For months my iPod wouldn't sync with my laptop. So for months I listened to the same however-so-many gigabytes of music (which is one of the reasons that Hippies vs. Punks posts have all but disappeared).
Sometime in December this problem corrected itself. When I re-synced my iPod I loaded it with every Bob Dylan record in my library. The idea was to re-explore Dylan in light of his being feted with a Nobel Prize in Literature. And it has been a revelation.
I think it is a fair argument to make that without "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" there is no super-historical Dylan and hence no Nobel.
What is singular about the Brandeis concert is the power of Dylan's bellows. He is flat-out fog-horning each verse. It is an amazing performance, reminding the listener of the absurdity of current events while feeling more grounded and sane imagining the dream of this young man.
I was particularly tickled by
Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptownAnd there was nobody aroun’I got into the driver’s seatAnd I drove down 42nd StreetIn my Cadillac. Good car to drive after a war
As Dylan's career progressed his writing lost much of its mirth.
What's interesting about the video at the top of the post is all the flannel and work clothes populating the bohemian coffee house television set. It looks exactly as we dressed in my California Hardcore youth of the early to mid-1980s.
If you are like me, the chronology of work produced by the great trinity of singer-songwriter solo artists -- Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young -- is not difficult to recapitulate until the beginning of the Hippie vs. Punks period, 1975 - 1979. Then things get murky.
Most of us know Dylan's Desire (1976) and Neil Young's Zuma (1975), and hopefully we have all listened to Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece (1974) into the triple figures. But who can say whether Neil Young's American Stars 'n Bars comes before or after Comes a Time? Or whether Dylan's Shot of Love antedates or follows Saved?
For Van Morrison this "Bermuda Triangle" period begins later because after the breakup-from-Janet-Planet album Veedon Fleece he takes a recording hiatus before reappearing in 1977, the big year for UK Punk, with A Period of Transition, basically naming the departure of the Aquarian Zeitgeist, which he then follows up the next year with the successful "New Wave" album, Wavelength.
The murkiness of Van the Man's discography begins, for me at least, with his last album of the 1970s, Into the Music (1979). I have always been under the impression that Beautiful Vision (1982) follows Wavelength. It doesn't. Beautiful Vision actually follows the Celtic rocker, Common One (1980).
I say all this to emphasize the point made last week in relation to Wavelength. The late-70s were a confusing time. Old verities were vanishing. And a simple sort of satori to bring this home is the attempt to chronologize the oeuvre from this period of the trinity of our modern masters, Dylan-Morrison-Young.
Apropos of this, the last few weeks I have traveled directly into the "heart of darkness," immersing myself in Into the Music. Though I would identify myself, like my father, as a Van Morrison man, I was not familiar with this record. I think I might have heard it once or twice back in the day. If I reach way back I might have a vision of a sun-bleached album cover and the smell of lavender perfume so strong it makes me gag.
The backstory of Into the Music is that Van, alienated by Wavelength, went for a reboot. So he traveled to the English countryside and walked the fields at dawn, getting into the music by plucking out songs on his guitar. The result, as the 1970s come to a close and Jimmy Carter greases the skids for the Reagan-Thatcher lurch to the right, is -- believe it or not -- a critic's choice album of the year (#4 on Robert Christgau's Pazz & Jop Dean's List for 1979).
I say "believe it or not" because the album is so sugary and earnest it is hard to hear it as anything other than a precursor of the Boomer nostalgia, perfectly captured by the Big Chill (1983), that is about to burst forth in the 1980s as Reaganism takes hold.
But Into the Music provides an amazingly accurate template for the type of record that Morrison would perfect in the 1980s once he leaves off his Celtic Scientology synthesizer voodoo (an album that I never tire of, 1983's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart).
In "Troubadours" Van introduces the piccolo trumpet and stroviola (not your usual rock'n'roll instruments) to go along with the strings and other horns to create a signature "neo-Avalon" sound that would become a staple of '80s albums like No Guru and Poetic Champions, an ideal accompaniment for the one-time Hippie now a solid burgher drinking his delicious Peet's coffee and scanning the morning business page.
From there it gets worse. "And the Healing Has Begun" is the type of Vegas showtune that Van has been able to extrude for the last 30 years as if he is the artistic equivalent of a plastic injection mold. Listening to it with its caws and whoops and "yeows!" one can't help but see the lads and lasses hoofing a Riverdance while the aging Boomers sip white wine in the audience and smile.
Of course we must doff our caps because it is after all 1979 and none of this was visible back then. Though it is hard to accept that Christgau was being sincere when he labeled Into the Music a pick hit, awarding it a rare A, and describing it as "Van's best album since Moondance."
For the last several weeks I have had a mental block on doing this post; subsequently, I have ended up listening repeatedly to Van Morrison's Wavelength, his last great album of the 1970s, for a lot longer than I originally intended.
The mental block has to do with the importance of Van Morrison in my personal history. My father was a Van Morrison man. I grew up to the sound of Van Morrison's voice. My sisters and I would complain in chorus, "Not Van Morrison again!" When I went off to the university, I discovered for myself the joys of the Belfast crooner's work. This was during the period that Van was experiencing a creative renaissance. I would listen to No Guru, No Method, No Teacher(1986) preparing for class in the morning.
I stayed loyal all the way up to the millennium when I lost track around You Win Again (2000) and Down the Road (2002). My father sent me a copy of What's Wrong with This Picture? (2003), but I never bonded with it, nor any of the others -- Magic Time(2005), Pay the Devil (2006), Keep It Simple(2008) -- until 2012's Born to Sing: No Plan B, which is great.What's remarkable to me is how commercially successful all these recent albums have been. For instance, Born to Sing: No Plan B was a Top 40 album across the Western world -- and the others were in the same basic tony territory -- creating the odd situation where the septuagenarian Irishman is more popular now than his Moondance (1970) salad days during the Hippie revolution.
"The late '70s were rough on you guys." I have said this before to my father. When I said it to him this last time we were driving back from San Francisco after spending the day there the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. "[Y]ou guys" was meant to refer to my father, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison.
The day before I had related the story of Bob Dylan's "Born Again" conversion, which prompted my father to quote from "When You Gonna Wake Up," off Dylan's great Christian Slow Train Coming (1979) album, about "Henry Kissinger's got you tied up in knots." Meaning? It is hard to pay attention to the news every day.
