The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “He’s at a meeting,” the secretary of the c. of the b. told us. “The past week, it’s been one hectic meeting after another. Go take a rest in his office. It’s very restful. It’s very mellow.”

  We rested there for a few minutes, in one of several immense leather armchairs, looking at Oriental rugs and a white ceiling embossed with cherubs and figures of the zodiac. Set on a bookshelf was an old-fashioned mahogany radio, a Stromberg-Carlson of early-thirties vintage. “I polish that old radio myself,” the c. of the b.’s secretary told us. “Everybody around here loves it.”

  John Updike

  JUNE 5, 1965 (“NOTES AND COMMENT”)

  WE CONFESS OURSELF pleased that the “big-bang” theory of cosmogony seems to have scored over its less flashy rival, the “steady-state” theory. The big-bang theory was proposed, you will recall, when it became apparent, in the 1920s, that the galaxies beyond our own galaxy, the Milky Way, were flying from us at speeds proportionate to their distances. Simple calculation indicated that all cosmic matter had therefore once been concentrated at one point, a gigantic, gigantically dense and hot “cosmic atom,” which had in an instant exploded into fragments that settled, over the aeons, into stars, planets, oceans, minerals, amoebae, and the constituents of this page and of the eyes perusing it. Whence the aboriginal ball of matter, and wherefore, were permitted to remain mysterious. The steady-state theory, in protest, claims that the universe is eternal and constant, and therefore had no definite beginning. The observed fact of cosmic expansion is explained rather curiously; to wit, new matter, in the form of hydrogen atoms, is unceasingly being generated out of nothing in the empty spaces between galaxies, which are retreating to make room for the new matter. So an infinite number of microcosmic miracles are substituted for a single macrocosmic one. The slow garnering of tiny, colorless somethings from vast fields of vacuity has always struck us as a somewhat dreary harvest, and we are glad that our aesthetic preferences have recently been reinforced by the plunging researches of radio astronomy.

  In brief, it is now thought that the flash of the initial explosion still exists in the air, in the form of radio waves. The expansion of the universe in the thirteen billion years or so since the blessed event has stretched the light waves into a low hum audible to a giant horn antenna in Homdel, New Jersey. The first emissions of creation, stretched out of visibility, still hover in the air; the command “Let there be light” is continuously arriving from the black gulf beyond the quasars. We find all this more comforting than not. Such simultaneity makes a haven of time, and satisfies that ancient man within us who likes a story to have a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

  · · ·

  We were present not long ago at a literary ceremonial (an occasion customarily as innocuous as a confluence of angels on the head of a pin) that began with a kind of bang—a stately, though startling, tirade against our government’s present role in Vietnam—and the next day we witnessed a meeting of the United Nations Security Council at which, to our surprise, the representative from Cuba, predictably attacking our intercession in the Dominican Republic, frequently referred for support and corroboration to the editorial columns of the New York Times. We cannot remember any time in the last twenty years when United States foreign policy has received so much domestic criticism. Insofar as the present debate strengthens the democratic habit of debate, it is to the good. Insofar as it weakens the ties of respect and exchange between the intellectual community and the federal administration, it is to be regretted. The colleges seem to be fostering a self-righteous and rather idyllic pacifism, while the shadowy agencies of power perpetrate a self-righteous and rather grim activism.

  Now, a nation utterly unwilling to use its power has abdicated reality. But in our own recent use of power there has been a change of tone that is unwelcome even to those willing to believe that the gambles taken were well calculated. Perhaps the change has been reflected back to us from the world. Communism no longer appears a monolithic menace, so our own position feels deprived of grandeur. In the headlines that report our ubiquitous self-assertions, there is something naked, something at once petty and reckless. A nation is a mass of intertwined selfishnesses that yet must seem selfless to itself. It is not enough to have national interests and to administer them; when Rome degenerated from an ideal to an administrative system, men had to be paid to risk death for it. There are no simple alternatives. The possibility of total destruction limits crusades; yet the United States, in adjusting to a pragmatic world of piecemeal decisions, may have overadjusted.

