IN THE ANNALS of rock and roll writing Paul Williams, who was spawned and bred in our very own Cambridge, Mass., holds a special place. The story is of how he dropped out of Swarthmore three years ago to single-handedly set up his own magazine of rock, Crawdaddy!, and went on to establish it briefly […]
Category: Archive
Poor Bitos
IN THE FIRST breath of the play the stained glass windows light up, eerie and striking, their patterns pop, untrite and yet faithful to the spirit of the cathedral and religious scenes that one has come to expect from the medium. The stage is floor level, jutting on three sides into the audience and consisting […]
The Miami Pop Festival: Silver Linings Galore in the Faint Cloud Over Rock
My first night on Miami Beach I found myself in a grunjy teen-age hangout semi-filled with its regulars. Music from a tape-recorder on a table in the center of the room with a huge lampshade hanging right over, filled with a disturbingly weak bulb. The music was unmentionable top-40 staple. The girl in rapacious charge […]
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Toward An Ethic of Political Conduct
Any system of political ethics has two functions. 1) To serve as a guide for one’s personal political conduct and 2) to enable one to consider the actions of political bodies, governments, in the past or the present, which in turn would have implications for individual behavior. Max Weber, in his fundamental essay, “Politics as […]
New Rock Concert
THE PROGRAM aptly billed it as a “New Rock” concert. Peter Ivers, fresh from New York, has put together a strain of music incorporating jazz and blues with the sugar-coating of a rock-beat to stir our minds a bit, drenched as they are in the winter gloom. The set-up on stage consisted of bassoon (dig […]
Back to the Basics-Theoretics
There are different definitions of “class” in political theory. My prefered one is that a class is determined by its objective material conditions. Thus, depending on the kind of house you live in and the amount of money you have to spend on food you are a member of a certain class. The potential difficulty […]
The Beatles
DEEP IN THE winter of 1965 the Beatles released an album titled Beatles for Sale that contained such songs as “I’m a Loser,” “Baby’s in Black,” “Mr. Moonlight.” They were nice songs all and strikingly performed as usual, but that album left one with the distinct feeling that the Beatles` were treading water, that they […]
The Jeff Beck Group
It’s always very tense before a show starts — for the performers, doubts about another road audience, for the crowd, the tightness of anticipation. Preparations continue in the last minutes on amps and mics and lights. In a blue-carpeted backroom deep within the Boston Tea Party, the Jeff Beck Group kicks around a squishy soccer […]
A Radical Vision
RADICALS view American society as being dominated by a relatively small group of people–an elite, more or less tightly co-ordinated, that benefits considerably from the present system. Under this upper crust lies a vast semi-oppressed white lumpenproletariat and a clearly oppressed black proletariat. Such an analysis of the situation leads a radical to the conclusion […]
The Old Mole
IN AN ARTICLE entitled ‘Sexual Role Exploitation,’ in the first issue of The Old Mole, the writer suggests that one way of restoring dignity to male-female relationships is to have girls pay their own expenses when they go out with boys. This idea is sensible since it would assure that girls would go out only […]