Hippies is free this week. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MTGGWZV/
Go on. Do it. Release your inner hippie.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Hippies free
8
Tag Archives: 1960s
Hippies TV
View the Twitch.tv episode (Yes We Cannibal) on Hippies here.
Go ahead. Click the cover below. Release your inner hippie.
Read it. Share it. Drop a rating on Amazon.
4.1 stars in 82 Amazon ratings.
Featured in radio interviews on KSKQ Oregon and WRBH New Orleans.
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Hippies won’t stop
More news on Hippies (which is still at 99c for a few more days).
Here’s a link to my latest radio interview: WRBH interview on Hippies
Feel free to share 🙂
Gary
* * *
99c Hippies
HIPPIES 99c this week (US). Download and sink in for under a buck.
- 4.1 stars on 73 Amazon ratings.
- Selected for radio interviews on KSKQ Oregon (May 2020) and WRBH New Orleans (July 2021).
- Author is a Faulkner-Wisdom Prize finalist.
- Featured here in Book Reader Magazine.
Go ahead. Click it. Release your inner hippie.
Read it. Share it. Drop a rating on Amazon.
* * *
Free love, free hippies
HIPPIES FREE this week. Download now.
4.2 stars on 50 Amazon ratings. Selected for Oregon community radio interview.
Follow Jazmine and Ziggy as they stumble through the sights, sounds, and ideals of the 1960s toward a dramatic personal climax.
Go ahead. Click it. Release your inner hippie.
Read it. Share it. Drop a rating on Amazon.
* * *
What happened in 1967?
Something happened between 5/1967 and 11/1967. Click through to YouTube to see these two clips of Eric Clapton and Cream. Musically, they are equivalent and on the same page. The blues guitar had entered the psychedelic age. That doesn’t change from the May clip to the November clip. But the visual self-presentation is different. In the May clip, Clapton doesn’t seem to know what to do with that hair, how to dress, how to present himself. In the November clip, he is totally comfortable in his own skin, the casual hippie style has settled into place.
So what happened between May and November of 1967 that might have signalled hippie/psychedelic culture finding its comfort zone? The release of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s album at the very end of May, just two weeks after Cream’s gig at the Beat Club in the top clip? Or their worldwide live release of “All You Need Is Love” a few weeks after that? The explosion of hippiedom in the San Francisco Summer of Love from June to August? Maybe. Then again, this may all be my own quirky reading of the two clips. But I hope you enjoyed the little trip down memory lane to the music scene of 1967, which imho pivoted away from Elvis/Sinatra days and carved out a new sonic landscape that still bears fruit today 🙂
* * * Click covers for links * * *
Release your inner hippie
HIPPIES FREE this week. Download now.
4.2 stars on 47 Amazon reviews. Selected for Oregon community radio interview.
Follow Jazmine and Ziggy as they stumble through the sights, sounds, and ideals of the 1960s toward a dramatic personal climax.
Go ahead. Click it. Release your inner hippie.
Read it. Share it. Write reviews.
* * *
Why the Beatles
I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico lately, and some of my younger friends there have asked why there is such a mystique surrounding the Beatles. So here are my thoughts, especially for my younger friends who know something big was happening at the time but crave more context on the Beatlemania that swept the world in the 1960s.
They only released 12 studio albums over 7 years, but in shaping the modern (post-Elvis) era of music, no other band comes close. 11 of those 12 albums reached #1 on the charts (and the 12th peaked at #2). Nearly every song on every album was a hit. When I look today at Rolling Stone magazine’s list of top 100 Beatles songs, I can sing at least 85 of them right now off the top of my head, and so can many people without even realizing it. No other band has seeped into the popular imagination in quite that way. As an indication of their dominance, even the last song on the Rolling Stone list, #100, reached #1 on the singles charts. During some years, they were releasing hit songs so fast that they were taking up all the spots (e.g., there was at least one week in the mid-1960s when Beatles songs held all of the five top spots on the Billboard singles chart). Keith Richards, who was there at the 1960s epicenter as lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones, once said that there would be no Rolling Stones without the Beatles, because “they kicked the door in” for the Stones and everyone else to follow. (You can see Keith, Mick Jagger, and others in a couple of the later Beatles clips below, as they were usually hanging around for the taping.)
Ozzy Osbourne, whose Satanic antics with his late 60s proto-metal band, Black Sabbath, earned him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness,” was once talking to one of the Sex Pistols in the mid-70s London punk scene. The Sex Pistol (I forget which one) said he didn’t like the Beatles. Ozzy’s response was typical Ozzy: “There’s something fucking wrong with you,” was all he said. But he later added: “For a musician in 1970s London, saying you don’t like the Beatles is like saying you don’t like oxygen.”
The revolutionary work of the Beatles – culturally and musically – is less clear now than it was then, partly (1) because they shaped the sound of music so much to their own image that they now sound like just “one of those 1960s bands,” and (2) their own evolution from beautiful pop love songs to psychedelic rock and experimental sounds, though rapid, was steady enough that no one point seems revolutionary (although some would focus on the 1967 release of the Sgt Pepper’s album as that point). So yes, there were many great bands in the mid-60s to mid-70s reshaping the sonic universe of music, and some of them you might like more than the Beatles, but most of them looked back at the Beatles as the groundbreakers.
Here are a few songs in historical order:
(If it helps measure historical impact, note that even what I’ve listed as “late” Beatles came before the emergence of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin or the Woodstock festival.)
Early Beatles (1964) https://vimeo.com/241059239
Middle Beatles (1966) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYvkICbTZIQ
Late Beatles (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usNsCeOV4GM
And bonus songs/videos from 1967-68:
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (1967) https://vimeo.com/249451145
All You Need Is Love (1967) https://vimeo.com/214047758
Revolution (1968) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFckPkukF7g
Click covers below for links.
From Shrooms to Hippies
I didn’t quite realize it but now Hippies is 99c. Follow Jaz and Ziggy through the risks and pleasures of the 1960s. Go ahead. Click it. Release your inner hippie.
Read it. Share it. Write reviews.
Click covers below for links.
A collaboration worth noting
Here it is. Worst nightmare for 1960s segregationists and 2020 woke progressives. A white southerner joining a black singer to do a song by a white British band who were mainly influenced by African-American music. The layers of cultural appropriation is dizzying. The white guys involved don’t seem to know they are supposed to self-identify as racists, and the black guys don’t seem to know they’re supposed to resent the white guys. They are all just digging the collaboration, celebrating each other’s input. May those who have taken a wrong turn to the left and those who have taken a wrong turn to the right find this spirit again someday! (Click image for link.)
* * *
Click covers for links
shakemyheadhollow 