‘Papa’ John – sufficiently ‘Hairy’, but too spaced out

Of all the numerous genealogical links to and from the Rock Operas which I have pursued (and, occasionally, simply stumbled across) during the last few years, Chris Campion provided one of the most intriguing and bizarre in this Sunday’s Observer Music Monthly. Campion’s excellent, in-depth article on the post-Mamas & Papas life and career of chief ‘Papa’ John Phillips is well worth reading in full.

For anyone interested in pop-rock music on the cusp of the 1960s and 1970s, John Phillips is an important figure. He wrote, for The Mamas & the Papas (and Scott McKenzie), some of the anthems of the ‘peace and love’ generation which had the widest transatlantic appeal at the time, and which have proved most enduring as iconic musical statements of the era. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, The Mamas & the Papas were and sometimes still are subjected to that tiresomely frequent accusation of ‘commercializing’ or ‘selling-out’ the ‘Counter-Culture’. A broadly-based audience warmed to their non-threatening version of hippiedom, their beautiful (by anyone’s standards) vocal harmonies, and Phillips’ melodies and lyrics. This wide appeal, combined with the fact that they did not play their own instruments (because they were singers – and we should note that this was never an impediment to ‘counter-cultural’ acclaim for Janis Joplin) has often made them rather too ‘pop’ for many ‘Counter-Cultural’ purists. Campion’s article goes some way towards redressing the perception of The Mamas & the Papas, and Phillips in particular, as ‘squeaky clean’. On the contrary: Phillips’ ‘spiritual’ and environmental concerns, prodigious libidinousness and even more prodigious drug intake place him firmly within the (admittedly contradictory) ‘mainstream’ of the ‘counter-cultural’ rock milieu of the time. This was, after all, a man who apparently ‘”believed in drug-taking as a way of life”‘.

Phillips also, it seems, developed a rock musical-theatre work with Hair producer Michael Butler. As Campion explains, in the early 1970s, between his first solo album and his dissolute 1977 recording sessions with Keith Richards, Phillips was ‘obsessed with the idea of writing an opera set in space’. The Apollo 11 moon landing had provided the inspiration, and the central role was written with Elvis Presley in mind. (Yes – Elvis.) Having ‘pitched the idea to Michael Butler’, Butler ‘brought on board a young director called Michael Bennett [who would take Broadway by storm in 1975 with A Chorus Line]. For several months, Phillips’ mansion became a hive of activity. Brainstorming sessions were held in the library, a pile of cocaine available for anyone to dip into….Unfortunately, it was not to be. Michael Butler pulled out of the project just as the final cast was to be approved. “Drugs made John very difficult to work with,” Butler says. “He also had a lot of paranoia. And that was the last thing we needed.”…The idea of turning the musical into a sci-fi comedy movie faded too (despite some interest from Jack Nicholson and the mooted involvement of George Lucas)…Nonetheless, with the help of Andy Warhol, Phillips had found new financial backing for Space, now to be retitled Man on the Moon….Harvey Goldberg attended one of the 45 preview performances. “It was so bad that I couldn’t even bring myself to go backstage,” he remembers. “It was truly one of the worst things I’d ever seen.”…The New York Times wrote: “For connoisseurs of the truly bad, Man on the Moon may be a small milestone.” The show closed after five nights…What was left was a suite of 22 songs (which will be released for the first time ever later this year) in which Phillips reinvented himself as a space-age Cole Porter, questing after love and truth in the outer realms.’ Read the full article here.

R.I.P. Tom O’Horgan

Tom O’Horgan, the man who brought nudity to London’s West End, died on 11 January 2009. Michael Coveney’s excellent obituary of ‘the big daddy of the modern rock musical’ ran in The Guardian on 21 January.

O’Horgan – not least as the director who first staged Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar – figures prominently in my thesis. Coveney makes many highly perceptive observations about O’Horgan’s artistic reputation, which soared and plummeted (in both cases sometimes unjustly) during his lifetime. O’Horgan personified, in many ways, the often artificially-amplified tensions between the ‘Counter-Cultural’ and ‘the mainstream’; ‘experimental’ and ‘conventional’ theatre; ‘artistic integrity’ versus ‘selling-out’.

