Psychedelia – The Hip Quotient

Roll Up, Roll Up — for the Greyhound Bus Hippyland Tour!

Dana Spiardi — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 04:00:40 +0000

So, you’re trippin’ with your blue-jean baby down a marijuana-scented street, wearing your tie-dyed shirt, love beads and huaraches, when you hear an announcement blaring from a packed tour bus: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you look to your left you’ll see a hairy hippie passed out in front of the Phật Phúc Noodle Bar. Ahead on the right you’ll notice a parade of shaved-head Hare Krishnas — such a happy lot, wrapped in their orange gauze! Oh, and do you see those scraggly kids carrying signs that say ‘drop acid, not bombs’? They’re the pinko-loving, un-American war protestors. Now, just up ahead on your left is a store where stoners buy things called zig-zag paper and roach clips. They call it a ‘head shop’….don’t ask me why!”

What better way to take in the sights, sounds and aromas of the Summer of Love than to book a reservation on a Greyhound Bus Line “Hippyland Tour” of the famous Haight-Ashbury district.

This San Francisco neighborhood was the epicenter of psychedelia in 1967. Musicians, akin to snake charmers, hypnotized the beautiful flower-children who gyrated like whirling dervishes. India-inspired glad rags and Peter Max posters filled the funky shops. And LSD had everybody seeing white rabbits. Kids were heading to SF with flowers in their hair to obey Jefferson Airplane’s directive: find somebody to love. George Harrison dropped down from the heavens to partake of the scene. The Monterey Pop Festival was the place to be, and the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album (released on June 1) was the LP to smoke dope to. Time magazine’s July 7 cover story was “The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture.” Mainstream society was catching on. TV’s most trusted anchorman, Walter Cronkite, clued the clueless in on the happenings on his nightly network news report.

I, a child of 7 whose favorite “Revolver” song was the hypnotic “Tomorrow Never Knows,” stared at our black-and-white cabinet TV with envy at the scenes of peaceniks putting daisies in the barrels of police rifles, hippies dancing in a hallucinogenic stupor in Golden Gate Park, and pinkos burning draft cards in Chicago. Heck, by the time the Age of Aquarius hit Pennsyltucky it was already the Age of Libra. But I could dream, couldn’t I?

It was cultural voyeurs like me (and profit potential) that no doubt inspired Greyhound to launch a “Hippland Bus Tour” of the Haight district in April of 1967. Imagine, everyone from wanna-be hipsters to well-coiffed housewives to short-haired accountants (as John Lennon described the unhip) gawking through bus windows, in awe of this psychedelic horn-a-plenty! It was a Magical Mystery Tour for those who dreaded what their kiddies might dream of experiencing. The media played up the Greyhound tour, drawing thousands of kids to the Haight to perform like wild zoo-children, while spectators snapped photos with their little Kodaks, safe behind tempered glass.

The youthquake of 1967 was a short-lived diversion from the troubles of the day. It wouldn’t be long before 1968 ushered in some of the worst tragedies of the decade: the mayhem at the Democratic National Convention, student-cop clashes on campuses, mounting Vietnam War horrors, and the assassinations of two leaders who offered us hope: Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Blood on the streets runs a river of sadness,” sang Jim Morrison.

Here’s the original Scott McKenzie song that set the mood for 1967. “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

Nearly a year after first publishing this article, I was thrilled to receive an email from the beautiful young lady in the photo at the top of this post. Her name is Kathy Aydelotte Castro, and she was only 16 when photographer Robert W. Klein took this picture of her during a Summer Solstice gathering in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1967. He took the photo for the Associated Press; it was later published in various newspapers and magazines. Klein may or may not have asked for her written permission to publish this photo. Nevertheless, the name “Judy Smith” became attached to it. She’s never received any type of recognition for the picture, so I hope to correct that now! Thanks, Kathy, for finding my blog and contacting me. It’s great to connect with someone whose photo I chose from the dozens I screened for this article. (Apologies to Mr. Klein for using the photo without his permission.)

© Dana Spiardi, May 6, 2014

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Vacancies Abound…in Frank Zappa’s Surrealist-Furnished Motel

Dana Spiardi — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 05:00:30 +0000

I’ve stayed in my share of dreary motels, haughty hotels, Socialist-designed apartments with poster-board walls, and even nuclear plant “guest houses” (don’t even ask) in villages with names that lacked vowels, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like Frank Zappa’s 1971 mind-blowing movie, “200 Motels.” But then, I never dropped acid, either. (Becherovka was the only substance available to numb the reality of the Motel Moskva in Brno, Czechoslovakia, the worst of my many lodging nightmares). Every time I thought I was losing my mind – traveling the weary road on business trips in the 1990s – I remembered the opening line of a movie I once saw, and suddenly I didn’t feel so alone in my misery.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you can go mad on the road. That is precisely what this film is all about.” So goes the intro to Zappa’s “surrealistic documentary,” which opened at London’s Piccadilly Classic Cinema in the U.K. on this date in 1971. The film parodied the on-the-road touring experiences of his art-rock band, The Mothers of Invention. Ringo Starr played Larry the Dwarf (masquerading as Zappa), and Academy Award nominated actor and folk singer Theodore Bikel played Rance Muhammitz, a fascist dictator of sorts. The Who’s Keith Moon appeared as a pop star disguised as a groupie disguised as a nun. Need I go on?

