Peace & Love

When you think of the 1960s, it’s all too easy to reduce it to love beads and bell-bottoms. And let’s be clear – we are all for love beads and bell-bottoms.

But we’re also for the entire decade. The anti-establishment teenage movement shattered the earlier ideal of unconditional peace and love, and it was an era of revolution mixed with darkness of unexplainable war and unrest. TV shows and movies underscored all that was safe, strong and wholesome about America, and yet recreational drugs ran rampant. Nixon was the President of the United States and anger boiled under the surface as issues like the rights of women and the Civil Rights Movement changed us for all time.

And then there was the music.

In 1969, in this time of change and predictable unrest, the Beatles gave their last public performance. In March of that same year John Lennon married Yoko Ono becoming John Ono Lennon. While Let It Be was the final Beatles release, Friday, September 26 marked the day the group released Abbey Road, the final album the group had actually created together.

A record influenced by pop, progressive rock and the blues, it gave us an eclectic yet complete musical statement that was a metaphor for the decade itself. With the 1970s almost in view, the era of peace and love was perhaps best summed up by the lyric in the album’s cut entitled, The End – “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”.

Join Jeans ‘n Classics and the Jeans ‘n Classics Rock Symphony on September 19 and hear the Abbey Road album performed in its entirety with vocalist David Blamires.

Get tickets now. If you do, you’ll also be supporting Habitat for Humanity Heartland Ontario.