Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll
I went to see Hair the other day. To my surprise, most of the musical came back to me, even though I had only seen it once before, nearly 50 years ago. The songs and the loosely articulated story had lodged somewhere in my memory, and I could remember the excitement and emotion that had captured my soul back then. However, this time around there was one significant difference, but to explain that I need to set my experience of Hair in context.
Going right back to the middle of the 1950’s, British theatre had seen a series of plays by the ‘angry young men’, beginning with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956. The playwrights were young, and fierce critics of contemporary society. Their plays depicted the crushing conformity and conservatism of a class-ridden country, realistic ‘kitchen sink’ stories confronting audiences with adulterous affairs, inter-racial relationships, and liaisons that cut across class boundaries. One of my favourites (if that is the right word) was Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, about a teenager who has an affair with an African-American sailor, becomes pregnant, and moves out from home to live with a gay friend. The plays spun out into films, with A Taste of Honey being made into a film in 1961, just two years after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of my all-time favourites, with Albert Finney as the philandering shop-floor machinist. These were followed in 1962 by A Kind of Loving, and The L Shaped Room, both of which explored the impact of unwanted pregnancies on relationships between husbands, wives and other partners. Today, when I read about ‘reality television’ my mind always slips back to the dramas of that time. There was the world, depicted in the gritty and grim realities of day-to-day life and the unrelenting pressures of complicated affairs, each story slipping inexorably into one kind of uncomfortable compromise or another.
Then it all changed in the UK. I think the signal moment was late 1962, with the release of The Beatles first hit record, Love Me Do, followed early in 1963 by their first LP, Please Please Me. The miseries of working-class life in the Midlands were replaced by the irrepressible and infectious music and behaviour of four mop-haired Liverpudlians. That rather trite phrase “you had to have been there” is the only way I can explain the impact of the music that followed, with The Rolling Stones, Gerry & the Pacemakers, The Moody Blues, The Dave Clark Five and The Yardbirds. In a period of six years, youth culture took over. It was exhilarating, even for a stodgy young middle-class nerd like me.
Part of the underpinning of the change was the drug culture. Marijuana had been around in the UK since the 1950s, but by the middle of the 1960’s it, together with amphetamines, began to be the part of what defined the youth experience of the time, quickly followed by LSD as it made its way across the Atlantic. For bookish people, the man of the zeitgeist, Carlos Castaneda, was off having mystical experiences under the guidance of a sorcerer. Avidly read by students, his journey was first outlined in The Teachings of Don Juan which came out in 1968; we had to wait until later in the 1970’s to get the full story, but by then Castaneda’s moment had passed.[i]
At the same time, the so-called sexual revolution was emerging. The origins of the changes in sexual behaviour are harder to determine. In part they were driven by the development of the contraceptive pill (in 1960) and better drugs, especially penicillin, to treat sexually transmitted diseases. But there was more going on. Playboy emerged on the scene, divorce rates started to increase, and nudity became evident in mainstream magazines, films and even newspapers. A rather one-sided revolution, too, as most changes turned out for the benefit of men.
If you were living in Britain, it was the era of ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’. Much of the same was true of youth culture in the US, but there some other issues were also pressing. The first was war. Slowly but surely, America had been drawn further into the conflict in Vietnam, where President Kennedy had seen the need to support the south, to “make our power credible” [ii]. An attack on the destroyer USS Maddox in 1964 proved the trigger for a massive escalation in the American effort, and, without declaring war, Congress authorised President Johnson to conduct military operations, beginning with air strikes (Operation Rolling Thunder), followed by a huge increase in the number of US military in the country, jumping from 16,000 during 1963 to more than 530,000 by 1968.[iii] This massive deployment of troops required an equally massive increase in servicemen, through increased drafting: US conscription had continued at a low level from the end of the Korean War, but it grew rapidly. With more being drafted, more protested.
