Hippies vs. Punks: Ravi Shankar

It has been a strange week. The sizable crew of painters who have been working on the exterior of the apartment building for weeks finally arrived to the north side where my studio is located. They use diesel telescopic booms. From Monday on my windows have been masked with milky polyethylene plastic sheeting and brown paper. So when I arrive home after work it has been like stepping into a spider's cocoon, dark and stuffy.

At the same time I have been preparing for a job interview, actually interviewing, and then waiting to hear if I would receive a job offer. I did, which then created another cycle of adrenaline as I submitted two-week's notice to the office manager at the local.

Waking up every morning in the midst of this I needed something sonically different, something calming but nutritious. By happenstance I lighted on my collection of Ravi Shankar records.

Listening to Hindustani classical Indian music turned out to be just the thing I needed.

Of course Ravi Shankar played an enormous role in the definition of Hippie culture. He was present at the creation when the Summer of Love kicked off at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967.

And he and George Harrison pioneered the superstar blow-out benefit rock concert with The Concert for Bangladesh the summer of 1971.

But critical for Hippies vs. Punks is his role in the Dark Horse Tour with Harrison in November and December of 1974. The concerts were savaged in the music press. Shankar suffered a heart attack and Harrison lost his voice. To me it is a critical moment in the expiration of the Hippie. If the Manson Family and Altamont hadn't killed off the Hippie at the end of 1969, since the massification of bohemia along Hippie lines proceeded apace all during the early 1970s, by the beginning of 1975, given the stillbirth of the first tour of the U.S. by a Beatle since 1966, it was clear the Hippie had run out of juice.

This photo from the Dark Horse Tour of Harrison and Shankar in the White House with Gerald Ford (Billy Preston to the left of Harrison) sums it all up. The president who pardoned Nixon (thereby preventing a necessary airing of a dangerously corrupt system) and who presided over the fall of Saigon yuks it up with the coked out peddler of "Krishna Consciousness." Is there a more fitting bon voyage to the Hippie?

Nonetheless Ravi Shankar's recordings are a goldmine. The ragas are particularly rejuvenating:

Hippies vs. Punks: The Jimi-Janis Die-Off Event

Theodore Roszak warned against the Hippies' obsession with drug use in The Making of a Counter Culture; he devoted an entire chapter to it at the very heart of the book, "The Counterfeit Infinity: The Use and Abuse of Psychedelic Experience."

In 1970 the Hippies lost two of their leading lights within a month. Jimi Hendrix loaded on sleeping pills drowned in his own puke in September; Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin in October. I remember when my mother announced the news to the family. We were in the kitchen and it was early morning. I can't differentiate the two announcements. I know she made a separate one for each, but in my memory they are fused as a single moment. The great Jimi-Janis extinction event. It rocked the Hippies to their core.

The die-off due to overdose and burnout has to be considered as a factor in the rapid ascension of the Punks in the late 1970's. Any avant-garde wedded, as most are, to alcohol and drug use has a limited lifespan. If we date the Hippies from the summer of 1964, as we did earlier, that means by the end of 1970 they had been partying hard for seven years. Jimi and Janis certainly had. And they both gave up the ghost at 27 years of age. The body can only take so much. (Twenty-seven is when I first felt the lasting effects of regular, heavy drinking. I got a pair of black eyes that never left.)

You can see from this listless almost self-parodying performance at the Isle of Wight Festival three weeks before his death that Hendrix was spent:

For Hippies who kept at it for another five years, if death didn't result then mental and physical impairment often did. Did George Harrison ever recover creatively from his coked-out Dark Horse tour? One can argue that he did not. By the time the Punks arrive on the scene the Hippies are reeling from the effects of 11 years of drinking, smoking and drugging; they're easy pickings for a pack of "no future" nihilists.

Ten years ago I read Victor Bockris' Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography. I had picked it up off a remainder table. In the 1990's Patti Smith's husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith; her original Patti Smith Group keyboard player, Richard Sohl; and her brother, Todd, all died, depending on where you read it, of heart attacks (some sources refer to Todd's cause of death as stroke). The oldest, at 45, was Fred "Sonic" Smith.

The rocker, whether Punk or Hippie, rockin' it true doesn't last long. The proto-Punk avatar poet Arthur Rimbaud is the Romantic model; he only made it to 37. 

Hippies vs. Punks: Krishna Crashes, Free Bird Soars

It's 1975. The last hurrah of the Hippies. Krishna Consciousness is on the way out after George Harrison is savaged in the press for his Dark Horse album, released in December 1974, and the accompanying calamitous tour with Ravi Shankar. Fortunately for the Hippies at the same time George and Ravi are crashing and burning the boys in Lynyrd Skynyrd are flying high. When I saw this performance of  "Free Bird" last winter, after checking out from my branch library a DVD of the Old Grey Whistle Test, I was catapulted back to the days of rugby shirts, puka shell necklaces, adidas Viennas and drawstring pants. Note the athleticism of the band; these Southern boys are dripping with testosterone:

But Skynyrd Hippieness is merely formal. As soon as those locks are shorn the Hippie is gone. The end is fast approaching. The Punks are coming.