And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes. It goes through high school, obedient graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. The cause of this reversion is not hard to spot.
Instead, this generation’s real roots lie further back, in the fifties, the golden age of Saturday nights.
Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, Altamont-all of them draw a blank. In many cases, they genuinely can’t remember who Bob Dylan was, let alone Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary. No hep jargon either, and no Pepsi revolutions. No waterbeds or Moroccan cushions, no hand-thrown pottery, for them. They know nothing of flower power or meditation, pansexuality, or mind expansion. Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them by entirely. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud. All the things, in fact, that the Manhattan circuit, in its smugness, has lost. Kids of sixteen to twenty, full of energy, urgency, hunger. While Manhattan remains firmly rooted in the sixties, still caught up in faction and fad and the dreary games of decadence, a whole new generation has been growing up around it, virtually unrecognized. In reality, however, almost the reverse is true. If the other boroughs exist at all, it is merely as a camp joke-Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens, monstrous urban limbo, filled with everyone who is no one. The center is everything, all the rest irrelevant. Within the closed circuits of rock & roll fashion, it is assumed that New York means Manhattan. Only the names of the main characters have been changed. Artist James McMullan also spent many hours observing this development, but his paintings, reproduced here, are less specific although they deal with the same locations and group, they are generalized images of these Saturday night rituals.Įverything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved. In the present article, I have focused on one club and one tight-knit group which seem to sum up the experience as a whole. Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, from disco to disco, an explorer out of my depth, I have tried to learn the patterns, the old/new tribal rites.
Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent in watching this new generation.
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