"Californy is the place you oughta be."

The Trip to California Part 1 "Californy is the place you oughta be."


40 years ago, in July and I think part of August 1968, mom and dad took us on the biggest trip of our lives, "The Trip to California." This was no Grapes of Wrath, this was the result of hard work by my parents to raise two boys and both work. Mom was a school teacher, dad was a printer. They took three weeks vacation. We had a fold out camper, known as the "Nimrod" and I remember having to open up and set up that thing almost every night. Motels were a back up, but we would sleep with the coyotes and bears and racoons, and worst of all, other idiiot campers. But the first night, it was easy. i knew we were on vacation, with a destination, because the 1st night camping on the way to California in the middle of July, we had Vane Mickle's mini TV and plugged it in to the electric post at the campground, set it on the picnic table.


A Hard Days Night (the first Beatles' movie, in black and white, now a classic) came on network television, and mom and dad let us watch the whole thing til 11 pm. This was one of those unforgettable moments from that film that forever burns in my memory,, where I first saw it since I did not when it came eout 4 years earlier in 1964. This was 2 years after the Beatles had abandoned touring and the moptop image, but then and now it is a wonderful visit to link between how it was and how it changed in just four short years from short hair to long hair, for stale teen music to music that meant something, even in the form of a beautiful but simple love song that even had some parents saying, "Okay, they can sing good and write ballads, okay, I can accept that..they're just a fad, and when they grow up they'll write more adult music, they got potential, maybe they're okay after all." I think my mom intuitively, if not on purpose, was one of those parents, knowing that kids have their generation to worry about, being a teacher.


So, sitting at a campground, in a folding chair with the TV on a picnic table in Missouri somewhere......at night, dark........squinting at a small TV screen, to see my heroes sing and cavort around, in their suits. But this song and film clip, as they used to call them, sticks out in my mind as a melancholy moment of the 1960's (not to be be confused with John Melencamp - get it? melancholy and camping? Okay, okay, ugh!!!) saying we're the new generation, and we need love. Well, see the link:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=x8fNDfdjXd8

by mr.t