As Coveney notes, O’Horgan’s ‘style of direction…was organically evolved in the off-off-Broadway theatre of the mid-1960s and rooted in an alternative lifestyle and the hippy culture’. By 1971 Hair and Superstar were two of four O’Horgan productions running on Broadway. ‘This was his time’, however, and, sadly, ‘he never really thrived beyond it’. In large part, this was because ‘O’Horgan attracted scorn from the critical avant garde, who felt he had sold out, and disdain from the purists for his wacky, outrageous style of synthesising many influences’. Such ‘avant garde scorn’, combined with the commercial disaster of O’Horgan’s 1972 production of Dude by MacDermot and Ragni would, ultimately, result in O’Horgan’s rather sad – but not unjustifiable – reflection ‘in 1993 that he had been put on “an enemies list” by critics and other members of the theatrical establishment’.

In the air

I’m pleased that the Broadway opening of Hair at the Biltmore Theatre on 29th April has been noted in Radio 4′s 1968: Day by Day. According to John Tusa, ‘Broadway’s defences crumble[d]‘ as the ‘first Rock Musical’ arrived after playing Off-Broadway for six months. (Not only that, Sir John: Hair was the first theatre piece ever to transfer from Off- to On-Broadway.) However, while it’s great to hear a burst of Nina Simone, the rather clumsy statement ‘at [Hair's] heart: Nina Simone’s classic – Ain’t Got No…I Got Life‘ could give the erroneous impression that she wrote the song. It was Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot’s ‘classic’ before it was ‘hers’.

Forty years and one day later, Albert Hoffman, the man who invented LSD, died. He was 102. He must have been doing something right.

Forty years and two days later, the city formerly known as ‘Swinging’ London seems inclined, on May Day, to elect as its Mayor a man who does a very convincing impersonation of an imbecile – which, of course, he can’t be because he was ‘educated’ at Eton and Balliol. And it just doesn’t get any better than that, does it? If, forty years on, so many caps can still willingly be doffed at a pig’s bladder on a stick, did 1968 change anything…?

“What have you got, 1968, that makes you so damned superior?”*

Image (from London Shaftesbury Theatre production): http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair/ holding/photographs/hair/images/London5.jpg

[*The title of this post is a quote from Hair. In a debate amongst the generations, Claude, the hero, is asked 'what have you got, 1968, that makes you so damned superior....and gives me such a headache?' He replies: 'well if you really want to know, 1948....', then launches into the number 'I Got Life' (made famous by Nina Simone, amongst others). Later versions of the prompt script from the London production reveal that this reference was updated during the five-year run of the show. Thus the line later became, for example : 'what have you got, 1971.....well if you really want to know 1951....']

I mentioned below that there was a comment in a recent BBC Radio 4 programme which I found somewhat dismissive, unjustified, and all too typical of the ‘canonical’ view of the key case studies of my thesis: the ‘Rock Operas’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In ‘London’, the first episode of the series 1968 – The Year of Revolutions, presented by John Tusa and first broadcast on Tuesday 18th March at 9am, the playwright (and, generally, astute social commentator) David Edgar discussed the state of theatre during that year. So far, so good. Surely, I thought to myself, Hair, (the undisputed British theatrical event of the year, which opened one day after theatre censorship ended in September) will finally warrant the recognition it deserves?

And lo, we got a burst of the original London cast singing Aquarius, while Edgar told us that the Lord Chamberlain putting down his blue pencil for the last time resulted in ‘this sudden whoosh of work, I mean things like the musical Hair which knew it was coming and wanted to be the first on the block. But much more importantly all kinds of radical theatre work from America in particular but also from Europe which just couldn’t have been performed in Britain which of course came much more in 1969 and subsequent years and transformed the British theatre.’

Mmmm.

BBC Radio 4: ’1968 – Myth or Reality?’

Let’s not be churlish in advance (an easy thing to do, as we drown in simplistic Channel 5-style clip-shows): it is difficult to deny that the BBC’s extensive coverage of the events of 1968 looks extremely impressive and exciting. We have all summer to judge whether they succeed in answering the question posed by the umbrella title for the season of programmes. The depth and quality of the analysis remains to be seen, but the range of issues to be covered is very commendable indeed.

