Rock And Roll: A 1960's Perspective

[RonPrice]

IN TACT

 

...the only important thing that ever happened to me: the description I made of part of my life...it was the most important because I fixed it in words. And now what am I? Not he who lived but he who described. -Italo Svevo in The Complex Image: Faith and Method in American Autobiography, Joseph Fichtelberg, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989, Preface.

 

The following poem is one simple way of describing, summarizing, my experience of the 1960s. I was 15 when the sixties started. I wrote this poem after seeing a 1990 movie Flashback. About the only external thing still left that stands out easily from this period of time is the fact I still say “Man”. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 4 February 1996.

I was too busy at high school

and university and teaching kids

to really become part of the sixties.

Manic-depression, schizo-affective

state kept me on heat, nose-down,

although I had time for a beard,

a demonstration, a little sex,

but nowhere near as much as

I would have liked and that

some guys I knew got.

 

My dad died; I grew up;

taught Eskimos, country,

small town kids; got married.

It was a busy decade for me,

back then and when it ended

I got ready to go to Australia.

 

Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll

always stayed on the edge

of my life, periferal to the core.

And my religion remained intact,

Surprisingly, protecting me.

 

Ron Price

4 February 1996