Charles Laquidara, WBCN, and me.

Not us. But it could have been. 

Soon after we decamped from Amherst and academia to Boston and a Phillips Street apartment on the back of Beacon Hill in June 1968, Bobby Kennedy was assasinated. That year had been on a bad trajectory from the start, with Martin Luther King's assasination and street protests against the intensifying Vietnam War. All the good intentions and vibrations of the early 1960s had begun to wash away, replaced with a general uneasiness. It was not uncommon to hear the word "revolution" in casual conversations at work and elsewhere. Not that anyone we knew had a plan for revolution, but rather that it felt like something was going to blow, something big and scary. As John Lennon would say "Don't you know that you can count me out...in".

We were all trying to maintain order in our lives - getting up in the morning, getting dressed, going to work, and generally getting on with life, trying to establish some semblance of normalcy. It was even possible then to keep negative information somewhat at bay from our everyday lives, or at least to compartmentalize it. There was no constant parade of information and distraction from the Internet, no instant communication. Drugs were cheap and available, and the amazing new music that was coming more and more frequently numbed us all in mostly pleasant ways. We looked for something to grab hold of, to steady us, to help us ride out the storm, and maybe figure out where that storm was coming from.

One of the things that many of us grabbed on to was the new phenomenon (to us) of FM Radio. And, in Boston, WBCN-FM. This was back when WBCN was referred to as "Underground Radio" and young disc jockeys who sounded like us couldn't wait to play the new album by Quicksilver, or Moby Grape, or some other group that sounded and felt just right for that moment. These DJs played what they liked, without regard to the length of the album cut, or any need for commercial breaks. There were no corporate playlists yet. We looked forward to what new album Mississippi would play for us that night.

From this small-scale, subversive radio station would emerge the WBCN of the 1970s and 1980s that most people remember, which was mainstream, but which very much retained its subversive origins with DJs like Charles Laquidara.    

Last week, I attended a screening of "I Am What I Play" and had a chance to hear Charles reflect on the sorry state of corporate FM Radio these days. Charles is featured in this very fine documentary about four pioneers of DJ-curated FM radio. I recommend that you see it if you have the opportunity. It acknowledges that times change, and that people have to change with them. Music will always be important to each new generation, and the ways in which they discover and consume it will always remain in flux.

I also discovered that there is a neat, well-written book, "Radio Free Boston" by Carter Alan, which traces end-to-end the fascinating history of WBCN, from its very first show, which opened with Cream's "I Feel Free", to its last, which closed with "Video Killed The Radio Star".

Ronnie Spector At 72

The Girl Groups of the 1960s helped cement themes in American pop that have stuck to this day: glamour, adolescence, scandal, and the tension between capturing old, universal sentiments and instituting new ones. Ronnie Spector, of the pivotal group the Ronettes, was, and still is, an easy choice for poster girl. At seventy-two, she remains sinuous and spritely; sharpened by adversity, she is emblematic of those volatile sixties, which look more familiar with each turbulent, new headline. These days, Spector sits between songs, but her exuberant performances are a lesson in pop history. She promises the “Best Christmas Party Ever” at City Winery, Dec. 22-23; with standards like “Be My Baby” and classic renditions of “Sleigh Ride” and “Frosty the Snowman,” it’s a hard holiday evening to beat. [The New Yorker]

Country Music Royalty: The Carter Family

Janis: Little Girl Blue

Janis Joplin

There was a weekend during the Summer of 1968, walking along one of the streets on the back side of Beacon Hill, when it seemed like everybody was playing the new Big Brother And The Holding Company album.  You couldn't go more than twenty feet without hearing "Piece Of My Heart" or "Ball And Chain" coming from an open apartment window. The summer before, you would have been hearing the Red Sox game during their "Impossible Dream" season, but this summer, back in the time when nobody on that part of The Hill had an air conditioner in the window, it just seemed like everyone discovered Janis Joplin at the same time.

The West Coast had discovered Janis the year before at the Monterey Pop Music Festival, but it took a year for the word to spread, and for a major record label like Columbia to put their advertising support behind the group, creating a national audience and making it possible for them to tour behind the release of the album. All of a sudden, it was in the Summer air, everywhere. 

So I bought my copy of the album for $2.79 at The Harvard Coop on Saturday, and immediately put it into constant rotation on our KLH stereo all weekend long.

Janis' story has become so trite and cliche over the years - the Jack Daniels, the outrageous outfits - that those generations who never had the opportunity to see her live in concert have no idea what they missed. Before her depression and substance abuse killed her, she was totally in control of her music and her performances.

