Life is not lived at that intensity for too many years. In those days every discovery hit like an express train and every bookshelf held high explosives. The choices multiplied and it became no longer easy to tell black from white.īack then we built a whole galaxy of heroes up from wild trips to the art house cinema to quarry Bergman or Pasolini from the granite cliffs of existentialism, or raids on libraries and second hand bookshops when we got to hear first about Kerouac and Kesey, not to mention Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, not to mention Emily Dickinson and Captain Beefheart and folk music and Alan Lomax and Alan Watts and John Fahey and Buffy Sainte-Marie. I know where each of them are to this day, but we don't see each other. That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

It was all that easy to tell wrong from rightĪnd our choices were few and the thought never hit With haunted hearts through the heat and coldīut our chances really was a million to one Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon Has there been a writer whose reputation has plummeted quite so much between the 70s and now as jolly Jack and his tales of merry misogynism? But like Bob Dylan saysĬoncerning myself and the first few friends I had That's a completely nostalgic four stars of course.

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