Word: rocked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are other, easier ways to make a lot of money. Go into the stock market. Why do people do the public-hippie trip? Well. Entertainers occupy a quasi-sexual world onstage, symbolically conquering entire audiences with their vasty charms. A good rock performer must maintain a tremendously sexual presence onstage, and let it be known in various ways that he's got a bigger one than any two men in the audience. C.F. Mick Jagger or Hendrix. By throwing your head around dramatically, by sweating a lot, by swinging your libidinously sweat-curled hair like an escaped rapist...
...Fame and Money. The big recording companies were pouring money into promotion of the scene before it had matured, feigning great interest in the musicians. The musicians, myself included, fell for it. Somehow in our hearts we all believed that there, way up high on top of the Big Rock Candy Mountain a recording contract was being written by genial producers and stamped with approval by God. Nobody really had any idea what was going on, although every rumor you had ever heard was filed neatly in the rucksack of your mind to act as a pillow for your weary...
...reason that rock music in general, and the Boston Sound in particular, is such a confused area is that there are no critical standards by which to judge the music. White rock musicians today have nothing, in Dylan's phrase, to live up to. And the audiences will pay in turn to be insulted (The Mothers), bored (The Ultimate Spinach), assaulted (The Fugs and MC 5), ignored (The Jefferson Airplane and Procol Harum), and urinated upon by a lukewarm assemblage of beligerent flower-cretins. Entertainment is left up to a very few white groups who know how to act onstage...
...summer of 1967, at a small-time bar and ballroom in Hyannis, a group called the Underground Cinema was doing its set. Ian Bruce Douglas, now probably the most fiscally successful of the Boston rock musicians, was rapping at the audience, mostly fortyish folk with company suits who were sucking booze from the bar and looking woozily over their shoulders at the weirdos on the stage. Occasionally a bleached-blonde hot tomato would do her version of the Swim with some paunchy insurance salesman, the type who would have had a lampshade on his head if there had been...
...know," he said in the speeded-up way that rock musicians have when they are about to show their knowledge, "You guys ought to play more of your own material, Top-40 isn't where it's at anymore." He bounced on the balls of his feet, flashing his hands around and laughing. I looked at Billy, our rhythm guitarist, who shrugged. It was obvious that this Douglas cat belonged in Bridgewater. I just said yeah, I guess we ought to, and Douglas disappeared from my life until the next fall when the Ultimate Spinach album came...