Here she is at her peak. Mama Cass' reaction perfectly captures the moment. 

 http://youtu.be/Bld_-7gzJ-o 

Nun And Cabbie

A cabbie picks up a Nun. She gets into the cab, and notices that the VERY handsome cab driver won’t stop staring at her. She asks him why he is staring.

He replies: “I have a question to ask, but I don’t want to offend you.”

She answers, “My son, you cannot offend me. When you’re as old as I am and have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I’m sure that there’s nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive.”

“Well, I’ve always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me.”

She responds, “Well, let’s see what we can do about that…

1) You have to be single and

2) You must be Catholic.”

The cab driver is very excited and says, “Yes, I’m single and Catholic!”

“OK” the nun says. “Pull into the next alley.”

The nun fulfills his fantasy with a kiss that would make a hooker blush. But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying.

“My dear child,” said the nun, “why are you crying?”

“Forgive me, but I’ve sinned. I lied and I must confess, I’m married and I’m Jewish.”

The nun says, “That’s OK. My name is Kevin and I’m going to a Halloween party!”

The Seventies

I've been watching CNN's very good series about the 1970s, which is a difficult decade to relive in many ways. But one aspect of it in particular has stood out to me throughout all the segments: how much more focused and serious network news coverage was at the time.

At the end of the episode about the winding down of the Vietnam War, John Chancellor and, especially, David Brinkley put everything into perspective, in a way I'm afraid is no longer possible on commercial television.

I'm Back

No, I haven't disappeared or been abducted by ancient aliens, although prior to the kickoff of the NFL regular season this past weekend, I did find myself watching that show on the History Channel. I don't think that was good for me.

I just "decided" to take the second half of my Summer off. Because I could. And because I had allowed myself to become more of a consumer than a creator of content, and that always tends to sap my energy. Commenting on Facebook, Twitter and other threads is a lot like eating junk food - it provides an ephemeral thrill, but it slows you down, and an hour later you have nothing to show for it except "likes" and "retweets" if they matter to you.

I need to be writing and creating content again, curating and synthesizing stuff that interests me, satisfying my curiosity, and sharing it with my small circle of friends. 

The Tiger Parents Of Silicon Valley (And Boston)

This trend has become noticeable in affluent towns around Boston as well.

Fathers Day

The It Girl

Clara Bow, 1930

Smile!

The Band And Van Morrison

I recall that it was a blustery, cold Halloween night in 1969 when we went to see The Band in concert. We'd toked up pretty good inside a friend's car, in a parking spot we'd miraculously found on Saint Stephen Street, directly behind Symphony Hall. Normally we would have taken the Red Line then the Green Line to Symphony Hall from our Beacon Hill apartment, but I guess whoever we went to the concert with had wheels, and we were happy not to have to stand outside and smoke in the cold. Second-hand smoke under these circumstances is a good thing.

The concert at Symphony Hall that night was The Band, touring behind their second album. The surprise, unbilled opening act was Van Morrison, who was living on the other side of the river in Cambridge at the time and who I don't think we'd ever heard of. I believe the ticket price was $5.00, which was a lot of money in those days, considering the fact that I was making $1.25 per hour at my job at The Book Clearing House on Boylston Street. (Gail supplemented our income with her job at Harvard Divinity School.) The monthly rent for our apartment was $100, and we were living large enough to take a two-week vacation in England that year, which included a stop at the Isle Of Wight festival. We didn't have to worry about where our next smoke would come from, and we always seemed to have a little money left over each month at Suffolk Franklin Bank. (We paid for that UK vacation in advance, in cash.)  Good times indeed. 

What immediately caught our attention inside Symphony Hall once we'd found our seats (stage right with an excellent view down to the stage) was the massive array of speakers and other assorted sound equipment deployed on the stage, and what are now called "sound technicians" (we called all non-band members of rock groups "roadies" or "groupies") scurrying about, communicating with the engineer at the sound board in the back of the hall, getting the sound levels just right. We had never before seen such attention to detail at a concert; we soon discovered why it was all so important, and how The Band was different from all the other live performers we had seen up to this point.

Van Morrison was introduced by Robbie Robertson, and proceeded to play very strong set, considering that he was completely blotto. A bottle of Jack Daniels sat precariously on top of one of the Marshall speakers, and I suspect alcohol was not the only agent in his system that night. As loud as the sound was - and the sound at rock concerts back then (as now) was loud - it was crisp, clear, and just about perfect (except for the slurred lyrics on Van's part). "Into The Mystic" blew our minds.

Van ended his set passed out on the stage. On the Queen's birthday in 2015, he became "Sir Van". And so it goes...

As for the Band, their set was astonishing. Every note sounded just like it did on their albums. We had never before experienced that kind of precision and absolutely perfect renderings of music that we were intimately familiar with from countless listenings on vinyl, and through reasonably good stereo speakers, given the state of home audio technology in the 1960s. (Now of course, everything sounds incredible right through the headphones attached to your phone.)

