Old Timey Music for Howard and DC

howard · Post by **howard** » Fri May 15, 2015 5:25 pm

DaveInSeattle wrote:My neighbors, my GF, and now myself are completely sick of hearing "For What's Its Worth" by Buffalo Springfield, now that it has become the first song I'm learning on the guitar...

That's just paranoia, runs deep. Into your life it will creep.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Fri May 15, 2015 6:25 pm

It's, like, you're just speaking your mind, but getting so much resistance from behind? Drag.

As long as the GF is cool with your new Stills-Young mutton chops, it's cool. As you know, you can't get the right kind of sustain on the guitar solo without that.

I recall banging away on 'Cinnamon Girl' until the audible sighs and closed doors would start just as I got to "... with a cinnamon girl."

MaxWebster · Post by **MaxWebster** » Fri May 15, 2015 7:33 pm

god, my poor parents/neighborhood back when i was teaching myself Rush's YYZ. loudly. through a 20W Crate amp turned up entirely too high.

rass · Post by **rass** » Fri May 29, 2015 5:57 pm

Heard this today, on the radio, for the first time in...I don't know. Long enough that I didn't recognize it until the chorus, and then it just slapped something loose in my head.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Sat May 30, 2015 12:58 am

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Sat May 30, 2015 1:04 am

And after that on the youtube queue

Harvey Mandel was the guitar player in the second "classic lineup" of Canned Heat so 1969-71 or so.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Sat May 30, 2015 2:49 am

Dig that '60s blues jam.

Here's Harvey Mandel playing slide guitar during his short time with Canned Heat.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Sat May 30, 2015 11:31 am

Some more 60s blues.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Sat May 30, 2015 1:49 pm

Years ago, I saw Nick Gravenites at a small club in San Francisco. My lasting memory is that I had never smelled so much patchouli and pot in a club before.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Sat May 30, 2015 11:54 pm

I thought you grew up in Colorado? :)

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Sun May 31, 2015 8:21 pm

Brutal weather in Toronto today - 45 degrees and raining.

Made me think of this classic.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Sun May 31, 2015 11:17 pm

sancarlos wrote:Years ago, I saw Nick Gravenites at a small club in San Francisco. My lasting memory is that I had never smelled so much patchouli and pot in a club before.

By the late '80s most small clubs in SF were coated with 3/32" of a mix of the two. In many cases this was an important structural support, so after the last big quake the City Code was changed so that it is now must be left in place. Even if neither substance is being utilized at a particular time, at temperatures over 67 degrees farenheit, the out-gassing alone will cause a light haze to blanket the space. Musicians know this, and tune very slightly above the proper pitch when they get ready back-stage in order to accommodate the effect on sound waves.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Mon Jun 01, 2015 11:27 pm

I prefer Little Green Bag.

Rush2112 · Post by **Rush2112** » Fri Jun 05, 2015 10:54 am

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Fri Jun 05, 2015 12:24 pm

Ok, that stuff is all well and good. But, now let's get out of bed and play a little ROCK AND ROLL!

howard · Post by **howard** » Fri Jun 05, 2015 1:21 pm

sancarlos wrote:Ok, that stuff is all well and good. But, now let's get out of bed and play a little ROCK AND ROLL!

Teenage Kicks was brit DJ/TV host John Peel's favorite single of all time. Not a bad choice.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Fri Jun 05, 2015 1:49 pm

Great tune! Love me some Undertones.

What about these fellas?

howard · Post by **howard** » Fri Jun 05, 2015 2:02 pm

What do I get? Whatdya expect when you've fallen in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with.

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Fri Jun 05, 2015 3:13 pm

howard wrote:What do I get? Whatdya expect when you've fallen in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with.

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

What you should expect is some Autonomy!

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Sun Jun 07, 2015 1:01 am

The Byrds, Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers pointed the way for others to play country rock, with some meaningful emphasis on the former. In the wake of the Buffalo Springfield implosion, then came Poco. Circa 1972-73, I played the album closed by this song until the grooves wore off.

