Groovin

Peter Fonda was looking right at me behind those Easy Rider sunglasses. He was wearing the cool leather jacket. Only it wasn’t the movie. Momentarily confused, I was forced to focus on what he was saying, my finger resting uneasily on the remote. It was 2:30 a.m. and I was channel surfing. Ever have one of those nights when you wake up at two in the morning and just know you won’t be drifting off soon? I had one of those nights recently. It was either toss and turn for a couple of hours or get up and face the wee small hours of the morning. That’s how I found Mr. Fonda, who probably has his share of sleepless nights wondering about self parody.
My first thought was, “Is Peter Fonda doing a financial planning commercial? Dennis Hopper does them, why not Fonda? Could Nicholson be far behind?” I soon saw how wrong I was. This was no 30 second spot. I was watching an infomercial. He was hawking Time-Life’s Flower Power CD set, 175 hits from the late sixties and early seventies available with easy installment payments.
As I watched a succession of clips from acts that performed forty years ago I couldn’t help but smile. As infomercials go, Time Life has some of the most entertaining. For people of a certain age, looking at black and white images of the Temptations, Linda Ronstadt and The Rascals, is pure joy. Well it is if you can’t sleep. I’ll bet they sell lots of CDs that way, even if only insomniacs ever see their pitch. I got a kick out of watching baby boomers cavorting freely in a time now recalled as one long festival. The Viet Nam War and the struggle for civil rights must have separate sound tracks. Naturally, they showed us scenes from Woodstock and Haight Ashbury during the summer of love. We were young and beautiful then. And at 68, I’ll admit Peter Fonda still looks great. His female partner was a young woman who probably wasn’t even born when these songs hit the airwaves. Why didn’t Time Life pair up Fonda with Grace Slick?
Time Life also solicits endorsements from people that claim to have been there when it was a happening. Big mistake! These Boomers, now in their fifties and sixties, reminisced the way my aunts and uncles did about the 1940s. I’ll tell you it shattered my reveries. Who were these people? It’s weird to look at men and women “your age” describing how deliriously happy those songs made them. I stared at them and thought of my parents, not me. Suddenly, the infomercial seemed sad. Not for me personally of course. I still look a lot younger than I actually am. Don’t you? But what about the millions of baby boomers that look their age? Watching a bunch of AARP members talk about meeting their true love while the Turtles sing Happy Together hardly put me in the mood to reach for my credit card.
Then there was this: With Steppenwolf singing Born to Be Wild a woman in her late fifties was saying that she always felt she was born to be wild and still felt that way. Now most of us who heard that song back then probably had a secret desire to be wild, especially when the song was playing on the car radio. Most of us however, were born to be mild. Our idea of wild is spending six days instead of three at Disney World so we can hop on Space Mountain again with its top speed of 28 miles per hour. The prim dress the wild child was wearing belied the nice middle-aged woman’s claim that she is still “born to be wild.”
Once I got over mourning my lost youth, I began to pay more attention to the catalogue of songs in the 10 CD set, two of which are free. It didn’t take long for me to see the folly in paying for all those hits when I could simply download the songs I really wanted for about a buck a piece. Believe me, if I never hear Incense and Peppermints by Strawberry Alarm Clock again, not to mention In the Year 2525, I think I Will Survive.
Of course I will have to forgo the Flower Power collector’s box with the groovy VW bus and its psychedelic images. Where would I put it anyway? Wait! Maybe there’s a spot between the love beads and the strobe light.

Copyright 2009 Len Serafino. All rights reserved.