Hippies vs. Punks: The Monkees' Head (1968)

This is an aborted Hippies vs Punks post. My aspiration was that I would subject myself to a painful work-week immersion in one or all four of the Monkees albums that dominated the Billboard 200 charts during the psychedelic year of the Hippie, 1967.

The albums were the Monkees' first four -- the eponymous The Monkees (1966), which was #1 from November 1966 to February 1967; More of the Monkees (1967), which was #1 from February until June; Headquarters (1967), which was #1 for only the week of June 24; and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. (1967), which closed out the year #1 throughout the month of December.

Kids might have been growing their locks long, wearing flowers in their hair, migrating to The Haight to get a taste of free love, but for the great mass musical tastes were in the thrall of jingly garage rock (not) played by four actors hired to star in a half-hour NBC sitcom, The Monkees, which first aired September 1966. The first Monkees album was a promotional tie-in that exceeded expectations and far surpassed the popularity of the television show.

I did a quick audit last night of the annual Billboard 200 lists. I could not find another year that one group or solo artist had four different #1 albums. It appears to be unprecedented

The story is that the first two, besides Micky Dolenz's vocals, were all done with studio musicians from The Wrecking Crew. Members of the Monkees, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork principally, began to complain to management. As a result, the albums beginning with Headquarters began to feature more actual songwriting and instrument-playing by Nesmith, Dolenz, Tork and Davy Jones (tambourine).

This is an aborted post because I couldn't bring myself to purchase any Monkees albums. I had to settle for a Best of the Monkees disk put out by Rhino which I checked out from the public library. But due to a failed CD drive on my laptop I wasn't able to listen to it.

I did watch the super-flop feature film debut of the band, Head (1968), co-produced and co-written by a pre-Easy Rider (1969) Jack Nicholson (who even has a cameo), which was released after the two seasons of The Monkees TV show.  It's not bad. There is some anti-war stuff in there, as well as some toss-off psychedelia; overall though, it is musically unmemorable (see the YouTube above). My favorite sequence is the Davy Jones-Toni Basil dance number. Davy Jones could dance:

The story behind the flop of Head is the story of the Monkees in toto. The Monkees were trying to establish hipster cred by producing a politically conscious psychedelic feature film. The problem was that it was beyond anything the band's pimply, unconscious fan base could comprehend, while the real hipsters, Hippies and heads just scoffed at it, even if Frank Zappa did make an appearance to extol the group's importance to the youth of nation:

The television series, reruns of which were forever on in my childhood, are almost unwatchable. I made it two episodes into season one before I gave up. If you ever question that this culture has evolved, watch a sitcom from the 1960s. The laugh tracks alone are like taking a physical beating.

In any event, by the end of 1968 the Monkees are essentially kaput. And herein lies an important clue to the Hippies and the 1960s. The culture was moving so fast, throwing off great splinters and chunks, that a number-one group -- and a number-one group marketed directly to young, white youth -- could be completely discredited in the span of a single year. Not even Milli Vanilli or Vanilla Ice flamed out so abruptly.

There is a 50-year-anniversary tour underway, as well as a new album, Good Times (2016).

Hippies vs. Punks: After Bathing at Baxter's (1967)

After Bathing at Baxter's, released at the end of the revolutionary psychedelic year of 1967, is Jefferson Airplane code for tripping on acid. The album, I think, provides the best example of the what the Hippies, birthed as they were in the San Francisco Bay Area, were all about.

For an accurate, succinct appraisal let's turn to "The 40 Essential Albums of 1967" by Robert Christgau and David Fricke:

Jefferson Airplane: After Bathing at Baxter's (RCA)
Singer Marty Balin was so alienated by the acid-fueled indulgence of the sessions for the Airplane's third album -- four months in Los Angeles, where the band stayed in a mansion that once housed the Beatles -- that he co-wrote only one song, "Young Girl Sunday Blues." Yet Baxter's was the Airplane at their most defiantly psychedelic, exploring outer limits of despair and song form in the dark urgency of "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil," Grace Slick's "Rejoyce" -- a protest-cabaret adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses -- and the nine-minute instrumental improvisation, "Spare Chaynge." The raw challenge of Baxter's was also a requiem for the Day-Glo life promised a few months earlier by the Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow. In the closing medley, "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon," Paul Kantner looked back in longing at the Human Be-In of January '67, a new dawn that already seemed a lifetime ago.

