Text by Bruce Gallanther (Downtown Music Gallery, November 4th, 2022)
“Blow your harmonica, son!” says Uncle Frank Z.
Up until the time I was 13, when I bought the first album by the Mothers of Invention, titled Freak-Out!, I never really questioned the fact that the U.S. was called “the land of the free & the home of the brave”. The concept of “Freedom” always appealed to me but I never considered how much we were being manipulated into believing that things that are not really the truth of what is actually going on around us. Protest music/songs by Bob Dylan, PF Sloan’s “The Eve of Destruction” and “Trouble Every Day” by the Mothers often made me reconsider my view of what is just and what is unfair or just not right. I’ve shed many skins and worn many hats over time: being a hippie in the sixties, being a proghead in the seventies, being a hard-core punk in the eighties and then discarding all of those pigeonholes as I got older to become a Wise Old Man (sometimes) in my post millenium Golden Years.
