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Saturday, June 17, 2017

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Ah Bill, my old friend and fellow music lovers...I love this article to pieces, what a perfectly polished bit of writing ...my only complaint is that it's too short, I wanted MORE !.....and I say this .....I would trade any 4 or 5 of my concerts of the time to have been there in Montery.....( remember, in those days, there was always at least 3 bands on single night's bill, many times 4 or 5 ....so it's a fair trade!)

I will always think to be born at exactly the time we were was to have the best of all worlds .....and at the very top of that bestness is our music ....damn damn damn ....amazing music .....and those concerts ....for 3 bucks up to as much as 10/15 dollars for a festival, you got to see the cream (heh, little play on words there) of a vast and varied assembly of groups....from Motown to hard rock, from folk rock to acid rock, and the much scorned soft rock, ( unless it was late at night with your lover ...heh) huge talents spread their notes across the country speaking to an entire generation....most of us can name the tune in less than 4 bars.....

....I know music helps define each era, from about the 1890s or so, but the 60s .....it was a time when if we were inarticulate, the music said it for us ...it was that underlying ribbon of music that ran through our lives....our radios and record players blasted it out, at the beach, out of a car, and pouring from our windows, the advent of FM underground radio kicked it all up a notch in the mid 60s'ish, stuff that AM radio wouldn't or couldn't touch now had an outlet ....YAYAYAYA .....the only people who used headphones were the techs in the studios ...whether recording or DJs ....we shared our music with the world ...(whether they wanted to hear it or not) we didn't live in our own heads with the music, like this headphone wearing generation....

....I think, like the low tech sound of an LP, it was the technology of the times ( or lack thereof) that contributed to the excitement of our music....with the advancement of technology, came a smoothness, a controlled quality of the music that also killed the raw excitement, and wild character of the music of the 60s....

.....Last summer, the kids next door, all in their mid 20s, had their living room window open ....and while I was doing the dishes, I was treated to their rendition of "Sounds of Silence" ...a cappela... and they ALL knew the tune, and ALL the words ...cause they was raised right ! ...*cough* ....anyway, it was ever so nice to know that our music is living on in younger generations......

Dear old Sally I shall bend to your demand and dig up some more in the same vein from my archives. So stay tuned.

Your writing above approximates to the swerving, mad onrush of Kerouac. Yes, our generation had and has a special relation to its music. Our music became the sound track of our lives, in a way that was not possible for our parents, and this because of such technological developments as the transistor. We took those little transistor radios everywhere, to the beach, on our bikes . . .

I still have all the old LPs in excellent condition with their jackets and their liners too. No scratches.

Yes it does warm the heart that the young are glomming onto a lot of what moved us back in the day. No surprise. Our music had meaning: it came from the heart and spoke to the soul about things that matter. It was idealistic. It was a music of engagement with life: neither the escapism of lounge-lizard crooners like Sinatra nor the vile hip-hop horseshit of the rappers. Am I being fair?

Are we generational chauvinists? Mebbe so . . .

Anyway, here is an S & G tune that I'll bet you can still relate to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKlSVNxLB-A

and Bill, therein lies the philosopher, your paragraph starting "Yes it does warm the heart" captures that whole once world......our music had meaning .....plus, you could understand most of the words ...and those words were important ....above and beyond the usual purile words of young love, we spoke of people standing together ....one can't help but wonder how many of us are left ....not just in body, but how many of us are still clinging to the idea that we should care for each other, that we should "love one another right now" ...

I have often said I never grew up .....the values that I held dear in my youth, I still hold dear......impractical as they may be, and often are...

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