But then, we had no reason expect to hear the lyrics sung clearly and balanced with the instruments. Part of it can be attributed to the marvelous acoustics of Symphony Hall, of course, but most of it was accomplished through the sophisticated application of technology and a commitment to excellence on the part of the artists, as well as pride in this amazing body of work they had created.

It was a magical evening. 

Dumpster Fire

This photograph perfectly captures the state of the Boston Red Sox tonight, having coughed up a seven-run lead to the Toronto Blue Jays. 

Drive Defensively

Ever since I started walking by the back lot of a towing company/body shop that receives some of the worst wrecks in Boston, I've noticed that I've been driving much more defensively.  

RIP Ornette Coleman

A jazz original. 

Baby Boomers Rule The World Again

The Rolling Stones are once again on tour in the United States, filling enormous stadiums and shaking loose every dollar they missed in 2013, when they played smaller venues. In their seventies now for the most part, they still deliver high-quality rock and roll to audiences that include many people the age of their grandchildren.

I've been noticing lately that the Baby Boomer generation, of which I am a founding member, has not been receiving very much love as we "age out" of the general population. Boomers are about as popular with other generations as Tom Brady and the New England Patriots are with the population outside New England. And that's okay with me. As the tee shirt slogan of the moment in Boston asserts: "They hate us because they ain't us."

Credit: The Atlantic. Granted, this is a posed shot to generate smiles from readers who think it's exaggerated. But based on what I've seen of the demographic of the tribe that's preparing to attend the Grateful Dead Reunion this Summer, it's not far off.

This Atlantic article really got me to thinking about how my generation has always refused to comply with norms. And most of us now simply refuse to meet the expectations others have for us as we "age out" of the population. Other generations have done their share of navel-gazing, and none quite so eloquently as "The Lost Generation" as chronicled by one of its greatest writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald:

"We were born to power and intense nationalism. We did not have to stand up in a movie house and recite a child's pledge to the flag to be aware of it. We were told, individually and as a unit, that we were a race that could potentially lick ten others of any genus. This is not a nostalgic article for it has a point to make -- but we began life in post-Fauntleroy suits (often a sailor's uniform as a taunt to Spain). Jingo was the lingo. 

"That America passed away somewhere between 1910 and 1920; and the fact gives my generation its uniqueness -- we are at once prewar and postwar. We were well-grown in the tense Spring of 1917, but for the most part not married and settled. The peace found us almost intact--less than five percent of my college class were killed in the war, and the colleges had a high average compared to the country as a whole. Men of our age in Europe simply do not exist. I have looked for them often, but they are twenty-five years dead.

"So we inherited two worlds -- the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of disillusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world was growing as remote as another country, however close in time."

If Boomers are indeed hogging all the resources and oxygen in the process of perpetuating our social and (especially musical) preferences and looking out for our own self-interests, then so be it. The lessons we pulled out of the debris and rubble of the 1960s, Vietnam, Watergate, and the struggle for civil rights taught us that we needed to look out for ourselves first and foremost, while maybe doing a little good along the way. And especially to keep on rocking in the free world.

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe was a major part of what came to be called "The New Journalism" in the early 1960s. His prose was to conventional reporter-prose as Impressionist art was to classical art of its time, and he made anything he wrote about interesting and incandescent, especially to an undergraduate student majoring in American Literature. Later on in the 1960s, Hunter S. Thompson came along with his drug and alcohol infused essays on politics, race, rock and roll, and an America coming apart at the seams. Rolling Stone magazine was must-reading every two weeks for a large number of disaffected young citizens hungry to see what Thompson or Wolfe or one of the other young Rolling Stone staff writers would have to say about the cataclysmic events that seemed to roll through every week in that fever dream time at the end of the 1960s.

Here's an excerpt from Tom Wolfe's "Las Vegas" from Esquire Magazine in 1964, which pretty much captures him at his best:

 Bugsy [Siegel] pulled into Las Vegas in 1945 with several million dollars that, after his assassination, was traced back in the general direction of gangster-financiers. Siegel put up a hotel-casino such as Las Vegas had never seen and called it the Flamingo—all Miami Modern, and the hell with piano players with garters and whatever that was all about. Everybody drove out Route 91 just to gape. Such shapes! Boomerang Modern supports, Palette Curvilinear bars, Hot Shoppe Cantilever roofs and a scalloped swimming pool. Such colors! All the new electrochemical pastels of the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green, viridine, aquamarine, phenosafranine, incandescent orange, scarlet-fever purple, cyanic blue, tessellated bronze, hospital-fruit-basket orange. And such signs! Two cylinders rose at either end of the Flamingo—eight stories high and covered from top to bottom with neon rings in the shape of bubbles that fizzed all eight stories up into the desert sky all night long like an illuminated whisky-soda tumbler filled to the brim with pink champagne.

