Why do I dig?
Recently I was inspired to start posting some more of the hidden gems I’ve come across in my extensive diggings for music from the mid-60’s to mid-70’s. While I dig for a lot of very different kinds of music (more like, what don’t I dig for?), I have a huge soft spot for that era. Not only was the fervor of new ideas being spread at a rapid rate in the United States, it was a fever that was spreading to every part of the world. So what does that mean for music?
People started testing the limits of the traditional music genres we had come to know so well. It was a wild fire of song influenced by drugs, politics, a love of music, and even a fear of the world not changing, but because there was so much music being produced around this time, so many musicians got drowned out by all the waves of psychedelic noise and the clamor of a thousand electric guitars, lost down the deep, soulful river of blues and folk, hidden in the gospel chorus with all those other honky tonk angels.
What’s even crazier and keeps me on this goose-chase is that all too often, these musicians were right under our noses. So many of them played on albums for musicians we know too well, occasionally even produced by big-named producers. So many of them were talented enough to have made it huge but it just never happened and they get lost in the liner notes of one of your favorite musician’s albums, a footnote in musical history.
So, I dig. I dig because there is so much history and talent hiding in crates of your local record store, I dig because it’s so telling of the times and I want to better understand how that wave of change came, so I can learn to apply it to today. I dig because I think everyone deserves to be heard. Now, the question is, can you dig it?
