We were introduced by a mutual friend. I was a naïve student journalist; he was the recently appointed director of the Child Poverty Action Group.
 
My friend and I had travelled down from Cambridge to the CPAG office so that I could interview Frank Field for a piece in The 1/- Paper. He was generous with his time. We discussed the importance of the work of Brian Abel Smith and the need to transform the CPAG into an effective pressure group, aimed at redressing the failures of the Labour Government of the time.
 
And then he took us for lunch.
 
He regaled us with stories of the left before my time, notably - I recall – the attempt by Gerry Healey (of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party) to run him down outside a meeting at which Frank had challenged Healey’s agenda. The story involved Frank taking cover behind a concrete bollard into which an irate Healey smashed his car. And then, long into the afternoon, he talked quietly and powerfully about his faith. And although I was familiar with the truism that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marx, I wrote later that Frank must be one of the first to come to socialism via High Anglicanism.
 
That day Frank Field was committed, thoughtful, witty, charismatic. As he was also on subsequent occasions, addressing small groups of students at ill-attended meetings (a couple of which I organized), patiently explaining to us that there was much that could be achieved to eradicate poverty even before the revolution!
 
Forty years on, that Frank Field is no longer recognizable. And it’s a source of profound regret to those of us who believed that he was a progressive force.
 
Over the years, I have consistently given him the benefit of my doubt. I have read with detailed attentiveness each new paper, each new policy proposal, looking for evidence to justify my belief that he was a maverick but he was our maverick, that his Anglican social democratic instincts nevertheless made the Labour Party his natural home. I even sought to justify his relationship with Thatcher and his acceptance of an offer to work with Cameron as ploys to further a Labour agenda, to exploit every contradiction etc etc.
 
But today, I can no longer do so.
 
Frank is too intelligent a man to believe the stuff in his resignation note but he said it anyway. Just as an ex-Chief Rabbi must surely know the difference between Jewish and Zionist, so Frank must surely know that the party he has represented in parliament since 1979 is not racist or anti-semitic and nor is its leader. To argue that the the bizarre statement by Sachs is the reason he has resigned is the ‘last straw’ for me and, I suspect, for thousands of members and supporters who, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, acknowledged his right to independent thought and action.
 
Throughout his career, Frank has been a member of a legitimate tendency within the Labour Party. It is not a tendency to which I subscribe, but I also prefer to watch the parking meters and I recognize that it has a long and valid tradition.
 
Trouble is, it is this very tradition which Frank is undermining. Oy vey.

Today from the everysmith vaults: My birthday album, Highway 61 Revisited. (the mono recording obviously.) Probably my favourite of the extraordinary 60s triptych anyway. Released on 30 August 1965, it emerges from the vaults both regularly and frequently.

Jerry was irreplaceable. We can all agree at least on that. Even the ‘core four’ of those that remained were at one on this point.
 
But that’s the full extent of their unanimity after 9 August 1995 according to a new book by Joel Selvin, the ‘veteran’ San Francisco-based rock journalist, probably the only such who claims not to be a Deadhead.
 
Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip is not an easy read. It records the Machiavellian intrigues which beset the band as they struggled, individually and collectively, to come to terms with the death of Jerry Garcia and find a role for themselves. For any Deadhead, it makes uncomfortable and disconcerting reading as it digs up a succession of skeletons in the closet.
 
At the heart of the book, and allegedly at the centre of the machinations, is Phil – and Jill - Lesh. Selvin has said that “It turned out that Phil and his wife were Macbeth and Lady Macbeth” and that “power went to their heads”. It certainly appears that way in this version of the story, and Dennis Mcnally has agreed that it is 99% accurate. But Phil and Jill did not give interviews and nor did Bill Kreutzmann, so reports of their motives and behaviour are at best partial and at worst prejudiced.  (Selvin and Lesh have form.)
 
Most of the power plays took place in private, but, as Deadheads, we knew there was something going on. The conflicts were evident on stage and in the press. Mickey Hart was reported as saying that Phil, the recipient of a donor liver, “maybe got the liver of an asshole”. Phil scheduled a show a few miles from a previously announced gig by the other three, forcing Deadheads to decide between the two rival bands. (The result was 50-50.) When they did play together, there were musical differences and backstage rows as Phil called the shots that others didn’t want, and granted himself vocals on songs that were traditionally Weir’s territory.
 
