BellaOnline Forums Books and Music Classic Rock THE ROLLING STONES and MARTIN LUTHER

In April of 1962, four months before I began my travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha�i community, the Rolling Stones rock band was formed. I had no idea at the time getting ready, as I was, for my grade 12 exams, trying to deal with my embryonic and increasingly turbulent erotic-emotional life and my final year of organized baseball. I did not follow the who�s who of the rock music world back then in my teens, nor did I follow it to any significant extent as my adult life crept on its petty pace from my 20s to my 60s, from 1962 to 2012.

The Rolling Stones have now had half a century of immense success, fame and fortune, since their emergence into international popularity in the sixties. I won�t go into all the details here. Their fans already know much of their story and others can read about it. Wikipedia has an excellent overview at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones

I watched part of the Rolling Stones New York 2008 concert on New Year�s Eve here in Tasmania.1 I realized, yet again, as I watched this now very rich and very successful band, as the new year of 2012 rolled-in, and I approached the age of 70, how far rock-and-roll had been out on the periphery of my life since those not-so-halcyon days of the sixties. -Ron Price with thanks to 1TDT TV: 31/12/�11-1/1/�12, The Shine A Light 2008 Film.

In April of �62 I used to go down to
Toronto on Friday nights to those
youth firesides�..the only ones in
Ontario back then, in that Golden
Horseshoe where my little fire was
kindled for the lifelong flame which
the earth often clouded and water
nearly quenched. The peoples of the
world have been powerless to resist
its force, although they put up a good
fight in that half century with the many
rapid crossfires which rubbed me raw.
But: here I stand as that theologian is
reported to have said five hundred years
ago during that period of great change.1

1 Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. Luther is sometimes quoted as saying: "Here I stand. I can do no other". Recent scholars consider the evidence for these words to be unreliable since they were inserted before "May God help me" only in later versions of one of his speeches and not recorded in witness accounts of that speeches� proceedings.

Roland Herbert Bainton (1894-1984) the British born American Protestant church historian, published Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther in 1950. I had just started primary school and my mother would have her first contact with the Baha�i Faith three years later in the small town of Burlington Ontario. Bainton�s biography of Luther has come to be regarded as a work of accurate scholarship based upon a thorough knowledge of the sources and secondary works. It possesses a vivid, readable literary style and imaginative insights into Luther and the times. I remember reading Here I Stand when I was a student of history and philosophy in my second year of university in Hamilton Ontario: 1964-1965.

Ron Price
2 January 2012
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To me, the Rolling Stones are just a group that cashed in on the success of The Beatles.