I understand how destabilizing, confusing and powerful the late-70s counterrevolution was because I lived through it with my father. At the end of 1978, when Wavelength first appeared with a Norman Seeff cover photo (with the ubiquitous late-70s background pastel highlights) of "Van the Man" decked out in crotch-hugging white disco pants and a short-sleeved Studio 54 urban chic tee, it was clear -- to me at least, and to my father as well, no doubt -- that the Hippie's day was done. There was no way in good conscience that my father, a Morrison acolyte living in the Santa Cruz Mountains trying to establish some sort of alternative education type of schooling, was going to emulate his hero. There was no going back, but the way forward was obviously false, celebrating as it did money and a superficiality.
[I'm reading Philip Jenkins' Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (2006). Though it is not Jenkins' intention -- he's a Christian conservative academic who now teaches at scandal-plagued Baylor University -- he makes a convincing case that the Carter-Reagan swing to the right was likely a color revolution initiated by a national security state seriously on the ropes after the '60s cultural revolution, Vietnam, Watergate and the Church and Pike Committees.]
Wavelength announced unequivocally the end of the Hippie and a celebration of the counterrevolution. I never sat down and made a study of the recorduntil the summer of 1990 when I separated from my wife (a time covered in the last Hippies vs. Punks post). I thought it would be appropriate because the album represented a period that roughly corresponds to the end of my parents' marriage; I thought maybe I was missing something, that if I just spent more time listening something would be revealed.
Despite my efforts that summer I never really shook the impression that Wavelength is superficial. Until now that is. After listening to the record for the past two-plus weeks, I have to say that of all Van Morrison's numerous albums Wavelength might be the most unique. He is struggling, not always successfully, to find a new way. There are a lot of synthesizers which seem extraneous. And there's a ska-inflected "Venice U.S.A." (the third YouTube from the top of the post), followed by the (unsuccessful) disco Celtic soul number, "Lifetimes."
But on side two, beginning with the title cut, "Wavelength" (fourth YouTube from the top of the post), everything meshes.
The songs that define the album are the last three: "Santa Fe/Beautiful Obsession" (fifth YouTube from the top), "Hungry for Your Love" and "Take It Where You Find It" (below).
They are big statements, mostly of confusion. The impression is of a guy knocked on the head by a brick falling out of the sky, and he's trying to walk it off and get his bearings. He's trying. He wants to be sincere. But he is having trouble figuring out where he is and what is going on. "Hungry for Your Love" is a smooth paean to carnality which provides a sonic chute to the nearly nine-minute, album-ending ur-statement "Take It Where You Find."
"Take It Where You Find" is Van Morrison's explicit message to the Hippies (and to himself) that the dream is over. It didn't work. The revolution died aborning. There is the beautiful chorus:
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin' about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
Followed by Van belting it out like only Van can:
I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I'm gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Trite? Yes. But what else is there to say? You lost. Dust yourself off and walk on, keeping an eye on your shining light.
In the end Wavelength was a way forward for the Hippie, but only if he were willing to acknowledge that he had lost. Commercially, the album was successful, probably the most successful up until ten years later and the batch of lucrative albums beginning with Avalon Sunset;this leads me to believe that a lot of Hippies were receptive to Van's message.
Equally a way forward for the Hippie was Rick Danko's solo album from a year earlier. Interestingly, Danko did not counsel an acknowledgement of defeat by his Hippie brothers and sisters. He plowed an aural path that let the good times roll. But the Hippies apparently were having none of it. They did hanker after what Morrison and Dylan were peddling though, whether New Age mysticism or Born Again Christianity.
I think I mentioned in a previous post that I've been listening to Interpol's El Pintor (2014). Recently on Fridays, after I've spent the week immersed in whatever record I am studying for the Hippies vs, Punks post, I find that hearing Interpol again is like slaking a great thirst. I don't know what exactly it is, but I suspect that it has something to do with disappearing testosterone.
When Interpol's debut full length, Turn on the Bright Lights, appeared in 2002 it had a great impact on me. Part of the millennial Post-Punk revival (think Franz Ferdinand), Turn on the Bright Lights was recommended to me by a buddy and coworker. I was going through a breakup with my girlfriend of 11 years while struggling with a return to alcoholism after six-plus years of teetotaling; at the same time, I was getting traction as a local politico, even quoted once in a while in the weekly city newspaper.
It was an intense time. Looking back now, I can clearly see it for what it was, a classic end-of-young-manhood overextension and freak out, some sort of ego-driven self-immolation. And there was no better soundtrack for such a production than Interpol's guitar-drenched derivative (of Joy Division and Sonic Youth) Turn on the Bright Lights.
El Pintor is Interpol's fifth studio album in 12 years. While succeeding records have not been able to match the instrumental power of the band's debut, all are remarkably consistent. Interpol has not monkeyed much with their sound. You don't get extreme creative pivots. There are stable components: the defensive restrained vocals of frontman Paul Banks; the pulsating, chiming guitar of Daniel Kessler; and the efficient score-keeping drums of Sam Fogarino.
The album prior to El Pintor, the eponymous Interpol (2010), I listened to a lot. Its release roughly coincided with my last lay off. The three months I was unemployed I did a lot of running, usually five days a week. I had Interpol loaded on my iPod. I bonded with Interpol, as I did with the follow-up to Turn on the Bright Lights, the commercially successful Antics (2004), which was also a time I was laid off.
The only Interpol record I never really meshed with is the band's one non-Matador album, 2007's Our Love to Admire, released on Capitol Records. It is a perfectly good album. It just happened to coincide with a time that I was fully employed and with a new girlfriend. So I guess I didn't need any lengthy testosterone-laden sonic sojourns.
Last night walking home from the train station listening to "PDA" from Turn on the Bright Lights, it hit me what I have been after, what holy grail I have been searching for in the years I have been listening to Interpol recordings.
One hot Friday in July I got stoned with a guy after work. He was a techie, a Photoshop guru who had been hired by the magazine where I worked as a production coordinator. He was an offensive guy who had been after me to get high with him for a while. On this particular day I relented.
