What people say and do

I was lucky enough to listen to the Woodstock tapes and was blown away by the variation of style and skills exhibited by those who took part. All had their roots on jazz or blues or rock and roll and all had the skills which went with paying their instruments from a sound back ground. As I listened to some of the heavier rock and roll of Ten Years After I suddenly realised something. The parents of those young people sitting their listening an dup on stage playing all had their roots in Doris Day, Irving Berlin, Frank Sinatra, a controlled music which was for its day, new and sensational. We had had Elvis and he had shocked the establishment with his hip movements and now we had these people pushing the boundaries of music into areas previously untapped. The ending of the war had produced a large bulge on the population of youth and they were about to sweep aside what had gone before.
Alvin Lee continued an amazing guitar solo in which you could hear vestiges of artists to come and I realised he had become the inspiration to later musicians as Muddy Waters and other blues and jazz player had been to them.
It made me smile when I thought of the onset of punk and how outraged we were at it and then at the rap and new r&b which developed, but isn’t it all progression from one norm to the next, each generation making its stamp through its fashion and music and language?
I sat there and continued to listen as Alvin went onto a long riff with the base guitarist and then the drums and then the keyboard. Here was a man out on a limb of acceptability, pushing the boundaries of what the establishment would accept and yet we are now the ones who turn round and complain at low hanging trousers, hair which is made into solid, bouncing artistic creations and music which s as foreign to us as ours was to our parents.
I thought of the phrase, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Mm, exactly.