#fred turner

[womandust]

Vintage Beef: Randy Bachman and Fred Turner from Bachman Turner Overdrive

Love how they fill out those tight 70s-style shirts! 😍

[krispyweiss]

Bachman-Turner Overdrive Co-founder Tim Bachman Dies at 71

Tim Bachman, the guitarist and singer who co-founded Bachman-Turner Overdrive with his brothers Randy (guitar) and Robbie (drums) and bassist Fred Turner, has died.

Randy Bachman confirmed his brother’s death through his manager, the Toronto Star reports.

Tim Bachman was 71 when he died April 28; no cause of death was given.

The guitarist appeared on BTO’s 1973 LPs Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Bachman-Turner Overdrive II, for which he wrote “Down and Out Man,” “Blown” and “I Don’t Have to Hide.”

Tim Bachman left the band in 1974 but returned for a reunion tour a decade later. After leaving music behind, he worked as a realtor.

4/30/23

[visfar-the-101]

Bachman-Turner Overdrive

[rainingmusic]

Bachman-Turner Overdrive - Let It Ride

[beautifulcinephile]

Bachman Turner Overdrive is a band that deserves more love.

[temporal-index]

Race relations echoed patterns found elsewhere in the counterculture. Virtually all of the back-to-the-landers were white, and most were under thirty years of age, well-educated, socially privileged, and financially stable. Explicit prejudice against African Americans or other people of color would have been unwelcome on almost all communes. In fact, by the late 1960s, more than a few New Communalists, like some on the New Left, saw themselves as social revolutionaries. “We are very much like the Vietcong,” explained Bill Wheeler, who founded Wheeler’s Ranch in California’s Sonoma County. “We are a form of guerilla warfare and we’re going to take our losses.” At the same time, however, very few nonwhites took part in the New Communalist migrations of the time, and those who did were often as well-educated and well-off as their white counterparts. Throughout the New Communalist movement, it was far more common for young, white, highly mobile hippies to find their interests in conflict with those of the comparatively impoverished and immobile populations of Hispanics and African Americans among whom they often settled. As communes sprang up around Taos, New Mexico, for example, realtors celebrated the hippie-driven rise in land values while other local residents seethed. William Hedgepeth recalled watching a long-time Hispanic resident tell some new, white arrivals, “You see the scenery. We see a battleground.” By the summer of 1969, teachers in the Taos public schools had banded together to write an anti-hippie resolution decrying the commune-dwellers’ “excesses in drug addiction, sexual immorality, obscene behavior ...and public exhibitions of perversion and licentiousness.” As this resolution suggests, part of the problem was simply that hippies brought with them an alien code of behavior. In addition, though, their arrival tapped into memories of very old patterns of colonization and migration. A Chicano member of New Mexico’s Reality Construction Company commune told a visiting reporter, “Every time a white hippie comes in and buys a Chicano’s land to escape the fuckin’ city, he sends that Chicano to the city to go through what he’s trying to escape from, can you dig it? What can you do with that bread out here, man? Nothing. Then when that money’s gone, see, the Chicano has to stay in the city, cause now he ain’t got no land to come back to. He’s stuck, and the hippie’s free. That’s why they don’t dig the fuckin’ hippies, man.” And yet, in their own minds at least, the New Communalists were not simply colonizers. They may have bought up lands that formerly belonged to farmers and laborers, and they may have appropriated what they imagined to be working-class styles of manual labor and associated values of craft; but above all, they saw themselves as well-equipped refugees from technocracy. Drawing on the education, money, and technological savvy provided by the American mainstream and, less self-consciously, on its frontier mythology, they aimed to build communities that not only would serve as alternatives to a buttoned-down society, but would ultimately save that society from itself.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) 

[temporal-index]

The urge to “hack” politics by bringing governance down to a manageable local level and by basing social integration on technologically facilitated forms of consciousness was one of the driving impulses behind the New Communalist movement. Now, however, the old hammer-and-saw wielding, do-it-yourself ethos of the back-to-the-landers had been fused to the craft ethic of computer programmers. Much as Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues had done at the Hacker’s Conference of 1984, Quittner and Dyson joined the cultural legitimacy of the counterculture to the technological and economic legitimacy of the computer industry. Married to a libertarian longing for the reduction of government, Dyson’s Internet became an idealized political sphere in the image of the forms of organization pursued by the Merry Pranksters, USCO, and many communes— forms in which authority was distributed, hierarchies were leveled, and citizens were linked by invisible energies. The Internet became both a metaphor for such a system and a means to bring it into being.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)

[temporal-index]

They allowed former New Communalists to transfer their longings for a communal home to the same large-scale technologies that characterized the cold war technocracy they had sought to undermine. Fantasies of a shared, transcendent consciousness gave way to dreams of technologically enabled collaboration in friction-free space. Within a decade, these fantasies would reappear in the rhetoric of cyberspace and the electronic frontier, and as they did, they would help structure public perceptions of computer networking technology. But in the late 1970s, they marked the final breakdown of the New Communalist movement. The communes of the late 1960s were almost all long gone. And neither the soft-technology wing of CQ’s readership nor those who dreamed of traveling to space would see their socio-technical visions survive the decade. By 1979 space colonies remained little more than an elaborate fantasy. The soft-technology movement left a more widespread legacy. By the end of the decade, even urban Americans tried to conserve energy and to recycle their waste. Even as many of the movement’s conservationist ideals persisted, though, the hope that small-scale technologies might lead their users into utopian communion with one another vanished from public view.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)