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OT: 2020 feels like 1969


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I'll tread carefully as well.

 

Speaking as someone who spent a sizable chunk of my career in the R&B scene, I can bear witness that the prejudice African Americans face is very real and entrenched. I've been pulled over by the police for the stated reason of being the first white person he'd seen in that neighborhood in months. I wound up in a brawl at a late night eatery because a racist started throwing punches at our bass player after he had the temerity to ask, "How's it going?" A band I was in that was mostly African American (one of the best bands I was ever in, by the way) could only find gigs at "black clubs" and air force bases. And those are just a few examples...

 

I've long instinctively felt that we are all intrinsically the same at a fundamental level. Sure, we have physical differences and our own talents and abilities; but I see a dignity that underlies each and every one of us. As a result, I've navigated through the world differently than I might have otherwise.

 

I highly recommend looking for the dignity in others. It may not be the solution, but I think it's a good place to start.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

My Blue Someday appears on Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon

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I was 7 :)

I remember the televised moon landing and my parents playing Herb Alpert on the record player.

 

It's such a shame that today's kids don't listen to the record player anymore in the evenings. . :gofish:

J a z z  P i a n o 8 8

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Yamaha C7D

Montage8 | CP300 | CP4 | SK1-73 | OB6 | Seven

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I'll tread carefully as well.

 

Speaking as someone who spent a sizable chunk of my career in the R&B scene, I can bear witness that the prejudice African Americans face is very real and entrenched. I've been pulled over by the police for the stated reason of being the first white person he'd seen in that neighborhood in months. I wound up in a brawl at a late night eatery because a racist started throwing punches at our bass player after he had the temerity to ask, "How's it going?" A band I was in that was mostly African American (one of the best bands I was ever in, by the way) could only find gigs at "black clubs" and air force bases. And those are just a few examples...

 

I've long instinctively felt that we are all intrinsically the same at a fundamental level. Sure, we have physical differences and our own talents and abilities; but I see a dignity that underlies each and every one of us. As a result, I've navigated through the world differently than I might have otherwise.

 

I highly recommend looking for the dignity in others. It may not be the solution, but I think it's a good place to start.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

 

 

Excellent post Geoff, thank you!

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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I was at Boy Scout camp the night they first landed on the Moon. I and the other boys were completely psyched because they let us stay up late to watch the televised images as those boots touched Lunar soil. Wow! Simply wow.

 

Today we have to settle for "well, at least we can get into space on American hardware again, instead of having to hitch a ride with the Russians." The sad thing is that we've fallen so far that it's exciting simply to get back to where we were. Damn, by now we should have had permanent bases on the Moon and perhaps an outpost on Mars and...

 

At least in 1969 we were doing NEW things. In 2020 the best we can manage is to play catch up with where we were.

 

We've come full circle in other ways as well.

 

Americans are dying in an endless, pointless war in the Middle East instead of Southeast Asia.

 

Greed rules.

 

And racism? Racism never went away. People who thought that progress was being made were fooling themselves. I worked with some of the most virulent racists you could imagine. They chafed under what they imagined as the iron boot of liberals who were preventing them from assuming their rightful place at the pinnacle of society. Now they've been unleashed; they're free to speak aloud the things they only muttered under their breath before. They've been enabled, encouraged, and enraged by people who tell them that they are victims.

 

People like that cannot be cured of their hatred. They will not stop. They will not get better. You cannot reason with them because they don't run on reason, they run on emotion...and negative emotions, at that. There will always be a dark side to human nature. There will never be a golden age where it suddenly ceases to exist. The best you can do is to manage the problem. Don't fall for the false equivalence of "Encouraging violence = Free Speech." Don't let them start playing the victim card about how they've been downtrodden. And don't ever vote them into any office higher than dog catcher...and preferably not even that, because they'll just kick the dogs they've caught out of pure spite.

 

It was true in 1969 and fifty years later, it's still true in 2020. It'll still be true in another fifty years, and also fifty years after that. Hatred, fear, prejudice, suspicion, superstition, and greed will always be with us. When people of that nature start crawling out from under their rocks, don't let them reach critical mass. The history books are brimming with grisly, bloody lessons of what goes wrong if they gain control.

 

I just never thought it would be the United States of America that led the way into darkness.

