The Power of Music of The Baby Boomer Generation Changed a Nation!

Buffalo Springfield, left to right: Stephen Stills,
Dewey Martin, Bruce Palmer, Richie Furay,
Neil Young - Wikipedia

One era of time in our country’s history clearly illustrates the power of music and that is of the 1960’s and 1970’s when a movement of socially conscious musicians, who were disturbed by war and the path they felt the government was taking the country, led a young generation to force a change. Music and lyrics started playing the battle cries of a generation who knew the power that this music possessed. It caused the Baby Boomer generation to come together for a purpose of change that could not be ignored. The music didn’t make the change. It brought together a young generation of people who then felt the power they had to shout a message that was unified and undeniable. The government and the mainstream media heard them clearly and one of our nation’s clearest marks of how people can change a nation where imprinted in history. The power of music made that all happen.

Some of the earliest and most influential songwriters who helped use that power were Stephen Stills and Neil Young. There are many others, but these two came together in their beginnings of success and influence in a band named “Buffalo Springfield” and their first successful song, “For What It’s Worth”, written by Stephen Stills. Today’s generations hear this song and others of those times in the numerous movies about the Vietnam War, such as “Forrest Gump”. The music is included in these movies to not only show the role that music played, but to bring that same power to the movie itself.

Here is one of those first songs that made a generation come together and realize the power they had to make change happen.

(Clip of Monterey Pop Concert, 1987 from http://www.rockpeaks.com/)

These social changing musicians were just kids who were influenced by rock n’ roll of the 1950’s and The Beatles, who picked up some guitars and formed bands to have some fun. Their years of growing from teenagers living at home to becoming adults and seeing how much the government was going to direct their lives. They faced being drafted and forced to go to a war that did not have the same clear reason that their parents faced when World War II began. These musicians felt a spark ignite within them and they used music to release their feelings into stories and messages of social change. The rest of the country’s youth heard the same messages, uniting them for a movement of change.


Today's movement of unrest brought on by mistrust of financial, big corporations and government partisanship and special interests have their various portions of the population coming together, but using the Internet as their tool of today. The Internet lacks the passion and power that music has in our daily lives. Music was the key before and only music has that power of movement. The best thing about this emotional power of music is that it can't be bought by the haves to manipulate for their greedy purposes. Music has a truth within it, which is the reason for it's ability to grab onto the soul and inspire to do great things!

Just last week, I only dream’d of being an on-tra-pra-nor....now I R one!

 

I have been talking about starting my own small business for so long, that it was starting to feel like that’s actually what I do....”talk about it”. I finally received the funds I need and signed a three year lease on a space in a shopping plaza.... ME!!!!!.... owning a business in one of dem’ dere’ shopping plazas, that I always drive by and get my hair cut and by a burger, or a D.Q..... I have to say...it was an out-of-body experience driving down to the owners office and signing that lease. I still feel like I’m dreaming. I can only image what I will feel like when I see construction going on and watch this creation come to life. It is all exciting and all scary at the same time!

The journey that has led me to this point is one of exploration, asking questions, and getting a HELL of a lot of wonderful, experienced people to help me find my way through the weeds and help me find the path. I have been creating a L-O-N-G list of these people to thank for walking me here, to where I am now. In the end, I realize that I have done some things that I look back on and am amazed! Who is that man behind that curtain?.... ME, that’s who!

Almost one year ago, in August of 2009, I enrolled in a Community College course, “How to Start a Small Business”, which was a six week course of a lot of information and a general teaching of how to start and a lot of resources to start investigating. It was a great way to begin my journey. Although I had already formulated my business idea before the course began, it made me aware that I have committed myself to this journey...I spent some money and placed my first baby-step forward. The biggest thing I learned from the course was how only through my passion and persistence to work through any and all obstacles, would this ever become a reality. Many a day over the last year, I have woken in the middle of the night, wondering “what in the hell am I thinking?... this isn’t something that I WOULD DO!!!”. Each and every time I have said that to myself, in a manner of speaking, I slap myself in the face to awake from that self doubting nightmare. It’s the same nightmare I have been waking from all of my life, but NO MORE! NO MORE will I listen to that self doubting inner voice that has held me back for over 50 years! At the age of 58, as I look back at many things I have accomplished, many of them in just the last decade or so, I come to a realization that I can do achieve a goal, IF, and ONLY IF, it is a true passion and ONLY IF I don’t stop moving toward the goal. Obstacles are only learning experiences and things to work out, work around and move aside, and most importantly....remember and learn from.

There is so much more to do to make this dream real and even more importantly, successful, and I know there will be many more mistakes and lessons learned, but I will always remember to push the negativity aside, look for a solution and keep moving forward. The first payback will be seeing my goals become real. The ongoing payback will be proving that I was correct in thinking that I can do great things. The most important payback will be waking up each day and looking forward to doing something that I absolutely love! Everything beyond that is all gravy!

Baby Boomer Reinvention of Retirement

There is a beginning of another new way the Baby Boomer Generation is changing what “retirement” will mean in the future occurring. This is resulting out of two driving forces, of which one is how the past decades of greed of the rich and powerful have destroyed what used to be thought of as retirement. The other is once again, just a natural result of the sheer size of this generation of people who were born between 1946 and 1964. Retirement is defined as, “the period of one’s life after leaving one’s job and ceasing to work”. 


