DAY 55 – SPACE MUSIC

May 3, 2013

55 of 65

Space Music

The summer of 1969. I was 21 and it seemed a good time for rock and roll. Everyone remembers the Woodstock Nation as summer wound down in August. Heck, I remember it and I was over a thousand miles away. The first major concert event that year was much closer to home, though. It was the Denver Pop Festival held the last weekend of June.

I was delivering mail that summer. Having a real job, making a real salary was nice after my part-time minimum wage job at the library during school. While I needed to save for the next school year, I could afford a little entertainment. The Pop Festival tickets were $6 per day. I could afford that.

The performances began on Friday night at Mile High Stadium. I did not go that night, so I missed Frank Zappa inventing “the wave” as he “conducted” the audience. On Saturday, the first part of the show was in competition with a loud demonstration outside the stadium. This time the crowd was not protesting the Vietnam War, it was protesting the price of the tickets. Music should be free, said the demonstrators.

The second act that night was a Boulder band, Zephyr, which featured vocalist Candy Givens, who was every bit as good as Janis Joplin, and guitar legend Tommy Bolin. Bolin later played with The James Gang and Deep Purple. During their set, the protestors outside broke through security fences and began rushing into the stadium. Police responded by firing tear gas into the crowd. As I look back, breathing that gas was more memorable than the music. Order was finally restored and we heard Poco, Johnny Winter, Tim Buckley and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I didn’t know what to expect on Sunday night. All the concert tickets had been sold. The promoter, wanting to avoid any more demonstrating and rioting, announced from the stage that the remainder of the festival would be free. Anyone not having tickets was allowed to sit in the South Stands, where they could hear the music, but could not see much. The highlight of that night was Jimi Hendrix. During his set, Hendrix announced that it was the last show for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which was disbanded immediately afterward.

One thing I enjoyed about delivering mail was that working hours were usually 7:00 am to 3:30 pm. The sun stayed up for hours after I finished work, giving me the opportunity to hike, bike and enjoy the warm days. Often I would go to Boulder to hang out with friends in the evening. Among those I enjoyed seeing were two women named Connie and Joanne, who shared a house and were my co-workers at the library. In early July, a friend of Joanne’s came to visit her for several weeks from New York. All these years later, I can’t remember his name. I will just call him “John,” because that might have been it.

So soon after the Pop Festival, we discussed rock music quite a bit. John was a big fan of the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, a group of mostly Juilliard-trained classical musicians who found they could make more money with electric guitars than with their cellos and oboes – but they included all of those instruments in their performances. By coincidence, that group had a concert scheduled in Denver, so John and I attended – the girls did not want to go. The juxtaposition between the different musical styles was interesting.

Although my life was pretty calm, I could not help but observe the weirdness across much of the country.

In California murders were committed by the Zodiac Killer and the Charles Manson cult. In Pennsylvania, the York Race Riots lasted for days. In Massachusetts, a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, killing a passenger named Mary Jo Kopechne. He did not report the accident for more than nine hours, and only after his car and the body were discovered by others. Justice was dispensed, and served, a week later when Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was given a two month suspended sentence.

All those stories, though, were overshadowed by the flight of Apollo 11. For the first time in history a human being was going to set foot on some piece of the solar system other than the Earth. Men were going to walk on the Moon. Literally the whole world was watching. Keeping with the theme of music, David Bowie tried to commercialize the event by releasing his song “Space Oddity” only a few days before the launch; but hardly anyone cared. What they did care about was that Man – Humankind – was ready to crown millions of years of evolution and free itself to be a celestial, trans-terrestrial being. It was incredible; it really was.

I worked on Saturday, July 19, the day Apollo 11 went into orbit around the Moon. When I was finished, I drove to Boulder to visit Connie and Joanne and John. We hiked part way up Flagstaff Mountain to sit on a large boulder overlooking the city. We talked about the Moon. We discussed the wonders of science. I lamented that my major subject, Psychology, pretended to be a science, but was really only another branch of the humanities. We were concerned for the safety of the astronauts. And I think we were also proud to be Americans.

We were not proud of our country’s war in Southeast Asia. We were not proud of the American record on civil rights. We were not proud of the political system (the Chappaquiddick incident had happened only the day before) or the culture of violence. We were proud, though – we didn’t say it explicitly, but we were proud – that the United States of America had achieved the magnificent feat of sending fellow citizens to the Moon. This was not “to the moon, Alice,” as Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) would say. This was to the Moon and the stars and the Universe beyond.

It had been less than 12 years since the Russians had launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite; and many had lamented that the US had lost the so-called “space race.” We could not even imagine what lay ahead.

On July 20, I spent most of the day close to home, checking the TV news every now and then to see how Apollo 11 was doing. Later that evening, the whole family gathered around and we watched on live television as the “Eagle,” the lunar lander, made contact with the surface of the Moon. At just before 9:00 pm MDT, we saw Neil Armstrong step onto that surface and say, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I took a photograph of the television screen to record that first step/leap. All across the country and around the world, other people were photographing television sets.

A few days after that, I was back in Boulder to register for the Fall Semester. Having completed most of my Psychology requirements, I opted for classes in Physics and Astrophysics. I had taken the basic science courses and calculus and other math classes. I still had my slide rule. Now I was ready to pursue the science that could help me imagine what lay ahead. Those classes were difficult, and a lot of what I was taught as fact is seen as discredited theory these 40+ years later. For at least a semester, though, I could feel like and think like a scientist.

What did lie ahead? Humans were on the Moon during five more Apollo missions, ending in December 1972. No one has been there since.

Science has changed our understanding of this and other worlds many times. Some of those changes have affected people’s everyday lives more than one, or six, trips to the Moon could ever do. Yet, I see it all as an anticlimax to that giant leap on a night in July 1969 when we all paused to watch television, live from out of this world.

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