Showing posts with label Joe Cocker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Cocker. Show all posts

Thursday, 15 February 2018

THE BEANS & THE HIPPIE MOVEMENT IN SAN FRANCISCO

Paqui Bean ready to enjoy Hippie lifestyle
Today, The Beans have been working some new aspects of the English grammar like Used to and Object Pronouns

The family is a little tired because of the rythm of the trips. They are doing exceptional efforts but they are hard workers and exceptional students and they are doing a great job.

More information: Used to 1, 2 and 3

The family has decided to stay in the hotel and talk about the history of the city that they are going to visit deeply during the next days. San Francisco is a city with a huge history, a great referent in all kind of social movements and the city where the Hippie movement born in the 60's like a peaceful movement against war policies.

The Beans have been talking about the importance of this movement not only for the history of the USA but for the universal history because it was a mirror for other countries and communities.

More information: Object Pronouns

If you talk about the Hippie movement, you must remember incredible voices and composers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimmi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Scott McKenzie, Jefferson Airplane and others. An exceptional generation of great artists who expanded the global message of peace and love around the planet.

Salvador Dalí, a genius of painting
The Grandma has also talked about the influence of the drugs in this movement, particularly, and how drugs have been used by the power to stop social movements and to control them. 

It has been a very hard moment because this is a theme that affects everybody in some senses and everyone of us has a closer experience to tell, to remember and sometimes, to forget.

Finally, the family has been talking about some important artists and writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Mercè Rodoreda, Agatha Christie, Federico Garcia Lorca, Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández.

More information: Cambrige 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

A hippie is a member of a counterculture, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The term hippie first found popularity in San Francisco by Herb Caen, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jimmi Hendrix & Janis Joplin
The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana, LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.

In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, popularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. 

Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. 

More information: All That Interesting

Hippies enjoying life in the 60's
In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people. In later years, mobile peace convoys of New Age travelers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere.

In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass

Piedra Roja Festival, a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970. Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s young culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe.

More information: The Culture Trip

Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a larger audience.


The hippie movement politicized my generation. 
When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history,  
looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion. 

Vivienne Westwood

Thursday, 22 December 2016

JOE COCKER: WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

Joe Cocker
Today, The Grandma is still visiting Vienna. The Christmas Markets are very popular in the city and she's buying some presents, especially, music and books. In a little old stand, The Grandma has bought an exclusive single of Joe Cocker's With a little help from my friends. Two years ago, in a day like today, Joe Cocker left us but we continue enjoying his beautiful music and his broken voice.

John Robert Cocker (20 May 1944–22 December 2014) was an English singer and musician. He was known for his gritty voice, spasmodic body movement in performance and definitive versions of popular songs.

Cocker was born on 20 May 1944 at 38 Tasker Road, Crookes, Sheffield. He was the youngest son of a civil servant, Harold Cocker, and Madge Cocker, née Lee. According to differing family stories, Cocker received his nickname of Joe either from playing a childhood game called Cowboy Joe, or from a local window cleaner named Joe.
More information: Joe Cocker Official Site

Cocker entered the big time with a groundbreaking rearrangement of With a Little Help from My Friends, another Beatles cover, which, many years later, was used as the opening theme for The Wonder Years.

Joe Cocker's single cover
In 1982, at the behest of producer Stewart Levine, Cocker recorded the duet Up where we belong with Jennifer Warnes for the soundtrack of the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. The song was an international hit, reaching number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and winning a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo. The duet also won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, and Cocker and Warnes performed the song at the awards ceremony.
 
In 1993 Cocker was nominated for the Brit Award for Best British Male, in 2007 was awarded a bronze Sheffield Legends plaque in his hometown and in 2008 he received an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to music. Cocker was ranked number 97 on Rolling Stone's 100 greatest singers list.


While performing a concert at Madison Square Garden on 17 September 2014, fellow musician Billy Joel stated that Cocker was not very well right now and endorsed Cocker for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before impersonating the singer in a take on With a little help from my friends.

Cocker died from lung cancer on 22 December 2014 in Crawford, Colorado at the age of 70. The two remaining living ex-Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were among those who paid tribute to the singer, while Cocker's agent, Barrie Marshall, said that Cocker was without doubt the greatest rock/soul singer ever to come out of Britain.


 I have one message for young musicians around the world: Stay true to your heart, believe in yourself, and work hard.

Joe Cocker