By the end of the week, we will embark on the 40th anniversary of one of the most amazingly newsworthy months of our history. July 16th, of course, is the anniversary of the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first me to walk on the moon. Two days after that, on Martha’s Vineyard, Teddy Kennedy drove off his Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off the Dyke Bridge, and young Mary Jo Kopechne lost her life. Three weeks later, on the nights of August 8th and 9th, the Charles Manson and his followers brutally murdered Sharon Tate and five other people. The following week, in a small town in Sullivan County, New York, the Woodstock Festival proved to the world that the kids could have three days of fun and music, and nothing but fun and music.
Four weeks, four signature, name-brand moments that serve as memorable signposts to the era. What did they have in common?
Not much, really. Maybe you could argue that they were climactic moments to long-running stories that dominated the decade: the space program never mattered as much once we reached the moon, hopes of Kennedy presidential dynasty ended that night, and the counterculture had both its triumphant flowering and cruel, most horrifying crash. But of course, this is just a lame construct built with the most ephemeral substance known to man—ideas. Not even did the people who were most tuned in at the time see connections. “In truth,’’ one friend has written to me, “1968 was so incredibly tumultuous, this seemed like a normal news flow.’’
There is one connecting element: for all four of those events, the Number One song in the country was a turgid, apocalyptic bit of melodrama called “In the Year 2525.’’ Had the Beatles delayed “Get Back’’ a few weeks, or had the Rolling Stones hurried a few weeks to release “Honky Tonk Women,’’ the honor of being the background music to a momentous event could have gone to a momentous band. Instead, the distinction fell to a one-hit wonder duo out of Nebraska called Zager and Evans, whose marketing acumen was such that their follow-up to this megahit was “Mr. Turnkey”, a song about a rapist who nails his own wrist to the jail wall. Still, with its bizarre subject matter, Evans’ quivery evangelical tenor, and a simple, propulsive riff that kept the strange brew moving, “In the Year 2525” does have its weird appeal. After all, who can resist a lyric that says ``In the year 9595/ I’m kinda wondering if man’s gonna be alive/ He’s taken everything this old earth can give/ And he ain’t put back nothing/ Wo-oh-wo.’’
Wo-oh-wo. Just so. Exactly right.