Dave Mason - Elmont, NY. 1978

Elmont, NY.
July 8, 1978
WNEW FM Source/soundboard @flac



Gal can PLAY!

. . . . .Alex Chiton fascinates me . . .as song writers go and from The Letter onwards like so many of us bought when it came out and if we stuck with Big Star we were on a journey and no mistake . . . (Chilton on the right in this picture)
For most of the year, the Medicine Wheel at Bighorn Range in Wyoming is hidden away from the world. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that it has lasted for nearly a century of human history in such perfect condition, but on a deeply selfish level, there’s something sad about that.
Medicine Wheel is the name given to a gigantic circular rock formation 80 feet in diameter, studded with 28 spokes around the rim. It gets hidden because it’s at the very summit of Medicine Mountain, some 10,000 feet in the air. Thus, for most of the year, it is covered by several feet of snow. However, during the summer months, when the snow melts, we get a look into Native American customs from centuries past, showing the colonialism at the heart of all those jokes about America having no history.
Because, sure, the country is a quarter of a century old. There are public toilets in Europe that are the same age, we get it. However, that’s not American history. This is. The land colonised by the pilgrims is impossibly old, and people have been there the entire time, making things of such beauty and complexity that we didn’t fully understand them until centuries down the line. Things like the Medicine Wheel. Something people had no idea what the relevance of it was until Jack Eddy, an archaeoastronomer, made an incredible discovery in the 1970s.
Up until Eddy’s work, archaeologists had worked with the Native American Tribes of the area to have a basic understanding of the significance of the Medicine Wheel. After all, it was one of hundreds across America, so there had been several minds at work researching them.
What they did understand was its spiritual significance. This was a ceremonial site, one that tribes had used for vision quests and prayer hundreds of years ago. Any deeper understanding wasn’t made until Eddy studied the Wheel at night.
He found that the cairns that studded the Wheel’s rim matched exactly where the sun would rise and set during the summer solstice. It also showed the location of bright stars like Rigel and Sirius, the kind that can give an early tribe of humans a pretty exact date. The Medicine Wheel, among many other uses, was an early calendar.
However, a key mystery still remains. It’s a site of deep significance to surrounding Native American tribes, yet none of them, from Apsáalooke to Cheyenne to Lakota and anyone in between, claims the site as their own doing.
Each tribe that has ever set foot there and recorded their experiences has stated that the Medicine Wheel was there when they arrived. This may sound like a bittersweet note to end on, as if we may never know who was responsible for one of the great works of real American history.
However, the truth is something a little brighter. While the tribes can’t say they know which tribe is responsible, they’ve instead chosen to view the Medicine Wheel not as a singular tribe’s achievement, but a part of their own unified history and culture. One that spans millennia and will never be truly erased.