Die-hard Zappanistas and chemical connoisseurs no doubt found the film delightful. The casual viewer could make no sense of it. But, the movie was original and visually provocative enough to draw praise from two of America’s leading film critics. Since I can barely muster the words to describe the images and their impact on the psyche, I’ll leave it to the experts.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, “No self-proclaimed surrealistic documentary can be all bad when it has a score composed by Frank Zappa, the Orson Welles of the rock music world….It cheerily evokes the image of groupies, warm beer, cheeseburgers, overflowing ash trays, efficient plumbing and inefficient air-conditioning, which freezes the air without cleaning it, in an endless chain of identical bed-sitters that are the homes-away-from-home for the members of a touring rock group.” Wow, it sounds like Mr. Canby knows that setting a little too well.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times praises the technology behind the project: “We have been hearing for a long time that videotape is going to revolutionize filmmaking, and now here is the vanguard of the revolution. Whatever else it may be, Frank Zappa’s ‘200 Motels’ is a joyous, fanatic, slightly weird experiment in the uses of the color videotape process. If there is more that can be done with videotape, I do not want to be there when they do it…The movie is so unrelentingly high that you even wish for intermissions….It is the kind of movie you can barely see once: not because it’s simple, but became it’s so complicated that you finally realize you aren’t meant to get everything and sort everything out. It is a full wall of sight-and-sound input, and the experience of the input — not its content, is what Zappa’s giving us. ‘200 Motels’ is out of Howard Johnson by Tinker Bell, with Aquarius setting.” Hmmm, I wonder if the late, great Mr. Ebert was “unrelentingly high” when he screened the flick!

To borrow a line from Frank himself, watching “200 Motels” is “…a bit like eating a sausage: you don’t know what’s in it, you probably shouldn’t know what’s in there; but if it tastes good, well there you go.” And that’s a great philosophy to have when you’re out on the road looking for adventure. So, take a chance…save some dough on your next vacation and book a room in a minimalist dive. You’ll then be able to entertain your friends (or, like me, bore them to death) with your “motel from hell” stories for the next 20 years.

Now, sit back, grab whatever mind-altering substance you might have on hand, and enjoy the trailer:

© Dana Spiardi, Dec 16, 2013

Many Shades of Pale

Dana Spiardi — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 07:57:20 +0000

There have been more than 1,000 cover versions of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the debut single by British progressive-rock band Procol Harum. The hauntingly beautiful song with its Bach-like melody and trippy lyrics was a perfect soundtrack for the Summer of Love. It hit the #1 one spot on the U.K. charts on June 8, 1967, and remained there for six weeks. It reached #1 in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Australia and peaked at #5 on the U.S. charts. In fact, it’s one of fewer than 30 singles to have sold over 10 million copies worldwide, and has probably received more airplay than any other song in the U.K.

Keith Reid, who co-wrote the song with bandmates Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher, said its title was based on a comment he overheard at a party: someone told a woman she’d “turned a whiter shade of pale.”

And just how did the band get that weird, hard-to-spell name? Their original manager, Guy Stevens, named the group after a friend’s Burmese cat: Procul Harun (Procul was the breeder’s prefix).

Here’s the original video of the song:

Hela, Heba Helloa, Everybody

Dana Spiardi — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 09:32:14 +0000

Forty-five years ago today, The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” was the number one song in America. For me, the best part of the tune is the sing-along ending coda, “hela, heba helloa.” I just love the way it chug-chugs along. (Those words, written by Paul McCartney, mean absolutely nothing in any any foreign language, by the way). “Hello, Goodbye” was the first Beatles single to trick us with a fake ending, then restart with a completely different rhythm. The band referred to the coda as the Maori Finale, due to its tribal sound.

When the song was completed, Paul felt it lacked something. So he asked recording engineer Geoff Emerick if they could add some heavy echo to Ringo’s tom-toms. And, voila! The song goes out with a bang. John Lennon said that the ending was the only part he liked, in fact. He referred to the remainder as “three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions,” saying it “smells a mile away.” Hmmm, maybe he was bitter that his composition, “I Am The Walrus,” was chosen as the B side of the single. Oh, that John and his show-offy lyrics!

You might need to wear sunglasses while watching this video. The colors are that extreme. The ‘hela, heba helloa’ ending is the best part – complete with hula dancers and twisting Beatles. Ringo looks adorable. John can really shake it up, but, blimey! He must be blind without his granny glasses. Oh, the days of wine and acid.