Afterwards I walked over to 8th Avenue from 25th Street. My girlfriend, the one who I would break up with tens years later, the year of Interpol's debut album, worked at a magazine on 8th and 34th and I was going to meet her. We were to take the subway to Brooklyn where she lived in a spacious railroad apartment that occupied the entire top floor of a tenement building on 2nd Street near 4th Avenue.
It was hot, and I was stoned. The sun was scorching. When I got to 8th Avenue, which at that time, the early 1990s, was pretty dicey between 23rd and Madison Square Garden, populated by junkies, panhandlers, thieves, petty toughs -- the urban milieu that used to be commonplace in New York City before gentrification began in earnest during "Giulianitime." (It is surprising how many Whole Foods pop up as I Google Map some of these streets now.)
As I walked up 8th I noticed a young blond woman in modest professional attire pulling a suitcase behind her. I figured she was making her way up to the Garden for the Democratic National Convention. The denizens of the street had already started to prey on her, and it was apparent that she was unnerved.
So in the full flower of my street-fighter 27-year-old youth, clad in my red 501s, my Black Flag bars t-shirt, my Carolina boots, arms muscled from curling a barbell, waist narrow from running, I strolled up beside her. I was not close enough to exchange a greeting, but near to where the junkies and thieves thought we might be together.
Suddenly the gauntlet that she had been walking fell back. She looked around to see what had happened. She saw that it was me. And that look of recognition in her eyes -- she was young and attractive -- that I was the reason she was no longer being harassed, well, it is hard to describe how it made me feel because it is such a core male fantasy; but in my stoned state it felt for a moment there like I was Clint Eastwood swinging his arms up the avenue.
In four blocks we arrived at the edge of Madison Square Garden. She crossed the street toward the blue police sawhorse barricades and the many satellite television trucks. I walked up the steps of the U.S. Post Office across from the Garden and sat down in the high heat. And I remember I had two very clear realizations as I studied all the satellite trucks with their parabolic dishes pointed to the heavens in a religious fashion: 1) This -- meaning the Democratic National Convention -- was obviously too important to be free and spontaneous -- money clearly controlled the outcome; and 2) the planet was getting too hot.
Ten years later, as my relationship with the best girlfriend I ever had disintegrated and I looked forward to trading it in for some ego-addled male fantasy of being a "player," I connected with NYC's Interpol because -- as I realized last night walking home in the July sunshine -- Turn on the Bright Lights aurally captures how I felt when I escorted the young lady up 8th Avenue to the 1992 Democratic National Convention.
But, as I was to painfully learn, there is a big difference between 37 and 27. Alcohol doesn't get you as high; sex cannot be pursued with the same abandon. Now that I am 50 and have given up both for years I think Bob Dylan pretty much says it it all when he sings in "Highlands":
The sun is beginning to shine on me But it’s not like the sun that used to be The party’s over and there’s less and less to say I got new eyes Everything looks far away
I cast about at the beginning of the week for an album for this Friday's Hippies vs. Punks. At first, having recently finished Ed Sanders' The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, my intention was to focus on Sanders' Truckstop (1969). But quickly I confronted the difficulty of immersing myself for an entire work week in Sanders' Country-&-Western send-up of Hippies vs. Squares.
As I was coming to grips with this realization I was in line at a Starbucks getting my morning coffee. Piped in over the PA was a song from Bob Dylan's Self Portrait (1970). I just happened to have The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) loaded on my iPod. So I decided that would be the album for this week.
But then I thought, "How can I ignore the 'Fare Thee Well' concerts of the the Grateful Dead?" The ultimate Hippie band officially reforming 20 years after Jerry Garcia's death in order to officially call it quits. The final football stadium shows in Santa Clara and Chicago received an ample amount of ink. Besides Jon Pareles' bloodless review, stories seemed to focus on the exorbitant ticket prices.
In any event, never a Deadhead, I decided to take another listen to the band's debut album, The Grateful Dead (1967). Recorded in Los Angeles for the Warner Bros. label during the month of January 1967, the most illuminating takeaway for me is how dated the record sounds. This is no American Beauty (1970) or Workingman's Dead (1970). A majority of the tracks are governed by a Go-Go dancer's beat, proving, like Moby Grape's debut, that the San Francisco Sound in 1967 was evolving out of a L.A.-dominated Sunset Strip Freak Scene. In the run-up to Monterey Pop and the Summer of Love, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (1967) is a far more innovative, defining record than The Grateful Dead.
Nonetheless "Viola Lee Blues" is certainly a statement of great things to come:
The blog is a strange format. It is at once disposable -- a toss off -- and always accessible, retrievable, semi-permanent. That's why I began this page: as a way to organize my random thoughts. I live alone; my time away from the job -- what of it there is -- is my own. I carry on a dialogue with myself in solitude, Vita contemplativa. The blog helps.
NFL Week 9 put me in mind of a post I wrote about NFL Week 13 of the 2012 season. The topic was the bumper crop of rookie QBs: Luck, RG3, Tannehill, Weeden and Wilson. This past Sunday I watched games featuring three-fifths of said quarterbacks, now in their third year.
The two I didn't see, the two broadly considered the standout quarterbacks of the draft and the ones who garnered the most media attention in 2012, Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, are a study in contrasts. Luck's Colts are a perennial playoff contender; his play has been stellar. For a moment there this season, prior to a demolition meted out by the Steelers in NFL Week 8, Indianapolis looked good enough to contend for the AFC Championship. RG3 and his Redskins are the exact opposite. The team and the player, since their wildcard playoff elimination by the Seahawks in the 2012 season, a game that ended with RG3 suffering a catastrophic knee injury, seem to be constantly on the brink of collapse. At this point, it is not clear the Griffin will ever return to the form he displayed his rookie year, which is tragic, worthy of the talents of some modern-day Euripides.
But, quickly, to the games I televisually witnessed: I bounced back and forth between the two early Sunday match-ups: Cardinals vs. Cowboys; Chargers vs. Dolphins. Brandon Weeden, cast off from Cleveland, was filling in for an injured Tony Romo. Weeden played abominably. If Dallas still had Kyle Orton as its backup quarterback instead of allowing him to depart to Buffalo, the Cowboys would have beat Arizona. Without a passer who can complete throws to wideouts Dez Bryant and Terrance Williams, an opposing defense can isolate on the Herculean DeMarco Murray and limit his impact. And that's what happened last Sunday.
The most impressive performance I saw in NFL Week 9 was that of Ryan Tannehill. Granted, San Diego is in the midst of another mid-season crisis of confidence, something the Chargers seem to experience every year regardless of who the head coach is; nonetheless, the show that Tannehill put on -- 24 of 34 for 288 yards and three TDs; four rushes for 47 yards -- in Miami's 37-0 blowout of a team that dominated the Super Bowl Champion Seahawks in NFL Week 2 is a highlight of the season.
Russell Wilson, to conclude this "where are they now?" snapshot of the rookie QB standouts of 2012, played poorly against the Raiders. The Seahawks had to hold on at the end of the fourth quarter, narrowly averting disaster when Cooper Helfet botched the handling of an onside kick. Fortunately, Jermaine Kearse was right there to fall on the ball and Wilson took a knee to bleed the clock out.
Throughout the entire game Wilson threw high to his receivers. And it became apparent to me that he was unable to see the middle of the field. The Raiders blitzed the center of Seattle's line all day long, which is how most teams deal with Wilson. The word is out and it has been for a year now: Russell Wilson can't see downfield in the face of pressure. He can see the sideline routes, and he can pick up receivers over the middle if the pocket breaks down and he is able to scramble around for a couple of seconds.
Given the realities of poor play by the Seahawks offensive line one wonders what the rest of this year holds for the defending champs. I think there is some hope if Seattle goes all in with a Bill Walsh West Coast offense of an early vintage -- late '70s/early '80s. If you recall those teams they lived and died on the swing-out dump-off pass to a runner out of the backfield. You can tell that Darrell Bevell is trying to incorporate this into the offensive game plan with Marshawn Lynch. He needs to try harder.
****
To conclude, a few brief thoughts about Tuesday's election. Yesterday I was thinking that I should write more about work. My workplace is a gold mine of dysfunction, as is every workplace. People are penned in together year after year, day in and day out, and made to perform the same barren routines. Most people don't read, don't think, don't aspire to anything other than the satisfaction of their own petty comforts. For the most part there is nothing grand or noble on display in the modern office.
I work for a union local, You would think that after Tuesday's huge victory by an anti-labor GOP -- Davis-Bacon is in the party's crosshairs -- there would be a sense of urgency, of renewed purpose. There was nothing of the sort. It was as if the home team Seahawks sustained a bad beating, and that was it. Nothing really was at stake; it was just another event in the media stream directly unrelated to our everyday lives.
It is NFL Week Four Sunday, which means if I am going to live up to my pledge and be done by the end of the season with this old letter project, the one I have dubbed "The Colt 45 Chronicle" after my beer of choice consumed while writing these epistles 25-years ago, I might have to start posting two a week. An audit of the remaining letters is called for at least to get a count. So far I have just been selecting them off the top. No culling, no cherry picking, no organization.
The letter below, addressed to my friends Greg and Tresca, is concerned primarily with the necessity of new music, pursuing new sounds. My wife and I often acted as hosts, and one my principal duties was as disc jockey. I liked to have the latest "leader of the pack," whether at the time it was Sonic Youth, or The Pogues or The Pixies, and then embed that in a foundation of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Velvet Underground.
I was reminded of the importance of fresh sounds this morning on a run around Lake Union. A couple years back I downloaded a free 2011 Merge Records sampler, on which appears a song, "Civilian" by Wye Oak. It shuffled on my iPod while I was working down the parking lots that line the lake just east of Westlake Avenue:
I close the letter with an expression of love. Greg and Tresca were important to me because they seemed to be doing their own thing. They were refuseniks. They worked but didn't believe that it would amount to anything. They drank. Greg was a tremendous athlete. A big guy at 6'3" or 6'4" and over 210 lbs. Drinking was what they did, drinking and listening to music.
Winter 1989
I finally shelled for some new music. It happened last Monday, down on Broadway and West 4th Street. It was a Monday, but I wasn't working; and the snow was sure snowing. But I braved it all -- the avoidance of worklife and the sloshing in West Village snow streets (like the cover of The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan, Levi's feeling much too thin) -- so I could get some new music in my life, or at least some music that I hadn't heard for quite a while.
Too many times in the near past I have found myself overcome, forlorn, because none of the stuff I have does the trick anymore. You know, people come over, bring a few bottles of wine or some quarts of beer (some of Ashley's med-school chums -- though, sadly, not very often; it's usually I who does most of the bringing) and you want to put something on that sparks, that inspires, that captures the mood, but you don't have anything. Sure, you have the old standards, the solid-and-always-reliable: the B.Dylan and N.Young and L.Reed and J.Rotten (everybody knows 'em and everybody loves 'em). But as your're fingering through the pile, you realize/know that they don't cut it, not when you're trying to get people up. People feel too secure around them, too normal and historical, like a high school yearbook; they've got too many memories, too many stories and sorrows attached to each tune you put on the turntable. It's like trying to get people to beer bong and dance, shoot a tequila shot and smoke a joint, all while eating Christmas dinner in the parents' living room and wishing mother a happy birthday, the bright light shooting off the freshly painted white walls down to your white china platter with the slice of white breast meat and the sliver of dark, the patch of stuffing and mash potatoes pig-penned in turkey-neck gravy, the cranberry sauce breeding on the perimeter.
Music, I hope, isn't supposed supposed to be so comforting and tight-in-the-loins and unthinking as that. I would hope, and do think, that music -- and this is what makes looking for new music (or music you haven't heard before) necessary -- that music is something very outwardly social, energetic and revolutionary.
We, Greg and I, would drive out to San Ramon drinking 12-ounce coffees in paper cups. One morning he put on R.E.M., and I was just getting high from the caffeine. It was Green, and I hadn't heard it before. -- Because of my situation (staying over in S.F.), I was always drunk in the morning (as I know you guys were too). So the coffee would hit me hard -- but friendly -- and so would the sun (we were driving due East in the morning).
Without being hokey, because I'm good and drunk in one night, I love you two. You're important to me.
This morning will continue a pattern started with the last Hippies vs. Punks post (on Contact High with the Godz) -- a quick hitter on an important Hippie-era recording that I am exploring thanks to having recently read Lester Bangs' essay, "Do the Godz Speak Esperanto?"
