General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 1968 (Your Help, Please!) [View all]amandabeech
(9,893 posts)I was in small-town Michigan, but we were close enough to one of the smaller industrial cities that there were UAW auto workers living in my neighborhood and one of my uncles worked on the line at the old GM Fisher Body plant in Grand Rapids.
All those guys got discounts on the new models and bought a new one every two or three years. So there were a lot of new cars around every fall. My uncle favored great big Oldsmobiles in blue.
Back then, all the factories in Michigan were going full blast all the time. If they weren't making cars and pickups, they were making tanks and two-and-a-half-tons. Guns and butter. There were good-paying union jobs everywhere. It was really kind of crazy. All that prosperity and young men getting shot up on the evening news every night at the same time.
Songs have words and instrumentals that sometimes go together seamlessly to give a real feel or emotion to the song that transcends the individual elements. I've always thought that the Rolling Stone's "Gimme Shelter" fit that really insane time. It has the same out of control energy that I remember from that time.