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.
The ocean of time that laps through the doors of one's perception in the span of 168 hours is too sublime for the mind to comprehend. We use crude notations to give us a sense of what has gone before, but it's hopeless. We're animals trapped in the present permitted snatches of past presents.
I am resting up today for a 5K race tomorrow. So I didn't go out for my usual early Saturday morning eight-mile run. But I'm missing the mobility now. Movement is everything.
I did read an interesting blog post this morning on Naked Capitalism. It's a cross post from Wolf Richter's Testosterone Pit. Tokyo Electric Power Company has been systematically lying about the radiation exposure levels caused by the meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Here's what caught my attention:
All this came at a very inconvenient time: TEPCO is cooling the reactors and spent fuel rods with a constant flow of water – 400 metric tons per day – and then stores that contaminated water in tanks on site. But some of them have been leaking due to sloppy workmanship. Plus, it cannot indefinitely build new tanks for that endless flow of water. So, it is trying to get approval to just dump that contaminated water into the Pacific. Whatever isn’t already leaking into it.
For some reason I was under the impression that the reactors had been sealed and stabilized. I had no idea that they're still hot and requiring constant inundation with water to keep from burning and that the water has to be stored because it's radioactive. I consider myself informed. It just goes to show you that we are trapped in the present. You change the images on the screen for a few days and we forget what has gone before.
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Oh, Lord, through the revolution
Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, there's a solution
I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I'm free
Fly through the revolution
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future
The image of a bird flying to the sea is likely lifted from the powerful ending to Visions of Cody, Kerouac's source book for On the Road (1957). If there is a Book of Genesis for the counter culture it is On the Road. And if there is a film version of this Hippie Book of Genesis it is Easy Rider (1969).
And what is the philosophical underpinning of both On the Road and Easy Rider? Man understands -- Man has the ability to know -- time. As the Neal Cassady character Dean Moriarty says in On the Road,"Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!"
What's On the Road about? It's about becoming free, pursuing one's path aimlessly -- time unmarked and unbound from work and family and study and all expectations other than the adventure at hand. In other words, a trip to Mexico. What's Easy Rider about? Making one big cocaine score in Mexico, selling it to Phil Spector, and then heading out on the road to Mardi Gras.
Before Wyatt (a.k.a., Captain America) and Billy take off on their motorcycles, Captain America pulls off his wristwatch and tosses it on the ground. Heroes don't do clocks. Then at the end, right before Captain America and Billy are shotgunned by the rednecks, Wyatt says, "We blew it!" What does Captain American mean? He's responding to Billy's gleeful prattle about being rich and retiring to Florida; Captain America realizes that their entire enterprise was merely a reaffirmation of the rat race and the equation of time and money. Make a pile of loot and retire to Florida. Easy Rider as a film version of the Hippie Book of Genesis is a refutation of Founding Father Ben Franklin's "Time is money."
Fly Like an Eagle had three top ten hits: "Take the Money and Run," "Rock'n Me" and "Fly Like an Eagle" (which though released as a single at the end of 1976, didn't chart until March of the following year). Go into any hardware store or walk onto any construction site in North America on any given day and chances are that you'll hear Tea Party politics and classic rock radio; and on that radio "Fly Like an Eagle" will be playing. Like the hackneyed insect trapped in prehistoric amber, Time keeps on slippin', slippin' slippin' into the past.
The past is 1976. Gerald Ford is on his way out, having successfully managed the aftermath of the Watergate crisis with his controversial presidential pardon of Richard Nixon as well as having shrewdly got out front of the Church Committee and Nedzi/Pike Committee with his Rockefeller Commission and thereby arguably lessening some of the public outrage over revelations of the nefarious aspects of American Empire.
This was a moment of structural weakness for the Leviathan, known in Iran as Great Satan. But the Hippies were no longer in any mood to confront "The Man." They elected an evangelizing peanut farmer from Plains, GA who promised them clean government but who ended up bequeathing us our current corrupt and exhausted neoliberal paradigm, hallmarks of which are rule by and for the 1%, government gridlock and permanent military occupation of the Persian Gulf (Carter Doctrine).
So much promise evaporated between 1975 and 1980. We went from Empire exposed and on the defensive to Empire reborn. The Hippies could have done something. But they didn't; they were tired. They were content listening to their sun-drenched California rock, safe in suburbs and exurbs with their good dope and coke. The horizon was clear. The mists of the Aquarian Age had finally, after more than a decade, burned off. In 1976 things seemed, for the moment at least, peaceful, hopeful, new. Almost perfect. It's no wonder that the Hippies decided to kick back, enjoy the clear weather and "fly like an eagle to the sea" (and it's no coincidence that this is also a critical year for the Punks).
