it is difficult to imagine all this was possible (and may be possible again)

free gigging. free festivals. anarchy man!

like the minutemen (a band on every block, and every few blocks a venue they could play) here and now offered a different economy of music to the paid gig and the record. 

surprises here? daevid allen's 'no drugs onstage' policy. 

it's tendentious to say they were the first placed band of the hippie underground. horsemouth would argue they were distinctly the second rank (beneath  hawkwind and gong). while people may have their issues with dave brock and his politics (the kind of issues they don't have with saint lemmy) it has to be admitted that he took the band into another era of free gigs on that west country circuit (hence adrian shaw and harvey bainbridge - successive bass players from the south west hippie scene). 

it seems strange that the whole economy of the festival circuit once existed. and then that rave was successfully grafted onto it. 

it is difficult to imagine all this was possible (and may be possible again). 

horsemouth had an unusual talent for missing history. sometimes this served him well (the poll tax riot? he was out of the country), at other times (hawkwind play treworgy) he kind of wishes he'd been more bold. 

musically (frankly) it's all a bit poor. there is a pull to the mainstream in here and now (but that said it was good music to dance to). horsemouth has a cassette somewhere coaxed out from oxford . 

yesterday horsemouth sat in the sun and read. he finished off valis and moved on to do androids dream of electric sheep. once again it is the thing round empathy and pulling together that strikes him, the humans have the advantage because of empathy. the replicants lack of empathy is seen as a grave defect (lack of solidarity makes it difficult for them to have a slave revolt for example). 

this lack of empathy is not, as in contemporary views of autism, seen as a superpower. partly this is the rise of the nerds and the relative cultural importance of brain work. 

what is great with  philip k. dick is his use of his own personal shit being played out and worked through once again. 

afterwards horsemouth watched a large chunk of the good, the bad and the ugly an unrelenting vision of sadism, greed and the disasters of war against which can only be posited a rugged individualism. the lack of empathy the characters display for each other is a function of the society they are in (they literally can't afford it if they are going to survive). as such it actually functions as a critique of the state (war), the  modern world, and our alienated condition under capitalism.

the hippie idyll, the free festival scene, is marked by a spaghetti western like reality overlaid by hippie idealism that cannot overcome its circumstances.  

still it was instructive to try. 

today a walk horsemouth thinks (if only to the supermarket).