Amazingly well crafted article, here is an excerpt.
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Radio was the soundtrack of our lives, and most of the songs in the Top 40 in the late 50's and early 60's were written for teens, sung by teens and bought by teens. And then there was an awareness—distant at first—of folk music. Top 40 was cool, man, but some heard another call, to a gentler, more acoustic music that was increasingly reflective of contemporary ills such as civil rights and nuclear proliferation. This was also a time when a small conflict in Viet Nam was starting to show up in the news, and put half of those students in the line of fire. Thus, some of said youth went off to college where they were allowed to hear any of a smorgasbord of New Age possibilities mixed in with all those liberal ideas about rights and such. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring came out in 1962, becoming the first warning of a coming global environmental catastrophe, and by 1964, enlightened teachers were urging students to read it, and it was discussed on campuses and in coffee houses where the hip met to drink java, listen to folk music or poetry, and discuss the issues, putting climate change on the radar for the first time. Oh, there were a host of other ills needing attention, but let's focus on those four while, for the first time, pot, hashish and then LSD were competing with beer for the on-and-off-campus drug of choice. College kids, many who were living away from home for the first time—and still on their parents' dime— with time on their hands, ideas in the air, and Viet Nam over their heads, and all this mixing with optimism and naiveté will get you a groundswell of unhappy idealists, a generation willing to try some new way of thinking…

• http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/672-music-me-spark