  George W. S. Trow

  APRIL 8, 1967 (“(YET ANOTHER) FIRST STEP”)

  MR. A. T. ENGKVIST, a district manager of the New York Telephone Company, wrote the other day to tell us about a step he was taking—it was a “First Step”—to improve communications services. Mr. Engkvist is a polite man who addresses us, in formal fashion, as “Dear Customer,” and he is very fond of issuing stirring announcements, all of which we have read with interest. This time, he brought news of an important achievement: the elimination of the old dial tone, which was getting in the way, in favor of a new—and presumably better—one, noticeably “lower in pitch.” We remembered that Mr. Engkvist, or his predecessor, in previous “First Step”s, had eliminated the telephone operator and the telephone exchange, and we began to see that there were no lengths to which he and his company would not go to improve service.

  Following a suggestion in Mr. Engkvist’s letter, we dialled 759-5820 (this used to be PLaza 9-5820, in the days when there was a Third Avenue “L” and a Roxy Theatre) to hear a preview sample of the new tone. We heard, successively, a sound like an overloaded Waring Blendor, a nice recorded young lady telling us that the new tone would improve our communications services, and then the Waring Blendor sound again. This, though entertaining, and very neatly done, did not completely satisfy our curiosity, so we went downtown to the New York Telephone Company’s Headquarters to talk to some people in the know.

  We visited Mr. Al Smith, who is a tall man, and gray, and genial, in his office, on the tenth floor of 140 West Street. Mr. Smith (he is not related to the other Al Smith) told us that the new dial tone is a part of “The Touch-Tone Story,” which is a phrase that telephone people use when they want to talk about improved communications services. Touch-tone telephones have small buttons (one for every number), which make strange little sounds when you touch them. Anyone with practice can play them very quickly, which is the whole point. “Now, on the rotary dial a ten-digit pull—number plus area code—will take you, on the average, about fourteen seconds,” Mr. Smith said. “On the touch-tone unit it will take you about four seconds. If you have a rotary-dial phone, you see, and you have a lot of eights or nines or zeros in the number, you have to wait for the dial to come back. That’s where the touch-tone makes the saving.”

  Mr. Smith introduced us by phone to an engineer called Ken, who explained why the old dial tone wouldn’t do for touch-tone purposes. “We had to pick the touch-tone sounds very carefully, so our equipment wouldn’t confuse them with other sounds—like music on the radio,” Ken said. “The old dial tone was wrong for this system and would have confused the equipment. Also, the new tone is much more interesting musically. It is a chord, really—two pure, different frequencies. The old one was one tone modulated by another tone.”

  Mr. Smith said that touch-tone equipment could be installed (at a slight extra cost) only on lines that had been changed over to the new dial tone, that there weren’t very many of those lines now, but that the Telephone Company hoped to have a hundred thousand available to customers by the end of the year. Then he showed us the most modern touch-tone telephone of all, a unit called the Touch-Tone Trimline, which is only a month old, and a unit known as the Card Dialler, which has been in use for five or six years. Mr. Smith told us that when a programmed card is inserted in a slot the Card Dialler will dial a number automatically. Mr. Smith looked through some cards, found one that was programmed for the
New York weather number, and demonstrated. The unit dialled the number automatically in something over fourteen seconds. Mr. Smith said that he sometimes read the paper while the number was being dialled, and that struck us as a very sensible thing to do.

