This service was born in a conversation that I had with Bob McKee just after he returned from a youth-group trip to Oklahoma City. He said that the youth had listened to music on much the trip and that they talked about their music in interesting ways. This story gave me the idea of putting together a pair of services on the music that had shaped the spirits of different generations, past and present. This service is about the music that shaped the spirit of Generation Past. On November 25, Ben will lead a service on the music that shaped the spirit of Generation Present. I drew the line between these two generations at Timothy Leary's threshold of trust. Leary once said, "Never trust anyone over 30," and today's service is about the music of the no-longer-trustworthy.
You'll hear a few spirit-shaping songs today, but most of the music that shaped our generation, you'll not hear, simply because there isn't time to play it. One of the songs you'll not hear is "I get by with a little help from my friends." However, that song is embodied in the service itself. My friends today are John, who's agreed to provide real music, Janet who is about 10 years down the road from me and who has a different persective on our music, Margaret Batschelet, who could not be here but who sent Ben as a surrogate, and most important, all of you. Please help us sing, even if you don't feel like it.
I must confess that the bulk of today's music was of my choice. I started by searching for something that shaped the spirit of generations before my own. Hearing nothing from them, i decided that the music that shaped their spirit must have been, well, spiritual music. This morning's prelude took me back, and was meant to take you back to a time when we sat in comforting, traditional church pews and took our solace from comforting, traditional religion. Sometime in the sixties, we left that place. Mike Nichols was one of the few that saw it coming.
He directed one of the most prophetic movies, perhaps, the most prophetic movie of all time, "The Graduate" with Ann Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, and Elaine Ross-and notably-the music of Simon and Garfinkel. "Mrs. Robinson" is significant, not just as part of this movie but also for its mocking, sacreligious lyrics. We, "the graduates," were the shock troops of the sixties. We knew that we had to break with the "plastic" generation, but we didn't know quite how. We tried confrontation, which often had the effect of landing us in jail or getting our heads bashed in. We also tried mockery, especially in our music. That's what you hear in "Mrs. Robinson," and in a great deal of the music of no-longer-trustworthy.
Better than Simon and Garfunkel at this game was the group that defined much of the music of our generation, The Beatles. At some point, around '65, I think, they shed their little-boy, "She loves me, yea, yea, yea" style and turned themselves into revolutionary musicians. Listen to "Let It Be." There is nothing the words to this song that make it extraordinary. (I've actually heard the words read from a Unity church pulpit, and could hardly stop myself from breaking out laughing.) Nor is there anything remarkable about the music itself. But the combination is dynamite. It says a lot about what was on our minds and in our hearts back then.
Music of the Beatles contributed more to the spirit of my generation than one can possibly imagine. More than that, the way they lived spawned a whole new lifestyle, one based on the conviction that peace, love, freedom (especially freedom to smoke dope) it's where it's at. I suppose that this spirit survives today in New Age culture, so it would be a shame if we didn't hear at least one hippie song today. This from the musical "Hair."
Our generation was at war and in war, so there was a darker side to all of our music. When I asked for contributions to this service, all of the suggestions, from John's "Blowin' in the Wind" to both of the songs you're about to hear reflect this darker side in different ways.
Our generation left home a long time ago, and we've never come back. Not that there was anything to come back to. We've spread out across the spiritual landscape. We killed God, and we found Jesus, and Buddha, and Mao. We smoked dope, and we stopped smoking, and we stopped a war. We gave birth to black power, pink power, women's lib, and Gaia consciousness. Some of us have settled down, finding, in liberalism, the same comfort that our parent found sitting in church and listening to Rock of Ages. Others, and I count myself among them, still wander the spiritual countryside. But wherever we went, we took our music with us. Or maybe it was the music that took us.
I'd like to close with the words and music of two musicians who lived through the whole thing. Joan Baez started as a folker in the early sixties. She never was much of a songwriter, but the song you'll hear in the postlude is one of the finest comments on the spirit of our generation. Pete Seeger is even older than Joan Baez. Indeed, Seeger is older than God. He's a Unitarian. He was propping up Woodie Guthrie and singing in union halls long before he wrote The Hammer Song. Our closing words are from an interview with Seeger that has to do with the children's song this morning.