This Way To The Sixties: John Lennon's Death Five Years After

It was a red letter day and all within a decade, the sixties.     Psychadelic and all because the Electric Circus opened up     Walking Yonge Street in the December cold, aging     "hippies", the word itself a joke, reminisced:     National Guardsmen, for one, doing post-mortems on     their rifle butts, record covers carrying the first life-     sized zippers and mashed up rubber dolls; Cher Bono     getting up nerve and a career to name her child     Chastity but walking off with a card.     By the end of the decade they were asking questions.     We had landed on the moon per schedule but who     would have believed in the efficacy of Rock or the     efficency of napham before Vietnam? Frosted hair.     Body paint. The sixties produced a lot of it. With one     bullet, the Beatles, the secular saviours, were     breaking up. Before they had finished reuniting the     world. Before the history of music could be written.     Before John Lennon, did we dare trust ourselves,     World leaders, gurus?     That was the meaning of the assassination.     History won't budge an inch for neophytes, The     Clockwork Orange was instructive but didn't go far     enough. Frodo wouldn't live in Yorkville today if     given a chance.     Now for the most poignant mental lapse of the Candle     carriers, mourners and mock biers with frozen     flowers. Simply the reminder half the population     didn't share his vision. Veterans grumbled. The press     paid more attention to this solitary event than     Armistice Day. Schoolchildren tittered. What was     that? The so-called generation gap seemed poised on     that comment. Then John's comment the Beatles were     more popular than Jesus Christ     Donovan didn't survive tunes like Epistle to Dippy.     Lennon won't survive the Elvis Beatle syndrome.     The lights are going out on the sixties,     The eighties are austere.     Cherry cokes are the memory of a laugh.     The Purple Onion only causes perplexion like Charlie     Brown's Great Pumpkin.     Forget about words like "catalyst".     Lennon was the conflageration.     Graffiti after him has renewed licence.