 

The joke's on me, I guess. Failure of imagination. A sin in a science fiction author.

 

Grey

I'm not interested in someone's ability to program. I'm interested in their ability to compose and play.

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I hope we all realize the irony in praising the fact that great music comes out of great violence, oppression, and death. Yes, it would be foolish to discard works of art that help us to heal and learn after tragedies. I believe it's also pretty foolish to lick our chops at the possibility of another wave of such creativity when we're staring right at the causes.
Hey Eric, pretty sure some of my commentary fits the profile you're describing here. I would counter that it's not meant to be chop licking (even though it might seem so).

 

Rather, for some musicians, inspiration is driven by what's happening around them, the good bad ugly, and in the middle of the chaos they do what they know, which is to create. And this is coming from someone who grew up in a scary rough neighborhood wracked by wretched violence every day and night. With all that, I see your point clearly, much respect.

Some music I've recorded and played over the years with a few different bands

Tommy Rude Soundcloud

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I was 7 :)

I remember the televised moon landing and my parents playing Herb Alpert on the record player.

 

It's such a shame that today's kids don't listen to the record player anymore in the evenings. . :gofish:

 

My kids dig Herb Albert on vinyl. Also Paul Desmond, Sergio Mendes, Getz/Gilberto, Bitches Brew, Abbey Road, and so on . . .

 

In my house, it's always the late 60's.

Gigging: Crumar Mojo 61, Hammond SKPro

Home: Vintage Vibe 64

 

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People like that cannot be cured of their hatred. They will not stop. They will not get better. You cannot reason with them because they don't run on reason, they run on emotion...and negative emotions, at that. There will always be a dark side to human nature. There will never be a golden age where it suddenly ceases to exist. The best you can do is to manage the problem. Don't fall for the false equivalence of "Encouraging violence = Free Speech." Don't let them start playing the victim card about how they've been downtrodden. And don't ever vote them into any office higher than dog catcher...and preferably not even that, because they'll just kick the dogs they've caught out of pure spite.

I'm not saying racism can ever be completely cured (I believe it comes from human nature, belief in your group vs. theirs, mistrust of differences, etc.), but I do think it can be mitigated and minimized. It takes work. We will always be fighting it, it happens everywhere, not just the U.S. (again, because it's human nature), and that's a drag, but we just can't let racism win.

 

How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes <- And, this link has music content. sort of!

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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Today we have to settle for "well, at least we can get into space on American hardware again, instead of having to hitch a ride with the Russians." The sad thing is that we've fallen so far that it's exciting simply to get back to where we were. Damn, by now we should have had permanent bases on the Moon and perhaps an outpost on Mars and...

Grey

I think this was a combination of two things. (1) We'd placed all of our eggs into a heavy lifting vehicle (STS) that had an unacceptable failure rate. (2) After 2008 there was no public appetite to spend the money it would take to fix STS and redirect into a coherent/viable program.

J a z z  P i a n o 8 8

--

Yamaha C7D

Montage8 | CP300 | CP4 | SK1-73 | OB6 | Seven

K8.2 | 3300 | CPSv.3

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I'm not saying that we should just let racism run rampant. Far from it. My point is that you can never "win" against that sort of thing, only manage the problem.

 

Around here we have something called the American Cockroach, aka Palmetto Bug. They're big suckers, up to 2" long. They're not rare, either--'bout near as common as mosquitoes. Some nights we get as many as five or six coming in from outside, and that's after I went through and meticulously sealed the house several years back. One memorable night my wife was sick and trying to sleep on the couch and I killed something like thirteen of the damned things over a four or five hour period. How they get in, I do not know. They are relentless and they are legion. Like racists, you're not going to "win" against Palmetto Bugs. They were here long before our ancestors were crafting the first tools on the African savanna and they'll be here long after the last human is radioactive dust. That said and in spite of the fact that they're "part of the natural order of things," I don't intend to tolerate them...nor do I suggest a policy toleration towards their relatives, the American Racist Assholes.

 

Unfortunately, there's no bug spray for racists.

 

Grey

I'm not interested in someone's ability to program. I'm interested in their ability to compose and play.

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Today we have to settle for "well, at least we can get into space on American hardware again, instead of having to hitch a ride with the Russians." The sad thing is that we've fallen so far that it's exciting simply to get back to where we were. Damn, by now we should have had permanent bases on the Moon and perhaps an outpost on Mars and...

