Good Morning, Starshine

[poliphilo]

Joe has the soundtrack for the movie version of Hair. I borrowed it the other day and it was crap- all smoothed out and picked clean of emotion. So I just had to get the original Broadway cast recording. It came yesterday and it's tons better- raw and spiky and antsy-  just the way I remember it. Hair is special to me. It's the sound of my generation enjoying its brief moment of glory before the sell-outs began.

The film version- which didn't get made until 1979- was wrong. It came out too early to be a period piece and too late to feel connected to anything but its director's fuzzy memories.  Someone should do a remake now. It's time has come; we're immersed in another "dirty little war" and don't seem to have a voice to protest it. The Hair lyrics are still fresh and funny and cheeky. There's a sadness in realising how much braver we were back then.

Comments

[frumiousb.livejournal.com]

I have a version of the soundtrack done by Nina Hagen & friends in German. It's, um, strange.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

Hair quickly became an international franchise, so I suppose there must be "original cast" recordings in a whole range of languages.

[methodius.livejournal.com]

One of the nice things about being an old fart is that one can remember just how much better things were in the bad old days.

Chanting outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square:

Hey, hey, LBJ
How many kids did you kill today.

But to be perfectly honest and frank and reasonable, Harold Wilson of Old Labour was not much better about Vietnam than Tony Blair of New Labour is about Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan, so what's changed really?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess the difference is that Harold Wilson didn't actually take Britain into the war. He demonstrated that much independence.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I love that record.

Even at the time, I was a little ambivalent about the show: it's a show about hippies made by people who aren't hippies, with Broadway musical values. It's about hippies the way that Oklahoma is about cowboys and farmers. Not that there's anything wrong with Broadway musicals...

Anyway, I too have the original American cast recording, so not the show I saw in London, but oh, I love that record!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ragni and Rado were sort of hippies, weren't they? It says on Wikipedia that Ragni played Berger so often he eventually turned into him.

And I just checked out Rado's website. He sounds like he's keeping the dream alive- and still trying to get his no-hope, post-Hair, hippie musicals off the ground.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that: thank's for telling me.

I wonder why the show does feel so artificial, then? Is it just that the associations of the musical are so - so unhippyish?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't like musicals much. The only two I really love are Hair and My Fair lady.

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

About ten years ago or so, my older sister, who's your age, took me to see a touring company of Hair. It was a fun outing, but I have never seen such a tame nude scene in my life. There was more transgressive subtext in the weird all-chick version of Waiting for Godot in which I performed at the age of eleven.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think if I were staging Hair now I'd want to cut the nude scene. It's bound to be anti-climactic. Naked bodies no ponger have much power to shock. But I guess it's partly thanks to Hair that this is so.

An all-chick Godot? Did the Beckett estate know about this?

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Beckett estate knew. *g* I don't think anybody knew, because we had the smallest audiences I ever performed for in my years of amateur theatre. The director was a professional Equity man who for some reason wanted to do this amateur production, which he was not supposed to do, according to union regs, and he also thought he could "improve" upon Beckett by throwing in a lot of four-letter words. My parents did not allow me to see or hear any of the show beyond the (heavily lesbian subtextual) scenes I was in. It was, altogether, one of the more traumatic experiences of my childhood.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Now that does sound weird!

Four letter words? Lesbian subtext?

I'm guessing you must have played Lucky.

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

I was too young for Lucky. Remember there was a boy who comes along twice and promises Vladimir and Estragon that Godot is coming? That was me.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten about the boy. I was remembering it as a four-hander.