I got to see the Joe Strummer movie, The Future Is Unwritten, with Townsman Chickenfrank the other night. It’s funny, as I was getting ready to go, with Hrrundi’s latest anti-hippie rant (only the first in a series that I’m sure he thinks will finally convince us of his point of view on this matter) fresh in mind, I was wondering if I could somehow tie my thoughts on the life and works of Strummer into refuting my good friend’s latest cry for help. And as it happened, this Julian Temple memorial service of a biography played right into my hand!
What the film lacked in Clash nerdboy musical analysis (eg, no complete song performances, no scenes with engineer Bill Price pulling up tracks from the master tapes, no in-depth discussions of how a cool track on, say, Sandinista was built from the ground up), it made up for in love. Bucketfulls of love! Using tape recordings of Strummer telling his own tale and a vast array of unseen (at least by my eyes) footage, including childhood home movies; a very early Clash rehearsal; and a holy grail for me, actual footage of The 101ers (!!!), Temple structures the film around campfire reminiscences by friends, former bandmates, lovers, and the like.
In what first seemed like an unnecessary act of Insider Cool but what I would come to see as a warm, egalitarian touch, Temple does not flash any names under the speakers, so when you’re not seeing the obvious characters, like Steve or Mick Jones, you have to figure out for yourself if you’re seeing an old love, a bandmate from The 101ers, John Cooper Clarke, or Zander “Snake” Schloss. I think one of the points of the film was that Strummer had built a broad community in his years and any one of us might have felt a part of it. No one’s flashing subtitles under your face or my face, so why should the folks on the screen have their identities highlighted? For the most part, it kept the focus on what each person had to say about Joe. There were exceptions, of course (Johnny Depp in his Captain Jack get-up), but even Bono worked hard at being one of the admirers.
One of the highlights for me was seeing Topper Headon looking so healthy and well-adjusted. Compared with footage of him from his final days in The Clash along with my memories of him looking at death’s door a few years ago in that Don Letts film on the band, Topper is looking like he’s turned a corner, sitting on the beach in his pink v-neck sweater. Drummers that great need to stay free.
But onto the hippie/punk stuff…
It was made clear early on in the film that Strummer came of age in the age of love. He was a hippie, with hippie hair, hippie body odor, hippie girlfriends, hippie clothes. This guy with a very cold upbringing and one close brother who had just killed himself built a family, or community, for himself through the means of Hrrundi’s dreaded Hippie Culture. Like all hippies, I’m sure he hit some bum notes along the way, belted out the chorus from “Feelin’ All Right” one too many times, and maybe even debated with friends over the best version of “Wooden Ships”, but he was gettin’ his shit together, man. This is a big benefit of Hippie Culture that Hrrundi seems to overlook. A young person needs time to do what’s not expected of him. I’ve seen some of the most creative minds of my era not take the time to do what’s not expected of them, and their creativity has withered or stagnated as a result. More sad, in some cases, their sense of community withered. Nowadays they think playing a round of golf with clients is an occasion for joy.
So Strummer got his shit together as a hippie, his friends in the film tell us, then he saw The Sex Pistols opening for his 101ers. As he put it, he saw the future. The next day he lept into the future, ditching his pub rock band, cutting his hair, tossing his flares. You’ve heard this story a hundred times. What’s cool, though, as the film continues and you’ve heard a series of “Year Zero,” life-changing events for Strummer, is that he kept piling up members of his community. He kept rallying the troops, gathering new influences – even bad ones. His Hippie Culture background enabled him to stay true to the moment more than a lot of past-their-prime people are able to do after coming off what must have been a killer high of being the leader of The Only Band That Mattered. It wasn’t easy, by any accounts. In fact, Strummer’s life seemed pretty miserable for long stretches. But the guy carried on, and toward the end of his life, the Tymon Doggs and Mick Joneses and Richard Dudanskis would be there with him. For contrast, where are Rick Buckler and Mick Talbott going to be for a modern world hard-ass like Paul Weller in 10 years? For that matter, does one guy from The Five Americans even know if another guy still exists? [In honor of our newest Townsman and to acknowledge my own incorrect assumption, I am striking this comment. Now let’s get back to the business of putting the world’s hippie-hating rock lovers in their rightful place!]
