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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

In the transition is the interesting stuff

I think I love the '60s because it was a decade of such utter transition.  Compare 1958 with 1972 and the world is a very, very different place.  And it's inside these transitions where the most interesting things happen, new ideas clashing with old ones, nobody sure what's gonna win or what new ideas are gonna stick.  Allot of people in the '50s thought rock n roll was a fad that would soon be replaced by Calypso or Bossa Nova.
When I was writing SSS, I wanted to place it in the exact transition between the naivete of the early '60s-- where the most important thing on most kids minds was What new dance is gonna replace The Twist?!-- and the bitter cynicism of the late '60s/'70s.  It's in that transition when garage bands sprang up everywhere and teens were trying to write dance songs, but with fuzzed out Farfisa organs and reverb-drenched guitar chords.  I found this video on a bootleg DVD of Garage Bands several years ago at Dragon*Con.  It was significantly influential (along with the Hullabaloo DVD box set) in the look of SSS.

One video in particular really struck me-- PSYCHOTIC REACTION by The Count Five.  It's been a couple years since I've see this clip, but I remember a moment-- when the garage-pop repetition turns into an atonal, off-time guitar solo and the Go-Go Girls have a look of panic because their happy dance steps no longer fit here.  They don't know what to do.



Looking at this now, that moment is clearly in my head only.  Regardless, this song will always represent the exact moment when innocence is lost and and the '50s became the '70s.  After this, a whole lot of music became too self-aware, less fun and people started dancing with themselves instead of each other.

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