There is something that I want to mention and if I don't do it soon I'll forget it entirely. Two weeks for me is about the outer limit of keeping something in mind without writing it down.
Not last week but the week before, when I was limping along in a great deal of pain one morning trying to get through a crosswalk before the light turned red, The Damned's "New Rose" shuffled on the iPod:
What a song! Though each step sent a jolt of misery into my brain, I smiled a bruised smiled because my brain was also filled with the aural ecstasy of "New Rose."
Released in October of 1976 when Fly Like an Eagle was soaring the charts and giving the Hippies a swan song, "New Rose" is credited with being the first single by a UK Punk band; I think it might be the purest expression of Punk any Punk music not just first wave English Punk.
The Damned were always considered also-rans to The Clash and Sex Pistols. On the storied Anarchy in the UK Tour, The Damned decided to perform at a few venues that refused to allow the Pistols on stage (due to the band's super-historic incendiary appearance on the Today show). The Clash and The Heartbreakers showed solidarity and refused to perform.
I was so affected by hearing "New Rose" that I purchased the first album, Damned Damned Damned(1977), though it can be streamed for free on YouTube:
I know I have written briefly before about this album, the first full-length Punk record released in the UK, preceding The Clash (1977) by two months. I called it good. But it is time to amend that. I am ready to class Damned Damned Damned -- along with The Clash (1977), Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) and Pink Flag (1977) -- as a timeless monument to Punk.
Listen to this record. Put your player on repeat. Summer is upon us. July approaches. The planet is growing hotter.
The sound you will hear is the sound of purity. The buzz burning blur of youth and its confused clarity.
"Society is a Hole," as Sonic Youth would sing eight-years later. The Hippies felt the same way but acted as if there there was a way out of the hole. The Punks brought home the message that there is no way out.
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.
