Prelude

The looking glass never lies. It stares back at us in stark indifference, mirroring our lives and culture. Likewise, music never lies. It reflects our character, reveals our psyche and melodically records our culture. Music is our looking glass into the past and present.

 The music we sang and danced to between 1957 and 1967 echoed the disturbing cultural undercurrents that triggered the American Cultural Revolution. Earlier events, such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid hunt for communist sympathizers, the unpopular war in Korea, and the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka all foreshadowed the dramatic change that would begin at the close of the ‘50s.

American optimism ran high during the Eisenhower administration, when many Americans were achieving the American dream, with steady paychecks, intact families and two cars in a new garage. Yet, a lingering Cold War between America and the Soviet Union kept the threat of global nuclear war on everyone’s mind. And when Sputnik blasted into space, it sent shock waves of embarrassment and anger across our country for being upstaged by the Russians.

It was left to iconoclast philosophers to fill the gulf between prosperity and disillusion. Jack Kerouac created a sensation with On the Road. Ayn Rand posed, “Who is John Galt?” and a former adman with a pen name of Dr. Seuss revolutionized the way kids learn to read.

For the second time in a hundred years, rumblings of civil war crept from the shadows of racial and political disparity. Still struggling to rationalize a slave based cultural heritage, scores of aging Southerners fanned the flames of discontent. On the national stage, a younger generation pitted itself against the status quo, embracing birth control pills, free love, easy drugs, the hippie generation and Vietnam War protesters.

On the cusp of an emotional breakdown, Americans agonized over the assassination of their president, conspiracy theories, the Cold War, faux reality and societal anarchy. The only thing certain was change.

Throughout this period of turmoil, Rocky Strong was a college student and self-supporting professional musician, struggling to deal with the truth he witnessed – but sometimes refused to see – in the looking glass. Living through tectonic events in American society during the ‘50s and ‘60s, Rocky tells the story of the Fabulous Carousels, a band of six southern musicians on the road for six years, covering 30 states, 64 cities, 132 venues and 300,000 road miles.

You are invited to step through the looking glass and share their youthful dreams, hopes, fears and free love – not to mention the subterraneans, drugs, wiseguys, JFK’s assassination, betrayal – and, ultimately, self-actualization. Join the Fabulous Carousels, The Pride of Dixie, as they pursue dreams of becoming celebrity heroes in America during the tumultuous American Cultural Revolution.