It's been over a year since I posted something under the "Hippies vs. Punks" header. It's not for a lack of thought on the topic, which, to refresh you, is the hypothesis that popular music as a unifying, generally progressive social force splintered and shifted in the years from 1975 to 1979, kind of a "last hurrah" for the great "massification of bohemia" (Robert Christgau's term vis-a-vis The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album) brought on by the 1960s rock'n'roll revolution.
It's no coincidence that this period of time is also the same period where postwar social democracy is exchanged for the market orthodoxy of neoliberalism; in many ways we've been living within a monoculture every since. We are now at a point where maintaining this static horizon of neoliberalism has become increasingly problematic to the point of absurdity. Contradictions are piled upon contradictions. City of London bankers find a return to social democracy, something neoliberalism was enshrined to shatter, preferable to following the increasingly insane logic of no-horizon neoliberalism.
In my young-man youth there was an attempt to bridge the Hippies vs. Punks war. That, for lack of a better descriptor, was Grunge, which was really a mainstreaming of underground rock'n'roll that had flourished on the margins of mainstream major label corporate arena rock and pop. So I have been exploring 1987 to 1994. My last Hippies vs. Punks post on The Leaving Trains dealt with this.
Mostly over the last year I have pivoted back and forth between listening to music that influenced me during the time 1987-1994, like Sonic Youth, and using Robert Christgau's Pazz & Jop 1979 Dean's List as a treasure map to guide me in a reconstruction of 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher and the Iranian Revolution.
The great failing of Christgau's 1979 Dean's List is that besides Pere Ubu's Dub Housing it contains no Post-Punk albums. Where's Entertainment! and Metal Box?
It's other major failing, something which struck me when I went to my normal lunch spot the other day and the classic rock streaming on the PA was Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" off their seminal Double Vision (1978) album, is the absence of classic cock rock. Look at the bands that appeared at Bill Graham's Day on the Green concerts in the 1978 and 1979 and you get an idea what teenagers were listening to. It wasn't Pere Ubu and it wasn't Tom Verlaine.
Classic rock as practiced by Aerosmith and Foreigner is and was a celebration of the "bottom of the sack," which actually sounds good in our no-horizon zombieland of today.
There is a moment when everything is clear. Ideas are fully revealed. Bright, solid, bold. Then it's back to befuddlement.
What happened to the wide-open horizon of my youth? --Work happened.
One loses track. The job takes over. Sometimes it's a woman. Sometimes it's drugs and alcohol. Sometimes it's poor health. Mine is the job.
When I was 23 I owned this album. I couldn't figure it out. Now that I am 53, I was able to figure it out.
What I remember about The Leaving Trains is that they were fronted by a guy, a super-hipster, a crossdresser junkie a la the New York Dolls, by the name of "Falling James" Moreland.
If you Google The Leaving Trains today, or Falling James, you won't find much: A Wikipedia entry. A Discogs page. A relatively recent blog post about Moreland's failed marriage to Courtney Love (he preceded Kurt Cobain to the altar). Then some links which allude to his work as a writer for the L.A. Weekly. That's basically it.
What I seem to recall about The Leaving Trains and Fuck is that SST Records actively promoted the band -- and this particular album -- as the immediate "shape of things to come." So as a young devotee of SST I took note.
But, as I mentioned in a previous post, I threw in the towel after a few listens. The aesthetic was too hard, resistant, slick; too junkie cool. I was a heart-on-your-sleeve guy, not a hipster.
Over the years I continued to carry a torch for this record though because it is associated in my mind with the spring of 1988, my girlfriend Stacey and her railroad apartment on the Oakland-Berkeley border near the Alcatel Bottle Shop. At the time, my horizon was unblinkered; the future seemed infinite.
When I heard Fuck again in February, as I mentioned before, I thought I was listening to a Fleshtones album. Lenny Kaye's "Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968" influenced underground rock'n'roll throughout the 1980s, as did the Velvet Underground.
A breakdown of the 14 songs of Fuck reveal a Punk-heavy album:
"What Cissy Said" -- Lou Reed VU vibe, could be the best song
"The Horse Song" -- Iggy Pop cover from the early '80s
"Disasters" -- Rockabilly number
"Walking With You" -- Punk number
"Sleep" -- Another Punk number
"With Dr. A.W.O.L." -- Another Lou Reed number
"27 Days" -- Another Punk number
"So Fucked Up" -- Album cover; reminds me of Stacey's railroad apartment
"I Don't Know What I'm Doing Here" -- Lenny Kaye's Nuggets
"Violent Sex" -- Black Flagnumber
"Welcome to New York" -- Another Punk number, West Coast critique of NYC
"What the President Meant to Say" -- Negativlandesque take on Iran-Contra hearings
It is a moving between styles in a limited style alphabet of the underground rock'n'roll avant-garde of the 1980s -- with an emphasis on L.A. Punk. When I say I "got" Fuck after 30 years, this is what I got. It is an accomplished -- one might even say breathtaking -- encapsulation of the West Coast rock'n'roll underground of the 1980s: predominantly Hardcore, a little Rockabilly, a fair amount of Velvet Underground, a respectful embrace of Garage Rock, dexterously tied together at the end by an ambitious sonic sculpture political commentary.
All in all an amazing document.
Futures come and go. The present is dominated by the promise of futures that never arrive. The Leaving Trains' Fuck was pretty much obsolete before the end of 1988. Its slick, hip, fast, Nuggety sound was replaced by a Hardcore reinterpretation of Classic Rock. Time moves on and we forget the futures that once existed for us. I rediscovered the future of 1987 this February past.
The last Hippies vs. Punks post was back at the end of August, nearly eight months ago. It is not as if I have stopped listening to or thinking about music. It's that a series of crises erupted at work. By the time things settled down in February I had figured out what I wanted to say, but a couple of things changed since last Summer that so far have prevented me from dipping back into the exploration of why, how, when the Hippies die off in the mid- to late-70s, to be replaced by the Punks.
First, my physical conditioning cratered. Week after week of 60-hour work-weeks prevented me from exercising. I was in survival mode for months. After a while when you don't exercise, you get weak. And when you get weak, your ability to produce diminishes; your discipline disappears; basically, you become another species.
Second, the demands placed upon me by my job, though no longer necessitating six-day work-weeks, are significantly more substantial than pre-crisis. Subsequently, I've had to slowly improve my physical conditioning before I can start sitting for hours in front of the computer on the weekend or get up early on a Friday morning (4:00 AM), which is how I used to do Hippies vs. Punks.
At the beginning of February, as the sunlight started to creep back from its winter recess, I happened to hear The Leaving Trains' Fuck (1987). I was in my kitchen preparing dinner when James Moreland's "Temporal Slut" shuffled on my iPod docking station. I couldn't place it. I thought it might be one of the later Fleshtones albums I purchased when I posted on Hexbreaker last April.