The 1968: Day by Day segment looks particularly interesting. Hats off to the production team (including Historical Consultant Dominic Sandbrook) for giving so much information on the website about sources and editorial policy.

Set your bookmarks/’Listen Again’ links/videos/BBC IPlayer, etc. It could be a long, hot summer. Here’s hoping it is also an informative one.

Nicker-less Parsons on “Hair”

One of the best things about writing a PhD on a subject such as mine is that ‘what archives are you using?’ – the ultimate historian-stuck-at-drinks-reception-and-lacking-in-social-small-talk question – seems almost laughable. I am frequently tempted to reply that ‘the world is my archive’; but that can sound both arch and somewhat ‘unprofessional’ (dear boy).

But it’s true, as proved by this week’s edition of Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs. Kirsty Young’s guest on Sunday 4th November was actor/game-show host/personality/national institution Nicholas Parsons. Charming, articulate, and with a touching interest in and empathy for all social stratas and walks-of-life, he also revealed himself to be a great admirer of Hair (if not quite a closet ‘counter-culturalist’). He was a late-1960s audience member who interpreted the famous nude scene in precisely the way intended by its authors. Here’s a transcript of his comments, which provided the context for his choice of the song Aquarius as one of eight pieces of music he would take to his desert island:

Kirsty Young: ‘In 1967 you won Radio Personality of the Year. Briefly, how did that come about?’

Nicholas Parsons: ‘People, young, and middle-aged like me, were breaking down all kinds of traditional, arcane attitudes and so forth, and the big breakthrough on television came with That Was The Week That Was. And I went to the Head of Light Entertainment for Radio and I said ‘you haven’t got anything similar on radio’. He said ‘no, we haven’t’. And I said ‘well, I’ve got this idea’. And we called the programme Listen To This Space and it took off, and I was lucky to get the award – the Variety Club Award of Radio Personality of the Year.’

Q: ‘Tell me about your next piece of music then.’

A: ‘Well, it’s all part of the Sixties, my next piece of music. New things were happening in the theatre. And there was a musical came over from America called Hair, and I went to see it. And it was memorable for one scene, I remember, because at the end of the first half they all seemed to be under a huge blanket and they struggled to get their kit off. And then the blanket was whipped away and they all stood up absolutely stark naked and they went into another number. And, you know, it wasn’t done to be provocative, it was actually rather innocent. And that was the joy of this period – there was an innocence, there was a great love going on everywhere. And one of the songs from that musical which has always been with me ever since is The Age Of Aquarius.’

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Thanks, Nicholas. I think you’ve just earned a little citation in my thesis.

Images: http://www.nicholasparsons.co.uk and http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair/

 

“The Lord Chamberlain’s Final Cut”

I will be giving a seminar paper entitled “HAIR, London, 1968: The Lord Chamberlain’s Final Cut” this Thursday, 4th October, at 5pm in room 3.16 of the Arts building at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS.

Although this is part of the QMUL History Department Postgraduate Seminar Series, anyone, working under any disciplinary label – or none – is very welcome to come along. In keeping with the tone of the paper (which covers just a small part of my PhD research), I aim to make the atmosphere slightly less formal than usual. This is an attempt at just a hint of a 1960s ‘happening’. To that end, there will be much wine available. Whether that results in the degeneration of some into a tediously squiffy state – with entirely predictable consequences – is largely beyond my control (although, while the chroniclers of the Counter-Culture rarely mention it, I suppose that must have happened at ‘happenings’ too. Or maybe they truly were more ‘enlightened’ than the dominant twenty-first century London culture?) My hope is, rather, that everyone will enter into a positive, ludic, ‘Aquarian’ spirit.

I scheduled this, however, before I discovered that I have a rather intense teaching schedule on a Thursday, and that last week and next are without doubt the two most stressful and downright unpleasant I’ve had to endure since I returned to Academia. I therefore suspect I’ll need to draw heavily on all my years of Dr Footlights to physically get through it. That may mean resorting to my drugs of choice in such situations: Berocca, four-star caffeine, cigarettes, bananas and intravenous Lucozade. But the show must go on because, as some of my more senior, eh, ‘colleagues’ realise (admirably), to a large extent (when it comes to delivery, at least) ‘it’s all acting, isn’t it?’ (Maybe I should have taken them along to that casting I declined last week – because the gig clashed with my teaching – to show them what that is really all about.)

