Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 1

We've come to the Hippies vs. Punks Rosetta Stone (at least my personal touchstone) -- The Last Waltz (1978).

A conceit is indulged here. The conceit is that I am an everyman personification of Hippies vs. Punks. I was born the year Kesey and the Merry Pranksters kicked off the Aquarian Age with their bus ride across the country to the 1964 New York World's Fair, and I was raised by parents who went from being solid middle-class liberals to commune-founding Hippies. When I set out on my own as a young man fresh from the university I did so flyin' the flannel, a symbol of Hardcore Punk popularized by bands on the SST Records label. And my first run as a bachelor, at the age of 25 after I parted company with my wife, was done under the guiding light of The Last Waltz.

At the time, from 1990 to 1992, I was living in the crack-infested neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Morningside Heights. I repeatedly viewed, usually drunk and stoned and usually with my buddies, VHS copies of the Scorsese documentary of The Band's final concert at the Winterland Ballroom.

It's a great -- if not the greatest -- rock concert movie. It speaks especially to young men who are coming to the end of their 20s and realizing, as we were, that the high life is actually hard work.

But essentially The Last Waltz, both the film and the album, is a love letter to male beauty, virility, camaraderie and the adoration of women. As Robbie Robertson tells Scorsese early in the documentary, explaining how he came to get a job playing with The Hawk, Ronnie Hawkins, "He called me up, and I said, 'Sure I'd like a job. What does it mean? What do I do?' And he said, 'Well, son, you won't make much money, but you'll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.' " This is what appealed to me as a newly minted bachelor on the dark side of my 20s, carousing the streets of upper Manhattan.

There are many reasons to class The Band as an Uber Hippie group. They were Dylan's band when he made his famous first electric tour of Europe in 1966. Following Dylan to Woodstock, The Band moved to Saugerties, NY, and in 1969, with "The Weight" a featured song in the Uber Hippie movie Easy Rider, they performed at the Uber Hippie music festival.

The more I thought about it this past week, the more I came to conclusion that The Last Waltz -- filmed on Thanksgiving Day in the California Bay Area, only three weeks after Carter squeaked by Ford in the 1976 presidential election, and released to theater audiences the spring of 1978 --  is Hippies vs. Punks ground zero. The period of time from performance to final product is the same time the Punks knock off the Hippies.

I realized too that the movie runs through my life at critical moments: when I graduate from high school in 1982; when I make my first run at being a bachelor, 1990 to 1992; and then again in 2002, during the 25th anniversary re-release, when I make my second run at being a bachelor. I'm now on my third attempt, and I think I've finally got it. And that's part of the realization -- I was trying to be like the guys in The Band -- desired by and enmeshed with women -- but they had it wrong. I think the key to happiness is to be able to avoid women.

All week I listened to Rick Danko (1977). (The cheapest used copy one can get on Amazon is $66.95.) Danko is my favorite member of The Band; he was also the first to be signed by a label as a solo artist (by the ghoulish Clive Davis for Arista Records). Much was revealed by my study of this album. The eventual fate of Danko with Arista is a perfect example of what was to happen to the Hippies forthwith in the late 1970s. But that's next Friday night.

Tonight, suffering a TKO from the work week (I didn't even make it to the grocery store) and with a race Sunday morning, I'm just priming the pump for what will be multiple Hippies vs. Punks posts on The Last Waltz.

Hippies vs. Punks: Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes 1975

To recapitulate. Hippies vs. Punks. In a very short period of time, from 1975 to 1979, the Punks replaced the Hippies as the vanguard youth movement in the West (though on Fridays to come we will consider the possibility of the continuation of a Hippie vanguard, albeit greatly shrunken, contemporaneous with the Punks). This is the same period of time, the late Seventies, when our current (now exhausted) Zeitgeist takes wing. Call it neoliberalism, or a political economy defined by the hyper movement of wealth from working people to the top tier, the rent-seekers, the 1%.

The idea I introduced earlier is that 1975 is the last hurrah of Hippies. What happens in 1975? The Vietnam War officially ends with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. And what makes a Hippie a Hippie? Being a longhair and being antiwar. Hippies are said to have got their start the summer of 1964 when Ken Kesey took his Merry Pranksters cross country in the psychedelic bus Futhur destined for the New York City World's Fair. While Babbs, Cassady, Kesey and the rest fried on acid Congress passed The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing LBJ to rapidly escalate the military conflict in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. When the "war" ends ten-years later so does a main reason for being a Hippie.

But the social characteristics -- such as long hair, promiscuity, and recreational drug use -- popularized by the Hippies not only remain but spread throughout Middle America. It is a mass libertinism minus any revolutionary ideology or social critique. This is Disco, a vital interregnum between the Hippies and the Punks, and crucial to understanding why the Hippies disappeared as a vanguard movement as quickly they did.

From the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1975, coming in at #100, is "Get Dancin'" by Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes. I was in 6th grade in 1975. That year I purchased a cheap copy of Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes; it was a cut-out bargain bin LP that I found at Tower Records in San Jose. When I wanted to drive my older sisters crazy (one was a prog rocker, the other was a Joni Mitchell devotee) I would put "Get Dancin'" on the turntable:

The Punks are coming.