Missing the good times

Subject: BS: Missing the good times
From: Neighmond
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 01:21 AM

I don't know as I am correct- but I feel like I came along too late (hatched in 1977) for all the good times-
I see the old films of the people in the village in NYC by the fountain, and the hippies in SanFrancisco, the old time gospel singers and itinerant singers in the early days of radio, when the people on the oprey(ies) and the hayride and all, if not as technically perfect, were all spontanious and had alot of fun.
I missed the golden age of Folk revival and the golden age of country by about thirty years I think.
Maybe there is something I am missing and I AM in good times. Am I just a blustering idiot? Is there some mecca for the new set (does my generation have enough gumption to get off its collective ass and DO anything?) Someone please set me straight if I am wrong. This has been bothering me for a while but I saw that post about the village pictures from 1963 and I had to say something. Sorry to be a nuisance.

Chaz

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: mg
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 01:37 AM

do you have enough food to eat? A warm place to sleep? A job? Medical care? I hope you do. If you do you are living in the good times..of course things could take a turn for the worse so appreciate them while you have them. There is plenty of music, plenty of fun...your generation will perhaps have to rise to the occasion and they will if needed...mg

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 02:07 AM

Hi, Neighmond:

Memory is a filter. It is wonderful to look back once and awhile to be thankful for what you had. But, it's a good idea to remember what
it was realy like... the bad, as well as the good. What you can't see in those photographs is as important as what you can see. Those were good times, for sure, but they weren't without their price. While I am thankful that I was there at that historic time, I realize that many of the people I knew back then are long gone, and for most of them, life was a brilliant burst of light that couldn't be sustained. Many died of drug overdoses, few thought of anything but their own pleasure. At the time, it seemed like the world would have an indefinite love afair with folk music. Or more accurately, there was no thought of the future at all. I imagine that people like me who were around at that time, if they're honest with themselves, can remember how confusing life was. Everything was colored by Vietnam hanging over our heads, just as Iraq is, now. It's no wonder that we didn't think alot about the future, because we couldn't see our way forward.

I remember those times for the excitement of walking down McDougal Street, running in to friends I knew, or stopping in to play at a pass-the-hat coffee house. At the time, everything was exciting. Now, when I look at the boxed sets of music that was popular at that time... one called Bleeker and McDougal, I have no desire to hear most of the music. The things that I am thankful for are having a chance to hear the old-timers, like Reverend Gary Davis, and Mississippi John Hurt, and friends like Tom Paxton and Dave Van Ronk when they were first starting out. Those were indeed exciting times.
But, I wouldn't swap one of those nights for a night I had two weeks ago, when my group was part of an evening of music that had every bit as much excitement, good music and friendship as any I've ever known. Now, I'm more thankful for what I have, while it's happening. The trick is to recognize what you have, when you have it... not looking back through the filter of time.

"How many good times are taken for granted, and only remembered when they've passed away." Enjoy now, and be grateful for the good times in the past. The music that I hear at folk gatherings now is far better than what was being made in the 60's, and the excitement of being discovered, or being the next "someone" has more than been replaced by the good times of just sharing music together for the fun of it.

Enjoy these days. Some day, someone may post photographs taken in 2003 and kids will be saying, "Wow,Man! Were you really there?"

Jerry

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 07:52 AM

I can also feel I've "missed the good times".

I was listening to folk music in the 70s but it was only the commercial stuff on the radio. I never went to the clubs that were scattered around Sydney, my friends spent time in pubs (no live music, just juke boxes) & partying, listening to rock & folk & folk rock & ??

6 years ago I discovered live folk & now have friends & acquaintances who have been singing since the 60's & 70's. One friend made her first album in 1968 (I had almost finished high school), & has been continually writing songs & intermittently recording ever since.

I just love spending time with the folks who have been performing or just singing for decades - I feel part of the history.

