Didn't see the original article, but it comes along with a not-unfamiliar theme.
There hasn't been a "community" in the club scene in SF since 1994, maybe before. Not in the sense that Paul Kantner was talking about. From probably 1990 to 1993 it was very real indeed. There were things that happened on dance floors in the SF scene that simply are beyond my ability to explain, and I'm not talking about weird behavior or outlandish costumes (which there were plenty of), but instead some kind of deeper communication at both the musical and mental level. We don't really talk about this any more, and even at the time attempts to do so usually ended up sounded like touchy-feely babble, but something really interesting was going on then. The Grateful Dead scene had this at one time as well, but it also gradually faded away as the novelty wore off, the audience dramatically expanded, and the usual bunch of money-grubbing emerged even within the core of the scene. But that's a story for a different time and place. In any event, Kantner is right that there were differences between the 1960s and 1990s. The drawback was not that people have missed one or the other, but that they might have believed the hype about either and not understood that the hype was only a layer over something far more different and powerful. A lot of people "from the 1960s" made that mistake about the 1990s, and the reverse is also true. Fred --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
