HAIGHT-ASHBURY and ALONG CAME JONES

BIDEN: “All of a sudden, ‘Along Came Jones,’ as that old song goes. Along came Trump,” Biden told a group of Democrats in Las Vegas in July.

“Just like what happened in my generation. My generation was dropping out. My generation, in the late ‘60s, when I was graduated from school, said ‘No, no. Go to Haight-Ashbury. Drop out. Trust no one over 30. Don’t be engaged.’”

CONTEXT: In this salad of 50- and 60-year-old pop culture references, Biden was riffing on a late 1950s R&B tune and the counterculture a decade later.

“Along Came Jones,” was a 45 — a single — on the longdefunct ATCO label that barely charted after its release in 1959, when Biden was a sophomore in high school. He used it as a segue to the defining moment for voters today, the election of President Donald Trump.

But then Biden goes on with a litany of references to the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, when Biden was in college and law school.

“Dropping out” was a reference to psychedelic therapy advocate Timothy Leary, the late University of CaliforniaBerkeley psychologist who urged the young in 1966 to “Turn on, tune in and drop out,” chiefly with the help of LSD.

Haight-Ashbury was the symbolic center of the movement, a corner of a low-rent San Francisco neighborhood where thousands of aimless youth flocked for community, but often found instead poverty and drug addiction. An up-and-coming band, The Grateful Dead, was a regular act in neighborhood basements.