Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
men—to just say yes to the boys who said no, and so they did. It was a political statement, well
received.
But imbalance was the sign of the times in a nation virulently divided. The love-it-or-
leave-it crowd could win the scuffle on any given day, and the hippies and war protesters could
dominate the airwaves on the next day. This was no yin/yang harmony, because both sides
buckled under the yoke of war. A great nation with co-opted leadership was overriding its
headlights, barreling down a dead end road. Barry McGuire assured over and over and over
again, my friend, that the end was nigh on most AM stations. FM was more lyrical, nuanced
and softly threatening with imagery like a hard rain that was bound to fall.
Most people felt the painful truth, that the eve of destruction had begun, and the hard rain
was falling. Bob Dylan foretold the reckoning as well. The hard rain pummeled with rhetoric-
al questions on the whereabouts of a blue-eyed son, a darling young one who was all too easily
imagined far away in dire straits.
Lyrics moved minds. Lyrics infused hearts with pain and suffering in the sweet bye and
bye. Creedence also asked who would stop the rain, as the body counts, fire fights, napalm
and bombings went on and on and on. Another Dylan lyric effectively captured the mood, the
sentiment, the feeling and direction. Jimi Hendrix had the same view from the watchtower,
backed by guitar and a haunting voice pleading for a way out of here, immersed in chaos and
inverted values, meaning and truth.
A tough situation bearing down generates anxiety. Richie Havens picked up the pace and
touched a nerve in a song called Freedom , repeating the word freedom over rhythm guitar as
a concept. Richie Havens pulled no punches, and let it all hang out with handsome Johnny
marching to the Concord war with a flintlock in his hand. Handsome Johnny marched to the
Gettysburg war with a musket in his hand, to the Dunkirk war with a carbine in his hand and,
oh, fuck me, to the Vietnam War with an M-15 in his hand.
These pages can't sing Magic Carpet Ride or pound the hard driving downbeat that got
us down that dark and lonely road. But we remember. Slinging pizza and beer pitchers at the
Hoffbrau House paid a buck and a quarter and hour—that's a dollar and twenty-five cents,
not the buck and a quarter of decades later that could range from a hundred twenty-five
dollars to a hundred twenty-five grand, depending on how things played out for any given
hippy. Those who sloshed beer or gobbled pizza or sat and stared at the universe unfolding or
danced the funky chicken alone in the cosmos—they too were one with those who served, all
part of everything as everything. Steppenwolf stepped aside for a crossfire hurricane that gave
birth to Jumpin' Jack Flash , and it was a gas. The toothless, bearded hag was on us. We were
drowned, washed up and left for dead—nobody illustrated the agony and the ecstasy better
than the Rolling Stones, who put a spike right through my hea-ead.
Mick got it to a T on what had befallen us and who we'd become. It was a pulse to match, a
consensus boiled down to jungle rhythm in defense against a jungle war. It was exhausting, a
Search WWH ::




Custom Search