The entire building was being consumed by flames and was slowly collapsing. Nothing would survive. Out of the rubble of the old world jumped the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, ripping the white and blue stripes off the French flag. Yet, the socialist revolution was more mythic than real and music did nothing to mitigate people's behavior. It was time for innovation. While singles from the Stones, Who, Kinks and MC5 provided an incendiary soundtrack for the revolution, it was Black Americans who truly blew the world from its foundations in the '60s. Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, and Archie Shepp left behind the jazz of their fathers' generation, liberating the notes, trashing the structures, diving headfirst into furious improvisations, inventing a new land without boundaries -- neither spiritual nor political. For 20 year olds in the early 1970s, making music was a political act; they grabbed a microphone to advance a cause, not to become rock stars. While the price of oil skyrocketed and Pompidou went overboard building horrible concrete apartment buildings for public housing and "adapting the city for the automobile," some took refuge in the countryside. Alternative communities formed all across France, giving rise to groups (or rather, collectives) with open-minded structures, cheerfully mixing music, theatrical happenings and agitprop, along with a good dose of acid. Projects bordering on the ridiculous were often tolerated (progressive rock was one of the primary banalities the era produced)! Double LP version, comes in a gatefold sleeve. 1968, in France!