Hippies vs. Punks: Patti Smith Group's Radio Ethiopia (1976)

The idea for this morning originally was to pay homage to Patti Smith's Horses on its 40th anniversary. Smith's seminal debut Punk album -- recorded at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, and produced by John Cale for Arista -- was released December of 1975, the beginning of a period we've been loosely focused on for almost three years.

Smith is now touring in support of the 40th anniversary of Horses, wrapping up a big year that saw the release of her critically acclaimed memoir M Train. I saw an interview with Smith recently on Democracy Now! and for some reason I started to tear up.

I don't know why. It was something I had to think about. So I have been thinking about it. And what I realize is that Patti Smith is extremely important to me. I should qualify that and say that the albums Smith did as the Patti Smith Group from 1975 to 1979, starting with Horses and ending with Wave (1979), are extremely important to me. They are wrapped up with my personal history, my marriage, my ex-wife, my Romantic sensibilities, etc.

Fifteen years ago, as an aspiring politico, I had a dalliance with a legislative aide to a city councilman. That dalliance sent me to the chair where I sit today: I broke up with my live-in girlfriend and moved into a studio bachelor pad, where I can be found most early mornings typing on a laptop in the dark.

When it was apparent that this dalliance was not going to blossom into any kind of relationship, I "bookended" the affair with a gift, Victor Bockris' Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography (1999), to mi amour. I had found the book on a remainder table in the university district. She loved it.

Like me, she was a Hippie kid. I ran into her again recently. She is running for city council to succeed her boss. Her race is noteworthy for the amount of independent-expenditure money that has been dumped into her district to try to beat her. After the first tally of votes on election night, she is running behind; but as votes continue to be counted, she is closing the gap. Can she make up the difference? I don't know. I hope she does.

When I ran into her. She showed me her smart phone. On it was the presser announcing the release of M Train.

So, yes, for some reason there is some pathos -- a pathetic connection -- that I have with Patti Smith.

Of course Patti Smith Group's four albums from 1975 to 1979 -- Horses, Radio Ethiopia (1976), Easter (1978) and Wave -- constitute the beginning and end of the Hippies vs. Punks period we've been trying to come to grips with. Apropos of that, I decided to do an audit of the records this week.

I haven't listened at length to Easter or Wave since I was living with my wife 25 years ago. My wife was a big fan of Easter, particularly "Rock N Roll Nigger." She and her medical-school girlfriends would get together and crank up the volume on the stereo. At the time, both Wave and Easter seemed uneven to me. I liked all the big singles off those albums -- "Frederick," "Dancing Barefoot" and "Because the Night" -- but the rest of the material didn't appeal to me especially.

Listening to those two albums again this week, my original assessment hasn't changed much. What struck me is how Blue Öyster Culty these records are, which makes sense since Smith was Allen Lanier's lover and collaborator prior to her marriage to Fred "Sonic" Smith and her relocation to Michigan. I must say I do appreciate "25th Floor" now.

And while my wife, my friends and I all loved and repeatedly listened to Horses, and it remains a vital record today, my favorite Patti Smith Group recording, and the one that I continue to regularly listen to, is Radio Ethiopia. My audit this week has backed up that appraisal.

Radio Ethiopia -- released in October 1976, the month before Carter's election and The Band's Last Waltz concert at Winterland -- has everything: classic hard rock cuts like "Ask the Angels" and the unsurpassed "Pumping"; the soulful rock balladry of "Pissing in the River"; a free-form Punk jam of the title track; and the two dilatory spoken word songs that constitute the album's sonic bedrock, "Poppies" and "Chiklets":

A few years back, when my conditioning was much better than it is today, I was running in the early morning sun. It must have been in the summer. No one was around. I had the streets and the trees and sunshine to myself. "Poppies" shuffled on my iPod and that line about "She just lay there and the gas traveled fast/Through the dorsal spine . . ." resonated with me, as has, in a similar circumstance, the line from "Chiklets" about "[T]he desperate beauty of a middleweight boxer."

For whatever reason, these two songs manage to capture the feeling of newness and possibility and open space that both Hippies (which I explored two-years back in a post devoted to Fly Like an Eagle) and Punks felt in 1976. The feeling wouldn't last.

