This song recalls for me another springtime and the bittersweet memory of my first love, more than half a century ago. I've written about Pat before, if you care to read the story - that chaste and secret love we shared came to a sad ending, but I've never forgotten the sunshine days of fun and friendship - that special cameraderie of boys becoming men together.
Other loves and other disappointments followed; but at this late age, living contentedly with M.P., I realize how blessed I was to have those friendships and passing joys. How true the saying is - better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.
Yesterday, I happened to come across this recording by the Mike Faraci Band, a local NYC group, which is an amzingly good cover of the 1972 Badfinger original. Huh. How do those young'uns even know about such antique music, I wonder.
By the way, Mike is a man of parts: lead singer, guitarist, composer, artist, interior designer, and is highly skilled at carpentry and other DIY projects. Rather studly, too. Check out this tour of his New York City apartment - his aesthetic is not mine, but I can appreciate what he's done with colors, textures, and light:
Poster for the Texas International Pop Festival, August 30 - September 1, 1969. (from Wikipedia)
It may surprise some of my truckbuddies to learn that Texas had its own hippie rock concert on Labor Day weekend, 1969, just a couple of weeks after the famous one in New York state. I'm surprised, too: I never heard of it, and neither did M.P. We were both still in high school, far away from Dallas. And I was too square to care; still am. But as matter of social history in my own lifetime, it was interesting to stumble upon these news videos and reminiscences of the event, which some surviving participants say was life-changing.
First, an official video from the City of Lewisville, a little ways north of Dallas proper, where the festival was held in a large open field next to Interstate 35. The site has been heavily redeveloped since then (see maps). The promoter who first appears at 1:36 is a son of the founder of the Six Flags theme parks, Angus Wynn, Jr.
It says a lot about small-town Texas that the upright, God-fearing citizenry at the time were outraged, not by the long hair, rock music, and drugs, but by all the nekkid bodies skinny-dipping in the nearby lake in broad daylight! The locals knew the kids were naked because they were out there in their motorboats, intently scrutinizing all that indecency through binoculars.
Notice what the newsman in the next clip says about "it's hard to know what to call these young people" - most of them were "weekend hippies" whose hair and clothes were still within the limits of respectability. In the next few years, what was strange and different, even shocking, in 1969 became ordinary: that's how the fashion industry works.
Just a couple of years after this event, I was sitting in a goverment class when the instructor posed a discussion question: "What is a hippie?" We all looked at each other mutely as we realized that "hippie" had become "normal." Long-ish hair, flares or bell-bottoms, wide belts, long sideburns, mustaches, beards, and hip-hugging blue jeans - most young men dressed that way, at least for slogging around campus, regardless of their socio-political orientation. The words "hippie" and "groovy" were already obsolete; but blue jeans - workman's clothing - became the default choice for casual wear, and remain so to this day.
But 1969 was the starry-eyed Age of Aquarius: harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding. It's poignant to hear the earnest young folks in these clips spout all those utopian sentiments of peace, love, and joy: "just be yourself, do what you want to do - people will love you for it." A happy thought, a hopeful thought - but mistaken. Human nature just doesn't work that way. But they surely found that out later on.
This last video opens with a crotch shot that proves more than words ever could that rock and roll is all about sex, and vice versa.
Ah, the sounds of summer - 60 years ago (!) and still just as fine as ever. The Beach Boys performed this hit on the Ed Sullivan Show on September 27, 1964:
The crazed modern world has nothing to compare to this.
The Platinum Jubilee festivities continue with a Party at the Palace, curiously featuring only two or three big names, and a long list of unknown youngsters whom nobody ever heard of. Perhaps it's some sort of jubilee scheme to help disadvantaged children - the Queen is keen on that sort of thing. And who knew Diana Ross was British?
Update, Midnight in London: I was away from the computer and could not watch the concert, which is not really my cup of tea, but here is the whole phantasmagoria from the BBC:
My truckbuddy Frank and his hubby Leon have been enjoying a sentimental journey back to their old stamping grounds in Provincetown on Cape Cod - which put me in mind of this sentimental favorite from the Bee Gees in 2001. While you listen, go check out Frank's great pics of their sojourn on Reluctant Rebel.
Note: the song ends at about 2:30; the rest is just chatter.
This week, it's one of your Head Trucker's all-time favorite rockers, the one and only Johnny Rivers. Something about his live-wire voice has always grabbed me, not to mention his studly good looks. The down-home Louisiana accent works for me too, but you'll be amazed when you discover in the interview where he was really born.
Let's start with Johnny's first gold record from 1964, the Chuck Berry ballad with a surprise ending:
I love the live sound of these recordings made at the Whisky à Go-Go. I still have the album depicted here, and back when I had a record player I must have played it a million times. From 1965, here's Johnny's soulful cover of a big Supremes hit:
No one who wasn't around in 1966 can imagine how electrifying this next record was, with its opening riff taken from the "James Bond" theme - it came out at the height of the secret-agent craze that inspired all sorts of movies, TV shows, and even comic books and kids' cloak-and-dagger toys. For a time there, you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing Johnny taking the roof off with this rendition:
And believe it or not, at age 71 Johnny is still rockin' it as hard as he ever did - here he is performing in Beverly Hills last January:
This recent interview features Johnny discussing how he got started and where the road led him:
Been out of town a few days, helping a friend and enjoying the fine spring weather.
This song came out in spring of my senior year of high school. It always reminds me of sunshine and blue skies, running the back roads in my Malibu 350 V-8, the smell of the piney woods, the fun of tubing down the river with my best bud, the scent of creosote melting out of railroad ties in the hot sun as we walked along the tracks, laughter and popcorn and ice-cold cokes, the infinite hopes of youth, the sight of bare, tanned muscles, the bittersweet pangs of forbidden desire.
Our gay sister, the lovely Lesley Gore, singing at the T.A.M.I. Show - when it was still respectable for a girl to sing rock and roll, while dressed - and acting - like a lady.
My truckbuddy Tim over in sunny rainy Spain is working on another essay, which he's sent me a draft of - and something in it made me go look up some old sixties rock performances on YouTube. And to my amazement, I found that somebody has uploaded the complete film of the legendary T.A.M.I. Show from 1964 - lots of great music and classic performances there, thought the rest of you fellas might want to revisit your memories with this.
Performers include:
The Beach Boys
Chuck Berry
James Brown
Marvin Gaye
Gerry & the Pacemakers
Lesley Gore
Jan and Dean
Smokey Robinson and The Miracles
The Rolling Stones
The Supremes
Oh my, that was a good time to be young. Who's your fave?
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
