I just caught “Hair” on TCM last night. I had seen it in 1979 twelve years after it was produced on Broadway and, in my mind and experience, ten years after the close of the Sixties; for me the 70s were post-apocalyptic and a very drab decade, although I was married in 1970 and struggling to make my way while raising two children. I had summered at a friend’s home in Woodstock in 1968 and 1969 and observed the revolution in that upstate rural town. There were artists, and mock artists, poets, head shops (do you recall?), and the glorious music piped into the streets from garage bands. I would observe in the middle of town how downstaters would come up to Woodstock because they felt they were missing something, and indeed they were. I remember one zaftig woman in a white suit (stunning) get off the bus and appear quite frenetic because she did not know what to do, where to go. It turned out she was an editor and I almost started an affair with her but the age difference (stupid me) seemed too much. It was as if some of us in the straight culture knew something was happening — it was, but didn’t know how to grab on. Luckily, I was thrown right into it. I have viewed in retrospect the Sixties as a romantic revolution much like the era of Shelley, Keats, Byron; it is as if things cogitate and wriggle beneath the culture and go underground and erupt decades later. When Treat Williams does his Twyla Tharp dancing upon that huge dining room table with dozens of stunned guests, he tore my heart out at the very first lines of the song — the caption of this blog. What I associate to that is a willingness to be open, to all experiences. Woodstock put me into many situations in which I had to de-laminate myself of the layers of formica I absorbed growing up in the Fifties. I allowed myself to be softened, to be tenderized and the rewards were innumerable, and very personal. I felt. I did not get into the drug end of the Sixties but I did absorb the artistic and musical aspects of it, the freedom and openness. So when Treat says “I am life, mother” I knew exactly what he meant. The Sixties gutted me, left me anatomically open and for that I am grateful. I still believe it produced the greatest music of the century. In 1965 I had seen the Beatles’ “Help!” that loony, merry, Marx brothers picture filled with joy and fun and I opened a self-crack for it to invade my heart. Before that I was a stiff, tight-ass, too intellectual dude who needed to be massaged by life. Three years later my experience in Woodstock completed the emotional marinade.
I associate to many things as I blog — Nehru jackets, porkchop whiskers on men, women uncomfortable in their marriages now having an excuse to cut out as they took in the values of the moment, individuals experimenting in song and sculpture, attempting to allow themselves an inner freedom, young women saying they were not concerned about protection, women who did not use deodorant, a freeing, they believed, demonstrativeness, sharing, bathing nude in groups, trying new ways to relate, touch, affairs with themetracks by Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles, bell bottom pants and long sideburns, acting out, acting in, allowing oneself to be, seizing the moment, living internally “On the Road,”on and on and on. I grew in the Sixties. To grow one needs to be not a little open to it — perplexing. I was ready, I suppose. I went for it. And it still shows till this day. I am defensive about the Sixties, as if a decade needs my support. I defend it because it was about living one’s life. In “Hair” Berger and Bukowski play out this culture conflict. It is fascinating to observe how one value system sees another and what is to be made of that; the values questioned are even more important at this politically correct, constipated and militarily virulent moment in our national history. Watch Arthur Penn’s quasi-social document, “Alice’s Restaurant” made in 1969 based on Guthrie’s 18 minute song and between both movies you might smell the heavily intoxicated wafts of a bong pipe, the new social freedom, and Eric Clapton at his best.
I may come back to this because the film still moves me. I wept in 1979 when I first saw it, not for what was lost but for the remembrance of things past.
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