Image:  http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair/

Dead grotty, man

Here’s a little lexical fact which may be well-known, but was completely new to me.

Rowana Agajanian’s excellent chapter in the very useful Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture edited by Aldgate, Chapman and Marwick (London: IB Taurus, 2000) reveals that the word “grotty” only entered general English usage in 1964 when it was put into the mouths of The Beatles (particularly George Harrison) by writer Alun Owen through his screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night. “Grotty” is, apparently, a contraction of ‘grotesque’.

Incidentally, while it is fairly widely known that Brian Epstein had asked Joe Orton to write an early (and rejected) version of the next Beatles film, Help!, A Hard Day’s Night was originally to be scripted by Johnny Speight, creator of Alf Garnett and Till Death Us Do Part. Speight was unavailable, hence the job fell to Alun Owen – a highly regarded contributor to ITV’s Armchair Theatre and a writer very much of the ‘Northern realist’ or ‘kitchen sink’ genre. Owen had a particularly acute ear for the vernacular. This, presumably, is why ‘grotty’ now sounds so natural in the mouths of The Beatles, even though, as Paul McCartney later told Barry Miles, none of them had ever heard let alone used the word prior to shooting A Hard Day’s Night.

Is this one of those linguistic facts which everyone except me already knew, I wonder?

This is all part of my attempt to get to grips with the linguistic tropes of the period. If some linguist type hasn’t already written a PhD on ‘hep talk’ of the 1960s they certainly should. In a nutshell, social-science heavy, quasi-Marcusian jargon combined with (often rather vague) ‘New Age’ and ‘mystical’ or ‘Eastern’ concepts seems fairly universal in British, American and (from what I’ve read in translation) West German ‘counter-cultural’ texts of the time. The US Yippies added a distinctive soupcon of Situationist humour. In Britain, much of any added humour which is on display comes from The Beatles, and particularly John Lennon. The influence of The Goons and even English Music Hall is often apparent, particularly in The Beatles’ love of blatant puns and double entendres. The title A Hard Day’s Night, leapt upon by Lennon, itself came from Ringo Starr, infamous for his subconscious malapropisms. I’ll leave this area to skilled writers who can step inside the first person and replicate such dialogue. Andrew O’Hagan captures the late-50s ‘jazz daddy-o’ school brilliantly in the character of Michael in his novel Personality and, as we’ve seen, Mike Myers has the ‘Swinging London hipster’ turn-of-phrase tripping from the tongue of Austin Powers.

The point is: we recognise it when we see or hear it even if, as in the case of ‘grotty’, we don’t know exactly where it started.

It’s not my job to make judgments, of course….but, innit, like, so much more entertaining and witty than, like, the ‘street talk’ of today, geez? (And certainly closer to grammatical correctness.) Or is I, like, dissin da kidz of da new millennium? Hang loose, man.

More groovy dialogue, baby!

I’ve been somewhat loath to share this idea with anyone as I’m hoping it is an insight into representations (misrepresentations?) of the 1960s which has not yet been tackled in any detail within Academe. However, by posting it here with a date stamp and a Creative Commons Licence, I suppose I’m going some way to making it my own. Anyway, I find it a highly useful ‘text’. And it makes me laugh. So here goes…

I recently spent a few days at home with my parents. They were slightly bemused that I wanted to watch all three ‘Austin Powers’ films. The implied question ‘you get funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to watch things like this?’ seemed to hang in the air. Can’t think why.

However, all three films were, from 1997 onwards, very commercially successful worldwide, and hinge entirely upon both a recognition of and affection for many of the reductive ‘myths’ of the 1960s. They are brilliantly observed and executed homages to numerous late 60s films, of course – not least the Goldfinger era Bonds. The third, Goldmember, even pastiches elements of ‘Blaxploitation’ films.

