I’m stuck on the news about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.
Partly because their deaths make me feel old. And partly because of what their celebrity means about my generation.
As a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, I was lukewarm about both superstars. Kate Jackson was my favorite angel. And my affections for the King of Pop waned not long after breaking my Jackson 5 lunchbox.
Still, both were part of the wallpaper of my youth, an era without identity or agenda, producing a generation with only the letter “X” defining us.
As it happened Thursday between news of their deaths, I was at the Denver Art Museum’s “Psychedelic Experience,” an exhibit of rock posters from 1965 to 1971.
My interest was in the “Wayback Machine,” an installation converting two old phone booths into spaces for people to share memories of that era. The museum has posted their musings unedited on .
The videos feature aging boomers confessing that they dropped LSD or skipped school to hitchhike cross-country to shows at the Avalon.
A former activist remembers the day the Rev. Martin Luther King was shot.
A wilting flower child speaks of the freedom of no longer having to iron her curly hair.
And a Denver grandfather with an unconvincing comb-over describes losing his virginity after a Jimi Hendrix concert.
It can blow your mind what people will reveal in a phone booth.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, but . . .,” begins a woman who goes on to detail an acid trip gone sour. “It was a time of awakening, of opening our eyes to the world.”
There is meaning, if not mythology, in their stories. Yet there’s something embarrassingly intimate about the videos, much like walking in on your parents making out.
It’s often said than anyone who remembers the ’60s wasn’t really there. Fact is, anyone who came of age in the era is getting pretty old.
“You never like to think of yourself as a primary source document,” says Denverite Rick Ritter, 56, who tells his own story about a Janis Joplin show at the Fillmore.
It’s even more depressing to think of yourself as a secondary-source document.
While the Reagan Youth of my town were snorting coke off the boxes of their “Thriller” cassettes, half of my high school was following the Dead and dressing like retro hippies. Ours was a lens that by then was 20 years old.
And no wonder.
As fine as Fawcett may have looked in her red swimsuit, she didn’t open anyone’s eyes. And undeniable as was Jackson’s genius, he — like so many kids raised on his music — squirmed in his own skin. There was a vapidness to Gen-X icons who did little to help us understand who we were. There was, as Gertrude Stein wrote, “no there there.”
Which brings me to the “Wayback,” a term we used to describe the space in the rear of the station wagon where we’d fight for the right to ride in reverse. It occurs to me that we spent much of our youth looking backward, not just out the windows of our parents’ cars, but also through time.
My own kids asked last week about the dead celebrities on TV. I strained to explain why they mattered.
I thought about the “Wayback Machine” and wondered what an exhibit might say a decade from now about my own generic generation. And I envied the old hippies for the meaning behind their memories.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
