Phil Chesser / Chronicle contributor
For my birthday in 1969 my brother gave me Abbey Road, the Beatles' next to last album. In the intervening years my children and then my grandchildren have become Beatles fans. My 21-year-old daughter (yes, I have a child that young) has many Beatle tunes on her MP3.
I became aware of the Beatles in 1964 when they burst upon the American scene with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. After that I heard their songs again and again on the radio and especially at work on the ship’s entertainment system. (I had been in the Navy about ten years by then.) I heard the songs so often I still know most of the words.
At that time I was (and still am) a jazz enthusiast but I always loved rhythm and blues and then its offspring, rock and roll, but I looked askance at the Beatles. Who were these unkempt upstarts in ill fitting suits who needed a good barber and a competent tailor? But then the tunes won me over.
In the strictest sense the Beatles were more British music hall than rock and roll, especially by the time Abbey Road came along. “Something,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and “Octopus’s Garden” are more music hall and novelty than blues or rock and roll. (“Come Together” now underscores a TV ad.) Earlier albums like the very imaginative White Album, from which “Helter Skelter” comes (more about that below), and beautiful songs like “And I Love Her” and “Yesterday” established the Beatles as important 20th century popular music composers.
Also in 1969 American Neal Armstrong walked on the moon, giving Americans reasons to feel patriotic, especially with the anti-war and racial turmoil that then plagued the cities. The year before, 1968 (the year the White Album appeared), had seen assassinations and riots in Chicago. 1969 was a slight improvement. Even Woodstock, that demonstration of mass debauchery still celebrated by aging flower children, was better than the hate America, anti-establishment sloganeering that characterized earlier years of the decade. If I had to choose between stoned, mud-wallowing hippies and angry, rock throwing anti-war demonstrators, I would take the former.
That same year my brother, who gave me Abbey Road, was a recovery swimmer on Apollo 11, the shot that put an American on the moon. After a couple of deployments to Vietnam with the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, he went to work on Apollo, participating in three recoveries, 6, 10, and 11. He then left the Navy and with two others bought a 36-foot ketch and sailed the Caribbean for a year.
Additionally, 1969 witnessed the murders of Sharon Tate and the LaBianca family, which were masterminded by psychopath Charles Manson, who claimed to have been inspired by the White Album’s “Helter Skelter,” the name Manson family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi gave his book about the murders and the trial.
Manson’s fevered reading of “Helter Skelter” made him believe that the current national turmoil would culminate in a race war between black and white. That didn’t happen, but the 1960s greatly accelerated, if they didn’t begin, the moral and cultural rot that has given the nation increased promiscuity, increased out of wedlock births, decaying central cities, the decline of respect for marriage and the family, the dumbing down of education, a popular culture that is an open sewer, and a president and a White House full of advisors whose ruling philosophy is informed by the decadent 1960s.
Except for Tate/LaBianca 1969 was festive, but 40 years later we see the ugly result of 1960’s nihilism. I doubt the nation will ever recover.
