Hippies vs. Punks: A Contemporary Interlude, Push the Sky Away

Tonight I am filled with -- to borrow the Hippie phrase -- "negative energy." There is a problem at work. One of the members of our clerical bargaining unit repeatedly calls in sick, day after day, week in and week out, month after month, year after year. The office manager does nothing. The rest of us pick up the slack and feel resentful. Morale deteriorates. But today a line was crossed and a decision was made to say something to the office manager. I am angry about this because I will be the one who has to do it, and it's something with which I shouldn't have to be dealing.

Last week the summer was waning but still with us. This week, autumn, 36-hours away, is waxing. 

On my walk downtown to the train station this morning I realized that the thing that unites Hippie with Punk is the desire to be heard. Their music cries, each in its own way, "Listen to me! I am special! I need to be heard!" 

What prompted me to think this was the decision to forego my saturation of Moby Grape -- which was my intended topic, following last week's ode to Quicksilver Messenger Service's first two albums, for tonight's post -- in favor of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Push the Sky Away. Released in February, I became enraptured with the album at the end of spring, typing brief posts here for several days in a row at the beginning of June.

Both the Hippies and the Punks intended to shock. If there is one improvement in the music of today it is the refinement of a sensibility which says, "Listen to me. Or don't listen to me. I don't care." When beard rock is transcendent it is because of this. (I've been listening to a lot of Bon Iver these days.) And no finer example of this dispassionate "take it or leave it" ethos -- though Nick Cave and Mick Harvey are certainly no beard rockers, their roots tracing back to the seminal Post-Punk band The Birthday Party -- can be found than the second single off Push the Sky Away, "Jubilee Street":

We must aspire to this detached state. The Hippie failed, and so too did the Punk. We're sitting in the swill of their failure. We have to be prepared for the end. It's coming. Nick Cave is a fine model. Note his trim frame in the video above. As we age we must remain slender:

Next week, Skip Spence's Moby Grape and the Hippie version of detachment (drug damaged) captured in his solo classic from 1969, Oar.

Hippies vs. Punks: Aquarian Family Festival 1969

Nineteen-sixty-nine. The year that Nixon assumes the throne. Johnson jets back to the LBJ Ranch with a load of White House toilet paper ( -- that nugget is from Ronald Kessler's Inside the White House: The Hidden Lives of the Modern Presidents and the Secrets of the World’s Most Powerful Institution). It's also the year of the Hippie's zenith. The summer of '69 sees the release of Easy Rider, the staging of Woodstock and the Tate-LaBianca murders. The year draws to a close with Altamont.

But what I'm interested in is the story of the Aquarian Family Festival -- the non-stop, three-day free rock concert held at the end of May, 1969 on the San Jose State football practice field across from Kelley Park. It was a masterwork of Hippie ingenuity and pluck and served as a model for Woodstock (though Woodstock's promoters sought to get rich and were forced after the fact to accept circumstances and open their "Aquarian Exposition" to all-comers free of charge).

Today I worked through lunch. It was a busy day. But on the train home I managed to jot down a few notes for tonight's Hippies vs. Punks post. As is my wont, I stopped off at the supermarket to get my grocery shopping done and out of the way for next week. When I was piling steak and chicken into my basket I saw a big tall  -- over six foot -- classy blonde woman. I looked her in the face. She looked back at me. I knew her. She was different. But I knew her. "Shelley!" It came up my throat and out of my mouth unbidden.

She replied with my name. And suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of an encounter with a former lover who has not been seen for almost a decade.

She looked good. She has a prestigious job. I was stuporous. I had just finished drinking a strawberry protein drink that I had grabbed out of the juice cooler. I probably had red foam in my mustache. We both wanted to escape, quickly. I felt ashamed, diminished. She seemed to tower over me. "Have I shrunk?"

"No, I'm wearing heels."

After a few more pleasantries, she said, "I have to run." I shook her hand and said goodbye and walked away to get yogurt. I felt old, completely absent of any mojo, a graybeard, a juiceless cypher. It's shocking when one looks himself full in the face and sees nothing attractive. And more shocking still is the acceptance and familiarity of this shock. I've dealt with it so many times over the last three-and-a-half years of burdened bachelorhood that I can't feel pity anymore for my pitifulness.

But the encounter did zap my will power for tonight's Hippies vs. Punks post on 1969 and the Aquarian Family Festival. I did, in preparation, immerse myself in the first album by Joy Of Cooking, the eponymous Joy Of Cooking (1971). Joy of Cooking was one of the bands that performed at the Aquarian Family Festival. They were a Berkeley fern bar boogie band, unusual in that they were led by two women -- piano player Toni Brown and guitarist Terry Garthwaite. There are a few tracks at the beginning of the album that haven't aged well. They remind one of the "Far out!" fatuousness of Hippies cavorting in the grass and getting freaky. But all in all it is a smooth, well-made, easy-to-listen-to recording. This is a live version, not the version on the first album, of "Brownsville/Mockingbird," which can be found on "Back to Your Heart": previously unreleased live and studio recordings 1968-1972 (available for order on the band's web site). It is a good example of Bay Area folk rock from the late '60s/early '70s. The video contains footage of People's Park 1969:

I'll be out of town next Friday night. We'll pick up Hippies vs. Punks on May 31.