Another rare, and probably unheard one from The Hollywood Bowl this weekend. This time it's Hugh Masekela, who was riding high on the crossover hit Grazin' In The Grass and appearing at The Hollywood Bowl for the first time on August 14, 1968.

Oddly, part of a Fashion Show put on by The Broadway Department Stores in Los Angeles, Masekela was sandwiched in between Fall Fashion Previews and The Shopping Experience At The Broadway. But it was still enough to make an impression on the audience, and luckily it was recorded and can now be enjoyed.

Before Hugh Masekela came on the scene, Jazz from South Africa was thought not to exist, at least in the States. Certainly, it was heard about and talked about among Jazz aficianados, but it was Masekela who turned everyone, including an audience steeped in rock and pop, on to a new and exciting take on the Jazz idiom.

Coming in at a little less than a half-hour (with one or two numbers missing and a supposed 2nd half which never materialized) it's a memorable slice of musical history from an influential and much admired musician we just don't hear much about these days.

Except here.

Get ready for Monday.

When certain people become instrumental in shaping the formative years of your life by way of their message, their point of view or their example, their passing seems doubly poignant as it signifies an integral part of your development as a person is no longer able to be there. That sure-fire sign you can never go back.

I'll admit it's been a long time since I heard The Firesign Theater. By the 1970's I was on to other things, other messages and other examples. But hearing of the passing last week of Peter Bergman, the man who was the backbone of perhaps one of the most innovative and outrageous comedy groups in the U.S., brought me back to those nights when I was stuck to my radio like glue, joining this outrageous team of metaphysical clowns on their trip through hyper-reality.

The Firesign Theater were only part of the bigger picture. Radio Free Oz was "the big show" and was one of the more eclectic examples of broadcasting to come along in a very long time. Initially they were on KPFK, the Public radio station in Los Angeles. And then, for a short while, were on a top-40 AM station on Sunday nights. KRLA, which was one of the most popular Top-40 station at the time, played host to Bergman and Company.

Tonight I'm running a little under 2 hours of their final broadcast at KRLA. In typical Radio Free Oz fashion, the mix is heady, with an interview and poetry reading by Deep Image Poet Robert Kelly, and later featuring an interview with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In between all that is a Firesign skit "A Life In The Day" and lots of music.

I left just about everything as-is. Sadly, the show isn't complete and is missing the last hour (it's around, but it got separated from it's companion reel) and I did cut down on the music, but even that's an interesting point of departure since 1968 saw the beginning of Free-form radio on FM, and AM was dabbling in being free-form.

At any rate - as a tribute to Peter Bergman and the genius of The Firesign Theater, here is the last Radio Free Oz broadcast from KRLA on January 14, 1967.

I broke it up between two players - the top player features Poet Robert Kelly and the bottom player features A Life In The Day.

All in all, an interesting footprint in time and an appreciation to Peter Bergman for all he did and all those minds that were delightfully blown by his amazing presence.

Enjoy.

The Oscar Peterson Trio this weekend, recorded live at the Summer Festival Canada in Peterson's hometown Montreal by CBC Radio in 1968.

Classic Peterson with some original compositions added to the mix. A great concert which I'm not sure has seen the light of reissue, either by The CBC or via the Jazz collector's circuit.

In any event, something groovy the round out your Sunday.

And then there was 1968. The year just about everything came unhinged. The Vietnam War escalated and got very personal. The protests escalated accordingly - people who weren't against the war were violently opposed to it now. President Johnson declined re-election, leaving the field open for former Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy to run. The Civil Rights Movement was becoming increasingly violent, culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King. France went on strike and took it to the streets, shutting the entire country down. Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated. Chaos would erupt at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nixon would emerge as President and that era would soon start.

And beyond all that Apollo 8 made the very first orbit of the moon. A rehearsal for the landing to take place in 1969. Even from outer space, the view of earth from the landscape of the moon gave one the impression Earth was just not a happy place to be.

But we were stuck there.

Those highlights and a ton of other news from that year, all via the BBC and their Radio 1 Year-end retrospect for December 31, 1968 which looked at the year from a world wide standpoint.

And some people say 2012 will make 1968 look like a picnic.

One wonders - at least you have some frame of reference to consider.

I am always fascinated to listen to assessments of dissent from the past. How much it resembles the present, how often it was distorted in the past - how spot-on or miles-off the observations were.

Marya Mannes, a name that's all but forgotten now, was a writer, journalist and social commentator who mixed caustic with clever, often with keen insights and sometimes mixed results.

In this commentary, which came from the same Newsfront broadcast as yesterday's Milton Friedman entry (May 5,1968), she talks about the then-current state of dissent in our country. The peaceful versus violent protests that were sweeping the U.S. at the time (end destined to get much worse as the year went on), and where youth was fitting into the picture.

Bear in mind that Mannes was born in 1904, and at the time of this commentary she was 64. So there is a goodly amount of "generation gap" to sift through. But the thing that I noticed, and something many people were concerned with at the time, was the seeming co-opting of peaceful anti-war protest by a violent minority.

Sound familiar? This was something that plagued the Peace Movement in the 1960's, and something which has confronted just about every movement of this kind throughout history. The strong desire to keep the Occupy Movement peaceful has been in large part a desire not to fall into the patterns of the past - breaking with the protest movements that have gone on before and trying something new. Which is why OWS has been successful and continues to gain momentum - not because of it's violence on the parts of the protesters, but because of the peace and non-violence of the protesters. The violence has been perpetrated by the Police, and not a reaction of the police to violent actions. Of course, our mainstream media has chosen to focus, as it always has, on violence because it largely feels that chaos is more attractive to viewers.

