Hippies vs. Punks: Hugh Masekela's The Promise of a Future (1968)

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.

To provide an exploratory framework I decided at first to focus on some key festivals. For the Hippie era, the two that I spent the most time on and am still working through are 1) San Jose's Aquarian Family Festival of May 1969, and 2) Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of June 1970. I concentrated on bands from the undercard like The Chocolate Watchband, Joy of Cooking, Damnation of Adam's Blessing, Bloodrock, et al. I did the same thing for the Punks, examining the 100 Club Punk Festival of September 1976 and the night Punk died, the January 14, 1978 Sex Pistols show at Bill Graham's Winterland.

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?

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 Grateful Dead (1967)

I cast about at the beginning of the week for an album for this Friday's Hippies vs. Punks. At first, having recently finished Ed Sanders' The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, my intention was to focus on Sanders' Truckstop (1969). But quickly I confronted the difficulty of immersing myself for an entire work week in Sanders' Country-&-Western send-up of Hippies vs. Squares.

As I was coming to grips with this realization I was in line at a Starbucks getting my morning coffee. Piped in over the PA was a song from Bob Dylan's Self Portrait (1970). I just happened to have The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) loaded on my iPod. So I decided that would be the album for this week.

But then I thought, "How can I ignore the 'Fare Thee Well' concerts of the the Grateful Dead?" The ultimate Hippie band officially reforming 20 years after Jerry Garcia's death in order to officially call it quits. The final football stadium shows in Santa Clara and Chicago received an ample amount of ink. Besides Jon Pareles' bloodless review, stories seemed to focus on the exorbitant ticket prices.

In any event, never a Deadhead, I decided to take another listen to the band's debut album, The Grateful Dead (1967). Recorded in Los Angeles for the Warner Bros. label during the month of January 1967, the most illuminating takeaway for me is how dated the record sounds. This is no American Beauty (1970) or Workingman's Dead (1970). A majority of the tracks are governed by a Go-Go dancer's beat, proving, like Moby Grape's debut, that the San Francisco Sound in 1967 was evolving out of a L.A.-dominated Sunset Strip Freak Scene. In the run-up to Monterey Pop and the Summer of Love, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (1967) is a far more innovative, defining record than The Grateful Dead.

Nonetheless "Viola Lee Blues" is certainly a statement of great things to come:

Hippies vs. Punks: Skip Spence and Moby Grape

The story of Skip Spence and Moby Grape has it all -- a great psychedelic name, a scheming manager (Matthew Katz), drug abuse, violence, insanity, a stint in the psychiatric ward, robust creativity, and superb music. Skip and the band rose like a rocket and fell from the firmament as fast as lightning.

Spence was a founder and guitarist of Moby Grape. He had been the drummer on Jefferson Airplane's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off (1966), as well as a member of an early iteration of Quicksilver Messenger Service.

I was originally attracted to the band as a source for a Hippies vs. Punks post when I saw that they opened the historic Mantra-Rock Dance, the event that introduced the Hare Krishnas, a.k.a., the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) to the West Coast "Flower Power" scene. The Mantra-Rock Dance was held at Chet Helms' Avalon Ballroom on Sunday night, January 29, 1967 -- the beginning of what would later be seen as the year of the Hippie; the more famous Human Be-In had taken place a couple of weeks earlier.

Star Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, the man who coined the term "Flower Power," helped organize and MC'd the Mantra-Rock Dance in order to introduce ISKCON founder Swami Bhaktivedanta to Haight-Ashbury. Moby Grape, a band much sought after at the time by the record labels, made a big splash that night, not only kicking things off but also joining Ginsberg, Swami Bhaktivedanta, and the members of Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company in leading the ballroom audience in two hours of chanting and dancing.

When I stray from my temporal confines -- what I have designated as the years 1975 through 1979 -- of Hippies vs. Punks one of the things that I like to do is select a band from the undercard of a rock festival or important show from either Hippie or Punk era and immerse myself in its music during the work week. In this case, and towards the goal of furthering our understanding of the "San Francisco Sound," without which the Hippie does not exist, I have submerged myself over the last two weeks in the first two Moby Grape albums -- Moby Grape (1967) and Wow/Grape Jam (1968), as well as the post-acid meltdown record of founding member Alexander "Skip" Spence, Oar (1969).

The eponymous Moby Grape was released on June 6, 1967 shortly before the band performed at what would later be hyped as the blast-off event to the Hippie "Summer of Love" -- the Monterey Pop Festival. The album peaked in September at #24 on the Billboard 200 chart. It's a highly-regarded record. For instance, it outpolls QSM's Happy Trails (1969), which I consider to be much better, in the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time ranking. Christgau gives it an enthusiastic A-minus. I found Moby Grape, having listened to it repeatedly, to be more akin to the Los Angeles Whiskey a Go Go music of Buffalo Springfield (another three-guitar band) than the psychedelic ballroom sound of San Francisco bands Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. In addition to plenty of twangy guitar and a go-go dancing backbeat, Moby Grape features a fulsome holy sententious, non-ironic male vocal style, something for the most part no longer acceptable. Now we like our male lead singers fragile, obscure, exhausted. We will accept a diffident Jesus Christ pose, but not a Charlton Hestonesque Moses.

I prefer the next Moby Grape recording, the double LP, Wow/Grape Jam. Where the first record was recorded in Los Angeles, Wow/Grape Jam was mostly recorded in New York City because producer David Rubinson wanted to be with his family. This necessitated the band moving back East to live out of hotel rooms for many months. It took its toll. If you're a West Coast boy coming to New York City for the first time to live, it will fuck you up. I can speak from experience. There's nothing to prepare you for the energy, the density, the easy availability of women and drugs, and the constant drinking. It fucked up Skip Spence. 

It was during the band's stay in New York while Wow/Grape Jam was being produced that Spence disappeared with a woman after a Moby Grape show at Fillmore East. When he reappeared he was transformed, drug crazed. The story is a famous one. Skip took a fire ax to drummer Don Stevenson's hotel room door, attempting to kill him in order to save him from himself. He held the ax to the hotel doorman's head. The police were called and Spence was taken to jail. From there he spent six months pumped full of Thorazine in the psychiatric ward of Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital.

What makes Wow/Grape Jam sound so great is that it manages to capture this intensity, this craziness -- the bigness, the energy -- of what the Hippies were wrestling with during the counterculture apex years of 1967-1968. The era of the rock 'n' roll musician as a grand artistic visionary -- an oracle, a synthesizer of the present age -- is long gone. But listen to the string and horn arrangements of Wow or the super studio jams of Grape Jam and you get a sense of the huge scale and  high confidence the Hippies were trading in.

And that's what makes Skip Spence's only solo album, Oar -- an album on which Spence plays all the instruments and was made with a three-track recorder -- stand out. It's the exact opposite. In an age of bombastic grandiosity it prefigures by more than three decades the "small ball" genre of Downer Folk that is one of the hallmarks of our current End Times.

The story, apparently apocryphal, is that once he was released from Bellevue Hospital, Spence, wearing pajamas, jumped on a motorcycle and drove non-stop to Nashville where he recorded Oar in seven days at the Columbia Records studio.

The album was released in spring of 1969. It ended up being, at that time, the lowest-selling album in the history of Columbia Records. It was removed from the Columbia catalog within a year. The Hippies, flocking to any and all rock festivals like Woodstock and Altamont and movie theaters to see Easy Rider, could not fathom the depths that Oar presented.

The easiest way to think of it is in terms of Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding (1967), another album that confounded the Hippies, and, appropriately, a recording made in the same Nashville studio one year prior to Oar. In many places, such as "Cripple Creek" and "Broken Heart," Oar sounds identical to John Wesley Harding:

But it isn't Dylan's Biblical world that Spence inhabits. Oar is an irreligious, drug-damaged, Bizarro-world version of John Wesley Harding, one that accurately predicted our present constricted -- owing to our loss of free time -- sense of space (constricted to the point of miniaturization). We're working longer hours for less money. Everything has been monetized. Public parks require an admission fee. Churches stand vacant. Our commons no longer exist. It's a brutal, nihilistic world. Skip Spence captured it 44 years ago.

In 2009, Beck lovingly devoted one of his Record Club sessions to Oar. Check it out. You'll come away appreciating Skip Spence even more.

Hippies vs. Punks: Quicksilver Messenger Service and Happy Trails

One band that seemed to be a participant at every seminal event in the formative Hippie years of 1966-1967 is Quicksilver Messenger Service. For instance, QMS performed at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in January 1967, where the Hippie was named, and the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where the Hippie burst into the national consciousness during the "Summer of Love."

I've had a copy of Happy Trails (1969) loaded on my iTunes for a while, but I didn't really get around to studying it until this year. Word is that it is one of the all time great rock albums. Listen to it and you very well might agree. Its extended contemplation of Bo Diddley's foundational "Who Do You Love?" is otherwordly; it has been called the definitive recording of the psychedelic San Francisco ballroom sound. Listen to it and you conjure up a world whose conception of time -- the Hippie trip -- has long since gone the way of the dinosaurs.

That pregnant, full, meandering, languorous sense of time is on display in the first album as well, the eponymous Quicksilver Messenger Service (1968), though here it is less beautiful and seems shot through with Technicolor 1960s cowboy Western rhythms and imagery.

It is ironic that the band that so perfectly captured the Hippie sensibility of a deep, flowing type of time, as opposed to a standard manic rat-race reaffirmation of time found on the three-minute AM radio pop tune, would choose the speedy, elusive messenger god Mercury as its namesake. Speed as the primary force shaping our time is the hallmark of the Punk. (See Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, published in the Punk year of 1977, for a discussion of speed as the essence of technological society.) And in the end this is an argument for the Hippie being a much more radical, revolutionary figure than the Punk. The Hippie sought an entirely different temporal order than the technological one ruling Industrial/Post-industrial society. The Punk pursued the opposite strategy. Rather than eschewing the temporal order of the dominant society, the Punk attempted to pluck out its heart -- speed.

After Happy Trails lead singer and rhythm guitarist Gary Duncan took a year-long hiatus, and QMS, like any good band, moved on in a different direction. But for those who want to experience what time felt like in the 1960s -- really, what the '60s were all about -- we have the first two Quicksilver Messenger Service records.