Personally, I think that the best of the post-Jerry music was produced by Phil & Friends. I loved the idea of treating the music as repertoire, to be played by virtuosi such as Larry Campbell and Tray Anastasia, rather than Jerry mimics, however brilliant, like John Kadlicik. Although of course Phil then went on to recruit Kadlicik! And I saw Ratdog, Bob Weir’s band, with Mark Karan, and also without a lead guitar at all, and loved both. But then I would, wouldn’t I?
 
Selvin’s book has a happy ending. In Chicago. With all surviving members of the Dead on stage for a run of shows that provided the band and the audience with resolution and reconciliation. It’s not the end – Dead & Co (with Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann) are on the road as I write and rumoured to arrive in Europe this fall. Phil is, most nights, at Terrapin Crossroads, the club owned by him and Jill.
 
So despite everything, the music never stopped. And despite everything, in this household, never will. 

Today from the everysmith vaults: Not as you may think anything by Further, The Dead, Ratdog, Phil & Friends, Dead & Co, The Other Ones or any of the various manifestations of the post-Jerry Dead. Instead, a great duo called Wet Tuna (yes, Wet): their new album, Living the Die, and a Detroit show with a wonderfully spacey I Know You Rider jam.

I’m not sure how many of us remember the tales of Jennings and Darbishire, written by Anthony Buckeridge in the last century. I read them, or at least the first few, in the ‘50s, enchanted by, and jealous of, the idealized version of my own prep school.
 
A large part of the appeal of the stories was the wordplay and jokes, and I remember one to this day. Jennings has a pet rat, which he keeps in a shoe box as I recall. He is discussing the rat with his amiable housemaster – Mr Carter? – and tells him, “I call it Gloucestershire, sir, because it’s got a long tail.”
 
If you are not smiling, I should explain that, in the cricket county championship of that year, Gloucestershire was noted for its poor batting. Batsmen 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 were incapable of reaching double figures and this was known, in cricketing parlance, as a “long tail”.
 
Don’t worry if you don’t get it; I haven’t heard the expression in years. But my point is that, back in 1957, I and all my fellow 8 year old chums did get it, just as we also got Buckeridge’s Latin puns! Cricket was part of our lives. We knew the scores each day; we knew who was top of the championship, and who was top of the averages.
 
I don’t know any of these today. The county scoreboards are not easily come by. Most of the time, one is not even aware that games are being played. There is no structure to the season. A four day county game or two is followed by a random assortment of one day games, one night games, and day-night games. And we are told that, next year, we shall have yet another competition of 10 overs of 10 balls. Or something like that anyway.

Even the test series is being subjected to the same cavalier treatment of the schedule. Starting today is the second test. And then, nothing until August – apart from ODIs. It’s madness. 

Matthew Engel, once the editor of Wisden, the cricketing bible, wrote recently about this lack of a season-long narrative, attributing his falling out of love with cricket to this vandalism. He used a religious metaphor: he still believes, but no longer attends church with any regularity or enjoyment. And he contrasts cricket with baseball, referring to his daily check on the box scores from St Louis (unaccountably he is a Cardinals fan) and wondering whether next year’s proposed two game series between the Sox and the Yankees may remind English sports fans of what they have lost, certainly what they are missing.
 
I suspect it will. Like Engel, I have embraced the game of baseball. And although I am currently listening to Test Match Special from Headingley, and although I managed a day the Oval test last year, it is baseball that keeps my summer on the daily straight and narrow.

The prospect of rain at Headingley could well England’s best chance of avoiding defeat in the test match.
 
But whatever happens, I fear that English cricket is already facing an innings defeat.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Been listening to the Dead’s run at the Warfield in October 1980. Not my favourite period by any means, but these are very good shows and the work of the digital engineers has worked wonders with some iffy SBDs and audience recordings. Also, on the 11th, John Cippolina makes a guest appearance.

Sunday morning in the everysmith household. I am wrestling with the prosaic prejudices of Andrew Rawnsley and Nick Cohen in The Observer. Jill is listening to a recent episode of Desert Island Discs on catch-up. The castaway is John Gray, whom Kirstie describes as possessing “a disarming lack of introspection”, which I enjoyed, but what attracts my attention to the extent that I stop reading, is Gray's reference to Isaiah Berlin, a thinker in whom I affected interest in the sixth form.
 
