Do you ever feel like you really belong in a different generation?

What if you’re 58 when you finally realize what you should have done with your life? I’ve  always had a feeling that I was born too late and took the wrong path.  As I have written before, I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life and just kind of fell into a thirty year career for lack of a definitive dream or sense of purpose.  I’ve always had an interest in popular culture, music, art, fashion, literature and movies from generations before mine. I just had no clue how to make that into a living, a life.  I now know that I should have done something with music, maybe in the history and culture of rock and roll.  Oh well.  I guess I’m glad I finally figured it out! 

So part of my deep conviction that I was born in the wrong decade has a lot to do with cultural influences of growing up as an early Gen Xer. Movies/music/tv shows made deep impressions on me.  (But obviously not enough to make me figure out what the hell to do with all that stuff in my head!) When I was a kid in the early/mid seventies I wished I had  lived in the 1950s all due to watching Happy Days on television.  Saddle shoes and circle skirts were what I wanted to wear. (I have since owned several pairs of saddle shoes.)  I was thrilled when I got the Dick Clark 25 Years of Rock and Roll double album via my Columbia House Record and Tape Club membership.  It had Carl Perkins Blue Suede Shoes, Bill Haley and Fats Domino. Classics! And then, the movie that made the biggest impact on my life when I was a very impressionable twelve-year-old middle schooler; Grease! Of course this was released in the stellar year of 1978.  That really made me wish I had been a teen in the 50s. Rizzo was totally my role model. The dances! The drive-in movies! Greased lightning! The car race for pink slips! Oh, my pre-teen heart. 

And then the next year I moved on.  I was done with the 50s. I became thoroughly enthralled with the idea of what it was like to have lived in the  60s when I was awed by the film Hair at the Cinema 1, the old movie theater that was in the village hall building.  For several years when the summer school of the arts program convened on the SUNY Fredonia campus in the summer, the FSA would show movies at the concrete amphitheater and Hair was one of the films that I made sure never to miss. That movie changed my life and permanently imprinted on my brain that I should have been a hippie, protested at anti-war rallies and gone to Woodstock.  (Funny story: my Aunt who is a nun appears in the early scenes of the documentary about Woodstock.  She and two other sisters happened to be traveling on the NYS thruway and got stuck at the same time that thousands of young people were headed to Max Yasgur’s farm.  You can see them in their habits at 8:36 if you watch.  One of the young sisters flashes the peace sign!)

Treat Williams, Donnie Dacus, Annie Golden and Dorsey Wright in Hair, 1979,directed by Milos Forman.

This desire to have been a teen in the sixties continued into high school with my passionate love of the Beatles and other bands like The Who, Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Zombies, The Doors.  All my friends and I read the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. The hedonism and debauchery in the book and of the times was completely alluring to me. As were Jim Morrison’s leather pants.  I also had a deep interest in being a mod with cool mini-dresses and gorgeous boots like Edie Sedgwick, and hobnobbing with Andy Warhol at The Factory.  I was terribly disillusioned when I asked my parents what happened to all the hippies and they told me they grew up to become regular old people; teachers, doctors, plumbers, lawyers, moms and dads, etc. That information just completely deflated me. 

Photo by Enzo Sellerio for Vogue, August 1965

In the midst of these competing decade dreams was when I saw the “clean”version of Saturday Night Fever. That really sent me into a tizzy- I previously wrote about my deep lust of 70s John Travolta.  1970s Brooklyn and Manhattan were about as far away from my life as the moon.  And were so captivating to this small town girl.  70s disco fashion and the Bee Gees had me thinking that going to  clubs and dancing every night in search of  Tony Manero was what my destiny might be. My love of this movie endured for decades and I literally devoured an article in New York magazine about the original story  that started the whole craze- Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night by Nik Cohn. The former was a look back at the original article and included photos and details about the making of the movie.  I refuse to read anything about Cohn making up his original piece.  I will forever pretend that it was completely based on real people in real situations. Even if I know better. 

And this brings me to my other all time favorite movie set in the 1970s:  Dazed and Confused.  I personally know people that each of the characters in this film could have been based on, so unlike SNF, these kids are totally real.  I recently saw a post on social media that cruelly pointed out that the year it came out, 1993, was closer to the time period it depicted in 1976 than it is to today.

AAACCKKKK!!! 

I was ten years old during the Bicentennial.  What I wouldn’t have given to have been about six years older.  To have been a teenager in the late 70s I imagine would have been awesome. Bell bottoms, platform shoes, the music, cool cars like Corvettes, Camaros, Trans Am Firebirds!  Aerosmith concerts at the height of their first round of popularity!  The scene in the movie when redheaded Cynthia, the character played by Marissa Ribisi, talks about the “every other decade theory”; the fifties were boring, the sixties were great, the seventies were terrible so the eighties were destined to be better is so funny. I think the audience laughed out loud at this scene when I saw it in the theater.  Right- the eighties would be better. Reaganism. The Moral Majority. Conspicuous consumption. Yuppies.  Yeah, not that great.  But, in retrospect, I’m glad I was a kid in the eighties rather than a kid now.  But back in the 70s,  teens were way more free than they are today to experiment, explore, to just be young. In my opinion, this is one of the best movies for capturing the look, the feel, the fashion, the lingo and just the whole zeitgeist of an era.  There is nothing that rings false about the mid 70s in this film.  When I entered high school in the fall of 1980, a lot of the same things like hazing and partying were still part of the teenage experience. By today’s standards, those rituals would be considered bullying.  Back then they were just considered rites of passage.  

Another thing that was different ( and by different I mean better) in the 70s was ease of access to and interest in live music. I came across a post in a group I follow on Facebook that shared a picture from a newspaper for a series of concerts that a local Cleveland concert promoter was advertising from sometime in the mid-late 70s.  There were eight concerts at different venues in the Cleveland area.  Each show had two or three groups performing.  One show was Journey, with both Montrose and Van Halen as openers.  Van Halen was opening….that blew my mind.  Another was The Outlaws with Jay Ferguson opening. Tickets were priced from $6 to $7 and could be purchased at Ticketron locations at Sears and May Co. Department stores.  In an earlier post I recalled being able to buy concert tickets at Kaufmann’s Department Store, which was a part of the May Company. They could also be purchased at Peaches Records and Tapes stores. Gosh going to the record store was so much fun. Perusing the bins of records was an adventure unto itself.  

 The comments on the Facebook post were interesting and telling. Many of them were about how affordable it used to be to see national acts, how great the shows were, how many people went to several of the shows  and also how few concerts of this caliber there are anymore in what now are considered smaller markets. More evidence that I should have been born in a different decade! 

Random other thoughts-

I saw the Rolling Stones in Cleveland in June. My first time seeing them.  I figured I’d better see them now- or it might possibly be never.  They were great. Animated. Having fun. Sounded fantastic. Hard to believe how old they are- it gives me hope that there is a full life to be lived well into seniorhood. 

And I watched the Bret Michaels bio-documentary on A & E on Sunday night.  What a fun trip back to the 80s that was.  I was never a fan of Poison or that kind of music when it was popular but I have come to love Bret Michaels as a person.  The tenacity of that band in their attempts to “make it” was phenomenal. I love that Bret still has that Yinzer way of speaking.  And I love his attitude of thankfulness and appreciation of his fans. And he’s still out there touring.

So I guess being 58 in 2024 is an ok decade in which to be living and listening to music-it isn’t so bad after all.