Hippies vs. Punks: Eagles' Hotel California (1976)

This excursion on chart-topping records from 1975 began after I smelled a rat last month. The local hipster radio station bent over backwards in lugubrious homage after the passing of David Bowie on January 10, devoting a whole day of programming to the oeuvre of the Thin White Duke after just having spent a whole Friday playing Bowie records in honor of his birthday, January 8. My antenna started to tingle after the station engaged in the most perfunctory of memorials following the death of one of the Hippie founding fathers and a godfather of psychedelia, Paul Kantner, at the end of January. The attention paid to Kantner far outstripped what respects were paid to Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey though, because as far as I could tell the hipsters marked Frey's passing not at all (much the same could be said of KEXP's treatment of Maurice White). This does not speak well of hipsters.

It is frequently quoted that "History is written by the victors," which is a form of presentism, the idea that the best way to look at the past is through a prism of the current cultural paradigm. Whereas the radio station's elision of Earth, Wind & Fire is undoubtedly due to racism, the omission of Eagles music can be chalked up to a brittle snobbery and an elite know-nothingism.

The fact is that the Eagles are as important to the Great American Songbook as George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash. They are the highest-selling America band in U.S. history with the highest-selling album in U.S. history, 1976's Their Greatest Hits, 1971 - 1975. Growing up in the United States of the 1970s Eagles music was ambient. And what makes it important for us on this page is that they ruled the roost when Hippies gave up the ghost in the middle-1970s and the Punks arrived on the scene.

Originally, to stay with the year 1975, this post was meant to be about One of These Nights, the hugely successful Eagles album produced by Bill Szymczyk. Unfortunately, the hold I placed on the album at my public library never arrived, and I couldn't bring myself to pay for a digital download. Instead, I found an inexpensive used CD of Hotel California (1976) at my local record emporium. Having a connection to the album, I decided to immerse myself in it this week.

My connection to Hotel California is twofold. First, though the album is listed as a product of 1976, which it is, it didn't achieve saturation radio airplay until the following summer. The Eagles' masterpiece "Hotel California" and the saccharine, lachrymose, Frey-sung "New Kid in Town" both reached #1 on the U.S Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, and "Life in the Fast Lane" almost cracked the top ten. I remember playing Frisbee with my oldest sister's girlfriend, the stereo speakers blasting "Hotel California," on a warm summer evening; it seemed to me to be some sort of perfection, like a state of bliss was aurally captured and transmitted and history had to end because there was no place left for time to go.

That was in the summer of 1977, about the same time as the Sex Pistols took their famous boat-ride-turned-police-melee on the Thames during Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee anniversary celebration. Second, my hipster college girlfriend, a person that flits in and out of these Hippies-vs.-Punks posts (see the Pure Mania post or the Hate Your Friends post), someone with whom I became intimate when my wife-to-be was largely absent for the year prior to our relocating to the East Coast, made a mix tape for me as a going-away gift. Anchoring the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr. and Replacements tracks was "Hotel California."

So, to my mind, the Eagles' Hotel California always had hipster chops. That sense was upheld this week. The two-guitar attack of Don Felder and Joe Walsh that provides the coda to "Hotel California" might not be as arty as Glenn Branca but it is definitely not lite rock and it definitely has an avant-garde edge to it.

There are other arty flourishes throughout Hotel California: the symphonic instrumental reprise of "Wasted Time" that begins side two; a song sung by bass player Randy Meisner, "Try and Love Again," that sounds like something off Gerald Collier's hipster-fave eponymous album from 1997; Don Henley's shrewd indictment of American Manifest Destiny in "The Last Resort" to conclude the album, not to mention an exhaustive criticism of the bankruptcy of "massified bohemia" found in "Hotel California" and "Life in the Fast Lane."

Walking to work on a chilly morning this week listening to "Life in the Fast Lane" I saw a young woman dressed for the office driving in her compact car, and what struck me is that the same thing has been happening for the 40 years since Hotel California was released and the machine has only gotten worse.

In the end, what is interesting about Hotel California is how negative it is and how prescient it was. The dead end had arrived for the Hippies by 1977, and the Eagles called it. Despite this almost hostile negativity, the record is celebrated as a pillar of classic rock. That makes Hotel California a fascinating document of the nihilism that is the root of our present neoliberal age. Too bad the hipsters at the radio station didn't give it a listen.

Hippies vs. Punks: Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975)

Three big names in rock'n'roll died in January. First, David Bowie, followed by Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, and then Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner. So far this month, Earth, Wind & Fire's Maurice White has passed. The new year has been rough on radio stars of the 1970s.