Every movement has had its fair share of malcontents, chaos merchants and infiltrators. There are people who simply want to disrupt and destroy for no other reason than that they can.They have been largely isolated and shunned by the peaceful majority and that most likely will continue in the coming weeks and months.

But it hasn't always been that way. And this commentary by a respected member of the Fourth Estate gives some idea of what people were thinking at the time.

Reference points are always good to have now and then.

With all the accusations of Socialism being bandied around the past few years, I thought it would be interesting (or at least informative) to hear a Candidate from The Socialist Labor Party, Henning Blomen, who was running for President in 1968. Back when the playing field was rather awash with all kinds of Third Parties, the Socialist Labor Party was perhaps one of the more obscure. Having been around since 1890 and not really getting the notoriety that many of the comparable parties did, they still kept it together (and are, by all appearances still together) and ran candidates in all the major elections.

Apparently Henning Blomen was a pretty obscure figure, even as Socialists go. There is virtually no film footage of him and this is about the only recording I have heard of him making a campaign speech, even though he ran for Governor of Massachusetts some 14 times. A barn-burner it's not, and since it was a "paid political announcement" there didn't seem to be much money in the coffers to lay out for anything more than a four minute pitch. In any event, this is history and this is what the Third Party Movement was up to in 1968.

The name Laura Nyro probably doesn't ring that many bells with people today. Not like it did say, twenty or thirty years ago when she was riding the crest of a very big wave of singer-songwriters who had established careers on both sides of the fence; that of the performer and that of the writer for other performers. Nyro's work probably did as much to enhance the careers of others as it did her own. Her death in 1997 at the age of 49 robbed the music world of a unique and insightful voice that has remained for the most part timeless.

Here is a rare program originally run on NET from November, 1968 which features a short interview with Nyro as well as her manager David Geffen as well as Nyro performing solo while others remark on her work. The host is former CBS Newsman and host of the TV Game Show "What's My Line?" John Daly, who seems a bit mystified with popular culture of the time, and for all intents and purposes seems rather proud of that fact.

The remarks by the "critics" are annoying, tending to portray Nyro as something of a wounded bird or Savant - but this was the state of music criticism at the time, particularly with regards to women. Can't get around the misogyny, even though the music itself was bigger than the pigeon hole.

That's just the way it was and small wonder the Women's Movement came about a short time later.

Since we're coming to the end of a year and the end of a decade, I thought taking a look at the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson and the turbulent times surrounding it might be a good idea.

Here is a look back at the Johnson years, as presented by NBC Radio and their Second Sunday series, broadcast on January 1969, as Richard Nixon assumed the White House.

Opinions on Johnson as President were sharply divided as much as everything else in the country at the time. In that respect, there are striking similarities between then and now with very little in the way of "middle-ground" opinions it seems.

So in case you were wondering if the country has always been divided over a leader and an administration's policies. I'm here to tell you it's always been that way.

I guess we just have to get used to it.

Happy New Year.

As tastes and technology began to change, the old bastions of youth culture started to slowly fade. Pop Culture and rock n' roll were synonymous with AM radio ever since the early 1950's. The reason was rather simple - Radio was undergoing a huge change in its audience, as TV crept into every home in America and was becoming abandoned as the primary source of entertainment. Much of what had been popular on radio since the 1930's simply transformed itself to television, leaving Radio stranded and looking for an audience as well as ad revenue. When Rock n' Roll came to light, it found a tailor made goldmine with AM radio because a: most adults were too busy with TV to notice and b: every American car had an AM radio. It was perfect and it stayed perfect for the better part of two decades.

And then music changed. Albums were replacing singles and longer cuts became impractical for formats structured around the two minute cut. Coupled with the spreading popularity of FM which, up until 1968 was broadcasting primarily for the high-end Audiofile crowd or simulcasting the AM counterparts of stations who owned both AM and FM stations, and the auto industry who were now installing FM radios as standard equipment, the writing was on the wall for AM radio as a center of Youth Culture.

In 1968 one of the most popular rock radio stations in Los Angeles, KFWB, was sold and the new owner was eager to dump the music format in exchange for all news (a new concept at the time). So on March 11th, KFWB played their last batch of 45's and bid a teary-eyed farewell to one part of music history before the next one popped up weeks later; FM Underground.

Here are the last 40 minutes of that broadcast as it happened on the evening of March 11, 1968.

Always evolving. Strangely, KFWB just dropped their all-News format in favor of another format; talk-radio.

(Hoyt Axton - gave the world The Pusher)

Tonight's installment of the Chronicles heads over to Pasadena during the early months of 1968 when B. Mitchell Reed and Tom Donohue tinkered with that new thing called "FM Freeform". Like the transformation of popular culture on San Francisco airwaves via KSAN and KMPX, KPPC was originally owned by the Pasadena Presbyterian Church and didn't do a whole lot with it. That is, until some enterprising folks decided it would make the perfect launching platform for a new age of radio broadcasting. And KPPC came into being. A riotous freeform radio station where anything went and no format was adhered to. It was, for all intents and purposes, a great time.

As witness this half hour impromptu concert by local folk hero Hoyt Axton, who dropped in on Reed during his afternoon shift and played a few tunes. One of the interesting sidelights is the fact that Axton plays The Pusher, a song which brought lots of attention to Steppenwolf when they recorded it and it was featured on the soundtrack to Easy Rider, but Axton wasn't to officially record his version until the 1970's. So this little concert predates that and, aside from some of the technical glitches, offers a pretty fascinating glimpse into radio, the singer-songwriter and the general goofiness of the time.

All good fun - all gone too quickly. But popular culture is just like that.