  Lillian Ross

  JUNE 24, 1967

  Meet the Beatles, the first (January, 1964) record album in the United States of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, has sold five million three hundred thousand copies to date. Pictures of the faces of John, Paul, George, and Ringo appeared on its cover. The songs “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “All My Loving,” among others, were featured. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the thirteenth and latest (June, 1967) album of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, came out the week before last and has sold twelve hundred thousand copies to date, with ninety-five thousand more in back orders. On the cover, John, Paul, George, and Ringo are pictured, wearing old-timey satin-and-braid brass-band costumes, in the company of the faces of—to name just a few—Shirley Temple, H. G. Wells, Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Lenny Bruce, Edgar Allan Poe, Lawrence of Arabia, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Weissmuller, Dion, Carl Jung, Mae West, Fred Astaire, Tom Mix, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bob Dylan, Oscar Wilde, and Madame Tussaud’s wax figures of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. On this record, the Beatles (with Paul singing most of the solos) create the effect of a live show, starting with a number about Sgt. Pepper and going on, with no more than momentary interruptions, to numbers called, among others, “A Little Help from My Friends,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Fixing a Hole,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “When I’m Sixty-four,” “Lovely Rita,” and “A Day in the Life.” (The other Beatles albums: No. 2, The Beatles’ Second Album, was brought out in April, 1964. No. 3, Something New, was brought out in July, 1964. No. 4, A Hard Day’s Night, September, 1964. No. 5, The Beatles’ Story, November, 1964. No. 6, Beatles ’65, December, 1964. No. 7, The Early Beatles, March, 1965. No. 8, Beatles VI, June, 1965. No. 9, Help!, the sound track of the movie of that name, August, 1965. No. 10, Rubber Soul, December, 1965. No. 11, Yesterday and Today, June, 1966. No. 12, Revolver, August, 1966.)

  About a year ago, the screams of the Beatles’ teen-age fans abated somewhat, and other voices began to be heard, saying that the Beatles were “going too far,” or were “burned out,” or were “getting too serious,” or weren’t “funny anymore.” Now Sgt. Pepper is out, and it’s a huge success, and we’ve been talking to some record people about it. “We were the first to play it on the air,” a WMCA disc jockey named Joe O’Brien told us. “We played ‘A Day in the Life’ on April 18th, six weeks before the album came out. This to me is the first album that’s ever been made by a popular group. All others, including all other Beatles albums, are a collection of singles. This one is a forty-minute-long single.”

  “How did the listeners react?” we asked.

  “Not much,” O’Brien said. “They’re unprepared. Just as people were unprepared for Picasso. That’s because this album is not a teen-age album. It’s a terribly intellectual album. My youngest son is a freshman at Yale. He tells me that the day the album was issued the entire student body of Yale went out and bought it. Exactly the same thing happened at Harvard. The college students are now the hard-core Beatles fans. This album is really a cantata. Teen-agers don’t want that.”

  “Proof positive of their musical maturity,” was Murray the K’s pronouncement to us. “The Beatles had the guts to go ahead and do something different from anything they’ve ever done before. There are very few commercial songs in this one, but it’s a giant step forward. I’ve been playing the whole album, non-stop, on my show. I don’t have to worry. My listeners are in the eighteen-to-twenty-five age group.”

  We went over to Sam Goody’s West Forty-ninth Street record shop, and there we ran into a couple of young men who were picking up the album. “It’s like a show!,” a tieless, shoeless guitar carrier named Richard Mellerton told us. “It stones you.” We elicited a more detailed response from a dark-suited young man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, who told us he was an English Lit. major at C.C.N.Y. and is now a summer busboy at the Hotel Penn Garden Coffee House. The student, John Van Aalst, told us, “I’m really more interested in classical music, but this Beatles record goes beyond the sound of the record. It’s technically interesting and imaginative. This is no longer computerized rock ’n’ roll. This may have grown out of the hoodlum rock ’n’ roll of the fifties, but it’s an attempt to create music with meaning. It goes beyond making you feel good, although it does do that. It has aesthetic appeal. It conforms more to my conception of art.”

  One of Goody’s staff men watched the parade of Beatles buyers with a friendly eye. The record, he told us, was big, very big, at Goody’s. “We’ve sold thousands,” he said. “It’s selling like the first Horowitz Carnegie Hall return concert.”

