I Almost Cut My Hair

California post-60's dismay, ah millionaire Cali-rockers riding the acid revolution all the way to the bank (w/ David Geffen leading the way). I'm looking at you GD and CSN&Y. Ah if the 60's weren't DEAD by Altamont, they were definitely dead by the time of Deja Vu. But this is retroactively pinning down all those post-Woodstock albums as automatic bummers or faux-non-bummers, and who cares when the 60's ended, more importantly when did the musicians realize it ended? or better, did it ever really matter? Better, it seems that by the time of Woodstock and CSN&Y and the Stones' Altamont most people on the inside were already seeing that the Magic was gone. Calls of it being over started as early as 1966 in SF (the year before the Summer of Love), with the various busts and bad acid and MONEY-MAKERS (very few contemporaries of Bill Graham seem to have a problem with him, but he seems like a Grade-A profiteer at best) and the overwhelming number of carpetbagging kids trying to touch-down into enlightenment but were really just bumming everyone out. It must have been confusing to decide if the newcomers didn't and couldn't get it or if they were pilgrims to be converted, the proto-revolutionary middle class caucus to turn everyone on. Not that psychedelic SF defined a unified vision; it encompassed acid missionaries, anarchist revolutionaries, absurdists troupes and more. And there weren't many big on "NUANCE".

It's hard, in retrospect (esp. for someone like me born in '79), to have any sense for when people started to feel things were OVER for the 60's. It is easy to see when people started to profit on the end-of-60's rhetoric. Look at all the 60's are dead albums/statements. Let it Be and Get Back, all of the Stones "roots and country" albums, most Neil Young, most CSN&Y, Prog, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. None of this stuff seemed to be trying to sustain the mid-60's vibe, but trying to define the new Spectacle. Who could pin the new trend, recapturing a past/beginning that never existed. By the time the Stones got to Altamont they weren't even making Psychadelic Rock anymore. Gone were the ragas and fairies; it was all rough and tumble Rock and Roll. Why shouldn't it end in Death. The Stones didn't have a progressive agenda to end class war or have harmony between Hell's Angel's thugs, middle class teenage late-comers, druggies, Black hipsters, etc. They need rough to touch up their post-60's dystopic image and they GOT IT.

All of this is a digression from what I was gonna talk about. How much I like David Crosby's If I Could only Remember My Name (and on top of that, the album of the summer Deja Vu). Honestly being artists part and parcel with the 60's rebellion commerce spectacle, most of the 60's icons made just as good or better music telling us it was over and all a sham, as when they were selling it to us in the first place, if only because it's more honest. There's no room for you and me in the all-star cast of hip rock luminaries (ie INSIDERS) that make up everyone who contributes to Crosby's album (most of GD, CSN&Y, Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, etc). So the curtain has dropped and that can make you either angry and disillusioned OR okay to appreciate who it was all a sham to begin with and can't we get down with that. We're not included (making PUNK necessary) but we can still watch (what they show us) and sometimes Fake Can Be Just As Good.

Next up: why C.W. Nevius (and most San Franciscans) can suck a big Dick.