Are there such things as “generations,” and if there are, can they have a conscience? Can they have voices that represent those consciences? I’m not sure about the first question, though I have my doubts. Far too many variables and feedback loops. But I’ll say yes for now and posit this: For the young at heart in the 1960s and 1970s, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young certainly qualified, as did Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, Melanie, Cat Stevens and,…
Enumerations I am sitting in a wooden upholstered chair built in the nineteen fifties (I know because the table it came with had the original sales receipt from 1957) at my computer desk listening to Jimi Hendrix performing with the Band of Gypsies on New Years 1970 at the Filmore East almost two years before I was born. My cat Sibyl is sleeping behind me. She is almost 13. Hard to believe. She looks five and has the most…
There are days when I curse being a musician. I work long hours for a ridiculously small wage and often under crummy conditions. Think about the loudest, dirtiest, smokiest bar you have visited with your pals in the last 12 months. I have probably performed there, or at least some place exactly like it. In fact the word performed probably needs the qualifier of “tried to” before it, because like the fabled tree falling in the forest, if you are…