Today, more than 35 years later, we have lost touch with the message of "Fly Like an Eagle," even as it is pooped anew endlessly out of countless speakers across our broad continent. It is a radical message. Homo sapiens sapiens is a creature capable of knowing time -- a ghost trapped in the present, ruled by force, but somehow forever slippin' into the future.
An update. -- This is letter number 20 taken from a collection of letters written from the end of summer 1988 to the spring of 1990, my first two years in New York City. The idea going in was that by posting these letters something might be revealed about pre-Internet communication (all the letters were keypunched on an AT&T PC using WordPerfect, printed on an Epson dot-matrix, stuffed in a legal-size envelope and then mailed via the United States Postal Service) and how my marriage came to an end (this blog is after all "Burdens of a Bachelor"). So far there's been a lot of repetition: tales of intoxication and the agony of being a sports fan alongside the horror of work punctuated by an occasional bar brawl. The common and cruel story of youth.
But onward we go. I'm taking letters off the top as they come. They're not in any chronological order, and they don't appear to be organized by theme. I've only skipped two so far, both purely perfunctory: a "thank you" note to my wife's aunt for allowing us to stay with her for a brief vacation at her home in Vermont; and some sort of inscrutable, brief "sorry I missed you" missive to my friend Jeff. Otherwise, the letters are exactly as found when I yanked them out of storage during halftime of January's Seahawks playoff loss to the Falcons.
In the letter below, addressed to my friend Mark, I engage in some drunken holiday The Sorrows of Young Werther-grade pessimism regarding our perception of time.
Christmas 1989
I want to say Merry Christmas now and send it off right away for fear that if I waited any longer there'd be no way that it'd get to you on time. I don't know what your plans are, whether you're coming back to the U.S. or not, but I figure you're gonna stay in Spain for the holiday season. If it's any consolation, I'm spending Christmas alone as well. Ashley is going to her mom's in Ashland, and I'm staying here in New York to work and take care of the cat, and also because there's really nothing for me in Ashland, nothing to jeopardize my job over (you see, steady work since July and I'm already thinking like a stiff). I'll sure miss Ashley, but I'm hoping I'll be able to get a few things done, like writing my mom a letter and finishing that story that I started for you.
Colum's back from Guatemala. I saw him today and the first thing he said to me was that I looked like a long-haired school girl. I knocked on the door, and he opened it up, and that's what he said -- that I looked like a long-haired school girl. I chuckled; shit, he was definitely on to something. I didn't trouble myself with it for much longer because he invited me in and we started talking about something else.
I don't know, I don't if it's the New York winter (it makes everything seem miles away, like you're in a forest) or if it's the dread whip of going to work every subway morning; but whatever it is, it's changing me. The heart of things isn't golden and holy; it's tear stained and bow backed; that's what I've come to expect. Time is the only certainty. And don't get me wrong. Time is a great thing; I think time is the most powerful thing in the world. My complaint with it is an entirely selfish one, namely, there's always something to look back on and feel bad about: you can look back on something and feel proud about it -- something like how good looking you once were -- but then you'll just feel bad about it because it's past, past tense, and that's not what you look like now (same thing with writing -- I'll read something I wrote years ago, say when I was 21, and I'll say to myself, "There's no way I can touch that now"). And let's not forget that there's always something to look back on with guilty pain, like how you fucked up: how you cheated someone, how you were covetous and cowardly, how you whined like a bitch and tortured your fellow man who in the end is just another starving dog like yourself. So time is the world, and time is sadness. So the world is sadness. Everybody knows it anyway; that's the sad thing: everybody knows the heart of the world; we just blind ourselves with illusions of satiety, which are just nickel-&-dime gags: whoopee cushions and featherless chickens made of rubber.
Bah! I'm drunk on malt liquor and full of gloom. Toss this out with the bath water. I'll write you soon.
There is a persistent feeling of never having enough time. I am constantly watching my wristwatch. Is this how time ends, with an exhausted, stressed longing for more? It would be nice to quote Heracleitus here but I don't know where my English-translation copy of Fragmente der Vorsokratiker is.
Ah, I found it! It's where I thought it was.
Heracleitus, Fragment 123: "Nature likes to hide."