Brilliant dobro playing by Rusty Young. Over Richie Furay's right shoulder is Timothy B. Schmit, later the Eagles' (second) fine bass player and harmony singer. This is the Poco configuration after Jim Messina left the group to make some mediocre pop albums with another guy.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Sun Jun 07, 2015 7:52 pm

I love Richie Furay's voice. A good feeling to know, indeed.

howard · Post by **howard** » Mon Jun 15, 2015 4:38 pm

I didn't restrict myself to rock and roll in my youth. And I had forgotten that Stevie Wonder wrote a commentary on Barack Obama's presidency. Jackson Five sing along with me now (doo-doo-wop):

And here is another example of very slickly produced doesn't necessarily mean overproduced:

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Mon Jun 15, 2015 5:15 pm

[old guy rant] When we old guys were young, music wasn't quite as polarized. In my rural hometown, we didn't have a real rock station until I was well out of high school. The choices were 2 country, 1 easy listening, 1 top forty, and the fm classical. By the time I was 17, I had an antenna connected to the cable tv that allowed me to access the Denver rock stations. But, the station all the local kids grew up on was the top-40 station. (I was even a teen dj for our high school radio show an hour a week!) So, you'd hear a Jim Croce song, and then a Stylistics song, and then a Grass Roots song, and then Motown, and then CSN... My point is - you got to hear a lot of good stuff (and, admittedly, a lot of pap) that you wouldn't have necessarily chosen for yourself. Nowadays, kids know nothing outside of the genre of their choice.

Also, looking around the Fillmore before concerts, reading the old advert bills tacked on the walls, you see that Bill Graham used to put guys like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Johnny Lee Hooker on the same bills as the big name rock acts. Paying tribute to the old masters and introducing the kids to the origins of their rock music they came to hear. A pretty cool idea.

MaxWebster · Post by **MaxWebster** » Mon Jun 15, 2015 6:35 pm

i don't think this should be an old guy rant - totally true. Look at the bill on the 74 California Jam. Black Sabbath. Deep Purple. Seals & MF Crofts. Eagles. Earth Wind & Fire. ELP. Such variety and quality (except for the Eagles of course BAM).

It's tough listening to any stations be they radio or streaming/Spotify - everything is so narrow-casted.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Mon Jun 15, 2015 9:33 pm

sancarlos wrote:[old guy rant] Also, looking around the Fillmore before concerts, reading the old advert bills tacked on the walls, you see that Bill Graham used to put guys like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Johnny Lee Hooker on the same bills as the big name rock acts. Paying tribute to the old masters and introducing the kids to the origins of their rock music they came to hear. A pretty cool idea.

To be fair, Graham was a pretty unique guy. We're talking about a guy who booked the Woody Herman Orchestra to open for Led Zeppelin or the Who, or both. He was a brilliant music impresario. Apart from Graham, virtually the entire business was dominated by promoters who were as limited in their musical vision as they are today.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a Bill Graham movie. He was a massive character, at the center of the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. There would no doubt be a major problem getting the rights to the music that happened at his shows, and simulating the performances of historic acts. Perhaps in another 50 years when only the heirs of the musicians are alive.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Mon Jun 15, 2015 10:19 pm

howard wrote:I didn't restrict myself to rock and roll in my youth. And I had forgotten that Stevie Wonder wrote a commentary on Barack Obama's presidency. Jackson Five sing along with me now (doo-doo-wop)

As hard as this may be to believe, back in the day, there was this thing where people took to the streets to demand justice and political action, and many of the musicians we revered were right there with us as artists.

So when four people died at Kent State, just a few weeks later you could hear Neil Young singing "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own ..." on radios everywhere in the country, despite the song being banned on many mainstream stations.

A few years later, Richard Nixon was in his political death throes. Tens of thousands of people were in D.C. protesting in the summer of 1974. Me among them. Stevie Wonder's commentary on Nixon (which of course applies to his spiritual successor today) was on every radio. He captured the scorn the protesters were expressing, and turned it into a brilliantly funky song. How cool it was for those of us who were taking to the streets that Stevie Wonder was on our side, and sending it out, embedded in layers of clavs and synths, all across the nation!