I've listened to One Nation Underground (1967), Pearls Before Swine's debut on ESP-Disk, several mornings this week and I've got to say it has been a real treat. I seem to have found myself in almost a constant state of stress for the last month and partly thanks to listening to One Nation Underground I found that the state has almost entirely disappeared.
One Nation Underground was recorded right before the Summer of Love and released three months before the Tet Offensive drove a stake through the heart of LBJ's Great Society. You would be hard pressed to find a better vehicle to transport you back to a time when the masses were cohering into Hippiedom. One Nation Underground is an amazing aural document, necessary listening, I think, for any serious student or dialectician who wants to understand how we ended up in our current predicament.
This is a drunken buddy love letter that waxes nostalgic about the joys of being an undergraduate. It speaks for itself.
If you ever wonder what it is all those young men in their beards and flannel shirts and dirty jeans are hankering for, it is on display right here. Bliss.
Summer 1989
Well, Niall, what was that season? The season when we were open to a grand life-tide, tossing a football up Durant Avenue in the Berkeley winter late afternoon sun (which is better than the spring sun for most of the world) when that pretty 18-year-old beauty student of mine came walking down the same sidewalk. You had just tossed the old brick-red pigskin, and I was reaching up -- both arms stretched up and outward like a shit-ass brat begging for mamma's crotch and tit) -- but my eyes were slanted to her, to Melissa, making sure that she was looking on as I made the catch. And she was; and I made the catch. And then I pulled up and started to chat with her, and you came trotting up; and we -- Melissa and I -- proceeded to talk about that phone number of mine that I had included on her final paper along with her course grade; and she said that she had considered calling me but that she hadn't because she didn't know what to make of it; and then I assured her -- in your presence -- that everything was on the up-and-up and that she should call, and, better yet, that I would call her, if she would give me her phone number. And she did. Then you and I departed, returning to our pigskin-tossing jaunt up Durant destined for the post office. (You had to mail something pertaining to law school.) Man, that was really a wonderful time. It meant a lot when you were living there with me, after I had my shindig with Maura. We'd toss the ball out on that stretch of university lawn by Oxford Avenue while the low Hawaii-bound sun scraped the top of our heads, shooting through our hair with its strawberry poptart fingers. Nothing can replace that time. And we spent it together: sleeping on the blue futon in the Berkeley morning; sharing a cup or two of coffee listening to Dylan or the Pogues; those good tasty meals in the evening (that were either made for us or by ourselves); but best of all: all those happy and vitally important social functions we hosted. I can see us now, smiling, the door knob in your hand and the door in an open position, a person walking through the door -- that person could be Craig, could be Mark, could be Eric, or Maura or Colin or some girl -- a background tune blanketing the air, the house already half full; and me, standing guileless and greeting, with a peanut-butter jar of Coors, at ease.
Listen, just make sure that you don't forget how close we are, and how much we've been through together, and what it is that we are to each other: like the times we'd go to the BANCROFT LOUNGE and dance in appreciation of the simplicity of our drunkenness; not to dance to be seen or to be powerful, just to be drunk and alone and with a heartfelt buddy. Thank you, man, for all and whatever we've done together; you're a true friend.
A departure for Hippies vs. Punks: I actually went to see a live performance of an artist who will be the subject of today's post.
Richard Buckner is conducting a tour of what he is calling his "Living Room Shows." Last night was his first, and I was there, seated on a sofa with a couple other graybeards; an attractive, mature couple sipping red wine at my feet; facing us ten-feet away, Richard Buckner, a big guy with long hair in a brown sports coat, looking not unlike a more attractive, virile Tiny Tim. He sat in a wooden chair at the front of the staircase and played acoustic guitar and sang and spoke for 90 minutes. He ended the performance with the a capella "Fater," from his seminal Devotion + Doubt (1997) major-label debut, delivered from the bathroom, which provided just enough distance and echo. Wonderful!
Before proceeding any further, I want to say that there a lot of ways I can approach this. I am dealing with a more liberal time constraint since I used a vacation day today knowing that I would get home late and not want to go into work with four-hours sleep. I could do a straight review of Buckner's performance and what it felt like to see an artist in a private residence among other fans who learned about the show via the Internet; I could describe the heft of Buckner's catalog; I could discourse on what I mean by "Life at the Millennium." But mostly I just want to make a purely adulatory statement: I think Richard Buckner is one of our most important contemporary artists. His recordings are close to my heart. As I mentioned in a previous Hippies vs. Punks post, his Impasse (2002) helped get me through a difficult stretch. In this age of digitally distracted time constriction, Richard Buckner's music taps into a fundamental honeyed current that must exist in order for life to flow forward.
The "Living Room Shows" support Surrounded, Buckner's latest record which was released at the end of last summer. It is an excellent album, consistent with the high quality we have come to expect from our bard of the millennium, and well worth picking up:
Buckner appeared yesterday morning on KEXP during Cheryl Waters' "The Midday Show" and performed some songs off Surrounded. It was on KEXP over 15 years ago, when it was KCMU, that I first heard Richard Buckner. Then he was promoting Devotion + Doubt on Amanda Wilde's show. What I remember is how hilarious the two were together, so much so that I got out a cassette tape and started recording their repartee. (Somewhere in a storage facility in Southern Oregon I still have that cassette.) Last night Buckner performed quite a few songs, in addition to the above-mentioned "Fater," from Devotion + Doubt:
One of the things that I remember about Amanda Wilde's electrifying interview of Richard Buckner from those days preceding the millennium is that it was a beautiful sunny afternoon. You see, we still had the sun -- sunniness -- back in the 1990s. Now, the sun still shines, but, paraphrasing Dylan from "Highlands," it is not the same sun. The sun that shines now heralds not a Golden Age, but a period of cataclysm and destruction and evil spirits. We cleared the Y2K hurdle, but we haven't made it to "the millennium" yet.
Time after time during the winter of 2002-2003 I would listen to Impasse. I was breaking up with my girlfriend of 11 years. I was fracturing, splitting in two. But I still had to go to work and earn a living, etc. The nation, post 9/11, was on its way to war with Iraq. At the office we were allowed to listen to music while we sat and toiled at our desks. I had a Sony Walkman. Once I made it through the first 11 songs of Impasse, I would cross a dividing line when I got to track 12, "Were You Tried & Not as Tough."
