In the early 70s, in the suburbs of San Jose, California, my babysitter Rosemary, a tall, blonde twelve-year-old who had a crush on a different middle school boy every week, and I spent our days listening to Carole King’s Tapestry and Rare Earth’s Get Ready. We watched Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In, Diahann Carroll on Julia, and the television families on The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. One summer night, we heard a San Francisco DJ on KFRC 610 AM lose his mind, lock himself in the studio, and play the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” over and over for three hours before his supervisors could pry him away from the turntable. We agreed that “Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” from Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World,” was the greatest opening line ever. We listened to the soundtrack of Hair and contemplated what it meant to be living in the Age of Aquarius. We marveled at the loving connection portrayed in the famous Coke commercial in which people joined hands and sang “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”
Mainlining 70s rock and culture as a prepubescent kid, then attending high school during the age of Marvin Gaye, Earth, Wind & Fire, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Roxy Music, Aerosmith, Jackson Browne, Steely Dan, the Bee Gees, and Journey, had a permanent effect on me. I emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area music culture of the 1970s. Humans like to think they shed their skin and grow new ones as they evolve, but this is true only on a superficial level. During adolescence, we are permeable creatures who, through cultural osmosis, undergo a permanent molecular change from our musical and cultural environment. If you grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 70s, that environment was more potent than you could have imagined at the time.
Like it or not, you have become an Aquarian, someone who, on a deep level, exists inside a permanent Coke commercial, singing about the brotherhood of man. Your entire life becomes an attempt to find that connection and universal love. Just as Citizen Kane had his Rosebud, you have your Rosemary, an avatar of Aquarian love and transcendence.
Rosemary is in her late 60s now. I imagine somewhere she is drinking her morning coffee, staring out the window, and longing for the days when the whole world held hands on a mountaintop and sang about universal love.
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