I am astonished to think of the sheer physical energy required to produce that much music. A magnificent obsession? And the determination of fans to preserve all that music – the mind boggles.
I've always had a lot of respect for the Grateful Dead, even though I don't qualify as anything but the most casual fan. Listening to some of these concerts however I understand both their limitations and their genius. The music can seem a bit monotonous but then there are these amazing moments where you sit up straight and say, "what was THAT?" or "that's IT!"
Image: The front cover of "Live Dead," an early commercial release.
... waiting for Jonathan Jarret's return from Leeds. And for all the rest of my readers.
John Cipollina was the phenomenal talent of Quicksilver Messenger Service. Nick Gravenites produced the first QMS album, which was pretty close to perfect. See also: Pride of Man.
A certain number of people in France think they are unhappy about Muslim immigrants and their children for not fitting in to the French way of life. I am not so sure that their self-diagnosis is correct.
The issue that everyone is talking about is the government policy forbidding women -- Muslim women -- from wearing in many public places veils of various sorts and more concealing garments like the burqa. Although there are about 5 million Muslims in France, it is estimated that only a few thousand or maybe even a few hundred women actually wear these things. Yet the government is rolling out the big guns against them.
It was when I read the Globe and Mail report about the wider context of this move that I began to doubt that Islam is really that central to this feeling of France is on the wrong track. Look at these quotations and you tell me:
The public hearing [part of a government-sponsored national debate] was called to discuss one question: What does it mean to be French? It got off to a rocky start...
The next speaker wanted to talk about globalization. “Kids today,” he said, as people around him rolled their eyes, “identify more with Michael Jackson and Madonna than with France."
...
The French have also been uninhibited in their response to the call for debate, with more than 40,000 comments posted in the first month on the government's national identity website. About 6 per cent, according to the Immigration Ministry, were racist or hateful enough to be removed.
The posts that remain run the gamut from quotations from 19th-century French philosophers to rants about immigrants.
“France has become a colony of Africa,” wrote one contributor. To be truly French, wrote another, one must have “French blood” from both parents “and going back several generations.” Others said all schoolchildren should be required to memorize the Marseillaise and to sing it, on pain of punishment, at least once a week.
...
Nadine Morano, the junior minister for family affairs, has tried to backtrack for days after she was filmed at another debate advising young French Muslims how to fit in. “What I want,” she said, “is that they love France when they live in this country, they get a job, they not use slang … and not wear their caps back to front.”
I absolutely love the junior minister's remarks about the characteristics of all powerful, unstoppable, heritage-endangering Islam. If you somehow missed that in the last paragraph, that dangerous foreign religion apparently consists of:
Hating France
Not getting a job
Using slang
Wearing [baseball] caps back to front.
Straight out of the Arabian desert in the seventh century! I might buy some of this had I not been a teenager in the 60s, when I was told that wearing jeans to school and growing your hair too long made you some kind of outlaw. Same, same.
One of the most distinctive voices of the protest folk music of the 1960s, Phil Ochs is pretty much forgotten now. The song I was talking about in the last post, "The War is Over," starts about 6:10.
This is one of the more memorable songs I listened to in those halcyon days. At least, I remember it clearly. Now, we all just sit back and laugh. Or not.
Last night I was listening to Randy Bachmann's music show on CBC2. Bachmann, who comes across as a marvelously intelligent and informed person, plays a selection of popular music organized around various themes. This is not exactly an original idea, but he does it well.
Last night his theme was songs named after women. He happened to mention a song by the Association called Along Comes Mary. I was around in 1966 and 1967 when the song was popular and I remember it well, so I looked it up on the YouTube time machine. (That's how I think of it.) It was there all right, and I had a few minutes of appreciating how odd and how unfamiliar something I actually lived through could seem:
Then, just because it was there, a video of the 1999 Bloodhound Gang cover of the same song (does not embed but you can watch it here), with a curiously similar theme. Could it be that the Bloodhound Gang had access to this old film back in the 90s?
The Jefferson Airplane on the Smothers Brothers Show.
I feel a desire to point out that the words of this song come, more or less, from an excellent post-apocalyptic novel by John Wyndham entitled The Chrysalids (UK) or Rebirth (US). This book was an assigned text in one Toronto high school for years, presumably until too many copies fell apart. Not a bad choice. Perhaps it led a few students to conclude "I've seen their ways too often for my liking" a little more quickly.
Long ago, I heard this song, Pride of Man by Hamilton Camp, on the first Quicksilver Messenger Service album; a friend heard a young Gordon Lightfoot sing it live. I put the lyrics here for my Ancient Civilizations students who worked so hard on Robert Wright's A Short History of Progress and Bryan Ward-Perkins's The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. The students will see the connection, I think.
I've always had an ambiguous feeling toward this song. It's certainly powerful; but I can all too easily see Maximilien Robespierre and Osama bin Laden doing a duet. Classic imagery works, but it's all too easily adopted wholesale.
Pride of Man by Hamilton Camp
Turn around, go back down, back the way you came, Can't you see that flash of fire ten times brighter than the day? And behold a mighty city broken in the dust again, Oh God, Pride of Man, broken in the dust again.
Turn around, go back down, back the way you came, Babylon is laid to waste, Egypt's buried in her shame, The mighty men are all beaten down, their kings are fallen in the ways, Oh God, Pride of Man, broken in the dust again.
Turn around, go back down, back the way you came, Terror is on every side, lo our leaders are dismayed. For those who place their faith in fire, their faith in fire shall be repaid, Oh God, Pride of Man, broken in the dust again.
Turn around, go back down, back the way you came, And shout a warning unto the nation that the sword of God is raised. Yes, Babylon, that mighty city, rich in treasures, wide in fame, Oh God, Pride of Man, broken in the dust again.
The meek shall cause your tower to fall, make of you a pyre of flame, Oh you who dwell on many waters, rich in treasures, wide in fame. you bow unto your God of gold, your pride of might shall be a shame, For only God can lead His people back unto the Earth again.
Oh God, Pride of Man, broken in the dust again. A Holy mountain be restored, and mercy on that people, that people
Update: that link has disappeared off YouTube, so I am replacing it with a 1980 version done by John Cipollina, the genius guitarist of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Nick Gravenites.