A couple more songs played and I still couldn't place it. Finally, I went and looked at the iPod. I saw that it was The Leaving Trains' Fuck which I had downloaded several months ago after I saw that the band's oeuvre was finally available for purchase and digital download. I think the last time I looked, 2014 or 2015, the only recordings available online were YouTube cuts.
At one time I owned Fuck. I had purchased it either in late 1987 or early 1988, but I never managed to get a handle on its hard, slick LA thrash sound. Much like my unsuccessful attempts at mastering Back Flag's My War and Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record, I tossed in the sponge after several attempts, never really to listen to it again.
And while I apparently didn't remember much of the record's sound, I do remember the cover art:
A cloudy firmament conjuring up heaven's pearly gates juxtaposed with the basic building block of profanity. A kind of perfection, a marriage of the sacred and the profane whose semiotic economy one would be hard pressed to equal.
And when I think about Fuck, I think about Stacey. Stacey was my girlfriend right before I married my ex-wife. This was a time -- 1988 -- that SST Records seemed to significantly increase the number of bands signed to the label and the records which those bands produced. The horizon seemed wide open, free, robust and filled with rock'n'roll.
I must have listened to Fuck more than 25 times in February. I figured it out. I got it, which is something of an achievement given that it was three decades in coming. I am even prepared to do a song-by-song breakdown of the record.
But what it really got me thinking about was the period from 1987 to 1994, and how in this time frame I was alive, my horizon was truly open, and how everything since then has been of a diminished nature.
Rock'n'roll begins its death march in 1994. There are some bright spots along the way, including some manifest perfection in the form of Post-Rock and Alt-Country. But its descent to cultural marginality is clear; Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer for music should make that obvious. As NYT rock critique Jon Pareles says in today's paper ("Kendrick Lamar Shakes Up the Pulitzer Game: Let’s Discuss"):
To me, it looks like some of the squawks are complaints about exclusivity being breached. And if you ask me, it should have happened sooner. I hereby nominate, for a retrospective Pulitzer, Public Enemy’s 1988 album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”: an experimental sonic bombshell, a verbal torrent, a mind expander. For that matter, the Pulitzers were late on Kendrick Lamar, too: “To Pimp a Butterfly,” from 2015, has even more musical breadth than “DAMN.” (which has plenty).
All of March I re-explored 1987 and 1988 in popular music. It's an amazing period. I saw Public Enemy perform at Nassau Coliseum in 1988.
What we shall do in the weeks ahead is back-burner 1975-1979 in favor of 1987-1994. Big-ticket culturally-unifying rock'n'roll dies with Kurt Cobain. There was an off-ramping period with Oasis and Radiohead, but 25 years later Hip Hop is the cultural king. No doubt about it.
The Hippie and the Punk are both cliches. Yes, they still resonate in the right audience. But for how much longer?
Gregg Allman died at the end of May. I have been meaning to say something about his first solo album, Laid Back (1973), a gold record that reached high up the charts in both Canada and United States. I have listened to Laid Back off and on my whole life: first as a child -- it was a staple of my parents' record collection in the 1970s -- and then as an adult -- it provided a musical accompaniment to my meager peregrinations as a bachelor.
Laid Back beautifully documents the Hippie Weltanschauung during the Watergate era. The counterculture revolution had failed to overturn the established political order, but it had successfully produced a massified bohemia. Nixon won an historic landslide in 1972, but by October of 1973, when Laid Back was released, he was desperately trying to keep hold of his presidency after the Saturday Night Massacre.
It is this combination of cooling New Left revolutionary fervor (how many got sucked in by McGovern?) with an enormous political crisis of the major parties, plus a massified bohemia, that creates a truly unique period. There was an absolute confidence that the old way of doing things was done, yet there was no urgency to come up with a new scheme. The horizon wasn't blasted wide open by brilliant psychedelic sunshine, as it had been at the end of the 1960s, but it was roomy and familiar. There appeared to be no impediments to free movement. So instead of more fussing and fighting and erecting of new worlds, why not just kick back on the couch or putter around the yard? Why not just be laid back?
The other night I happened to see the opening of Lindsay Anderson's classic film from 1973, O Lucky Man! Alan Price, like Gregg Allman, a keyboard player (he founded the Animals), captures the post-failed-revolutionary chic of the Watergate era.
The Watergate era ends with Jimmy Carter's election. (That's why The Last Waltz, filmed on Thanksgiving 1976 and released the spring of 1978, is an essential document because it captures the cultural exit of the Hippie; it also corresponds with the rise and fall of first wave Punk.)
The Watergate era I would mark as beginning in the spring of 1973, when the Senate Watergate Committee got cooking, until the summer of 1976 and the hurricane of propaganda unleashed by the U.S. Bicentennial. A little over three years.
I remember the period fondly because it was the last time my family was together under one roof. We lived in a large Victorian house in a town at the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. There was a carriage house and spacious grounds filled with frog ponds and old trees.
I remember intently studying the Laid Back cover art of Mati Klarwein. I remember taking a trip to the hardware store with my father on a Saturday afternoon as "Midnight Rider" played on the car radio, a long-haired, long-bearded Hippie standing in a front yard next to a tire swing as we drove by.
I have developed a block about this post. I think it has something to do with a clear memory I have of playing this record, the Minutemen's Project: Mersh (1985) EP, on my 21st birthday. The summer sun was shining brightly. I drank beer from one of my high-school debate trophies. I stood in the living room of a second-story apartment near the U.C. Berkeley campus. My girlfriend was there, and so too was my father. My father had driven down from Solano County to celebrate the occasion. I was now officially a man.
Taken together it was as if a brand-new counterculture had been formed in the space of a summer, and I was part of it. But what was it?
It was Hardcore, but not of the clownish, reactionary, dress-coded Nazi Punk variety. The Hardcore of Double Nickels, Zen Arcade and Meat Puppets II welcomed everyone who wanted to listen. It was politically engaged, openly intellectual (Double Nickels devoted songs to Dmitri Shostakovich and James Joyce), guileless and egalitarian. Primarily, it espoused an ethic of do-it-yourself hard work.
Imagine the Hippies without all the "Summer of Love" marketing overlays and metaphysical pretensions, and the First Wave U.K. Punks without their perfunctory negativity, and you get a sense of what SST Hardcore 1984 was like. Another world is possible. So let's just do it. (Nike cashed in on "Just Do It" later in the decade. Without being preceded by the Hardcore avant-garde, I doubt the shoe company could have.)
