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great pleasure to root talk with katherine who is roaming around our great nation promoting her new book. then schaede the way we talk about abortion rights today and changing hearts and minds. i went like to invite her to read for a bit then we will have a discussion if there is time we will take a few questions from the audience. . .ere on this beautiful but rather warm day. i am going to read the introduction to this book which is called pro: reclaiming abortion rights because it gives you a taste of what is to come in the book. i never had an abortion, but my mother did. she did not tell me about it, but from what i pieced together after her death from all line in her fbi file, which my father, the old radical, had requested along with his own color it was in 1960. so like almost all abortions back then, it was illegal. the agent to counter file wrote that she was in the care of the physician for gun logical problems below which i like to think was his chivalrous ....
liberation movement, bound up in music such as glam rock, david bowie, lou reed, bound up in disco. as we said, in a sense, that music was inherently political. something that the really vicious anti-disco campaign drove home. so it seems to me we ve started building the idea that post- 60s, american music still is politicized, still is engaged but in a different way, a way that rejected, as we saw with david bowie or we saw with hoople, that rejected countercultural rock. that s where i want to go today in talking, as i promised, about issues of women in popular music in the 1970s. we ve already dealt with this before in thinking about the very limited place accorded to women in popular music as a business, as performers really with the idea that women couldn t place instruments, that they could only sing. we ve seen that s deeply embedded in western culture, western ideas. and yet this is a period in the 1970s of real change in thinking about women. so there s an oppo ....
energy from to do all this. and the only thing that i can really say is i look at the world through the eyes of my children. and i have to i personally have to make it better for me. and i have to make it better for my wife, and i have to make the world better for my kids. my firstborn son, jackson, a year and a half ago, gave us our first grandchild. and you d better watch out for this one because she s a kick ass. i know every grandfather says the same thing, but she s a stunning woman. my second born son, will, just in the last month found out that him and his wife, shannon, are expecting identical twin boys in july. so i look at the world through the eyes of the future generation. and i ve seen this planet environmentally getting much worse. and i ve seen the world getting much worse. the reason why i m in hawaii was in the late 60s, i used to live in san francisco. and i saw a billboard that said shower with a friend because we re running out of water. okay. f ....
let me see here. we have to change this. uh-oh. i m a very simple man. and i m totally serious about that. i m not a clever musician. i hardly know, you know, anything about the piano or the guitar, but i know what i need to say. and this song is for you all. this is the one i finished at 4:30 in the morning and sang that night. it s called here for you. i m here for you just look at what we ve been through together all these years i m here for you through all the laughter and through all the tears i m by your side through thick and thin we will always be friends i m by your side holding on until the very end day to day i think about our life together with the children and a future that s been born and it would break my heart if we were not together knowing we ll go on and on i m here for you when all the memories that passed i m here for you the love we share is a love that lasts i m here for you thank you. gr ....
just as a kind of baby boomer nostalgia for the days that were. what we ve been trying to deal with is this sense of pervasive disappointment, that the revolution somehow ended in the early 1970 s. the popular music became a disappointment, aesthetically, politically. that s the cliche. we saw plenty of evidence for it. what we ve been trying to do is to say ok. maybe if we shift perspective, maybe if we don t simply buy the assumptions that went into the age of countercultural music, if we do that, we may well see music engaged in a different way. and the way i suggested, the way we ve started out is by saying isn t it the case that popular music in the u.s. in the 1970 s was doing what popular music typically had done well before the 1960 s? which is to mediate relationships between men and women, to mediate notions of gender, to rethink sexuality. and that s where we started last time, with ideas about masculinity. and the way in which there s a radical transformatio ....