Rockin' Robins Rolls Thanksgiving Memories

I've got another rock group to check out--Gomez--thanks to Wayne Robins' review. Thank you, Wayne, for keeping an over-the-hill guy in the loop. It's embarassing to admit my ignorance in public, but, hey, I'm still way ahead of most of my peers, who got about as far as The Stones and The Beatles.

Robins also blogs a negative critique of the Scorcese flick, "The Last Waltz," the famous farewell concert of The Band on Thanksgiving, 1976, at which Robins was in attendance.

While I can't disagree with his skewering of the "rock star sanctimony," I nonetheless had a wonderful experience with the video of this film. It was during Thanksgiving holiday in the mid-80's--I don't remember the exact year, but sometime just before my kids hit adolescence and wouldn't be caught dead watching a music flick with the old man, but were old enough to dig a piece of rock music history.

I seized this brief window of opportunity, and we all sat down as a family and watched the video on a cold and blustery late November night.


It was a wonderful bonding experience. The kids didn't care about the sanctimony, and neither did their parents. We just dug the music, and went to bed with smiles on our faces and tunes in our heads.

However, it was only a year or two later that my guys were dismissing the likes of Joni Mitchell, and Van Morrison in particular, as mere excrement. "Pieces of shit," I believe, was the exact terminology. So glad we got that video when we did.