But what I thought about this week trudging up the hill home after work was this frat guy I worked with at the library when I was in college. His name was Eric Hawkins, whom I referred to as "Screamin' Jay," even though he was very quiet and kind.

One afternoon while out on a book run we stopped off for lunch at the Top Dog on the north side of campus. He had broken a blood vessel in his eye from a drinking bout at the frat house the night before. He was suffering, questioning the whole "high life" thing. I could understand.

I mention this because he would come over to my apartment on Friday nights with all my other library co-workers. I lived close to campus. So it was convenient to relocate our post-work bacchanal from whatever pizza parlor, restaurant or bar to my place where we would continue to drink and I would DJ. I had a decent stereo and a good record collection.

I would hold "Pissing in the River" until the right time for maximum effect. I was amazed by the song, couldn't get enough of it. But my friends and co-workers didn't seem to pay much attention to it, which kind of chagrined me. "Screamin' Jay" noticed, and in a display of kindness and tact said something like, "No, man. I get it. It is a good song."

Hippies vs. Punks: Blue Öyster Cult's Agents of Fortune (1976)

If my week hadn't been derailed by an illness that I picked up, I suspect, when I went to a new barber Tuesday evening after work my intention was to devote the weekly Friday morning Hippies vs. Punks post to  Blue Öyster Cult's Agents of Fortune, the band's breakthrough platinum album released in May of 1976 that featured the Billboard 100 smash hit "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," written and sung by the BÖC lead guitarist Buck Dharma.

Wednesday on my way into work I started feeling lousy. Then, after about 90 minutes at the office, I had to throw in the towel. It felt like I had the flu coming on. But the hard part was just beginning -- getting home on the bus and the train. Both were packed with riders. I was alternating between chills and fever. I thought I was going to pass out. The thought crossed my mind just to slump in my seat in a comatose state and have the transit security deal with me. That is how awful I felt. But I made it home by noon. I promptly crawled into bed like a wounded animal into a burrow. I stayed there until eight o'clock the next morning. My entire body ached, including my head; plus, my heart rate was off. I wondered if I was going into some sort of toxic shock.

The only thing that I could conclude was that I caught a bug when I went to a new barber, a young Vietnamese guy. He did an excellent job buzzing my head with electric shears. But I bet there was some sort of virus lingering on the cutting cape that he draped over me. And just to confirm that I am not being hysterical a friend emailed me the following yesterday:

[S]omething must be going around. A friend ended up in ER on Tues. morning with really weird symptoms and the only thing the Dr. could tell her was there were 5 people in the ER that very morning with the same symptoms and they think it is some kind of a new virus. [My daughter] has been fighting what she feels is the flu, fever, chills, body aches etc. since last Saturday.....we have had the girls off and on this week so she can rest.

Which got me thinking about germ warfare and the MERS outbreak in South Korea. I know my physical tolerances well. I recently completed four races in five weeks. The last, the Bay to Breakers, I pushed myself to the limit. Not that I ran these runs at a blistering pace, but I did show up and do my best. So I know what I am dealing with, what strength levels I can tap; that, and having been vegan since last year, I know my system is clean. All I can say is that it felt like I had been poisoned, that someone poisoned me, and that there was something alien that had been introduced into my system.

This doesn't mean that the virus I picked up wasn't naturally occurring. But I thought about the story that was revisited post-9/11 of how the U.S. Army dispersed bacteria in cities like San Francsico and New York in order to simulate germ warfare on the general populous. Then there was a quote I read a long time ago from a Fred Hoyle interview in Scientific American where he said HIV was too tricky to be natural and was likely man-made. Why couldn't MERS have a human fingerprint?

In any event, I have been meaning to devote some attention to Blue Öyster Cult since seeing the documentary One Track Heart (2013) about Yoga rock star Krishna Das. The film creates the impression that Jeffrey Kagel, a.k.a., Krishna Das, before traveling to India in 1970 and studying with Neem Karoli Baba, was to be the next lead vocalist for the band that would become Blue Öyster Cult. Presumably, this would be after lead vocalist Les Braunstein, of BÖC precursor Soft White Underbelly, quit while the group was recording material in the studio for a debut record on the Elektra label. In actuality, Kagel claims in print to have been lead singer prior to the band even being called Soft White Underbelly.