I'm on the committee of Australia's oldest folk club (Bush Music Club, 50 next year) with Bob Bolton & our founders were in the forefront of the revival, collecting songs which are now in the National Library collections, and sung widely. Our members are still collecting & disseminating these songs. The walls of our hut are covered in posters advertising past folk clubs & concerts - a veritable history of folk around our city & surrounds. We have investigated painting as the ex-army hut (WWI vintage)is shabby, but whatever we do, we can't damage our heritage.

I hang around with a great lot of people & try to soak it all up, but at times get the poor me's cos I have only known these people for 6 years, not 30.

sandra

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: alanabit
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 08:36 AM

That's right. What's happening near you now? Where are you playing or listening to live music? I recall the dreary job I left in 1979 to set off for Germany busking. I walked out in the beautiful grounds of that hospital on a wonderful May morning and said to myself, "I am going to take it in and enjoy it now - then I will never need to get all regretful when I look back." I enjoyed the beauty of that place and moved on to find the next thing.
Some of the people who I met on the streets here have gone on to achieve fame, fortune and sometimes both. Many - in fact most of the buskers - are now dead. They were good, bad, mean, generous,strong, weak, talented, untalented, interesting and dull. In fact most of them were a mixture of all. I would say they all added something to my life. I would not have minded being in New York in 1963 either (although I may have struggled as a busker at the age of eight), but I would not have missed a minute of the experience (good and bad) which has come my way. I have got my own story and it is worth no more and no less than yours.

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Tinker
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 08:40 AM

If you're here, you're part of something. At my first Getaway three years ago I was sitting dumbfounded at a song circle (my first ever) in the "Mudcat" cabin. I had a camera next to me but wasn't using it when Caroline Paton looked over at me and said, "Take some pictures, times like this don't always come again... " She was ever so right.

The last two years I've brought a video camera and think of it as history. There are amazing people, amazing music, and a few bits of amazing silliness. I'll have to work really hard to ever make even the proficient musicain stage, but I'm loving every minute of being along for the ride.

Tinker

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 08:43 AM

You got it right, Allan. Over here, many people have a trunk full of memories of some of the great festivals that are long since gone: Fox Hollow, The Eisteddfod in N. Dartmouth, Mass, and the coffee houses that ran for so many years. But, right now, there's the Getaway in Washington, the NOMAD festival here in Connecticut, the arisen Eisteddfod to be held in Brooklyn and countless others around the world. My Mother has always said that life is making memories.

The good old days are still to come.

Jerry

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: IanC
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 08:52 AM

When I was young, I sometimes wondered if I was born in the wrong century. A bit over 16 years ago, I discovered I was diabetic. Amazing how something like that can wake you up.

There was no golden past. Some things may have been better. Some were undoubtedly worse.

Rather than regret the things you think you missed out on, why not make them happen. There's very little that can't be done once you set your mind on it.

:-)

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: MMario
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 09:03 AM

'Old Songs' too!

For that matter the FSGW is doing a pretty good job (IMO) with their house concerts and sing arounds and sessions.

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 09:30 AM

You might have to search a bit harder to find the good times than you might have then, at some times in some places, but it's all there, and more than ever. So far as the music goes, there's probably more of it, and better, and more chance to play it - it's just that it's not plugged into the music industry, and that's a good thing really.

Maybe it's harder to kid yourself that turning round the world for the better is going to be a simple quick thing, but there are people out there working on that, and it's a long haul. In some ways the mainstream world looks uglier than ever, but especially for people involved in this kind of music there's a stronger and healthier counterculture. And it's much less sexist and racist and unaware of thing like people with disabilities being excluded and so forth.

As for things like terrorism - well, all those years we had the four-minute warning and the H-bombs hanging over us, and Mutual Assured Destruction. The worst scenarios people imagine now tend to be a nuclear device in a big city - that doesn't even compare with all-out nuclear war, which we don't worry too much about these days.

And when it comes to being in a time when things open up, and things are happening for the first time, that was true about the 60s in a lot of ways - but it's true today, of different things, and sometimes of the same things coming round again.

