Hippies vs. Punks: Peter Gabriel's Security (1982)

We have a way forward. We'll take a look at Peter Gabriel's followup to the Melt album, 1982's Peter Gabriel, a.k.a., Security. Then we will attempt a landing at Hippies vs. Punks ground zero, 1976's Taxi Driver. I saw it again last Saturday, wanting to make a reappraisal of the Martin Scorsese-Paul Schrader version of the Arthur Bremer story, and was blown away how perfectly it enacts the death match between the Hippie and the Punk, and in so doing, provides a punchlist for neoliberalism's rollback of post-WWII social democracy.

So far we have arrived at some solid signposts. Nineteen-seventy-five: The death rattle is gargled out of the Hippie's maw before New Year's Day with the catastrophic November-December 1974 Harrison-Shankar Dark Horse Tour, the first North American tour by a Beatle since 1966. Its failure proved prescient. One-year later Patti Smith would proclaim a new dispensation with her debut LP, Horses. Nineteen-seventy-six: Taxi Driver is released in February. Punks rise from the earth, California lite rock fills the Bicentennial airwaves, and The Band stages The Last Waltz at Winterland with Marty Scorsese in the director's chair. Carter is on his way to the White House. Alea iacta est.

Before turning to Peter Gabriel, a few thoughts on aging. One problem with aging, besides a loss of energy, is that as you age people -- young people -- stop paying attention to you. Young people are, whether conscious of it or not, governed by sexual appetites. For youth, and by youth I mean 40ish and under, it is all about the sex organs. An old codger like me -- north of the half-century mark, gray beard, with wrinkled brow and eye socket, throat flesh beginning its droop -- is politely placed off to the side.

I have no problem being out of the game. It takes too much time. But one's species-being is one's species-being. And the Homo sapiens stands out in the animal kingdom for its insatiable desire to be desired. Add to this the fact that young people are the ones with the energy and who are doing things -- being invisible to this audience is not to one's advantage -- and suddenly the realization that one is marginalized due to agedness becomes dispiriting.

Fortunately we were all once young. When I was young, living on my own for the first time as a teenager in the Bay Area, autumn of 1982, a big album for me, possibly the biggest, from the fall through the winter and into the spring, was Peter Gabriel's Security.

Peter Gabriel 3 and Peter Gabriel 4 are an amazing tandem of albums. Three, with Steve Lillywhite handling production chores, is more a Post-Punk album; with Security, Gabriel creates more of a Hippie, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway-type of album. The lead guitar is almost entirely absent. Larry Fast's synthesizers, Tony Levin's Chapman Stick, Gabriel's sampler and, last but not least, Jerry Marotta's drumming provide the album's distinctive sound.

I saw this lineup twice. First, must have been January 1983, at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium (now the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium); and then, either late spring or early summer 1983, at Berkeley's Greek Theater. What I remember about the show at the Greek is that Gabriel came out early, before even the warm-up band had come on and most of the audience had yet to arrive, and spoke to those of us who were there. Most didn't recognize him. Gabriel looked like a leading man. Dressed in very expensive casual clothes -- charcoal slacks, a black windbreaker jacket -- he asked us to give due consideration to the opening act, the name of which I can't recall, and he might have said a few words about Reagan's dirty wars underway in Central America.

These shows were noteworthy at the time because Gabriel would stage dive and be passed around atop the audience for more than ten minutes during "Lay Your Hands on Me." My girlfriend-who-would-be-my-wife excitedly related how at the Greek show she was able to wrap her hands around Gabriel's belly. My brother-in-law at the time, who went to the show with us, marveled at the ease with which someone could stab him.

Listening to the album again all this past week what jumps out is Marotta's drumming. The gated drum sound that defines the 1980s is tweaked and radically improved upon from the introductory experiments of Melt. Listen to "I Have the Touch" (third YouTube from the top) and "Lay Your Hands on Me" (above) to hear a tour de force. My brother-in-law, who was an aspiring prog rock drummer before becoming a history professor, stood gape-mouthed studying Marotta most of the show.

