If you are a new reader here, you deserve some explanation as to what is happening here. KCAC Lives! started almost as a joke. Actually, a catch-all for jokes between a few compulsive emailers, who were jamming up everyone's mailboxes - (at least people who were formerly involved with KCAC and KDKB radio) in Phoenix.
That was a couple of years ago. Now, steeped in nostalgia and memories, it has grown to include listeners and fans of those thrilling days of yesteryear when most of us were just out for some fun. Fun is a dangerously contagious thing, very difficult to regulate or govern and even after all these years, the spontenaity of the time frame of particularly 1969-1977 has come under scruitiny. I was very fortunate to be a small part of it. Fun after all - real fun - is free when you can find it.
We - the readers and contributors of this blog - seem to be a part of not only those times, but a part of a more recent generation that is searching for fun - like in those times in question. There was far more freedom. There was far less suspicion. There was far more fun. So much so, that we now have even youngsters visiting this site apparently in the hopes that some of that Old Magic will rub off on them.
As we Old Timers drag our aging bodies to the mirror, we begin to realize that we have become "the enemy" the Institution, the over-30 crowd that we used to identify as "other" in the times we celebrated as being Ours Forever. So it seems incongrous to read the statistics of this website (see site counters at the bottom of the page) and discover that more than a few of our voyeurs are young people, some from universities and broadcast schools as far away as Hong Kong. The number of hits on this website averagre about 25 per day and have at times, been into the hundreds! Early on, it was just a handfull per day. It used to be remarkable to watch the accumulated hits exceeding 5,000. Now we are well over 20,000 last time I looked. There is no way to tally the hits in the archives but if you are LOOKING for clues, there are a bunch there.
WHAT HAPPENED BACK THERE? in 1969 and even into the early eighties? It was a HUGE outburst of creativity in song and art that we are STILL feeling the effects of and still trying to understand. ENTIRE radio stations are now devoted to this music and the interest just keeps enduring like - "It doesn't get any better than this".
That may be. The Song has been sung and will probably never be sung again. There will never be another Woodstock. There will never be another Haight-Ashbury. There will never be another Beale Street. There will never be another time when Money didn't really matter, when love - finding and giving it - was more important than gridlock on the commute.
And yet, there are those who are seeking. Who don't remember because they were not born yet. So I guess you could say that it is YOU to whom we dedicate what we do. You who are driven to find even an echo of The Mantra that has spontaneously risen here.
WHATEVER HAPPENS NEXT will be a new thing. It will be YOUR thing. Rock on.
God is Alive - Magic Is Afoot.
4 comments:
Well said, Ron. Where'd you get the picture of me? Most of my previous posts were time- or subject-specific and I don't think they need to be re-posted; presumably there's some way to "search" the archives if anybody's interested.
But I do insist that all blog readers scroll down to my last post (Sunday 4/1/07) and follow up on my music recommendation. Lest you thought it was some sort of April Fools joke, it isn't - Ivo Papasov and his band are among the most astonishing, creative, and FUN music-makers out there! (But a warning: if you go to youtube, there's some wimpy singer/songwriter named Ivo, no relationship, who may come up in your search. Ignore him and try one of the other results; you'll know the real thing as soon as you see it.)
Tom
Here's a free Ivo Papasov MP3 someone posted on another blog:
http://www.undomondo.com/alarm/ivo_papasov_and_his_wedding_band--song_for_baba_nedelya.mp3
Incidentally, you can find a lot of free MP3s by searching on Tyoogle (http://www.tyoogle.com/) - it basically makes use of Google's advanced search features for finding MP3s buried in blogs and such. Hey, if you can find Ivo Papasov tracks this way, you can probably find anything!
Oh, and Ron: I had an interesting discussion the other day with my teenaged sons about that "time when money didn't really matter." They seemed genuinely perplexed over why anyone would have any problem with accumulating money - and I was hard pressed to come up with a good answer! The best I could muster was, "Remember how good the Internet was before everyone started trying to make money off it? Before MP3s came crippled with DRM? When you could still find every good Colbert bit on YouTube?" That seemed to make a connection . . .
Perhaps what we have lost in the translation Jimmy, is a sense of PERSPECTIVE.
I have come to place VALUE of money in terms of "Elvis Money". When Elvis made his first million just before he went into the army, it was the result of six years of hard work and hit records.
Somebody did a financial analysis the other day that gives some perspective; to have a million bucks in Elvis Money (buying value) nowadays you need roughly six to fifteen million bucks depending on where you shop and what you buy. GETTING money is not really all that difficult - gettiing ENOUGH to accomplish a certain goal - is. They keep changing the game as soon as you learn the rules.
The economic collapse that we are seeing the first part of now, is not a POP like a baloon. it is more like a collapsing circuw tent that has been slashed. Wanna run for President? 400 million bucks - just for the opening bet.
Nobody really knows how much money there really IS (or was) or where it is. The Fed just prints more when the game gets shakey - kind of like the way a casino operates. Hide the money, give them chips.
Near the end of WWII the German Mark was so devalued that people were LITERALLY pushing wheelbarrows of cash to the bakeries to buy bread.
Where are WE going? Go ask Alice.
What's it worth? Go ask Elvis.
Ronco
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