I never thought the seventies could ever come back.

For those too young to have experienced that decade, it was a long hangover, a period of cocooning after the twin tragedies of Kent State and the election of Richard Nixon.  "The Movement" was dead.  People retreated to communes.  They began farming.  Life became more about experience than thought.

And now that era looks desirable.  After the greed of the eighties and the tech roller coaster thereafter.  Everybody’s connected.  You can turn off your cell phone, disconnect from the Internet, but you still feel caught up in the craziness of the world.

Until you come to Telluride.

The scenery is positively breathtaking.  I wish everybody could come here once.  Not to be humbled by nature, but to be exhilarated by the mountains and the greenery.  There are vast verdant plateaus 12,000 feet in the air. There’s a waterfall hovering over town that I would think were painted if Strasburg hadn’t ridden his motorcycle and taken pictures up close and personal.

This is the nature I needed to commune with, the one that made me go to college in Vermont.  But now when I go to the mountains…everything’s been brought up to snuff, modernized, as if the past is something to be forgotten.

And that’s how it is in Mountain Village.

But the town of Telluride?  It’s like it was hermetically sealed a hundred years ago, it’s like the miners just left, it’s a living, breathing museum to what once was.  Aspen was similar in the seventies.  Park City was a junior version. But the former was overrun by high end shops and the latter is now so laden with vacation homes, it’s got no soul. But you figure if they shut down the ski area, if they had no festivals, Telluride would still survive, as an outpost for those who just don’t cotton to the city, who don’t want to do it your way, but their way.

You can feel the Phish vibe.  And even though everyone’s tapping on his BlackBerry or iPhone, the late teens and twentysomethings look like my seventies counterparts.  No one’s wearing designer duds.  The women are not painfully thin.  People aren’t put together so much as dressed for life, a good time, with their brethren.

Pockets of people are huddled on the street.  Communing as if they know each other from other Phish shows.  And there’s a constant buzz of friendliness, of everybody being in it together.

Walking the streets, I marveled at what it must be like to be a member of the band.  To get 10,000 people to come to this humble burg just to see YOU!  Then again, when I connected with Mike Gordon in the hotel lobby, he was unlike the TMZ stars, Perez Hilton could take a lesson.  Dressed just like me, in jeans, Mike was soft-spoken and open, like someone you just met at summer camp.  They say it’s about fame, but really it’s about music.  That’s what brought everybody to Telluride.

And, they’re coming from all over the world.  Or at least the U.S.  We rode in the gondola with five residents of Oklahoma.  Two just out of the army, living on unemployment and going to school on the G.I. Bill.  One woman was planning to see six Phish shows in a week.  She wanted to participate.

That’s what’s wrong with the old model.  There’s a gap.  You can buy the music, go to the show, lay out cash for merchandise but you’re still separate from the performer.  Who’s whisked off into the night before you can even leave the building.  That’s show business.

But it’s not rock and roll.

Rock and roll is a communion, a link between player and listener via the music.  A fan wants to meet his hero not to get a story to tell, but to thank the musician for providing so much joy!  There’s respect!

In the seventies, I had two passions.  Skiing and music.  I slid downhill every day, and listened to music every night. It was harder back then.  We had no Internet, we had no iPods.  We sacrificed in order to buy vinyl records.  And we transferred our favorites to cassette, so we could listen in the car when we were out of range of our favorite deejays. The music wasn’t background, rather it was your best buddy, riding shotgun through life.

And now I’m back in the exact same place.  Surrounded by peaks that put a smile on my face as the mellifluous notes remind me it’s fucking great to be alive.