Posts

Rock reminiscences of an 80-year-old in 2036 (Ch 4)

Image
  Chapter 4 ‘Sjoe, Gramps, that was a marathon bit of music-based reminiscing,’ says Tim, at 16 already almost a fully grown man. ‘But, as you said, you’ve only just begun.’ ‘Yes, guys, this was the foundation upon which an empire of musical magic was built, and it was often not reflected in the hit parades, not even in the UK or USA. ‘I’ve just been checking out Bruce Springsteen, for example, and see that his first two albums had mediocre success, but even his breakthrough LP, Born To Run, from 1975, only reached No 3, or #3 as they prefer, in the US and No 17 in the UK. Yet without that eponymous hit single, which itself only reached No 23 on the Billboard Hot 100, who knows whether Springsteen would ever have honed his skills and got the breaks to turn him into The Boss, one of rock’s superstars of the next several decades? So much seemed to depend on good fortune, timing, and so on, in the pioneering days of rock music.’ ‘So,’ says Tim, ‘let me guess who you’ll start y...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rock reminiscences of an 80-year-old in 2036 (Ch 3)

Image
  Chapter 3 ‘That’s so cool,’ says Jane, like her brother Tony also a promising musician quite capable of singing in tune. She too has accumulated a wealth of knowledge in the course of her 14 years. Hence, her follow-up question was predictable. ‘Grandad, tell us about the influence of radio on your generation. I mean, that was before South Africa even got television, let alone all the modern technology we saw introduced from the 1990s and which has escalated to a point where even we, digital natives, struggle to keep up.’ ‘Jane it was like another world back then. Far simpler, for sure, but remember that the 20 th century saw amazing progress, some of it destructive for sure, in nuclear physics and biochemistry. The sequencing of DNA was occurring for the first time around when I was a baby in the 1950s. ‘As it so happens, I also wrote about this era in my old blog (it sounds so dated a term now, but was short for web log) while still living in Port Elizabeth, outlandish...
Post a Comment
Read more