We just had the pleasure of a spontaneous conversation with Lowell “Banana” Levinger and his spouse (whose first name I regret I did not capture) on the patio of a trattoria in Florence. He’s still doing gigs- even in Italy.
This needs to be played currently. Humility is needed urgently, because evil and vitriol is taking over this world with haters voicing their false propaganda and fascist ideology.
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. … It seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time … There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. … that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. …. Our energy would simply prevail. … We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. … So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.