And then suddenly, Nixon was gone. The helicopter took off from the White House lawn, next destination Hell. Nixon and all the people like Nixon were through now. We had the momentum. The Vietnam War was over, Nixon and his war criminal ilk were on the run. The Golden Era of American Democracy was on its way. The corrupt would be washed out, and a vision inspired by the 60s, but with more practicality, was going to reform and revitalize .... well, actually, it all pretty much turned to a sea of stinking shit.

But for a very brief time, roughly the first half of the 70s, radical political reform was on the upswing in America, and it had its own amazing sound track.

howard · Post by **howard** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 6:28 am

Fucking Jimmy Carter. But don't get me started. (At least his problem was much more incompetency, rather than banal evil.)

Biggest problem with the end of that brief period was the economic bill for the war, the anti-poverty programs, and the Nixon gold shock came due. Well, the gold part is a big bill, and most of that continued to be deferred, to this day. And it is coming due pretty damn soon, but don't get me started.

What was the issue that had people in the streets of DC in '74? I don't remember (although having just finished high school, I was as disconnected from the news and larger affairs than at any time in my life. Baseball, girls, working to save money for college, full-time job. Boy, that was a fun summer.)

MaxWebster wrote:It's tough listening to any stations be they radio or streaming/Spotify - everything is so narrow-casted.

This is one big reason my listening is glued to Tom Petty's channel on Sirius Satellite Radio. He plays a wonderful mix of stuff, centered on the decades of his/our youth (but he rarely plays Tom Petty stuff, which is my only complaint.) I can't pimp his station too much, I love it so.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Tue Jun 16, 2015 4:20 pm

howard wrote:Fucking Jimmy Carter. But don't get me started. (At least his problem was much more incompetency, rather than banal evil.)

I still remember how much I bought into the Carter myth. I mean, this was a guy with no ties to the corrupt Democratic past -- either southern or northern. He quoted Dylan and was beloved by the Allman Brothers. He beat the man who pardoned Nixon. What was there not to love? When he was elected, it was just another sign that Our Side was going to kick ass and reform the whole goddam country. And why not the whole world?

What was the issue that had people in the streets of DC in '74? I don't remember (although having just finished high school, I was as disconnected from the news and larger affairs than at any time in my life. Baseball, girls, working to save money for college, full-time job. Boy, that was a fun summer.)

While you were partying like an irresponsible teenager, I was personally responsible for removing Nixon, the stain on the soul of our great land.

I might also have been partying that summer, but I had wrecked my rotator cuff and thus ended my competitive sports career not so long after Arthur Ashe told me I could be a great one. Well, he didn't actually say exactly that. Or even talk to me. But surely I impressed him when I was crushing his serves. Actually, trying hard not to be hit by them. Also, in Washington I met the first girl that I could actually do more with than talk.

But back to my noble sacrifices in purifying the American Spirit and stuff like that. One thing that was very different in the summer of '74 compared to the summer of '15 is the news media. I remember standing near guys like Mike Wallace (when he was a working journalist rather than a talking head) outside of the gate to some building on Capital Hill, where he was waiting to get in and I was part of the peasants with pitchforks. It seemed to my foolish, easily-deceived teenage mind that guys like Wallace were On Our Side. Like Woodward and Bernstein, and the New York Times (publishers of The Pentagon Papers), he was Out To Get The S.O.B's. The news media was part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Today there is sadly a stark contrast. Now the mainstream media -- certainly including the NY Times -- are out to get guys like Snowden, not the guys like Nixon. They will promote any absurd tale the government feeds it. Even after the WMD scandal that should have led to mass resignations at the NY Times. The most recent case was the instant acceptance of the 'fact' that the guy the police killed in Boston a couple weeks ago was about to act on his clear conspiracy to behead police officers. Despite the fact that they didn't even have enough evidence of their shaky theory to get a warrant for his arrest before they went after him. And despite the fact that they wouldn't produce the video they claimed fully backed up their claims for how the event went down, and then when it was produced it was of such low quality that it supported nothing that the police claimed.

MaxWebster wrote:It's tough listening to any stations be they radio or streaming/Spotify - everything is so narrow-casted.