Security is also something of a bon voyage for the big statement rock album. MTV had just gotten off the ground and was rising fast. In fact, the video for "Shock the Monkey," the album's Billboard #1 single, helped establish the new television channel. After that it was all Duran Duran.

Hippies vs. Punks: Earth, Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World (1975)

Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White died at the beginning of the month, adding his name to the list of influential artists -- David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Paul Kantner -- who have passed so far in this young year and who also dominated the radio in the important Hippies vs. Punks year of 1975.

Nineteen-seventy-five is important because it is the year that the present global neoliberal paradigm takes root and begins its rigorous extirpation of post-WWII social democracy. Most if not all important indices -- union density, inflation-adjusted hourly wages, workforce share in productivity gains -- mark the middle 1970s as the beginning of U.S. working-class decline. It is no coincidence that the mid-70s are the time that the Punks arrive on the scene to begin their extermination of what remains of the Hippies (think Patti Smith's Horses, released at the same time, the end of 1975, as Earth, Wind & Fire's live album, Gratitude).

In the latest issue of Jacobin there is an interview with UCLA historian Robert Brenner, "The Dynamics of Retreat," that adds some context to why it is that 1975 is such a critical year:

This surge of working-class resistance did slow the employers’ offensive and the revival of profitability. But the deep recession of 1974–75 brought a major reversal, specifically a major increase in unemployment that sapped worker energy and reduced combativeness. The way was thus opened to round after round of wage restraint and spending cuts that, sooner or later, received the backing of the official social-democratic and labor leaderships in every country. 

Did it all have to collapse? Was there a reformist path out of the contradictions that you’re talking about? Or can we say that, unless there had been some kind of anticapitalist break sometime in the 1970s, we were unlikely to prevent the situation we’re suffering through today?

I do think it’s clear today that, short of the overthrow of the capitalist order, there were powerful economic and political pressures that make it unsurprising that we’ve ended up where we are.

On the one hand, the economic responses of capital itself to its profitability problem have only made things worse. The reduced rate of return has decreased the incentives for capitalists to invest and employ. It has, at the same time, motivated capital and the state to cut back on the growth of compensation and social spending so as to jack up profits by reducing the cost of production. The outcome has been ever-slower growth in demand for investment goods, consumer goods, and state services, and this has put further downward pressures on the rate of return.

There it is. Hippies vs. Punks in a nutshell. In 1975 we needed the Hippies to be bold and power an anti-capitalist revolution. But the Hippies were far past the point of offering even the tiniest resistance; they were too busy wallowing in the corporate trough. In 1975 the Hippies cloaked their abject capitulation to the predatory capitalist order with appeals to mysticism, libertinism or esoteric Eastern religiosity. Enter the Punks. Hallelujah.

The big breakthrough #1 album for Maurice White and Earth, Wind & Fire is That's the Way of the World. Released at the end of winter in 1975, the album was also a soundtrack to a Sid Shore film of the same name, written by Robert Lipsyte and starring the great Harvey Keitel.

You couldn't go anywhere in a car with the radio on in 1975 without hearing "Shining Star" or "That's the Way of the World," the two big singles off the album. As a kid I liked both. As for Earth, Wind & Fire, the group struck me as magnificent black Hippies. The size of band was intimidating, as was Maurice White's incorporation of the exotic sounds of the Frankiphone, an electronically amplified kalimba (African thumb piano), backed up by a horn section, spiced with the immaculate R&B guitar of Al McKay. To a white Hippie kid 6th grader living in the Santa Cruz mountains, being driven by his parents with the car radio always on a half hour each way to and from town, Earth, Wind & Fire was a revolution unto itself.