  Up at the Colony Record Center, on Broadway at Fifty-second Street, we came across a spirited, professorial-looking man named Lawrence LeFevre, who was plucking the Beatles’ new record from a bin that contained the works of the Jefferson Airplane, the Blues Project, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Mr. LeFevre gave us a little lecture: “This is really a coming of age for the Beatles,” he said. “In musical substance, Sgt. Pepper is a much bigger advance than Revolver, and Revolver was a tremendous advance, if you recall. There are many musical structures here that are both new and extremely interesting, as well as new combinations of rhythms, new chord progressions, new instrumentations, and a continuation of the great fresh flow of melody. The Beatles, as you know, have drawn upon everything musical that has been done in the past, including Romantic, baroque, liturgical, and all the popular genres of music, including blues, jazz, the English music hall, English folk, and, of course, rock ’n’ roll. Many people have pointed out how eclectic the Beatles are. They’ve drawn on everything. But now this is Beatles music. Hundreds of people are imitating what they do, but no one even gets close. This record is a musical event, comparable to a notable new opera or symphonic work. However, there is more going on musically in this one record than has gone on lately almost anywhere else. ‘A Day in the Life’ is not only the most ambitious thing they ever wrote but possibly the best piece of music they’ve done up to now. One can’t say just what it is—it fits into no category—but it’s a complex and powerful number. Another number, ‘When I’m Sixty-four,’ has so much charm and taste. It’s a parody, but, like the best parody, it is written with affection, and it has an excellence in its own right, independent of its value as parody. And ‘Fixing a Hole’ is right up there with the Beatles’ nicest. The Beatles write to please themselves. Unlike many artists now, who get their kicks out of offending the public, they’re having a great time with the stuff itself. It has enormous cheerfulness, along with the sadness that keeps turning up. It’s buoyant. This album is a whole world created by the Beatles. It’s a musical comedy. It’s a film. Only, it’s a record. There’s no individual number that’s as downright lovely as, say, ‘Michelle’ or ‘Here, There, and Everywhere,’ but you have to look at this album as an entity, and as such it has considerable beauty. Of course, you can’t talk about the Beatles without mentioning the transcendent Duke Ellington. Just as he has never fit into the jazz scheme of things, the Beatles don’t fit into the rock-’n’-roll scheme. They are off by themselves, doing their own thing, just as Ellington always has been. Like Ellington, they’re unclassifiable musicians. And, again like Ellington, they are working in that special territory where entertainment slips over into art. I might add that in this record there isn’t anything that is manufactured or contrived or synthetic. All of it is spontaneous, inspired music. There’s a wry kind of sweetness in several of the numbers, some of which has to do with McCartney’s—excuse me, I mean Paul’s—way of singing. You never feel that the Beatles are writing themselves out. They have a lot in reserve. This is just a beginning for them. The high point of the high point f
or me is the delicate way, in ‘A Day in the Life,’ Lennon—John—sings the words ‘oh boy.’ Let me add one last thing. The Beatles have done more to brighten up the world in recent years than almost anything else in the arts.”

  Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.

  JULY 26, 1969 (FROM “LETTER FROM THE SPACE CENTER”)

  JULY 21

  AFTER THE LAUNCH of Apollo 11 at Cape Kennedy last week, several thousand people who had been at the Cape checked into hotels in the vicinity of the Manned Spaceflight Center, in Houston. One of the arrivals was Dr. Harold C. Urey, the elder statesman among selenologists, who had gone from here to the Cape early last week. The launch, he said, had more than lived up to his expectations. “The V.I.P. bleachers were so far away that we didn’t hear the noise until the base of the rocket had reached the top of the tower,” he said on his return. “Then there was this enormous light, and the rocket goes up and up, and then it goes through the first skiff of clouds, and then through the second skiff of clouds, and then you see a puff of smoke—the first burn-out—and then the rocket disappears. The precision! The accuracy! If only a fraction of this precision and accuracy spins off into industry, it will pay for the whole space program.” David Reed, the Flight Dynamics Officer, who for months had been practicing the flight in simulations, and who was sitting in the front row of the Mission Control Room in Houston after liftoff, said that the reason he knew the launch was the real thing and not another simulation was that everything was going so well….

  · · ·

  On Sunday afternoon, after the lunar module had touched down on the moon, the only way a visitor could tell that anything out of the ordinary was going on at the Space Center was that suddenly, at a little after three o’clock, many people started pinning buttons on their lapels that read “Lunar Contact.” Outside the Public Affairs Building, a number of demonstrators sat around a full-size mockup of the LM displaying signs that read “Texas—Big on Hunger” and “Good Luck from the Hungry Children of Houston.” The demonstrators refused to leave at five o’clock, when the Space Center closes to visitors, and they lingered on during a thunderstorm, from which a few of them took refuge beneath the LM. On the roof of a nearby building, a radio dish was aimed at the moon, which was behind a thundercloud, and as the evening progressed the dish tilted farther and farther to the west.