Nineteen sixty-seven is the year the United States starts its slide into freak out. The year opens with the January release of the eponymous debut by The Doors, which implores people to "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" in its opening track, followed in February by Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, before Sgt. Pepper's arrives in June. During 1967 the Beatles release not one but two psychedelic albums, Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour; as do The Doors, The Doors and Strange Days. The Jimi Hendrix Experience adds to the cerebral onslaught with two of its own, Are You Experienced?, released in August. and Axis: Bold as Love, in December. Not to be left out, The Who and the Rolling Stones get into the mix with psychedelic releases of their own: Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Rolling Stones' psychedelic one-off, and The Who's brilliant The Who Sell Out.

By the end of 1967 the U.S. body politic is roiling and primed for the "crack in time" to come in 1968. Nineteen sixty-seven began with the arrival of the counterculture as a political force. The event was the Human Be-In, the founding moment for the Hippie. Peace, love, self-exploration and rock 'n' roll were its high points. But by the time the year had run its course -- huge race riots in Newark and Detroit and the first massive march on the Pentagon to call for a halt to the Vietnam War -- the Hippies were mindful that "breaking through to the other side" was going to be a messy business.

A year or two back I did a week-long immersion in After Bathing at Baxter's, the idea being that it would be the subject of a Hippies vs. Punks post.

One winter afternoon I descended to the large file room on the first floor of the building where I worked. There, after eating an apple and CLIF Builders Protein Bar, I nestled myself in the stacks and flat on my back on the carpeted floor drifted off to a state of quasi-consciousness while listening to After Bathing at Baxter's on my iPod. The lights to the file room were set to a motion detector. So after 15 minutes they blinked off and it was as if I were in a John Lilly sensory-deprivation tank.

It must have been Paul Kantner's "Martha" that I was listening to. I heard the song's concluding lines -- "There she'll be: in green sun, on blue earth under warm running shower" -- and it all came back to me: My childhood growing up in the Bay Area in the Sixties and Seventies. The weekend family outings and nature getaways. The green space and wetlands. Cattails. An intimate up-close tactile memory of cattails. Who interacts with cattails anymore? I certainly don't. But there I was on my back in the dark file room with my face in a cattail smeared with duck down set against a background of cool blue sky.

I figured what had happened is that I had accessed a buried memory of After Bathing at Baxter's. I don't think my parents owned I copy. I think my parents' best friends, the Bruscas, did. Our family would often go over to the Brusca family manse, a restored Victorian, on Friday nights and while the kids played Monopoly and watched horror movies on television the adults would smoke dope and listen to the stereo in the living with a big fireplace. This is where I am certain I must have been exposed to After Bathing at Baxter's because I remember being mesmerized by Ron Cobb's cover art. The Bruscas were the family we went with on camping trips -- to the beach, to various area parks and trails.

When I think about the Hippies I think about the vast San Francisco Estuary. I don't think you have the Hippies without the sense of the ecology of this gigantic wetlands; that, and a platform of shared prosperity and social democracy that Pat Brown liberalism realized in Northern California.

The Hippies were weekenders retreating from the workaday world. They thought it would be a good idea to make the weekend retreat an everyday reality. I agree wholeheartedly. It is. If you want to hear what that idea feels like listen to After Bathing at Baxter's. particularly the last track, Kantner's elegy for the Human Be-In, "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon":

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Apologies. I promised a hypothesis explaining our current hopelessness. Maybe next week. We'll stay on 1967. Get ready for The Monkees!

Hippies vs. Punks: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

George Martin, the Beatles producer, commonly referred to as the "Fifth Beatle" (though not by John Lennon), died last Tuesday at his home in England. He was 90. I was under the impression that he had already died,

Martin's obituary in The New York Times summarizes his career as follows:

Mr. Martin helped redefine a record producer’s role in pop music. He was one of a handful of pop producers — Phil Spector and Quincy Jones among them — to become almost as famous as the musicians they recorded. And when he left Parlophone, a subsidiary of EMI Records, to start his own production company in 1965, his reputation as the producer of the Beatles helped raise the stature of record production as an independent career, rather than as simply a record label function.

