The August of Farewells

So many things came to an end in one month, one-half century ago.

It is impossible to overstate how much changed in global popular culture between 9 February 1964 when The Beatles first appeared on U.S. television and 22 August 1969, when that same band, looking like they’d aged ten years instead of five, posed for their last publicity photos. Styles of hair and dress that would have been unthinkable in the U.S. around the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination had become commonplace, and would get even stranger in the succeeding decades.

I would later learn the band was indeed all together in one room the following month holding contentious meetings, from which John Lennon eventually walked away. The exact last day is unknown, only that it was sometime between 15-19 September. The story is here, but for my purposes, I’ll count The Very Last Day of The Beatles as 22 August.

You see it in their faces. They had just put their final album to bed two days before. Few people realized how utterly final Abbey Road was; Let It Be, the “new phase Beatles album” was the salvaging of an aborted project the winter before. When they had crossed the street for its iconic cover on the 8th, recording engineer Geoff Emerick noted that the chosen shot was of them walking away from EMI Studios. They were done.

The world’s first superstar rock band was finished in time for the leaves to start changing, before the new decade brought its numerous fads and fashions of music and dress, from earnest long-haired singer-songwriters to spangly dressed disco divas to spiky-haired punks. More than a mere “dream” was over. It was the end of a five and one-half year-long era that changed nearly everything.

No one seemed to know it at the time, though, not even The Beatles themselves. It’s poignant to note that no one thought to call it over until April 1970 when Paul answered in the negative to a question in a promotional interview for his solo album regarding whether he would consider working with John Lennon again. To be fair, by 22 August 1969, maybe only Ringo could imagine them all together in the studio again. 

It had been a long, intense ride since their days as teenagers taking the bus to wherever they needed to go in Liverpool. Now they were almost 30. It was ending sometime. It may not have ended well, but half a century down the road it’s apparent it ended when it had to.

The last photo of them all together, ever. I’ve noted this before, but it’s interesting that the two now long-deceased ones are the ones looking away at something else.

I smile to think that, as a teenager in the far more creatively and culturally diverse 1970s (thanks to the 1960s, mind you), my two biggest wishes were for The Beatles to get back together and for new episodes of a revived Star Trek. Thank God neither happened. These core bits of what would eventually become worn-out, chewed-over, flavorless franchises ended when they had to. And their endings marked the end of the beginning of whatever it was that’s led us here.

To mash things up a bit. I don’t know who made this, but my hat’s off and my glass is raised.

On what was either 26 August or the day after Labor, the last re-run of the original Star Trek was broadcast on U.S. network television. I haven’t been able to find precise listings for those specific months, but the last month of summer seems a fitting month to consider that all over. I wonder what famously cringe-inducing third season episode repeated that Tuesday night. The struggling sci-fi TV show that would eventually become a huge franchise over ten years later died with a whimpering of embarrassingly awful scripts and dinner theater budgeting amid a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

I note the passage of Star Trek on network TV primarily because it marked the ignoble end of an era of imaginative television that encompassed The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Wild, Wild West, Irwin Allen’s sci-fi shows, et al. Television might get more “sophisticated” in the 1970s with urban sitcoms and Norman Lear’s reworkings of BBC shows, but it would never have the sense of weird, wacky, good-natured fun one got from most television in the 1960s.

James Bama’s 1966 promotional art, featuring
a “pulp” aesthetic impossible to imagine for anything
in the 1970s, save for that movie that came out
in May 1977. Even that original Star Wars was one of a
kind in that regard, and, like Trek, it never replicated
that original excitement. Yes, “inb4 Empire Strikes Back,”
my favorite movie, but you can’t imagine what it was
like seeing that first one after so many dark and
depressing things between 1970 and 1977.

Star Trek is oft praised for its presumably rare optimism about the future, but it was far from the only television show expressing that. The Robinsons may have been Lost in Space, but they were having a good time. Admiral Nelson’s and Captain Crane’s Seaview dealt decisively with whatever rubber-suit strangeness it came against in their Voyage to the Bottom of Sea. Any darkness and back-stabbing intrigue were the work of foreign agents, but the good guys always triumphed. There was none of the cynicism you saw, say, exactly ten years later in the movie Alien. Captain Kirk may have directly disobeyed Starfleet on occasion, but only on very special occasions, because Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets were honorable organizations.

By August 1969, all that, too, had passed. Passing with it was an make-do/can-do aesthetic of filming television sci-fi that required the viewer to meet the set designers and effects people halfway. For all the remakes and rehashes and re-imaginings to come, this particular flavor of magic would never spark again.

It couldn’t. The very environment which had spawned it had changed. The world of August 1969 was markedly different from the world of August 1968, which in turn was markedly different from August 1966. You get the idea.

As with The Beatles one-half century later, it’s impossible to imagine new episodes of original Star Trek sallying on into 1970. Even as the show’s popularity exploded during the show’s syndication in the following decade, those original 79 episodes were all she wrote. There would be no more because there could be no more.

I’d have preferred the standard flyaway shot into the generic void from the original effects but I must admit this final shot made especially for the “Turnabout Intruder” remaster, in honor of the last original Star Trek episode, is nicer.

Somewhere in the middle of all that a thing called Woodstock happened. It was a music festival that the promoters lost all control over (and quite a bit of money) that marked the high-water mark of the hippie scene. The band lineup was a Who’s Who of those whose stars would rise with the next decade as well as those who would soon pass into memory.

Truth be told, there really isn’t much to say about Woodstock except that it was a music festival that marked the beginning of many music festivals to come, much better managed and far more tightly controlled. When Woodstock happened—and for maybe four or five more years, when disco would put that lie to rest—people believed that Music Can Change the World. Oh, the insane, blank-eyed naivete of it all!

The generation everyone loves to hate when they’re not hating on Millennials. Most of it’s well-earned, I’ll grant that.

Looking back, though, it’s easy to see how people came to feel that way. The new pop music, with its new sounds and arrangements, if it aggravated and terrified the oldsters so much, it had to be doing something right. And speaking as an old duffer who remembers those old duffers of the past—I’m here to tell all you New Traditionalists out there who want to revive the old architecture and mores of days gone by, people threw all that good old stuff to the wayside because no one gave them any reasons to hang onto it other than, “‘Cause I’m yer elder, and I done told you so! Now turn that dang noise off and git back to wuck!”

And then our wise elders sent our jobs overseas. The jobs they couldn’t send overseas, they depressed the wages on by bringing people into the U.S. to work. But they got a handle on controlling—and milking—large crowds for music festivals. So there’s that.

And the music, well, whatever you’re into, it’s something to just get you through your day, however that’s going.

Hendrix was one of those you wondered how he would have turned out had he lived. Jim Morrison and The Doors were clearly finished after L.A. Woman, but Hendrix might have made a career clear through the 1970s for his tremendous talent and willingness to explore.

This isn’t so much an exercise in nostalgia as it is noting that, for one narrow window of time within one numerical decade that happened to coincide with The Beatles’ U.S. television debut in 1964 and their dissolution in 1969, a lot came and went. Much was changed forever. Network television went from broadcasting in black-and-white to color, for one. For a fun exercise, consider all the popular television shows that came and went. Some of the best remembered ones, e.g., The Munsters, The Addams Family, Batman, barely lasted two seasons. There was the spy craze, the “camp” fad, all those sci-fi shows. The movies from that time frame are another thread altogether.

Few people seem to remember what a big deal it was for a man to wear his hair any longer than a buzzcut. “Izzat a man or a woman, I cain’t tell! Hyuck!” By 1970, a few brave souls were sporting locks over their ears. I still remember seeing grown men losing their composure at the sound of the most anodyne pop songs on the radio up until 1978.  But everyone else knew at the time these old men were just ridiculous. They were on their way out, thank God, and not a minute too soon.

There was actually a time when the music one listened to and how you wore your hair was a political statement, much like the U.S. flag decals in the curve of the lower left rear windshield that said at once, “I support the war in Vietnam because @#$% communists and you stupid longhair hippies, too.” The sides were squaring off, between the Establishment-worshiping squares and everyone else who was sick of being yelled at by blustering, authoritarian old fools with more skeletons in their closets than clothes.

I’m old enough to remember when wearing an American flag on the butt-pocket of your jeans was an invitation to fight you some PATE-tree-otic Amurricans who didn’t cotton to no disrespect to the ol’ Red, White, and Blue, no sir! Up until about 1974, but that’s just me. And, yes, these same people would be scandalized by the above image. Pornography! On one hand, I could see where they were coming from. On the other, what a sadly skewed sense of priorities. That’s why that attitude died out.

August 1969, as The Beatles wound up their last full-band recording sessions and posed for one last set of publicity shots, as the last of the Star Trek third season reruns broadcast on NBC, as The Who played the entirety of Tommy for their largest audience so far and Jimi Hendrix redefined the “Star Spangled Banner” for a generation defined by electric guitar... fifty years ago was the end of the beginning. 

If people keep coming back to all this, it’s because there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot else as gobsmackingly original since. Most of your all-time greats of anything are one-offs, and these just happened to one-off all at once. 

It’s nobody’s fault, really. Just the way things happened. It is what it was.