Tom Wolfe, Esquire Magazine February 1964

Timelines And Context

It's amazing to me that ten years ago, there was no iPhone and no Facebook. These days, it seems, everything has become much more immediate, and much more ephemeral.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately, and Memorial Day last month brought to mind my father's death in the military when I was a baby. That was very long ago, in another century, but it got me to remembering specific events in my life, reminding me that it's time to update the timeline I began several years ago, also in another century.

I learned from Jim Croce that you can't catch time in a bottle. But I also learned that I could create a spreadsheet, indexed by year, starting with the year I was born, and then flesh out my personal history in separate columns for things like the car I drove, where I lived and at what address, what school I was going to and what grade I was in, who in the family died that year, or had a major illness, who my significant other was - you get the idea. An Excel spreadsheet has an almost unlimited number of columns for you to drop in as much information as you require. 

When I built my personal timeline, I added things like my wife's age, my kids' ages, which pets we had, where everyone worked, where we vacationed, things like that. And as more and more details accumulated, I began to get a pretty detailed and comprehensive picture of what the year 1982 (for instance) was like.

I have done quite a lot of work on ancestry.com, tracing our family heritage back more than two hundred years, and that has been an exciting process of discovery for me. But the timeline adds flavor and texture to the broader picture that Ancestry can create.

One of the things that always seemed to be lacking when I studied history in school was context. There was always a push (even more so now, I gather) to remember and be tested on discrete names, dates and events, but very little time learning what else was happening simultaneously with these things. I can re-create any specific year of my life now, with all of the detail I've layered into my timeline, and almost feel like I'm reliving it. And every visit and re-creation suggests more details.

I'm not planning to write an autobiography, but if I ever did, my timeline would be a great place to begin. 

Is Craft Beer The New Wine?

A craft beer store opened a few years ago in an upscale suburban town west of Boston. Knowing a thing or two about retail, and having once operated a bookstore in that same town, a couple doors down, I was curious about how the owners of the craft beer store were thinking about the niche they had carved out for themselves, and their business plan.

So I became a customer, got to know the owners a little, signed up for the newsletter, set up a frequent-buyer account, and over the next few months attempted to educate myself about what was actually in some of those $8 bottles of beer with the clever labels, from small breweries with ironic names that were seemingly springing up everywhere, blessed by home equity loans, angel investors, and the Gods Of Venture Capital. The various beers were said to be infused with all kinds of things, some of them aged in whiskey barrels, and all of them subjected to a wide range of other free-range processes. They were discussed in a language that reminded me in many ways of how wine is discussed and marketed. Some of the bottles I purchased were good, some were awful, but all of them were expensive, relative to what I could buy a six-pack of Samuel Adams for (or Yuengling whenever I was in Philadelphia, before they expanded their distribution into New England).

I attended a couple of "Craft Beer Expos" and chatted up a few founders and principals of craft brew start-ups, most of whom were bright young fellows who spoke passionately and knowledgeably about the manufacture, quality and particular characteristics of their beers. After a time, I noticed an "us versus them" theme emerging, pitting the upstart small craft breweries and their customers (us) against Coors, Budweiser, Miller, and the other giant breweries (them). When I inquired as to whether any of the founders/principals would be open to being acquired by one of "them" someday, the answer was "no", but I imagine that if old Adolph Coors came calling with a fistful of dollars, looking to add a "craft beer" label to his lineup of mainstream beers, they would likely rethink their position. I've noticed some of "them" already marketing new beers with clever ironic names (like Shock Top) which make them look very much like craft beers.

Something about the craft been phenomenon feels to me like a bubble. I browsed a gigantic beer selection at a Boston area Wegman's the other day, and was astonished at how much real estate craft beers occupy, relative to mass market beers. Real estate at Wegman's is not inexpensive, and they don't bequeath it to a product or a category unless that product produces profitable retail dollars. And as with all of the products they carry, Wegman's has priced the craft beer to sell.

I'm reminded of an early episode of "Mad Men", in which Sterling Cooper has landed the Heineken Beer account, at a time when imported beers were all new and shiny in the United States in the early 1960s. Don Draper developed a successful marketing campaign for Heineken that infused (sorry) the brand with status and prestige and resulted in consumers paying a premium to feature the brand at special dinners and for special occasions.

I'm going to use Wegman's beer department as a barometer to gauge the extent to which craft beer will carve out a permanent niche for itself. I'm sure there are a lot of Don Drapers out there trying to figure out how to make that happen too.