Unrehabilitated

Okay, I’m on such a roll down memory lane, here’s an extra bonus track.

Because—remember—it wasn’t just the Summer of Love; it was also the peak of the Vietnam War, our most recent implementation of a conscripted military.

So it seems appropriate to close out the week with the quintessential anti-draft protest song, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”. If you do not know it, you really owe it to yourself to listen, all the way through. Yes, it’s long. But Guthrie is a storyteller, an easy-going, folksy storyteller, who builds context on his way to the punchline.

(As an aside, I saw the film Alice's Restaurant at a cinema in Tokyo, with Japanese side titles. I really wondered how some of the dialogue was translated, and what the locals thought of it.)

A while ago I used the expression “extra primo good” in an email to a friend in the UK. He replied saying that he knew it from Trading Places, and asking if it was something in general use or if I’d got it from the film. Well, I’ve been using it for so long I’d forgotten whence it came, but indeed, it was from TP.

So it is for phrases from “Alice’s Restaurant” that I use when the occasion warrants. Viz.”

“Wait for it to come around again on the guitar.”

“Eight by ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is.”

“The judge walked in with a seeing-eye dog.” (I actually experienced something like this during an arbitration session. I was convinced that the arbitrator—a retired judge of severe superannuation—would be too senile to follow the evidence. But I hadn’t even got back to my seat from having given testimony before he told the plaintiff that he was dismissing the case.)

“Five-part harmony.”

“Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?”

“I’m not proud.”

The truth is plain to see

Carrying on with the Summer of Love reminiscence, here’s a range from that time.

Reminding us that it wasn’t all rock ‘n roll, here’s Nina Simone’s “He Ain’t Comin’ Home No More”, from her High Priestess of Soul album.

The Queen of Soul released perhaps her most iconic song in April of 1967, but it was still going strong that summer, so here it is.

And on the other side of the Atlantic that year, a British band was forming, giving itself a Latin name referring to “beyond these far-off things”, and putting together a sound that drew on Baroque and Classical music traditions, which led to what became known as progressive rock. Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was their first—and biggest—hit, released in May.

I love the reference to this piece in Alan Parker’s The Commitments, based on Roddy Doyle’s novel. (It’s particularly apt for today’s post, because The Commitments is about the protagonist’s obsession with soul music. The Irish soul band’s renditions of “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and “The Dark End of the Street” are particularly zesty.)

(Sorry about the size; it’s the only clip I can find online.)

Noticing the light had changed

Can’t go back to the 60s or 70s without making a stop at the Beatles, can we? Picking one or two of their best would be a fool’s errand, but perhaps a couple dating from somewhere around the Summer of Love, eh? You know—when they’d lost the Carnaby Street look and started pushing the envelope, but before they got involved in the whole Yoko Ono range war. (Lennon didn't start writing anti-war songs until a little later, so—regrettably—the likes of "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance" don't go here.)

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in June of 1967, so it should qualify. I was never a huge fan of the title track, but “A Day in the Life” is something I can get behind.

Also, here’s “Within You, Without You”, on account of Harrison’s whole Maharishi period. If you want to invoke the zeitgeist of the end of the 60s, you just have to let in some macrobiotics, however you choose to ingest them. This was way before the whole non-fat vegan gluten-free hand flapping you get today. This was go-to-India-experience-nirvana-and-amoebic-dysentery macrobiotics.

Taken one track at a time, it isn’t bad. But you have no idea what it was like to grow up with album after album of imitations of this kind of thing being played at full volume, cutting through the haze of smoke of one sort or another.

One more—from Magical Mystery Tour, which was released earlier in 1967. I’ve just always loved “Hello, Goodbye”. Besides—get a gander of the duds. Man—the 60s.

What's that sound?

Ah, well, I appear to be stuck in the past this week. Let’s have a couple of pieces from Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young).

Way, way back, when they were still Buffalo Springfield, Stephen Stills wrote “For What It’s Worth”.

One of my outstanding associations for this song is them singing it on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. When they got to the line, “There’s a man with a sign over there/Telling me I got to beware,” the man was Tommy Smothers, holding a sign that said "Beware".

Aside from that, the song was not in any way amusing. Stills wrote it about curfew riots on the Sunset Strip in 1966, but its applicability to what was going on in Vietnam was immediately apparent.

(Yes, children, there once was a time when kids under 18 could be legally detained if they were out “after curfew”, which in many municipalities was 10pm. It was truly the Dark Ages.)

The CSN&Y song that’s perhaps most associated with the anti-war movement was Neil Young’s “Ohio”, which was about the killing in 1970 of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen called in to quell an on-campus protest of the US incursion into Cambodia. In less than 15 seconds, Guardsmen fired more than 65 rounds into a crowd of students. It was an appalling thing to see on your TV screen and think, Not Saigon, not Lagos; Ohio.

