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.

Hippies vs. Punks: Alice Cooper's Straight Albums

After posting last week's Hippies vs. Punks on Bloodrock, a band on the undercard of the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival that didn't appear on the national telecast, I decided to settle in and watch the entire hour-plus video of the broadcast, which is available on YouTube.

It was a warm night and I stayed up -- what for me is an extremely late hour -- after 11 PM. It was June in time present, and I was watching video of June time past, 43-years past. A couple of times I wandered into the kitchen to get something cold to drink. The only light was a low-watt bulb above my ancient refrigerator, a refrigerator older than my family's new frostless refrigerator that so fascinated me as a kid in 1970. I was fascinated by how clean and colorful and modern it was.

And what stood out for me watching Midsummer Rock was how colorfully dressed and clean and slender and well behaved the young men and women were who attended the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival. You wouldn't know that the nation was being rocked by bloody protests. Nowadays I think it's safe to say that one-out-of-six to one-out-of-five concertgoers -- 15 to 20 percent -- would be overweight and not nearly so well put together. The downside to that festival in 1970 was that everyone was lily white. At least now a big city popular music festival is much more racially diverse.

The other thing that really struck me was the Alice Cooper band. They were easily the most interesting act of the bands that made it on the telecast.

The performance of "Black Juju," which is a great track off the Love It to Death (1971) album, is famous because lead singer Vince Furnier, a.k.a., Alice Cooper, took a pie in the face.

Alice Cooper -- unlike Traffic, Grand Funk Railroad and Mountain, who all assumed the standard rock 'n' roll poses -- put on an iconoclastic, self-effacing, tight show. Watching them, trim and athletic as you would expect a former cross-country team to be, was like looking at a good Grunge band -- a group of guys who could play their instruments and think about what they were playing and poke fun at the whole bombastic rock festival hype; it was like seeing a band from the 1960s who had somehow listened to the future.

All of this took me sort of by surprise. The only indication I had that Alice Cooper had a history as an art-rock band was from their appearance in the party scene from Carrie Snodgrass' Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), a movie released the same month, August, that Midsummer Rock appeared on television:

Arriving to work this past Monday, a coworker, who knows that I enjoy Punk music, asked if I had ever heard of a band called Death made up of three black brothers from Detroit who were among the first practitioners of Punk. I said I had not and promptly Googled and pulled up on YouTube the 1975, released in 2009 by Drag City, ...For the Whole World to See album.

Reading the New York Times article by Mike Rubin, I learned that the Hackney brothers gave up R&B and switched to hard rock after seeing an Alice Cooper show in 1973. (Ah, synchronicity!) There's even a documentary about the band, A Band Called Death (2012).

This past week I decided to explore the first three Alice Cooper albums, recordings which correspond to the period when the band appeared in Diary of a Mad Housewife and the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival and which were done under contract with Frank Zappa's Straight Records.

I started out with Easy Action (1970). It's incredibly strong start to finish. The last track, "Lay Down and Die, Goodbye," is a combination of garage rock and noise that could have been recorded by Sonic Youth, assuming Sonic Youth had someone who could sing as well as Vince Furnier.

To give a sense of the band's versatility, take a listen to the agile harmonies of the preceding track, "Beautiful Flyaway."

From Easy Action, which I have not tired of hearing and think it might be my favorite of the three Straight Records albums, I moved to the first recording, Pretties for You (1969). It has more of a Beatles-via-Zappa vibe, which is definitely different and makes for good listening. Here are tracks one and two, "Titanic Overture" and "10 Minutes Before the Worm."

Then with the last album for Straight, the previously mentioned Love It to Death, the band's sound is getting closer to the blockbuster success of  School's Out (1972), which you can distinctly hear in the lead track, "Caught In a Dream."

Though all the albums are available to listen to in full on YouTube, I went ahead and paid the $10 apiece for MP3 downloads available on Amazon because I wanted to be able to listen on my iPod and my Altec Lansing docking station.

All three albums Alice Cooper did for Straight Records are dynamite. I've listened to each one constantly all week and have not grown a bit tired; my Independence Day holiday afternoon was spent totally immersed in the records. It's the sound from a time, 1969 to 1971, when Hippies could be Punks and people struggled to figure out what was going on. Robert Christgau did. But now it's apparent that the music was ahead of its time.

Hippies vs. Punks: Bloodrock 1970

Tonight Hippies vs. Punks returns once again to the year 1970.

The Ohio National Guard shootings on the campus of Kent State University took place in early May of 1970 and so did the reaction -- student strikes and campus shutdowns at over 800 colleges across the country. There was also the famous counter-riot, known as the Hard Hat Riot, of pro-war construction workers who attacked students protesting Kent State in lower Manhattan. The initial protests at Kent State that led to the Guard being called out were about Nixon's invasion of Cambodia.

The nation was at war with itself in 1970: the country was on fire, and youth were willing to fight.

In June of 1970, the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival was staged at the home of the Reds, Crosley Field. Daylong or multi-day rock 'n' roll festivals were a big draw, despite Altamont, and promoters were always eager to cash in. The Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival is remembered because of the television film that was shot that day and then broadcast nationally in August; it featured the famous performance of The Stooges doing "T.V. Eye" where Iggy Pop goes crowd surfing. Other bands that appeared on television were Traffic, Alice Cooper, Mountain and Grand Funk Railroad.

But there were plenty of other bands performing that day who didn't make it on the Midsummer Rock broadcast. Several of these bands I had never heard of, such as the Fort Worth hard rockers Bloodrock.

The experiment I want to engage in periodically on Friday nights is to take a band from the undercard of either the 1970 Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival or the 1969 Aquarian Family Festival in San Jose or the 1976 100 Club Punk Special and, having immersed myself in their music during the work week, see if I can, with a beginner's mind, divine the time-spirit of Hippie vs. Punk. I took a stab at this with Joy of Cooking (1971), but it was really more a feint.

All week at work I listened with my ear buds to Bloodrock's first album, Bloodrock (1970), and I never tired of it. On a track here the band might sound a little too much like Blood, Sweat & Tears, and a track there you can hear Steppenwolf; other times, such as "Fantastic Piece of Architecture," Vanilla Fudge. But all in all Bloodrock sounds fresh and forceful. I particularly like the lead vocals of Jim Rutledge.

How many bands like this -- how much great music -- lie buried in the past? (I searched in vain on Robert Christgau's web site for any indication that he ever reviewed a Bloodrock recording in his forty-plus years of criticism.) The guilelessness of Bloodrock is refreshing, even its poses and pretentiousness seem more honest than the pervading Punk "everything is shit" sentimentality.

True to the spirit of the time, the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival ended with a midnight police riot rock and bottle melee. Seventy-four arrests were made and 12 concert-goers ended up in the hospital.

I remember the summer of 1970. I remember the black asphalt road that ran in front of our house throbbing in the sun. I remember my uncle's wood-paneled Hi-Fi that took up a length of the living room blasting "Back in the U.S.S.R." I remember my father sitting with me in front of said Hi-Fi and reverentially explaining how The Who's Pete Townshend swung his electric guitar over his head and then smashed it to pieces.