Interesting times

Last year was the fortieth anniversary of NCPR, among many other notable events, but it's hard to beat 1969 for portentous happenings. The moon landing on July 16 sticks in most minds. Less well-known is that on July 17, The New York Times publicly retracted its 1920 article ridiculing rocket pioneer Robert Goddard for asserting the possibility of spaceflight. Close behind Apollo 11 comes Woodstock, which beamed down onto Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel NY, forty years ago this week. Also in 1969, on January 30, the last public concert of The Beatles was held on the roof of Apple Records, until broken up by the police.

Nixon was inaugurated January 20; on March 13, the secret bombing of Cambodia began. On February 20, the Boeing 747 was test-flown, and on March 2, the Concorde. On June 2, John and Yoko began a "bed-in" for world peace in Montreal. On June 28, the Stonewall Riots launched the modern gay rights movement. On August 8 (a week before Woodstock), members of the Manson cult murdered Sharon Tate and friends.

The ATM machine was born September 2 and the last Looney Toon cartoon was released September 20. Monty Python first aired October 5, and on October 29, the first message was sent via ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. Sesame Street premiered on November 10; the first Wendy's opened November 15. On December 6, the disastrous Altamont Free Concert formed the other bookend to Woodstock. And sometime in 1969, AIDS is thought to have first come to the US via Haiti.

If you're too young to remember 1969, the benediction/curse "May you live in interesting times" may not be fully appreciated. But then again, 2009 is not without its "features of interest." Check back in 40 years.

Woodstock: Back to the Garden

The Woodstock Music Festival ended forty years ago today. In the years since, neither the Apocalyse nor the Harmonic Convergence has come to pass, but the culture wars are still alive and well. What did it all mean? Were you there? Share your stories of what it was like in a comment below. Radio Bob will feature your replies on the Radio Bob Show, starting 3 pm Wednesday.

Do you still have a pair of mud-encrusted jeans preserved in the attic? Send your photos from the festival or of other memorabilia to dale@ncpr.org. We'll attach them along with your remembrances to this post.

Small is not so beautiful

It's time for spring cleaning in the NCPR music library again, and there is a takeaway table outside the studio door stacked with LPs and CDs. While I don't miss the inconvenience of vinyl, I must say that the LP art drew me to the table from all the way down the hall. Something went out of music appreciation when the foot-square album cover shrank to a few inches on CD, then vanished altogether in the age of downloads.

I turned a lot of hard-earned cash into so-so music just on the strength of cover art back in the '60s and '70s. I can't say that I ever bought a CD just because of the cover. Nor have I ever memorized the lyrics of a song from the CD insert, where the type is as tiny as the fine print on a subprime mortgage.

The best album covers had enough going on to keep you occupied through both the A and B sides--front cover, back cover, overleaf, sleeve, insert, label--all crawling with images and text. The best graphic artists in the world dined out on the copious real estate. Album covers performed the job of fan newsletter and band website. The object was the promotion. I could hardly wait to tear away the plastic wrap, and I can't think of a "shopping experience" that has been so satisfying since. Send me your nominations for the best LP art of all time. Tell us why they rock, and provide an image, if you can. Email to dale@ncpr.org. We'll post the results (with disappointingly tiny thumbnails) next week.

A child's garden

These days my gardening efforts are pretty much reduced to weeding the perennials that survived another winter and the predation of the deer. Life in Millennium 3 seems to leave less and less time for playing in the mud. But I'm finding that each year of neglect brings my yard more closely into line with what I remember from my childhood. The hardy survivors seem to be those favored by earlier generations of North Country gardeners. The honeysuckle and mock orange will probably outlive me. Day lilies and bearded iris grow where they've always grown, and have even spread to the old compost pile where I dumped the spade-damaged thinnings. Exotics and annuals have long gone extinct, but the lily of the valley and the myrtle undergird the thick old lilacs each season. The peony transplanted from my grandfather's house sprawls each spring in aromatic disarray.

Dutchman's Pipe shaded many a North Country porch

The elms of my childhood are long gone, supplanted by maples that struggle now with their own blights. Much else that once shaped the North Country yard is also gone rare. As a once-voracious grazer of my neighbors' bounty, I can tell you that style has changed from "eating apples" to flowering crab apple in most places, and that the ubiquitous twin patches, one for rhubarb and one for raspberries, are now a rarity in town. And in the age before air conditioning, a vine-shaded front porch was the summer living room. Now only the Potsdam Food Co-op seems to sport the huge-leaved vine (I forget its name) that once broke the summer sun all over town. And I miss other old-fashioned favorites—few plant gladioli and more, or the simple miniature cabbage roses--modest, but hardy.

But then there was also that rash affection for japonica, or "bamboo"—three and four generations later, we still pay the toll on our knees, digging out the roots that extend without end—who knows—all the way through the earth to their Pacific island home. Long after we're all gone, japonica can fight it out with the cockroaches.

