If a photo from twenty years ago can sometimes transport you to a time and place, what about a live concert recording?
Whether a picture is worth a thousand words or not, it's a good concept. Words, particularly on a printed page, need to be interpreted to come alive. You have to create the sounds, imagery, and smells in your mind. It's very different from being confronted more directly with something in the form of deeply familiar smells, images, or sounds.
Just one good photo from a demo you participated in twenty years ago can transport you to the event in your mind's eye immediately, as can an unexpected whiff of just the same combination of sweat and tear gas that you might have associated with that day.
I knew all this already, so it shouldn't have surprised me so much that listening to an entire concert from a certain moment in history could have an even more powerful impact.
I was born in 1967, and therefore I grew up in the shadow of the Sixties. As a small child, the sights and sounds were around me, my babysitter smelled of patchouli, had long hair, wore colorful clothes, had sparkling eyes, didn't eat meat, and said things like "far out" and "groovy" regularly.
I have some solid memories of the Seventies, but only some visceral feelings and impressions from before then. But having been there or not, it would be hard to overstate the difference between listening to a Phil Ochs concert from 1968 and listening to a bootleg recording of one of his concerts from 1971. There was at least a guarded optimism about the possibilities for the future that you can hear in the recordings from the Sixties, even after all the leaders assassinated, the cities burned, and the countries bombed.
That sense of optimism was absent from the later recordings. You could hear the change palpably in both what Phil talked about in between songs, and how the audience reacted to what he was saying and singing, before and after 1970.
Parenthetically, I know people often say that "the Sixties" as people understand the term really began around 1965 and ended around 1975. But by so many accounts, and by my observation from the distant future listening to recordings and reading books, 1970 was a very important year, in terms of that sense of possibility that characterized the Sixties being basically massacred in Ohio, Mississippi, and elsewhere.
I had had this experience with listening to the recordings of other artists from prior epochs, but a few days ago I had this experience listening to a concert I gave myself, almost twenty years ago now.
I do often reminisce about the social movements I was swimming in in the late 1990's and early Naughties in the US -- the global justice movement, the movement against the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Palestine solidarity movement, and the environmental movement, in no particular order. (No one talked about "the student movement" by this time anymore, but individual student groups and associations of student groups still had political influence and major amounts of spending money, so a significant amount of all of these movements were still taking place on college campuses, unlike in later years.)
Anyway, reminiscing is one thing, but listening to a beautifully-recorded live concert from sometime in late 2003 is another experience entirely.
If you have friends who you don't see very often, it's really evident just how rarely you see them when kids are involved. If your friends have a kid, not seeing them for a few years can be the difference between their kids remembering who you are or having no clue. The kid you last saw as a cute little toddler might now be taller than you. When there aren't such obvious markers as a growing child, time can just slip by even faster.
Whatever the explanation is, it had been quite a while since I had even looked at the list of concerts my friend John had archived online for me so long ago.
Starting sometime in the late Nineties, continuing for around a decade, before music streaming platforms existed, I was putting up all my music for free download, along with all the concert recordings anyone made who handed me a CDR with audio files on it. Or rather, my friend John was doing that for me. Eventually I learned how to deal with audio files myself, but it took a decade or so.
So I'd stick a CDR in the mail to John, he'd put the concert up on archive.org, and I'd forget all about it. About once every five years I might look my name up on archive.org and see what was there, note with approval that some of those concert recordings have been downloaded thousands of times, and move on to some other activity.
It's hard to imagine that it took me almost twenty years to really check out any of those recordings, beyond their view count or listening to a few seconds of a clip to see about the recording quality. But finally, after two decades, a few days ago I ventured to really check out those 14 concerts John uploaded for me.
Among the 14, several are excellent soundboard recordings, but one of them, which I believe would have been from sometime in late 2003 at the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center in Boulder, Colorado, particularly stood out, because whoever made the recording not only captured my guitar and voice beautifully, but also the audience, which is something generally lost with recordings that are soundboard-only, where the audience is often virtually inaudible, or very distant.
How an audience might behave of course depends on many factors, such as whether they know or like the performer they're listening to, whether the venue is a good listening room or more of a bar atmosphere, etc. But having heard many recordings of the quality of this one from Boulder that were made in other places at later dates, it's easy to hear what I'm talking about. At least, it's a very recognizable thing for me. Since Live in Boulder is now up as an album on Bandcamp and soon on streaming platforms, I'll be curious to hear about the impressions other people may have.
As I listen, I'm struck by so many things. But even before listening, just thinking of things like the venue, the city, the state, and the region.
Boulder, a place I used to visit at least annually for so many years, to play gigs there and in other cities throughout the state of Colorado, along with every one of the states bordering Colorado -- Utah, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming. I had friends and comrades from different parts of society in all of those states, and played in all of them regularly, at universities and at peace & justice centers, which could be found in all of those states.
Perhaps now it's been long enough since that time that I can safely brag that twenty years ago I was even lovers with wonderful women in four of those states, between Colorado and its neighbors. It's now been around a decade since I've managed to visit most of those states, or seen most of the people I used to see in them so often. In many cases we've kept in touch online, but that's not at all the same.
Most of those peace & justice centers closed or are struggling to survive. The generation that started and ran most of them was still pre-retirement age in 2003, and was also the generation that was then leading the antiwar movement. Now those folks who were in their sixties are in their eighties.
None of the student groups that used to organize half of my gigs in those states and across the country exist anymore, or if they do, they don't have budgets. It's not at all a case of people being less radical now than they were then. They just don't have the resources that used to be available, plus they chronically lack both the ability to organize effectively, hampered as we all are by anti-social media. And these days we all lack the revolutionary optimism so necessary in maintaining any social movement in a real way.
That's just what strikes me when I look at the meta data -- time, place, venue.
Listening to the actual content, I'm transported to that moment in history in late 2003 when we had recently had what were possibly the biggest series of simultaneous antiwar demonstrations around the world ever, including the one in New York City, where I performed for half a million freezing people on February 15th of that year, just over a month before the US full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003 began, following 13 years of partial occupations and deadly sanctions.
Despite the war having started after these demonstrations, there was still a sense of the possibility of what we could accomplish if we mobilized well enough and in large enough numbers. On- and off-campus, there was a general buzz in the air with regards to the excesses of the Bush administration in particular, and bipartisan US imperialism in general. There was a widespread outrage that the media was so extremely propagandistic in the wake of 9/11, the invasions, and the "War on Terror."
In small towns across the country, people of many different political backgrounds, with many different political beliefs and lifestyles, were coming together to oppose these invasions, sometimes for very different sorts of reasons.
In towns like Boulder and everywhere else, there were disagreements between elements of the peace movement. There were those who believed in wrapping themselves in the US flag, and those who believed in burning them. There were also a lot of people somewhere in between. There were those who wanted to protest the invasions, and in the same breath, protest what they saw as a CIA-led conspiracy to blow up the Twin Towers in order to disrupt the global justice movement.
There were others who thought introducing this unproven allegation was a massive distraction, and that the focus of the movement should be on getting the US military out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Others thought we should specifically only focus on the occupation of Iraq, and that the invasion of Afghanistan was different. But all these elements went to the same protests and came to the same concerts, and they were all there in that room in Boulder, laughing heartily at all my jokes.
This was still a time when in the US -- not just in other countries -- meetings of the global financial and political elite in cities across the country would be met by tens of thousands of protesters demanding real democracy.
When I sang about shutting down meetings of the corporate elite, it was evident that I was just sharing the news about what happened at the meetings of the IMF, the World Bank, the G7 and the WTO, not making outrageous predictions. When I sang "we'll shut down the SOA," no one present needed me to explain that the SOA is the School of the Americas, where Latin American soldiers are trained by military officers and CIA agents how to conduct coups and torture people. Everyone knew about that school, and probably half of the people in the room had at some point in the past few years boarded a plane or a bus to Georgia to spend a weekend there protesting in Columbus at the gates of Fort Benning.
I don't at all mean to exaggerate the significance of anything that was happening in the US twenty years ago.
To be sure, then as now, we weren't winning, and we didn't win. Capitalism and imperialism continued as it had, or worse, possibly with slight modifications, just like it did after other, even bigger, more militant, and better-organized movements in past times.
Nonetheless, it's a fascinating thing to get a little window into a time gone by like this. Having heard many decent live recordings from shows I did after this period in the US, say post-2005, with a few brief exceptions over the years since then, listening back on late 2003 just reinforces my impression that this movement I was part of for so many years was really quite something, and it also had a beginning and an end.
Neither current events or history are neat and tidy. The global justice movement was waning as the antiwar movement was being born, primarily for the same reason -- 9/11. And this antiwar movement of which I speak sustained itself and existed in small towns and big cities throughout the entirety of the US, up until late 2005, after which point it basically vanished, though it took a few years to dissipate in some areas, and never entirely disappeared in a few places.
I think often of my eldest daughter, Leila, now 17, who I took on the road with me a lot when she was very small. She was only born in 2006, in the tail end of this antiwar movement. When she was a baby, Cindy Sheehan was still a household name, possibly more well-known than Bruce Springsteen at the time. (I have a photo of Cindy cradling Leila after a gig in Texas.)
When Leila was a baby, there were many young people at my gigs, but the majority of a given audience was often, like that one in Boulder, made up of people twenty years or so older than me. People who were twenty years older than me back then were still at least nominally middle-aged. Maybe not in their physical prime anymore, but also not yet old enough to be slowing down much.
One of the most memorable aspects of this period in history (though I'm not sure if this observation can be directly heard in the audience's reaction to this concert, per se), were the numbers of people of the Sixties or Seventies generations who were avid followers of one or another political tendency when they were young, who would literally not give members of other left political tendencies the time of day back when they were all young and sectarian, who by the time of this concert, were old enough to realize the foolishness of their youthful ideological rigidity. By that time, anyway, the numbers of people in this or that party had shrunken dramatically since when they were young, and they really had little choice but to hang out together, if they were going to be active on the left at all.
I'm not going to make any efforts here to share whatever the lessons might or might not be from 2003 for the present, though they exist, and I've written about that a bit before. I'll only conclude by saying that listening to this concert reminded me that it's often the direct window into history -- listening to a concert from the period or reading a book written during the period, rather than reading a book about the period that was written later -- that will give us the most insight.
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