Syd Barrett was supposed to be the genius of Pink Floyd, the songwriter who gave the band its psychedelic soul. But by 1967, the drugs and whatever was unraveling inside his mind had made him unreliable. He’d stare blankly at audiences, play one chord for an hour, or simply not show up. The band knew they had to do something.
They called David Gilmour, Barrett’s childhood friend, to cover for him on stage. At first it was temporary, just a way to get through the shows. But on February 18th, 1968, the arrangement became permanent. Gilmour was in the band, and Barrett was out.
He wrote a couple of songs for their next album, but by then it was clear the creative force who had named the group was gone. He was only 22 years old. Not long before, in December of 1967, soul singer Otis Redding was still riding the high of his biggest success yet. Inspired by the Beatles’ Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he wanted a new sound, something softer and more personal. He sat down with guitarist Steve Cropper and wrote a song about watching the world from a dock in San Francisco Bay. On December 10th, three days after recording it, he boarded a plane in Madison, Wisconsin. The plane crashed into a lake.
Redding was 26. When the tape of that song, “The Dock of the Bay,” was released on January 8th, it became the first posthumous number one single in American history. The man who made it never got to hear it on the radio. Three weeks later, on January 30th, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive.
It was the largest campaign of the war, a wave of surprise attacks across South Vietnam that caught American and South Vietnamese forces completely off guard. The brutality and scale of the fighting were broadcast straight into American living rooms, and something cracked in the public’s support for the war. Even though the offensive ultimately failed militarily, it achieved something far more damaging. It made an entire nation question why their sons were dying.
In Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4th, Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was waiting for dinner, talking to a musician named Ben Branch who was set to perform that night. King’s words to him were simple: “Ben, make sure you play Take My Hand, Precious Lord in the meeting tonight.
Play it real pretty. ”
Those were his last words. A bullet struck him in the face, breaking his jaw and lodging in his shoulder. He died at 7:05 p.
m. The rifle was found across the street. The fingerprints belonged to James Earl Ray, a convicted felon who had escaped from prison. Ray was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London, and he pleaded guilty in exchange for a 99-year sentence.
King’s family never believed he was the killer. Two months later, on June 5th, Senator Robert F. Kennedy had just won the California primary. He was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles through the kitchen when a 24-year-old named Sirhan Sirhan opened fire.
Kennedy was hit and died 25 hours later. He was 42. His assassin was convicted and sentenced to death, then had the sentence commuted to life in prison. In between those two assassinations, on April 23rd, student activists took over several buildings at Columbia University in New York.
They were protesting the school’s ties to a weapons research think tank and its plan to build a gym that would have circumvented anti-segregation laws. The protesters held Hamilton Hall and then the president’s office. Police stormed the campus with tear gas a week later, and the protest collapsed. But the message had been sent: the young people of America were not going to sit quietly.
Later that summer, on August 26th, over 10,000 protesters showed up in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. The city’s police were on edge before anyone even arrived. Things went wrong almost immediately. On the second day, officers shot a 17-year-old boy.
In the days that followed, they beat protesters in the streets while the television cameras watched. The protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching. ” Watching, they were. The violence was so open and so brutal that it turned people against the party in power.
It turned people against the system itself. One of the people watching all of this was a young woman in Los Angeles. She was a schoolteacher, and when Martin Luther King was assassinated, she couldn’t stop thinking about her black students, about how scared and hopeless they looked. She decided to write a letter to the cartoonist Charles Schulz.
She begged him to put a black character into Peanuts. Schulz agreed. On July 22nd, a black child named Franklin appeared in the strip, helping Charlie Brown build a sandcastle on the beach. He was the first black character ever to appear in a major comic strip.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash made their debut that year, and the Heisman Trophy went to a wholesome young man named O. J. Simpson. Wacky Races premiered on CBS, and Intel was founded.
Ruth Eisemann Schier became the first woman placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. And a couple of days after Franklin appeared in the funnies, a brand new set of toys hit the shelves at the Mattel company. They were called Hot Wheels, and they were invented by Elliot Handler, whose wife Ruth had created Barbie. They were designed to appeal to boys the way Barbie appealed to girls, fast, exaggerated hot rods with flames painted on the sides.
Their competitors, Matchbox, made cars that looked like real production vehicles. Hot Wheels were pure fantasy. In New York, on September 30th, Boeing unveiled the first 747, the largest passenger jet the world had ever seen. The prototype was rolled out of a specially built factory in Everett, Washington, and it could carry 366 passengers.
Pan Am had asked for a jet two and a half times the size of the 707 a decade earlier. Now it was real. That same night, the Elvis Presley special aired on television. It had been taped in June, and Elvis had spent seven years making movies he was tired of.
The special, a raw, intimate performance with him singing his old hits like “Hound Dog” and “All Shook Up,” became the most watched television program of the year. It brought him back from the dead, musically speaking. A few days before the Elvis special, on September 16th, Richard Nixon had made an appearance on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Nixon wasn’t known for his sense of humor, but his friend, a writer on the show, convinced him that appearing would soften his image.
Nixon stood stiffly in front of the camera and delivered one of the show’s catchphrases: “Sock it to me. ” It lasted about five seconds. It worked. In October, Jackie Kennedy, terrified for her children’s lives after the two assassinations, married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on his private island of Skorpios.
She became Jacqueline Onassis, but the press called her Jackie O. That same month, at the Mexico City Olympics, a young boxer named George Foreman won the heavyweight gold medal by pummeling the Soviet Union’s Jonas Čepulis so badly that the referee stopped the fight in the second round. Foreman carried a small American flag around the ring and would later call that moment the proudest achievement of his career. Shirley Chisholm was elected to Congress in November, the first Black woman ever elected to the body.
And just days later, the first scripted interracial kiss on American television aired in an episode of Star Trek. Executive were terrified that southern viewers would be outraged. The episode aired. The public barely reacted.
On December 9th, engineer Douglas Engelbart gave a demonstration that would come to be called the Mother of All Demos. In a single presentation, he showed the world the computer mouse, the word processor, hypertext, and windows. It was the first time all of those elements existed in a single system. Nobody in the room fully understood what they were watching.
But they were watching the future. Ten days later, on December 20th, high school students Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday parked on Lake Herman Road in Benicia, California. It was their first date. Around 11:00 p.
m. , another car pulled up. A stranger got out and shot David Faraday in the head. Then he shot Betty Lou Jensen five times as she tried to run.
The double homicide would later be identified as the first confirmed attack of the Zodiac Killer. On December 24th, Apollo 8 became the first crewed space vehicle to orbit the moon. Commander Frank Borman and his crew, Jim Lovell and William Anders, were photographing the lunar surface when something unexpected happened. Anders glanced up and saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon.
“Oh my god, look at that picture over there,” he shouted. “There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that’s pretty. ”
He asked Lovell for color film and snapped the Earthrise photo.
It would be described as the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. A tiny blue marble, alone in the black. They broadcast back a reading from the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…” Then they signed off with, “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you on the good Earth. ”
Back on the ground, the year ended with Hair still knocking ‘em dead on Broadway, Elvis restored and roaring, and the Zodiac Killer still walking free.
The last thing anyone knew was that nothing would ever be the same. The decade was ending, and it was ending loudly.
