The song was “Honey Hush,” a No. 1 R. & B. hit in 1953 for the Kansas City blues shouter. The man was Van Morrison, the Irish singer and songwriter, who was in town to play a pair of shows that week at the WaMu Theatre, at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were recitals of an old record, the 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” But Morrison wanted to talk about even older records. “There was a place in Belfast called Atlantic Records,” he said, his accent strong, his speaking voice lighter than his singing voice. “They imported the stuff from here, actually: jazz records and blues records. I’d go with my father from when I was three.”
Joe Turner had stopped coming out of the jukebox. Now it was the founding fathers of rock and roll, in quick succession: Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Sixty Minute Man,” Chuck Berry with “Tulane,” Bo Diddley’s “Dearest Darling,” Little Richard on “Rip It Up.” Morrison acknowledged each song with a nod. He looked slimmer than he has in the past, and he had long red hair of a hue reminiscent of Sumner Redstone. He sipped tea from a mug, and his press agent brought him a bagel with tuna salad. “The first Little Richard song I heard was ‘Tutti Frutti,’ ” he said. “No, it was the one from the movie ‘The Girl Can’t Help It.’ Little Richard was doing rhythm and blues, but with horns,” Morrison went on. “It was different than Elvis Presley, and so I preferred it. Why would you like Elvis if you had the real stuff? I also preferred Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent. Vincent was different. He was rock and roll, dangerous.”
Morrison mentioned Wynonie Harris, the ribald singer of the late forties and early fifties known as Mr. Blues: “I heard one of his on the radio, on a daytime show. Someone probably played it by accident.” He held forth on Leadbelly: “He did everything from children’s songs to cowboy songs to show tunes.” He talked about the blind harpist Sonny Terry (the first record he ever bought was one of Terry’s), the powerhouse vocalist Bobby Bland, and the skiffle pioneer Lonnie Donegan. When someone grouped Donegan with other practitioners of “pre-Beatles rock and roll,” Morrison pulled up short.
“That’s a cliché,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “I don’t think ‘pre-Beatles’ means anything, because there was stuff before them. Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of the Beatles. We don’t think music started there. Rolling Stone magazine does, because it’s their mythology. The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn’t really mean anything. To me, it was meaningless.”

Morrison—now forty years and nearly forty albums into a solo career—said that he rarely goes to see young bands. “I’ve seen all the people I wanted to see,” he said. “Ray Charles loads of times, James Brown lots of times, Mose Allison, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. Why do I need to keep finding new bands when I have the originals?”

i saw ur video its pretty much on the mark for modern times, like Charlie Chaplin’s movie “Modern Times”, i mean in the sense that your characters in the video are caged in behind a glass or futuristic version of it i guess.

i had an interesting experience tonight, that pretty much speaks to the modern and urban pathos that can take a culture and traditions thousands of years old and reduce them to the reductiveness of robotic living.

okay i went to the Gurdawara for diwali with my parents, its their thing and i think so why not go to make them happy. well while there i was asked to help out in the kitchen making rotis as they were shorthanded to feed the 10,000 people or so who showed up. so i volunteered assuming lots of people would be there as well expressing their Panjabi spirit of participation and generosity. After all we are all about Fraternity to quote the French.

except it does not exist here in North America, the land of the brave and the free. ya brave enough to exert that they don’t need to be on the giving side of life just on the receiving end of it, and free enough not to feel ashamed that 10,000 of them are lining up to receive free food, otherwise known as langer in the land of the believer, and only about 20 people are engaged frantically in service providing this free food without delay. i guess the Sikh tradition of sava only exists for that minuscule portion of the population who were energetically engaged in it.

So here i am part of this tiny highly organized and systematic ant system completely that is completely focused on the task of churning out 100 rotis a minute, and i have never felt so alive and happy. this group is the epitome of what human existence is all about, dedication in manifesting the creative force that perpecuates all life,

and i look out at the sea of people who are still and dead looking in the slow moving line to get their small meager portion of the divinely created food, which they have waited for over an hour,or more, in the line for.

i think why not be on this side, where i am and feel this incredible joy in this participation process where god and all of divinity is so reachable in this one small kitchen, instead of standing in line like a corpse who hasn’t yet realized that it is dead and of no use to anyone.

so Diamond where your humans broke free from their cages and their oppression, modern day Indians in the Diaspora are willingly choosing their path of depersonalization and cultural annihilation. Welcome to Modern Times !

AFP
Jagger and Lennon wanted money not revolution: study

Thu Oct 9, 9:40 AM

LONDON (AFP) – Pop culture icons John Lennon and Mick Jagger were clever capitalists who cashed in on the mood of the 1960s, not spokesmen for a generation seeking revolution, a British academic said Thursday.

Cambridge University historian David Fowler said that so-called “Swinging London” was in fact beyond most normal people, “less a golden age for the nation’s young than a celebration of wealth by its social elite.”

“The 1960s are often viewed as the point at which youth culture in this country exploded, but in many ways they were the years in which the idea began to fall apart,” said Fowler.

“Groups like The Beatles were basically capitalists interested in enriching themselves through the music industry. They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation’s young people as The Spice Girls did in the 1990s.”

Fowler notes that Rolling Stones frontman Jagger himself, when asked by an interviewer whether he was a spokesman for a generation, replied that he was just a musician.

The academic, who teaches modern British history in Cambridge, said more authentically revolutionary youth movements can be found in the period between World War I and World War II.

He singled out a little-known Cambridge student Rolf Gardiner, who was fascinated by the concept of Jugendkultur in Germany as a way that young people could express themselves more freely and challenge their elders.

Gardiner’s cult championed physical labour and rural reconstruction, Fowler said, recounting also how he organised naked bathing sessions along the Cam river, as an expression of “back to nature” values.

“People forget that real youth movements are about a lot more than spending and consumerism — they are a way of life,” added the academic from Clare Hall college, Cambridge, author of “Youth Culture In Modern Britain, c.1920-c.1970.”

“People like Rolf Gardiner were true cultural subversives, pop stars before pop even existed. In terms of the influence he had on giving Britain’s young people a sense of identity … he is just as important as Mick Jagger.”

The reason the 1960s is perceived as the dawn of youth culture is because of a “break in chronology” due to World War II, which left a state of “collective amnesia,” the academic said.

Groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones took advantage of this — but their separation from real fans’ lives was reflected in the way they installed themselves in grand country houses, while the London “scene” was equally beyond most people’s purses.

“The world of Swinging London may be viewed as an emblem of youth culture now, but it was really for the Michael Caines of this world; an elite who could afford it,” Fowler said.

Keep on doing what u do, the world will follow, eventually,