CSN&Y recorded “Ohio” on 21 May, less than three weeks after the shootings. When it was released, the B-side featured Stills’ “Find the Cost of Freedom,” which has always sent me into silence, from the moment I first heard them perform it.

There’s a long acoustic introduction, which annoyed some audiences on their tour. But the whole thing is extremely powerful.

Fortunate and muddy

Taking yesterday’s caravan down memory lane got me thinking about music from the end of the sixties; especially about anti-war stuff.

John Fogarty’s “Fortunate Son” has probably always been true, but it seems painfully relevant in the post-9/11 world, when Congress-at-the-trough is so eager to send our military to war to defend corporate interests. In Vietnam, it was a conscripted military; now it’s volunteer. But the bulk of the ranks are filled with people who are not the sons and daughters of politicians.

(Props to Senator Tammy Duckworth, R-Ill., who lost both legs flying a Black Hawk helicopter in combat in Iraq, and to the sons of Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Kaine, D-Va., who are both USMC officers. They are the very rare exceptions.)

(By the way, if you look at the rosters of those who served in Vietnam—or, you know, take a stroll along the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall and look at the names in that black granite—you’ll see Hernandez, Sotos, Echevarria, Calderon…all those “somebody else’s babies” that scumbags like congressmoron Steve King (representing the heartland Iowa Fourth District, which would collapse if its Latinos left the area) warn are going to ruin the nation.)

Then there’s Pete Seeger’s “Big Muddy”. Man—this one is so viscerally painful, I can’t even listen to it. It brings to my mind’s eye not only the idiocy of Vietnam, but every battle fought in World War I in France and Belgium after September 1914. The classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

And, yeah—that was Vietnam, too. With some variations, just doing the same old shit over and over, pouring more blood and treasure into a different sinkhole.

Don’t even get me started on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now Syria. Just don’t.

Gratitude Monday: Caravan to the past

Well, blow me—it’s the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love. And of peak intensity of the Vietnam War. Expect a lot of retrospectives in the media (but no recognition whatsoever from the Kleptocrat, who spent this period getting draft deferments and testing the limits of prophylactics) on every possible aspect of these phenomena. They’ll probably run longer than the real thing.

But on Saturday I was in an organic market in NoVa that gives out free cups of coffees and teas they’re featuring. I picked up a packet of one of the latter called “Russian Caravan”, and the instant I opened it and got a sniff, I was whisked back to…somewhere. At first, I couldn’t place where it was, but eventually I realized it was a Russian deli in Los Angeles. I’d read about it in the Times, and bugged my mom to take me over there one Saturday. The place had that same smoky, exotic aroma as the Russian Caravan tea bag. So there I was—in Herndon, in childhood LA and in a tea house in Moscow, where I’ve only been in my imagination—all at the same time.

I got to talking with the coffee-tea woman about the experience, and we agreed that scents and music seem to be the most powerful connectors to memory. (For Marcel Proust, it was famously taste. But a strong component of taste is actually smell.) Because you hear a song, and boom—you’re back wherever you were, doing whatever you were doing, when you first heard it. Ditto a sudden whiff of…something.

The smell of diesel exhaust over wet pavement always triggers my first experience in Paris, when I began my pilgrimage to Santiago.

Constant Comment tea is forever entwined with long conversations with my BFF in her cousin’s very old-fashioned kitchen.

Someone on Twitter said he was in a Bob Seger mood for the first time since he was 15, and “Fire Lake” flashed onto my cortex. I felt the uncontrollable urge to put on my gypsy leathers, and I was back at the Greek Theater for a summer concert.

But thinking about the Summer of Love, and Vietnam, man, what an embarrassment of riches—all of which spark technicolor memories. And, you know, I’m grateful for having made it through that time, and its aftermath.

Summer of Love—gotta include The Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”. The Airplane and Rabbit pretty much defined the San Francisco scene. (And you'll just have to go elsewhere if you want to hear "If You're Going to San Francisco". I can't even.)

You probably know Country Joe and The Fish from their iconic performance at Woodstock. Possibly it was the prelude to “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” that is most memorable, but the song itself dates from 1967, so it’s legit here.

Years after both the Summer of Love and Woodstock, I heard The Youngbloods perform this last piece at a free concert in Griffith Park. (It, too, was written in 1967.)

That’s the one I’m thinking about these days, when we the people are again taking to the streets to tell the anti-democracy crowd in government that we’re not going gentle into their black plutocratic night. Fifty years on, and we’ve got the same lessons to teach and to learn. It’s solidarity that will prevail, and I’m grateful for the reminder.

Because, man—we're gonna need a lotta tea and music to get us through the times ahead of us.