Listening to That's the Way of the World all week -- and a truly stressful week it was -- I was surprised what a masterpiece the record is. Yes, there are the hit singles, which are flawless. But there is also an amazing -- no lie -- breadth of material. Songs like "All About Love," "Reasons" and "See the Light" showcase jazz fusion, disco, prog rock, Billy Paul Philly Soul and traditional African music. No better encapsulation of Hippie sensibility in the mid-70s can be found than Maurice White's rap about radiating the inner-beauty of the self in "All About Love":

Now, I want you to stop whatever you're doing.
You're doing. Just stop.
You know, they say there' s beauty
in the eyes which I say is not the fact.
'Cause you are as beautiful as your
thoughts, right on.

You know, for instance, we study all
kinds of sciences, astrology, mysticism,
religion, so forth you dig.
And like coming from hip place, all these things help
because they give you insight into  your inner self
Have mercy!

Now. there's an outer self we got to deal with
the one that likes to go to parties,
one that likes to dress up and be cool
and look pretty, all ego-trips and all this.

Hear you all, I'm trying to tell you,
you gotta love you. And learn all the beautiful things around you,
trees and birds. And if there ain't no beauty,
you got to make some beauty. Have mercy!
Listen to me, Yeah!

There it is in a nutshell once again. By the mid-70s Hippies -- both black and white -- had given up the hope of building a better world on top of the wreckage of the technocratic war machine in favor of accommodation fueled by a mass narcotic self-love.

Don't get me wrong. This is an incredibly fertile period for the Hippies, this dying time bardo state of the middle 1970s. Classic rock bursts forth, like Minerva from the brow of Zeus, during these few years as a powerful opiate which maintains a grip on the masses under Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Clinton and Blair.

We'll wind down this contemplation of 1975 next week with a look at the classic rockers par excellence, The Eagles.

Hippies vs. Punks: David Bowie's Young Americans (1975)

I've been listening to David Bowie's Young Americans (1975), the album, along with Station to Station (1976), that stands as a tiny island between the land masses of Glam and the Berlin Trilogy in the Bowie oeuvre. Though I am not what I would call a Bowie expert (more an appreciative student), I would say that there is no other Bowie record that is like Young Americans, with its strange combination of Philadelphia Soul and Beatlephilia.

Christgau's review is illuminating:

David Bowie: Young Americans [RCA Victor, 1975]
This is a failure. The tunes make (Lennon-McCartney's) "Across the Universe" sound like a melodic highlight, and although the amalgam of English hard rock and Philly soul is so thin it's interesting, it often overwhelms David's voice, which is even thinner. But after the total alienation of Diamond Dogs and the total ripoff of David Live, I'm pleased with Bowie's renewed generosity of spirit--he takes pains to simulate compassion and risks failure simply by moving on. His reward is two successes: the title tune, in which pain stimulates compassion, and (Bowie-Lennon-Alomar's) "Fame," which rhymes with pain and makes you believe it. B-

Christgau likes the two hit singles, "Young Americans" and "Fame." (Bowie shares a writing credit on "Fame" with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.) But the entire album is chock full of excellent material. "Fascination" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me," not to mention "Win," are particularly strong.

What has made an impression on me this past week listening to Young Americans is the extent to which the alto saxophone of David Sanborn dominates the album. The guitar is reduced to the high treble fills found in funk, and the resulting sound, with the backing vocals of Ava Cherry, Robin Clark and Luther Vandross, is a slick edgy urban soul, what Bowie called "plastic soul," and what most of us recognize from the Saturday Night Live Band, which debuted in 1975.

So there is a "present at the creation" quality to Young Americans. Commodified urban chic is the product being extruded.  If you want to hear what an aural leap Young Americans represents, listen to Diamond Dogs (1974) or Pin Ups (1973). Bowie was shrewd to abandon Glam when he did. By the middle 1970s Glam, soon to be lampooned in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), had devolved into the same old arena rock god trap in which prog rockers found themselves.