Grey

I think this was a combination of two things. (1) We'd placed all of our eggs into a heavy lifting vehicle (STS) that had an unacceptable failure rate. (2) After 2008 there was no public appetite to spend the money it would take to fix STS and redirect into a coherent/viable program.

 

I view it as part of the increasing anti-science sentiment that we're seeing.

 

Grey

I'm not interested in someone's ability to program. I'm interested in their ability to compose and play.

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Around here we have something called the American Cockroach, aka Palmetto Bug.

Apparently you haven't noticed that I live in Houston. :rolleyes: I've had nights like you describe. I've ignorantly left a cardboard box in a garage and then went to get it ages later and there were millions of them in there. I've seen them in sewer pipes when I had plumbing done.

 

Anyway, I wasn't sure you were saying that. I was just saying we can't give up, tiring as it may be. We will be better for it. :thu:

"I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck

 

"The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI

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I'm concerned with people referring to the concept of yore times and pick on the relatively few violent subjects that made the news. If you want for instance to associate the zeit geist with the black panthers and stuff like that, where's the summer of love, woodstock, and all those hippies working for love and piece, for which the era is more known. It's lke modern kids are supposed to accept their daddy is an organized traitor, doesn't want to do much about cleaning out all the oil reserves and wants a ride with the little love and peace the kids bring up because they've got no other choice. Very extremely not 60 and 70 history. And worse about the wars the U.S> specifically was and is engaged in, the protests and the commentations here are way way off IMO.

 

T.

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Love the post GRollins, even though it makes me said that I agree with it, mostly.

 

I have some hope that younger generations can move forward, incrementally at least. While there certainly are young degenerate racists I think the worst ones I've ever come across are in the older generations (whatever those happened to be as time moved forward). I have heard a lot of very casual racism coming from older folks--the kind that they don't think twice about. They aren't using n***er as a curse, it's how they think about black people. It's how it was when things were truly great (for them) without all this pesky diversity.

 

My kids are half-Chinese, their group of friends looks like it was drawn up at a diversity meeting :) Not on purpose, none of them give two shits about skin color. Granted these are all suburban kids, and 'band kids' at that so perhaps not quite the norm. One of my oldest's friends has two moms, nobody in his school cares, he's very popular. There is a gay club at his high school. I can't even fathom those things existing when I was in high school 30 years ago. Flip side, I don't like what I hear in the online gaming culture that seems like most kids frequent--there are a lot of trolls and racists on there that go after black kids. I guess any platform that allows trolls and cowards to hurt others is going to be abused (looking at you too, anti-social media).

 

We are certainly in a period where the rocks are being lifted and the roaches aren't scattering--they are proudly standing there flipping the bird. There is a positive to that, you get to see people for who they really are, and that lets me excise them from my life.

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Today we have to settle for "well, at least we can get into space on American hardware again, instead of having to hitch a ride with the Russians." The sad thing is that we've fallen so far that it's exciting simply to get back to where we were. Damn, by now we should have had permanent bases on the Moon and perhaps an outpost on Mars and...

Grey

I think this was a combination of two things. (1) We'd placed all of our eggs into a heavy lifting vehicle (STS) that had an unacceptable failure rate. (2) After 2008 there was no public appetite to spend the money it would take to fix STS and redirect into a coherent/viable program.

 

Well, at least this time private industry is bankrolling the drive to space, and not capricious government funding. Although now is still a perilous time - almost all our eggs are in the Musk basket instead of the STS basket. We need a couple more commercial space companies to establish the industry.

Moe

---

 

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Prediction: in some of those bellwether anthems, there will be great keyboards at the core :thu:

 

In 1969, I was playing keysâa beat-up Hammond M3 and Leslie 147--in a cover band in Toronto. We churned out mainstream FM rock on weekends at colleges, high schools, community centres, artsy clubs, private parties. No licensed establishments. We were kids, too young and hippieish to work bars in bluenose Ontario. Fat joints and hash pipes out behind the gymâ¦.another story.

 

A year earlier, we"d gaped in amazement at the brutal violence unleashed on our American contemporaries outside the Democratic national convention in Chicago. 'The whole world is watching' was their chorus. That was us we saw at the wrong end of the billy clubs, demographically and emotionally. The American cultural maelstrom drew us in.

