I think I’ve mentioned my late friend Larry Rosa; he was an Emerson freak, which led me to several ELP shows in my youth. Larry was a talented self-taught keyboardist, mostly learning by imitating Emerson. He jury-rigged a key-bass into a “synthesizer” and eventually got his sister to finance a minimoog. In junior high he had a band together that did a surprisingly convincing prog-rock show for a bunch of 15 year olds. This was certainly in contrast to the Ramones attitude. I’ve always given the “doability factor” a certain amount of weight in the development of Punk, but kids like Larry in the early 70s showed that they could do sophisticated music if they really wanted to, which leads me to believe that the final dissolution of the progressive and positive hippie ethos was perhaps the determinative factor for Punk as a widespread phenomenon. Up from the ashes, and back to square one.
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- alex 9-08-2004 5:36 pm