My feeling is that Bowie has to be studied because he was an amazing synthesizer who had the ability to crystallize and commodify musical vapors swirling in the avant-garde. Basically the guy could do no wrong from 1969 to 1984. He popularized Glam and in so doing drove a stake in the heart of Hippie and his hopes that another world was possible. (After Let's Dance (1983) Bowie loses his mojo. I remember seeing him interviewed on television promoting his Glass Spider Tour. He was attempting one of his countless reinventions, this time as a Steve Jones Sex Pistols Punk rocker. Bowie had once again correctly identified the musical Zeitgeist. But at 40 years old in 1987, and famously androgynous in past personas, he could not pull it off. I remember thinking to myself, "Jesus, is that pathetic.")

Young Americans and its odd matrimony of Beatles and Philadelphia Soul is a one-off. The record strikes me as a conscious effort by Bowie to feed himself some sonic comfort food after starving the Hippies to death with Glam. It is his bon voyage to the 1960s, the best of which, Bowie is saying, are black music and the Beatles. (John Lennon's "Across the Universe" anchors side two of the album.)

Bowie would not tarry on "plastic soul." He would abandon Sigma Sound and Electric Lady for Cherokee Studios in Hollywood and the coked-out brilliance of Station to Station. Does a more bizarre song than "Golden Years" ever receive saturation airplay on AM radio?

Bowie retreats from the United States after Station to Station, relocating to the European continent to help remake popular music with Brian Eno. What we get is New Wave.

If anything, Young Americans and Station to Station, isolated and "islands in the stream"-like as they are in the Bowie oeuvre, buttress the Hippies vs. Punks hypothesis that in 1975 and 1976 something serious and dislocating happens in the West to set us on our current path to destruction. Let's hope the order that began to form back then cracks asunder in 2016.

Hippies vs. Punks: Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975)

Three big names in rock'n'roll died in January. First, David Bowie, followed by Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, and then Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner. So far this month, Earth, Wind & Fire's Maurice White has passed. The new year has been rough on radio stars of the 1970s.

At the job, my coworker likes to listen to the local hipster radio station, KEXP. (Today the station is celebrating International Clash Day.) On his birthday, January 8, KEXP devoted an entire day to Bowie music, which was then repeated on Monday, January 11 in memoriam. The DJs spoke in hushed, awed voices about what Bowie had meant to them and how his death had knocked them breathless.

To mark Paul Kantner's passing, the station played a sprinkling of songs, something off the super-historical After Bathing at Baxter's (1967), as well as cuts from Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969). But that was about it. All stuff from the band's psychedilc Hippie heyday and nothing from Kantner's days at the helm of Jefferson Starship in the mid- to late-1970s, a time when Kantner and his mates in Jefferson were just as popular and commercially successful as they were in the 1960s.

But Kantner fared better on hipster KEXP than Glenn Frey. From what I could tell, even in memoriam, not one Eagles tune was played by the station.

Which got me thinking. I listened to a lot of radio as a kid in 1975, a time when all three artists -- Bowie, Kantner and Frey -- filled the airwaves. One of These Nights (1975) was huge and the Eagles were generally well received by the Hippies, and Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975) occupied the #1 position on the Billboard 200 list of top albums for 1975 several different times in the late summer and fall. Bowie's Young Americans (1975) never made it to #1, but two Bowie singles, "Fame" and "Golden Years," were huge at the same time as Jefferson Starship's hit single "Miracles."

"Fame" and "Miracles" both have this murky voodoo quality that sort of terrified and mesmerized me as a sixth grader. Since it is a Hippies vs. Punks thesis that 1975 is an all-important year, I decided to study Red Octopus all week to try to divine what was going on in the national consciousness at a time prior to the first wave of UK Punk and when Disco was just starting to dominate the landscape.

The obvious thing listening to Red Octopus is its corporate sensibility. It sounds like it was pumped out of the PA at a cineplex or mall. Grace Slick's paeans to love sound like ready-made commercial jingles for Jiffy Lube or Holland America Line cruises. To be fair, the two instrumental tracks -- "Git Fiddler" and "Sandalphon" -- are good, as is "There Will Be Love," where there is some interesting multi-vocal Hippie harmonizing going on.