This is one big reason my listening is glued to Tom Petty's channel on Sirius Satellite Radio. He plays a wonderful mix of stuff, centered on the decades of his/our youth (but he rarely plays Tom Petty stuff, which is my only complaint.) I can't pimp his station too much, I love it so.

Keep pimping, as I own the stock.

Tom Petty trivial facts: I once had my furnace repaired by a guy who took guitar lessons from Petty in Florida. Said he was cool. And that Petty took lessons from Don Felder, once of the Eagles. I'm not sure, but I think Felder played in a band with Stephen Stills, either then or shortly thereafter when he moved to NYC. I believe Petty also hung with the Allmans in Gainesville. That's a lot of guitar-picking talent in one then-small pond. Also, a good HVC guy.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 7:33 am

(Feeling very cynical this morning - and what I wrote below does not apply to the more intelligent members of society - just to the other 80%)

There will never be protests again as there were in the late 60s and 70s. Circuses have won out over bread. We now have the ability to be mentally elsewhere wherever we go. When all eyes are aimed down at a small screen, no one can see what is going on around them. And when people come together for communal events, they spend their time holding up their phone/cameras so they can immediately show it to others. We are all stars in our own tv shows now - as facile as any reality show.

Snowden confirmed many people's worst fears, yet in the immediate aftermath of his revelations, there were feature stories about the girlfriend he left behind. As if THAT was relevant.

And when you talk about music - when we live in a culture where listeners would much rather steal music than reward musicians for the work they put in, it says more about human nature than we probably want to hear.

So let Neil Young sing "Ohio" on his current tour. You don't need to go to hear it live - Three generations of fans will record it and it will be available on YouTube all summer long.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:01 pm

I see nothing cynical in this comment. Exempting 20% of Americans is probably generous.

However, to build on this idea, I think that the segment of the population that was really engaged by matters of peace and justice in 1974 was no more than 20%. And I don't mean the percent that was rallying on the streets of our nations capital and elsewhere. My guess is that no more than 5% of the population was part of a demonstration of any kind -- even once -- in the 60s and 70s.

Why did the number get as high as 5% then, when it is probably 0.5% now? Even when the US has been actively at war for over a decade and serious matters of justice exist wherever you look?

I have no real idea. I would like to read a long article explaining this, as I've experienced both eras and feel pretty clueless. But my off-the-cuff rank order of factors would start with these two.

1. A high percentage of young people in the USA. There are many reasons why young people are more prone to take political action. But in most eras and most places, they are the radicals. I read a review of a book about the French Resistance in WWII this morning, published in the Wall Street Journal. It reminded me that this was largely a young-persons movement. In many families, the elders were part of the Vichy regime and the youngsters were with the Resistance. I don't know the numbers, but it strikes me that there were a lot more youngsters around in 1974 than 2015.

2. The chance of the government making you a soldier. When they stopped giving out student deferrals, most males felt that they had a reasonably high chance of being drafted in the late 60s and early 70s. We saw it coming even when we were 13 or 14. In our minds, being drafted meant killing and/or being killed. We didn't know that much about non-combat roles, or ways that the well-connected could be cleverly selected into them (e.g., G.W. Bush). We just saw dead and disabled Americans who looked just like us on the television set every night. This is one hell of a radicalizer. I think it made us a whole lot more sensitive to American war crimes when the same people who authorized them were going to soon conduct a lottery in which the losers would be sacrificed.

Will these factors and others that would make a longer, better-informed list, again co-occur? Almost certainly not in the USA in the next few decades. But others could emerge that would again radicalize the population. Things that seriously threatened a substantial segment of the population can happen. And by 'seriously' I mean something more than significant student loan debt, which seemed to be important to many of those who engaged in the Occupy movement (which I did with my daughter one day). By 'substantial segment' I mean more substantial than the numbers of black people who are at real risk of being gunned down by the police in dubious circumstances. Things can be bad without triggering wide-spread and long-lasting protest. But someday, and not in the infinite future, things can be that bad again.

Pruitt · Post by **Pruitt** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:57 pm

I don't know.