Toward the end of the film Strummer’s friends discussed the fact that he was always a hippie at heart, even while in his punk phase. His old hippie friends gave him credit for eventually dragging them into the present. His punk friends gave him credit for injecting their scene with some of that smelly hippie love. Come on, Hrrundi! I know you’ve got the heart to see the value in Hippie Culture, despite the damage it did to tight musical arrangements and hooks.
Has anyone else seen this film yet? Like I say, it’s not rich in musical nerdboy stuff that I hunger for on a daily basis, but as someone who felt like he was under Strummer’s tent, I came away feeling all the hippie love Temple and friends wanted to convey.
First of all British Hippydom doesn’t count. Secondly, unless I’m misreading Mr. Bakshi (in which case my support here may be doing more damage than good for his cause) I don’t think he, or at least not I, have a single issue with hippy ideals. Nor do I think that he, or at least I, was suggesting the The Five Americans are superior to The Jefferson Airplane.
The Airplane clip is a great example of what is wrong with the hippy scene. It became fashion to fly your freak flag and wallow about in your own muck but sooner, not later, it was time to put on your pinstripes, get a job and change your name to Starship.
The hippy movement was good for lots of reasons but it can be argued that at least on the level of bringing The Age of Aquarius, it failed. Punk has been to me, in part, an outgrowth of that failure. “Fuck, love didn’t work!!!, Now I’m pissed off.”
Like with any musical genre, there’s good and bad and I took the anti-hippy stance as a way to highlight the truly, truly bad side of the whole scene.
So…
Wha? Hey, Mod, as always, I appreciate the time and effort that went into this latest post of yours, but it doesn’t refute *anything* that I believe about hippie-dom and its impact on popular music.
To begin with, let me just state for the record that I admire the principles that seem to make up much (though probably not all) of the hippie, uh, philosophy. In other words: peace is good! Love is good! Sharing is good! Materialism is bad! Etc.!
What this has to do with music is — well, it has nothing to do with music, except that the youth-centric counterculture movement of the 1960s was (like all youth-centric counterculture movements) born out of a desire to piss off its parents, which at least promised something new and different. It helped that these parents were largely conservative in nature, having experienced a Great Depression, a World War, and having learned the lessons of treading the straight and narrow in an effort to keep a hold on what they had. This, of course, was a huge pendulum swing that inevitably had to come back to center, and kudos to the hippie movement for giving it a good shove back in the right direction.
But a rousing chorus of cheek-flapping farts is in order for letting the sound principles listed above slide into standard, run-of-the-mill hedonism and self-absorption — the chief negative components of the hippie movement as they related to the music of the age. Love is good? Result: “Triad.” Self-expression is good? Result: letting Brian Wilson “do his thing” until his madness was too far gone to be arrested. Artistic limits and conventions are bad? Result: Vanilla Fudge. Materialism is bad? Result: greasy hair and Very Bad Looks.
My problem with the hippie movement in music was that nobody in it ever thought it could succumb to its excesses, and nobody seemed to notice — or even care — when it inevitably did. Joe Strummer seems to have recognized when it was time to bail on the broken parts of the hippie promise. Kudos to him. I’m still waiting on David Crosby.
Of course they did. What do you think the ‘back to the basics’ approach of Humble Pie, for example, was all about?
Like most art forms, rock is in a constant state of flux between the impulse to expand the possibilities and the desire to break things down to their roots.
Also, doesn’t pretty every movement that’s a reaction to the previous movement’s excesses eventually succumb to its own excesses? How are the hippies different from any other, apart from the fact that they’re boomers and would thus dominate the way cultural history is interpreted.
Humble Pie was far too little, too late — and furthermore, the Steve Marriott vocal and guitar hero excesses were egregious sins against good taste and sound judgement that could only have been rationalized by the hippie music that preceded them. Humble Pie was far from alone in this, obviously. Come on, guys — can’t you see how direct and solid the line is between “Two Virgins” and “Rick Wakeman’s Journey To the Center Of the Earth”?
HVB, draw your line between two inconsequential jerkoff albums all you want. Can’t YOU see how direct and solid the line is between some smelly, early ’70s Lennon slop, like the Plastic Ono Band album, and some of punk rock’s eventual values? Can’t you see the value of the hippies’ DIY ethos and alternative venues and the punks’ DIY ethos? What influence would Colgems have on the future?
One sign of self-indulgence is the refusal to accept any evidence that runs contrary to one’s feelings. I say this in case any of you were thinking it was even remotely possible to change bakshi’s mind.
