There's excess of ego, and there's want of taste.

Excess of ego is what I'm guilty of if I imagine none of my songs can ever be improved or adapted to someone else's style - even though, as Bullfrog does, I labor over them and usually mean exactly what I write.

It is what you are guilty of if you don't make a reasonable effort to figure out why I wrote something as I did (or why a traditional song has taken whatever form it has). Just because you didn't get it on first reading or hearing doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Want of taste is mine when I imagine that I can successfully translate any song into my voice or my idiom. Music is not a universal language, as the sappy phrase would have it. Knowing what you can't do is as important as knowing what you can do. Some people have a real genius for cross-idiom or cross-cultural larceny. More of us (I plead guilty to this) only fancy that we do.

Want of taste is yours when (metaphorically speaking) you bellow a request from the back of the room for something that is clearly out of the performer's idiom . Some people really do only want to hear "Freebird", no matter by whom.[Some, of course,don't really want to hear it, but want to feel they've got the dynamics and/or to show off for their friends.]

Sure, Dick. It is open season on anything any of us put out in public. But each of us ought to take responsibility for being sure of our target before we blaze away.

Of course we only learn by trying.

And Pete can say what he graciously wants to say, but I don't think PP&M did improve the Hammer Song. Popularize it ? Sure. And their alterations were part of that. That's one kind of good, maybe. But I found the original more musically compelling, and that sharpened the focus on the content. Knock enough of the edges off, push it far enough toward elevator music, and it won't matter any more what the lyrics say. It will no longer work as a call to conscience. It'll just become part of the incessant background racket that numbs us all out.

There's a fine and invisible line there someplace.