Fournier's book reminded me of several things about Double Nickels that I had forgotten. I remembered that the double-album length was a response to Hüsker Dü's planned release of the double-album Zen Arcade ("Take that Hüsker!" appears somewhere on the gate-fold Double Nickels album cover), but it had slipped my mind that the Minutemen had copied Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969) in giving each band member his own side of the record. Double Nickels has a D. Boon side, a Mike Watt side and George Hurley side. The fourth side is labeled "Chaff."
Another aspect of the album that I had forgotten is that the title refers to butt rocker Sammy Hagar's 1984 smash hit "I Can't Drive 55." In Double Nickels on the Dime the Minutemen are saying "We drive 55 m.p.h. on Interstate 10. So what? Does that make us square? What does speeding have to do with making music?"
After listening to the double album again non-stop for two weeks, I realized that I couldn't do it justice. There were several years, probably 1985 to 1987, when I pretty much exclusively listened to Bob Dylan and the Minutemen at night, and Van Morrison in the morning. It was a dividing-line period in my life, a time when I came to believe that "doing-your-own-thing" in a do-it-yourself fashion was more important than status, than acquiring a four-year degree and then quickly moving on to graduate or law school.
While it's too daunting at this point to take on Double Nickels, I thought I could manage the follow-up, Project: Mersh, the six-song EP released the winter of 1985 that contains the last great Minutemen song before the death of lead singer/guitarist D. Boon in December of that year.
The EP is three A-side songs, and three B-side songs adorned with a painting by D. Boon lampooning cigar-chomping record executives, one of whom proclaims, "I got it! We'll have them write hit songs!"
The big departure from previous albums is that the songs, with the exception of the final track, "More Spiel," are more conventional in structure. Gone is the 90-second free-jazzesque deconstruction of the pop tune, like in "Polarity" off What Makes a Man Start Fires (1983). Most of the tracks on Double Nickels are approximately 90 seconds; in fact, the longest song on the double album is two minutes 55 seconds.
An important point about the Minutemen in particular, Hardcore Punk in general, and one that connects it with the psychedelic ballroom San Francisco Sound of Happy Trails (1969) and Anthem of the Sun(1968), not to mention Eno's ambient records or PiL's Metal Box , is the destruction of or attack on the three-minute pop tune.
In Project: Mersh the Minutemen embrace the three-minute pop tune. The two first cuts "The Cheerleaders" and "King of the Hill" are both overtly political.
The third and last cut on the A-side is a cover of Steppenwolf's "Hey Lawdy Mama."
The Minutemen were always reaching back and covering bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf and Blue Öyster Cult -- politically-engaged rock bands from the Hippie era. (If you don't think Steppenwolf was political, listen to Steppenwolf Live (1970) again sometime.)
These bands provide a clue into who the Minutemen were emulating among the Hippies. In choosing "Hey Lawdy Mama," a sexist rant about coitus with groupies on the road, the band is poking fun at its flavor-of-the-month status as top of the heap left of the dial.
The B-side starts with "Take Our Test," before arriving at the best song of the EP, and the last great song the Minutemen produced, "Tour-Spiel," performed by bassist Mike Watt. (The final studio album, 3-Way Tie (For Last), released the same month as D. Boon's death, is not that good.)
I've been reading No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead by Peter Richardson. One thing Richardson makes plain is that the Dead were a continuation of the Beats, of Kerouac and Cassady and On the Road (1957). The Hippies and the Beats are organically connected. (We visited this subject before.)
If "Hey Lawdy Mama" is Steppenwolf's tribute to life on the road, and "Truckin'" is the Grateful Dead's, then I would say that the Hippies had lost their way as early as 1970. But with a song like "Tour-Spiel," a song about life on the road that is much truer to the Beats, I think we can say that Hardcore Punks had rediscovered Ground Zero:
Now you got your guitar And your practice amp You travel the USA in a van And Troccoli's counting on some situation Are you going to write the song I demand? And with the guitar turned off And the gas tank empty And the typewriter on But my head is empty And to really find me I've got to look inside me
From there the song segues into a five-minute acid rave, the last cut, "More Spiel," part of an emerging rave or neo-paisley psychedelic scene.
If you had to neatly encapsulate the message of the counterculture -- from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception(1954) to the Beats, the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests and Trips Festival, including Easy Rider, on up to George Harrison's Dark Horse and Patti Smith's Horses, before arriving at Project: Mersh -- it's those two lines: "And to really find me/I've got to look inside me."
To review: It was four or five years ago I saw some video of the Old Grey Whistle Test television program. The show ran from the early 1970s until the late 1980s.
The transition from the bands of the Hippie era to the arrival of the Punks was jarring. The music went from being good to sounding horrible. The situation did not improve with the advent of Post-Punk and New Wave.
Around the same time that I watched the old Whistle Test episodes, I saw the Martin Scorsese documentary on George Harrison. I was struck by the large crowds for the disastrous Dark Horse tour November-December 1974. An army of Krishna Consciousness fans cheering for a boozed and coked-up Harrison.
The question that I was confronted with is -- How do we go from Krishna Consciousness to The Damned and Sex Pistols in a few short years? How does that happen?
I don't think it is merely a coincidence (or, as an old girlfriend gratingly used to say, "a co-inky-dink") that the same time period -- the middle-to-late 1970s -- is synonymous with rise of neoliberalism. Union density has peaked; financialization of Wall Street has begun; Thatcher, Reagan and TINA ("There Is No Alternative" to capitalism) are about to launch the inequality rocketship.
Originally, I had intended for these posts to stay focused on just the transitional years, 1974-1979. Then I realized that it was necessary, in order to understand who the Hippie was, to go back to the 1960s.
The mother and father of all multi-day rock'n'roll festivals during the Age of Aquarius are Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Separated by two years, two months and the expanse of the continental United States, these concerts are weightier than all others because of the feature films associated with them: D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop (1968) and Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock (1970).
The movies were released only one-year-and-three-months apart; most of the artists who performed at Monterey Pop perform at Woodstock.
It's been a while since I've seen either, but if you were to view them one after the other I think you would agree that the norm had become distinctly freakier by August 1969.
Which brings up an interesting issue about the incubation period of social movements. The summer of 1967 is known as the "Summer of Love." (Otis Redding asked from the stage at Monterey Pop, "This is the Love Crowd, right?") But Monterey Pop didn't make its big splash on movie screens nationwide until after Christmas 1968, by which time, for instance, Janis Joplin, one of the big stars of the film, had already dumped her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the country had somersaulted from Eros to Thanatos with the assassinations of MLK and RFK and the police riot at the Chicago Democratic National Convention.
But thanks to the relative slowness of media in the 1960s (communication was much more localized than it is today), the massification of bohemia was able to cohere in wave after wave, year upon year, building an organic mass base that necessitated an equally massive counterrevolution.
