Hippies vs. Punks: The Damnation of Adam Blessing

Last Friday I had to take a rain check on the Hippies vs. Punks post. I was wiped out. The loss of Daylight Savings combined with my daily three-hour commute has sent me reeling. My training regimen has largely disappeared; subsequently, my conditioning is on the wane. It will be interesting to see how I perform at a Thanksgiving 10K turkey trot. I anticipate a lot of suffering.

For last Friday's post I had intended to return to the Cincinnati Pop Festival of 1970 to look at another band on the undercard of that show. The Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of 1970 is remembered because the entire 14-hour show was filmed by WLWT (Channel 5) and then edited down to 90 minutes and broadcast nationally in August as Midsummer Rock. The iconic image that remains from that event is Iggy Pop's crowd surfing to "T.V. Eye" and "1970."

The Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of 1970 took place at Crosley Field on June 13, 1970 a couple weeks before the Reds moved to Riverfront Stadium and a month after the nation's campuses burned as a result of the Kent State shootings. Nineteen-seventy is an important year for the Hippie. The more time I spend on Hippies vs. Punks the more I realize it is the high-water mark for the Hippies, a time when revolution seemed inevitable.

I have looked at a couple of other bands who performed at the Cinci Pop Festival -- Texas Hippies Bloodrock, and Alice Cooper when they were still with Frank Zappa's avant-garde Straight Records label. Originally I had intended to focus on The Damnation of Adam Blessing but opted for Bloodrock instead because full albums are available on YouTube; for the Damnation of Adam Blessing there are only individual songs, mostly from the 1969 eponymous debut.

The Damnation of Adam Blessing was a Cleveland Acid Rock band that played second fiddle to the James Gang. To form the group guitarist Jim Quinn and lead singer Adam Blessing née Bill Constable originally of the garage band the Society recruited Bob Kalamasz, Ray Benich and Bill Schwark of Dust.

(The damnation or curse of Adam refers to God's punishment of Adam and Eve for eating of the apple: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and . . . By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground,” Genesis 3:17-19. Adam's curse, that he has to toil, is also his blessing -- his labor.)

The Damnation of Adam Blessing put out a total of four albums: The Damnation of Adam Blessing (1969); Second Damnation (1970); Which is the Justice Which is the Thief (1971) under the shortened band name of Damnation; and finally Glory (1973) under the band name Glory.

The first two albums along with the final album can be downloaded in MP3 format from Amazon. I listened to the first two albums repeatedly all of last week. They're excellent. I prefer them to the first James Gang record, Yer' Album (1969). (Yer' Album is noteworthy because it captures the "Classic Rock" avalanche to come over the next few years, the one that buries the Hippies.)

The sound of the The Damnation of Adam Blessing and Second Damnation is Acid Rock, what rock 'n' roll was before it lost its social revolutionary component and coagulated into "Hard Rock," and then into what is now referred to as Classic Rock. This transformation takes place starting in 1971 and ends when the Punks knock the Hippies off in the late 1970s.

Now buildings are being bulldozed by the thousands in industrial heartland cities like Detroit and Cleveland and urban forests are springing up in St. Louis. Cleveland is allowing people to raise sheep, pigs and goats in residential areas. Looking back on 1970 and listening to the Acid Rock of Second Damnation (my favorite Damnation of Adam Blessing record, particularly the track "In the Morning") what one sees (and hears) is the zenith of the Hippies but also a farewell to post-war American industrial stability.