The Death of Innocence

There is a version of this story—the story of 1970, the moment the sixties finally, officially gasped their last—that gets told as pure tragedy, a slow-motion funeral procession with no redemption at the end of it. I’ve resisted that version throughout this entire account, and I want to use this chapter to explain exactly why, because getting this right matters for how you read the other nine years still ahead of us. Here is the tally, stated plainly, without softening it. Jimi Hendrix was dead at twenty-seven on September 18 from a barbiturate overdose that followed months of visible, agonizing unraveling—booed in Germany, abandoned by Billy Cox, and turning hostilely on his own hometown crowd in Seattle. Janis Joplin was dead at twenty-seven on October 4, just seventeen days later, arriving almost unbearably right in the middle of her most hopeful, focused recording sessions for Pearl. Jim Morrison was circling the exact same drain, delivering a December performance at the Warehouse in New Orleans so unstable the Doors quit touring on the spot—a decision that looked downright prescient when Morrison was dead seven months later. Add to that a Beatles breakup so bitter it required actual civil litigation to formalize, a rock star sentenced to hard labor for a Miami concert, a cult leader releasing an album from behind bars, and a fatal car accident involving one of rock's most beloved drummers, and you have, by any reasonable measure, a genuinely brutal year.

But here’s what I keep insisting on, and what the flattened, purely tragic version of this story consistently misses– none of this actually stopped anything. It didn’t stop the music, which was in the middle of arguably its single greatest year ever. It didn’t stop the political accountability that started at Kent State and built toward a presidential resignation four years later. It didn’t stop the environmental infrastructure built after the first Earth Day, or Hollywood's transformation into its most artistically ambitious self. Every single strand of progress kept moving forward at full speed, running directly alongside and sometimes directly through the grief. That simultaneity is the actual lesson of 1970, and it applies to the entire decade ahead of us. The seventies did not succeed despite being a hard, violent, grief-soaked era. The seventies succeeded because a hard, violent, grief-soaked era forces a culture to stop lying and be honest. Honesty, it turns out, is the single necessary ingredient for producing anything of lasting value. Comfortable eras produce comfortable art and comfortable politics, both of which age terribly because comfort has nothing at stake. 1970 had everything at stake, constantly, and that is precisely why it produced Layla, All Things Must Pass, and a documented turning point in American political consciousness rather than a footnote quietly buried by a compliant press.

Before we move into 1971, I’ll leave you with one more image, because it captures the whole argument better than any summary I could write. Sometime in that terrible autumn, with Hendrix gone and Joplin's death still fresh, George Harrison was putting the finishing touches on All Things Must Pass. The entire thesis was right there in the title: nothing lasts—not fame, not bands, not friendships, not even grief itself, eventually. Harrison had spent a decade watching the biggest cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century slowly disintegrate around him, had watched his own songwriting get consistently sidelined by two men more famous and more sure of themselves than he was, and had come out the other side of all of it not bitter, not nihilistic, but somehow genuinely at peace, singing about impermanence with something closer to gratitude than despair. That is 1970. That is the whole decade in embryo. Everything falling apart, constantly, right on schedule—and somebody, somewhere, always managing to turn the wreckage into something that outlasts the people who lived through it. Next year, the accountability gets sharper, the films get darker and better, and the music keeps going. But 1970 is where the seventies actually began—not with a bang, but with a Bentley crashing outside a pub in Hertfordshire, and it never really slowed down from there.