At the job, my coworker likes to listen to the local hipster radio station, KEXP. (Today the station is celebrating International Clash Day.) On his birthday, January 8, KEXP devoted an entire day to Bowie music, which was then repeated on Monday, January 11 in memoriam. The DJs spoke in hushed, awed voices about what Bowie had meant to them and how his death had knocked them breathless.

To mark Paul Kantner's passing, the station played a sprinkling of songs, something off the super-historical After Bathing at Baxter's (1967), as well as cuts from Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969). But that was about it. All stuff from the band's psychedilc Hippie heyday and nothing from Kantner's days at the helm of Jefferson Starship in the mid- to late-1970s, a time when Kantner and his mates in Jefferson were just as popular and commercially successful as they were in the 1960s.

But Kantner fared better on hipster KEXP than Glenn Frey. From what I could tell, even in memoriam, not one Eagles tune was played by the station.

Which got me thinking. I listened to a lot of radio as a kid in 1975, a time when all three artists -- Bowie, Kantner and Frey -- filled the airwaves. One of These Nights (1975) was huge and the Eagles were generally well received by the Hippies, and Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975) occupied the #1 position on the Billboard 200 list of top albums for 1975 several different times in the late summer and fall. Bowie's Young Americans (1975) never made it to #1, but two Bowie singles, "Fame" and "Golden Years," were huge at the same time as Jefferson Starship's hit single "Miracles."

"Fame" and "Miracles" both have this murky voodoo quality that sort of terrified and mesmerized me as a sixth grader. Since it is a Hippies vs. Punks thesis that 1975 is an all-important year, I decided to study Red Octopus all week to try to divine what was going on in the national consciousness at a time prior to the first wave of UK Punk and when Disco was just starting to dominate the landscape.

The obvious thing listening to Red Octopus is its corporate sensibility. It sounds like it was pumped out of the PA at a cineplex or mall. Grace Slick's paeans to love sound like ready-made commercial jingles for Jiffy Lube or Holland America Line cruises. To be fair, the two instrumental tracks -- "Git Fiddler" and "Sandalphon" -- are good, as is "There Will Be Love," where there is some interesting multi-vocal Hippie harmonizing going on.

But the power of Red Octopus is in Marty Balin's seven-minute masterpiece, "Miracles," the single version of which was chopped in half to excise a line about cunnilingus: "I had a taste of the real world when I went down on you, girl."

Listening to "Miracles" repeatedly this week I couldn't help imagining myself as some solid American male in 1975, a Teamsters business rep or pool equipment salesman, driving around in a Ford Crown Victoria, pulling into the lounge at a Holiday Inn or a Best Western, ordering a 7 and 7 at the bar and kicking back and listening to Marty Balin sing "If only you believe like I believe, baby," while scanning the trim in the room. Then at the same time across town at some Hippie fern bar a longhair was basically engaged in the same pursuit. That's a cultural commons that we once had in this country. And to think that it was, however briefly, maybe six or seven years in the 1970s, Hippie based is nothing short of a miracle to me.

Hippies vs. Punks: Genesis & Peter Gabriel

Trespass by Genesis is a gem from 1970; aurally it represents the Renaissance fair, sword and sorcery, Dungeons & Dragons, magic and mystery aspect of Hippiedom. My oldest sister, who was free schooled in the Santa Cruz Mountains, was a Trespass devotee. She seemed to listen to it constantly. So I imbibed it growing up. Then, being a huge Peter Gabriel fan in high school and as a lower-division undergraduate, I again regularly listened to Trespass in the early 1980's. Finally, when I was breaking up with my girlfriend of 11 years in 2002, I returned to it once more. Repeatedly listening to Trespass and Richard Buckner's Impasse (2002) got me through.

Peter Gabriel is one of those artists who made the transformation from Hippie to Punk; well, if not a spit-soaked screaming Punk, then a member of the New Wave, a more record-industry, synthesizer friendly appellation. My sister and her girlfriends stuck with the Phil Collins-led Genesis after Peter Gabriel departed. They would listen to Trick of the Tail (1976) and Wind & Wuthering (1976) along with the Eagles' One of These Nights (1975) and Hotel California (1976). (If this doesn't capture the death of the Hippies as a counter culture I don't know what does.)

Too bad they didn't explore Peter Gabriel's first two albums (or if they did I don't remember hearing them). They might have saved themselves several years of heartache chasing after Hippie heaven when it had already disappeared. Both Peter Gabriel 1 (Car) (1977) and Peter Gabriel 2 (Scratch) (1978) showcase the new sound that was driving the Hippies to extinction.