This past Sunday, after I could stand being indoors no longer, I took my bad left foot out for an afternoon ramble. The sun was out and the temperature was pleasant. I had on a pair of running shorts and a lime green Seattle Seahawks t-shirt. On the iPod Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop" followed along with me on the sidewalk as I ascended the hill in search of an unoccupied playfield.
Miller Playfield had a women's soccer match about to begin. So I broke due north and headed for the Interlaken greenbelt. I took a trail through the greenbelt I hadn't traveled before, encountering a number of couples out for a walk.
From the greenbelt trail I headed downhill and over to Montlake Playfield, where I know there to be a new artificial turf football field surrounded by a frequently flooded dirt track. A girl's lacrosse camp was in progress on the football field. So I settled for at first running back and forth on the natural grass outfield of the adjoining baseball diamond before deciding that the dirt track might actually be softer on my ailing foot.
Sure enough, the track was just what the doctor ordered. I did a leisurely six laps while the girls ran back and forth on the football field with their lacrosse sticks. Then I made my way home.
There is something about a sunny Sunday afternoon in the city, the parks and playfields filled with athletes and husbands and wives and fathers and daughters, that for me at least is one of the highest manifestations of civilization. I am fortunate to live near an Olmsted Brothers park
After leaving Volunteer Park, in the last few block before my apartment building, I was cascaded with several ambrosial songs: Beirut's "A Sunday Smile"; Will Oldham's "Drinking Woman"; and Lykke Li's cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Silver Springs":
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Oh, Lord, through the revolution
Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, there's a solution
I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
The image of a bird flying to the sea is likely lifted from the powerful ending to Visions of Cody, Kerouac's source book for On the Road (1957). If there is a Book of Genesis for the counter culture it is On the Road. And if there is a film version of this Hippie Book of Genesis it is Easy Rider (1969).
And what is the philosophical underpinning of both On the Road and Easy Rider? Man understands -- Man has the ability to know -- time. As the Neal Cassady character Dean Moriarty says in On the Road,"Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!"
What's On the Road about? It's about becoming free, pursuing one's path aimlessly -- time unmarked and unbound from work and family and study and all expectations other than the adventure at hand. In other words, a trip to Mexico. What's Easy Rider about? Making one big cocaine score in Mexico, selling it to Phil Spector, and then heading out on the road to Mardi Gras.
Before Wyatt (a.k.a., Captain America) and Billy take off on their motorcycles, Captain America pulls off his wristwatch and tosses it on the ground. Heroes don't do clocks. Then at the end, right before Captain America and Billy are shotgunned by the rednecks, Wyatt says, "We blew it!" What does Captain American mean? He's responding to Billy's gleeful prattle about being rich and retiring to Florida; Captain America realizes that their entire enterprise was merely a reaffirmation of the rat race and the equation of time and money. Make a pile of loot and retire to Florida. Easy Rider as a film version of the Hippie Book of Genesis is a refutation of Founding Father Ben Franklin's "Time is money."
Fly Like an Eagle had three top ten hits: "Take the Money and Run," "Rock'n Me" and "Fly Like an Eagle" (which though released as a single at the end of 1976, didn't chart until March of the following year). Go into any hardware store or walk onto any construction site in North America on any given day and chances are that you'll hear Tea Party politics and classic rock radio; and on that radio "Fly Like an Eagle" will be playing. Like the hackneyed insect trapped in prehistoric amber, Time keeps on slippin', slippin' slippin' into the past.
The past is 1976. Gerald Ford is on his way out, having successfully managed the aftermath of the Watergate crisis with his controversial presidential pardon of Richard Nixon as well as having shrewdly got out front of the Church Committee and Nedzi/Pike Committee with his Rockefeller Commission and thereby arguably lessening some of the public outrage over revelations of the nefarious aspects of American Empire.
This was a moment of structural weakness for the Leviathan, known in Iran as Great Satan. But the Hippies were no longer in any mood to confront "The Man." They elected an evangelizing peanut farmer from Plains, GA who promised them clean government but who ended up bequeathing us our current corrupt and exhausted neoliberal paradigm, hallmarks of which are rule by and for the 1%, government gridlock and permanent military occupation of the Persian Gulf (Carter Doctrine).
So much promise evaporated between 1975 and 1980. We went from Empire exposed and on the defensive to Empire reborn. The Hippies could have done something. But they didn't; they were tired. They were content listening to their sun-drenched California rock, safe in suburbs and exurbs with their good dope and coke. The horizon was clear. The mists of the Aquarian Age had finally, after more than a decade, burned off. In 1976 things seemed, for the moment at least, peaceful, hopeful, new. Almost perfect. It's no wonder that the Hippies decided to kick back, enjoy the clear weather and "fly like an eagle to the sea" (and it's no coincidence that this is also a critical year for the Punks).
Today, more than 35 years later, we have lost touch with the message of "Fly Like an Eagle," even as it is pooped anew endlessly out of countless speakers across our broad continent. It is a radical message. Homo sapiens sapiens is a creature capable of knowing time -- a ghost trapped in the present, ruled by force, but somehow forever slippin' into the future.
To get a jump on tomorrow night's "Hippies vs. Punks Fridays" I happened to listen to two songs on my walk home from work that capture the titanic clash and cultural shift in the 1970's and early 1980's. In this case the timeline isn't compact because Kiln House was recorded and released in 1970, while What Makes a Man Start Fires? was recorded the summer of 1982 and released January 1983 (my freshman year at the university). But I'm getting ahead myself.
A song ahead of its time I would say; it prefigures the mid-1970's California sound of Buckingham Nicks and The Eagles ascendant. Towards the end of "Earl Gray" one can even hear Explosions in the Sky. I like it; I think it's a good song. Christgau gave Kiln House an A-minus. But there's no Krishna Consciousness or rock revolution; no emancipatory lunge for social justice. It's just a pretty song.
Then, since I'm listening to songs alphabetically on my iPod touch, comes the Minutemen's "East Wind/Faith" off what What Makes a Man Starts Fires? and it just kicks ass. The first half of the two-minute song is a George Hurley percussion solo; then D. Boon's high-treble guitar kicks in, followed by Watt's bass; then the singing:
And don't forget that time
Is still ticking
Run through halls
Pass doors
Like lines
White lines on the freeway
Stop like a roulette ball
Reach fr the door
Beyond
There's a drawer
Hope fr hope is really a prayer
Hope fr hope is really a prayer
A complete contrast to the instrumental "Earl Gray." The Punks, in this case, wipe out the Hippies.
I can't find "East Wind/Faith" on YouTube, only the complete What Makes a Man Starts Fires? album:
