Hair
Forty years ago today Hair, the "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater. It was an instant sensation, and opened on Broadway the following April. It ran for 1750 performances and spawned some hit songs. It was the first Broadway musical to use rock and roll music, and it set the conventions of that medium on its ear.
The book and lyrics were written by two actors, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, who also played the leads, George Berger and Claude Bukowski. The music was written by a Canadian named Galt McDermot. Nothing anything of them would do from then on would come close to the lightning in a bottle they captured with Hair.
When I was in high school, I joined one of those record clubs where you buy a certain number of records for a penny and then promise to buy more. One of the initial records I got was the Broadway cast recording for Hair, which I played over and over again. As I've written in other posts on this blog, I have always been attracted to the sixties counterculture, which I missed by about a decade. Recently I picked up the CD version of the recording, which includes songs that weren't on the vinyl, but except for that listening to it again was like taking a trip back to the past. I have ingrained almost every note in my subconscious.
What made Hair work, in addition to being shocking for its time, was that the songs were incredibly catchy. They cover quite a few genres of rock, but mostly fall comfortably into what we would think of pop. Aquarius, the opening number, became a big hit for The Fifth Dimension, while Good Morning Starshine, Easy to Be Hard, and the title song also became big hits. There are also forays into more mind-bending rock, such as the drug anthem Walking in Space and the anti-war song Three-Five-Zero-Zero. But mostly the music is finger-snapping pop.
I have never seen a production of Hair. There was a brief revival in 1977 but nothing since then, although it is still performed by amateur groups. This is easy to explain, because though the songs are timeless, the gestalt of the thing is incredibly dated, and can only be produced as some sort of curiosity. When I was in college, I was the assistant director of a production that never really got off the ground, mostly due to the director, a woman who was way over her head.
What is the story of Hair? If you've seen the Milos Forman movie, made in 1979, don't be misled, that was a complete reinterpretation. The book is pointedly referred to as a non-book, as there is no real story. As with the film, Claude has just been drafted, but he and all the other members of the Tribe are hippies living in a park in New York. After Aquarius is sung, George is introduced by singing the hard-rocking Donna, a song of unrequited love about a sixteen-year-old tattooed virgin, while he swings on a rope over the audience. If that weren't enough to shock the first-nighters used to Rodgers and Hammerstein, a character known as Woof sings the following: "Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty. Father, why do these words sound so nasty? Masturbation can be fun, join the holy orgy, Kama Sutra, everyone!"
This is the first of a series of songs that establish the characters by the means of a list. Hud, a black hippie, sings Colored Spade, which is a list of every derogatory name for blacks you can think of. Then the whole tribe encapsulates everything with IRT: "LBJ took the IRT down to Fourth Street, USA. When he got there what did he see? The youth of America on LSD." Hair has songs that touch on most of the hot button issues of the day, including air pollution, the war, gender identity and miscegenation, with the Black Boys/White Boys number, with women of the opposite race extolling the virtues of jungle fever (on Black Boys, the voice of Diane Keaton, the one cast member who became a major star, can be heard). The first act ends with Be-In, which is the Hare Krishna chant while some of the cast disrobes. This became a shocking sensation, and drew theater-goers armed with binoculars to see what all the fuss was about.
Hair was also part historical pageant. Portions of My Country 'Tis of Thee, the Star-Spangled Banner, and Thomas Paine's Common Sense are heard, as well as a not-really mocking tribute to Old Glory called Don't Put it Down. In the second act, the Gettysburg Address is recited during Happy Birthday, Abie, Baby, a tribute to the sixteenth president that would have certainly tickled Lincoln (although one wonders how we would have liked the line, "Emancipator of the slaves, yeah yeah yeah, emanci-motherfuckin'-pator of the slaves.") There's even some Shakespeare, with a portion of Hamlet sung ("What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason") and Hamlet's last words, "the rest is silence," is used prominently in Let the Sunshine In, the closing number of the show.
Thinking about Hair forty years later raises a few thoughts. One is the heavy influence of the drug culture. Many of the songs are about drugs, and they sound hopelessly naive. Walking in Space is a paean to acid trips, while during Donna Berger sings, "I'm evolving from the drugs that you put down." Drugs, of course, ruined whatever was good about the sixties. No less an expert on this is rock musician David Crosby, who said, "We were right about the war but wrong about drugs." Also, it's interesting that rock music has never really gotten a firm foothold on Broadway. It pops up every once in a while, with the Who's Tommy and jukebox musicals with the music of Billy Joel, Abba or the Four Seasons. But those have all been exercises in nostalgia. Very few Broadway musicals have attempted to do what Hair did, and that is put the music of the moment on stage for the bus loads of tourists who come in for Wednesday matinees. Lightning in a bottle indeed.
