Arts & Manners: Wowing ’em at Carnegie Hall

Rock music, land sakes’ alive, in Carnegie Hall; red-plushed, carpeted, chandeliered Carnegie Hall, where dead great musicians frown down from rows and rows of pictures: so run the twitters nowadays, here and there in the public prints. Why not—and so what? It’s been going on, actually, a long time—since 1964 when the Beatles, those tweakers of ah but doters on the Establishment, chose Carnegie for their first appearance in the United States. Or, mutatis mutandis, since nineteen-fifty-something, when the fellowtraveling Weavers sang folk music in Carnegie Hall, or 1938 when Benny Goodman played jazz in Carnegie Hall.

The rock audiences behave well enough—they shrug when an insufficiently concealed bottle of Ripple Red is confiscated at the gate, and when the Establishment waves its flashlights, they stomp out their joints. (The Carnegie management has hit upon an ingenious way of keeping order: They employ, in addition to the usual renta-cops, large numbers of middle-aged Negroes in quiet suits, and white liberal guilt does the rest.)

CS

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C. H. Simonds

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Rock music, land sakes’ alive, in Carnegie Hall; red-plushed, carpeted, chandeliered Carnegie Hall, where dead great musicians frown down from rows and rows of pictures: so run the twitters nowadays, here and there in the public prints. Why not—and so what? It’s been going on, actually, a long time—since 1964 when the Beatles, those tweakers of ah but doters on the Establishment, chose Carnegie for their first appearance in the United States. Or, mutatis mutandis, since nineteen-fifty-something, when the fellowtraveling Weavers sang folk music in Carnegie Hall, or 1938 when Benny Goodman played jazz in Carnegie Hall.

The rock audiences behave well enough—they shrug when an insufficiently concealed bottle of Ripple Red is confiscated at the gate, and when the Establishment waves its flashlights, they stomp out their joints. (The Carnegie management has hit upon an ingenious way of keeping order: They employ, in addition to the usual renta-cops, large numbers of middle-aged Negroes in quiet suits, and white liberal guilt does the rest.)