But the power of Red Octopus is in Marty Balin's seven-minute masterpiece, "Miracles," the single version of which was chopped in half to excise a line about cunnilingus: "I had a taste of the real world when I went down on you, girl."

Listening to "Miracles" repeatedly this week I couldn't help imagining myself as some solid American male in 1975, a Teamsters business rep or pool equipment salesman, driving around in a Ford Crown Victoria, pulling into the lounge at a Holiday Inn or a Best Western, ordering a 7 and 7 at the bar and kicking back and listening to Marty Balin sing "If only you believe like I believe, baby," while scanning the trim in the room. Then at the same time across town at some Hippie fern bar a longhair was basically engaged in the same pursuit. That's a cultural commons that we once had in this country. And to think that it was, however briefly, maybe six or seven years in the 1970s, Hippie based is nothing short of a miracle to me.

Hippies vs. Punks: Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert (1975)

I read in the little booklet that accompanies PUNK 45: KILL THE HIPPIES! KILL YOURSELF! THE AMERICAN NATION DESTROYS ITS YOUNG, UNDERGROUND PUNK IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, VOL. 1. 1973-1980 that no wave grew out of the void left when the major labels snatched up the CBGB bands like Television, Patti Smith Group, the Ramones and Talking Heads and sent them out on the road to promote albums. This got me thinking that I should devote a post to Theoretical Girls, the Glenn Branca and Jeff Lohn no wave group extraordinaire. The tie-in being that my friend and co-worker Tony, who I mentioned in last week's post in connection with a live performance by Lee Ranaldo, suggested that I acquire the definitive album, Theoretical Girls: Theoretical Record (2002), one afternoon when we were in a record store that has been closed now for several years.

But I couldn't stomach an immersion in a lo-fi sonic assault. Instead, I have been listening all week to my collection of Keith Jarrett solo recordings. From quiet electronica to the acoustic piano, that is all I have been able to muster for myself in December.

Then the other day, after working my way through Hamburg '72,  Concerts and The Impulse Years: 1973-1974, The Köln Concert (1975) came over my speakers, and it was as if the spirit of the post-revolutionary Hippie appeared before me fully formed.

I had no idea that The Köln Concert is by far Keith Jarrett's most successful record, not to mention the most successful solo jazz album of all time. The Köln Concert is right up there -- which is hard for me to believe -- with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959).

The story of the The Köln Concert is well known. Jarrett had just driven from Switzerland. His back was killing him; he was wearing a brace. When he arrived at the opera house in Cologne where the gig was he learned that the piano he requested was not there; instead, a smaller, out of tune practice piano was found backstage and frantic attempts were made to make it listenable. The upper and lower keys were hard to hear. This molded the performance that Jarrett was to deliver because it forced him to play predominantly with the middle keys; also, the spacey, wafting New Age sound was partly a result of using a double mic, which one reviewer commented made the piano sound like it was made out of five stories of glass.

What we have is a faithful mirror of the Zeitgeist 1975. Improvised before a packed house of Hippies at midnight, The Köln Concert would create a whole new genre, New Age. It reminds me of the Windam Hill Records sound so prevalent in the late '70s and into the mid-'80s. It is the sound of the Hippie turning her back on revolution and settling down to a solidly bourgeois lifestyle.

This is not to say it is bad record. I think it is an amazing document, particularly "Part IIb," the third segment of the double LP. There was a space of time in the middle '70s when the Hippies and Punks were incredibly creative. And there is some really good writing online about The Köln Concert. Kind Of Weird: How The Köln Concert Made Keith Jarrett A Pop Star by John Lingan manages in the last two paragraphs to conjure up the spirit of Jarrett's January 1975 Cologne improv:

But what a marvelous, bizarre thing that an artist like this can become so popular, even for a moment, embraced by people, like my dad, who barely messed with jazz besides. I first discovered Köln in our basement, among Dad's old LPs, sandwiched among Ten Years After, Grin, and Mountain. I was a young teenager, intrigued by the spare album art and curious as to how Dad could like something so New-Agey. When I listen to it now, I get the same feeling I had the first time: I feel stronger, smarter, more inspired. It works when I'm sad, when I'm joyful, when I'm driving or falling asleep. 

