On this day in 2016, we lost Leon Russell. (Click images for songs.)
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On this day in 2016
10
Tag Archives: counterculture
Navigating the rules
“The trick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern.” (Dave Hickey, Essays on Art and Democracy)
“Break a rule when it doesn’t work.” (The Chicago Manual of Style)
“Let me be clear about this: I don’t have a drug problem. I have a police problem.” (Keith Richards)
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 🙂
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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.
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Before you know it
I didn’t even realize it. Hippies is free again this week.
Follow Jazmine and Ziggy through their Age of Aguarius sorrows, joys, and wonders.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MTGGWZV/
Go on. Do it. Release your inner hippie.
Just be nice for the freebie and write an honest Amazon review, however brief 🙂
(Click covers for links)
Hippies on Eartheart Radio
Friends, lovers, and vagabond spirits of the world!
Here’s last week’s interview for the excellent novel, Hippies, on Eartheart Radio (Oregon Community Radio). Derek, Eartheart radio host and a good brother to all, has interviewed all manner of characters from Wavy Gravy and Squeaky Fromme to Bhagavan Das (Baba Ram Dass’s first guide in India, as chronicled in Be Here Now). Follow Derek’s weekly shows KSKQ or on his Eartheart YouTube channel.
For what it’s worth, I was paired for my segment with St. Catherine of Siena 🙂
Click HERE for Eartheart’s YouTube home
(Click covers below for Hippies or other books by Gary Gautier)
Three language tricks
To finish off this spontaneous chain of posts on Woodstock and antecedents (from Joe Cocker to Elvis, from Elvis to Roy Rogers), let’s do just one more – Country Joe McDonald’s “Fixin’-To-Die-Rag,” an object lesson in how to use language in multiple ways outside the scope of literal meaning. In fact, I tried it twice on my intermediate-to-advanced ESL (English as a second language) students for just that reason – once it was a hit, once it was a flop. Go figure. But let’s listen.
Friends, lovers, hippies, it’s a long way back to Elvis.
But the language. The only literal meanings in the clip come in the 10-second aside at the 2:00 mark. Everything else elapses via three essential language tricks:
Irony
Rhetorical frames
Clichés, collocations, and idioms
My ESL students pretty quickly get that the song is ironic – that the words literally advocate support for the war (“Put down your books and pick up a gun / We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun”) but the speaker’s point is the opposite. But when they go through the irony line-for-line, it is still a learning experience for them to see how each phrase flips to its opposite meaning and how some of the flips can be quite serious and powerful (as when the speaker tries to energize parents with the upbeat thought that they could “Be the first ones on your block / To have your boy come home in a box”).
This brings me to the second trick – rhetorical frames. First, the playful tone that frames the whole song. It’s like a children’s sing-a-long (“one, two, three … five, six, seven …”). When up against content as heavy as “your boy come home in a box,” the emotional impact is amplified. The US government would like you to think this is a game, but Country Joe’s language tricks (which are really just an undoing of the GOVERNMENT’S language tricks) make it clear that this is NOT a game.
The second rhetorical frame is that of the all-American high school football game. The Fish cheer (“Give me an ‘f’ … give me a ‘u’ …”) and indeed the whole song can be seen as a kind of (mock-) pep rally. If the Man can’t distract you from the brutality of the war with the “children’s sing-a-long” veneer, maybe they can get you to think of the Vietnam war as a high school football game. Rah-rah-rah for our side. The rhetoric of the high school cheerleader. Not so in the hands of Country Joe. He takes that trivializing frame and turns it on its head. Is his inversion of the cheerleading rhetoric in the Fish cheer offensive? Absolutely. But this is not just a rebellious kid breaking the household rule. Country Joe’s point is that “your war is offensive – your turning it into a cheerleaders’ game is offensive – WE are offended by your war and your rhetorical tricks to make us comfortable with it. These are our friends coming home in boxes, so you’ll excuse us if we get a little offensive in this song.”
If the rhetorical framing is really just one expression of the overarching irony, my third and final language trick – clichés, collocations, and idioms – is really just one more aspect of the rhetorical framing. The entire text is composed of clichés, collocations, and idioms. Just look at the first 10 lines, with italics on the phrases the might be called clichés, collocations, or idioms:
Well, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
We could go on through the lyrics – pearly gates, tools of the trade, kingdom come, etc. – but why collocations, idioms, and clichés? Doesn’t that just show a lack of originality? When used gratuitously, yes. But this is far from gratuitous. It is part of the design. Country Joe is not interested in literal meaning but in emotional impact, and this is one way to get it. Collocations, idioms, and clichés are the things that localize language. They give you a house built of baseball, hot dogs, and mom’s apple pie. This is Americana in its most cliché form. Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. That’s the image the US government is using to sell you the Vietnam War. And Country Joe’s counterpoint is probably most anchored to the idiom, “I don’t give a damn.” After all, that’s the million-dollar question that Country Joe really wants to press on these 400,000 hippies: “What are we fighting for?” In 1969, no one really knew. And yet cousins and neighbors were coming home in boxes. This is the question Uncle Sam most wants you to look away from (“no, no, no, you shouldn’t give a damn about that”). So naturally that’s exactly where Country Joe, wordsmith, musician, counterculture icon, and smart-ass par excellence (who was already on an FBI watch list at the time of this clip, btw) goes to build his lyrical house.
Country Joe’s website: http://countryjoe.com/
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(Click covers for links)
shakemyheadhollow 