There are some concerts that are by definition musical history, and I happened to see one of them last night — Hot Tuna acoustic at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. Hot Tuna consist of two members of the former Jefferson Airplane — guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Cassady — as well as multi-instrumentalist Barry Mitterhof, and one guest worth a whole article who I’ll identify as soon as my phone rings. This was a moment of living history: of seeing, feeling and partaking in a fully vital American folk music tradition. This would have been considered a hot concert in 1860, except for one thing: people would have been dancing.
Living tradition is the image of Mercury [slowing down toward retrograde] in Capricorn. You might say it’s good for the holiday season; we can pray that it will bring something authentic to all of our mostly-dead traditions; the ones that annoy so many people with their lurking sense of obligation and doing everything in automatic mode. For example, instead of putting lights on your Xmas tree, you might want to take it outside and light it on fire — the original tree-based, light-oriented symbol of transformation and renewal that is so central to the actual traditions of our current time of year.
If you really want to go for doing something old timey, you can invite over a few hundred of your friends and throw a party for the original “Christmas before Jesus,” Saturnalia, which was celebrated by the Romans from Dec. 17 to Dec. 25. “The festival [included] similar customs (gift giving, feasting) that are done to celebrate Christmas today,” say our friends at Wikipedia, using forensic evidence to explain the existence of the shopping holiday. “Another argument is that Christmas was set on the feast of Sol Invictus, which was also on Dec. 25.”