"We were there during the legendary sixties, with visions and insights and lava lamps and black lights and sitar music and really dynamite home-grown weed that would get you high in only 178 tokes. We lit candles and sat around listening to John Lennon sing, with genuine passion in his voice, about how he was the egg man, and they were the egg men, and he was the walrus, and by God we knew exactly what he meant. That was the level of hipness that we attained, in My Generation. Oh sure, people tried to put us down, just because we got around. Our parents would come into our bedroom, where we were listening to the opening guitar lick of "Purple Haze" with the stereo cranked up loud enough to be audible on Mars (which is where Jimi Hendrix originated) and they'd hold their hands over their ears and make a face as though they were passing a kidney stone the size of a volleyball and they'd shout: "You call that music? That sounds like somebody strangling a cat. Our parents' idea of swinging music was Frank Sinatra snapping his fingers in front of sixty-seven guys who looked like your dentist playing the trombone. They were totally Out Of It, our parents. Hopeless. They were so square they though that people, other tan Maynard G. Krebs, actually used words like "square." As Bob Dylan, who as so hip that sometimes even he didn't understand what he meant, put it: "Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" That was our parents: Mr. and Mrs. Jones. But not us. We defined hip. We set all kinds of world hipness records, and we were sure they'd never be broken."