At the same time, two other issues were prominent. First was the civil rights movement. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, (and later the Voting Rights Act in 1965), violence and marches had continued across the country, violence that was to culminate in Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968. At the same time, there was growing resentment in universities over the restrictions on free speech for students. For personal reasons, I’d like to highlight one critical point in this: the emergence of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1964-5 academic year, under the leadership of Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Brian Turner and several others, a movement that sought to support and address academic freedom, the civil rights movement, ending the conflict in Vietnam and overturning the draft.[iv]
With several others, Brian Turner was one of the leaders who was imprisoned for his role in the Free Speech Movement. During his time in prison, he successfully applied for the Ehrman Studentship at King’s College, Cambridge and arrived there in October 1967. Brian came to study social anthropology, and as a college tutor he was assigned as one of my students. A year younger than me, he was, quite simply, the most able student I have ever worked with. However, his past caught up with him, and in 1968 he received his notice of draft into the US Army. Brian was smart, as well as clever, and after admitting himself as a psychiatric patient to the local hospital, he managed to have his status changed!
Soon after that episode, Brian married a fellow American, a brilliant woman PhD student, studying philosophy. I was invited to the wedding, along with my wife and three very young children. I am not sure it was a ‘legal’ wedding (I think they may have gone to a registry office to deal with that requirement), but bride, groom and guests met on a sunny afternoon in the large garden of a house owned by King’s. Everyone was dressed in flower power garb. Well, almost everyone: I managed slacks and an open-necked shirt (no jeans for me, and I left my jacket with leather elbow patches at home, together with my pipe). It was a memorable day, celebrating love, flower power, and music, with a heavy, heady atmosphere of drugs being smoked all around me. Ah, and memorable for another reason: unnoticed, my five-year-old daughter and her sister (a year younger) ate a small fragment of the hash brownie, cream and petal wedding cake! Not much, but when I thought I saw them floating about the garden soon after, I guessed they had nibbled what was meant to be an adults’ delight!! [v]
Brian disappeared from sight after completing his degree at Cambridge. I have been unable to find any papers, articles or books he has written. When the new edition of the college Register appeared this year, his was the second name I checked (yes, mine was the first!). It told me two things I didn’t know: he had done research, at the University of Columbia and in Paris, on the history of anthropology; and he was described as ‘retired’ with no contact information. A brilliant person who effectively disappeared along with those flower power years.
It was an era of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll? As usual, I exaggerate. That was true for a small part of the British population, mostly privileged students at university and idle young things in Chelsea! The rest of the country went on much as usual. In 1968, I carried out a consulting project for a training group, which saw me visiting woollen mills in Scotland. The furthest north we went was to Brora, in Sutherland (a small hamlet above Inverness). When we arrived there, the owner called his small number of his staff into the room. When they had arrived, he told my wife (and I mean ‘told’) to stand on a chair, which she did. “There’, he said. “That, that’s what’s ruining our industry. That, that is a mini-skirt!”. I wish I could write the way he said it, with a broad, aggressive Scottish accent. The revolution might not have reached northern Scotland, but the consequences were already there.
By this time, the heyday of the Beatles was over, almost certainly having culminated in the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album (I will leave it to you to decide where the best music is to be found, but for sure, that LP was the end of the ‘big’ successes). Like so many other students, I found the mood had become darker. After MLK’s death, we were busy joining marches, carrying protest placards against the Vietnam War outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’. In meetings and discussion groups we were exploring new approaches to education and the attractions of the Free University of Berlin. Having cut my hair short (like the Beatles), now it was time to let it grow again. I managed to add a long, drooping moustache (which is evident in my official college photograph, I believe).
Then, in early 1969, I was down in London, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, watching Hair. Those songs: Aquarius, Sodomy, Manchester England, Black Boys White Boys, Good Morning Starshine. The costumes, even more garish and exciting than those I had seen at Brian’s wedding. Nudity, swearing, wow. It was a joyous night, even if I couldn’t quite get myself to join the packed stage with cast and audience dancing at the end to ‘Let the Sun Shine In’. Yup, a wimp, even that night!! Uplifting, fun, but with a bitter sweet element as Claude succumbed to the draft, an element of the story which almost got swept aside by the vibrancy of the casts’ performance. I think I should add one more detail: how about Marsha Hunt, Dionne in Hair, with her halo of black hair; I was in love with her (and Diana Rigg) for the next few years!!
