Color... In Two Parts

Two views of what passes for Fall color in this part o' the world:

This phenomenon is pretty unusual for The High Plains of New Mexico.  Most years I've awakened around this time o' year, looked out my window and see that ALL the leaves fell overnight with absolutely NO change in color.  I mean the ground is literally carpeted with green leaves, a classic case of "here today, gone tomorrow."  But not this year... the leaves are a beautiful golden yellow and this brings back memories of Former Happy Days when we lived up in the deciduous north.  I miss that... until I remember what always followed: tons of fucking snow.

―:☺:―

So.  We continue to read "Life" and we continue to encounter some real gems, just as I thought knew we would.  Here are a couple o' such...

The most bizarre part of the whole story is that having done what we intended to do in our narrow, purist teenage brains at the time, which was to turn people on to the blues, what actually happened was we turned American people back on to their own music. And that’s probably our greatest contribution to music. We turned white America’s brain and ears around. And I wouldn’t say we were the only ones—without the Beatles probably nobody would have broken the door down. And they certainly weren’t bluesmen.

American black music was going along like an express train. But white cats, after Buddy Holly died and Eddie Cochran died, and Elvis was in the army gone wonky, white American music when I arrived was the Beach Boys and Bobby Vee. They were still stuck in the past. The past was six months ago; it wasn’t a long time. But shit changed. The Beatles were the milestone. And then they got stuck inside their own cage. “The Fab Four.” Hence, eventually, you got the Monkees, all this ersatz shit. But I think there was a vacuum somewhere in white American music at the time.

[...]

Jim Dickinson, the southern boy who played piano on “Wild Horses,” was exposed to black music through the powerful and only black radio station, WDIA, when he was growing up in Memphis, so when he went to college in Texas he had a musical education that exceeded that of anybody he met there. But he never saw any black musicians, even though he lived in Memphis, except once he saw the Memphis Jug Band with Will Shade and Good Kid on the washboard, when they were playing in the street when he was nine. But the racial barriers were so severe that those kinds of players were inaccessible to him. Then Furry Lewis —at whose funeral he played—and Bukka White and others were being brought out to play via the folk revival.

I do think maybe the Stones had a lot to do with making people twiddle their knobs a little more. When we put out “Little Red Rooster,” a raw Willie Dixon blues with slide guitar and all, it was a daring move at the time, November 1964. We were getting no-no’s from the record company, management, everyone else. But we felt we were on the crest of a wave and we could push it. It was almost in defiance of pop. In our arrogance at the time, we wanted to make a statement. “I am the little red rooster / Too lazy to crow for day.” See if you can get that to the top of the charts, motherfucker. Song about a chicken. Mick and I stood up and said, come on, let’s push it. This is what we’re fucking about. And the floodgates burst after that, suddenly Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy are getting gigs and working. It was a breakthrough. And the record got to number one. And I’m absolutely sure what we were doing made Berry Gordy at Motown capable of pushing his stuff elsewhere, and it certainly rejuvenated Chicago blues as well.

I'm absolutely certain about the Stones expanding America's musical tastes, as well.  I've written about this before (well, sorta) and at the risk of being somewhat self-serving, let me quote: 

Fast forward to 1960. I was now 15 and living in Washington, D.C. I'll choose the James Brown single on the left as an example of the revelation that came upon me beginning sometime around 1959 and culminated in 1960. That revelation was Black Radio and the R&B music featured there… which was unlike anything I had ever heard before (sorta: see Fats Domino, above). I'd go into my room at night and listen to my crackly, staticky AM radio, marveling at the music I heard… music that was Unobtanium in my white-bread, lily-white suburban world. Once again, consider the times… you simply did NOT find James Brown, Lloyd Price, or Ray Charles in the "hits" bin at Woolworths back in the day… that day being 1958 - 1960… at least not in suburbia. I would have had to journey into Southeast Washington to get that music in my hands back then and since I was only 15 and without a driver's license, that was out of the question. My parents simply wouldn't go there… literally… but the music was on the radio, the radio was in my room, and it was ON every single night. It was an education like no other.

I need to expand on the above.  My father retired from the Air Force in 1960 and moved the fam'bly out to California.  White-bread, suburban California, specifically the San Jose suburbs.  My access to black radio was gone with the wind after that move and it didn't return until sometime in the 1965 - 1966 timeframe when FM radio exploded and Da Blooz became fashionable for middle class white folks. 

But it was the Stones that were largely responsible for that renaissance of American roots music and the foundation for countless numbers of American rock'n'roll bands who followed in the Stones' footsteps.  I can't say I was in the vanguard of Stones fandom; no, I got to the party sometime around 1965 or perhaps early in 1966.   I'm thinking it was right around the time "Aftermath" was released, but memory is a fragile thing and it could have been earlier... much earlier.  The important thing is the fact I got there, innit?  And the more important thing is those old black guys who played Da Blooz suddenly began to appear everywhere... in record bins and on stage, all across America. 

I know I have a few Gentle Readers who have no memory of 1964 - 1966, some because they simply didn't exist at that point in time and others who were far too young to remember that time in any detail, if they remember it at all.  But it was heady indeed for those of us to whom music really matters.  I mean really, rilly matters. 

We, as Americans, owe the Stones a lot.  You can say "thank you" now.  It's not too late.