Hippies vs. Punks: Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky (1974)

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.

Hippies vs Punks: The Idea

I'm thinking of making Friday evenings "Hippie Fridays" since last Friday night I cursorily and by happenstance mentioned the student rebellion of the 1960's and a couple theories by prominent authors -- Theodore H. White and Theodore Roszak -- regarding its causes.

But rather than "Hippie Fridays" maybe it should be called "Hippies vs. Punks Fridays" because what I am really fascinated by is how quickly and completely we underwent a huge cultural shift in the West in the middle 1970's when the punks came on the scene and in the space of a few years wiped out the hippies as a vanguard movement.

Last winter I watched DVDs of the English rock show The Old Grey Whistle Test. It started broadcasting in the late 1960's and ran all the way up until the late 1980's. And very clearly starting with acts like Jackson Browne, Fairport Convention and Stealers Wheel you can see the hippies. It was all about the music, kind of freaky; just hanging out there, you know. Then come the punks. The Jam, PiL, The Damned. And it's glaringly different. The music is hard. It's angry. It sounds much worse. And were talking in a very short space of time, a couple of years. It's like the homo sapiens are supposed to have wiped the Neanderthals. And this is the music of my maturation. This is the music I embraced while rejecting the "pussy music" of my parents, who were hippies.

And this is important beyond a shift in musical tastes among Western youth. Why? Because it's well acknowledged that the paradigm we're suffering through -- we could call it a lot of things, but let's stick with "neoliberalism" for the time being -- was launched, approximately, at the time that punks wiped out the hippies. So if we can understand why the hippies fell so quickly to the punks maybe we can figure out why neoliberalism completely bamboozled us and we ended up in our current predicament where the 1% have captured just about everything.

There are a lot of songs that I could cap off the Friday night with here. Patti Smith's cover of "Hey Joe," a song popularized by hippie god Jimi Hendrix, is a good one for at least two reasons. First, Patti Smith is a progenitor of punk music. Her seminal debut album, Horses, is produced in the "hinge" year 1975 when we make our move into the new paradigm. Second, Patti Smith was, is and always will be a hippie. This highlights the possibility that rather than being wiped out by the punks, the hippies became the punks. In any event, Patti Smith is a transformational figure, which is on full display in this recording: