Concerts, vinyl and audiophiles

I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1970-1974. I have many fond memories of those years, including listening to the great rock music that came out of the 60’s and early 70’s. I went to some great concerts, both on and off campus.

I remember driving from Champaign to Indiana University in Bloomington to hear Emerson, Lake and Palmer and The Band. E, L & P were the back-up band, but they later went on to become a very popular group in their own right (Lucky Man was one of my favorites).

I also went to hear the Grateful Dead at the Assembly Hall on the U of I campus. It was a sold-out concert and, if I remember correctly, pretty rowdy (Deadheads galore!). One weekend I drove to Chicago with a group of girls I didn’t know (I had advertised for a ride) to go to an Allman Brothers concert. It was on a Sunday night, so we drove up Sunday afternoon and came back after the concert ended at midnight. I had to be at work at 8:00 AM on Monday, so I got no sleep that night, but it was worth it. Another weekend I drove to Chicago to see Genesis, one of my favorite groups, at the Auditorium.

I had an extensive LP collection (rock, jazz, and classical) and was continually in pursuit of a better stereo system. I got some great deals through Good Vibes and Playback, the two audio equipment stores on campus (one of my boyfriends worked at Good Vibes; a later boyfriend worked at Playback).

At the time, for the audiophile college student, it was all about savoring the audio experience to the utmost. Each component (receiver/amplifier, turntable and speakers) played its part in contributing to the final sound. I remember going to Good Vibes after hours to sample different speakers at very loud volumes (with my boyfriend, who worked there and had the key to let us in!).

Some of my favorite groups were The Doors, Moody Blues, Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Yes, and of course Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and my LP collection certainly reflected that fact. I still have all of my LP’s (about 500) sitting in boxes on the floor of my closet (in pristine condition, I might add), in addition to my turntable (Philips 212 with an Empire top-of-the-line cartridge – tracked at less than 1 gram!) and speakers (Dynaco A-25’s) that I used back then (the turntable has been replaced by a Sony CD player, however).

Look in both the Sno-Isle and Everett Public Libraries catalog under the subject heading Rock music 1961-1970 to check out CD’s from that era. Sorry, LP’s are no longer available in the collections.

Mary K. Johnson
Librarian
Sno-Isle Libraries


Photo credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/khiltscher/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Mad-Town

The Things They Carried is a novel that brings back memories. While I wasn’t around to participate in the events of the Vietnam War era directly, the legacy of the war and especially the protests against it had a large impact on the city where I spent many of my formative years: Madison, Wisconsin.

If you have spent any time in Madison, you know that it has a reputation for being a home to radical and alternative ideas. One of the monikers attached to the city, Mad-Town, says it all. A major reason for this is the fact that Madison is home to the University of Wisconsin at Madison which has a continual influx of academics and students who aren’t shy about expressing their beliefs, orthodox or not.

Not surprisingly, during the late 60s and early 70s UW-Madison was a hotbed of protest and opposition to the Vietnam War. A NOVA documentary, Two Days in October, based on the book They Marched into Sunlight, artfully recreates this time and the people who lived through it by recording the events in Vietnam and on the campus of the UW-Madison over the course of the same two days in 1967.

After the war and the protests were long over, the central conflict between those who decided to go to Vietnam and those who did not still haunted the campus. One of O’Brien’s stories, "On the Rainy River," captures the agonizing decision many men had to make and how they, and society, judged them for it.

In many of the lectures I attended my instructors were clearly still grappling with the decision they had made about Vietnam all those years ago. It is this memory, or perhaps it is a story as O’Brien suggests, of a personal decision having such a powerful effect on a whole generation that came back to me when reading The Things They Carried.

Richard Woolf
Everett Public Library




Image: Poster with a large image of the Dow Riot (1967) on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, with riot police beating protesters. Includes the Lyndon Baines Johnson quote, "Our foreign policy must always be an extension of this nation's domestic policy. Our safest guide to what we do abroad is a good look at what we are doing at home."

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whsimages/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

When We Were Young

It was the fall of 1967. I returned to college for my sophomore year as a married woman. No, I didn’t “have to get married.” I just thought I couldn’t live without my high school sweetheart. I had had a big wedding the month before – 5 bridesmaids, 5 groomsmen, a maid of honor, a matron of honor, a ring bearer and a flower girl. My ring bearer was my young nephew. I had to ask my brother if it would be ok if his son wore black velvet shorts and a jacket with a big white lace collar, white tights and Mary Janes. I had seen that in a picture in Life Magazine for one of the Rockefeller weddings. My young niece wore an antebellum dress and tossed rose petals down the aisle to make way for the bride.

The Vietnam War was figuratively and literally miles away.

Amazing how things can change in only a few months. Three months later, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, and six months later, my husband was drafted. A 20-year-old non-college student from the Midwest was a sitting duck. I remember writing to my congressman asking him to spare my husband, because he was the only son of an only son of an only son. I think I had that mixed up with the Sole Survivor Policy, which was a direct result of the death of the Sullivan brothers, five brothers who all died on the same warship in World War II. That it protects “only sons” and sole surviving sons is a common misconception, I guess.

So off he went to the Army. After I said goodbye and dropped him at the bus, I went off and bought a dress I had wanted. I guess that is what 19 year olds do. I only saw him twice in the next three years. Once he and his new Army buddy snuck away from boot camp to see me. I cried when I saw that they had shaved off all of his hair. He looked so young. Living alone in married housing, I would watch the news coverage of the war on Walter Cronkite every night. Part of me hoped I would see him as they filmed the soldiers on patrol and half of me was scared I would see him wounded or dead. You see, back then the media acknowledged we were at war, and there was extensive and gruesome coverage. Not like now.

I also have to say that I took quite a bit of flack from fellow students and even professors about my husband fighting in Vietnam. I was against the war like almost everyone in my college environment. Being a sophomore in college and married was one thing, but my husband being in Vietnam was quite controversial. But it also gave me a perspective about the war – on the one hand I was against it, but on the other, I didn’t blame the soldiers.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried has brought much of this back to me and made me realize I had no idea what my husband was really going through, despite the letters and occasional phone calls. We were in very different worlds. And everyone was so young.

Fortunately, he made it safely back. Three years later. His Army buddy he had brought to meet me was not so lucky. He was killed.

Turns out my husband saw a lot of battle – in the war and at home. We broke up soon after he returned.

Wars separate people. Wars change people. Young people at war see and do things that change them forever. That they will carry forever. Those left behind sometimes move on.

Turns out I could live without my high school sweetheart after all.

Rosy Brewer
Sno-Isle Libraries


Photograph courtesy of Rosy Brewer. All rights reserved.