Rolling Past a Rock on Highway 1

“The ‘60s music was less rock and more roll,” she said. I don’t know what it means, but I loved her for saying it.

The speaker is my daughter Emma, just turned 14. The scene is somewhere on California Highway 1, a long, windy stretch looking down at a huge expanse of beach. And we’ll have fun, fun, fun, as her mommy drives the Camry along.

Suddenly, I get this feeling--it’s not quite deja vu. Let’s call it “deja something.” I haven’t had this feeling before. But it’s a feeling I have wanted to have, a feeling I have imagined having these past 14 years. I am having an intellectual discussion of rock ‘n’ roll with my daughter.

The song on the radio was Steve Miller’s remake of “Sittin’ in My Ya-Ya, Waitin’ for My La-La.” (Or is it “Sittin’ in My La-La, Waitin’ for My Ya-Ya”?) Either way, I tell her, we are looking at a classic example of the genre that T. S. Eliot might have called “do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit” rock ‘n’ roll.

I explain that Miller represents a mellowed-out, bluesy ‘60s take on the simplistic, hyper ‘50s sound. That’s when Emma wows me with her own profound insight. This past year her retro rock education fast-forwarded from the ‘50s to the ‘60s. She heard most of this music from movie sound tracks and TV commercials. You know, like the one where Mrs. Boomer gets Mr. Boomer to eat a high-fiber breakfast cereal to the tune of “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love.”

Another song comes on, but I can’t identify the artist. I know it’s not Leonardo.

“Is that one of those guys who sounded like a girl?” Emma asks me. “You know, Little Somebody.”

“You mean like Little Richard or Little Anthony or Little Stevie Wonder? No, this isn’t Little Anybody,” I explain, continuing my lecture on the fundamentals of rock.

Before I know it, Emma will be in college, and some professor of popular culture will have her writing papers like “The Inverse Relationship Between Height and Soul in Pre-Beatlean Rock.”

So we ride on, the ocean below us, the mountain above us, talking about when Elvis went bad, how Three Dog Night got their name, how Paul might actually have been better than John, why Frankie Lyman never grew up and a thousand other stories. She, the budding rockomusicologist. Me, the Henry Steele Commager-cum-Dick Clark--the blathering eminence grease. And with the radio blastin’, goin’ through it just as fast as we can now--I remember the dream I had the night before. I was in some huge auditorium filled with thousands of people all around age 40. We were dressed in our Sunday best--men in suits and ties, women in suits and pearls. But the behavior was strictly Juke Box Saturday Night. We were all singing and swaying like a heavenly chorus.

But the hymn was “Runaround Sue.” Ten thousand well-dressed men and women singing in perfect harmony, “I said a-hey, a-hey, bumba diddy diddy. . . .”

I don’t know why rock ‘n’ roll became the major religious experience of my generation. I don’t know why we’ll always love Frankie Lymon and Elvis Presley and John Lennon even if they were sick people and died or were killed before we could save them.

I do know that this music was the way millions of us--raised to be uptight middle-class marshmallows--experienced rhythm. And that was no small experience. As Lenny Bruce said, “You don’t mind dying if you’ve got a natural sense of rhythm.”

So we’re riding along on this beautiful day on this beautiful highway, and this song comes on and I say to my beautiful 14-year-old daughter what I have said about 100 other songs. “Emma, this was my favorite song when I was 14.”

Then we both start singing at the top of our lungs: “Shaboom, shaboom . . . life could be a dream, sweetheart.”