In David Foster Wallace's 1989 story "Girl With Curious Hair," the unnamed sociopathic narrator goes with his dirtbag friends to a solo Keith Jarrett concert in the early '80s. The friends drop acid, and one explains that the improvisation "smelled like old velvet in a trunk in an attic, or like vitamins, or medicine, or morning … [It] resembled weak sunlight through ice." That's true enough, but I prefer the brevity of the awful narrator, who's never heard Jarrett's music before and who, sober, declares with great enthusiasm that the show is "punkrock." The Köln Concert will remain ever so.

If it is Punk, it is a quiet kind of Punk, which is the Punk that I prefer to listen to as another year winds down. Walking to work yesterday in the dark, I decided to leave my iPod in my jacket pocket and trek the two miles to the office listening to the unusually calm sounds of the morning traffic. It made me realize, a la Gertrude Stein, that there is no there there. Maybe that is the point of quiet, to remind us that everything is empty; or, if there is a there there it is not the there that we think is there. The realization is that the there we thought was there is not there and either nothing is there or something so different it might as well be nothing is there.

Hippies vs. Punks: Metal Machine Music 1975

Lou Reed died this past Sunday. Here is one of the items from his New York Times obituary by Ben Ratliff that caught my eye:

Beloved of Mr. Reed and not too many others, “Metal Machine Music” was four sides of electric-guitar feedback strobing between two amplifiers, with Mr. Reed altering the speed of the tape recorder; no singing, no drums, no stated key. At the time it was mostly understood, if at all, as a riddle about artistic intent. Was it his truest self? Was it a joke? Or was there no difference? 

Mr. Reed wrote in the liner notes that “no one I know has listened to it all the way through, including myself,” but he also defended it as the next step after La Monte Young’s early minimalism. “There’s infinite ways of listening to it,” he told the critic Lester Bangs in 1976.

I read the obit Monday morning on the train coming into work. As an homage I listened to Metal Machine Music, which was released the summer of 1975, all the way through on Wednesday.  I made another attempted go-round on Thursday, making it only halfway before I was pulled away from my desk to rearrange the conference space on the first floor. I resumed this afternoon approximately where I left off

James Wolcott in a review from August 14, 1975 in Rolling Stone calls M/M/M a masochistic indulgence:

If this album is Reed's Self Portrait, then we may have to tolerate a lot of stroboscopic sludge before he gets back on the tracks. What's most distressing is the possibility that Metal Machine Music isn't so much a knife slash at his detractors as perhaps a blade turned inward. At its very worst this album suggests masochism.

And I think there's something to it. Absorbing all that guitar feedback you can't help but feel as if you are indulging in self-punishment. The sound is the sound of radio signals bouncing through deep space; it's the sound reminiscent of the soundtrack of low-budget science fiction masterpiece Dark Star (1974); it's a sound that includes squeaking noises of small feral animals; it's the sound of the monkey-mind chattering away during that part of the race when you are done, finished, kaput but you have miles left to go -- "Stop! Give up! You're just hurting yourself." / "No. I must continue." Metal Machine Music is the sound of suffering.

But for all of that, listening to M/M/M is not unpleasant. It was appropriate that I did so at work, ear buds affixed to head, toiling away at my Bartlebyesque chores. The modern office, boneyard of Western Man, is a perfect environment to hear Metal Machine Music. No one wants to be in an office: it's a soulless, sorrowful place filled with electronic equipment and alienated people; it's not a place for pop or hard rock or really for any music other than the distorted electronic feedback sounds captured on M/M/M.

