I've been listening to Bachman Turner Overdrive, "Not Fragile", and it just touches me how much differently things were then and now.
"Rock is my life (and this is my song)"
"When we play our music, Hands are in the air"
Now they wave their cellphones in the air, a hunk of technology, divorced from the warming glow of matches or BIC lighters, removed from the connection we felt towards our Rock and Roll defiant music; now they bask in the cold and artificial electronic shine of technology.
Now the music is harder (not musically speaking), even more corporate, driven by the polarization and hatred of our times, unshaded by the loss of the revolution, of sticking it to the man, of seeking a different way forward, that was the driving force behind much of Rock Music in the 60's and 70's and early 80's.*
And I find that ineffably sad.
It's a hurried up life
But it's the life I choose
No use in asking me to slow down
Cause I got nothing to lose
But time and time is all I've got
You know I born standing up with a guitar in my hand
I'm not trying to come on like hollywood
But hollywood is what I am
When we come into a new town
Everybody's there
When we play our music
Hands are in the air
When the music's over
You wonder where we are
I'm standing in the silence
With my old guitar
Rock is my life and this is my song
It's a crying shame
That some of us have not survived
No use in asking how it happened
But very few are left alive
I just wanna keep on makin' music
We gotta keep on keepin' on
You're only as good as your last record
I know that someday we'll be gone, gone
When we come into a new town
Everybody's there
When we play our music
Hands are in the air
When the music's over
You wonder where we are
I'm standing in the silence
With my old guitar
Rock is my life and this is my song
When we come into a new town
Everybody's there
When we play our music
Candles light the air
When the music's over, over
You wonder where we are
I'm standing in the silence
With my old guitar, my only friend
Rock is my life and this is my song
*I know, not all of the music of today is like that, but we've lost the sense of wonder and new found powers that we once had, and you young-uns are missing out on that.
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3 comments:
So, ... maybe we need a draft to kick up some sense of involvement.
I am 58 ( in north SD County, your neighbor, kinda'), and I don't see where there is much concern or drama in most young men's lives. They don't even drive well, and they have no interest in how their car works. With this mental set, they will never be what we were.
I blame the tax cuts.
(Seriously.)
It's about whether society seems fair and rewarding.
It doesn't. I blame the tax cuts.
Seriously.
But, about them cell phones at the concert. I still go to quite a few every year - everything at the DelMar horse races, some big ones at big venues. I don't have a cell phone. Could it be that they are beaming their experience to their friends? Is the cell phone sharing the experience, and is bigger than a lighter? I have a friend who called his own answering machine to leave a musical remnant.
It's something I've said or thought many times, that we don't have any kind of direction in this country, and haven't for a long time. Now we just drift along, drift along.
The shiny baubles and inducements offered by the pure capitalistic model so favored by the right just doesn't really fulfill people, that's why so many turn to the false promises of religion espoused by the Dobsons and Falwells of the world, because they're still looking for something more satisfying in their lives, something that money and blind obedience to false prophets won't provide.
It all comes down to the fact that we're social animals, which is what makes those tiny little photonic images so ultimately unfulfilling, but so understandable.
We're losing our connections to people and place, and that underlying disconnect fuels much of the bizarre and hedonistic behavior we see around us. Like the Escondido City Council, they really had to think about letting those homeless get some shelter when it's 28 degree's out. I mean, fer cryin out loud, all they had to do was say, it's okay, that was the extent of their involvement, yet they wanted to make some political statement by playing with people's lives. That one chick is really lost as a human being, like a Katherine Harris writ for a small town stage.
We saw STP at the Fairgrounds a couple years back, set-up was pretty cheesey, but they put on a helluva good show. And we saw Greenday at Coors, which was a good show when they played music instead of dicking around likethey seem to do. That's where the cell phone thing first hit me. They were just waving their lights like we did back in the day when we were just trying to keep on keepin on!
Powerful stuff. I'll be back in the future, methinks.
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