For example, there's this place. There was nothing at all like the Mudcat back then, linking us to people to exchange music and thoughts with all round the world, and opening up ways of getting together with them as well, from time to time.

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: harvey andrews
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 09:30 AM

I'm afraid I have to agree with the questioner, but purely in musical terms.I think I lived through a golden age of song in the 50's 60's and 70's.I don't think it's anywhere like as interesting now. How do young songwriters compete with the greats of that time? they can't. They can only repeat...like Oasis and others. It's been done.The same is true of painting. There are still artists who paint like the Impressionists, but the excitement of art at that time cannot be regained, if you want to see Impressionism you go to Monet et al. I think we all have times we'd like to re-visit. I'd love to go to Paris in the 1890's for Cafe Concert, to the Olympia Theatre in the late 50's to see Jacques Brel, to Lubbock 1956 to see the Crickets,to Toronto in the 70's to see Stan Rogers, but it's all history now as is the folk scene in the 1960's/70's. I still remember vividly appearing at the Cambridge folk festival with two young Americans called Prine and Goodman. Now I'd like to go back to that weekend!
There have always been golden ages in the arts followed by fallow periods. Maybe this isn't a golden age of song, maybe a lot of marking time is taking place, maybe music will never reflect a time like it did then ever again..who knows. But if you were lucky enough to have been born at the right time you could have been in New Orleans, Paris, Barcelona,Liverpool, etc when something new was bursting through, something not seen or heard before, something bloody exciting! it could happen tomorrow anywhere in the world. Sometime, somewhere, someone's going to be lucky. A lot of us were.
My son manages the web site for one of the BBC television's best pop progs and gets to go to the show.
Only last week we were talking about contemporary music. he has his favourites and goes to see them in concert, but when I asked him what period he would like to be able to do the job in if he had the choice he said "The Sixties, no question."
Who am I to disagree.

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Amos
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 10:03 AM

I'd suggest that good times are what you make. If youaren't seeing any, consider the source!!

A

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Neighmond
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 10:14 AM

Thanks-It's good to get a dose of perspective now and again.

Chaz

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 12:44 PM

Amos: You remindedme of one of my favorite Peanuts comic strips.
Lucy appears in the box, looking angry and unhappy. Charlie asks her what's wrong, and she answers "I'm not happy... someone's not doing their job!"

As for me, I'm as excited about the appearance of Norah Jones on the scene as I was about Dylan, and I'd take the Dixie Chicks over The Highwaymen, The Kingston Trio, The Chad Mitchell Four or any sixties group. I'd match Steve Earle against just about any of the 60's songwriters, too.

I think what we're talking about is "being there." Well, I was there when Rick Fielding did a concert recently in Branford, Connecticut, and I'll be there when Harvey Andrews comes over, and perhaps my friend Roy Harris if he's anywhere near here. And you know I'm going to be here when the Shellbacks Chorus comes over. Just because people aren't getting signed to major companies now, and there isn't the same market for folk music that there was in the sixties doesn't diminish today in my eyes. How many records did Mississippi John sell the first time around? If he was still around today, he'd probably sell even fewer, unless he used a drum machine and mixed a little more rap into his songs.

The human spirit will always rise..

Jerry

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: alanabit
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 01:14 PM

Just because good music is not on the Billboard charts or Top of the Pops it does not mean that it isn't out there. People who I saw in the UK folk scene like Bill Boazman, Johnny Coppin, Alan Taylor and Downes and Beer moved me just as much as Bob Dylan or the Beatles ever did. It may not be possible to sell committed, inteligent musicians to the broader public, but that does not diminish the value of their work one iota. It simply makes it more difficult for them to make a living out of it. For folk music that has a useful side effect, because it means only the most dedicated and honest can survive. There never was a trash free age. "Gimme Shelter", "Ballad of Thin Man" and "I am the Walrus" may have come from the sixties - but so did "I was Kaiser BIll's Batman", "Yummy Yummy Yummy" and "Sugar Sugar".

