At A Loss

A couple of weeks ago I sat down and settled in to watch the 1968 concert film Monterey Pop by D.A. Pennebaker that I had recorded from Turner Classic Movies. With a line up that included The Mamas & The Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Hugh Masekela, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding company with Janis Joplin, The Animals, The Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Otis Redding, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Ravi Shankar, I had to simply lounge back on the sofa and wallow in the sheer goodness of it all.

 

 

Interspersed in the band footage, Mr. Pennebaker lets it all hang out with visuals of hippies, flower children, bearded, bespectacled intellectuals and button-down squares all soaking up 1968’s great American songbook. The strait-laced partying with the painted or costumed. The sophisticated sleek mingling with bikers and women in flowing, flowered caftans. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to go? I always thought so.

This morning I woke up to the news that 64 year-old Stephen Paddock repeatedly fired weapons from his Mandalay Bay Hotel Room upon the 22,000 concertgoers at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival. With more than 50 dead and 500 wounded, this mass shooting has gone down as the worst in American history. But that’s always a tricky bit of trivia, isn’t it? It’s the worst so far. What in the hell could possible be down the road next?

I suspect the usual cast of characters in the wake of this mass murder will appear and then disappear like so much smoke like the somber-faced politicians reverently praying for those lost and those injured or the grim local news reporter spouting platitudes against a backdrop of lit candles and those angry self-appointed defenders of justice who if they had been there would have pulled out their own guns and dispatched the perpetrator with undue haste. But that’s always the problem isn’t it that those quick-draw Dirty Harrys are never around we they are needed. I also suspect that there will be the inevitable questions as to why Mr. Paddock committed such an atrocity, as if there could possibly be a good excuse or thoughtful reason.

 

 

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to pray our way out of this. Surely, enough prayers were said in the wake of the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan in Pairs, or the Pulse nightclub shooting on Latin night in Orlando, Florida or the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena to finally put an end to this kind of massacre. I don’t think the prayers are working. Certainly, cities like Caracas in Venezuela, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, Cape Town in South Africa and U.S. cities like St. Louis, Baltimore and New Orleans that made it onto Mexico’s Citizens’ Council for Public Security’s annual ranking of the world’s most violent cities for 2016 are chocked full of the faithful. If praying were the cure-all wouldn’t Chicago or Cleveland and Milwaukee be much different places than they currently are?

I further suspect that forces are gathering as I write this summoning the music community to respond to this tragedy by way of a proceeds-for-victims concert, or a foundation or a fucking bunch of heartfelt tweets. I simply can’t image looking back on a musical career and pointing to a single concert performance as one of your best, where you got to jam with musical greats or played your heart out, all to memorialize a bunch of dead music fans.

Bob Dylan sang to us “There must be some way out of here.” Well, Bob, I just don’t see that happening any time soon.