The thirty-threes of sixty-eight

Radio Bob wandered in this morning with his latest $5 CD treasure, a compendium of Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly--tasty. The music of 1968 was special for a lot of reasons, but most special because I was then 15 years old--an age when musical passion runs an inch wide but a mile deep, when there are only 3 or 4 decent bands in the world and the rest of everything is chopped liver, when you can listen to the same cut 15 times in a row, just because that screaming guitar lick is so freaking amazing.

My early adopter friend David stopped me on the street in the summer of '68 to pass along a brand new copy of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Iron Butterfly's side-long rock extravaganza. I was about to hustle it home to fire it up on my crunchy portable, the one with the tone arm weighted down with a penny to grind the needle over the skips. David said, "No man--you gotta do this with headphones." I trekked up to the college library's listening booth and jacked in. And the world changed, or so it seemed.

But the world changes, and then it keeps on changing. Iron Butterfly just doesn't sound the same. I listen to '60s music still, but different music, and with a different ear. Less naïve perhaps, but also less engaged, less willing to be transported. I have the benefit of experience, and the deficit.

Bobby plus 40

When a talking head these days cites the "post 9/11" world and how dangerous it is, it might be worthwhile to consider the halcyon days of 1968. That year the Soviet Union had 20,000 nuclear weapons targeted on hair trigger at the US, and we were targeted right back. They had just crushed Czechoslovakia's bid for liberal autonomy in the heart of Europe with tanks and machine guns. China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, killing and imprisoning millions. The War in Vietnam was at its peak, with a weekly US body count in the hundreds. At home, protests drew more than a million demonstrators into the streets. Martin Luther King was gunned down and cities burned across the country. Bobby Kennedy was gunned down on the brink of winning nomination for the presidency, and his party's convention in Chicago brought a new term to the American lexicon: police riot.

In the North Country that year, the last sound one heard before dropping off to sleep was the distant rumble of B-52s from Plattsburgh and Griffiths Air Bases, carrying their nuclear payloads around in circles, waiting for the "Go" code. Like many in my age group, I shifted my allegiance (grudgingly at first) from Eugene McCarthy to Bobby Kennedy. But by June I was ready to believe. How long would we have to live under the shadow of violence and fear? Then came the gunshots, and an answer of sorts.

The feeling of insecurity is a relative thing, and fear is an optional response. How we behave given the dangers we face is the measure of character.

Where did the future go?

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.

Be everywhere now

I don't very often get out to big outdoor concerts, but when we heard that Van Morrison would be opening Bluesfest in Ottawa, his first return to the area in 40-odd years, we bought our tickets the first hour they were offered. Certain music heard at certain times in life just burns itself into the bottom of the brain. Van has a little chunk of grey matter all to himself somewhere to the south of my prefrontal cortex. I've changed in the interim, and no doubt Van has too, but the songs remain fresh as a daisy.

But while my attention was otherwise occupied, the outdoor concert seems to have changed, too. While the audience was always wired up--by the proximity of tens of thousands of co-religionists--now they are also wired up in a more technological sense. We bought our tickets online, where once we would have queued up for hours outside some box office, gabbing with fellow fans. Inside the venue, the pre-concert rain remained unchanged, but many were plugged into iPods under their umbrellas, grooving to unknowable music, and many more were texting their beer orders to friends who drew the short straw for standing in line. Others were calling directions into their cell phones, trying to hook up friends with patches of grass held open for their arrival.

Once fan banners were used to conceal microphones to capture bootleg recordings of favorite artists--now people wave aloft their phones, broadcasting the concert direct to friends at home in streaming video. We were 50 yards from stage with a good view, but people around us were often turned away from the stage to watch the video feed on the big screen. Some were even videoing the video screen--the giant cyberhead of Van eclipsing the little Van laboring onstage. Be Here Now used to be the dictum when Van was last in town. The 21st century version is, apparently, Be Everywhere Now.

No Joy

If the wind from the north has brought you an odd sound along with the near frost, it is probably the collective wailing and gnashing of teeth north of the border. Lord Stanley’s Cup—in Disneyland? Arrrgghhhh! I fully sympathize; simple justice dictates that it return home to Canada, or at least to the same climatic zone. When did it become all right to play hockey in places where, if the power went out, the ice would melt? You don’t find surfers in Nunavut. I miss the black and white hockey of my youth, when players had names like Boom-Boom and Rocket, and smiles like an orthodontist’s nightmare. Or hometown games in the old Clarkson Arena—a modified cattle barn, except colder—where the WPDM announcer would have to cut to commercial while Golden Knights fans bellowed chants that would bring down a $50,000 fine.
These latter days are much reduced--civil, some say, or businesslike. Fah! I suspect the Ducks overcame the Senators through Disney animatronics. You can make an animated character do anything. Picture the Road Runner, with mask and pads. But the Senators have to bear some of the blame, adopting the name of the perennially-undistinguished DC baseball team. And who could ignore the horrible omen from last week’s fan rally, when the Ottawa City Hall fountain mysteriously filled up with blood? A calamity of Biblical dimension.