"Impasse:," "I Know What I Knew," and "Stutterstep" would follow, concluding the album and locating me in a blank, airy heaven realm.
Each time I completed listening to Impasse I participated in some sort of magical, healing dramaturgy, and I was stronger for it. What else can art aspire to? Once "Stutterstep" finished I would hit play and start the process over again.
So I'm going to cut it short with that. No disquisition of how alt-country grows out of cowpunk; no thumbnail sketch of American political history since Clintontime. Just pick up any Richard Buckner record and have a listen. Better yet, go hear him sing in someone's living room.
The story of Skip Spence and Moby Grape has it all -- a great psychedelic name, a scheming manager (Matthew Katz), drug abuse, violence, insanity, a stint in the psychiatric ward, robust creativity, and superb music. Skip and the band rose like a rocket and fell from the firmament as fast as lightning.
I was originally attracted to the band as a source for a Hippies vs. Punks post when I saw that they opened the historic Mantra-Rock Dance, the event that introduced the Hare Krishnas, a.k.a., the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) to the West Coast "Flower Power" scene. The Mantra-Rock Dance was held at Chet Helms' Avalon Ballroom on Sunday night, January 29, 1967 -- the beginning of what would later be seen as the year of the Hippie; the more famous Human Be-In had taken place a couple of weeks earlier.
Star Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, the man who coined the term "Flower Power," helped organize and MC'd the Mantra-Rock Dance in order to introduce ISKCON founder Swami Bhaktivedanta to Haight-Ashbury. Moby Grape, a band much sought after at the time by the record labels, made a big splash that night, not only kicking things off but alsojoining Ginsberg, Swami Bhaktivedanta, and the members of Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company in leading the ballroom audience in two hours of chanting and dancing.
When I stray from my temporal confines -- what I have designated as the years 1975 through 1979 -- of Hippies vs. Punks one of the things that I like to do is select a band from the undercard of a rock festival or important show from either Hippie or Punk era and immerse myself in its music during the work week. In this case, and towards the goal of furthering our understanding of the "San Francisco Sound," without which the Hippie does not exist, I have submerged myself over the last two weeks in the first two Moby Grape albums -- Moby Grape (1967) and Wow/Grape Jam (1968), as well as the post-acid meltdown record of founding member Alexander "Skip" Spence, Oar (1969).
The eponymous Moby Grape was released on June 6, 1967 shortly before the band performed at what would later be hyped as the blast-off event to the Hippie "Summer of Love" -- the Monterey Pop Festival. The album peaked in September at #24 on the Billboard 200 chart. It's a highly-regarded record. For instance, it outpolls QSM's Happy Trails (1969), which I consider to be much better, in the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time ranking. Christgau gives it an enthusiastic A-minus. I found Moby Grape, having listened to it repeatedly, to be more akin to the Los Angeles Whiskey a Go Go music of Buffalo Springfield (another three-guitar band) than the psychedelic ballroom sound of San Francisco bands Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. In addition to plenty of twangy guitar and a go-go dancing backbeat, Moby Grape features a fulsome holy sententious, non-ironic male vocal style, something for the most part no longer acceptable. Now we like our male lead singers fragile, obscure, exhausted. We will accept a diffident Jesus Christ pose, but not a Charlton Hestonesque Moses.
I prefer the next Moby Grape recording, the double LP, Wow/Grape Jam. Where the first record was recorded in Los Angeles, Wow/Grape Jam was mostlyrecorded in New York City because producer David Rubinson wanted to be with his family. This necessitated the band moving back East to live out of hotel rooms for many months. It took its toll. If you're a West Coast boy coming to New York City for the first time to live, it will fuck you up. I can speak from experience. There's nothing to prepare you for the energy, the density, the easy availability of women and drugs, and the constant drinking. It fucked up Skip Spence.
It was during the band's stay in New York while Wow/Grape Jam was being producedthat Spence disappeared with a woman after a Moby Grape show at Fillmore East. When he reappeared he was transformed, drug crazed. The story is a famous one. Skip took a fire ax to drummer Don Stevenson's hotel room door, attempting to kill him in order to save him from himself. He held the ax to the hotel doorman's head. The police were called and Spence was taken to jail. From there he spent six months pumped full of Thorazine in the psychiatric ward of Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital.
What makes Wow/Grape Jam sound so great is that it manages to capture this intensity, this craziness -- the bigness, the energy -- of what the Hippies were wrestling with during the counterculture apex years of 1967-1968. The era of the rock 'n' roll musician as a grand artistic visionary -- an oracle, a synthesizer of the present age -- is long gone. But listen to the string and horn arrangements of Wow or the super studio jams of Grape Jam andyou get a sense of the huge scale and high confidence the Hippies were trading in.
And that's what makes Skip Spence's only solo album, Oar -- an album on which Spence plays all the instruments and was made with a three-track recorder -- stand out. It's the exact opposite. In an age of bombastic grandiosity it prefigures by more than three decades the "small ball" genre of Downer Folk that is one of the hallmarks of our current End Times.
The story, apparently apocryphal, is that once he was released from Bellevue Hospital, Spence, wearing pajamas, jumped on a motorcycle and drove non-stop to Nashville where he recorded Oar in seven days at the Columbia Records studio.
The album was released in spring of 1969. It ended up being, at that time, the lowest-selling album in the history of Columbia Records. It was removed from the Columbia catalog within a year. The Hippies, flocking to any and all rock festivals like Woodstock and Altamont and movie theaters to see Easy Rider, could not fathom the depths that Oar presented.
The easiest way to think of it is in terms of Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding (1967), another album that confounded the Hippies, and, appropriately, a recording made in the same Nashville studio one year prior to Oar. In many places, such as "Cripple Creek" and "Broken Heart," Oar sounds identical to John Wesley Harding:
But it isn't Dylan's Biblical world that Spence inhabits. Oar is an irreligious, drug-damaged, Bizarro-world version of John Wesley Harding, one that accurately predicted our present constricted -- owing to our loss of free time -- sense of space (constricted to the point of miniaturization). We're working longer hours for less money. Everything has been monetized. Public parks require an admission fee. Churches stand vacant. Our commons no longer exist. It's a brutal, nihilistic world. Skip Spence captured it 44 years ago.
