Personally, I've had it up to hear with attitudes such as the ones expressed by the GUEST troll which appears earlier in this thread. It's commonplace now to slap the 60s and the culture of that time around, but it's usually done on a surprisingly superficial level. It's like standing in the valley and looking up and criticizing the mountain for being way to low.

The 60s and spirituality were one and the same to me. Period. I, like an earlier person posting, loved Ravi Shankar and saw him in or around 1968 in Houston at perhaps one of the most astonishing concerts I've ever been to. I knew of Tim Leary not as a relic reduced to an internet broadcast death as a gimmick. I was friends with Alan Watts, one very cool guy on his own, and launched off into eastern philosophy, an ocean I've swam in for the past thirty five years. Music, as with Shankar, was at its best when it was spiritual. The Incredible String Band as well as Van Morrison (and, hey, let's not be *too* critical, spiritual-lite was more than available in the Moody Blues) were among the voices. Others will have their own names to toss in.

The point is, there is a huge difference between the wide open nature of music in the 60s and the streams that flowed from it and the stagnant backwater eddy -- a footnote, I think -- of the music today, the stuff that's canned and processed like cheese in a spray can and labled with .... dare I even think it .. the likes of Britney Spears and what's her name, the one who did the nuclear meltdown/hoedown nonsense when her lip sync track attacked her on national television on Saturday Night Live.

No one with any range of vision can argue successfully that the cultural possibilities, the antiwar mindset that is so missing from today's world, the rage against the machine of the 60s, along with the era's spiritual watershed that arose then (beyond today's fundamentalist idiocy of making Christianity a true/false test with one question)is either silly or vapid when viewed from today's point of view.

MojoBanjo