Archive
Pre 1970s
© 2018 The Harvard Crimson, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Sal acquired a taste for published writing at Harvard as a member of the Editorial Board of the college’s daily newspaper the Harvard Crimson in the course of which he wrote about the sweeping political, social and cultural events of the tumultuous times known as the late ‘60s. Among other interests he became a rock music reviewer which enabled him to attend concerts by, and get to know, some of the great musical figures of the time. The Archive of this website contains a number of these pieces as a matter of general interest and because some of them seem to have stood the test of time!
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The Rock-Freak A Few Rushes
February 21, 1970
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. […]
Beatles Abbey Road
October 21, 1969
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
August 20, 1969
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
May 9, 1969
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
April 30, 1969
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 […]
Outlaw Blues
March 18, 1969
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
February 21, 1969
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
January 22, 1969
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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New Rock Concert
December 19, 1968
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 […]
The Beatles
December 3, 1968
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
October 30, 1968
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 […]
Hey Revolution
September 18, 1968
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
August 13, 1968
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
July 26, 1968
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
July 23, 1968
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
July 19, 1968
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
July 5, 1968
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
July 1, 1968
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 […]
Dylan Gets Religion
February 7, 1968
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 […]
There’s No Point Fighting to Lose
April 23, 1969
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 […]
Toward An Ethic of Political Conduct
January 15, 1969
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 […]
Back to the Basics-Theoretics
December 4, 1968
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 […]
A Radical Vision
October 15, 1968
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
September 26, 1968
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 […]
The Digger Papers
July 16, 1968
The magazine, The Realist, made its name ten years ago (didn’t know it was going that long did you?) as a scurrilous irreverent underground rag. In its latest issue though, Paul Krassner, the organization’s guiding light, has turned to the more elevated purpose of spreading the hippies good word. The diggers, that nimble group of […]
Presidential Sack?
June 11, 1968
THERE is no institution so perfect that it cannot be subjected to calm criticism. The office of the Presidency of the United States, despite its hallowed aura, is in need of such scrutiny because it has become too intensely concentrated a center of power. Worse, the Presidency has come to be viewed by the public […]
A Proposal For Educational Reform: Reading Period First, Lectures After
April 23, 1968
THE lecture system at Harvard gives Professors a chance to develop their ideas on some chosen topic at length and regularly over a period of time. It is far superior to the British, system, say, in which lectures are sporadic events to be made use of or not as the mood strikes one. Nevertheless, the […]
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Beyond Bundy
March 18, 1968
MCGEORGE Bundy haunted Harvard last week, bringing back with him a conception of society and man’s role in it that has recently come to be discredited around here. His argument, astringent and eloquent was, despite weaknesses, ultimately reassuring. The Godkin topic was “To Govern for Freedom in an Age of Explosions,” and Bundy’s message was […]
The Politics of Culture
March 17, 1968
THE fork of “liberalization” that is jabbing all of Communist Europe these days has two prongs: “Cultural Freedom” and “Political Liberty.” It is easy in an advanced capitalist country to forget sometimes how closely inter-related the two are. European Communist reformers, however, have never lost sight of this close connection–indeed, they sometimes disguise their political […]
An Argument From Self-Interest
March 8, 1968
ATTACKING the immorality and illegality of the Vietnam war could conceivably shame people into stopping it but this is unlikely. Human beings are remarkably impervious to the calls of conscience when acting on self-interest. The most fruitful argument, then, is one that attempts to show that the American interest is not, in fact, advanced by […]
The War Economy
February 24, 1968
THE President’s Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (read Riots Commission) will probably recommend, unsurprisingly, that up to $20 billion be spent in the cities over the next five years. Skeptics have doubted that such large outlays will ever materialize. They reason that the health of the economy as a whole depends on such heavy Federal […]