By Dave Read, July 7, 2024 – For fifty years, James Taylor has been on the bill at Tanglewood, where pop music now is treated with a reverence once exclusive to the symphony and opera. Taylor fledged into the world of rock ‘n roll in the 1960s, which has since been domesticated and re-purposed to be of service to the consumer economy.
Closing the sale is the heart and soul of the consumer economy, as opposed to the long-lasting products and comprehensive services produced by our earlier manufacturing economy. Therefore, people who create the bills of summertime music know that it is easier to sell again what sold earlier, which also reduces the risk and expense of selling something new and unheard.
Of course, that is a recipe for the death of music, when our best venues only host the tried and true. Back in the day, inchoate singers and bands, from James Taylor to Janis Joplin to The Who multiplied their audiences via their Tanglewood gigs.
Sad to say, but there is no rock ‘n roll today, nor do most people abandon adolescence and adopt the music and mores of the post-adolescents, their parents, who once managed the manufacturing economy.
does for son what Beatles did for him
Rather than listen to awesome, crazy disc jockeys such as Cousin Brucie, Murray the K, and Wolfman Jack for what’s happening today in rock ‘n roll, we talk toward devices, then accept what the corporations on the listening end tell us to listen to.
At Tanglewood on July 4, 2024, James Taylor first reminded us how grateful he is to the Beatles for plucking him from the sea of sad and lonely guitar strummers and making him world famous overnight. Then he said maybe we should re-think the American Revolution. We love you Sweet Baby James, but we always suspected you for a Tory. It is more than a little ironic that he built his home on the side of the same slope that houses the Berkshires’ notorious Tory Cave!
Here’s hoping Tanglewood adjusts and henceforth puts the immensity of its Fourth of July stage in service to young, promising musicians who favor the responsibility of liberty over obedience to established order, a.k.a. to musicians who understand and prefer the plebian American way to the aristocratic British way!