The Song That Defined the Sixties

Woodstock wasn't the coolest festival of the sixties, that had happened a few years before at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and if I could only take my Time Machine to one of them then it would definitely be Monterey.  I wasn't at the concert but I have imagined I was many, many times.

There were two huge events in the concert as Bob Dylan played an electric guitar and folkies just don't do that.  The folkies wanted to burn him at the stake for betraying folk music.  These days folkies have gone back to Martin guitars and three-piece suits but there was a time when there was a folkie revolution and Dylan did it at Monterey.

The other event was Hendrix covering Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and it emphasised all the more just how important Dylan was and just how far out into space you could take his music if you gave it to Hendrix.

And there you have, in seven minutes, a prime example of what has gone largely down the toilet in the so-called New School.

Electric guitar does not have to be note-perfect, played at 240 bpm, and employ musical scales only known to Tibetan monks.

There has been some kind of neurotic quest for perfection in electric guitar playing over the last twenty years or so and it has produced something that is, in a way, musically perfect and yet is spiritually empty.  I recently heard some guy who was playing to claim a speed record and he was unbelievably fast but I was just shaking my head at him.  Dude. WHY?

Hendrix' playing here is almost sloppy at times and yet the FEEL of it is enormous.  That's what was lost and I will likely never understand in people is if you don't want to bring a feeling to people then why even swing the axe.  If you want to impress people then why not get into a spitting contest or hit things with a hammer.

A Second Life example is Anek Fuchs as in earlier SL days he was one of two Shred Gods and he played fast, fast, fast.  (Harleykillernl Back was the other one.  Unknown what became of him.)  Back then you'd go to Anek's show and think, fark, that cat is really fast but it really wasn't happenin'.  These days he has slowed down and not due to physical infirmity but rather he is playing for the soul of it and this music will capture you.

It's not my purpose to blow past the lyrics of the song as they were at least as important as the style in which the song was performed.  The lyrics have just as much meaning now and in the same way as at the time.

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

There are many, many diplomats today and all of them with chrome horses.  The trouble is that they usually suck as diplomats and they send the chrome horses to be built in China.  The Scots pull oil out of the North Sea but the money goes to London.  Siamese cats are expensive.

It amuses me in a dark way that the one time diplomats were possibly successful was in the deal with Iran so now all the other diplomats on their chrome horses are bucking up and down while screaming The World is Going to End.  Yah, Peace has such a bad history of wrecking the world, doesn't it.