LOONEY TOONS
1971 has not been the best possible year. There hasn’t been an aura of sunshine in events—measured daily, weekly or monthly—this year at all. George Jackson murdered, then Attica. Jim Morrison dies. Then Gene Vincent, King Curtis, Duane Allman, Louis Armstrong. All of that is recent—the first six months blur.
LOONEY TOONS
Dave maRSH
JEEZ, I CAN'T FIND MY KNEEZ
1971 has not been the best possible year. There hasn’t been an aura of sunshine in events—measured daily, weekly or monthly—this year at all. George Jackson murdered, then Attica. Jim Morrison dies. Then Gene Vincent, King Curtis, Duane Allman, Louis Armstrong. All of that is recent—the first six months blur.
Still, somehow coming out of it feels a lot better than going into it and there must be some reasons, for that somewhere. It has something to do with what I said this column would be about last time, the idea of folk-rock.
Anyone who lived through ’66 knows that folk-rock had little or nothing to do with folk music. It had to do with one folksinger—Bob Dylan, who was only minimally a folksinger at allplugging in his guitar. Then, a horde of hairy American barbarians switched on amps in righteous celebration of a new order of things.
The Byrds screamed “Mr. Tambourine Man” into ten million eight transistor radios and we took off. Eight miles high, the next thing we knew, in full flight.