In the dozen years before he met the Beatles, Mr. Martin produced symphonic, chamber and choral recordings, jazz albums and a string of popular comedy records by Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. In the 1960s, as the recordings he made with the Beatles rode the top of the charts, he also produced hits by other British Invasion acts, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He later worked with a diverse roster of pop and jazz performers, including Ella Fitzgerald, the Bee Gees, Jeff Beck, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Paul Winter, Cheap Trick, America and Ultravox.

His collaboration with the Beatles inevitably overshadowed his other accomplishments. From 1962 to 1970, Mr. Martin produced 13 albums and 22 singles for the group, a compact body of work that adds up to less than 10 hours of music but that revolutionized the popular music world. After the Beatles broke up, he virtually doubled that output, overseeing archival releases drawn from the group’s concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, BBC radio performances and unreleased studio recordings that reveal a great deal about the Beatles’ working process.

George Martin's greatest achievement, and the greatest achievement of the Beatles, is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), the ur-document of the 1960s, what Robert Christgau has referred to as the "massification of bohemia," numero uno on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time."

The Hippies might have existed without Sgt. Pepper's, named as they were in the press on the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in January 1967 (Sgt. Pepper's was released in June), but thanks to Sgt. Pepper's the Hippies went global. The album was number one throughout the summer of 1967. American consciousness was so saturated by Sgt. Pepper's in the 1960s, blue-collar workingmen drank their lunchtime coffee in dark winter diners accompanied by Lennon and McCartney's "A Day in the Life" on the radio. I know because I was there, a little kid eating lunch with his dad.

One would be hard-pressed to find another example in the history of popular consciousness when the avant-garde was being mainlined so directly to the masses. George Martin used techniques found in the work of John Cage and Krzysztof Penderecki to create the trippy effects in "A Day in the Life." According to Allan Kozinn, "George Martin and the Beatles: A Producer’s Impact, in Five Songs":

The song that closes “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and is, for many listeners, the most astonishing track on an astonishing album, actually began as a pair of unrelated songs: The melancholy outer verses were Lennon’s, the brighter central section was Mr. McCartney’s. What transformed these fragments into a cohesive whole is a touch of avant-garde string scoring by Mr. Martin. By the time the Beatles set to work on the track, on Jan. 19, 1967, they and Mr. Martin had mapped out its structure. Two of Lennon’s verses would open the song, followed by Mr. McCartney’s verse, which would lead back to final thoughts from Lennon. Between the two composers’ sections, though, the band would vamp for 24 bars, and there would be another long vamp after the closing verse. How these would be filled — well, Mr. Martin would figure that out later. 

For several weeks, the group tweaked the main parts of the song, polishing the vocals, drums and bass, adding extra percussion parts, and trying to imagine what should occupy those long vamped sections. Mr. McCartney thought an orchestral section would be good, but left the question of what that should entail to his producer. Mr. Martin’s solution was to take a page out of the playbooks of classical composers like John Cage and Krzysztof Penderecki, who at the time were creating works in which chance played a role. Mr. Martin hired 40 symphonic musicians for a session on Feb. 10, and when they turned up, they found on their stands a 24-bar score that had the lowest notes on their instruments in the first bar, and an E major chord in the last. Between them, the musicians were instructed to slide slowly from their lowest to highest notes, taking care not to move at the same pace as the musicians around them.

The sound was magnificently chaotic, and it became more so once Mr. Martin combined the four takes he recorded (some with Mr. McCartney on the podium, some conducted by Mr. Martin himself). It was a brilliant solution: as Lennon’s voice faded into the echoic distance, the orchestra began its buildup, ending sharply on the chord that begins Mr. McCartney’s section.

My parents purchased a copy of Sgt. Pepper's upon its release. It was played repeatedly on the family phonograph, probably so much so that grooves of the vinyl were worn down. The record no doubt structured my freshly myelinated little brain.

Listening to Sgt. Pepper's all week on my way to and from work what jumps out is the division of the album into bursting exuberance, positiveness and exceedingly hopeful tracks -- "With a Little Help From My Friends"; "Getting Better"; "When I'm Sixty-Four"; "Lovely Rita"; "Good Morning Good Morning" -- and the psychedelic, trippy tracks of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"; "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"; "Within You Without You"; and the masterpiece "A Day in the Life."

The overall effect screams -- Another world is not only possible, it is here right now; and it is wonderful!

It is hard to imagine, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the #1 album of all time, a message more alien in our current milieu with its multiplying perpetual wars, skyrocketing inequality, a political drift towards fascism, mass species extinction and a planetary crisis brought about by human-induced climate change.

Sgt. Pepper's is the shiny diamond, a beautiful artifact from the post-WWII age of post-scarcity. Anything and everything was possible, and possible right now. 

We have almost completely lost this sense. It has been drummed out of us decade after decade. Our bones our now bleached dry. We are in a constant state not of bliss but of pain

A timely example of this is the story from the other day by Sabrina Tavernise, "C.D.C. Painkiller Guidelines Aim to Reduce Addiction Risk":

WASHINGTON — In an effort to curb what many consider the worst public health drug crisis in decades, the federal government on Tuesday published the first national standards for prescription painkillers, recommending that doctors try pain relievers like ibuprofen before prescribing the highly addictive pills, and that they give most patients only a few days’ supply. 

The release of the new guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ends months of arguments with pain doctors and drug industry groups, which had bitterly opposed the recommendations on the grounds that they would create unfair hurdles for patients who legitimately have long-term pain. 

In the end, the agency softened the recommendations slightly but basically held its ground, a testament to how alarmed policy makers have become over the mounting overdoses and deaths from opioid addiction. Opioid deaths — including from heroin, which some people turn to after starting with prescription painkillers — reached a record 28,647 in 2014, according to the most recent federal statistics.

Can you imagine a more apt juxtaposition? If Sgt. Pepper's announced the "massification of bohemia" with a tribute to LSD, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," our present age is distinguished
by narcotic death. There are many reasons for this spike in heroin and prescription painkiller deaths -- the crass commercialism of a gigantic, poorly regulated pharmaceutical industry and the shameful quality of care provided by most medical doctors rank high on the list -- but a pervasive, almost atmospheric feeling of pain and hopelessness cannot be dismissed. It is real. You can feel it and so can I.

I have my own hypothesis about this pervasive atmosphere of pain and hopelessness we find ourselves in today; it is highly speculative, to the point of being located solidly on the lunatic fringe. I was going to indulge in it this morning because it follows on ideas I stumbled upon at the same time I was thinking about the alchemists' VITRIOL, as mentioned in last week's post. But it will have to keep. I am out of time. We will return to it next week when we treat ourselves to another psychedelic bombshell from 1967, Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's.

If fifty years ago we were thirsty for the infinite possibilities that psychedelic experience offered, why today are we are deadening ourselves en masse with painkillers? Just think about this. Now we spend our holidays watching football games funded by commercials for pills to reduce opioid-induced constipation.

Hippies vs. Punks: Pearls Before Swine's One Nation Underground

This morning will continue a pattern started with the last Hippies vs. Punks post (on Contact High with the Godz) -- a quick hitter on an important Hippie-era recording that I am exploring thanks to having recently read Lester Bangs' essay, "Do the Godz Speak Esperanto?"

I've listened to One Nation Underground (1967), Pearls Before Swine's debut on ESP-Disk, several mornings this week and I've got to say it has been a real treat. I seem to have found myself in almost a constant state of stress for the last month and partly thanks to listening to One Nation Underground I found that the state has almost entirely disappeared.

To me the record evokes an After Bathing at Baxter's (1967) psychedelia coupled with a flower Punk street corner Hippie rendition of Dylan's super-historical "gone electric" offerings: Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966).

One Nation Underground was recorded right before the Summer of Love and released three months before the Tet Offensive drove a stake through the heart of LBJ's Great Society. You would be hard pressed to find a better vehicle to transport you back to a time when the masses were cohering into Hippiedom. One Nation Underground is an amazing aural document, necessary listening, I think, for any serious student or dialectician who wants to understand how we ended up in our current predicament.