But Mike Meyer’s major achievement as scriptwriter of these films – aside from his brilliant portrayals of both Austin and Dr Evil – is to make us like Austin, for all of his anachronistic, and thus often crude and misogynistic behaviour. Humour is entirely subjective, of course, but, to paraphrase Kenneth Tynan on Look Back In Anger, I do not think I could love anyone who cannot at least smile at the opening title sequence of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Every element of costume, music, set and dance steps compresses so many of the stylistic tropes we have been conditioned to believe constituted ‘Swinging London’ into just a few minutes. Generally, with films, “if they don’t have subtitles I just don’t understand them”. But this is one mainstream movie which everyone with an interest in representations of this period should see.

I’ll be analysing Austin in much more depth, of course (oh, behave!), but here are two extracts of dialogue which I think are quite brilliant. Any reactions and comments on any of this would be gratefully received.

——–

Having been defrosted after 30 years of ‘cryongenic freezing’:

Vanessa Kensington: Mr Powers, my job is to acclimatize you to the Nineties. You know, a lot’s changed since 1967.

Austin: No doubt love, but as long as people are still having promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection, while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment, I’ll be sound as a pound.

——–

When Austin finally captures his nemesis, Dr Evil (underscored by Bacharach/David’s ‘What the World Needs Now is Love’):

Dr Evil: We’re not so different, you and I. However, isn’t it ironic that the very things that you stand for – free love, swinging, parties – are all now, in the Nineties, considered to be ‘evil’?

Austin: No, man, what we swingers were rebelling against is uptight squares like you whose bag was money and world domination. We were innocent, man. If we’d known the consequences of our sexual liberation we would have done things differently but the spirit would have remained the same. It’s freedom, baby, yeah!

Dr Evil: Face it – freedom failed.

Austin: No man, freedom didn’t fail. Right now we’ve got freedom and responsibility. It’s a very groovy time.

Dr Evil: There’s nothing more pathetic than an ageing hipster.

Austin: Alright baldy, shut your cakehole. Come on, let’s go. On your bike.

Hoop Jumping III: ‘The Definitive’.

I have been prevaricating badly for several weeks – or it could, perhaps, appear so to others. I’m having terrible trouble actually making the final edit/revision/cut of a proposed article I’ve been encouraged to produce for some time. This is a revision of previous (well-received) work.

Why the delay and apparent mental block? Because I’m lazy? No, because for weeks I’ve rarely switched-off from thinking about and actually working on material for this. Because I’m a ‘perfectionist’, as the psychologists would have it? Perhaps. Because I’m more interested in the research and learning process than the ‘kudos’ of winning the approval needed to get it into print? Quite possibly. Because I don’t respond well to, or simply resent, being told to produce to a deadline? I’m really not sure about that one.

I’m writing about a relatively recent historical event which is still very much alive and contested. I’ve been in contact with several of the key surviving political ‘big beasts’. They have offered encouragement, clarification and excellent personal insights. This has been a wonderful learning opportunity for me.

It has proved, however, that anyone who thinks the personal testimony/oral history route is somehow an easy one is badly mistaken. With respect to those who work in a purely archive-driven way, dealing with live human beings is an infinitely more time-consuming way of working. They take time to respond. They also need some charming, chasing-up and cajoling. This requires emotional investment and personal contact. It is an exciting but very draining process.

It also creates a sense of debt. In this case, I have received responses so encouraging and detailed that I’ve been encouraged to make yet more contacts and go further and further with my research. Undoubtedly, all of the insights I’ve received are worth hearing, and deserve to be part of a well-rounded historical record.

That’s the problem. I’m writing a 10,000 word article – not ‘the definitive’ magnum-opus of synthesis on the subject. (That can, and will, come later.) It can only be the best I can offer at the moment. In that sense, I have to accept that it is a work-in-progress. But when, if ever, does what we do cease to be a work-in-progress?

I’ve written this post quickly a) by way of a final plan of attack and kick-up-the-bum, b) to remind myself how this felt when it happens again (which, in my case, it always seems to do), and c) to ask: am I alone in this? If not, how do others cope? What techniques and strategies do you use to avoid or break through such a situation?