Free Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

turned out Isaac Newton’s third law of motion operates in the social universe as well as physics: the 1960s actions had been sudden and powerful, and the reactions starting in the 1970s were equal and opposite, with follow-on effects that lasted much, much longer.
    Some of the origins of this 1970s plunge into nostalgia, in fact, had showed themselves a bit earlier. Paradoxically, as America was approaching Peak New during the 1950s and ’60s, some members of the cultural avant-garde led the way in making the past seem stylish, embracing certain bits and pieces of the old days in order to be unorthodox, counter cultural, cooler. It was selective stylistic nostalgia as a way of going against the grain, rejecting earnest upbeat spic-and-span corporate suburban midcentury America. Back in the 1950s, when vintage applied only to wine and automobiles, the Beats and beatniks had bought and proudly worn used clothes from the 1920s and ’30s. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the classic cutting-edge Beat novel, is actually an exercise in nostalgia, as the critic Louis Menand says, published and set in 1957 but actually “a book about the nineteen-forties,” the “dying…world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders.” His cool 1950s characters, Kerouac wrote, all shared “a sentimental streak about the old days in America,…when the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone,” and the character Old Bull Lee’s “chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.” The simultaneous folk-music revival, from which Bob Dylan emerged, also consisted of cool kids scratching the same nostalgic American itch ahead of everyone else. College students and hepcats in the early 1960s also rediscovered and worshiped 1940s movies like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon at smoky revival movie theaters.
    In 1964 Kerouac’s road-trip buddy Neal Cassady joined young Ken Kesey and his band of protohippies, driving them across America from the Santa Cruz Mountains to New York City to visit, yes, the World’s Fair. They were pioneering inventors of the counterculture—which presently became a mass phenomenon and inherited some of the Beats’ sentimental streaks concerning the American old days. Even as youth circa 1970 thought of themselves as shock troops of a new age, part of their shocking newness was nostalgic cosplay. Dressed in reproduction nineteenth-century artifacts—blue jeans, fringed leather jackets, boots, bandanas, hats, men mustachioed and bearded—they fancied themselves hoboes and cowboys and joyriders and agrarian anarchists as they got high and listened to “Maggie’s Farm” (Bob Dylan), “Up on Cripple Creek” (the Band), and “Uncle John’s Band” (the Grateful Dead). Overnight they made the uncool old Victorian houses in San Francisco cool. The vision of the future sold starting in 1968 by the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture’s obligatory omnibus almanac, was agrarian and handmade as well as— so ahead of the curve—computerized and video-recorded.
    In 1969, at the Woodstock Festival, the music of the final performer, Jimi Hendrix, was absolute late ’60s, disconcertingly and deliciously freaky and vain. Playing right before him, however, had been a group almost nobody knew. Sha Na Na, led by a Columbia University graduate student, sang cover versions of a dozen rock and doo-wop songs from 1956 to 1963, wearing 1950s-style costumes and doing 1950s-style choreography. To the crowd and to the Woodstock movie audiences in 1970, this was spectacularly surprising and amusing. It was intense instant nostalgia, a measure of just how much and how quickly everything had changed. Songs only six or twelve years old, the music of their childhoods and earlier adolescence—“Jailhouse Rock,” “The Book of Love,” “At the Hop,” “Teen Angel,” “Duke of Earl”—already seemed so ridiculously dated. Even