The First Time We Met The Blues is ancient history. It was a much simpler time, a less stressful time, a time before cynicism took over, a time before politicians and public figures felt the public trust was a resource to be mined and ravaged.
The First Time is a story of the Sixties. It was a time when the stars aligned, as Rado and Ragni said; it couldn’t have happened at any other time. That alignment theme has been brought up many times in many situations, and there’s no other explanation for it. The Sixties was a time when people actually tried to do something for the Earth, rather than to the Earth. When people banded together for what they saw as positive change, change for the good of mankind, rather than the good of one man. And this book is part of it.
The very early Sixties was a time when the world was just beginning to pull away from the empty pockets, the rationing, doing without, of war and postwar, for the first time in the twentieth century. First it was the Spanish-American War, then World War One, then the Great Depression, then War in Europe, then World War Two, then the Korean War. Sixty years, three entire generations of virtually nonstop rationing in one form or another.
We were just beginning to see that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
People had a little money, a little time not required to put food on the table, and a lot of hope. The music of the twentieth century saw first the end of the Flapper Era, then the end of Blues, then the end of Big Band, and then the end of the saccharine sound. Suddenly it was the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll (and the folk-blues resurgence), and it was like the spring that follows a horrendous winter, people digging out from under the onslaught.
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