Damned Damned Damned

At some point I went from being approximately the same age of the majority of people in my neighborhood to now I am clearly older than most. It seems like this has happened in just the last couple of years. Capitol Hill went from being a neighborhood that though weighted towards young adults nonetheless had healthy representation in all age brackets except children now appears to be populated overwhelming by young people in their 20s and 30s.

I'm not complaining. I like young people, particularly if they're not intoxicated. Young people have yet to be defeated existentially; they still harbor hope. It's young people who are taking to the street in Turkey and Brazil. As Richard Hell has said, "The truth is in the youth."

The rich maintain power by pumping the youth full of religious dogma and then setting them to fight each other. Things might be starting to shift though.

This morning at work I decided to make a study of The Damned's first album, Damned Damned Damned (1977). I didn't listen to it in college. The first wave of English Punk bands that I listened to were The Clash, Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks. Nineteen-Seventy-Seven is huge for Punk, and Damned Damned Damned, released in February of that year, is a good album.

It's much better than live performances I saw on The Old Grey Whistle Test DVD I checked out from the library the winter of 2012 and that got me thinking about Hippies vs. Punks.

But The Damned were huge back in the day. No denying it.

Hippies vs. Punks: "Rasta Don't Work for No CIA"

Ska and reggae bled the Hippies, whereas the relationship of Punks to ska and reggae was symbiotic and collaborative.

What I mean when I say that roots reggae bled the Hippies is that the people who had progressive, tolerant, egalitarian tendencies in the counter culture gravitated toward the Rastaman Vibration (1976) at same time that the Southern Man -- the rural redneck who had no problem bombing colored folk -- grew his hair long, started smoking dope and rocking hard in football stadiums.

An analogy from this week's news comes to mind. If a Bob Marley-type politician appeared today on the scene, the Democratic Party, just having been pushed in the direction of the Southern Man by Obama's proposal to limit Social Security -- a program that is the bedrock of the modern Democratic Party -- would quickly start to splinter. This is what happened to the Hippies during the critical period 1975 to 1979 that we have been exploring each Friday evening.

My father is case in point. A Beatles and Van Morrison man who also favored The Who and Led Zeppelin, he went roots reggae in the late 1970s. He turned the album covers for Exodus (1977) and Survival (1979) into his own personal works of art -- embellishing them, cutting them, etc. When he became drunk and/or stoned he would often assume a Jamaican Patois.

When I got out on my own I too listened to Bob Marley & the Wailers. One of my favorite records as a lower-division undergraduate was Babylon by Bus, the 1978 live double album that includes "Punky Reggae Party" (a song that establishes the connection between Punk and Rastafari):

Today the recordings of Bob Marley & the Wailers (Peter Tosh's solo work as well) remain a strong filial bond with my father; any newly released live recording that I come across I promptly burn a copy and mail it off to him.

We must not underestimate the Rasta role in the demise of the Hippies as a cultural vanguard.

Next week, the weapon that gave the Punks full-spectrum dominance -- 2 Tone ska.

Hippies vs. Punks: Krishna Crashes, Free Bird Soars

It's 1975. The last hurrah of the Hippies. Krishna Consciousness is on the way out after George Harrison is savaged in the press for his Dark Horse album, released in December 1974, and the accompanying calamitous tour with Ravi Shankar. Fortunately for the Hippies at the same time George and Ravi are crashing and burning the boys in Lynyrd Skynyrd are flying high. When I saw this performance of  "Free Bird" last winter, after checking out from my branch library a DVD of the Old Grey Whistle Test, I was catapulted back to the days of rugby shirts, puka shell necklaces, adidas Viennas and drawstring pants. Note the athleticism of the band; these Southern boys are dripping with testosterone:

But Skynyrd Hippieness is merely formal. As soon as those locks are shorn the Hippie is gone. The end is fast approaching. The Punks are coming.

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: