To someone who never lived through them, it's probably hard to try to wrap your brain around the sheer tonnage of cultural experimentation taking place in the U.S. during the 1960s.  Nothing it seemed was being taken for granted, almost as though artists across the land had made it their singular mission to try to re-imagine every last aspect of American pop culture, especially music.

And the epicenter of all that experimentation was, of course, New York's Greenwich Village, which at the time was not only a hotbed of jazz, an art form that had at its very core, experimentation, but also the country's exploding folk scene.

As an outgrowth of that Greenwich Village stew of jazz, folk and even vague hints of rock, a group calling itself Circus Maximus emerged, having traveled up to that neighborhood in lower Manhattan from Austin, Texas, where they'd first met and formed.  Bob Bruno, a young jazz pianist, had crossed paths with four other like-minded players, including a young guitarist/recovering pop star named Ronny Crosby.  Months earlier, Crosby had relocated to Texas from Upstate New York and reinvented himself as a wandering folk troubadour calling himself Jerry Jeff Walker.

Bruno had been playing piano since the age of five and had, literally, been hanging around jazz clubs his entire life.

Walker, on the other hand, played ukulele as a kid, and in time formed a garage band in his hometown of Oneonta, in the foothills of New York's Catskill Mountains. Though Walker's band was good enough to score an unsuccessful audition on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, rock and pop were not really his cup of tea.  Over time he'd fallen in love with country and folk, and knew that's where he wanted to focus his creative energies.

So in 1967, when Bruno, Walker and Circus Maximus pulled up stakes, moved to Greenwich Village, and went into the studio to record the first of two albums, what they came out with was an offbeat, uneven, but occasionally inspired hybrid of jazz and folk.

Around the same time all this musical cross-pollination was out there percolating in the U.S., something nearly as interesting was taking place in the world of radio. The long-underutilized FM band, with its rich, full, static-free sound, started to slowly give rise to hundreds of non-commercial, "underground" stations, notably in college towns like Berkeley and Austin.

And the music the hosts on such stations played was the stuff most Top 40 stations wouldn't touch, the gumbo being offered up by such new, edgy groups as the Fugs, Holy Modal Rounders and Circus Maximus.  And one of the first (and only) national "hits" of that era was a song penned by Bruno called Wind, which proved particularly popular in New York and a handful of West Coast markets.

Wind featured an infectious jazz hook, some too-cool-for-school vocals by Bruno himself, and a few bars of free-form, almost atonal improvisational guitar and piano. It maintained, however, the unmistakable sound and feel of a folk tune, which made it perfect for an era whose iconography included such legendary folkies as Bob Dylan, Tim Harden, Joan Baez and Barry Maguire.

In part, because it clocked in at just over eight minutes, Wind never came close to charting as a single. It also remained out of print for a four decades before finally re-appearing on a reissue CD in 2007.

Nevertheless, for many children of the Sixties, Wind was and remains to this day both a touchstone of their lives and an essential building block of the desert island jukebox of their now sadder-but-wiser souls.

Because just like any magic carpet ride of youth, the song has managed to maintain its uncanny ability, despite the passing of the years, to transport those of a certain age to a simpler place and time, when life was defined less by the choices they'd already made, and more by the possibilities that still lie ahead of them.

So with that, please, sit back, turn up the volume, and enjoy our Song of the Day for Tuesday, November 2, 2010...Wind by Circus Maximus.

Song:  "Wind"
Group: Circus Maximus
Composer: Bob Bruno
Year Released:  1967