By Michael F. Duggan
It makes sense, but it sounds odd to say it: most of the popular music listened to by baby boomers in the 1960s was not written or performed by boomers (the postwar baby boom began in ’46), but by war babies born between 1939 and 1945: Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Hendrix, Simon and Garfunkel, The Kinks, Yardbirds, Eric Burton/Animals, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, CCR, the Doors (Ray Manczarek was born in ’39), Lou Reed/Velvet Underground (Nico was born in ’38), Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick was born in ’39), most of Buffalo Springfield, and all of the Beach Boys, except for Carl Wilson (b. Dec. 1946). Quite a list.
When you throw in others outside of music (Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind, Kip Thorne, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and the entire Monty Python crew, to name a few), the sub-generation wedged between the “silent” generation of the 1930s and the baby boom of the late 1940s, appears to have had a pan-spectrum constellation of talent and ability. It seems likely that human gifts are more or less evenly distributed over the generations, but this truncated cohort seems even more gifted on balance than most full-scale generations.