What a wonderful gesture. We’re happy to share the sound of the Ephlats and it’s amazing to hear the quality of the voices, the tenors still hitting those high notes some fifty years later…
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the babbel
“On Friday, February 11, 1966, ‛the babbel,’ Williams’ answer to a Greenwich Village espresso house, opened to a large and enthusiastic clientele…in the basement of Brainerd Mears House.” — Williams Record, Feb 15, 1966 Brainerd Mears had formerly been the ϴΔX Fraternity House, and the babbel was part of an effort symbolically to re-purpose the […]
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From Ian and Sylvia to Cream to Mountain starting in Lasell Gymnasium
Lloyd’s detailed memory of that weekend so long ago amazed me – something I hadn’t thought of for decades but which oddly seems clear. I remember it was a great concert, but it almost didn’t happen at all.
It was snowing that day, lightly all day, great for homecoming
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We gotta get out of this place
“If it’s the Last Thing We EVER DO!” This existential declaration in music hit the airways in 1965, a classic British Invasion contribution by Eric Burdon and the Animals. It was immediately embraced by collegians—collegians ending the evening at a lousy mixer, lamenting an unhappy social life, disgusted by a particular academic experience, or […]
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The sixties: the war in Vietnam and its music
It goes without saying that the Vietnam War was both a decisive and divisive event for the ‘60s, particularly the latter part. And the music around the war, both for and against it, was loud and impassioned. Two anthems of the antiwar movement were both released in 1967. “ I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” by Country Joe and […]
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Rock of Ages
The hits just kept on happening through a decade that summoned the energy of a renaissance and a revolution in what was called a youth culture — us, the children of warriors, raised in an era of unparalleled wealth, our college years bracketed by assassinations, against a backdrop of a civil rights movement that defined the era.
Read articleIn the early morning rain: Ian & Sylvia Fall 1965
The musical event at Williams College that made the biggest, most lasting impression upon me was a concert that I did not even physically attend. To be sure, I saw and heard lots of great music at Williams: the cool, accessible jazz of Dave Brubeck one year, and then the passionate anthems of Buffy Sainte- Marie another year in Chapin Hall. I sweated and stomped to the driving R&B of Junior Walker and the Allstars one year, and then enjoyed the gritty strutting of the James Cotton Blues Band another year in Baxter Hall. I even remember dancing in the mud which stretched beyond Gladden House and Route 7 while Percy Sledge mournfully crooned “When a Man Loves a Woman,” early one Spring.
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