"You seem like a fairly articulate guy," he said to me as we talked alone.

"So do you, Richard."

He looked at me innocently. "What are you doing in this business?" He was suspicious, and rightly so.

I countered cleverly: "What are you doing?"

"Making money," he said calmly. "And I dig it." He was the first person I had met who had a sane attitude towards the whole scene. I certainly never would have admitted that I was interesting in making money, ugh.

It is hard to get rock people to talk about money. Those who don't have it don't have any opinions, and those who do put it down. They can: they've busted their asses getting where they are and they can say any kind of damned foolishness. Our most revered culture-hero, Bob Dylan, whose lyrics bespeak a profound revulsion at our dear depraved society is a millionaire living in a millionaire's seclusion. This means absolutely nothing except that he was not profoundly revolted at accepting millions of dollars for his work. To hear the average rock musician talk, Dylan should be ashamed of getting so rich. Shame on you, Bobby. Because you don't live in the holes that some of your followers do, you are obviously blinded by the light all around you.

There are other, easier ways to make a lot of money. Go into the stock market. Why do people do the public-hippie trip? Well. Entertainers occupy a quasi-sexual world onstage, symbolically conquering entire audiences with their vasty charms. A good rock performer must maintain a tremendously sexual presence onstage, and let it be known in various ways that he's got a bigger one than any two men in the audience. C.F. Mick Jagger or Hendrix. By throwing your head around dramatically, by sweating a lot, by swinging your libidinously sweat-curled hair like an escaped rapist, you get a lot of slaveringly good mileage onstage. This is one reason guys prefer playing the Fillmore instead of Wall Street. The obvious status advantage in our suave college hip intellectual culture are another:

"I really liked the way you held the microphone."

"Thanks, honey."

"How'd you like to play at my coming-out at Newport?"

"I could dig it"

If I hadn't been in a band I would never have met George Plimpton.

IN WHICH IT IS SEEN THAT MEETING GEORGE PLIMPTON WAS THE BEST THING THE BOSTON SOUND EVER, EVER DID FOR ME -- III

ALL THE SHOUTING about the Boston Sound was mostly about the courtship the BS was carrying on with those two whores with hearts of gold, Fame and Money. The big recording companies were pouring money into promotion of the scene before it had matured, feigning great interest in the musicians. The musicians, myself included, fell for it. Somehow in our hearts we all believed that there, way up high on top of the Big Rock Candy Mountain a recording contract was being written by genial producers and stamped with approval by God. Nobody really had any idea what was going on, although every rumor you had ever heard was filed neatly in the rucksack of your mind to act as a pillow for your weary body as you stretched out on a cold night on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Rumors also served as food while you were starving.

The reason that rock music in general, and the Boston Sound in particular, is such a confused area is that there are no critical standards by which to judge the music. White rock musicians today have nothing, in Dylan's phrase, to live up to. And the audiences will pay in turn to be insulted (The Mothers), bored (The Ultimate Spinach), assaulted (The Fugs and MC 5), ignored (The Jefferson Airplane and Procol Harum), and urinated upon by a lukewarm assemblage of beligerent flower-cretins. Entertainment is left up to a very few white groups who know how to act onstage, such as the Who, the Stones, the Rascals, and most of the English blues people. Art is left pretty much up to the Beatles and Dylan. The common denominator of all the popular groups is that they have realized that they are not just "doing their thing" but that they are putting on a show, that they are different from their audience in some very material ways, and that they must maintain a sort of friendly inaccessibility. Richard Nixon and Eric Clapton share in common this ability to convey their superiority. That's why both are culture-heroes of different segments of our society. One of the reasons the Boston Sound failed was because of a hip unwillingness to idolize the performers so that, like the early Beatles or San Franciscans, they had something to live up to. It wasn't necessarily that the music was bad; perhaps the audiences were tired, that the prosletyzing impulse of the hip movement was dying out, that the hip audience was trying to live out its dictums instead of hearing them preached from a stage at the Tea Party. There had been too many heroes by the time the Boston Sound came on the scene.