It was a hot August day in 1969, and I was in New Hampshire with my MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship) group.  We had flown to New York and among the many things we did there, we went to a concert at Fillmore East to see Joe Cocker and the Grease Band with their new hit album With a Little Help from my Friends and the Jefferson Airplane (no not the Starship version) performing their new Volunteers in America lp.  It was a fun show.  We went to Sam Goody’s and the hot new album on the turn table was Crosby, Stills, and Nash. They had as of yet played together live only once (their second time was at Woodstock). It was the summer of love, and  several friends and I were mulling over whether to postpone the flight home to North Carolina and drive over to this little music festival in Walkill N.Y.  Something called Woodstock.  We decided it wouldn’t be much different from any other such festivals and we got back on the Eastern Airlines plane in N.Y. only to be handed a NY Times which had as its banner headline— NY STATE THROUGHWAY CLOSED AS 400,000 YOUTH DESCEND ON WALKILL N.Y.  There was a picture of the highway clogged with cars, and of  Max Yazgur’s farm– a helicopter shot showing people as thick as fleas all over that hill and everywhere else close.In some ways I was sad to miss it, and in some ways glad. The weather was not good on those hot August nights.

Of course lots of people will tell you ‘we were there’, who weren’t but I won’t be one of them.  I saw a problem free concert in Bill Graham’s auditorium (not to be confused with Billy Graham who filled very different auditoriums in 1969) in N.Y. and it was enough for me.  No muss, no fuss. But this summer I am celebrating that direct baptism into rock and roll (well I was already immersed in it any how by the Beatles and the Stones long before 1969) by attending a few classic rock concerts. 

In June we went and saw Clapton and Winwood in Columbus which was great, today we went and saw Heart and Journey in Louisiville, and Labor Day weekend it will be Loggins and Messina in Ohio.  And a good time will be had by all.  These days classic rock concerts are multi-generational events and the enjoyment factor is higher as the quality of sound systems and technology is so much better these days.  You have folks even taking their grand children to the shows.  Its amazing. 

So much of music today, especially rap and hip hop samples from and is derivative of classic rock it is not surprising that there is the attraction, as long as the bands can still play and sing well.  Some can,  some can’t, and some are just worn out.  I was sad last year when Toto retired before I got to see them.  But tonight I get to see my sister’s favorite 70s band– Journey who have gained new life through an amazing Steve Perry clone named Arnel Pineda, who is a little pint of dynamite from the Philippines found on YouTube by Neil Schon and Jonathan Cain of Journey. 

It is an amazing story.  In 1969 he would not have been found— there was no internet or cell phones etc.  No one was combing the karioke clubs in Manila for lead singers in those days. But one night Neil Schon found Arnel surfing the net, invited him to that  west coast city by the Bay, and the last two years have been an amazing meteoric resurgence of the band named Journey.  When Arnel got to passport control in San Francisco heading to the audition, they wouldn’t let him in the country as his passport was going to expire in three months— God Bless the good ole TSA. When he explained he was going to audition for the band Journey, he got lucky, as the passport dude was a Journey fan, who said “prove it’—– to which Arnel then ripped off bars of ‘Anyway you Want it’  ‘Faithfully’ etc. and the man stamped the passport saying “I hope you get the job, they need you”.  And the rest is history.  Those boys are rejuvenated.

What is different between then and now, that makes a difference?  You might think I would say, well we were in social turmoil then with the Vietnam war, but wait a minute, we are in two wars right now!  How come the music and the social message aren’t more interactive now like it was then? 

There are a lot of cultural reasons for this, some of which would explain the decline of classic rock and roll, but I will mention just a few.  Firstly, next to nothing even remotely revolutionary is happening on our college campuses these days.  Kids are mostly  job seekers or thrill seekers in a bad economy,  they are not protestors, pacificsts, or ‘pigs’ as we used to call the bad ole gendarmes.   The cultural ethos is very different now from then. 1969 may have been the summer of love, but we live in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, and while I doubt there is less sexual fraternizing on college campuses now than then,  at least most people are more cautious as to how they go about it.

If anything, it appears clear to me that America today is in a much more narcissicistic and jingoistic and insular place.  VISTA and the PEACE CORPS and walking on the moon, may be lines in a Sting song, but they are not aspirations or realities we hear about daily any more.

