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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

’60s gave us comedy, music, poetry that has aged well

I’ve been obsessed with the 1960s recently.

Or, to use a phrase I thought was lame even back then: My head is totally into the 1960s.

This may sound like garden-variety baby boomer nostalgia, but I have a good excuse for it. In the past two weeks, I have interviewed two influential names from the ’60s, Tommy Smothers and Art Garfunkel.

Talking to Smothers sparked my memories of the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” a show I never missed between the ages of 14 and 16 (1967-69). So I headed over to YouTube to catch some of the show’s best-known clips.

There, I found out what was making America laugh in the ’60s:

• A Tom-and-Dick Smothers routine, in which Tom begins by saying it’s nice that President Johnson is sending so much foreign aid overseas. But shouldn’t LBJ also try to do something good for the people right here at home?

Fine, says Dick, but what can the president really do?

“Resign,” says Tom, with a sly smile.

• The Smothers’ presidential candidate, Pat Paulsen, giving a speech in which he says it has cost the U.S. military hundreds of thousands of dollars for every Viet Cong killed.

Paulsen, completely deadpan, intones, “I say, we can buy them off cheaper than that.”

Jon Stewart might tip his hat to that bit of satire.

So I was already in a ’60s mood when I got on the phone with Art Garfunkel (look for a full story in Friday’s Today section). Garfunkel, a thoughtful and well-read guy, waxed philosophical about the influence and power of music in the ’60s. If anyone should know something about that, it’s a man who was at the center of it.

So this conversation set me off on an obsession with old Simon & Garfunkel songs. Yet this obsession did not take the form of me listening to the songs. I didn’t need to.

It took the form of me, in the dark, passing the time during a bout of insomnia, reconstructing the lyrics to dozens of old Simon & Garfunkel songs:

• “Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes, together …”

• “And each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories …”

• “Asking only workman’s wages, I go looking for a job, but I get no offers …”

• “We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files. We’d like to help you learn to help yourself …”

• “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. And tenement halls. And whispered in the sounds of silence.”

I was surprised, I suppose, at how thoroughly I could dredge up verses and songs, word for word.

Yet the more I thought about it, the less surprised I was. Kids of my generation were not required to memorize Kipling, Keats or Shakespeare. Yet we learned our own poetry by heart – our music.

As a baby boomer, I am used to apologizing for my generation’s many egregious hippy-dippy excesses. Plenty of cultural relics from the ’60s are now just plain embarrassing – just try listening to “Hair” these days.

Yet the best of our comedy and our music – and our poetry, courtesy of Paul Simon – has stood the test of time. Any generation, I think, might be proud of that.