"FM1: Homage to the 50s"

* denotes premiere recordings

POWER, PERFECTION AND PARANOIA

by David Williams

Hey, daddy-o, there were wars. The "war to end all wars," then part two was even uglier and we thought the world was exhausted.  Right.  Our allies, the Commies, looked pretty cool when we needed 'em, but then this McCarthy Square decides they're evil and that they are everywhere.  Freinds dropped dimes on friends, if you catch my drift, and I know that you do.  J. Edgar Hoover had files on everyone including the latest dress patterns from Vogue.  The Kefauver Commission tried to cut down the Mob in its prime, but most people thought Nixon was more of a crook and he wasn't even President yet!  The enemy had to be rebuilt for the jive economic 'miracle' to continue, so we helped Germany and Japan rise from the ashes and prepared them to beat us up where it really counts, in the wallet.  Russia tested their own nuke right about the time the "shot heard 'round the world" left Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, then orbited the first Sputnik, the war was cold.  Then Korea was hot, leftovers that the Red Chinese and Harry Truman fought over to a bloody, stalemated stump.  Lex Luther vs. Superman?  Competition in everything from tractors to shoes to training spacemen, but bombs, missiles and other war toys seemed more important.  Now that America ran the world, nobody wanted to be a second rate power and every kid wanted a coonskin cap.  Sex was something only animals, teenagers, and minorities did, while out in the new animal farms of conformity called suburbs, a new kind of family, the nuclear kind was incubated.  The male suburbanites had "interests" and "hobbies", not to mention jobs, but the women who had thought themselves liberated by the big war's need for them in the workplace were now going mad with boredom and taking more tranquilizers than babies got milk.  While television spewed censored images of design for living, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and the King of Rock and Roll shook up the status quo. Blast off, daddy-o!

Cold war culture schizophrenic fallout.  We didn't know what the government was doing, and they sure weren't going to tell us.  Ike? Imagine a General as president and national father of a divided family with a military, industrial complex.  Uncool.  Freedom? To escape with Barbie to a drive-in, flip through a girly magazine, fly your saucer, or make the scene.  Your big brother is still watching and No! we aren't there yet, so sit down, shut-p, and look out the window, or you won't get a mouseketeer hat.