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.

[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?

[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!

[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.