He's lived in Santa Monica for quite some time but former sun-never-sets folk-rock guitarist-singer Richard Thompson made a British-type point in an anecdote he told among several in a, well, British magazine.

On an American tour he was in as a member of Fairport Convention in 1970 he spoke of the "suits versus hippies" atmosphere of the time, which some of us remember and not under a "Happy Days" layer of Lethe icing. The band were having coffee at the airport in Detroit when they heard voices snarling about damned hippies and get a haircut-big-girly. They turned to see their verbal assailants were none other than Buck Owens and the Buckaroos.

Darn, thought Mr. Thompson, I have so many of your albums!

The British have always appreciated the puzzling mixes going into styles (social as well as musical and oft interwoven) which now we appreciate with somewhat fewer jarring social encounters. As Thompson loved the leads of Formica-counter cee 'n double-you, another fine guitarist, Albert Lee, used to puzzle many stateside country players at that time when as a lank-haired English squire type he approached them about the Fender amps and general playing styles which crawled under the hard-rockers thundering city scapes of Marshall amps like subversives under frontier barbed wire.

A few of us have said many long-ago Conway Twitty and Owens tracks, among others, actually are more interesting to us with their "hybrid" power than, oh sacrilege, the Elvis Sun recordings. And often made by guys who acted and looked the part (yeah, right, Mentor says!) of the parochial Boys Dean Of Discipline's favorite informer.

Music has been said to be spiritual. Yes, whatever. More often when it's good it is brutally sociological.