By Ray Mosby

“We can change the world, rearrange the world. It’s dying—to get better.”—Graham Nash.

ROLLING FORK—A friend of mine who is quite knowledgeable on the subject, mentioned in passing to me the other day that generationally speaking, “we were truly lucky” to have come of age (though I have a few years on him) during what was unquestionably the golden era of what’s now considered classic Rock ‘n’ Roll music.

And one need only turn on a radio, or that for matter be assaulted by the mega-decibel noise emanating from a passing vehicle today to realize how right he is. We Baby Boomers grew up on and with the good stuff.

Now you have to be careful when you write an opinion column about music, much in the same way that you do in writing one about religion or college football because folks tend to wear their feelings on their sleeves when it comes to all of them. There are country music purists and Rock ‘n’ Roll purists, just like there are State fans and Ole Miss fans and it is easy to start a fight without even trying, no matter how carefully one picks his words.

I wrote a column a few years ago about what I thought were the top 50, or 100, I don’t remember, rock songs of the 60s and 70s and was quite rightly admonished by the same fellow for having somehow managed to omit one or more Pink Floyd selections which certainly should have been included.

Then I equally foolishly wrote another column about what I thought were absolutely the worst songs of the same era, mainly syrupy. bubble-gumish “love” themed abominations and was promptly admonished by literally half the females in town for having defiled their all-time favorite tunes. I should have seen that one coming. You know, it’s the whole one from Mars, one from Venus thing.

But for this one, I’m trying to take a more general, big picture approach and avoid any kind of list, at all cost.

Because you see, as I have referenced before, I have a theory about this. Yes, I know, stop the presses, Ray has another theory, but I believe this one just might be right.

Every generation has its poetry and its poets, whether they are recognized as such, or not. And for “our” generation, the poets were our songwriters and the poetry was  the lyrics of the music which helped in no small way to define us. (Regrettably, there are those who will maintain that the writers of Rap and Hip-Hop represent the same thing for the current generation, an observation which, if one considers but for a moment, could explain just a whole lot.)

But for about a 10-year period that spanned two decades, we lived and learned and loved and lost to a backdrop of musical magic.

We “dreamed we saw the bomber death planes riding shotgun in the sky,” We were “busted flat in Baton Rouge” went on Magical Mystery Tours and we “squandered our resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises.”

We “Imagine(d) there’s no heaven” then we were “knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door” and it was “whispered that soon, if we all call the tune, then piper will lead us to reason.”

We rued going back to the House of the Rising Sun and learned that “you gotta pay your dues if you want to sing the Blues,” and  tried really, really hard “to make some front page drive-in news” while “those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, desperately remained at home, inventing lovers on the phone.”

We “skipped the light fandango,” and we “drove our Chevys to the levee,” and were told that our answers were “blowin’ in the wind,” and that we were both “cogs in something turning” and “just another brick in the wall.”

And in the midst of, and perhaps on account of it, some of us found ourselves “singing songs and carrying signs—mostly say hooray for our side.” We mourned the “four dead in Ohio” and wondered “in a land that’s known as freedom, how could such a thing be fair.”

My friend was right, we were lucky, a good fortune the extent of which we likely overlooked at the time but now recognize in the voices of our children and grandchildren as they, too, enjoy and echo the lyrics that are truly “words between the lines of age.”

(Award winning journalist Ray Mosby is publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork.)