I’m holding out hope that he goes to see this Strummer film. I know the man’s got the hippie love vibes deep inside. I want to be standing outside the theater when he walks out of the theater wearing a dashiki and looking to “jam” with some streat musicians.
I got news for you, Mod and mwall: We’re living in the future, and Colgems won. Colgems will always win. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing!
Look, the cultural struggle between The Stones and The Monkees is a very good thing (and on many levels is not a battle at all). But a battle between the Jefferson Airplane caterwauling on a rooftop and the 1910 Fruitgum Company is stupid and pointless. What’s the difference between them, you ask? Well, at least the 1910 Fruitgum Company knew that its music was shit, and that it was historically irrelevant.
To break this down to a watery portion even the most toothless of you can masticate: the proportion of gems to paste in the Colgems display case was much higher than the ratio of diamonds to mud in the hippie jungle. And the Colgems shopkeeper knew the difference, which is something the slobs in their faux-buckskin pants and headbands couldn’t (or wouldn’t) understand.
If Colgems really did rule the world, ZZ Top would never have recorded.
Don’t misunderstand: Colgems “winning” does not mean they “rule the world.” They just came out ahead. The hippies played a vital role keeping things interesting, but I thank the Rock Gods that they never actually came into ownership of anything.
Look, I acknowledge that this thing we call Rock is the result of a constant tug-of-war between the naive (if not idiotic) creative types and the shallow, rapacious money men. It’s a love/hate relationship that works. The key difference between David Crosby, ca. 1967, and Clive Davis is that Clive realizes he needs to effectively manage/manipulate the artsy-fartsy bullshit in order for everybody to make a buck. Hippie music types misinterpreted their once-in-a-century demographic jackpot and acquired a grating sense of artistic entitlement, if not an outright disdain for the hands that fed them. That’s just one of many things about that movement that bug the shit out of me.
See this is what always pisses me off when you go off on one of these tears. You start out talking about the music, but you always end up claiming to be able to interpret the motivations of people you’ve never met and really know very little about. Not only were you not there, but you’re guilty of projecting your own issues onto a collection of individuals. Just because Time magazine wrote articles about “the hippies” as if they all thought and felt the same thing, they didn’t. And then you trot out the old ‘then they all sold out and bought BMWs’ routine, again a gross oversimplification that is unworthy of a subject as complex as music.
Eh? For the record, I have no problem with hippies “selling out.” I dropped that heavy piece of baggage back in college.
And speaking of claiming to understand something about people I don’t know — what’s all this about me “projecting my own issues”? If you go back and read my post… well, look, I can’t be expected to accurately sum up all the complex dimensions of a generation in a freaking paragraph. I’m giving this thing the old college try, and I believe I’m clarifying things with as much industry as the topic merits. You seem mighty threatened by my palaver!
I’m not threatened by palaver, definition 2b of which is “misleading or beguiling speech.”
BigSteve wrote:
Ooooh, shot with his own gun!
Listen, Townspeople, let’s keep a couple of things in mind: that first piece that Hrrundi wrote comparing The Five Americans’ tune to the Jefferson Airplane atrocity was only the first in a series of what I’m confident will eventually demonstrate the author’s well-reasoned thoughts on the damage that hippie culture did to rock ‘n roll. Honestly, this is only our Townsman’s 14th essay along these lines. I think it’s only fair to allow him the time needed to develop his points as we have all had, at one time or another, for developing our own.
Meanwhile, I would encourage HVB to consider what many of us are really saying – not that he’s wrong but rather that much of what we’re saying has merit. He’s got to think outside the Airplane, if you will. And focus on the love. Really, man, you need to see the Strummer film. Or do you already have a beef with The Clash that I’ve never been aware of? You’re not like E. Pluribus Gergely, who is incapable of really getting The Clash, are you?
Rather than thinking outside the Airplane, I do find it fascinating that so MUCH of bakshi’s angry palaver seems focused on that band, one that played some tight singles, could stretch out effectively on occasion (though failing more often) and helped open up the content of rock and roll songs in its suggestion that alternative modes of living were a genuine possibility. In other words, why focus one’s angry palaver about the importance of three-minute singles on a psychedelic era band that actually had three-minute singles on every one of their studio albums? Is the issue that not every single song the Airplane tried was three minutes long? I gotta think the problem lies elsewhere.