There are lots of wide open spaces around where I live. In the late spring, I can gaze out from the window of my study and watch deer and squirrels and jackrabbits and butterflies enjoying the great outdoors together as though posing for the cover of Bambi. But no little creatures are visible from the window of my study today, for the Evils have decided to rehearse at their drummer’s house across the meadow again.

They seem, in addition to the drummer, to include only a guitarist and a singer— thus far, they’ve apparently been unable to recruit a bass player who shares their musical ideals. The guitarist goes in for a great deal of distortion—if he hasn’t got a Marshall stack, I feel sure he must at least have three fuzz pedals in sequence. The singer, who I suspect to be recent guest columnist Rollo Dexter, the swaggering 16-year-old who lives two doors up the street with his tattoos, alcoholic mother, pit bull, and collection of the recordings of Judas Priest, sounds a little like a higher-pitched version of the guy in Cinderella. That is, he sings as though his testicles are caught in an electric pencil sharpener whose plug he can’t find to pull.

I’m not sure that they’re actually called the Evils. I just think of them as such because they seem to only know one song, whose lyrics consist of the warning “I’m evil!” repeated about 14,000 times.

I am sure that I find myself thinking about going over there and suggesting that they call it a career. And that this impulse troubles me profoundly even though I know they’d just give me hey-fuck-you,old-man sneers, pretend not to speak English, and stop playing “I’m Evil” only long enough for me to hike back across the meadow.

Why did no one alert me to the fact that only about two-and-a-half months would seem to elapse between the times I and other members of the Fogmen, Thee Consouls, and others even less notable would stop murdering a particular Beatles or Byrds or Kinks or Stones favorite only long enough to glower murderously at anyone who’d come over to my parents’ garage to warn us to pipe down and the time when I yearn to pull the Evils’ plug?

It’s the Summer Of Love’s 20th anniversary as this is written. Can you blame the guy for getting sentimental? No? Then how about for suggesting that, all things considered, Things Were Better Then?

Kids today—aside, obviously, from those who think of themselves as groovy beyond telling and have the Brian Jones hairdos and paisley sportswear to prove it—generally think of the latter '60s as a time of rampant fatuity, a time when their parents dressed like clowns, babbled foolish slogans mindlessly, and thought that they were doing their part to make the world a better place by getting high and dancing like spastics to unspeakably lame Grateful Dead jams.

Today’s Young Person, on the other hand, is likely to be either a “stoner”—in which case, like poor Rollo up the street, he’ll dress like a two-bit (allowing for inflation) thug and devote himself to being perceived as a public menace—or a preppie (or whatever they’ve come to be called at your school)—in which case she’ll lust unashamedly after an MBA and expensive German automobiles, Gucci accessories, and Rolex wristwatches. In other words, the choice is between incontrovertible cynicism on the one hand and unconscionable greed on the other.

Some choice. In comparison to either, I submit, the peace-’n’-love ethos of my squandered youth, not to mention Richard Riegel’s, seems infinitely preferable. Never mind that the level of mindlessness among the audience at Woodstock must surely have been nearly the equal of that at, say, 1983’s US Festival Heavy Metal Sunday. Never mind because a kid’s taking on faith that it’s uncool not to be gentle and altruistic is intrinsically preferable to his taking on faith that he’s got to party hard, Jack, to show his buds that he’s every bit the bad macho mofo they are. Give me a kid in a kaftan and love beads getting off on pot before a kid in a motorcycle jacket and a W.A.S.P. “We Hate Women” Tour T-shirt getting off on crack or Jack Daniels any old time.

Speaking of badassedness, let’s consider for a minute that what you listened to around the time of the Summer Of Love if you were 16 or 17—and bad news incarnate was James Brown, the Temptations, and the Four Tops. Today, though, as noted above, it would be Motley Crue, Ozzy, and (let me get somebody new in here...) Tesla, or maybe, in rare cases, one of Southern California’s notorious fascist hard-core punk groups.

In view of his having to be content with such extravagantly inferior music, one almost finds his heart going out to the modern teen badass. Who’d have imagined it possible?