Drinkin' Again

How Suave Does It Get?

Facial Expressions

I sometimes write things here to sort things out. This is a perfect example. I've long been confused by two 1960s British bands, The Faces, and The Small Faces. Both groups never really charted well, but the Small Faces did better. Both groups eventually dissolved (The Small Faces became the Faces) and their former members went on to greater things: Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenny Jones, Rod Stewart, Ron Wood to name a few.

Henceforth I shall always remember that the Small Faces came first because Steve Marriott was short.

Here's an oldie but goodie:

50 Years Of MyTunes: 1967

One man's opinion:

There were three essential albums in the Magic Summer of '67: Sergeant Peppers's by The Beatles, Surrealistic Pillow by The Airplane, and The Doors by Robbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Jim Morrison--and in some ways, it is only the last of these that seems far away in time, as if we remember it from another world and another lifetime.

~Bruce Harris (1972)

Another man's opinion: Are You Experienced? ~ Jimi Hendrix

A few of my favorite Singles:

Purple Haze ~ The Jimi Hendrix Experience
White Rabbit ~ The Jefferson Airplane
Time Has Come Today ~ The Chambers Brothers
Brown Eyed Girl ~ Van Morrison
Tears Of A Clown~ Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
Get Together ~ The Youngbloods
I Think We're Alone Now ~ Tommy James & the Shondells
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds ~ The Beatles
Gentle On My Mind ~ Glen Campbell
San Francisco ~ Scott McKenzie
Break On Through ~ The Doors
Incense And Peppermints ~ Strawberry Alarm Clock
Spooky ~ Classics IV
Tuesday Afternoon ~ The Moody Blues
Strange Brew ~ Cream
Pictures Of Matchstick Men ~ The Status Quo
Itchycoo Park ~The Small Faces
Both Sides Now ~ Judy Collins

Some people really dislike "Incense and Peppermints" but I have this fantastic indelible memory of running around in the backyard when I was 7 or 8 singing:
Beatniks and politics nothing is new, a yardstick for lunatics, one point of view

The Hippies: By Hunter S. Thompson

My parents bought us a set of Collier's Encyclopedia when we were kids.  They may have been conned into it by a door-to-door salesman.  If so, I'm glad they were. I can remember poring through those volumes as a kid, much like I do now with Wikipedia, just randomly looking stuff up.

The Collier's Encyclopedia came with a supplementary annual Yearbook and we got that too, well into the early 1970's. The Yearbooks had feature articles covering the year's previous events. Two articles from those books stand out in my memory: The first was a black and white photograph of Jimi Hendrix (which I had never seen before nor have seen since) in the 1971 (covering the year 1970) volume.  The second was an article from the 1968 volume written by none other than Hunter S. Thompson, covering the Haight-Ashbury scene of that infamous Summer Of Love the previous year.  Now Hunter Thompson ended up doing do some pretty weird things later on but to me, as a kid, he wrote and sounded like everybody else who wrote for an Encyclopedia in 1968:

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.

You can read Thompson's whole essay here (scroll down about a third of the way).