Love

- "Alone Again Or" by Love, from Forever Changes (1967)

Naked, If I Want To

Forever forward.

- "Naked, If I Want To" by Moby Grape, from Moby Grape (1967)

With A Little Help From My Friends

Joe Cocker died today. Considering that for a good majority of my childhood I watched The Wonder Years before bed, here is Joe Cocker's cover of The Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends," from Woodstock 1969.

I Call Your Name

For all the drugs and debauchery, The Mamas & the Papas somehow managed to make some wonderful music. This song was originally written by John Lennon and released by the Beatles on their Long Tall Sally EP in 1964. The Mamas & the Papas covered it for their first album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, which came out just two years later in 1968.

You have to give them some credit for their idiosyncratic album covers:

That's more than enough background, though. Here is "I Call Your Name," as performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967:

The End

The West is The Best.

From The Doors' self-titled album, 1967

Waking Early, Sunday Morning

"Waking Early, Sunday Morning"

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.

Stop, back off. The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time's hoard before the day's begun!

Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.
Look up and see the harbor fill:
business as usual in eclipse
goes down to the sea in ships –
wake of refuse, dacron rope,
bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,
all bright before the morning watch
the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.

I watch a glass of water wet
with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,
silvery colors touched with sky,
serene in their neutrality –
yet if I shift, or change my mood,
I see some object made of wood,
background behind it of brown grain,
to darken it, but not to stain.

O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, "Faith of our fathers,"
and now the congregation gathers.

O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul.

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Hammering military splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor –
little redemption in the mass
liquidations of their brass,
elephant and phalanx moving
with the times and still improving,
when that kingdom hit the crash:
a million foreskins stacked like trash ...

Sing softer! But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by reckless caution,
while we listen to the bells –
anywhere, but somewhere else!

O to break loose. All life's grandeur
is something with a girl in summer ...
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!

No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life ...

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

by Robert Lowell, from Near the Ocean (1967)

Since I'm in a class on the guy, and it happens to be fairly early on a Sunday morning, I thought I'd share this.

Y Me Voy

I return to Wellesley on Sunday. Oi.

Here is a circa-1990 Rolling Stones performing "Ruby Tuesday." (Originally from Between the Buttons, 1967.)

Oh, and I just yesterday began reading D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. My heart is prepared for various wrenchings and breakings. I'm only on page twelve and already I feel so, so regretful for Mrs. Morel and her children. Now here's to hoping that I'm able to finish this book whilst in the grips of the academic semester.