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Mudlark
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 01:50 PM

"These are the best of times, these are the worst of times." Dickens did have a way with words! When I was young I often felt I was living in the wrong century...wanted to be on the land here in California before the mark of man had even begun to destroy the natural beauty. Then I went to live on a rural farm with no 20th c. amenities, and began to understand the downside of 19th c. living. Now in my 60's I look back with real nostalgia, not just on the 50's folk music/beatnik scene, but also back to the music, the innocence, even the shape of cars from the 30's-40's. I remember being a young female in Los Angeles at a time when I could frequent jazz clubs in Hollywood alone without fear...now I don't even like to DRIVE through LA. But though my heart may yearn for those times, my head knows that during much of that time black members of those great bands couldn't stay at the same hotels as the rest of the guys (and female musicians were relegated to the position of "songbird"), agricultural workers had little or no power to demand a working wage, prosperity in the US was the outcome of a terrible war, women's rights, for equal opportunity both financially and culturally, were in their infancy...and on and on.

From my prospective, there was a golden age of popular, then folk music. But independent distribution, via the Web, for instance, is now providing a new world of opportunity for musicians and writers. And I defy anyone to listen to the Mudcat CD's and not think this is a pretty good time to be alive, with ears (flood Dick!).

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: harvey andrews
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 02:15 PM

I think some of the above are missing the point of the original question. If you were a kid in the age of bebop who fell in love with the sound and the time of Dixieland you could still catch the old practitioners and originators who were left, but you'd feel you missed what you know, for you, was a golden age. But a kid who discovered bebop, had no time for dixieland, and was there when bebop started, would feel he was in a golden age and would talk about it for his whole life!
No matter how good we all feel the music is today, recordings can take us back in time and we become time travellers. Some find the past better than the present in terms of musical output. No amount of exhorting them to like today will make up for the fact that they'd really like to spend time in yesterday. We all do it to a certain extent, but so many of the young people I talk to regard the musical past as better than the musical present.

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: harvey andrews
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 02:16 PM

By the way "young people" for me means the under 35's!!!

Subject: Lyr Add: THOSE WERE THE DAYS (C Stouse & L Adams)
From: Rustic Rebel
Date: 21 Feb 03 - 03:06 PM

("Those Were the Days" by Charles Stouse and Lee Adams) - All in the Family
Boy the way Glen Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.

And you knew who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.


Brand/Artist Mary Hopkins
Album
Song Title Those Were The Days My Friend

Lyrics Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And think of all the great things we would do

Chorus:

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way
La la la la la la
La la la la la la

Then the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
If by chance I'd see you in the tavern
We'd smile and one another and we'd say

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days
Oh, yes, those were the days
La la la la la la
La la la la la la

Just tonight I stood before the tavern
Nothing seemed the way it used to be
In the glass I saw a strange reflection
Was that lonely woman really me?

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days
Oh, yes, those were the days
La la la la la la
La la la la la la

Through the door there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same...

Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days
Oh, yes, those were the days
La la la la la la
La la la la la la


a couple of songs that came to mind when I read this thread. I used to play the Mary Hopkins tune a long time ago. Makes me want to play it for old time sake!
Peace. Rustic, saying these are the good old days. (hey another song by C.Simon)

Subject: RE: BS: Missing the good times
From: Neighmond
Date: 22 Feb 03 - 01:25 AM

harvey andrews, Thanks for putting in words what I couldn't!

FWIW,
I dimmed the lamps, put my headset on (I have a good headset, an old Rochester that is superior in sound), and listened to Ruth Huber and Lois Judd sing "I'm goin' down that road (feelin' bad)" and I could hear the passing of trucks long passed, and the happy chatter of babies that certianly now have grandchildren of their own, the tuning of the guitars long since silent, and a few of the audience sing along with the chorus and for a few blessed moments I was in a migrant work camp in California in the lator days of the depression! The people heard in thhe record are scattered countless ways to the winds over the years, but just for the moment they were all recalled to that place, where a common bond held them.

I wish it were always that easy.
Chaz

Chaz