From: Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Cc: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Sent: Tue, December 21, 2010 4:34:57 PM
Subject: Re: RE: the 60's
Michael Peters wrote:
> from a 56 yr old geezer: were the 70's really that bad? not to me
From a 57 year old geezer (lol, I've never actually thought of myself as either old
or a geezer but it's fun for this conversation) the 70's (especially the middle 70's)
were particularly depressing because, as a musician, I witnessed all the freedom and creativity
and openness of the Hippy movement supplanted by wide spread cultural depression and
cynicism (I can only speak of Northern California where I lived). I saw this beautiful
blossoming of culture and creativity usurped by the music industry who had figured out
how much money could be made off of youth culture. I watched the fantastic free FM radio
stations of the Bay Area with all of their amazingly eclectic radio shows put out of business and replaced by corporate run FM stations with play lists. I watched the
Major Musical Labels muscle in on regional
American music and try as hard as they could to establish monopolies.
It was a very depressing time to me, but I was also a very angry young man struggling with my own
internal demons so that had to have clouded the experience.
I wouldn't see another blossoming of that kind of creativity until the early New Wave/Punk movements
in the late 70's and early 80's........even so, there has always been a kind of cynicism that has accompanied
a lot of the musical movements (well, perhaps not the New Age movement, but I just couldn't relate....lol)
since those times in modern popular movements............well, either cynicism or the kind of mindless
drug escapism that accompanied the Rave scene. The Psy Trance scene seems to have some kinship with
those earlier days but I'm, personally, just not all that enamored, emotionally, with that type of
music.
Okay, I ramble...................but after all those psychedlics and psycho-tropic drugs (and others)
I suppose it's a good thing that I can still muster complete sentences..........lol
rick walker