07-30-2007, 02:10 PM
I can't compete with Beachboy! But lemme see here. I saw Jim Morrison and the Doors only once.....but that one time was the infamous Aquarius theatre concert in Los Angeles that last all night long. Jim swung from a rope from the balcony. The music was bluesy (they loved to play the blues) and fine, but the experience was better as performance art. I had to sneak in when I got home. We all did. Saw Joni Mitchell and her warm up act, a comedian named Steve Martin, at the Troubadour in Santa Monica, right after her first album. She was sensational and so was Steve. He did a riff on how you had to say things just right to the French, or they would never give it to you.....frrrrroomage (cheese). Hilarious. And do I remember all these years later that my car broke down as we were leaving, right in the middle of Santa Monica Blvd. Not so much!
My true bragging rights come from seeing Bill Evans, with Scotty Lafaro (on bass) in Los Angeles. My sister in law dragged me there and, I think, gave it up to someone to sneak me into this over 21 jazz joint. She wanted me to hear real music. She was right. Bill Evans was fantastic and it changed my thinking about music, and I began losing my taste for pop.
As for the sixties, there really weren't that many hippies. That was just a name created by the media to categorize people. The whole idea of the sixties was to defy categorization and to force people to deal with you as a person.....man. I fit that pretty well. I had slightly longish hair, but was neat as pin and smelled good (Or so I am told -- no guarantees now!), and was pretty conservative religiously, and very progressive in other ways, but I rode horses and roped calves and went to bed with guys on the sly, and with girls in the open. There were millions like me -- people being very different because the times allowed us to be, and we were accepting of those differences.
Sorry you missed it. There was a very serious overlay to the times though. There was a horrendous war going on and people were being sucked up right and left to go to Vietnam to, uh, defend America. Stop Vietnam...you're SCARING us!!! My brother was drafted and we feared for him everyday. Bless all of those like him who did what their country asked them to do and just went. Salt of the earth and they all deserve our respect.
But the war itself was nonsensical. And so when people asked for peace, they were sincere. Our friends were being blown apart, and were being plucked up to go into thrown into the machinery of war.
Your birthday was on a ping pong ball, and on national television they drew the ping pong balls. We knew that they were going to take the first 100 or so birthdays drawn and we all sat around together and watched television to learn our fate. My birthday was number 53. I was going to go to Vietnam. Sure enough, I got a letter from the President. I reported to my draft board. But before I did, I met with a "draft counselor" -- a curiousity of the time. They advised you on ways to avoid the draft. One thing my counselor said stuck with me. I didn't think of myself as "homosexual" for some reason, but they mentioned that as an out. So I went to a friendly, chain-smoking psychiatrist. She asked me very explicit questions which chafed against my protestant upbringing, but I told her the truth. I told her my story and somewhere in the telling of the story I said to myself: Omigod...I think I might be a homosexual.
She did too. She wrote me a letter. I reported to the draft board, went through the physical -- my feet weren't flat enough to exclude me. So, I got to the very last table (which the counselor had told me about). This was the "is there anything else we need to know" table. I handed it over the the guy (who looked a little squirrely to me). He read the letter, his eyes popped out of his head, and he screamed "You're out!". I was not drafted. I would have ripped apart unit cohesion so bad, I'm not sure the army ever would have recovered. My experience affected my psychologically and so I went to a free clinic to talk to the staff psychologist about the feeling that I might be "a homosexual". As bad luck would have it, he was "a homosexual", asked to come see me where I was house sitting for a family who had gone back to Indiana, came on to me by singing opera to me and playing piano -- all of which the family unexpectedly walked in on, having decided to come home from Indiana early without telling me. I was saved by the bell, but this complicated my ability to handle this new realization: What I thought was a ruse to the draft board was actually the truth.
My brother survived Vietnam, thank god, as did so many others. Bless them all. But the sixties was not just about bad music, stoned people, or any of the rest of that, anymore than the 20's was about flappers and speakeasies.
I do think that Puna is kind of a throwback to those individualistic times, and that in that sense, it does have a 60's feel.
Keep in truckin' man!
My true bragging rights come from seeing Bill Evans, with Scotty Lafaro (on bass) in Los Angeles. My sister in law dragged me there and, I think, gave it up to someone to sneak me into this over 21 jazz joint. She wanted me to hear real music. She was right. Bill Evans was fantastic and it changed my thinking about music, and I began losing my taste for pop.
As for the sixties, there really weren't that many hippies. That was just a name created by the media to categorize people. The whole idea of the sixties was to defy categorization and to force people to deal with you as a person.....man. I fit that pretty well. I had slightly longish hair, but was neat as pin and smelled good (Or so I am told -- no guarantees now!), and was pretty conservative religiously, and very progressive in other ways, but I rode horses and roped calves and went to bed with guys on the sly, and with girls in the open. There were millions like me -- people being very different because the times allowed us to be, and we were accepting of those differences.
Sorry you missed it. There was a very serious overlay to the times though. There was a horrendous war going on and people were being sucked up right and left to go to Vietnam to, uh, defend America. Stop Vietnam...you're SCARING us!!! My brother was drafted and we feared for him everyday. Bless all of those like him who did what their country asked them to do and just went. Salt of the earth and they all deserve our respect.
But the war itself was nonsensical. And so when people asked for peace, they were sincere. Our friends were being blown apart, and were being plucked up to go into thrown into the machinery of war.
Your birthday was on a ping pong ball, and on national television they drew the ping pong balls. We knew that they were going to take the first 100 or so birthdays drawn and we all sat around together and watched television to learn our fate. My birthday was number 53. I was going to go to Vietnam. Sure enough, I got a letter from the President. I reported to my draft board. But before I did, I met with a "draft counselor" -- a curiousity of the time. They advised you on ways to avoid the draft. One thing my counselor said stuck with me. I didn't think of myself as "homosexual" for some reason, but they mentioned that as an out. So I went to a friendly, chain-smoking psychiatrist. She asked me very explicit questions which chafed against my protestant upbringing, but I told her the truth. I told her my story and somewhere in the telling of the story I said to myself: Omigod...I think I might be a homosexual.
She did too. She wrote me a letter. I reported to the draft board, went through the physical -- my feet weren't flat enough to exclude me. So, I got to the very last table (which the counselor had told me about). This was the "is there anything else we need to know" table. I handed it over the the guy (who looked a little squirrely to me). He read the letter, his eyes popped out of his head, and he screamed "You're out!". I was not drafted. I would have ripped apart unit cohesion so bad, I'm not sure the army ever would have recovered. My experience affected my psychologically and so I went to a free clinic to talk to the staff psychologist about the feeling that I might be "a homosexual". As bad luck would have it, he was "a homosexual", asked to come see me where I was house sitting for a family who had gone back to Indiana, came on to me by singing opera to me and playing piano -- all of which the family unexpectedly walked in on, having decided to come home from Indiana early without telling me. I was saved by the bell, but this complicated my ability to handle this new realization: What I thought was a ruse to the draft board was actually the truth.
My brother survived Vietnam, thank god, as did so many others. Bless them all. But the sixties was not just about bad music, stoned people, or any of the rest of that, anymore than the 20's was about flappers and speakeasies.
I do think that Puna is kind of a throwback to those individualistic times, and that in that sense, it does have a 60's feel.
Keep in truckin' man!