Casualties

Gave The Who's Quadrophenia a spin this afternoon, and was jolly glad I did so. Tuneful, toe-tapping stuff. Which got me thinking how really extraordinary it was that no fewer than three major British bands of the sixties were following in the wake of the greatest of them all, those lovable mop-heads from Liverpool, each one possessed of someone, sometimes more than one, of major song-writing ability and several of superlative instrumental chops: The Rolling Stones, The Who themselves, and The Kinks (possibly the finest of the trio in their way, though hardly recognised as such.) What was it in the air that allowed such a blossoming?

And then I got to thinking of how a few days ago I was reminded of the death of the unsurpassable Jimi Hendrix (sort of semi-British in an oddly sixties kind of way, and just twenty-seven when we lost him); and then I just happened upon a nice piece in The Straits Times telling with melancholy ruefulness (not a quality you find too often in its pages) of the fortunes of Mick Taylor, poor Brian Jones's replacement in the Stones, after leaving Mick & co. It seems he left to get away from their destructive life-style (i.e., hard drugs) and believes himself highly fortunate to have done so, despite now living in near poverty.

There are those who tacitly link the creative blossoming of the period with the license it extended for young people to screw up their lives through experimentation with various dangerously fashionable substances. I don't. Not at all. All I see is waste - the frittering away of talents, and sometimes something greater than that, in the pursuit of oblivion.

It's good to know that young Mick Taylor (I can somehow only see him that way despite the passage of years) escaped that.