 

Rock gigs in those days were like cod on the Grand Banksâso plentiful you had to be really bad not to hook enough of them to keep you fed and geared up. There were no tribute bands, only genres. You showed up on time, played some recognizable tunes, got the kids up dancing and didn"t offend the owners/teachers/parents/chaperones with in-your-face stuff like Country Joe"s fish chant. At college and club gigs, of course, you could play the unexpurgated version of 'Feel Like I"m Fixin" to Die', the Airplane"s 'We Could Be Together', anything by The Fugs if that"s where your your twisted muse took you. There was lots of solidarity with the American resisters who"d flooded north. But you had to be careful. The bottom line was you worked for your booking agent. If his clients were happy, you got more gigs. If not, the cash dried up and you had to move back in with your parents.

 

We picked our own music. Protest songs went over well, so we usually played some: 'For What It"s Worth', 'Get Together', rocked-up Dylan stuff like 'Blowin" In The Wind' and 'The Times They Are A-Changin"'. The CSN version of 'Wooden Ships' was a useful slow-dance song, and it had a prominent organ part for me to get emotive with.

 

Which brings me to the nub of this wandering reminiscence: there weren"t that many sixties protest songs with 'great keyboards at the core'. There was one released in 1969 about the Democratic convention riots that I still recall, an obscure track by a good band called Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys. Driven by prominent Hammond and Wurlie tracks, "How I Spent My Summer" was producedâperhaps surprisinglyâby one of the great guitarists of all time, Jimi Hendrix. As soon as I heard it, I prodded my bandmates to give it a shot. I covered organ and got one of our guitarists to take on the Wurlie rhythm track. It sounded cool. What ultimately killed us were the harmonies: too much work to get them down, not enough enthusiasm for the song to put in the time.

 

I thought of 'How I Spent My Summer' last week when I saw that old familiar unchecked abuse of power again soiling the streets of our much-loved southern neighbours. The whole world is still watching.

 

[video:youtube]

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

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I was 11. I agree that social tensions are reminiscent of '69. However, the music landscape is very different. In '69 there was a huge generational divide. I guess it was roughly between the Baby Boomers and their parent"s generation. Today young adults and even kids listen to music from 50 years ago (e.g., I recently asked my 13 year old granddaughter what she was listening to on her AirPods and it was The Beatles). In '69 the music from just 20 years earlier was called our parents music and not of much interest to the younger generation. So whereas the music of the 60"s was very anti-establishment by design, I"m having trouble seeing that same type of drastic change happening again anytime soon. But, we"ll see...
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Hey Polychrest, nice post. Although my summer of '69 was in Saskatchewan, by 1970 I was there in Toronto doing and reacting to the same things. Maybe we even ran into each other at the El Patio.

____________________________________
Rod

Here for the gear.

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Polychrest

 

Cool post and it reminded me that Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys were the opening act when I saw Hendrix. What a great night about ten of my friends went we were scattered all over, but met up later and spend the rest of the night talking about Jimi. All one of the girls that went with us that lets saw a bit too excited by Hendrix.

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I was 11. I agree that social tensions are reminiscent of '69. However, the music landscape is very different. In '69 there was a huge generational divide. I guess it was roughly between the Baby Boomers and their parent"s generation. Today young adults and even kids listen to music from 50 years ago (e.g., I recently asked my 13 year old granddaughter what she was listening to on her AirPods and it was The Beatles). In '69 the music from just 20 years earlier was called our parents music and not of much interest to the younger generation. So whereas the music of the 60"s was very anti-establishment by design, I"m having trouble seeing that same type of drastic change happening again anytime soon. But, we"ll see...
Al, completely agree with your take. I would take it a step further - back in the late 60s and into the 70s, a huge number of the younger generation completely rejected music from the 50s. I had no interest in Elvis, was much more into Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Stones. Back then I wouldn't have been caught dead going to see Pat Boone or Bobby Darin, wasn't interested in Rock Around the Clock.

 

NOW - that I'm older and wiser (hah), the music of the 50s is much more compelling. But back then, the perception was that the older music happened to coincide with the root causes that led to the social unrest, and therefore was rejected by some of the younger generation.

Some music I've recorded and played over the years with a few different bands

Tommy Rude Soundcloud

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