I think the rise of social media has given people the illusion that they are involved and active in the important issues of the day. But it is an illusion. Shut Guantanamo? End fracking? Support Caitlyn Jenner? Support Tom Brady? All of these issues have been reduced to the same level of import. Five seconds for a person to read a headline and then press "Like" and then on to the next thing.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 2:18 pm

You may be right. I may not be close enough to the phenomena to tell. But in the '80s it appeared to me that citizen political activism came to a crashing halt. And this was decades before smart phones and facebook.

This is just a single data point. But this and others like it inform the way I think about Young People Today. I coached girls soccer teams in the early part of the century. Those girls are now high school graduates; I'm interested whenever I hear about something they're doing. Two of the roughly 20 kids I coached were part of distinctly upper-class families. One seems to have rebelled from the path approved by her parents, first by coming out as gay and now by pursuing social justice activism both in college and her every-day life. She is not by nature a very aggressive or confident person. I root for her.

My daughter became her friend long after they ceased playing soccer together. She told me the other day that this girl was walking downtown and saw a policeman talking to a shabbily-dressed guy sitting on the sidewalk surrounded by boxes and bags, who was begging for change. She stopped to watch, with her cell phone out to record what happened. As it turns out, the policeman behaved properly. She put her phone away and went on her way. But this could have easily turned into an ugly scene. Without the smartphone, would this girl have dared to intervene? Would her intervention have carried any weight at all? Most likely, no and no. Did her presence raise the odds that the policeman would do his job properly? Perhaps. If not this time, it most likely will in the future.

It seems to me that modern technology, including social media, are making it easier for people like this girl to be activists. They made it easier for the protests around police shootings to to take wing. So too regarding the "Arab Spring." So technology is facilitating social change, at the same time that it may be dampening it.

howard · Post by **howard** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 6:58 pm

DC, I had no idea or recollection of protests in DC that summer demanding Nixon leave. Interesting. Just several months earlier, as a high school junior, I was asking my history teacher to let us watch even more of the televised senate hearings than he was already showing us, but he insisted we needed to actually learn about the Constitution to understand how those guys were violating it. I went from hyperaware 15yo to detached baseball, beer and girl crazy 17yo in something like two years.

A brief point. In 2003, during the runup to the Iraq war, there was a day of multiple coordinated massive antiwar protests in dozens of cities across the country. In NYC and SF the numbers of people who marched was in the neighborhood of 100,000 each (as I recall, and i'm not looking it up.)

This had zero effect on the senate and the president. Part and parcel of the zero effect is the minimal coverage by the mass media, and that minimal coverage was filled with lies and distortion, starting with severe underestimations of the size of the crowds (often parroting by the minimal figures provided by cops and officials.)

Such large numbers of people dissenting actively in the streets had been rendered 100% irrelevant. I took that as a marker of the long descent. As well as a marker of the 180˚ shift of the mass media to the functional equivalent of Soviet era press (TASS and Pravda) from DC's summer of '74. Well, with one key difference; the percentage of Soviet citizens who swallowed whole what their media told them was far lower than the number of Americans of all stripe who faithfully accept the word of the NY Times and the tv news.

One other point, more brief. At least the potential for cell phone/social media to be effective in the exercise of dissent is clear. Otherwise, the powers that be would not be installing internet kill switches. I experienced some of the bullshit the NYPD used to interrupt text messaging during Occupy.

howard · Post by **howard** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 7:04 pm

But, back to the soul music I listened to during my morning commute today.

Those long hair white dudes in SF weren't the only ones who were Truckin'. I'm the Red Ball Express--Of Loving!

Gentrification of Manhattan has reached northward to roughly 102nd on the east side, about 106 on the west. Hence, Across 110th street remains a hell of a tester.

sancarlos · Post by **sancarlos** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 7:10 pm

Jackie Brown was a very underrated Tarantino movie. Extra points for being based on an Elmore Leonard book, and for featuring the lovely Pam Grier.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 7:36 pm

[removed big photos]

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 7:43 pm

I think there were protests at various locations around Capitol Hill for many months before Nixon resigned in the summer of '74. I recall being in crowds around the Capitol building, where the Congressional Judiciary Committee was holding the hearings that eventually resulted in articles of impeachment being drafted. The vote on the articles demonstrated that Nixon was going to lose the impeachment vote. That's why he resigned.