The coffee shop I describe in the letter below to my friend Greg, who was also someone for whom I worked (his cousin was a drywall contractor who had his business located in Seattle, and is the reason I came to the Emerald City in the first place), was right across the street from Union Square. Googling it, it still appears to be there. But when I used to frequent it a quarter-century ago, it wasn't a hipster joint, as it now appears to be; it was an old-school working-class inner-city diner with waitresses who had thick ethnic accents. A detail I recall from my lunchtime cups of coffee sitting at the counter was that I used to read Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy (1912). One of my professors, Hans Sluga, had recommended it to me as one of Russell's best books. I was trying to keep up on my reading even as I wandered outside the walls of Academe.
Autumn 1988
Greg!! Goddamn, it's good to here from you. I was gonna write a bunch of different times, but I always balked out of the fear that it might seem like I was try to leverage a little reimbursement for the "Jim-Time," which was never my intention. I just wanted to stay in touch. Anyway, fuck all that; everything is fine and you wrote and my conscience is unencumbered and lily white. Right now, I'd like to swap my job at this pseudo-whitecollar shit house where I work for a few weeks back in CA in a kitchen with a pole sander. New York isn't so bad, it's just that it's not the West. It's a lot different out here, little things, everyday things . . . the way people drive; the way they eat and talk and treat other people. There is this coffee shop steak house around the corner from where I work . . . I go there to drink coffee during my lunch hour. I sit at the counter. Most of the time the waitress refills my cup, sometimes twice. I sit there and look at the people, to my right and to my my left -- a lot of women, middle-aged to ancient, smoking long cigarettes, skin the color of ash, looking stoned, dead; some younger ones, probably whores, puffy-eyed, ordering soft drinks . . . The second time I was there I sat down and ordered a cup of coffee. I looked down the counter and saw some guy, a guy about my age, eating a large platter of macaroni and cheese. On top of the macaroni and cheese was a huge slab of Wisconsin cheddar, the shape and color of a starfish. He kept spearing it and filling his mouth; then he'd wash it down with a gulp of milk from a big glass he squeezed in his left hand. I thought for sure it was a joke. Who would walk into a restaurant and order macaroni and cheese, with extra cheese, and sixteen ounces of milk? I couldn't stop looking at this guy. Maybe he was nursing a hangover. Maybe he was a drug addict trying to find home and mom. He had dirty hair that looked like rotten hay, and he wore a faded red sweat shirt, faded to a kind of pink. His eyes were dull, like a goldfish. Maybe he was a drummer just waking up after a kick-ass gig in SoHo the night before. Maybe he was an asshole -- a guy who kicked cats as a little kid -- working in the mailroom of some bullshit company in the neighborhood . . . He finished his glass of milk and had about a third left to go on his platter when he motioned to the waitress for the check. It wasn't an abrupt motion; it wasn't fast or nervous, but it caught me by surprise. I thought for sure he'd go on forever -- another glass, another platter, more cheese, until every udder in America's heartland was dry and they'd have to send jets to India to round up the sacred cows to grant his wish. His check came, and I craned my neck so I could see the total. $6.00! Jesus Christ! They did fly to India. But this guy was untouched. He looked at it, dug into his jeans pocket, drew out the bills, put them on top of the check, and pushed it all to the edge of the counter. I didn't even watch him leave . . . Somewhere off in the distance of the coffee shop, over the PA, a Dylan song began to play, "Just Like a Woman." I looked at my watch, it was time to go back to work. I looked at the women -- still smoking, still old and unhappy, Cleopatras without pyramids -- and I headed out into the street.
Well, anyway, I gave my two-weeks notice the other day. I should be off to California by the second week of December. I have work tentatively lined up in January with these Irish guys working on an apartment house in midtown Manhattan. I'll stop by and see you when I hit the Bay Area. We'll celebrate life with a little Adolph C. They've changed their bottles; it's no longer a "Banquet Beer." I saw Keith Richards do some of his new songs on TV and was surprised at how fucking real they were, just sloppy enough to make 'em tasty, not like that emasculated brain dead Jagger shit. Keith kept his dick and his brain; he's still alive. I'd be happy to work a few days for you in early January, if you have the need, before I travel back to NY. I'm driving my VW bus out to sell it in California (because of all the parking tickets we've accumulated here) and for the cross-country scenery. Ashley and I got married, and etc . . .
Some Hippies vs. Punks housekeeping is in order. There was a hiatus last Friday due to holiday travel. The last post, which appeared on May 17 and had been intended to deal with 1969 and the Aquarian Family Festival in San Jose that year, was stillborn as a result of a jarring encounter at the supermarket with an old girlfriend. Tonight, fortunately, my grocery shopping was without incident.
Stained glass windows keep the cold outside
While the hypocrites hide inside
With the lies of statues in their minds
Where the Christian religion made them blind
Where they hide
And prey to the God of a bitch spelled backwards is dog
Not for one race, one creed, one world
But for money
Effective
Absurd
Do you pray to the Holy Ghost when you suck your host
Do you read whos dead in the Irish Post
Do you give away the cash you cant afford
On bended knees and pray to lord
Fat pig priest
Sanctimonious smiles
He takes the money
You take the lies
This is religion and Jesus Christ
This is religion cheaply priced
This is bibles full of libel
This is sin in eternal hymn
This is what theyve done
This is your religion
The apostles were eleven
Now theres a sod in Heaven
This is religion
Theres a liar on the altar
The sermon never falter
This is religion
Your religion
We know from the Friday night post of May 3 that at the time that Public Image: First Issue is released Bob Dylan is going through his conversion experience, accepting Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. As the bard of the Hippies is being Born Again, the poet of Punks is laying it out in audacious style. Religion is a lie. This encapsulates Hippies vs. Punks as well as anything: At the end of 1978 Dylan converts to Christian fundamentalism, and PiL's first album is released.
The retreat into religious fundamentalism is the very antithesis of the avant-garde. The rise of religious fundamentalism signals a retreat from intellectualism and rationality in public discourse. Scientific pursuit becomes yoked to profit-seeking as a generalized secular culture of exploration disappears. It is a truth-and-reconciliation process in reverse. Deceit and division are the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion. To deify one set of texts is nonsense. There is no one book. And let's assume there is just one book, whose interpretation of the book is correct?
