on to be leading lights of the Beat Generation, as did Jack Kerouac, the shy Canuck from Lowell, Massachusetts, who attended but didn't read, preferringto cheerlead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. His "On the Road" published two years later, and dealing with his wanderings across America with his muse andfriend Neal Cassady remains Beat's most famous ever work. After the SixGallery reading, the Beat movement which had existed in embryonic formsince about 1944, left the underground to become an international craze, withthe Beatnik taking his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret,goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater and sandals.1955 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstreamthanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, althoughit's "The Blackboard Jungle", which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock' n' Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. It did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets's"Rock Around the Clock", over the film's opening credits. Originally a ratherconventional blues-based song recorded by Sonny Dae and his Knights,Haley's version, which was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency,ensured the world would never be the same after it. In August Sun Recordsreleased a long playing record entitled "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill",featuring the so-called King of the Western Bop who went on to becomeRock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles.On the 30
th
of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motoraccident aged 23 after having made only three films, the greatest of which,Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause" emerged about a month afterwards. Itcould be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to thesensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful andtortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed.The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s.Many theories exist as to how the staid conformist fifties could have yieldedas if my magic to the wild Dionysian sixties, some convincing, others less so.For me, if a little leaven is present in a theory for me it leavens, or spoils, theentire lump, even when much of it may be sound. Far from being a sudden,unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution has historical rootsreaching at least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, since which timethe West has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric. That said, its true source was the Serpent's falsepromise to Eve that through defiance of the Creator she and Adam could be asgods, knowing good and evil, which is at the heart of all vain, humanisticphilosophy.What happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since theFirst World War. Even Rock, a music which the American evangelist JohnMacArthur once described as having a bombastic atonality and dissonance was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of thedissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools.Still, for all the change that raged around me in the sixties, my own little world of the leafy suburbs of outer west London was an idyllic one which hadhardly changed from the day that I was born when the spirit of Victorianmorality was still more or less intact in Britain.Tales of Tasmania, Manitoba (and a Child's West London)
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