Jeff Beck+Carlos Santana+Steve Lukather
Prince Hotel, Karuizawa, Japan
1986-06-01 (complete show)
sbd
mp3 @ 320 [216 mb]
sq: A+
Lotus Gem (BUC 037)
artwork includedCD1
__Santana__
01 Intro - Primera Invasion
02 Black Magic Woman
__Santana & Steve Lukather__
03 Open Invitation
__Jeff Beck__
04 Star Cycle
05 'Cause We Ended As Lovers
06 Wild Thing
__Jeff Beck+Steve Lukather__
07 Freeway Jam
08 Going Down
09 EscapeCD2
__Jeff Beck+Steve Lukather+Santana__
10 Super Boogie
11 Lotus Blues
12 People get ready
13 Johnny B Goode
14 Love Will
15 Ambitious
16 Goodbye Pork-Pie-Hat
17 Stop, Look And Listen
18 Blue Windtt: 1:33:54Jeff Beck - Guitars
Jan Hammer - Keyboards
Simon Phillips - Drums
Jimmy Hall Vocals & Sax
Doug Wimbish - BassCarlos Santana - Guitars
George Miles - Vocals
Chester Thompson - Keyboards
Armando Peraza - Congas
Orestes Vilato - Timbales
Tom Coster - Keyboards
Graham Lear - Drums
Paul Rekow - PercussionSteve Lukather - Guitars
Eric Clapton
The Centrum, Worcester, MA
1985-06-26fm sbd
mp3 @ 320 [242 mb]
sq: A+
Hunger BurningCD1
01 Opening
02 Tulsa Time
03 Motherless Children
04 I Shot The Sheriff
05 Same Old Blues
06 Tangled In Love
07 White Room
08 Steppin' Out
09 Wonderful TonightCD2
10 She's Waiting
11 She Loves You
12 Badge
13 Let It Rain
14 Double Trouble
15 Cocaine
16 Layla
17 Forever Man
18 Band intro
19 Further On Up The Road
vintage-tigre
"In my opinion there are three great titans of the comic strip: Snoopy’s Charles M Schulz, Garfield’s Jim Davis and Calvin & Hobbes’ Bill Watterson.
What distinguishes Watterson from the other two is that he never monetized his creation, except for being paid by his publisher to deliver the work.
“I went into cartooning to draw cartoons,” Watterson says, “not to run a corporate empire.”
Watterson treated cartooning not as a content pipeline but as a craft, almost a vocation. He wrote every word, drew every line, colored the Sunday strips, and painted the book illustrations himself. He believed comics could be art in the old, serious, capital-letter sense, and he saw the shrinking newspaper comic format as a slow cultural tragedy conducted in little boxes.
His publishers, Universal Press Syndicate, wanted the obvious things: Calvin shirts, Spaceman Spiff bumper stickers, cartoons, films, and worst of all in Watterson’s eyes, a Hobbes doll. The article is very good on why that mattered. Hobbes works because he is never nailed down. To Calvin, he is alive. To adults, he is a stuffed tiger. Both realities coexist. A real plush Hobbes would collapse that magic into a product, and Watterson saw that as an act of imaginative vandalism.
This refusal cost him staggering amounts of money. The article contrasts him with Jim Davis and the Garfield empire, where merchandising became a commercial supernova. Watterson looked at that path and essentially said: no thanks, I came here to draw cartoons, not to supervise lunchboxes. For six years he fought the syndicate over licensing, even though the contract originally gave them those rights. In the end, astonishingly, Watterson won. The syndicate backed down and rewrote the contract in his favor.
The article wisely resists turning Watterson into a saint with a drawing board. He could be severe, stubborn, and inclined to treat commerce as a dragon guarding a cash register. His claim of helplessness before the syndicate may also be a little dramatic, since Calvin and Hobbes without Watterson would have been about as valuable as a snowman in July.
His next victory was over the Sunday page itself. He pushed for a larger, freer format, one where the story shaped the panels rather than the panels squeezing the story flat. Editors grumbled, as editors must, but very few papers dropped the strip. Once again, Watterson had nudged a commercial machine toward art.
The cost was that freedom made everything harder. Bigger Sunday pages meant more invention, more labor, more pressure, and more private life fed into the furnace of quality. In the end, he won the room he needed to make better art, and that room helped exhaust him.
The final strip turns all this into a kind of snowy benediction. Calvin and Hobbes stand before a blank white world, spacious and unwritten. Then Watterson more or less disappears, leaving behind the rarest thing in American pop culture: a beloved creation that was never flattened into toys, sequels, lunchboxes, or battery-powered tigers.
Watterson’s integrity cost him millions, strained his career, annoyed editors, exhausted his life, and finally led him away from the thing that made him famous. But it also preserved Calvin and Hobbes as something unusually pure: a private imaginative kingdom somehow shared by millions, never officially turned into a breakfast cereal, a theme park, or a talking plush tiger with replaceable batteries.
Amazingly, Watterson only worked on the comic for 10 years. The final strip was published on December 31, 1995.
The last panel of the final Calvin and Hobbes strip shows Calvin and Hobbes riding their sled down a snowy hill into a wide white landscape, with Calvin saying:
“It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy… let’s go exploring!”
It is a beautifully perfect ending: not a farewell speech, but a launch into mystery."
For those wondering what happened to the creator in the years that followed there’s more to be discovered on Wikipedia: