the year of 1965.
That was before many of us were alive.
Transmission was a three speed stick.
Sometimes, driving it made me sick.
For more than two years, that was all I could drive.
Newport Folk Festival 1965.
Behind the mirror is where we all
Tend to lurk,
Suffering through the pain of glass.
No one likes change,
Sometimes it is almost viewed as a sin.
Then you are punished
For attaining a higher majesty,
An alliance nearly gone.
But the times they were a changing
Folk had to realise,
A new power was being born
The climate just right for change.,
To plug in to the new.
After all a mirror image
Is the same,
But I suppose it is how
You look that matters,
Not what you see.
It was the orthodoxy
Of one Man that changed,
Someone who dared to be different.
It is some what ironic
That he said adieu,
With an acoustic version of
“It’s all over now , baby blue.”
But then,
The rest is history.
The headline screamed, or so it seemed,
to those who had known her well.
Said: Killer's Confession Solves Case
(from eleven years ago).
The headline shrieked so now at last
we would know all the horror
of how she was strangled
when they were both drunk
and high on something evil
when he stuffed her body in a log.
Today, his conscience broke down.
She was a sweet big-hearted woman
living homeless in an alcoholic fog.
She kept coming around to the rooms of A.A.
and even though for her we would pray,
we worried her days might be few.
Because he finally confessed
manslaughter is the charge he will do.
Twenty years in jail.
Twenty years seems way too few
for the Dixie we once knew.
1965
Yes, I'm the last baby boomer
too young for Woodstock, Kennedy
too old now to pretend
But I am the People
I'm this generation
freedom has been my friend
Call me niave, I still believe
we are all our beautiful color
our sister, father, brother
We are all Eve
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