Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Asher

Asher’s shrugging half-compliment is doing the classic musician move: puncturing the myth while keeping the feeling intact. He’s talking about live shows that were supposedly “brilliant,” then immediately undercutting the adjective with an engineer’s reality check: nobody could hear much anyway. That little pivot turns nostalgia into something more credible. It suggests the era’s reputation wasn’t built on pristine sound or technical excellence; it was built on volume, chaos, proximity, and the sheer novelty of youth culture discovering its own mass power.

The aside - “so perhaps it did not matter!” - is the key. It’s funny, but it also smuggles in a thesis about how pop history gets made. In scenes like early-60s rock, the audience isn’t buying fidelity; they’re buying belonging. If the PA system was muddy and the screams drowned the band, that wasn’t a failure of performance so much as evidence that the performance had tipped into event. The crowd becomes the instrument. “Nobody could hear” reads like a complaint, but it’s also an accidental boast: the hysteria was the point.

Then Asher lands on the sentence that matters most: “It was certainly a very exciting time for us all.” The “us all” widens the frame from band and fans to a whole cohort riding the same wave. He’s not claiming genius; he’s claiming participation. That modesty is strategic - it protects the memory from the slickness of legend while preserving what made it historically potent: not perfection, but ignition.