Music has always been a stray thread running through all our lives— always there, even when we weren’t looking for it. Especially for “Baby Boomers.”
In the 1960s, television understood that. If there was a market for music, they found a place to put it. You couldn’t turn on the set without hearing something. It wasn’t background noise, it was the point. The networks knew that kids wanted to see the records they were buying, and that parents would watch too. Music was not just entertainment then, it was common ground.
For me, the center of that was Shindig. Jimmy O’Neill was the host, and every week he would bring on the people we were hearing on AM radio. One week it was Jerry Lee Lewis pounding the piano like it owed him money, the next it was Bobby Sherman with every girl in town screaming, then the Righteous Brothers leaning into a harmony that could stop a room. I actually met O’Neill once, in a little radio station in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He was just as easygoing in person as he was on camera, like a guy who knew he had the best job in the country and wanted to share it.
And Shindig wasn’t alone. There was Hullabaloo with its go-go dancers and big production numbers, there was Dick Clark who made a career out of letting America vote with its feet on American Bandstand, and there was Where the Action Is — Dick Clark again, taking us to the beach and to the streets where the bands actually played. If Shindig was the party in the living room, those other shows were the invitation to go outside and join it. You learned how to dress, how to dance, how to talk to each other from those hours. And who could forget what The Ed Sullivan Show, which brought the biggest acts on every Sunday night.
Looking back now, I see what it was building. That constant music on television wasn’t just selling records. It was building our society. It gave an entire generation a shared soundtrack at the exact moment we needed one. Wherever you were, you heard the same songs that created your history. That is how culture is made — not in a big speech, but in a chorus everyone knows the words to; and you still remember all the lyrics today even if you can’t remember anything else.