Instead, in the wake of 9-11 what we hear is a lot of self-justification about our national defense and priorities as we march our children off to multiple tours of duty in Iraq or increasingly to Afghanistan, neither of which wars even remotely meet the critieria for being called a just war, never mind being a declared war.   The big big difference now of course is that there is no draft.  I remember vividly the year I was drafted and went down to the draft board in High Point to get my conscientious objector papers to fill out.  Fortunately I didn’t need to, as the draft board did not get to my number.  I would have joined the Peace Corps before that happened anyway. The fact that so many today are just waving the flag as the lambs go off to slaughter with hardly a protest (indeed protesting such a thing is seen as more anti-patriotic today than it was in 1969)  tells us a lot about where the heartbeat of our country is. 

Rock n’ roll used to be the music of rebellion, of ‘all we are saying, is give peace a chance’ as Lennon put it.   Not anymore.  Now rock and roll is just entertainment for geezers with tweezers and their offspring. Now rock n’ roll is just how 60 something muscians can pad their retirement accounts a bit.  And of course music has moved on, with the rise of much more African American music on the radio, much more country music hybrided to pop on the radio, and much more music by women on the radio.  I do not see any of that as a bad thing, but none of that has much revolutionary heart, spirit, or potential. It’s hard to watch Bob Seeger’s ‘Like a Rock’ being used for a GMC commerical these days, or even more surprising John Cougar Mellencamp writing an anthem for the American auto industry.  Wow. That’s a long way from his Scarecrow days.  

We are all more self-absorbed these days,  which may well explain why we are all contributing to our increasingly becoming a debtor nation these days.  God bless our standard of living, and God bless the U.S.A.  

The amount of vitriol in the healthcare debate is about the most anger, whether righteous or otherwise, that is being mustered, and that’s all about taking care of ourselves, not our mission in the world. 

It’s just amazi
ng to me some of the rhetoric on both sides of that debate which is supposed to pass for facts.  Take for example the rhetoric about the Canadian healthcare system compared to ours.  In fact 76% of all Canadians are very satisfied with their healthcare system compared to barely over 50% in America.   In fact healthcare in America costs about $8,000 per person compared to $4,000 per person in Switzerland where everyone is covered.   In fact there are 46 million Americans without healthcare, most of them children, college students, or the elderly who were not in the  S.S. system due to rural jobs.  No other Western country of our wealth has anywhere remotely as large a per centage of uncovered people (it is well over 10% of our population).  This would be like the whole of New Zealand and Austrailia and a few other places having no health for anyone!!  Amazing and shameful. My sweet daughter can’t even afford health insurance while she is doing her masters in Raleigh these days. They wanted to charge her $450 a month!  Ridiculous. She is 30 and in good health.   Something has to be done, but I am no expert as to what will work best. But we need reform badly.   

But I don’t hear any songs about the plight of the 46 million.  All I hear is more rhetoric about spongers on welfare or illegal aliens getting healthcare, used as an excuse to do nothing for ‘our fellow Americans’ , NOTHING.

My point is simple. Rock and roll, at its best and in its heyday had a voice of righteous anger about so many of societies ills.  Go back and listen to Stephen Still’s song ‘For What’s Its Worth’  or Country Joe Fish’s ‘I Feel like I’m Fixing to Die Rag’  or Jefferson Airplanes’ ‘Volunteers in America’ and so many other anthems of that era.  At least we cared about such things then.  Now we just play video games, twitter and tweet, endlessly talk on our cellphones to our insular ‘fave five’ and become more and more self-absorbed.  

And there is another reason this is happening in America. Its by no means just the decline of rock and roll’s  social voice.  It has a lot to do with the decline of the Judeo-Christian tradition in America.  When the heart turns away from God and in on itself, it not only forgets to love God with all its heart, it nearly totally forgets to love neighbor as self.

So I went to the Journey concert, and it reminded me as the Dead used to say of “what a long strange trip” this country has been on for the last 40 years.  To use a Tolkien metaphor, its worth asking whether its been a march into the light, or a march to Mordor.  What it definitely hasn’t been is  ‘buying a stairway to heaven’.  Think about these things.