I cannot find anything about Kagel mentioned in the "History" section of BÖC's authoritative web site. Also, it makes no sense that Kagel would be approached prior to his life-altering trip to India about being the band's lead vocalist because Eric Bloom had already assumed that role. Maybe the timelines are a little mixed up. Maybe in a panic after Braunstein quit in early 1969, someone in the band called Kagel inquiring as to his availability; and this became, for dramatic purposes, "the night before I was to leave for India." Or maybe Kagel is engaging in the kind of demented auto-hagiography Moby was found guilty of in American Hardcore (2006) when he claims to have fronted Flipper briefly.

The connection -- between Ram Dass-influenced kirtan singer Krishna Dass and heavy metal sex, drugs and rock'n'rollers Blue Öyster Cult -- intrigued me. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was ubiquitous in the last half of the 1970s. If you were in junior high school at the time, as I was, it was ambient.

For instance, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was in the franchise-creating 1978 John Carpenter film, Halloween. When my father and I saw it in a San Jose movie theater during its initial release, young men in the audience barked uncontrollably at the screen, "Gut her! Gut the bitch!" as a wounded Jamie Lee Curtis was stalked by the knife-wielding Michael Myers. My father was upset, nauseated; he turned to confront the young men, but I grabbed his arm and pleaded with him not to say anything. He turned backed toward the screen, grumbling, "House of illusion."

So how do you get from a Hippie Hindu sensibility to sadism, misogyny and a teenagers-having-sex snuff film?

The fact is the Blue Öyster Cult has better Punk credentials than most bands that emerged from the Age of Aquarius. Rock-critic sophisticate and Minutemen hero Richard Meltzer was a BÖC lyricist, as was Punk progenitor Patti Smith. Smith co-wrote and sings on "The Revenge of Vera Gemini," the final track on side one of Agents of Fortune. The Minutemen covered BÖC's "The Red & the Black" on their final studio album, 3-Way Tie (For Last) (1985):

If one watches the concert video of a show BÖC did in Maryland at the end of 1976, a time when Agents of Fortune is making its run up the charts, one realizes that the band is primarily a prog rock outfit with a nod here and there to what would come to be more commonly known as "heavy metal." Eric Bloom even treats the audience to a monologue devoted to the wonders of American exceptionalism, imploring them to go home after the show and write a letter to incoming president Jimmy Carter demanding that he decriminalize dope.

The Hippies were a confused bunch in 1976. Still wedded to fantasies of exceptionalism and a belief in the ballot box (at least a few states, forty years later, have proven that belief on the money when it comes to dope), they were a splintering mass of longhairs in Angels Flight disco attire, speculating about "E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)" -- the cut after "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" on Agents of Fortune -- while swapping lyrics with Punks and pouring on the fusion guitar licks.

No better example of the Hippies in 1976 -- the year all those seminal UK Punk bands form -- is Blue Öyster Cult's Agents of Fortune. The whole second side of the album is inscrutable to me. Maybe if I hadn't been zapped by a virus on Wednesday I would have figured it out.

Puke-Filled Juice Containers + Patti Smith + Mogwai

There are a few regular features to this blog. There's a daily comment on what's in the newspaper. For the last couple of months I've been focusing mostly on Syria. The ongoing civil war there is not only altering the Sykes-Picot Middle East, but it's exposing the fundamental schizophrenia of U.S. foreign policy. We are officially at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates yet we are officially supporting the Syrian National Coalition, which is working in concert with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

In addition to the daily news comment, there's a Friday night "Hippies vs. Punk" post, a Saturday morning Marvel Comics post and a Sunday late afternoon "Colt 45 Chronicle." Finally, there's a Monday "Remember! Work!" post where I recount something from the work day and as an aside relate whatever music I've immersed myself in the preceding weekend. I'm going to cut back on the weekday evening posts, which were pretty marginal anyway (usually a comment about a run and a song, heard on my iPod, that had tickled my fancy). Also, the Sunday morning post on a recently-released-to-DVD Hollywood big-budget movie has become sporadic of late. So I can't say that I'll be doing it regularly.

