I’m missing my first Skepticon, which is going on this weekend. Unfortunately, I can’t travel at all. My son has tickets and invited me to the Grand Funk Railroad & Jefferson Starship concert tomorrow, and I had to turn that down, too. This old age thing is really crimping my style.
Skepticon stuff is happening online, at least.
I guess I’m reduced to doing everything virtually for now. See you there!
I saw Jefferson Starship in the early 80s. I want to say some Canadian band called Red Rider opened. This song seems more apt now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunatic_Fringe_(song)
At least I didn’t watch Jefferson Airplane at Altamont. I would have been nearly two years old for that fiasco.
You’re not trying to imply that “heel spurs” are inhibiting your ability to do the Locomotion, are you?
Ouch.
That is going to hurt at least as much as your foot.
The Jefferson Starship and I go way back, over 50 years in fact.
I saw the Airplane in the late1960s. I was a kid then, that was one of my first rock concerts, and it was a mind altering and life changing experience.
I’ve seen the Jefferson Starship a few times recently and they are still amazingly good.
For a few hours, I’m a teenager again and you can imagine how hard that is to accomplish.
I thought this might have been apocryphal but it’s at least as I recall it told: “The Doors started their first European Tour at the Roundhouse in London on September 7th, 1968, one week later the band roamed to Amsterdam, Holland, to play the Concertgebouw. The band was touring with other West Coast band, the Jefferson Airplane, and as Grace Slick recalls, shortly before the concert some members of both bands went for a walk in the city where they were recognized and offered several different types of drugs. Slick remembers Morrison accepting and taking everything in the spot, from pills to bars of hash (just a few hours before arriving to Amsterdam Morrison had swollen a whole bar of Hash at the Frankfurt Airport in Germany). When the Jefferson Airplane took the stage that night, a very intoxicated Jim Morrison invaded their act and started to dance until he suddenly collapsed.”
https://www.popexpresso.com/2022/09/15/when-jim-morrison-died-in-amsterdam-and-the-doors-performed-as-a-trio/
And:
https://wbuf.com/jim-morrison-passes-out-amsterdam/
“As things seem to go in Amsterdam, friendly fans started handing band members various forms of narcotics — joints, pills, hash. In the DVD documentary ‘The Doors: Live in Europe 1968,’ the Airplane’s Grace Slick and Paul Kantner recall that while everyone else took maybe a hit of a joint and passed it on (or pocketed the stash for later), Morrison smoked and ingested everything handed to him that afternoon.
Everything.
When it was time for the concert to start, Morrison was backstage, bleary-eyed and checking out Jefferson Airplane’s set. As the band launched into ‘Fantastic Plastic Lover,’ Morrison walked onstage and began dancing to the music. It wasn’t long before the drugs, the dancing, everything, hit him, and he toppled over.”
Those were the days.
@3- raven
I kinda liked some Airplane/Starship stuff, but Pink Floyd was more my speed, early experimentally edged Pink Floyd. Some of that stuff would have held its own against much later electronica. They were kinda contemporary with the rise of Kraftwerk.
I saw a documentary recently about rifts in Pink Floyd and how ruthlessly visionary Waters was. He has his issues, but the recent dustup about his quasi-Nazi character kinda ignores the narrative of that character in The Wall. Maybe not a good optic though without the deeper context.
I’m kinda sour on Israeli revisionist brand Zionism (now called Likudniks) myself, but Waters seems all ate up about it all. Given Israeli protests about their supreme court’s threatened autonomy, I think many Israelis are not fond of that sort of right-wing Zionism either, yet Bibi holds on to power (shrug).
Roger Waters has gone Putinista-lite unfortunately, but that’s no excuse for not understanding that the fascistic imagery in The Wall is a criticism meant to reflect the character’s mental disintegration while also being a metaphor for the UK’s swing to Thatcherism portrayed as a betrayal of the soldiers who fought Nazism in WW2.
(Yes, this is a multifunction metaphor, but it’s not hard to pick up and I defy anyone to listen to The Wall or watch the movie and come away thinking there’s even a whiff of pro-fascist sentiment there. The metaphor is repeated with variation on The Final Cut and his solo album Radio KAOS, so it’s pretty central to post-WYWH Floyd/Waters.)
Thanks @chrislawson! You actual said what I would have wanted to say about Waters much better than I could.
I’m so sad to not be able to see you this year! You are missed!! I hope your feet find relief very soon. 💙
OT
If PZ -or someone else who is immobilised- wants to listen to pass the time, here is an old goodie from God Awful Movies, it comes complete with faked history and glorified mormons.
GAM317 The Fighting Preacher
https://youtu.be/MsVAn54fUB8