Hippies vs. Punks: Earth, Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World (1975)

Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White died at the beginning of the month, adding his name to the list of influential artists -- David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Paul Kantner -- who have passed so far in this young year and who also dominated the radio in the important Hippies vs. Punks year of 1975.

Nineteen-seventy-five is important because it is the year that the present global neoliberal paradigm takes root and begins its rigorous extirpation of post-WWII social democracy. Most if not all important indices -- union density, inflation-adjusted hourly wages, workforce share in productivity gains -- mark the middle 1970s as the beginning of U.S. working-class decline. It is no coincidence that the mid-70s are the time that the Punks arrive on the scene to begin their extermination of what remains of the Hippies (think Patti Smith's Horses, released at the same time, the end of 1975, as Earth, Wind & Fire's live album, Gratitude).

In the latest issue of Jacobin there is an interview with UCLA historian Robert Brenner, "The Dynamics of Retreat," that adds some context to why it is that 1975 is such a critical year:

This surge of working-class resistance did slow the employers’ offensive and the revival of profitability. But the deep recession of 1974–75 brought a major reversal, specifically a major increase in unemployment that sapped worker energy and reduced combativeness. The way was thus opened to round after round of wage restraint and spending cuts that, sooner or later, received the backing of the official social-democratic and labor leaderships in every country. 

Did it all have to collapse? Was there a reformist path out of the contradictions that you’re talking about? Or can we say that, unless there had been some kind of anticapitalist break sometime in the 1970s, we were unlikely to prevent the situation we’re suffering through today?

I do think it’s clear today that, short of the overthrow of the capitalist order, there were powerful economic and political pressures that make it unsurprising that we’ve ended up where we are.

On the one hand, the economic responses of capital itself to its profitability problem have only made things worse. The reduced rate of return has decreased the incentives for capitalists to invest and employ. It has, at the same time, motivated capital and the state to cut back on the growth of compensation and social spending so as to jack up profits by reducing the cost of production. The outcome has been ever-slower growth in demand for investment goods, consumer goods, and state services, and this has put further downward pressures on the rate of return.

There it is. Hippies vs. Punks in a nutshell. In 1975 we needed the Hippies to be bold and power an anti-capitalist revolution. But the Hippies were far past the point of offering even the tiniest resistance; they were too busy wallowing in the corporate trough. In 1975 the Hippies cloaked their abject capitulation to the predatory capitalist order with appeals to mysticism, libertinism or esoteric Eastern religiosity. Enter the Punks. Hallelujah.

The big breakthrough #1 album for Maurice White and Earth, Wind & Fire is That's the Way of the World. Released at the end of winter in 1975, the album was also a soundtrack to a Sid Shore film of the same name, written by Robert Lipsyte and starring the great Harvey Keitel.

You couldn't go anywhere in a car with the radio on in 1975 without hearing "Shining Star" or "That's the Way of the World," the two big singles off the album. As a kid I liked both. As for Earth, Wind & Fire, the group struck me as magnificent black Hippies. The size of band was intimidating, as was Maurice White's incorporation of the exotic sounds of the Frankiphone, an electronically amplified kalimba (African thumb piano), backed up by a horn section, spiced with the immaculate R&B guitar of Al McKay. To a white Hippie kid 6th grader living in the Santa Cruz mountains, being driven by his parents with the car radio always on a half hour each way to and from town, Earth, Wind & Fire was a revolution unto itself.

Listening to That's the Way of the World all week -- and a truly stressful week it was -- I was surprised what a masterpiece the record is. Yes, there are the hit singles, which are flawless. But there is also an amazing -- no lie -- breadth of material. Songs like "All About Love," "Reasons" and "See the Light" showcase jazz fusion, disco, prog rock, Billy Paul Philly Soul and traditional African music. No better encapsulation of Hippie sensibility in the mid-70s can be found than Maurice White's rap about radiating the inner-beauty of the self in "All About Love":

Now, I want you to stop whatever you're doing.
You're doing. Just stop.
You know, they say there' s beauty
in the eyes which I say is not the fact.
'Cause you are as beautiful as your
thoughts, right on.

You know, for instance, we study all
kinds of sciences, astrology, mysticism,
religion, so forth you dig.
And like coming from hip place, all these things help
because they give you insight into  your inner self
Have mercy!

Now. there's an outer self we got to deal with
the one that likes to go to parties,
one that likes to dress up and be cool
and look pretty, all ego-trips and all this.

Hear you all, I'm trying to tell you,
you gotta love you. And learn all the beautiful things around you,
trees and birds. And if there ain't no beauty,
you got to make some beauty. Have mercy!
Listen to me, Yeah!

There it is in a nutshell once again. By the mid-70s Hippies -- both black and white -- had given up the hope of building a better world on top of the wreckage of the technocratic war machine in favor of accommodation fueled by a mass narcotic self-love.

Don't get me wrong. This is an incredibly fertile period for the Hippies, this dying time bardo state of the middle 1970s. Classic rock bursts forth, like Minerva from the brow of Zeus, during these few years as a powerful opiate which maintains a grip on the masses under Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Clinton and Blair.

We'll wind down this contemplation of 1975 next week with a look at the classic rockers par excellence, The Eagles.

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.

"Earl Gray" + "EastWind/Faith"

To get a jump on tomorrow night's "Hippies vs. Punks Fridays" I happened to listen to two songs on my walk home from work that capture the titanic clash and cultural shift in the 1970's and early 1980's. In this case the timeline isn't compact because Kiln House was recorded and released in 1970, while What Makes a Man Start Fires? was recorded the summer of 1982 and released January 1983 (my freshman year at the university). But I'm getting ahead myself.

First,"Earl Gray," by Danny Kirwan of a post-Peter Green Fleetwood Mac:

A song ahead of its time I would say; it prefigures the mid-1970's California sound of Buckingham Nicks and The Eagles ascendant. Towards the end of "Earl Gray" one can even hear Explosions in the Sky. I like it; I think it's a good song. Christgau gave Kiln House an A-minus. But there's no Krishna Consciousness or rock revolution; no emancipatory lunge for social justice. It's just a pretty song.

Then, since I'm listening to songs alphabetically on my iPod touch, comes the Minutemen's "East Wind/Faith" off what What Makes a Man Starts Fires? and it just kicks ass. The first half of the two-minute song is a George Hurley percussion solo; then D. Boon's high-treble guitar kicks in, followed by Watt's bass; then the singing:

And don't forget that time
Is still ticking
Run through halls
Pass doors
Like lines
White lines on the freeway
Stop like a roulette ball
Reach fr the door
Beyond
There's a drawer
Hope fr hope is really a prayer
Hope fr hope is really a prayer

A complete contrast to the instrumental "Earl Gray." The Punks, in this case, wipe out the Hippies.

I can't find  "East Wind/Faith" on YouTube, only the complete What Makes a Man Starts Fires? album: