Earlier this year I launched the first book of my Rock and Roll trilogy, Beyond the Bridge. It took only a year to write, but it took my entire life to research. Born in 1951, I saw nearly all of the 50s and every minute if the 60s. The 70s I'm not so sure about, but I must have been there because I don't remember much!
That's a fib, really, but I think a lot of you can relate to it.
In Book One, With A Dream, the main character, Gordon Hammond, is a guitar god along the lines of Eric Clapton, George Harrison, or Jimmy Page, and lives in a beautiful, gated estate in Royal Tunbridge Wells, England. On this estate he has a hedge maze about which he later, in the 70s, jokes, "I think there might still be people on LSD in there who never found their way out." As I wrote With A Dream, I quickly realized that having lived the 60s one time just wasn't enough. I was going to have to go back into the hedge maze and locate some of the things I'd left behind.
I don't mean that I indulged in any substances while writing; I had to go back and learn the things I'd missed on my struggle to survive the first time around. As an 18 year-old mother of a two week-old baby, my flower child naivte was severely challenged when my Haight-Ashbury marriage ended with a drug overdose. In 1970, between drugs and Viet Nam, widowed mothers were all too common. I suddenly found that I'd become a statistic. Consequently, I had to grow up fast. I didn't have the time or energy to care why the 60s had happened, or what the a impact of that decade would be later on.
During the writing of With A Dream, I also had to research what the 60s were like in England. What caused them to happen there, and why their experience of the decade was so different from ours. In a recent radio interview I discussed this.
The Boomers of England had a completely different experience than we did. They experienced the Blitzkrieg and seeing their neighborhoods and homes destroyed, as well as the fear of Hitler taking over their country. They experienced a childhood of playing in bomb craters and malnourishment due to rationing all the way into 1958. No wonder they were all so thin! When they became teens and young adults, they wanted a new, shiny world. Instead of drab grey and soot, they wanted bright colors. While they rebeled against the trauma they'd known, we rebelled against a kind of grey-flannel boredom. Father Knows Best. Ozzie and Harriet. Leave it to Beaver. I had to look at my own experience of the 60s very differently.
If you're interested in checking out my book, watching the trailer, or reading the first chapter, please CLICK HERE.
Tags: Sixties, seventies, eighties, British invasion, rock and roll, music, novel
