ok, I don’t know why, but these oddball memories have been coming to me.
I remember the day I bought the band’s album cahoots up at hempstead mall. john brought me up there, he could drive.
at that time, he wasn’t much older than monica is now, and I wasn’t much older than lizzie.
we were already pretty much out there. everyone seemed to be, but I now realize it was something that was happening on the east coast and west coast, in the urban and suburban areas pretty much. something else was happening in various places, but not the kind of complete cultural upheaval we were amidst.
and when you’re growing up, first of all, you’re not ready for any of this stuff you don’t know what’s going on, even when things are pretty stable. but growing up in that time in that place, was nuts.
i’ve now known people who grew up poor, or rural, or both;
people who grew up on farms in kashmir, and in revolutionary housing blocks in shanghai under the maoists.
ok?
these folks have had it much harder than, praise God, I hope I ever have to know. that’s not what I’m talking about.
what I’m talking about is that we were completely at sea. if you’re poor, and growing up on a farm, its a pretty much known quantity. ok, we know where we are, and where we’re going, and maybe it sucks. but its known.
what we were dealing with was a rocking sea. it was more similar, I think to the turn of the twentieth century in europe, from what I understand, the fall of the ancient regime, and everything was different. all the pillars of society had essentially fallen. you found the results everywhere: in modern art, in modern music, in modern architecture, all of which seem quaint and dated now.
and the sixties and seventies seem like that somewhat now, except for the parts that endured, which we take for granted. equal rights, or at least the lip service and in reality something more nearly approaching equal opportunities for blacks and women, tolerance for differences in appearance, hair, dress, and lifestile, at least on a social level, the new music, and artistic milieu: irreverence in film, television, books. the antiwar movement, the ecology movement, the conspiracy theories, the drug culture. and later, the reactionaries, who are after all not entirely wrong. and ultimately its all about the dollars, and whatever it was you thought you were thinking just got coopted by the machine, like when you hear the who playing background to ads for hummer on tv, or the stones at the super bowl, or stockbrokers wearing expensive jerry garcia ties, its all kind of sick and disorienting. and putting aside how derivative all that rock music was, there was an element of uniqueness beyond what muddy waters or lighting hopkins ever did or said, its like this big echo chamber. they were responding to english folk and church music in the american south, and adding in african and other kinds of beats and whatever, and before there’s sunday morning, oh, there’s saturday night, and all that.
but what didn’t pass away, we now take as accepted norms. and its easy to forget what a challenge it was to bring out something that was new.