It is the rancid carapace of that counterrevolution that rules the globe today. It should have been cracked and discarded decades ago, really at the end of the 1980s (that's what Grunge was about), and certainly by Y2K. By the time we get to Obama 2008, that was the popular electoral mandate for scrapping the counterrevolutionary neoliberal paradigm.
You'll notice though that at each turn of wheel the counterrevolutionaries have manged to maintain control. They have done so by resorting to increasingly intense system shocks, principally war (it's no coincidence that there are more displaced people than at any time since World War Two), and invasive information technology.
What I'm saying is that the Hippies couldn't happen today because technology wouldn't allow it. Technology is too instantaneous and people are too plugged in for any social movement not to be immediately co-opted.
Richard Hell said something to the effect that "Blank Generation," his Punk manifesto, was written about the collapse of the 1960s and the Vietnam War simultaneous with the explosion in media, leaving him feeling overwhelmed, numbed, blunted.
It has become much, much worse. Worse than we imagined possible. I'd say it's worse than Orwell or Huxley. I think Cormac McCarthy gets the vibe right, but our actual dystopia is noisier, a screeching tiny ever-present squall.
This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival. (For a good, brief Monterey Pop retrospective, as framed by the experience of Sacramento-native and future power hitter for the Los Angeles Dodgers 18-year-old Dusty Baker, read Kevin Greene's "The Greatest Music Festival in History." It captures the wide-open Hippie Weltanschauung.)
Whenever I see the Pennebaker film I'm always struck by the appearance of South Arican trumpeter Hugh Masekela and his band (see second YouTube video above). That appearance seems so ahead of its time -- 15 years before WOMAD, and 25 years before Wo' Pop is broadly accepted in the United States.
So this past weekend I decided to get a copy of The Promise of a Future (1968). Masekela performed songs from the album at Monterey Pop, including his Billboard 100 #1 "Grazing in the Grass" (see YouTube at top of the post)
Ask yourself, "When was the last time an instrumental was #1?" It is a good question -- "Harlem Shake" in 2013, a testament to the power of the internet and YouTube. Before that you would have to travel all the way back to the mid-'80s and Jan Hammer's "Miami Vice Theme."
The 1970s were the golden age of the instrumental #1, thanks to the popularity of Disco (makes me think more kindly of the genre). Then, before Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" and Henry Mancini's "Love Theme to Romeo and Juliet" (which is basically Muzak), comes Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass" for two weeks in the summer of '68.
"Grazing in the Grass" reminds me of a Ramsey Lewis tune. My favorite from The Promise of a Future is the lead track, a two-minute rendition of the Ashford & Simpson classic, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."
The last three songs on the album are all Masekela originals. "Vuca" follows "Grazing in the Grass":
Listening to The Promise of a Future it is impossible not to feel wistful about the loss of the dreams of 1960s. The culture was much stronger. Egalitarian collective action seemed possible.
What happens to all the futures that never arrive?
I was working a conference in April and in attendance was a guy I've known for a long time. He is a member of my union; that's how I know him. He is something of a pop music aficionado. He can go on for long stretches of time; for instance, about the recording history and chart positions of British Invasion bands of the 1960s.
This is what he did when I gave him, and a couple other aging union brothers, a lift home from an all-day out-of-town union assembly. He had burned a British Invasion disk. To each track he provided a running commentary. It was a delight, until the CD player of the rental car I was driving ate the disk. The guy freaked and started pounding on the dashboard. Fortunately, we were only a few clicks from his aprtment. I was able to soothe him with the promise that a pair of needle-nose pliers would remedy the situation. When we got to his building, he ran upstairs, grabbed the pliers (which, thank goodness, he possessed) and returned to successfully extract his juicy nuggets of Georgie Fame, Petula Clark, Herman's Hermits and The Hollies.
Next I saw him, at last month's conference, there wasn't any shadow of the British-Invasion-CD meltdown, only the bright sunshine of his having seen the week prior The Zombies50th anniversary tour of Odessey & Oracle (1968).
Odessey & Oracle, which my union brother proceeded to tell me, is a classic from the psychedelic era. The album was recorded principally at Abbey Road Studios a few months after The Beatles had recorded Sgt. Pepper's there. He raved for a solid ten minutes about the record, saying I had to listen to it immediately, particularly if I was unfamiliar with it. I promised I would.
I waited until a copy, which was the 2004 reissue by Fuel 2000, was available from my public library. I've been listening to it off and on for four weeks (mostly on last week).
What I've been thinking about is mostly how short-lived psychedelic pop/rock was. This train of thought is a continuation from the last Hippies vs. Punks post. By 1969 Pink Floyd had put a lot of sonic space between it and their Syd Barrett records. (Just think of the aural distance between June 1, 1967 Sgt. Pepper's and November 22, 1968 The White Album.)
The popular reception of Odessey & Oracle is a testament to the spontaneously anachronistic quality of psychedelic pop. As Greg Russo explains in his liner notes, The Zombies were having difficulty making money on tour. After a disastrous trip to the Far East, the band -- really the songwriters, keyboard player Rod Argent and bass player Chris White -- decided to make one more go of it in the studio. They signed with CBS Records, and CBS put up the money to record at Abbey Road.
Once the session work was done and the mixes made, Clive Davis, head of CBS, was not much impressed, an opinion that was confirmed when the first two singles released in 1967, "Friends of Mine" (not the best choice) and "Care of Cell 44" (much better) both tanked, followed by the generally ignored release of the album in April 1968.
The label then basically shelved Odessey & Oracle. By this time most of The Zombies had gone out and found regular day jobs. Chasing after the Zeitgeist, Rod Argent was already working on rebuilding the band, moving a new Zombies (which would become Argent) in, as Russo says, "a progressive, heavier" direction.
Then something bizarre happened. A U.S. radio station in the Midwest started playing "Time of the Season" at the end of 1968/beginning of '69, and by March it was a smash hit, reaching #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the Cashbox chart.
By March of 1969 the first blush of psychedelia had already faded. Nixon was in the White House and his secret saturation bombing of Cambodia was underway. Nineteen-Sixty-Nine and 1970 -- with Woodstock and Altamont, Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Weather Underground and Kent State -- are the end of the '60s dream.
The Zombies psychedelic pop from the Summer of Love must have seemed simultaneously dated and fresh. Instantaneous nostalgia. Sgt. Pepper's promise that everything is right here right now had proven hard to hold onto. Societies are not founded on such freedom. But people didn't want to give up the dream, particularly as that dream was floating closer and closer to the mainstream. So Odessey & Oracle found its place on AM radios in station wagons headed to and from the beach, or even on the supermarket PA, soothing shoppers as they strolled the fluorescent aisles buying Pop-Tarts and Tang.
Last week when I went on my morning coffee break -- there is an espresso place up the block from the building where I work that serves good coffee and is staffed by friendly, attractive, thoughtful, non-hipster young people -- two young women (my favorites) were working the counter. while on the sound system The Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love" was playing.
Either these young women were very kind and adept at affecting interest or they were genuinely interested when I launched into a small spiel about how music is isomorphic, that it mirrors the society from whence it originates, and that now, for our society, it would be impossible to produce Motown sound. "We're not that happy anymore," I said.
One of the young women agreed. "Yeah. You're right. We don't do happy."
After the last Hippies vs. Punks post back in April I felt guilty about my mildly condemning juxtaposition of Pink Floyd’s meandering, soporific double album Ummagumma (1969) with the frenetic dance-friendly Post-Punk music of bands like The Fleshtones. I felt guilty because I think Ummagumma is a great record. My two favorite Pink Floyd albums are Ummagumma and its follow-up Atom Heart Mother (1970).
Post-Punk begat or, depending on how you look at it, is synonymous with Hardcore. The Hardcore of my young-man youth had a distinct world view (just as the Hippies had their own world view). The literary foundation of the Hardcore world view was the poetry and fiction of Charles Bukowski, popularized in no small part by Barbet Schroeder’s feature-length film, Barfly (1987), starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.
Interestingly, Barbet Schroeder, if you listen to him tell it, played a role in Pink Floyd’s post-Syd Barrett success. Schroeder sought them out to provide a soundtrack to his debut film, More (1969). Once the film became a smash hit in Europe, Pink Floyd rode it’s coattails to a larger audience.
There is evidence that Schroeder is telling the truth. The Syd Barrett psychedelic albums, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) and A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), charted in three countries -- the U.S., UK and France -- upon their initial release. More charted in France, the UK and Holland, but added a fourth country, the U.S., when it cracked the Billboard 200 on its re-release in 1973 (still the Hippie period).
Recorded and released the same year as Ummagumma, the soundtrack to More sounds similar, with musique concrete bird songs combined with early electronica (it sounds to me a lot like the first Tangerine Dream album, Electronic Meditation, also recorded in 1969). The difference is that there are a couple toss-off acid rock tracks the band recorded to provide the ambiance of the Paris Hippie scene of the day.
More the movie -- much like its 1969 companion, the Ur-Hippie document Easy Rider -- is a cautionary tale of excess. Instead of violent rednecks murdering Hippies prone to bad acid trips, More features a beautiful German youth, played by Klaus Grünberg, coupling with a beautiful American youth, Mimsy Farmer (who also starred in the 1967 Hippiexploitation classic Riot on Sunset Strip) on the sunny Mediterranean island of Ibiza. They rip off an ex-Nazi’s heroin stash and abscond with it to a beautiful seaside villa where they proceed to shoot smack and rut with abandon. The German youth eventually overdoses, and the movie ends with his burial in a pauper’s grave.
Despite its pessimistic, dreary conclusion, More captures the wide-open horizon of the 1960s. I speak of “horizon” here in the phenomenological or hermeneutic sense of everything that goes unquestioned in one’s temporal-social frame that nonetheless constitutes one’s field of perception or capacity for consciousness.The gestalt. In 1969 it was wide open. The revolution was being born. The sense was that you could do whatever you wanted. The old wartime social homogeneity cultural consensus was dead. The pitfall for youth of the day was that this freedom was bankrupted by the false infinity of hallucinogenic drugs and narcotics.
Fast forward nearly 20 years to Barfly, Minutemen and the Hardcore of my youth. The horizon has been flipped upside down. It is no longer wide open but hidden beneath a flannel sheet of dead-end, low-wage work; cheap liquor, beer and methamphetamine; and a D.I.Y. ethos of creativity eked out at the end of the evening. Almost everything has changed.
Fast forward another 30 years to now, and, as the Minutemen presciently sang in 1985, “reality appears digital,” our horizon is inseparable from the false infinity of information technology. Things are much worse.
What’s beautiful to me about listening to the More soundtrack, as well as Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, is the memory of a wide-open horizon.
Evidence of time-past is all around. The Damned are coming to town soon, on tour to promote a 40th anniversary edition of the album, Damned Damned Damned, the record that kicked off UK Punk. Then in the fall it will be Depeche Mode. Posters are up in abundance. Oh, and this August, at CenturyLink Field, where the Seahawks play, Metallica.
A couple months back, I experienced a "rock is dead" epiphany. I was sitting in a coffee house during my lunch hour, eating a grapefruit and reading the newspaper. Playing on the sound system was some sort of turgid tar-sands Grunge -- Screaming Trees? Skin Yard? And it struck me how truly distant and mothballed rock'n'roll has become.
The whole point of Grunge was to reanimate, revivify the old longhair Hippie headbanger cock-rocker by tapping into the uptempo testosterone of Punk. Well, on this particular winter afternoon, it might as well have been a recording of The Kingston Trio performing at The Purple Onion. That's how dead the sound was. Gone, baby, gone. A set of sensibilities as far removed as the horse-&-buggy days.
Then, not too much later, maybe just a day or two, I happened to be in a different neighborhood, and I decided to try the swank coffee bar in the main lobby of the Seattle Center building that houses the new KEXP studio. The coffee bar is staffed by attractive, well-mannered young adults, and it is next to the front entrance of a large, museum-type room -- almost an auditorium in size -- of architectural concrete. There is a stage for performances at one end of the room and a little Light In The Attic Records kiosk in a corner at the other end; in between are tables and chairs, coaches and stuffed chairs. Young people hang out and study their tablets and laptops. The sound system is state of the art
On this particular afternoon Television was on the PA. I was feeling good from a double espresso. The music sounded pristine and very much alive. Maybe rock isn't dead, but it lives on as a museum piece.
Another band on tour is The Fleshtones. They'll be touring Europe this summer.
I started thinking about The Fleshtones again after listening extensively to The Feelies last month. The Fleshtones, like The Feelies, are a band that we listened to a lot in the first half of the 1980s. Like The Feelies, The Fleshtones got their start performing at CBGBs in 1976. Like The Feelies, The Fleshtones have put out a new album recently. And like The Feelies, I saw The Fleshtones perform live at Berkeley Square in the 1980s.
At the time they were on tour promoting what is now regarded as their most successful album, the I.R.S. Records release, Hexbreaker! (1983). I can't remember if it was the late fall of 1983 or the early winter of 1984 that we -- my girlfriend (wife-to-be), my fellow student co-workers at the U.C. Berkeley library and I -- saw them perform one Friday night. What I can remember is that it was not one of the best shows I have ever seen. It was the best show I have seen. Ever.
