Hippies vs. Punks: Bobby Hutcherson's San Francisco

For the last month I've been listening to a lot of Bobby Hutcherson; mostly the recordings from his hard bop/post-bop heyday, albums like Dialogue (1965), Oblique (1967) and Head On (1971). These are complex records. But I don't think I am drawn to them because of an appetite for complexity. I think I have been immersing myself in Hutcherson because he is a virtuoso of the vibraphone.

The vibraphone is considered a percussion instrument. It is a xylophone equipped with resonator tubes which create a warm vibrato. It hums and hovers and blankets. And for some reason I need a lot of blanketing lately.

I am at the endpoint with my job: the toxic emotional environment of the secretarial bullpen, the ever-increasing workload, the three-hour daily commute. It has been this way for a while. Like a frog sitting in a pan of water placed on a lit burner, one tends to stay put until it is too late.

For the last year I have been planning to run the Bay to Breakers with my father. The spring of 1976, when I was in the sixth grade, my father, a friend of his named Jim Hall and I were on our way up to San Francisco to run the race when the engine to the family auto blew. The car was a Chevy Vega, infamous for its easily cracked aluminum engine block. We never made it to the race.

Nineteen-seventy-six, as I have explored in a previous Hippies vs. Punks post, is when my nuclear family fractured. The events -- the failure to run the Bay to Breakers, the disintegration of my parents' marriage -- are only incidentally connected, part of the same temporal womb. My idea, as proposed to my father, was that we should "journey back to past" and remedy our failure. So this past weekend we ran the Bay to Breakers.

In preparation for my trip down to the Bay Area, since I was listening to a lot of Bobby Hutcherson anyway, I decide to download his brilliant but modest flirtation with fusion, San Francisco.

Recorded in the all-important year of 1970, and released in 1971, San Francisco's success is its light touch. Two tracks that have the strongest rock/rhythm-&-blues elements are the lead cut "Goin' South" and "Ummh."

"Ummh" was so successful it earned Hutcherson enough money to buy an acre of land in San Mateo County upon which he erected his homestead where he lives to this day. "Ummh" has that urban corner bar "people are just people" populist fusion vibe that was ever-present in the early- to mid-1970s. (Think the theme song to Barney Miller.)

But my favorite cuts on San Francisco are "Prints Tie" and "Procession."

San Francisco is a beautiful city. The Bay to Breakers is an incredible race. You have the world-class athletes leading the way followed by a circus -- serious runners, weekend runners, joggers, shufflers, drunks and party people, nudists, walkers. The long march up Hayes Hill is a combination Mardi Gras and road race. People were dancing in the streets, amplifiers piled on the sidewalk blasting early hip-hop and house music.

Anyhow, I hit a wall at mile five and had to muscle my way through the rest of the course, which was through Golden Gate Park, before crossing the finish line with the waves of the Pacific breaking on a beach within eye-shot. Mission accomplished. Journey to the past completed.

But the past wasn't really present, and neither was the future. Really only the present was present, and that imperfectly so. Which in the end is our human condition.