The generations previous to the Baby Boomers, “The Greatest Generation” was the first to actually do this. Previous to the industrial age, there really was no retirement, nor a need to do so, as the life expectancy was not long enough to know what that would have meant anyway. So, as the parents of the Boomers worked long hours of hard labor through their lives, they were able to save money to stop working the job they had for most of their lives and “enjoy” their elder years. The word, “enjoy” here is relative, as health issues, often brought on by a complete stopping of all activity and thought, deeply affected the amount of enjoyment realized by most. Now the Baby Boomers, who saw and just naturally thought this was what retirement meant and also knew that they would be forced to retire at a certain age, realized they must save for this part of their lives at some point. This is where the greed that took advantage of these life long savings comes to bear, followed by the realization that these life long savings were gone.

Once again, it’s time to be innovative and reinvent. Boomers are now changing what retirement means, which is to find what your best talents, put them to work, combined with your true passion and continue to work as long as your body and mind will allow. There is no need to quit working, in fact, stopping all work will remove one’s purpose and thus reason to live a longer and more purposeful life. My mother always said, “When you make yourself go to work, you stay healthy. When you take off is when you get sick”. How true that has become.


Since losing my corporate job of over 22 years in 2008, I have been searching for what I want to do when I grow up...or for the rest of my life. I knew it had to be something that I wanted to go do every day and that it had to have something to do with some of my best talents. My strongest passion has always been music, whether it was playing it or listening to it. Music is an expression of spirit and a language of the human species. It has much more of a profound affect on our lives than we can imagine, as much as the environment and planet we live on. It influences our behavior on a daily basis, even when we are not aware of it, through media and our surroundings.


Some of my other best passions involve behaviors between people. During those 22 corporate working years, I observed and learned how teams work together, how others manage or do not manage teams and how upper management disconnects from behaviors and talents of its core work force. There is a disconnect of how to get the best abilities from its corporate workers, so much so that a completely new industry grew out of the last 20 years. Many who were dissatisfied with the corporate environment found that they could go to these large businesses and provide some structure in how people behave with one another, with a method that corporate executives could buy into. Basically, this “Coaching” business was created out of the fact that the corporate business world totally lost its capability of how to understand how to treat people!


One of the fundamentals of human behavior is interacting with another person in a way that will allow cooperation with each other. When one chooses to work alone, that person quickly discovers the limits of their capabilities and realizes that they need someone else’s help to accomplish certain goals. The best way to enable this cooperation is to promote beneficial behavior among them, in other words, make a friend and they will help you. Large businesses became so deeply focused on the prime directive of profit and growth that they became dysfunctional in this key fundamental knowledge of how people work together as teams. This new Coaching industry was welcomed into the corporate world as a methodology of correcting this. (I find this completely amazing that large groups of people forget how to behave to others when they enter that corporate world, and become someone different than they are in their personal lives!)

This brings me back to another of my passions, and that is to make every member of a team or of any effort, feel that they are valued and have something to contribute to any goal. I knew that this is another passion that I must bring to my new business venture.


The third passion I have been developing over that last 20 years is innovative thinking. I found my corporate years very frustrating because, in spite of the fact that I worked in an area that was born from innovation, technology, my environment did not promote it. The corporate world has been throwing the word “innovation” around for the last 10 years, but most did not seem to really understand what it meant. The other aspect was really back to the lack of effort to find what employees do best, and matching their job with those abilities. One cannot assign a person to suddenly be “innovative”, as this is actually “creativity” and comes from a person who possesses a heightened ability of the part of the human brain that “creates”.


These passions, that have taken my last 50 years to develop and realize, will be absolutely key to the success of my own business. The ongoing need to focus my efforts on these key aspects must be centered as often as possible, as the day to day of business will tend to cloud this focus. This is where the love of what you are doing works for you. The enjoyment of doing something you love to do, always grounds you, to naturally make you do whatever it takes to keep that focus for success.


As the Boomers enter this latter phase of life and struggle through the transition of it, we may realize that the remedies for all the predicted health, social and ecological issues of the Baby Boomer Generation growing old, may just be the realization that we must continue to work forever for monetary reasons as well as providing the best “quality of life”.

Perspective: Understood in a Pale Blue Dot

I just happened upon this video narrated by Carl Sagan. I always loved to watch anything Carl Sagan every spoke about, as no one ever quite put science and humankind's relationship to the Universe in better words. 

This video puts life as we know it very much in perspective. We all tend to think of the world and life as they evolve, surround and effect us, in our small moments in time.

In his perfect words, Carl Sagan puts everything we humans have ever known all in "perfect perspective".

A message for Father’s Day

I lost my Dad on December 21, 1989 and I think about, and talk about him more as the years go by. It seems like the early hurt goes away, but the yearning to talk to or see someone you lose, increases as time goes by. My Dad was the life force and humor of our family. I don’t mean to say he was perfect...none of us can say that! He was flawed and I was quick to find those flaws when I was younger. I basically got along with my Dad, but I often thought how I would be a better father than he was. I did do things differently, but that didn’t make me a more perfect father...just a differently flawed father.

