Thursday, December 13, 2012

Hey Hippies! Ravi was just not that much into your indulgences!

The Telegraph:
Until Ravi Shankar, most people in the West were familiar with Indian music – if at all – only as background noise in establishments with flock wallpaper, and would not have been in a position to discern the fine distinction between a morning raga and evening one, or even know whether in Shankar they were listening to a virtuoso or a rank beginner. 

But Shankar could be a fastidious man. The rock audiences who came to pay homage he haughtily dismissed in his autobiography as “these strange young weirdos”; while his appearances at the Monterey and Woodstock festivals – the great quasi-religious gatherings of the alternative society – were apparently painful ordeals, where the audiences were “shrieking, shouting, smoking, masturbating and copulating – all in a drug-crazed state… I used to tell them, 'You don’t behave like that when you go to hear a Bach, Beethoven or Mozart concert.’” Quite.
 Here is the master: 


R.I.P.

No comments: