Stopping time

 



https://youtu.be/HJm-RpPk16M

Thanks to all who have shared encouragement for Chain Link Zen. Your thoughts are much appreciated! Sales are brisk – I think we sold one yesterday, or maybe it was Monday.

But this blog isn't about that. This morning, this YouTube video appeared on my computer. It must have been linked to something, but I have no idea what, or from where, or why. It's an hour-long video of a concert Peter Paul and Mary did on BBC in 1965. 

It's in black and white, no frills, in front of a studio audience seated on risers. The sound is crystalline, the camerawork and editing unexpectedly superb. While I'm not, as a rule, given to fanboy behavior, I'm sharing it motivated by the question, is it just me, or is this the greatest concert/film ever? It's close, that's for sure.

Despite occasional lapses into dorky humor – a staple of hootenannies and folk concerts of the era – the songs have the power to stop time. And that's even before they get to The Times They Are A-Chaingin'. With every note they sang, every string they strummed, the harmonies that seem to come from heaven en route to sparking chills at the top of your spine, PP&M were perfectionists. No matter how many thousands of times they had performed a song before, note for note exactly the same, they made it seem like they were doing it, and you were hearing it, for the first time. 

Being in the moment, I think it's called. (Is it an accident that Roberta Flack's The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face is on the song list?)

Bob Dylan's music has always been all about time, and Peter Paul & Mary were the voices who introduced it to a new generation, and a new America, and a new world. Their sublime harmonies enhanced the lyrics in a way Dylan's craggy voice that sounded like an old man's when he was 20, and sounds like primordial man now, 60 years later, never could. For those of us hearing those songs for the first time when we were in high school, they taught us how to think, more than any teacher could.

And now, at the other end of time's pendulum swing, hearing – and watching – Peter Paul & Mary sing is thrilling. Three voices, no electronics, two guitars (and a guy named Dick playing the bass behind them) have the power of a choir. Being transported back to 1965, you realize now all the songs that hadn't been written, all the things that hadn't happened yet, all the moments of your life you had yet to live. 

It's no longer a metaphor to say Mary has the voice of an angel. It's literal. Times change, and never stop changing. The longing for what used to be, the fantasy of “the good ol' days” despite the fact that there never was any such thing, may have gotten co-opted and turned ugly by the MAGA mob, but it's shared by all of us. 

Dylan is still pondering time, even though he's looking backwards at it now. Progress turned out to be a fool's bargain. We have yet to fully realize the lethal danger of living in Google time, which offers the ultimate delusion – that every question has an easy answer, just a keystroke away. We want our Amazon, happy to sign on the dotted line, or rather, click the box without reading the fine print about everything we're giving up in the deal.

If Bob Dylan was a magician with time, and Peter Paul and Mary were his messengers, this black and white tape is a wondrous sort of alchemy. By preserving the moment of its creation, it makes that moment live again, right now.







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