Ironically, because I was in D.C., and the internet didn't exist, I really wasn't getting an overview of what was going on while I was there. I never saw a picture of the protests, because I was in them. I might have seen a newspaper a few times, but I was out on the streets when the evening news was broadcast. Making the scene, baby. Hard to imagine today I suppose.

So I don't have any idea of the extent of the protest crowds in D.C. that summer. But it was nothing like the 100,000 that were brought together at other times. My fragmentary memories include that mid-summer in Washington was really hot, and that Mike Wallace was really short. I rapped -- as we said back then -- with Wallace a bit one morning as he was waiting outside the Capital Building, perhaps getting ready to interview some congressman. I think he was 'relating' to me, getting a sense of what 'the young people' were thinking.

Here are some of the images of Citizens v. Nixon on the streets of DC:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ouched.jpg

http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace ... on1974.jpg

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 8:55 pm

sancarlos wrote:Jackie Brown was a very underrated Tarantino movie. Extra points for being based on an Elmore Leonard book, and for featuring the lovely Pam Grier.

This is my favorite Tarantino movie. And Across 110th Street is on my list of the under-rated songs of that era.

Super extra bonus points for this movie featuring an old white guy getting it on with Pam Grier. Tarantino's other movies lack this element of realism in my view.

HDO45331 · Post by **HDO45331** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 10:09 pm

DC47 wrote:I see nothing cynical in this comment. Exempting 20% of Americans is probably generous.

However, to build on this idea, I think that the segment of the population that was really engaged by matters of peace and justice in 1974 was no more than 20%. And I don't mean the percent that was rallying on the streets of our nations capital and elsewhere. My guess is that no more than 5% of the population was part of a demonstration of any kind -- even once -- in the 60s and 70s.

Why did the number get as high as 5% then, when it is probably 0.5% now? Even when the US has been actively at war for over a decade and serious matters of justice exist wherever you look?

I have no real idea. I would like to read a long article explaining this, as I've experienced both eras and feel pretty clueless. But my off-the-cuff rank order of factors would start with these two.

1. A high percentage of young people in the USA. There are many reasons why young people are more prone to take political action. But in most eras and most places, they are the radicals. I read a review of a book about the French Resistance in WWII this morning, published in the Wall Street Journal. It reminded me that this was largely a young-persons movement. In many families, the elders were part of the Vichy regime and the youngsters were with the Resistance. I don't know the numbers, but it strikes me that there were a lot more youngsters around in 1974 than 2015.

2. The chance of the government making you a soldier. When they stopped giving out student deferrals, most males felt that they had a reasonably high chance of being drafted in the late 60s and early 70s. We saw it coming even when we were 13 or 14. In our minds, being drafted meant killing and/or being killed. We didn't know that much about non-combat roles, or ways that the well-connected could be cleverly selected into them (e.g., G.W. Bush). We just saw dead and disabled Americans who looked just like us on the television set every night. This is one hell of a radicalizer. I think it made us a whole lot more sensitive to American war crimes when the same people who authorized them were going to soon conduct a lottery in which the losers would be sacrificed.

Will these factors and others that would make a longer, better-informed list, again co-occur? Almost certainly not in the USA in the next few decades. But others could emerge that would again radicalize the population. Things that seriously threatened a substantial segment of the population can happen. And by 'seriously' I mean something more than significant student loan debt, which seemed to be important to many of those who engaged in the Occupy movement (which I did with my daughter one day). By 'substantial segment' I mean more substantial than the numbers of black people who are at real risk of being gunned down by the police in dubious circumstances. Things can be bad without triggering wide-spread and long-lasting protest. But someday, and not in the infinite future, things can be that bad again.

Watergate had a of of influence on the 30-50 year old people. People were wired to the TVs every afternoon, during the hearings.

In addition, race had a big factor.