This week has been a pleasure because after downloading Hexbreaker! this past Sunday I've been listening to it all week, particularly the title track, "Hexbreaker." I've listened to "Hexbreaker"on repeat over and over. There is something that sax player Gordon Spaeth achieves at the crescendo of the song (there is a technical name for it; I just don't know what it is, when the notes are splaying, the saxophone reed is splintering, like Anthony Braxton is playing in a garage-rock band) that makes me feel as good as I did that night at the Berkeley Square.
I felt so good that night -- dancing side-by-side with my girlfriend and my friends who I worked with at the library -- that I think I stayed high for a whole week. And I wasn't stoned or even that drunk. Toward the end of the show lead singer Pete Zaremba danced a floor tom down to the pit in front of the stage and held it in one arm (no easy feat) while banging on it furiously with the palm of his other hand. We deliriously danced alongside him.
I remember the feeling well. I was high. We were all high. But we kept going higher. I remember thinking, "This has to stop. I can't keep feeling this good." But it just kept getting better and better.
The show finally ended with a bunch of people following Zaremba back up on stage and pogoing with him and the rest of the band, Zaremba placing a headlock on a Marilyn lookalike -- short-sleeved A-line dress, curly peroxide-blond hair, shock-red lipstick -- who I recognized from the coffee houses around campus, and dancing with her that way for several minutes.
There are some important Hippies vs. Punks clues to be found here. What The Fleshtones did, what the essence of the band is, is to return rock'n'roll to its rudiments, which is in the garage, before the Hippies, the Haight and the Summer of Love. The template they used is Lenny Kaye's Nuggets. Bands like The Seeds, The Standells, The Chocolate Watchband, Count Five, The Leaves.
When I started thinking about The Fleshtones again I checked first with my public library out of curiosity to see if they had any Fleshtones material in their collection. The only thing that came up in a keyword search was the 1982 film Urgh! A Music War.
Urgh! A Music War is a priceless document memorializing how different the Punk, Post-Punk and New Wave scene was from its Hippie predecessor.
For one, you had a band at the top of the heap for a spell of time, say, 1980 to 1983, that was progressive and supportive of the B- and C-list acts -- Skafish, Au Pairs, Wall of Voodo, The Fleshtones -- and that band was The Police.
Two, the shared traits of Post-Punk music -- the high-treble lead guitar; the robotic and repetitive drumbeat; and most all, the fact that the music is pretty uniformly uptempo -- clearly distinguish it from the lengthy and meandering ruminations of, for instance, Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969).
Why? So you can dance.
Nineteen-eighty to 1983 is an interesting period for rock'n'roll. Situated just outside the boundaries of the 1975-to-1979 Hippies-vs.-Punks war, it is pre-MTV and pre-Hardcore. The Hippies aren't an issue. They're zombies off to the side, staggering and stupefied. The essence of music is now dance, movement. 2 Tone ska.
With the ascent of MTV and the music video this kind of simple dance-party vibe gets crushed by commercialism. People like me found our way soon thereafter to Hardcore. The important year being 1984, when both Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime are released, effectively wiping out all other pole-position aspirants in the rock avant-garde.
But with Hardcore, whether we realized it or not, we were smuggling in a lot of metaphysics that would come back to haunt us. Maybe the metaphysics weren't as pie-eyed as the Hippies, but they were whoppers nonetheless. The divination of the D-I-Y working man for starters. (It is no coincidence that the mass appeal of Charles Bukowski's fiction corresponds to a time when young men were listening every night to "Working Men are Pissed.")
But, really, is there a working class in this country anymore? Was there one in the 1980s? I made a decision in my young-man youth to live as a member of the working class, but aren't we just consumers?
For rock to renew itself I think it has to go back to the garage, back to the dance party.
The month of March I started listening to The Feelies again.
Crazy Rhythms (1980) is a seminal album that we listened to all the time, particularly in the 1980s; it has a sound all its own. It manages to aurally capture dark space, nighttime distance, like no other record I can think of.
The band didn't provide a follow-up until six-years later, and by that time they had a new rhythm section. (Anton Fier's percussion work is really what makes Crazy Rhythmsunique.)
Last week I picked up Ork Records: New York, New York and discovered something I didn't know -- that The Feelies can trace their pedigree all the way back to the original CBGBs scene. So even though their debut album was not released until 1980, they were part of the first wave of Punk.
Simultaneously I saw that The Feelies had just released a new album in February, In Between, and it is surprisingly good. Not Crazy Rhythms good, but topnotch.
It is worth listening to if only as a present tense "mystic chord of memory" connecting us to our cultural Ground Zero, the middle- to late-1970s. We have to go back and figure out exactly what went wrong. Music and cultural was able to reinvent itself out of the detritus of the Hippie collapse.
Inventiveness. We've lost it. Money, all-pervasive digital technology . . . we're suffocating.
A critical scene in Taxi Driver (1976) is the one where Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, is sitting in front of his black-&-white television, pointing his Smith & Wesson .44 at the screen as youth slow dance to Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky" on American Bandstand.
It is a critical scene, representing a dividing line for the character, who kicks the TV over and thereafter fully commits to his mission as an assassin.
What's interesting is that it is the only clear, popular musical marker in the film. Everything else is Bernard Herrmann's anachronistic film noir score. There are a few minor sonic references -- background music in the diner where the drivers hang out; Harvey Keitel's pimp character Sport singing in the brothel to a record I haven't been able to identify -- but nothing like the prominent placement of "Late for the Sky."
Scorsese is communicating something to us. But what?
"Late for the Sky" is of course the lead and title track off Jackson Browne's masterpiece, Late for the Sky. Late for the Sky appeared at the end of summer 1974, not too long after Nixon's resignation. It was nominated for a Grammy, reached as high as #14 on the Billboard album charts, and cracked the top ten of the hipster Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 1974, though Christgau dismissed the record as follows:
Late for the Sky [Asylum, 1974]
Browne reminds me of Nixon: no matter how hard I listen to his pronouncements--important sociologically if nothing else, right?--my mind begins to wander. They're getting longer, too; the eight songs here average over five minutes. I admit that the longest is also the best, an intricate extended metaphor called "Fountain of Sorrow." But his linguistic gentility is inappropriate, his millenarianism is self-indulgent, and only if he sang as good as Dylan Thomas might I change my mind. B-
"Fountain of Sorrow" is indeed a terrific song that holds up to this day. One evening I think I listened to it on repeat five times:
My parents owned this album. It was one of their favorites. I think my father identified with Jackson Browne. He looked something like him and used to dress in brown corduroy pants and a white t-shirt, as Browne appears on the cover of The Pretender(1976) -- an album my Dad and I listened to a lot when my parents were going through their divorce.