The "Remember! Work!" installment for today has to with what I've come to realize is the most stressful part of the rat race -- the morning commute. Once I actually get on the train everything is fine; in fact, it's probably the best part of my day, or at least one of the best. I'm relaxed; it's almost always quiet, except for Fare Enforcement walking through the car now and again checking cards with their handheld scanners. No, the nasty part is getting down the hill to the train station. I give myself 20 minutes to make the trip from apartment door to train door, and that includes a stop at the Starbucks. And there is always a line at the Starbucks. We serfs need our performance-enhancing caffeine to compete in the rat race. Sometimes I jog. Sometimes I sprint. Mostly I walk at a brisk pace. The stress comes at the stoplights. There are a couple extremely busy intersections, and I can usually jump the light on those pretty quick; it's just that by leaving myself only 20 minutes, I have very little time to spare standing waiting for a signal to turn green.

One treat from today at the office is the story a coworker had about cleaning up trash this past weekend around an apartment building she and her husband own in the Fremont neighborhood. Apparently she discovered two large juice containers filled with vomit that were shoved back in the bushes. I asked what kind of juice. She said Sunny Delight or Sunny some-such-thing. I asked how could someone puke into such a narrow opening. She said that the container actually had quite a wide mouth. When I went to the grocery store tonight I sojourned at the the orange juice cooler. Sure enough there was one big plastic bottle, Sunny something, that had a very wide mouth.

My musical immersion happened yesterday post-5K. First, I listened to the two-disk Sons of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys (2013). Then the four-disk Occupy This Album: 99 Songs for the 99 Percent (2012). Sons of Rogues Gallery is topnotch; Occupy This Album is a little spotty but has some great stuff:

Hippies vs. Punks: The Jimi-Janis Die-Off Event

Theodore Roszak warned against the Hippies' obsession with drug use in The Making of a Counter Culture; he devoted an entire chapter to it at the very heart of the book, "The Counterfeit Infinity: The Use and Abuse of Psychedelic Experience."

In 1970 the Hippies lost two of their leading lights within a month. Jimi Hendrix loaded on sleeping pills drowned in his own puke in September; Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin in October. I remember when my mother announced the news to the family. We were in the kitchen and it was early morning. I can't differentiate the two announcements. I know she made a separate one for each, but in my memory they are fused as a single moment. The great Jimi-Janis extinction event. It rocked the Hippies to their core.

The die-off due to overdose and burnout has to be considered as a factor in the rapid ascension of the Punks in the late 1970's. Any avant-garde wedded, as most are, to alcohol and drug use has a limited lifespan. If we date the Hippies from the summer of 1964, as we did earlier, that means by the end of 1970 they had been partying hard for seven years. Jimi and Janis certainly had. And they both gave up the ghost at 27 years of age. The body can only take so much. (Twenty-seven is when I first felt the lasting effects of regular, heavy drinking. I got a pair of black eyes that never left.)

You can see from this listless almost self-parodying performance at the Isle of Wight Festival three weeks before his death that Hendrix was spent:

For Hippies who kept at it for another five years, if death didn't result then mental and physical impairment often did. Did George Harrison ever recover creatively from his coked-out Dark Horse tour? One can argue that he did not. By the time the Punks arrive on the scene the Hippies are reeling from the effects of 11 years of drinking, smoking and drugging; they're easy pickings for a pack of "no future" nihilists.

Ten years ago I read Victor Bockris' Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography. I had picked it up off a remainder table. In the 1990's Patti Smith's husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith; her original Patti Smith Group keyboard player, Richard Sohl; and her brother, Todd, all died, depending on where you read it, of heart attacks (some sources refer to Todd's cause of death as stroke). The oldest, at 45, was Fred "Sonic" Smith.

The rocker, whether Punk or Hippie, rockin' it true doesn't last long. The proto-Punk avatar poet Arthur Rimbaud is the Romantic model; he only made it to 37. 

"Hanging on the Telephone"

Though never a big Blondie fan (they were huge my freshman and sophomore years of high school, 1978-1980), they did come out of the same CBGB's scene that birthed Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell and the Ramones.

I heard "Hanging on the Telephone" the other day. And believe it or not for a moment I thought it was Kathleen Hanna. A lot of things get buried in the past.

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: