It was just 46 years ago, but a different people and a different nation

Was there ever a year to compare to 1969?

It was the first time there really was a man -- actually two of them -- on the Moon, and the year 400,000 kids spent a weekend in the rain and mud at Woodstock and 10 million kids later claimed they were there.

It was a phenomenal year for music. The Beatles were bowing out, although we didn't know it till 1970, but when "Abbey Road" came out, all of a sudden we were obsessed by the thought that maybe Paul McCartney was really dead.

The Who came out with "Tommy," and all of a sudden it seemed like our music had matured enough to take on the form of a "rock opera."

If that wasn't enough, songs from the musical "Hair" were all over the radio that year, and yes, the nudity may have been controversial but there was an awful lot of great music in that off-Broadway show. I caught a really good break that summer when I went to New York and got a ticket, only to be pleasantly surprised that on the night I was there, the original three stars had returned for one performance.


The nudity was a big shock in 1969, but 20 years later I saw my younger sister performing in a play in a small theater in Hollywood and she had a scene in which she was completely clothes-free. Heck, it was a long way for me from 19 to 39.

It was the year Creedence Clearwater Revival and Three Dog Night dominated the singles charts, but it was also the year when Bubble Gum Music was all over the place, particularly in the summertime. Was there ever a worse song than "Indian Giver?" Well, maybe "Chewy Chewy" or "Yummy Yummy Yummy."

And by summer, it seems like all we heard on the radio was "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies and "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe.

But there were some wonderful, truly memorable songs that summer. Songs like "What Does it Take (to Win Your Love for Me)" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars. Songs like "Honky Tony Women" by the Stones.

And of course "Abbey Road," the last album the Beatles recorded, with maybe their most memorable line ever:




As good as the music was in the last year of the 1960s, movies were every bit as good. It was the year Hollywood changed, thanks to Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider." And for the next five or six years, all sorts of amazing films got made.

Maybe the best one of all was one few people in America ever saw, Jean-Pierre Melville's "L'armee des ombres" (Army of Shadows) about the French resistance during World War II. Nearly 50 years after its original release, it has yet to gross $1 million in the United States, yet it is considered one of the finest antiwar films ever made.

It was the year we first saw what a phenomenal actress Jane Fonda was. Previously she had done mostly "sex kitten" type roles, but her performance as the doomed Gloria in "They Shoot Horses Don't They" showed her amazing depth. In her very next role, "Klute," she won her first Academy Award.

"Midnight Cowboy" won Best Picture, and Dustin Hoffman was robbed of his first Oscar by what was essentially a lifetime achievement Oscar for John Wayne in "True Grit." Paul Newman and Robert Redford shone in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," but it was the lovely Katharine Ross who won our hearts as Etta Place.

Beautiful women? Nobody was more lovely than Natalie Wood in the controversial "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,"but without question the most pleasant surprise of the year was 29-year-old model Ali MacGraw as Jewish-American Princess Brenda Patimkin in "Goodbye Columbus."

The movie made from Phillip Roth's novella was a late '50s story made into a late '60s story, and it had one of the best advertising lines ever:

"Every father's daughter is a virgin."

"Medium Cool" and "The Wild Bunch" were controversial for different reasons, and George Lazenby made his only appearance as James Bond in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service."

"Take the Money and Run"

And on August 18th, the same day Woodstock finished up in the mud, a little movie about a criminal named Virgil Starkwell opened in New York City. Virgil was wanted for "Assault, Armed Robbery and Committing a Lewd and Immoral Dance with a Chocolate Pudding."

If you hadn't already figured it out, "Take the Money and Run" was Woody Allen's first of many wonderful movies. Two years later he would hit his stride with "Bananas," and would never look back.

Eagle has landed

And of course there was the moon landing on July 20th, one of the last days we did something so wonderful that nearly everyone was proud of America and the "can do" spirit. Of course in the wretched times in which we now live, there are all sorts of skeptics trying to say we never really went to the moon.

I think the naysayers look at the country we have now, the men and women who have led us in this century, and they simply can't imagine the America that existed in the 1960s.

One of the best things about 1969 was that it wasn't 1968. The previous year had been one shock after another -- President Johnson saying he wouldn't run for another term, Martin Luther King being murdered in Memphis, Bobby Kennedy being murdered in Los Angeles just after winning the California primary, the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and finally, Richard Nixon winning the presidency in November.

And after 1969, everything changed.

The '60s ended for real on May 4, 1970, when frightened, undertrained Ohio National Guardsmen shot and killed four young war protesters at Kent State University.

And everything put together fell apart. The nation we were in the summer of '69, the summer of Woodstock and the Moon Landing, would hardly recognize the country we are now.

And vice versa.

You really can't go home again.