Posted on: January 31, 2012
Riffing off my previous essay, with its slightly tongue-in-cheek usage of the word schizoid, I thought I’d take a quick look at major changes within bands themselves during the 60s. Two come to mind easily:
The Moody Blues and the Beatles.
Listen to the Moody Blues’ first hit from 1964, Go Now. It doesn’t set trends. It follows them. It’s well within the parameters of the British Pop Invasion, with its echo of American Pop R&B and Blues. Yes, it has a Mersey beat twist. But it in no way prepares us for what would follow.
Go Now
Just three years later the Moody Blues, with a few changes to their original lineup (losing Denny Laine, picking up Justin Hayward), would embark on a musical Odyssey that only the Beatles had come close to attempting.…
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Posted on: January 24, 2012
Casting Mind back on the day. Back into the deep, dark past of youthful folly, delusion and spontaneous combustion. Back to a time when we just didn’t care, or we cared far too much. When everything was brand spanking new and we drank and drank ourselves into unearned nostalgia or oblivion.
Driving was everything. Driving was our escape and revenge, our home, something we controlled outside the law of adults. Their law wasn’t our law when we drove and partied and listened to Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Bruce Springsteen and the Beach Boys — what today some call Classic Rock. It wasn’t classic back then. It was just the music of our generation.
We had seen “American Graffiti” and we cruised the streets looking for our own version of West Coast Car Culture, knowing we’d never find it.…
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Posted on: January 12, 2012
Ishizuri Jakucho. 1770
Have decided to take the plunge. Jump in. No longer just an observer. I will practice. I will breathe zazen. I will contain all opposites and not look back. Will do Mu and find emptiness in all forms and form in all emptiness. Will do what is necessary to eliminate I.
The wheel. The great karmic wheel. How to get off it. Why wait? Why wait a thousand lifetimes? Why not now? Total immediacy, total naturalness, complete such-ness. Now. Within this one lifetime, which is all that there is, the nothing and the everything, the nowhere and the everywhere, the center and the circumference, I will get off the wheel. Why wait? Why postpone it? There is only now. There is only here, now.…
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