Lou Reed biographer Victor Bockris has called Metal Machine Music "the ultimate conceptual punk album and the progenitor of New York punk rock." And while this may be true, M/M/M is fundamentally an homage to drone music. Lou Reed gives a shout-out to La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, the group John Cale was a member of prior to The Velvet Underground, in the liner notes to M/M/M: "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music."

Cale's viola on "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin," my two favorite tracks on VU's debut LP, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), introduced countless college undergraduates to drone music:

A prime example of drone music is Dream House 78' 17" (1974), by its chief creator La Monte Young, with his partner Marian Zazeela and the Theatre of Eternal Music:

La Monte Young's drone music is influenced by Hindustani classical singer Pran Nath. (Lou Reed might have loathed the Hippies, but drone music is important to both.)

I went through a Spacemen 3 period a couple years back after stumbling across a copy of The Perfect Prescription (1987) in a branch library near work. Mostly I listened to Dreamweapon: An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music (1995), which is an appreciation of La Monte Young and a wonderful introduction to drone music:

In the last five years Lou Reed returned to Metal Machine Music by performing as part of the Metal Machine Trio. A recording of their first live show is excellent and available for download on Lou Reed's website.

To draw an illuminating contrast, a brief inspection of an album released a month prior to M/M/M is called for. Gary Wright's The Dream Weaver (1975) is touted as the first-ever all-synthesizer pop album (if you don't count the many Wendy Carlos albums like the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange (1971), or session superstar Jim Keltner's drumming or some Ronnie Montrose guitar on one track).

Released in June 1975 The Dream Weaver peaked in the spring of 1976 at #7 on Billboard's pop album chart. I listened to it twice in a row at work today. And believe it or not, while much shorter in length than Metal Machine Music, I found it more painful to listen to. There are some decent tracks. I like "Can't Find the Judge" and "Much Higher" where Wright is doing his best to channel his inner Stevie Wonder. (The Dream Weaver features the ARP synthesizer and the Fender Rhodes electric piano, Stevie's instruments of choice from the albums of his classic period.) I'm less enamored with all the Moog Wright employs; it frequently rises from the back of the mix like a stoned zombie teenager stumbling out of a Friday night 1970s planetarium laser light show.

Gary Wright was definitely a Hippie. A buddy of George Harrison -- he played piano and organ on All Things Must Pass (1970) -- and previously the organ player and a vocalist for Spooky Tooth, Gary Wright wrote the song "Dream Weaver," which, along with "Love is Alive," reached #2 on the Billboard singles chart, after reading the Hippie manifesto Autobiography of a Yogi, a gift from George Harrison. (I grew up in the 1970s frequently glancing at the picture of Paramahansa Yogananda that adorned the front cover of his autobiography; for a couple of years there my father always seemed to be caring around a copy.)

One thing you can say about Gary Wright's The Dream Weaver, it successfully forecast the synthesizer-based, slow-dance schlock that dominated the 1980s.

The moral of the story? In 1975 the Hippie cashed in while the Punk took a courageous stand.

Let's end with the words of the great Lester Bangs taken from a 1976 Creem article devoted to Metal Machine Music:

When you wake up in the morning with the worst hangover of your life, Metal Machine Music is the best medicine. Because when you first arise you're probably so fucked (i.e., still drunk) that is doesn't even really hurt yet (not like it's going to), so you should put this album on immediately, not only to clear all the crap out of your head, but to prepare you for what's in store the rest of the day. 

Speaking of clearing out crap, I once had this friend who would say, "I take acid at least every two months & JUST BLOW ALL THE BAD SHIT OUTA MY BRAIN!" So I say the same thing about MMM. Except I take it about once a day, like vitamins.

Not bad advice.