So, there I was last week, seeing it all again. As I said, it wasn’t quite the same. Now it was more bitter sweet and rather sad. Not so much sad because of Claude, but because of the sense that Hair fifty years earlier had been the anthem of change, of a new world, of young people coming into their own. And now I look back and see all that promise dissipated.
We saw some signs early on. Oz, the Australian hippie magazine that started a UK version, went commercial and carried advertisements: for Playboy, for Rise (an early antecedent of Viagra), for sex partners and autoerotic magazines, and for sex manuals. The stories were great, and the parodies of other magazines were outstanding, but a trial for ‘obscenity and trying to corrupt public morals’ was, probably, the beginning of the end. With two outstanding defence lawyers, John Mortimer (of ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ fame) and Geoffrey Robinson (of ‘Hypotheticals’ fame) the three editors were sentenced on only two minor charges, taken to prison where their long hair was cut, an act which caused even greater protests on top of the already considerable outcry surrounding the trial and verdict. However, the trio managed to get further publicity by arriving at the committal hearing wearing schoolgirl uniforms. At the time, it was the longest obscenity trial in the UK. On appeal, their sentences were struck down. However, from then on Oz’s circulation dropped, and in 1973 publication ceased, leaving £20,000 in debts.[vi]
Another change was coming: no sooner had I seen Hair than I was watching a cool Neil Armstrong piloting Eagle, the lunar module, on July 20, 1969, seeking a safe landing spot for the first moon landing. Technology took over from youth musicals, and just around the corner were computers which you could access from a terminal (the IBM 370 range in particular). No more dancing in the streets, and no more youth sit-ins and marches, not for a long time.
As I walked out from the theatre last week, I wondered how Hair was seen by the audience that night. There were a few from my age group, for whom this must have been a ‘remembrance of times past’. There were a lot of younger people. One, in the row in front of me, was texting at one point. As I was leaving two young women were talking, and, as usual, I didn’t want to hear but did: “Time to wear beads again; I’ve got some at home”. For almost everyone, I think it was a fun, joyous evening. The issues about the draft were already distant; at long last the sexual revolution is being rethought through #MeToo; and, as for drugs, I really don’t know what a millennial has to say about them. Cannabis OK; heroin and cocaine, not OK; fun drugs are fun?
Is Hair a ‘musical’? More like a loose assembly of songs and bits of songs, given meaning by the performers who are allowed and encouraged to improvise. Music theatre, a rock musical? It inspired (or was followed by) Jesus Christ Superstar, but defined an approach that ended almost as soon as it appeared. Ken Russell’s film of Tommy was released in 1974, but that was one of a kind, although it included some outstanding rock music by The Who. Improvisational, loosely articulated musicals are not a staple, too risky for most promoters, I would guess.
The writers of Hair rejected the theatre of Look Back in Anger and offered the promise of looking forward in hope. But last week I found I was look backing in sadness.
[i] Well, that’s what I think, but I discovered today he has a business and a website: <https://castaneda.com/>
[ii] In an interview with James Reston in 1961 in the New York Times: see <https://www.thenation.com/article/kennedy-week-jfks-uncertain-path-vietnam/>
[iii] <https://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm.
[iv] It was only when reading about the Free Speech Movement did I come to appreciate Brian’s role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement>
[v] Not enough to do any damage, fortunately.
[vi] Wikipedia has a good summary of the OZ story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OZ_(magazine). The University of Wollongong has online copies of both the Australia and UK copies of OZ, https://ro.uow.edu.au/ozsydney/, and https://ro.uow.edu.au/ozlondon/
