YOU KNOW I don’t think the full Significance of Let it Bleed has dawned yet on any of us. The album was released about four months ago; we got it green and appetizing, it ripened quickly into prime yellow and as it moved through time, acquired the characteristic rich brown brocade textures of old age. […]
Category: Pre 1970s
Beatles Abbey Road
ALL US rock and roll freaks are also inveterate list-makers, and we spend a large part of our non-〉listening hours Ranking the Groups we listen to the rest of the time.The puzzle is that in nearly every such reckoning the Beatles come out regularly, monotonously on top of the heap. This is puzzling because the […]
Woodstock ’69 | That Was The Weekend That Was
There was more to Woodstock than the hippies smoking their dope.(Our apologies to the New York Times.) There was, if you remember, rock music also. […]
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The Bead Game
VERY FEW rock groups, and even fewer American ones, manage to make music that is not only complex in its musical structure but at the same time retains the visceral, frantic dynamism that one associates with true rock&roll.; The Bead Game is one of the finest rock-groups in he country precisely because its music is […]
Bob Dylan Revisited
IN ANY attempt to understand Bob Dylan’s works, one ought to consider his music, his lyrics and his singing style separately, since each of these three elements has different history in the development of his art. Their conjunction–in the various stages of each’s evolution–is responsible for both the wide variety of Dylan’s musical output, and […]
There’s No Point Fighting to Lose
Between the two Soldiers’ Field meetings, a massive student defection from the SDS position took place. In part, the call to discontinue the strike sprang from weariness and the fear of academic abortion that haunts all of us. Yet it is important to realize that there was a definite element of political rationality in the […]
Outlaw Blues
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 […]
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 […]