SATURDAY MORNING PICTURES (how does it feel?)

Napoleon in rags and the language that he used? As regular visitors to Doc40 may have gleaned, it’s been a long hard week during which I have done one hell of a lot of writing – some of great interest and some the was the literary equivalent of hanging sheet-rock – but I will let you into a small secret. In pauses while I wait for the words to come, I’ve been sniffing around YouTube seeing what goodies a poor boy could find. Last Wednesday, I posted a clip of The Who doing “My Generation” at the Marquee in 1967, and now my friends (try this for size) we present eight fucking minutes of Bob Dylan and the Hawks doing “Like A Rolling Stone” at Newcastle City Hall in 1966. This was a manner of music that at the time, like The Who, made you feel you could tear the world apart with you bare hands. (And I guess I still have the metaphoric bleeding fingernails.) And guess what? If all that wasn’t enough, I was actually there. I was at that show! I even remember what I was wearing. All decked out very Chelsea Girl style in a white denim suit, a black and white paisley shirt, and white Victorian lace-up boots with Cuban heels that were extremely Brian Jones, and later, after the show, the ensemble almost got me beaten to death by blind drunk homophobic Geordies who decided that, despite my matching girlfriend, I qualified as queer.

How did it feel? It felt like the power structure would fall like a house of cards. That’s how it felt.

The secret word is Then

AND just to show the other side of the coin, here’s a demonstration film of the Johnny 7 One Man Army from approximately the same period.