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 […]
Category: Music and Arts
Hey Revolution
JOHN LENNON claims that the Beatles’ songs do not carry any messages and says he resents people who try to interpret them in that way. Neverheless, his latest song, ‘Revolution’, is so explicily and brutally to the point that one cannot help but sense a morning in it–and be painfully startled by this particular message. […]
The Who
The Who are not very deeply known in this country. At a time when flashy incoherent groups like Cream, and as yet unrealized ones like the Doors are raking it in, this is a strange blindness because the Who are artists of the noblest rank. All four of them–Peter Townshend, lead guitar, Roger Daltrey, singer, […]
A Winter’s Tale in Georgia
How does one illuminate a political situation ? Without making any claims that this is a rigid a priori formula it would seem that there has to be first, a dramatically interesting story that occurs at a human level, a story resonant with analogies so complex and yet, at moments, instantly and strikingly identifiable, that […]
The Who
Driving down to Rhode Island to hear the Who in concert, we mused about an accurate way of rating rock groups in terms of the distance one would travel to see them in action. Thus, Dylan is worth a trip to anywhere on the East Coast, the Stones are good for 300 miles, Jeff Beck […]
Waltz of The Toreadors
There are plays and plays. Some should not be adapted or altered for performance on stage, but equally, there are other plays that positively need to be clamped down to a specific interpretation. Anouilh’s “Waltz of the Toreadors” is one of the latter kind and suffers when a director is not willing to take liberties […]
The Jeff Beck Group
THE STAGE at the Boston Tea A local group called Quill has just finished its good-to-dreary slot with a bang-up African number. The Jeff Beck Group now quickly marches in, Mick Waller at the drums, Jeff Beck prophetically brandishing his guitar. The singer Rod Stewart in burnt sienna flush velours pants that fit tight, an […]
Earth Opera
The Arlington Street Church is one of the more remarkable youth hangouts. It has been the scene of anti-draft activity and recently, one resister tried to escape from Federal Marshals by claiming sanctuary at the Church’s altar. This Church has become the arena for the first accommodation by an established institution to the political and […]
Square Dance
HARVARD SQUARE has been gripped, while you were away, by the sprinkling of Summer that passes for Spring around here. The winds are generous, gushing, the fading-blue sky spreads milky sunlight–and the humans below etch jaunty patterns. […]
Dylan Gets Religion
THE Dylan of John Wesley Harding appears touched with grace. The snarling pieties of Highway 61 Revisited, the lucid and patient degeneration in Blonde on Blonde, seem to have been blotted from his memory. Instead, Dylan reaches further into his past for a starting point–and only a starting-point. The new album is a unique and […]