I graduated in 1969. In my senior year of high school, a student-teacher asked how many of us were going to Miami University (the good one, in Oxford, OH.) A few of us raised our hands. He said to look out, there would be problems, even riots, at this staid institution. One of his reasons was due to the low number of blacks enrolled (something like 116.) And, sure enough, there were riots over race and Viet Nam. Miami's was a week or two before Kent State. Pretty tense times.

Taking it to the streets beats bitching on a blog, by a great deal.

DC47 · Post by **DC47** » Wed Jun 17, 2015 10:40 pm

howard wrote:DC, I had no idea or recollection of protests in DC that summer demanding Nixon leave. Interesting. Just several months earlier, as a high school junior, I was asking my history teacher to let us watch even more of the televised senate hearings than he was already showing us, but he insisted we needed to actually learn about the Constitution to understand how those guys were violating it. I went from hyperaware 15yo to detached baseball, beer and girl crazy 17yo in something like two years.

My history teacher let us immerse in hearings. That made me crazy to learn more about the constitution and launched me on my way to Washington that summer. Definitely the better way to teach crazy, impatient teenagers.

A brief point. In 2003, during the runup to the Iraq war, there was a day of multiple coordinated massive antiwar protests in dozens of cities across the country. In NYC and SF the numbers of people who marched was in the neighborhood of 100,000 each (as I recall, and i'm not looking it up.)

This had zero effect on the senate and the president. Part and parcel of the zero effect is the minimal coverage by the mass media, and that minimal coverage was filled with lies and distortion, starting with severe underestimations of the size of the crowds (often parroting by the minimal figures provided by cops and officials.)

Such large numbers of people dissenting actively in the streets had been rendered 100% irrelevant. I took that as a marker of the long descent. As well as a marker of the 180˚ shift of the mass media to the functional equivalent of Soviet era press (TASS and Pravda) from DC's summer of '74. Well, with one key difference; the percentage of Soviet citizens who swallowed whole what their media told them was far lower than the number of Americans of all stripe who faithfully accept the word of the NY Times and the tv news.

This is some heavy shit. I wonder if it is a key factor that differentiates the winning streak for social justice activism in the 60s and 70s from the past 20 years? When I was but a lad, I looked at what was happening and drew the reasonable conclusion that if enough of us got together that we made for lots of big crowds, the politicians would feel the heat and at least do something moderately progressive. Protests for civil rights, to end the Vietnam War, to remove Nixon, to shut down nuclear power plants -- people in large numbers stopped what they were doing, endured some inconvenience (e.g., being shot down in cold blood at Kent State, jailed for trespassing at power plants), and kicked political ass. All were massive wins. When you grew up in that era, that was the revealed truth. It wasn't easy, but we could win. We would win.

But in the last 20 years the lesson has been reversed. Protest all you want, and they go to war after war for reasons that are even shallower than the Domino Theory (of communist domination). Gather in large numbers all across the country to Occupy, and you get nothing whatsoever. Except the smell of pepper spray and some really bad street theater. Mass protests just peter out. They don't trigger even larger protests, with a broader segment of society joining in. They don't accumulate, they dissipate.

I had never thought of Howard's point about the media's distortion of protests as being an important factor in their impotence. My last major protest effort on a national issue was abut nuclear power in the late 70s and early 80s. I went to some rallies, and of course a No Nukes concert in a SF park. Jackson, Bonnie, all those folks. But I was a bail provider, not a fence cutter, so I wasn't at the heart of the action. Then and later, I didn't follow the media coverage of protests in which I knew the truth. I was probably as clueless as anyone else about the suppression of information about the actual strength of the events. I can see how the established powers would naturally figure out this trick, and that the media would naturally fall right in line.

One other point, more brief. At least the potential for cell phone/social media to be effective in the exercise of dissent is clear. Otherwise, the powers that be would not be installing internet kill switches. I experienced some of the bullshit the NYPD used to interrupt text messaging during Occupy.

That's news to me. Is this established fact? If so, it's scary. Did they justify this as necessary due to the obvious threat of violence or terrorism? I mean, I doubt that you could safely park a BMW on the street within a five block radius of Zucotti Park. The horror!