TheCapitalClinic

I just finished reading the 40th Anniversary edition of Rolling Stone and reflecting on this publication’s current, largely mainstream, position in the music ecosystem. I compare the Rolling Stone of today with its free-spirited origins in San Francisco in the heady but politically charged days of musician-led protest, counter-culture, and new age spiritualism of the 60’s. While even now and only at the best of times, it still has echoes of its original verve, like it or not, Rolling Stone has come full-cycle from the cutting-edge of the unconventional and truly independent to the inevitably conventional due to the embrace of its own mass-market success. If I were to describe the movement of this culturally defining journal in socio-political terms, it would be a gradual but clearly perceptible journey from “liberal left” to “center left” where it sits conventionally and comfortably today.

In the same framework of time, when the Rolling Stone first came out, I was an alienated Vietnam vet out of sync with the exciting but rudderless times of the 60’s. Looking back, I was at the same time repelled [sometimes really pissed-off], yet attracted by all of the free-spirited souls “with flowers in their hair.” Fair to say, I was conflicted by my past and my then present, in the same way we all are by “what’s new” if we are honest about our external and internal selves as we evolve as individuals. Then, mid-cycle, in the post-Beatle era [if there is such a legitimate cultural benchmark] I became, in the main, an unconventionally conventional “suit” [lawyer/banker/entrepreneur] who stopped reading Rolling Stone. Now, more recently, because of Fuzz, which represents more than a journal [indeed, Fuzz is a self-styled musician’s label, technology platform, and community dealing with music and everything that music touches], I find myself moving more and more full-cycle on my own, forty year and more, journey, but in reverse order, from “center right” to “center left” - about where the Rolling Stone sits today. And, strangely, I find that I have “out-grown” Rolling Stone in the sense that I am now more willing to push out the envelope of what is culturally on the edge and, thus, defining than what I can generally find in today's Rolling Stone, that clear and courageous voice that once stood for change at the edge of the possible. What happened? Fuzz happened - because it [and all that seems to underlie the Fuzz spirit] is more relevant in our conflicted but technologically driven times.

Now, again due to the compelling pull of Fuzz, I find myself beyond where traditional ties would bind to become a more politically and socially committed individual more in keeping with the message of the Nightwatchman [recently featured at Fuzz] of the need to be a “one man revolution” and of Campbell Natale’s “Social Decay” [recently a Fuzz top tract] that addresses the creeping social decay all around us and the need for change.

Finally, in these chaotic times, thanks to Fuzz and the artists and people that I find here, I am more in tune with the spirit of the Rolling Stone in it early years as an exciting, edgy, unconventional, platform of the highly charged at the edge of chaos taking us to the delicious and dangerous territory where the conventional fear to tread. Music Uprising is music that really resonates and, thanks to Fuzz, I am free at last.