Go Sher: Changing music with friends

Billybaba BILLYBABA’S WANDERING | Just another WordPress.com site, Thanks for another great blog post (2023 July 26) with mention of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute. On that topic: ----

This blog post is about Music listening and personal relationships -- two Woodstocks (one in India in the 1950s and the other in NY in 1969).

Click and also this accompanying Photo Album on Music and Allahabad https://photos.app.goo.gl/9sqFSasz88UzSmL46

In response to your post, I wanted to mention the Allahabad Agricultural Institute (where your father worked and you grew up), and my distant relationship with it. The connections? Start with Timothy Sellers, (interviewed) a punk? grunge? Indie? musician in California, whose father’s (Bruce Sellers also my classmate) wife, Judith Sellers, is a descendant (granddaughter or great granddaughter) of Sam Higginbottom, a missionary who established the Institute in 1910.

Sam is also somewhat famous for meeting and talking with Gandhi around 1918. Judith was president and helped run the Primrose Society (2000s etc): see https://americanprimrosesociety.org/primula-101/grocery/

I’m not sure if you would really enjoy Timothy’s music from his Indie group, Artichoke, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artichoke_(band) but maybe. (more dission below on his music)

If you are like me, I’ve had a long history about Music types - first of exclusively enjoying only classical music growing up in the 1950s (and I played the lead character in the opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors” at Woodstock School in July1955).

Then, in college in the early 1960s I started to enjoy jazz, mainly because of Dave Brubeck’s musical with Louie Armstrong, The Real Ambassadors, and Dave’s incorporation of classical music styles, like in “Take Five” as well as most of his other music. Since then I began and still enjoy all of the great jazz music. The next eye-opener was Leonard Bernstein’s TV series in the mid-1960s, where he introduced and incorporated pop music. His programs got me interested in all pop music, especially through the pop opera music of The Who in Tommy. They inspired me to try to go and see The Who at the 1969 3-day music concert at Woodstock, NY (actually Mike Yager’s farm in Betel, NY). Initially I was somewhat put off by the huge price of the ticket of $13.50 for the 3-days, but my friend Larry and I bought tickets.

At the time I was teaching at nearby NY State University College in Oneonta, and so Larry and I drove down the 56 miles to Woodstock in August 1969 – it was sparse traffic driving south, whereas the Interstate was packed coming north from NY City. And then it became an open concert – tickets were useless as 400,000 or so crowded in for the Woodstock Concert.

The second night of the concert (actually around 5 am) The Who came on and I jumped up to cheer and dance to their music, but I was almost by myself in the crowd because everyone else had been dancing for 2 hours to Sly and the Family Stone and were tired and going to sleep, so there were only a few like me – waiting for The Who to come on. They were great.

Later that Sunday morning, my friend Larry and I decided to abandon the concert around 7:30 am though the music continued, and Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane was on stage and belted out “Good morning, people.” Larry and I were exhausted after 2 full days of marvelous music but with hardly any food and sleep. We left and drove back to Oneonta to carry on with our regular, boring lives. So, that’s how I became a whole music junkie after starting out as a classical music snob.

And that music now includes Indie music such as Timothy Sellers’. There are some classical hints to his music: such as two albums each with 26 tunes – 26 Scientists and 26 Animals Actually the song about ‘scientist’ Thomas Jefferson (who famously founded my local University of Virginia) is not that great. But you might enjoy Frog from Animals. And have a listen to “It’s so easy being me.” Fun, Nice.

By the way, I’ve visited classmate Bruce Sellers (Timothy’s father) at his NY home twice, mainly before our Class reunion in the summer of 1999. He lived up on the hillside above Unadilla, NY. Later, after Bruce carefully researched “round houses,” and he moved north from there into the countryside near South New Berlin, NY where he built his “round house” and is living there now. He’s not on FB or otherwise connected.