Music Banter - Explore America With The Official Small City/ Town Thread

Knowledge Is Over-rated Anyway

Just loving this thread with all its pics and insider info about where you guys are from. Batlord’s school and the posts by WWWP and Frownland I found particularly interesting. Great thread, Mindfulness :thumb:

I’ve only ever spent about 3 weeks in the USA, but I’m going to regard that as a minor disadvantage, not as a disqualification. After all, who better to provide an impartial take on small-town America than someone who knows nothing about it?

The Walrus and the Carpenter

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A little to the north of the Golden Gate Bridge is Stinson Beach, where I stayed one night in the eighties; a friend and I had hired a car and were on a short motor-tour to look for America. (© Paul Simon)
On a bright January afternoon we arrived at Stinson and walked along the wide, flat beach for ages. Inspire by the open sea view, during a lull in our conversation I very nearly recited that poem by Lewis Carol which begins,

Quote:

The Walrus and the Carpenter were walking close at hand
They wept like anything to see such quantities of sand
If only this were cleared away, they said, it would be grand.
"If seven maids with seven mops swept it for seven years,
do you suppose" the Walrus said,"that they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it " said the Carpenter, and shed a bitter tear.

As Brits we were surprised at how quiet this picturesque seaside village was on such a beautiful day. In England, that combination inevitably means crowds of tourists, deck chairs and ice-cream vendors, but here the beach, and the town, were inexplicably empty. In the evening, we mooched around looking for, but failing to find anywhere that was open. An uneasy feeling began to creep over both of us: the blight of Londoners away from London, the feeling that we had washed up in a backwater and that life was going on elsewhere without us.

So, despite its charm, I for one was relieved to be on the way again next morning, to be comforted by the every-day bustle of traffic on the highway. Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstacy - Bob Dylan could've been singing about me on that morning ;)

Imagine My Surprise

Imagine my surprise when about a year ago I was reading a collection of rock journalism entitled "The Rock History Reader" and came across this extract from Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test":-

Quote:

The third Acid Test was scheduled for Stinson Beach, 15 miles north of SanFrancisco. Stinson Beach was already a gathering place for local heads -you could live all winter in little beach cottages there for next to nothing- but at the last minute that whole deal fell through and they shifted the event to Muir Beach, a few miles south. The handbills were already out, all over SanFrancisco, advertising Cassidy & Ann Murphy Vaudeville and the celebrities who might be there, the Fugs, Ginsberg, Roland Kirk.

Anyway, at the last minute they headed for Muir Beach instead. The fact that many people wouldn't know about the change and would go to Stinson beach and never find the right place -somehow that didn't even seem distressing. It was part of some strange analogical order of the universe.

Muir Beach had a big log-cabin-style lodge for dances, banquets and the like. The Grateful Dead piled in with their equipment and the Pranksters with theirs, which now included a Hammond electric organ for Gretch and a great strobe light.
The strobe! To people standing under the mighty strobe everything seemed to fragment. Ecstatic dancers-their hands flew off their arms, frozen in the air- their glistening faces came apart- a gleaming ellipse of teeth here, a pair of highlit cheeks there- all flacking and fragmenting.... Then in comes Kesey, through the main door....

And that's how I very nearly attended an acid test with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia - it was just that I was in the wrong village and twenty years too late.