The book and lyrics were written by two actors, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, who also played the leads, George Berger and Claude Bukowski. The music was written by a Canadian named Galt McDermot. Nothing anything of them would do from then on would come close to the lightning in a bottle they captured with Hair.
When I was in high school, I joined one of those record clubs where you buy a certain number of records for a penny and then promise to buy more. One of the initial records I got was the Broadway cast recording for Hair, which I played over and over again. As I've written in other posts on this blog, I have always been attracted to the sixties counterculture, which I missed by about a decade. Recently I picked up the CD version of the recording, which includes songs that weren't on the vinyl, but except for that listening to it again was like taking a trip back to the past. I have ingrained almost every note in my subconscious.
What made Hair work, in addition to being shocking for its time, was that the songs were incredibly catchy. They cover quite a few genres of rock, but mostly fall comfortably into what we would think of pop. Aquarius, the opening number, became a big hit for The Fifth Dimension, while Good Morning Starshine, Easy to Be Hard, and the title song also became big hits. There are also forays into more mind-bending rock, such as the drug anthem Walking in Space and the anti-war song Three-Five-Zero-Zero. But mostly the music is finger-snapping pop.
I have never seen a production of Hair. There was a brief revival in 1977 but nothing since then, although it is still performed by amateur groups. This is easy to explain, because though the songs are timeless, the gestalt of the thing is incredibly dated, and can only be produced as some sort of curiosity. When I was in college, I was the assistant director of a production that never really got off the ground, mostly due to the director, a woman who was way over her head.
What is the story of Hair? If you've seen the Milos Forman movie, made in 1979, don't be misled, that was a complete reinterpretation. The book is pointedly referred to as a non-book, as there is no real story. As with the film, Claude has just been drafted, but he and all the other members of the Tribe are hippies living in a park in New York. After Aquarius is sung, George is introduced by singing the hard-rocking Donna, a song of unrequited love about a sixteen-year-old tattooed virgin, while he swings on a rope over the audience. If that weren't enough to shock the first-nighters used to Rodgers and Hammerstein, a character known as Woof sings the following: "Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty. Father, why do these words sound so nasty? Masturbation can be fun, join the holy orgy, Kama Sutra, everyone!"
This is the first of a series of songs that establish the characters by the means of a list. Hud, a black hippie, sings Colored Spade, which is a list of every derogatory name for blacks you can think of. Then the whole tribe encapsulates everything with IRT: "LBJ took the IRT down to Fourth Street, USA. When he got there what did he see? The youth of America on LSD." Hair has songs that touch on most of the hot button issues of the day, including air pollution, the war, gender identity and miscegenation, with the Black Boys/White Boys number, with women of the opposite race extolling the virtues of jungle fever (on Black Boys, the voice of Diane Keaton, the one cast member who became a major star, can be heard). The first act ends with Be-In, which is the Hare Krishna chant while some of the cast disrobes. This became a shocking sensation, and drew theater-goers armed with binoculars to see what all the fuss was about.
Hair was also part historical pageant. Portions of My Country 'Tis of Thee, the Star-Spangled Banner, and Thomas Paine's Common Sense are heard, as well as a not-really mocking tribute to Old Glory called Don't Put it Down. In the second act, the Gettysburg Address is recited during Happy Birthday, Abie, Baby, a tribute to the sixteenth president that would have certainly tickled Lincoln (although one wonders how we would have liked the line, "Emancipator of the slaves, yeah yeah yeah, emanci-motherfuckin'-pator of the slaves.") There's even some Shakespeare, with a portion of Hamlet sung ("What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason") and Hamlet's last words, "the rest is silence," is used prominently in Let the Sunshine In, the closing number of the show.
Thinking about Hair forty years later raises a few thoughts. One is the heavy influence of the drug culture. Many of the songs are about drugs, and they sound hopelessly naive. Walking in Space is a paean to acid trips, while during Donna Berger sings, "I'm evolving from the drugs that you put down." Drugs, of course, ruined whatever was good about the sixties. No less an expert on this is rock musician David Crosby, who said, "We were right about the war but wrong about drugs." Also, it's interesting that rock music has never really gotten a firm foothold on Broadway. It pops up every once in a while, with the Who's Tommy and jukebox musicals with the music of Billy Joel, Abba or the Four Seasons. But those have all been exercises in nostalgia. Very few Broadway musicals have attempted to do what Hair did, and that is put the music of the moment on stage for the bus loads of tourists who come in for Wednesday matinees. Lightning in a bottle indeed.
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