DON'T TRY TO BRIDGE THE GENERATION GAP

It surprised me recently that Hollywood found it necessary to remake "The Getaway," an entertaining movie from my youth but hardly the sort of classic story that bears retelling for each generation.

I mentioned this to my 11-year-old son.

"I saw that movie in high school," I told him.

Innocently, I believe, he responded, "So, why'd they wait so long to redo it?"

Located in two torturous words -- "so long" -- is evidence to my passage into the least enviable side of the generation gap.

Generation gap ... now that's a phrase cooked up when I was young designating the mental chasm between rebellious youth and the elders who failed to understand them. In modern parlance, it would be said the older folks "just don't get it."

The coinage carried with it an inbred snideness, not to mention bias, since those who used it often knew which side of the gap it was best to reside on.

Now, the phrase is being turned against the people who nurtured it to life. Hippies once thought they could change the world. Now, they eye retirement from brokerage firms and suffer from prostate problems.

Mick Jagger once said he would not be hopping around on stage singing "Satisfaction" when he was 40; he is now 50 and a wrinkled sprite in concert. Pete Townshend told his generation he hoped he died before he got old; he is now balding, graying and nearly deaf, and, with the success of "The Who's Tommy" on Broadway, heir to the musical theater legacy of George M. Cohen and Ethel Merman.

This doesn't suggest that advancing years have tempered the attitudes of rock 'n' roll's founding fathers. If anything, they have eased gently forward from those early days. There was a time they would have been satisfied to be merely rowdy and seductive; now, it's probably important to them to be thought of as artists.

While fashion is one thing, supple and ultimately forgiving, time furnishes no amnesty. People on my side of the generation gap can at least take comfort in knowing something the young folks don't.

Still, it becomes all too easy to raise an eyebrow at the enterprise of a generation that follows. I regard this as healthy tension, since people of one generation are generally square pegs in the round hole of the next. Inevitably, anyone who attempts to fit in comes off like Johnny Carson wearing Nehru jackets and love beads on "The Tonight Show"; if you have to try hard to be hip, you aren't.

Not that you have to be uninformed. I read the "Zines." I've heard of Four Non-Blondes. I know that Pauly Shore is "toast," that Bart Simpson is "way toast" and that Beavis and Butthead are on their way.

I also know that the outfit one used to wear to change oil in a car is now called "grunge" and on the descending slope of prevailing fashion. (One problem in weighing trends involves not intellect but longitude. Style tends to originate in coastal regions and work its way inland; even in the age of television, once a trend hits Missouri, it's probably no longer that in Seattle.)

And if young people think they have a monopoly on renegade names for their musical heroes (I concede, Smashing Pumpkins is a pretty good one), a history lesson is required. As a teen, I owned an eight-track tape by a group called Mott the Hoople. I probably listened to it on my way to Memphis one time when I went to a concert that featured three bands: Hydra, T. Rex and Humble Pie.

Another time, I went to a concert by a rock group promoting an album called "Brain Salad Surgery."

When I yearn for days of lost youth, I wonder why.

As an anniversary gift this month, my wife gave me a compact disc I'd wanted for a while, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." A reworking of some familiar rock songs plus some blues standards, this recording seemed agreeable to my children upon first listen.

It was only after I informed them that "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" was recorded in 1970 that they soured on it.

I tried to give them something to hang on to. "The singer is Joe Cocker," I said. "He sang that song at the beginning of `The Wonder Years.'"

"Oh," was the response.

Thus, Joe Cocker is now toast with my kids. That's how it should be. Young people must be free to develop their own tastes, cultivate their own heroes, define their own generation. They will reject notions of their parents simply because that's the way life constructs things. I did the same thing in my youth; nothing has changes with the years except the social acceptability of condoms.

Here's one piece of advice, though. If young people think their generation of music will endure, they might know that a fall can occur. As payment for the sins of my generation, there was disco. It can happen again.

Ken Newton is editor of the Southeast Missourian.