Hippies vs. Punks: Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes 1975

To recapitulate. Hippies vs. Punks. In a very short period of time, from 1975 to 1979, the Punks replaced the Hippies as the vanguard youth movement in the West (though on Fridays to come we will consider the possibility of the continuation of a Hippie vanguard, albeit greatly shrunken, contemporaneous with the Punks). This is the same period of time, the late Seventies, when our current (now exhausted) Zeitgeist takes wing. Call it neoliberalism, or a political economy defined by the hyper movement of wealth from working people to the top tier, the rent-seekers, the 1%.

The idea I introduced earlier is that 1975 is the last hurrah of Hippies. What happens in 1975? The Vietnam War officially ends with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. And what makes a Hippie a Hippie? Being a longhair and being antiwar. Hippies are said to have got their start the summer of 1964 when Ken Kesey took his Merry Pranksters cross country in the psychedelic bus Futhur destined for the New York City World's Fair. While Babbs, Cassady, Kesey and the rest fried on acid Congress passed The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing LBJ to rapidly escalate the military conflict in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. When the "war" ends ten-years later so does a main reason for being a Hippie.

But the social characteristics -- such as long hair, promiscuity, and recreational drug use -- popularized by the Hippies not only remain but spread throughout Middle America. It is a mass libertinism minus any revolutionary ideology or social critique. This is Disco, a vital interregnum between the Hippies and the Punks, and crucial to understanding why the Hippies disappeared as a vanguard movement as quickly they did.

From the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1975, coming in at #100, is "Get Dancin'" by Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes. I was in 6th grade in 1975. That year I purchased a cheap copy of Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes; it was a cut-out bargain bin LP that I found at Tower Records in San Jose. When I wanted to drive my older sisters crazy (one was a prog rocker, the other was a Joni Mitchell devotee) I would put "Get Dancin'" on the turntable:

The Punks are coming.

Hippies vs Punks: The Idea

I'm thinking of making Friday evenings "Hippie Fridays" since last Friday night I cursorily and by happenstance mentioned the student rebellion of the 1960's and a couple theories by prominent authors -- Theodore H. White and Theodore Roszak -- regarding its causes.

But rather than "Hippie Fridays" maybe it should be called "Hippies vs. Punks Fridays" because what I am really fascinated by is how quickly and completely we underwent a huge cultural shift in the West in the middle 1970's when the punks came on the scene and in the space of a few years wiped out the hippies as a vanguard movement.

Last winter I watched DVDs of the English rock show The Old Grey Whistle Test. It started broadcasting in the late 1960's and ran all the way up until the late 1980's. And very clearly starting with acts like Jackson Browne, Fairport Convention and Stealers Wheel you can see the hippies. It was all about the music, kind of freaky; just hanging out there, you know. Then come the punks. The Jam, PiL, The Damned. And it's glaringly different. The music is hard. It's angry. It sounds much worse. And were talking in a very short space of time, a couple of years. It's like the homo sapiens are supposed to have wiped the Neanderthals. And this is the music of my maturation. This is the music I embraced while rejecting the "pussy music" of my parents, who were hippies.

And this is important beyond a shift in musical tastes among Western youth. Why? Because it's well acknowledged that the paradigm we're suffering through -- we could call it a lot of things, but let's stick with "neoliberalism" for the time being -- was launched, approximately, at the time that punks wiped out the hippies. So if we can understand why the hippies fell so quickly to the punks maybe we can figure out why neoliberalism completely bamboozled us and we ended up in our current predicament where the 1% have captured just about everything.

There are a lot of songs that I could cap off the Friday night with here. Patti Smith's cover of "Hey Joe," a song popularized by hippie god Jimi Hendrix, is a good one for at least two reasons. First, Patti Smith is a progenitor of punk music. Her seminal debut album, Horses, is produced in the "hinge" year 1975 when we make our move into the new paradigm. Second, Patti Smith was, is and always will be a hippie. This highlights the possibility that rather than being wiped out by the punks, the hippies became the punks. In any event, Patti Smith is a transformational figure, which is on full display in this recording: