Tuned In, Turned On

When you think of 1968, you think of riots, assassinations, the Vietnam war, the youth revolt, the backlash—and the songs that reflected it all. It was the year of "Hey, Jude," "Revolution" and "Street Fighting Man"—the last two making it clear that wealthy rock stars didn't want to push this youth revolt thing too far. It was also the year James Brown, in "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)," told his fellow Americans that blacks would "rather die on our feet than keep livin' on our knees." At least he had some grit—when he wasn't cozying up to Hubert Humphrey. Strange days.

And no refuge. You went to a movie, turned on the TV, and there it all was. The radio, most of all, was a cultural war zone, with Johnny Cash's gangsta-country "Folsom Prison Blues" ("I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die") followed by Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" followed by Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man." (Tammy's vote for George Wallace canceled Brown's vote for Humphrey; no wonder Nixon won.) The high-culture types couldn't get away from the chaos either. One of the few great works of fiction that year was Donald Barthelme's collection "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts," whose first story, "The Indian Uprising," conflated the frontier west with Vietnam: "We killed a great many in the south suddenly with helicopters and rockets but we found that those we had killed were children." The white settlers' improvised barricades were made up of such contemporary bric-a-brac as "a hollow-core door in birch veneer on black wrought-iron legs," and intellectual bric-a-brac as well, including "thoughtfully planned job descriptions (including scales for the orderly progress of other colors)." It was a verbal collage-much like the radio's aural collage-of American smugness under attack from the Other. And vice versa. From Vietnam to Haight Ashbury to Chicago's Democratic convention to the inner city, what else was 1968 about?

Another Barthelme story, "Game," about two technicians in a missile bunker, faced the dread that lay under it all: "Shotwell has a key and I have a key. If we turn our keys simultaneously the bird flies." So many of 1968's books, songs, movies and TV shows were haunted, however covertly, by all those birds on hair-trigger alert, and what they might or might not do. Both NBC's "Star Trek" and the exploitation film "Barbarella" posited a distant, better, future in which Earth had somehow gotten through an era of violent confrontation intact, and was now on a mission to set the rest of the universe straight. (You can take the characters out of America, but.) Like Jane Fonda's Barbarella, William Shatner's Captain Kirk was an enlightened earthling who didn't see why primitive spacelings couldn't all get along. But he was willing to use phaser or fisticuffs when he had to-that is, in nearly every episode.

But in other, stronger works, the birds had already flown. Philip K. Dick set his sci-fi novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (the model for the film "Blade Runner") in the year 2021, on an earth ruined and mostly depopulated by "World War Terminus." No one, Dick wrote, "remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it." In post-apocalyptic "Planet of the Apes-with Charlton Heston, of all people, bearded and half-naked, railing against war like a Yippie outside Chicago's International Amphitheatre apes have learned to speak (and to kill for sport) while humans have devolved to mute feral creatures. The final scene, a darker analogue to the smooching-in-the-surf scene in "On the Beach," is the worst homecoming in movie history. In the crude and powerful horror flick "Night of the Living Dead," radiation turns an ever-increasing number of smalltown Americans into zombies-all speechless, like the humans in "Planet of the Apes." What was that about? Whatever you dreaded back then: robotic conformity, voracious capitalism, a violent, countercultural mob metastatizing to undo all civilization, the id let loose.

So it was understandable that an obsession with Evil was taking hold; Satan made a pop-culture comeback. He fathered Mia Farrow's child in the film "Rosemary's Baby," implicitly making just the sort of pro-choice case you'd expect from him. And Mick Jagger impersonated him in the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil"-"I rode a tank, held a general's rank/When the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank." The Stones embraced, as William Blake had, the notion of Old Scratch as an archrebel against the Celestial Stodge Himself-the year before, they'd released an anti-"Sgt. Pepper's" called "Their Satanic Majesties Request"-yet the evil in this song really was evil: the Holocaust was not a war of liberation. How did a song implicitly arguing we each had ultimate evil within us—"Everybody's Lucifer," Keith Richards said in an interview—become a pop hit? It wasn't just Richards's stabbing, soaring guitar solo.

By the way, that line "I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys?'" originally went "'Who killed John Kennedy?'" After June 5, it had to get an emergency update-a typical 1968 moment, in which reality kept breaking the frame. Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans and stylized Marilyn Monroe portraits had celebrated surface and celebrity-ironically or not; who could see beneath his relentless deadpan?-and rigorously excluded emotion: we were through with sentimentality. But in the same month RFK was assassinated, Warhol's controlled esthetic space was invaded by an over-the-edge radical feminist named Valerie Solanas, who shot and nearly killed him. Solanas was clearly deranged-though the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization of Women (also clearly deranged) called her "the first outstanding champion of women's rights."