Back in the day, I had been intrigued by Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, The Hedgehog and the Fox. The title of this famous essay comes from the 7th century Greek poet Archilochus, probably via Erasmus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
 
One suspects that this aphorism is to be taken literally: for all his cunning, the fox cannot defeat the hedgehog’s single form of defence. But it’s fun to take it figuratively and riff on the theme, characterizing assorted writers and philosophers as either foxes or hedgehogs. Those who recognize the world as diverse, a ‘world of fragments’ with a plethora of ideas and systems and those who see the world through the lens of a single, unifying idea.
 
Berlin compares Tolstoy with Dostoyevsky: the former a fox who should be a hedgehog, the latter a down-the-line hedgehog.
 
John Gray, it would appear, is a fox. He is one of a new and growing category of academics, strolling troubadours of erudition and opinion, moving effortlessly from the ivory towers of academe to the op-ed pages of our newspapers: from Oxford and Cambridge to the Sunday Times, from Harvard to BBC2 and PBS, from the literati to the twitterati.
 
This is not a new phenomenon – the ‘media don’ was a fixture of the BBC in my childhood, as I sat transfixed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, AJP Taylor and AJ Ayer. But, unless I misremember, their lectures to camera were specific to their own field. Whereas now, it appears that academic achievement in one discipline is sufficient to justify a forum for views on pretty much anything.
 
I am thinking, not disparagingly at all, of, for example, Niall Ferguson, of Simon Sharma, of Mary Beard, of Bethany Hughes, of John Gray himself.
 
These polymaths are clearly foxes of a high order. They know a great deal about a great many things. They are in the great tradition of “Renaissance” men and women: famous foxes such as Leonardo and Shakespeare as opposed to Proust, say, or Dante.
 
We can all play the game: Hegel and Marx are hedgehogs; Sartre and de Beauvoir are foxes. Plato is a hedgehog; Aristotle a fox. Beethoven is a fox; Bach a hedgehog. Dylan is a fox; Van Morrison a hedgehog. Corbyn is a hedgehog; May is … who knows? Probably neither one nor the other.
 
And me? A second division fox who would give anything to be a hedgehog.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: an old BBC recital by Kathleen Ferrier: Warlock, Britten, Vaughan Williams. Such an exquisite voice which transports me back to the Third Programme in my childhood. In a good way.

I'm very careful on Sunday mornings. At my age, I have to be.

At least half an hour before turning to the Comment section of The Observer, I take 10mg of diazepam, and whilst waiting for it to kick in, carry out a series of deep breathing exercises to bring down my heart rate.

Only then am I able to turn, tentatively, to Nick Cohen's column. Usually, whatever its apparent subject, I can read through to the end with its gratuitous and irrelevant slur against Corbyn without too much difficulty. After all, I’ve been doing it for years. With the appropriate preparation and medication, it is possible to complete the entire piece without serious risk to one’s long-term health.

Not this morning.

Even by Cohen’s standards, the attack on Jennie Formby is appalling. Take a deep breath, hold your nose, and read this:

“Unite is trying to force through the appointment of its official Jennie Formby as labour’s new general secretary on the grounds that she is the feminist candidate who will challenge the patriarchy. Its egalitarian argument would carry greater force were she not McCluskey’s former mistress. Was it for this Emily Davison died?”

Where to start? Unite is not trying to ‘force’ anything through; it is backing her in an appointment process. Yes, she is a feminist candidate and I hope she will challenge the patriarchy. But she has a great many other credentials for the role as well. Not least 30 years as a union official, working as a Regional Officer, National Officer, Political Director and Regional Secretary. None of which has any bearing as far as Cohen is concerned, because her entire career is reduced to one thing.

She is “McCluskey’s former mistress”.

For fuck’s sake. Of what conceivable relevance is this? And who uses the word ‘mistress’ these days? Emily Davison and Emily Dickinson would both be turning in their graves. If this is the kind of language used in 2018 by an Oxford-educated writer, then yes, they did die in vain.

