Tim Anderson

“Still Rudge worried. He worried like a campaign manager with a candidate to protect. He worried like a Secret Service man, assigned to guard the president. The week before the tour, his worries centered on the Palladium gig in L.A. The Hollywood Palladium is the home of Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers, a-one and a-two, a low, conventional-looking, L.A. stucco building that accommodates about forty-five hundred people for a rock concert. Over fifteen thousand letters requesting sixty thousand tickets to the Palladium concert were received. The Stones specified they wanted to play the hall because it is a smaller place, with some feeling to it, a welcome break from the antiseptic hockey arenas and sports stadiums they would be playing in most cities. But the Palladium has a history of easy access, of broken-in doors for Alice Cooper concerts, and bikers cruising on the street. It is a place kids can get next to and hang out around, and even a little girl I pick up hitchhiking on Ventura Boulevard tells me, “The Palladium, man? I know there’s going to be a riot there. That’s a walk-in concert. Everyone’s goin to that one, ticket or no ticket.”
― Robert Greenfield, S.t.p.: A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones

“In the ancient world, cosmogony was a therapeutic rather than a factual genre. People recited creation myths at a sickbed, at the start of a new project, or at the beginning of a new year – whenever they felt the need for an infusion of the divine potency that had, somehow, brought all things into being.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography

“The Strip is America’s main street of hype and promotion, where Dick Clark and Phil Spector are acros the-street neighbors, and Tower Records, which bills itself as “the largest record store in the known world,” is the closest thing to a true community center L.A. has.”
― Robert Greenfield, S.t.p.: A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones

“Cyrus fulfilled his promise. Towards the end of 539, a few months after his coronation, a small party of exiles set out for Jerusalem. Most of the Israelites chose to stay in Babylon, where they would make an important contribution to the Hebrew scriptures. The returning exiles brought home nine scrolls that traced the history of their people from the creation until their deportation: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings; they also brought anthologies of the oracles of the prophets (neviim) and a hymn book, which included new psalms composed in Babylon. It was still not complete, but the exiles had in their possession the bare bones of the Hebrew Bible.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography