Word: taken
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course, the audience has had a summer of softening up. The Who, who had played at Woodstock, had already come back, getting a jump on things when they were meant to be gone for good. Keith Moon, their great drummer, had taken some of the band's careening keenness with him when he died in 1978. Pete Townshend, their great songwriter and guitar player, his hearing shredded by more than two decades of high decibels, could not even re-create all his lead parts. Still they soldiered on, three bowed veterans suffering the onset of shell shock from a barrage...
...then, that the last time the Stones took an American stage, in 1981, they looked like the supporting cast from a George Romero epic, specters from the boneyard of the pop psyche thirsting for a transfusion of celebrity. Now the boys have regrouped and regroomed; better care is being taken all around, and light is being made of age, of gossip, of old reputation. Charlie Watts, the Stones bedrock drummer, who was never one of the group's wilder revelers, looked momentarily startled the other day when a visiting writer extended a hand in greeting. "Sorry," he said, recovering...
...That was probably the final nail," says Keith. "That really took the glue and the heart out of us all. It has taken us this long to reconcile being able to put the Stones together without him. Nobody knows much about Stu out there, but to the boys in the band, the Stones was his band. He was a real taskmaster, strictly rhythm and blues, jazz. You could see his face when you were writing, and if it sounded like a pop song, you knew he was cursing under his breath. In a way, we're all still working...
...Czechoslovakia offered a stubborn reminder of the old-style inflexibility. To commemorate the 21st anniversary of the Soviet invasion, the government of Milos Jakes ordered riot police to scare off some 3,000 demonstrators who had taken to the streets of Prague. Wielding truncheons, the police arrested several hundred protesters, including some from Hungary and Poland. Warned the party-owned afternoon daily Veerni Praha: "History cannot be changed. It is necessary to know it and take a lesson...
That very same day, I later discovered, my father -- a state secretary in the Foreign Ministry -- had taken part in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade Hitler from issuing the invasion order. In his notes my father remarked, "This afternoon is the most depressing of my life. Apart from the unforeseeable consequences for the existence of Germany and of my family, it is appalling that my name should be connected with this event...