So with stomach churning and heart racing, I ask what the hell The Observer is doing providing a platform for this offensive nonsense?

At a push, I can accept that Cohen has a right to think this kind of misogyny, and even express it. But I don’t want to see it in my Sunday newspaper.

Equally, if Mohammed bin Salman wants to spend a million or so on charm offensive advertisements, there is nothing to prevent him doing so. But I don’t want to see them in my copy of The Guardian. And while we’re on the subject, the editor of The Guardian may believe that Leveson 2 should not be progressed, but this is not a view I expect from my daily paper.

These examples are, I’m afraid, indicative of a conscious move by The Guardian and The Observer away from their once proud tradition and important role within a responsible and free press.

They have taken their new format too literally. They are, increasingly, tabloid tat. And although I have threatened it before, I really think that the subscription they took from my account on the 1st of March, will be the last.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from the Boar’s Head Coffee House in 1961. Historically fascinating. Musically great.

An interview on Radio 4 this morning, with Antony Gormley, reminds me that Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge is about to re-open after being closed for ‘refurbishment’.
 
I confess I am always a little apprehensive about these programmes of refurbishment in general and this exercise has caused me not a little concern, because the Kettle’s Yard I remember was not an art gallery. It was a home with some great art.
 
For a time, back in the late sixties, I would walk past Kettle’s Yard a couple of times a day, on a journey between my rooms in college and the digs of a girlfriend in Castle Street. In those days, there was no signage to invite one inside. It was all word of mouth. And it was from a friend that I heard that Jim Ede and his wife Helen would hold open house most afternoons, offering tea and guided tours to those who were lucky enough to knock on the door at the appropriate time.
 
On a couple of occasions, I was one of those.
 
I wasn’t totally visually illiterate then, but the art I liked was almost exclusively figurative. Paintings that told a story. Narrative art if you like.
 
The work that I saw on my first visit was revelatory, despite - or more probably because of - the fact that I was stoned. Very stoned. I doubt that I would have ventured to knock had I not been.
 
Helen Ede – it was just Helen on that day - must have realized this, but I was treated with courtesy and respect, given tea and shown round the collection. I was told stories of Ben Nicholson, David Jones, Miro. I saw sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
 
But I also saw odd stones and pebbles and bits of coloured glass and weathered wood.
 
In my normal, unintoxicated, hard-line rationalist state, I would have paid little heed to these found objects. But on that day, they were wonderful. Not for what they were, but for how they appeared. How they balanced and complemented the art, how the domesticity of the rooms seemed to be the ideal environment for their display.
 
There was no shop, no café. There were no little typewritten notes telling us what to think. Just a couple welcoming you to their house and sharing their love of art.
 
I felt completely at home.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday was Shostakovich String Quartets, all of them, from the first to the fifteenth. Today, it’s studio outtakes from Dylan’s Desire sessions. As ever, I am unable to understand Bob's decisions to take one cut and abandon others. 

There ought to be a word for it. There probably is a word for it in German. But the loss of one’s most precious sense, the sense that plays a central role in one’s life and work, appears not to have a specific medical or psychological term in the English language.
 
For Beethoven, whose extraordinary String Quartet in A minor, the Opus 132, I heard played superbly by the Brodsky Quartet on Friday evening, it was loss of hearing.

For Bruce Chatwin, it was loss of his sight. “People would compliment me on my ‘eye’” he wrote, “and my eyes, in rebellion, gave out.

​“After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning half-blind. The eye specialist said there was nothing wrong organically. Perhaps I'd been looking too closely at pictures? Perhaps I should try some long horizons?”
 
As John Berger taught us, there are different ways of seeing. And different ways of hearing.
 
Beethoven’s late quartets were written in silence. He was profoundly deaf. But he was recovered from a life-threatening gastric illness and was ready to address in his music his sense of mortality. Nowhere is this contemplation on life and death more emotionally charged and exquisitely expressed than in the third – slow – movement of the A minor, a Song of Thanksgiving for his recovery.

I have never heard it played so beautifully or so slowly, and listening with my eyes closed – a procedure on my eyes 48 hours previously had left me with headaches and blurred vision – I thought of that scene in Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, when the nihilist Spandrell introduces Rampion to this piece, claiming that it proves everything – God and goodness amongst other things – and that only Beethoven could achieve this “counterpoint of serenities”.
 