As for a legacy of humor, that is what my Dad gave us. He rarely laughed at things he did. In fact, most times you couldn’t tell if he was getting angry that we were all laughing at something he did or not. The stories are endless. I remember a moment when the whole family spent a New Year’s Eve weekend in an area ski resort, Seven Springs, where I played for many years in one of the first bands I was ever in. The whole family was staying in a fantastic chalet and we were all gathered in the living room area, watching the skiers on the mountain come down the hill in the night, and we were all having a great time. This also was where Mom and Dad were going to sleep, on the couch that folded out into a bed. Well, it was time for Dad to go to bed and he couldn’t care less that we were still all lying around and carrying on, making noise. When it time for him to sleep, that was what he was going to do. He got into the bed with his pajamas and his black dress socks, which was funny enough, but as we turned to look at him, already beginning to laugh at the black socks, we went into hysterics when we saw that the bottoms of his socks were completely torn to shreds. There were only a few strings of thread holding together on the bottom of those socks. Well, we howled with laughter to the point of tears. None of this commotion bothered him in any way. He was the consummate straight man and off to sleep-vile he went. These are the little moments of laughter and life that my Dad brought to the family. They are moments that will last all of our lives. I had heard of so many more stories of him from before I was even born, of tales where he would dress up like a ghost and stand in the woods near the neighbor houses, howling like a banshee, until the frightened trick and treaters began throwing stones at him and he had to run for his life! The go on and on.

I know I have some of that within me, but there will never be another “Big Dave”! He was one of a kind and we all remind ourselves of the stories and laugh and enjoy his legacy to us, every day.

I also never hugged or said the words, “I love you” to him. I really regret that! We just never talked openly like that in my family. I make sure I say if often in my family. I even recently started forcing myself to hug my wife’s father. I have only shook his hand for hello and good-bye for the last 15 years. I recently just made my mind up to hug him instead, as I do to the rest of the family. I found, to my surprise, that he seemed to be waiting for it!

So this father’s day, if you are blessed enough to still have your father, make sure you show him and say the things that he wants to hear. Don't wait for someday, when it may be too late. Make yourself do it this Father’s Day. Once you do, it will be easy to continue from that point on. Give him a huge hug! It will be his best gift.

Paul McCartney is coming to Pittsburgh!

Video from http://www.paulmccartney.com "Up and Coming Tour"

I may have to break my long time rule of not going to concerts at large venues ever again. It was announced yesterday, June 3, 2010, that the entertainer who would perform for the opening of the new Consol Energy Center, which is the new home of the Pittsburgh Penguins Hockey Team, will be non other than Sir Paul McCartney! The show will be on August 18, 2010. McCartney is 67 years young and going stronger than ever, displayed at his grand concert in New York City performed over three nights as the inaugural concert at New York City's Citi Field, 17, 18 and 21 July 2009.

Paul McCartney was last in Pittsburgh Feb. 4 and 5, 1990, at what was then the Civic Arena. He had appeared with The Beatles at the same venue on Sept. 14, 1964. Needless to say, seeing one of the Beatles perform live is not something that occurs many times in a lifetime. As a Baby Boomer who was about 10 when The Beatles took the US by storm in the early sixties and then inspired by their music to become a rock musician at 17, in 1969, the year of Woodstock and release of “Abby Road” and the beginning of the end of the greatest rock band ever, I think I need to find a way to get to this performance.

McCartney’s performances in New York City this year illustrated how he is as good as ever. He played many of The Beatles, Wings, and solo works that were as good as they get. The older I get, after over 40 years of playing as a professional musician, the more I appreciate and realize how amazing the songs written by the Fab Four were, as they endure and stand the test of time. We see the newest artists redo their classics again and again and every new generation finds the Beatles music fascinating. Over and over, I hear stories of young kids playing classic Beatles songs and becoming avid fans.

There is no doubt that The Beatles changed the world and have continued to do so for over 50 years. The idea that one of the most successful musicians of our times is coming to perform in the newest entertainment venue in Pittsburgh, this year, decrees to be a part of this in my lifetime. Now the problem is, will I even be able to get a ticket?

Be sure to check out a website that I just came across with the most Beatles information, rare early music, out takes, interviews and rare background detail on each recording. Check it out at The Beatles Rarity

* Interesting side note - (Article from the Trib Live: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/ae/music/s_684270.html)

"Pittsburgh connection

When Paul McCartney performs Aug. 18 at the Consol Energy Center, Carl Grefenstette hopes to be there for two reasons:

1. The owner of Pittsburgh Guitars in the South Side is a diehard Beatles fans.

2. The ex-Beatle will be playing a guitar Grefenstette once owned.

"It's a 1960 Les Paul, left-handed guitar, and it came from here," he says.

Grefenstette sold the guitar to Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick 25 years ago. The late Linda McCartney bought if from Nielsen a few years later for her husband.

Now, Grefenstette wants to hear it played again.

"I'm hoping I can get a ticket," he says."