Hmm. Pretty rude bunch tonight. You all know how to be real rude! You know about the spirit of the Anti-Christ? Does anyone here know about that? Ah, the spirit of the Anti-Christ is loose right now. Let me give you an example I got . . . somebody stopped by my house and gave me this tape cassette. There's many of them false deceivers running around these days. There is only one gospel. The Bible says, "Let anyone who preach anything other than the gospel, let him be accused." Anyway, a young fella stopped by my house one day and wanted to so-called "turn me on to" a -- I'm not going to mention his name -- he's a certain guru. I don't wanna mention his name right now, but he has a place out there in L.A. And he stopped by and he gave me this tape cassette to show me . . . (Audience: "Rock'n Roll!!") . . . If you want to rock'n roll, you go down and rock'n roll. You can go and see Kiss and you can rock'n roll all the way down to the pit! Anyway, let me give you an example: you wanna hear about this guru? (Positive response.) So. Anyway, this guru, he made a film of himself. He had one of these big conventions. He has himself a convention about once a month. Like, they go off to a big city. So, I took a look at this tape and sure enough he was having a big convention -- he must have had 5,000 people there, or 10,000 people there. 10,000 people. And what he was doing on stage was, he was sitting there with a load of flowers and things . . . He sure did look pretty though, kind of like on a throne, y'know? Listening to him talk on the tape, he said what life's about is life's to have fun, and I'm gonna show you how to have fun. And he had a big fire extinguisher and he would spray it out on the people, and they all laughed and had a good time. They took their clothes off. They were overjoyed to be sprayed by this man. And a little while after that, he's talking about his philosophy. And he said that he was God -- he did say that. He said that God is inside him and he is God. And they could think of him as God. I want to tell you this because they say there's many of these people walking around. They may not come out and say they're God, but they're just waiting for the opportunity. There is only one God. Let me hear you say who that is. Their God makes promises he doesn't keep. There are only two kinds of people like the preacher says -- only two kinds of people. Color don't separate them, neither does their clothes . . . (Rock'n Roll!) You still want rock'n roll? I'll tell you what the two kinds of people are. Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people. Yeah. Remember that I told you that. You may never see me again. You may not see me but sometime down the line you remember you heard it here, that Jesus is Lord. Every knee shall bow!
Three days earlier, PiL had released Metal Box -- three 12-inch 45-rpm disks that blow apart not just the Hippies but the Punks too. With Metal Box we're on new terrain. But at least it's a way forward. Dylan, inviting those in his audience calling for "Rock'n Roll!!" to "go and see Kiss and you can rock'n roll all the way down to the pit!" had, like most Hippies, run out of ideas. He should have listened to "Poptones":
After my parents separated in early 1977 my mother moved to Southern Oregon. The family was split: I stayed with my father the first year while my sisters took up residence in Ashland with my mother. This entailed many regular seven-to-eight hour trips up and down Interstate 5 in my mother's old orange (because it was once owned by the county) Dodge three-speed pickup. Along the freeway in Northern California huge "I'M SAVED!" signs starting springing up over the next couple of years. This was also the time that Rollen Stewart, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, inserted himself into the national consciousness via televised professional sporting events.
Bob Dylan's conversion took place at the end of 1978 while he was performing on the road. He was on stage in San Diego when someone threw him a silver cross. He bent down and picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then later, one night in Arizona, feeling low and in need he reached into his pocket and found the crucifix. That was it. Dylan was Born Again. He began preaching the Gospel during his shows.
In preparation for tonight's post I reread Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan, a tiny little paperback (part of a series, No. 36, put out by Hanuman Books, which also include titles authored by Richard Hell and Cookie Mueller) that I picked up at St. Mark's Bookshop at a time when I had recently separated from my wife. What Clinton Heylin, the Dylan scholar who edited the book, must have done (there is no forward or introduction) is transcribe all the talking parts from concert bootlegs in 1979 and 1980. The book is organized in numbered sections that correspond to concert locations/dates or interviews listed in an index at the back; it is a record of Dylan proselytizing his audience. Sounding like a fire and brimstone Pentecostal preacher, Dylan warns his fans to be wary of this world because it is ruled by Satan, the prince of the power of the air; that Jesus defeated Satan when he died on the cross; that they must let Jesus into their hearts for the end of the world is nigh. Dylan draws heavily from the Book of Revelation; he sees proof of its prophecy in geopolitical current events -- Iran, Afghanistan.
Dylan saw it all at the end of the 1970s. And the grip of the prince of the power of the air has done nothing but tighten in the last thirty years. Oil, money, power -- a profane world grown ever more corrupt. Slow Train Coming (1979) is a truly great album. Listen to it today and you'll find that it sounds like it was just recorded.
By 1979 the path is already cleared for Reagan. The previous year there was the rise of anti-tax ideology in the form of Howard Jarvis' Proposition 13. This began a generalized vilification from the Right of all things governmental. By 1979 you also had the rise of an American version of the stab-in-the-back myth with the politicization of the POW/MIA issue. Captured in the Chuck Norris film, Good Guys Wear Black (1978), the idea is that the G.I.s would've crushed the gooks if not for being sold out by venal politicians and those fucking filthy peace-freak Hippies. This ideology becomes rampant in the '80s with the Rambo movies; it is synonymous with the zenith of Reaganism. In 1979 you had the creation of the Moral Majority by Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell whose plan was to harness the resurgence of that "Old Time Religion" for a new, more conservative Republican Party.
A couple months after the Moral Majority is founded, Dylan releases Slow Train Coming. The one-time standard bearer of the counter culture is reading from the same script as Jerry Falwell. That's it. The party is officially over. The Hippies have melted away. They remain only as a scarecrow in the Right's stab-in-the-back myth and never-ending culture war, a pitiful effigy to toss around at the end of a noose and then set ablaze. The Punks never had the numbers to engage mainstream culture in serious battle. The Hippies did at one point. But by the end of the '70s, they're done. The field is free for Reaganism.
And though Dylan's three Christian albums -- Slow Train; Saved (1980); Shot of Love (1981) -- are significant events in the extinction of the Hippies (whether as effect or cause doesn't matter) and presage ever-darkening times, they are the Dylan albums (along with Time Out of Mind from 1997) that I continue to listen to the most.
