Friend and Lover--Reach Out in the Darkness (1968)

     Sometimes a song can capture a moment in time and frame the zeitgeist of a movement more than any other medium. This song from it's first line, "I think it's so groovy now that people are finally gettin' it together" spells out the short period of time where "flower power" really might have seemed more than just a cloud of pot smoke on the horizon. Coming out between the assassinations of Martin Luther King (in April) and Robert Kennedy (in June), it really was just one last gasp of what seemed a year before to be a viable future.
     Jim Post, who's previous experience had been in folk music had written the song after attending a love-in in New York. Jim and his wife Cathy Conn teamed up to create the song which seemed like a cross between Spanky and our Gang and Jefferson Airplane. The single, which was recorded with the help of Joe South and Ray Stevens, reached number 10 that summer. The song shimmered among the turmoil, anger and bitterness that was the summer of 1968.
     There was another single which broke into the top 100, but it was not many years later that Post and Conn divorced. He was to continue writing and singing on some 20 odd albums over the years. She left the entertainment business and is now a grandmother of three in the New Mexico mountains.