credit: mad.com High Art Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had absolutely nothing on Alfred E. Neuman when it came to gathering the tribe of suspect characters. Maybe it was just because this lineup in support of the What Me Worry Band was more contemporary, the deeds of the bad guys (and gals) fresher in Read More
All posts by jmp
New Moon Edition July 2023
Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash Normative Normal. A cool word to think about. What does it mean, really? In my town, there’s a Normal Street. What must it be like to live there? Can we suppose that by default a residence there is typical? Life itself exactly at the mean? A normal school was Read More
July 2023 Full Moon Edition
Titillation credit: inknown Isn’t it interesting – maybe even appropriate – that good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll has from it’s inception been closely paired in the public imagination with juvenile delinquency? The first nationally distributed song of that genre was Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets. It was the theme song Read More
May 2023 New Moon Edition
Snake Priest credit: E.S. Curtis Then and Now My generation had a sincere interest and deep fascination for Native American culture. We still today see historic images like this one posted in social media, often with quotes of Indigenous wisdom that seems especially profound in our current environment. We Read More
June 3, 2023 Full Moon Edition
jampags.com Blog Culture and Counterculture These beautifully painted tipis are such a classic image of Plains Indians. The Indigenous peoples who lived in them, their feather bonnets, quilled or beaded clothing, herds of fleet ponies in pursuit of the buffalo are iconic in the popular imagination of Native American history and culture. Most of us Read More
June 2023 New Moon Edition
MERSEY The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, B.J. Kramer, with Brian Epstein 1963 (guardian.com) Where were we in 63? I was bumming around Boulder, Colorado, couch surfing with friends – those few that had sofas – or snoring in the 9th Street cemetery cozy in my Holubar sleeping bag, confident that tomorrow was another day. Read More
Counter That!
We talk a lot about the counterculture in the work we’ve been doing lately. It may surprise you to learn the term was coined no earlier than the 1960s by Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture HERE. The tradition itself, though, no doubt goes back as far as societies have existed. I Read More
Best Ever
Bob Dylan called him, “the best guitar player I ever heard.” Being the astute musicologist he is, Bob has tuned in to more than a few great players, so that’s high praise. It merits serious attention. People love lists and love the rankings those lists bring us. What person’s number four, which city is most Read More
When the Rooster Crows
When something phenomenal happens and you give it some thought – how did it come about, what were the forces at play, was it simply a matter of timing, was it inevitable, who can explain it? – it sometimes seems to be made of a complex set of circumstances. Dauntingly so. At other times, Read More
Play It Like An Artist
Bob Dylan abruptly leaves the familiar orbit where he is widely celebrated and launches into a turbulent zone where none has gone before. Two years after this appearance at Newport, he returned with a rock band and blew down the walls. It was not well received. When Dylan went electric in concert July 25, 1965, it’s Read More