From 1972 to 1977 Jackson Browne is pretty much at the top of the heap of singer-songwriters, He enjoyed critical acclaim and robust record sales. If Late for the Sky represents Brown's zenith, what we can take away from it, I think persuasively, is that the end of the line for the Hippies is synonymous with The Flying Burrito Brothersesque Los Angeles country rock of the Watergate era and Ford presidency. (Eagles Don Henley and J.D Souther sing backup on Late for the Sky.)
Like Hotel California, Late for the Sky is a very cynical document packaged in a slick, mellifluous studio sound. Browne is preoccupied with apocalyptic floods and planet-ravaging catastrophes that will scrub man's decadent civilization clean. You could say he was ahead of his time. (It is too bad that he doesn't keep his website more up-to-date.)
Scorsese gives the song its privileged spot in Taxi Driver because it is a refutation of Romantic love and the idea that we can ever satisfy our beloved. Love is a delusion where we are forever trying to become someone who we are not.
Once Travis Bickle receives this message, he is on his way. He kicks his TV over, and with it the Hippies. The Punk era is born from a Jackson Browne song.
I left my apartment building a little before 7:20, as I do every weekday morning, on Valentine's Day, and what was there to greet me when I stepped out on the avenue? Light!
Last year at this time, maybe a few weeks sooner, I noticed the return of the light, at the same time as was I was re-examining the first four Lemonheads albums, and quite abruptly I felt not so bad about myself.
Seeking to recapture that feeling, Valentine's Day I launched myself in an immersion of It's a Shame AboutRay(1992). I happened to have it on my iPod knowing that I might want to pick up where I left off last winter.
What I remember about listening to It's a Shame when it was first released late spring of 1992 is, in fact, light. My buddy Mark and I, home from work, were drinking gin. The windows were flung open and June light filled my apartment. Mark was talking about a woman he had just started to date while "Alison's Starting to Happen" blasted out of the stereo speakers.
It was a moment of generational certitude. People forget. Reaganism was bankrupt by June of 1992. Unemployment kept rising (though Mark and I weren't feeling it because we both had steady jobs), and Bush looked cooked. The Dems were licking their chops. They were about to nominate a bright and shiny "New Democrat" known as "Slick Willie."
For those of us in our 20s who voted and read the newspapers, that was all fine. But what was really exciting was that underground, indie record labels like SST, Alternative Tentacles, Homestead, Touch and Go, Sub Pop and TAANG! were on the verge of a major invasion of the majors. All that Punk we listened to and lived by in the 1980s was bleeding into the mainstream in the form of Grunge, exterminating the headbanger hair bands.
Nineteen-ninety-two was the zenith. The next year would be the asteroid impact with negligible records like Blood Sugar Sex Magik,Blind Melon, and Pocket Full of Kryptonite in heavy rotation for such long a time (years?) that those of us who knew better and wished to resist finally succumbed and purchased copies of Enter Sandman and Siamese Dream.
It's a Shame About Ray is more Pop Rock than Grunge. Produced by The Robbs at their Cherokee Studios, Ray is no Station to Station(1976). But I am surprised how often now that it is played on the local hipster radio station. "My Drug Buddy" is one of the station's staples.
At the time, the summer of 1992, I was disappointed. I was a Lemonheads true believer, and it seemed to me that Evan Dando had purged the rest of the band members and gone Hollywood. He appeared on the cover of SPIN making out with indie film star Adrienne Shelly.
After reading Everett True's The Lemonheads (1994), "A Melody Maker Book," on Saturday I can say that my assessment was fairly accurate.
The story about Ray is that the band, following a mere 11,000 Lovey copies sold (compared to 30,000 for Lick released by independent TAANG!) headed Down Under for one last tour. There Dando discovered himself. Thanks to a lot of MDMA, surfing, songwriting help from Smudge frontman Tom Morgan and good old Aussie hospitality, Dando was able to piece together an album's worth (30 minutes) of material. Founding member, and my personal favorite, Jesse Peretz was out. Aussie Nic Dalton was in. Drummer David Ryan remained.
But the real story of It's a Shame About Ray is that it was headed in the direction of Lovey -- meaning, another dud -- until the the band was approached to do a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" (1968) for a new video release of The Graduate (1967), one of the seminal Hollywood films of the '60s cultural revolution. The single took off. Ray was re-released with "Mrs. Robinson" as a bonus track. The album started moving up the charts, eventually reaching #68 on the Billboard 200 for 1993. It did much better in the UK (#33) and Australia (#23).
Though I was disappointed by the bubble-gum quality of a lot of the songs, part of me was foolishly proud of Dando. It wasn't but a few years earlier that I was standing next to him at an empty CBGBs. Now he was making out bare-chested with a beautiful actress on the cover of a national mass-circulation magazine, not to mention partying hard with Hollywood stars at Johnny Depp's Viper Room.
Youth will be served in its boundless hope and dead-end arrogance. When I want to remember what that feeling feels like I think about that June evening in 1992, drinking gin, and my buddy Mark bathed in light talking about carnal delicacies that would soon be his.
Immersed in Ray all last week what became apparent to me is that most of the songs are actually a lot sadder than they seemed when originally ingested back in the early '90s. All the demos that are included in the 2008 Rhino re-issue of the album make this plain. It's stoner music, a sonic account of a young man equipped with the slimmest of defenses confronted with the inevitable assimilation to a brutal world yet hoping nonetheless . . . waiting to be saved. (The demo version of "Rudderless" captures this.)
The genius of It's a Shame About Ray is The Robbs' production -- to take all those downer stoner songs and make them uptempo and sunshiny Pop.
My favorite track though is the mid-tempo "Rudderless." "Hope in my past." The honest statement of a confused young man waiting for recognition buttressed by a solid Grunge guitar and topped off by a fragmenting deep space Sonic Youth guitar effect at the end:
For months my iPod wouldn't sync with my laptop. So for months I listened to the same however-so-many gigabytes of music (which is one of the reasons that Hippies vs. Punks posts have all but disappeared).
Sometime in December this problem corrected itself. When I re-synced my iPod I loaded it with every Bob Dylan record in my library. The idea was to re-explore Dylan in light of his being feted with a Nobel Prize in Literature. And it has been a revelation.
I think it is a fair argument to make that without "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" there is no super-historical Dylan and hence no Nobel.
What is singular about the Brandeis concert is the power of Dylan's bellows. He is flat-out fog-horning each verse. It is an amazing performance, reminding the listener of the absurdity of current events while feeling more grounded and sane imagining the dream of this young man.
I was particularly tickled by
Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptownAnd there was nobody aroun’I got into the driver’s seatAnd I drove down 42nd StreetIn my Cadillac. Good car to drive after a war
As Dylan's career progressed his writing lost much of its mirth.