And one reason why it could only be Beethoven is precisely because his most precious sense was gone. His deafness forced him into introspection. The sounds he heard in his head are the sounds of his hopes and his anguish, uncontaminated by the outside world. And he heard them in the purest manner. He did not sit at the piano to compose. He did not make the compromises of traditional composition. He poured it directly to the paper in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
 
All this went through my own head during that third movement as the Brodsky dispensed a salve on my self-pity and paranoia at the possible prognosis for my precious sight.
 
It was a genuine catharsis, a much-needed purgation of pity and fear. I feel better now.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Unaccountably, this is the first time I have seen the Brodsky perform live and I resolve that it shall not be the last. But meantime, delving into the digital vaults, I discovered this morning The Juliet Letters, a joint enterprise with Elvis Costello. I can’t remember acquiring it or playing it before, but it is strangely affecting. 

​Well, that’s all done, then.
 
Christmas has been cleared from our house. The tree is down, the baubles packed away and the pretty lights carefully boxed up. The Christmas cards sit on the desk – I will go through them to make a note of a new address here, unexpected contact from a friend there and pangs of guilt at those forgotten everywhere. But I am already turning my back on 2017 and setting out on a new trip with my equivalents of Gunslinger, Claude Levi-Strauss and Everything Kool.
 
Ed Dorn’s Cautious Gunslinger has been my travelling companion for many years. Here’s why:
 
Very good. Then you must
never consort with the Perfect,
stick to the Absolute, it’s
pliable, and upon it
you seem to play any tune
you choose.
 
Absolutely. And the tune I have chosen to play in 2018 is writing. Which means, firstly, reading. Reading about writing. And in doing so, I chanced upon David Lodge’s Writer’s Luck.
 
Many years ago – Lodge must have been still at the University of Birmingham – the two of us approached the last remaining empty table on the Marylebone to Leamington train, seated ourselves reluctantly opposite each other and, like synchronized swimmers, reached into our satchels and took out the current issue of the London Review of Books.
 
Had either of us been more sociable, in my case more confident also, this might have provoked an hour of conversation about the state of the novel, the business of writing and any number of other burning issues. It didn’t. We half-smiled to acknowledge the coincidence, nodded and bowed our heads to the printed pages of LRB.
 
I regret this lost opportunity. My silence was the result of not wishing to impinge on the time or solitude of a leading academic and author of one of the funniest books I have ever read, Changing Places. And his? At the time, I may have attributed it to aloofness, a kind of professorial hauteur. From Writer’s Luck, we discover that he is naturally shy, even timid; and he recounts an occasion at which he was snubbed throughout dinner by Germaine Greer, who turned her back on him, literally and figuratively, and conversed exclusively with her other neighbour.
 
The anecdote resonates with me because it brings to mind a similar episode. I have been a snubbee also, although not in such exalted company. I can confirm that being trapped by the cold shoulder in a social situation is not pleasant, even if one’s embarrassment is shared by one’s fellow diners.
 
The fact that both events occurred many years ago, and Lodge and I still remember – ah yes, we remember it well – is testament to that.
 
But I shall try to forget and forgive. And if I cannot forget, laugh about it:
 
Entrapment is this society’s
Sole activity, I whispered
and Only laughter
can blow it to rags.
 
That will be the resolution for the new year. Never consort with the Perfect. Stick to the Absolute. Play any tune you choose. And have a larf.
 
In 2018, “the sheer writing of the poem must be our shelter”.
 
Happy trails.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I would by now have ventured an opinion on the latest from Bob, which concerns itself with the Gospel years from 1979 to 1981. I have been listening, promise. And although I was less than enthused by his embracing of Jesus – think I only saw two or three shows during this period – I have to confess that there are some great songs and some brilliant shows. Nevertheless, my Christmas playlists have been heavily weighted in favour of Chris Forsyth, Dream Syndicate and the Dead. No, no regrets.

I have never had much time for the honours system in the UK, apart - obviously - from the medals awarded to my dad. But another exception must be the MBE conferred on Richard Phillips who, with his wife Veronica, is the driving force behind Leamington Music in general and the International String Quartet Series in particular.
 