What's interesting about the video at the top of the post is all the flannel and work clothes populating the bohemian coffee house television set. It looks exactly as we dressed in my California Hardcore youth of the early to mid-1980s.
There is a cornucopia of free downloads of DJ/rupture's mixes available on his Mudd Up! blog. Dating from Gold Teeth Thief (2001) and running up to Sunset Park Rent Strike (2012), the mixes provide a sonic history of our contemporary age.
There were a few moments of sunny relaxation during the low-wage full employment of Slick Willie's second term. Rents, while rising, were still manageable as long as work was readily available.
But then you had the dotcom boom and bust coinciding with 9/11, and things have never been the same. It's the "things have never been the same" that rupture's mixes capture.
Like sliding a analog radio dial on a global digital receiver, rupture's sonic world is a world of the marginalized black and brown of the periphery. The master narrative no longer rules. There is chaos.
That is why I thought it was appropriate to feature rupture's music today, the day of Trump's inauguration as the 45th POTUS. The Trump presidency cannot be sustained. The system is failing.
The system would have failed if Hillary had triumphed, but it could, from an elite perspective, have been a more managed failure. With Trump the system is hurtling toward abject, near-term failure.
My favorite rupture mixes are Uproot (2008) and, with Matt Shadetek, Solar Life Raft (2009).
One of the interesting things about the many "those who have passed" retrospectives that filled the newspapers at the end of the year was the absence of any mention of either Keith Emerson or Greg Lake, the 'E' and 'L' of ELP, Emerson Lake & Palmer, the Prog Rock super-group that came to define the bloated and doomed bombast of pop music in the 1970s that was such easy prey for the Punks.
Keith Emerson blew his brains out in March; Greg Lake succumbed to cancer last month. I only read one year-end round-up that granted the barest of mentions to these Prog Rock originators, William McDonald's "Among Deaths in 2016, a Heavy Toll in Pop Music":
Pop music figures fell all year, many of their voices still embedded in the nicked vinyl grooves of old records that a lot of people can’t bear to throw out. The roster included Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane; Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Glenn Frey of the Eagles; and Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen -- even George Michael -- were featured prominently in McDonald's piece. But at least Emerson and Lake were listed with a hyperlink to their obits.
I took the omission of Emerson and Lake as a telling bit of cultural forgetfulness. It is hard for people who didn't come of age in the 1970s to understand how huge Emerson, Lake & Palmer were. The band was the apotheosis of hugeness itself. Coming as they did right before Punk, blending Moog electronica with classical music and Carl Palmer's propulsive drumming -- all of which really hastened Punk's ascension -- ELP represents sort of a Francis Fukuyama "End of History" cultural signpost, a zenith of postwar amalgamation. The fact that this was nowhere on the radar as 2016 came to end should tell us something.
It tells us that the Punks, synonymous as they are with the installation of neoliberalism, have carried the day, have won the battle, have eclipsed the Hippies. The dialectic has been severed. As a society, we cannot fathom what the world looked like before 1977. We have not a clue what the aspirations of youth were prior to Never Mind the Bollocks (1977). We are floating on a cloud of nihilistic reaction. Things are going to have to continue to disintegrate before we can find a sustainable way forward.
There is a hip young man who works at my neighborhood comic shop. Simon is his name. Simon is also a DJ. When I am thinking about music I ask him his opinion. On Wednesday I asked him if he had heard that Greg Lake had died last month. He gave me a blank stare. I said, "Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake & Palmer." Simon said something to the effect that while some Prog Rock outfits have aged well, like King Crimson, ELP is not one of them.
At this point I could have said, "Well, Lake was a co-founder of King Crimson." But I didn't. Instead, like an affable buffoon, I replied, "I don't know. I have gone back recently and listened to some of those albums. They're really not that bad."
"Appropriately qualified," said Simon.
In any event, the point is that apex of popular Prog Rock is cut off from today's youth. The youth of today have no idea of what it was like to listen to Wendy Carlos' A Clockwork Orange (1972) or the soundtrack to Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away (1974). Even into the early 1980s I would put on Brain Salad Surgery (1973) when I needed a shot of testosterone to finish a column for the high school newspaper.
Testosterone is not an offering in Three Fates Project (2012). A lot of the time it sounds to me like John Tesh's Live at Red Rocks (1995), which is to say horrible. Three Fates Project is Keith Emerson's last studio album. It is not all bad. "Tarkus - Concertante" has its moments.
When I plod along Sunday afternoons lying on my back on the mattress on the floor watching the National Football League I have noticed the new Chili's commercials (though I didn't see any yesterday).
The ad campaign is called "The Hamburger Hippies." It celebrates the founding of the restaurant chain by bohemians from the Age of Aquarius. The counterculture is invoked with classic rock'n'roll songs -- Foghat's "Slow Ride" (1975), Faces' "Ooh La La" (1973) and ZZ Top's "Tush" (1975). I thought I heard Free's "All Right Now" (1970) too, but I can't verify that.
The ad campaign is effective because it reminds the viewer of a time when our culture seemed roomy and affordable enough that we could drink, get stoned and laid; then wake up the next day, yawn, and not feel paranoid about the rent going up or being late for work or feeling the need to check email or Facebook. In other words, society provided enough time and space -- freedom! -- for the working class to do what it likes, which is fornicate and alter the everyday mundane pensiveness of sober-minded consciousness.
We know though from the irregular -- the last one was in July -- "Hippies vs. Punks" posts that 1975 is in fact the end of the line for the Hippies. In 1976 there is an efflorescence of California lite rock with Hippie hues -- Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller Band, Eagles, Peter Frampton -- that signals an accommodation with the workaday world. No longer are the Hippies rocking out with cries of "Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker!" Rather, it is a shift on the assembly line before stopping off for a meal at a Hippie-run eatery (probably what Chili's was at its founding; what Geppetto's was in my hometown) before returning home to smoke a joint and watch Baretta on ABC.
The Hippies made the transition back to The Man, exchanging their aspirations for another world, whether psychedelic or political, for a steady job, cheap rent, and free time filled with recreational drugs and looser sexual mores.
Sounds pretty good, but something mostly alien in our present digital age. We still long for such a society though. When Foghat's "Slow Ride" or Free's "All Right Now" fill the air we remember what it was like.
The GOP came to power in the late 1960s thanks to two Californians, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. They perfected the politics of white working-class resentment. The scapegoats were Blacks and Hippies, the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles and the Freedom of Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley.
Now with marijuana set for a legalization breakthrough and Black Lives Matter here to stay as a cultural force, the foundation of reactionary politics is cracked. Hippies and Blacks are saintly once again. Trump is the last gasp of White Flight, like the Iraqi Baath Party hiding out in Nineveh bankrolled by Saudi royals waiting to pop up reborn as the Islamic State.