Over the years, the couple have brought to Leamington and Warwick some of the great quartets, many of them (the Atrium, the Petersen) appearing long before they achieved national and international critical acclaim.
 
Last night, we saw the return to Leamington of the Kodály Quartet from Hungary. The Kodály are emphatically not up and coming – they celebrated fifty years of playing together in 2016 – but despite this, and despite their mittel-European tradition, they always surprise and delight.
 
They began with Haydn, proving that they can play this kind of thing standing on their heads. There is a pattern emerging throughout the chamber music world of giving us a example of Haydn’s extraordinarily prolific output. Like the Dead opening with Bertha or Bob with Crash on the Levee, Haydn serves as a warm-up for many quartets, a plate of nibbles before the main course.
 
And so it was last night. But the Kodály’s main course was remarkable. I had never heard of Erno Dohnanyi before I saw the programme and this is very much my loss. His String Quartet #2, composed in 1906, was a revelation – by turns haunting and menacing, passionate and angry, evil and innocent, intense and sensitive.
 
The violinists Attila and Ferenc, the latter looking like a young Lewis Litt for you fans of Suits, swapped roles for this piece. But for me the highlights were the drive of the cello in the second movement and, in the finale, the opportunity for the viola to take centre stage. From my seat, directly behind the viola player, János appeared as if a Soviet-era discus thrower, all massively broad shoulders and close-cropped hair. But the sound he produced was beautiful.
 
Richard’s programme notes quote a claim that this is “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, post-Brahms Romantic quartet”. I don’t know enough to make that kind of judgement but I do know that, not least in its emotional range, it is close to a masterpiece. And I also know that, in their performance last evening, the collective virtuosity of the Kodály did it justice.
 
I am grateful I was there. Grateful to the quartet for their performance. And grateful to Richard and Veronica who make this kind of experience possible time after time.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I have no Dohnanyi in the vaults (yet), but I do have the Kodály playing string quartets by Kodály. So that’s what I’m listening to as I type.

We don’t talk very much about Harold Wilson these days. For my younger readers, he was leader of the Labour Party for 13 years and prime minister for eight, winning four general elections and losing one. He presided over a turbulent period of British and international politics and history, in the form of accounts written by his successors and colleagues, has not been kind to him.
 
But whatever his failings and his record of failure, we in Britain can be grateful to him for one thing.
 
He kept us out of Vietnam.
 
Where Thatcher leapt at the opportunity to take on Argentina over the Falklands, and Blair jumped into bed with Bush to invade Iraq, Harold Wilson devoted his energies duing the Vietnam War to peace initiatives, no less than nine of them during the course of Johnson’s presidency. And if his refusal to send British troops was more practical and ‘pragmatic’ (a Wilson word) than principled, and his refusal to condemn the American position upset the Labour Left, he did ensure that our generation was not called upon to fight an immoral war in south-east Asia.
 
I was contemplating this as I watched the opening half-dozen episodes of the Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War. It is notable for its inclusion of Vietnamese voices as well as American, reminding us that this conflict was not solely or even primarily an American tragedy, despite the fact that the blockbuster movies (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Born on the 4th of July, Platoon) and the key texts (Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, James Crumley’s And One To Count Cadence) focus on the American experience and in so doing reflect the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ treatment of Vietnam as an abstract concept in a game of dominoes rather than a country and a people with a long history and a vibrant culture.
 
By the end, of course, Vietnam was not longer even a concept; it was a situation from which the US needed to extract itself for reasons which had more to do with US politics than any recognition of the wrongness of the initial policy and the war itself.
 
What the Vietnamese call ‘the American War’ was the backdrop to my teenage and student years: I was 15 in 1964 when the first major demonstration against the war, at Berkeley, occurred and 18 at the time of the Tet Offensive in 1967. It is a truism that the war initiated a new era of divisive politics and a breakdown in the national consensus; it is also true that the war, the resistance to the war, and the raising of black consciousness which was an essential part of both, affected many of us beyond the shores of the US profoundly and individually.
 
Certainly it was our political focus in those years, and our political philosophy was forged from it and around it. My politics in particular are defined by it to this day and watching the documentary is a form of catharsis for my generation.
 
If you are not doing so, you should.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Zappa from the Boston Music Hall, 1976. Frank’s on fire.