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Country Joe and Janis: Hippie music can jump right out of your stereo
Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Back when I was growing up in small town Ontario in the mid 1960's, I was a "wannabe" hippie. My buddy Glen and I were watching Haight-Ashbury and all the neat stuff that was going on across North America, but primarilly in the U.S., on the tube every night. And we bought into a lot of the hippie philosophy, feeling that peace and love and cooperation and compromise were much better words to live by than what our parents had had to endure – Depression and war and more war and more war.
Anyway, we grew our hair and challenged the Establishment in our own small ways – wearing jeans to school, getting suspended for having our hair over our collar, walking out of school over issues we felt were important. It wasn't quite on the scale that it was happening in other areas, but we did play some small part in the social revolution of the 1960's.
The '60's made a huge impression on me as I guess most people's growing up years do. So, this past weekend, when Peter Martin of our local COGECO station gave me a call to see if I wanted to go to dinner with Lisa Law, I really had no idea how fortunate I was. You see Lisa seems to have been at every major hippie-type event during the decade of love and she photographed and filmed much of it. Wow! What a super interesting person to meet.
I revelled in the opportunity to have dinner with her and hear just a few stories about Woodstock or Monterey Pop or the Human Be-In or the Great Bus Race – all of which she attended. She knows and has photographed everyone from Bob Dylan to Dennis Hopper to Janis and Big Brother – in fact, she shot publicity shots of Big Brother.
Saturday evening, my wife and I attended a screening of Lisa's excellent film, Flashing on the Sixties, which takes a nostalgic look back at the days of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. I must say that it brought tears to my eyes, and not just because I'm a sentimental old fool. I wept because of the loss of innocence since those heady days. It was so wonderful to see Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Hog Farm Commune members looking like they were taking on the world and ready to lay a beating on it. How could such enthusiasm and brilliant creativity fail? But it did and there's the tragedy.
Anyway, back to the music. Meeting Lisa and seeing her documentary pulled me into the basement to listen to a little sixties "hippie" music. The Country Joe stuff is pure magic – tremendous free-form improvisation going on on every instrument – most of it high energy music that threatens to jump right out of your stereo and engulf the room. It is simply wonderful stuff that can literally blow your mind if you let it.
And what can I say about Janis – I've already dedicated a full column to her in Classic Vinyl. She is one of my favourite sixties icons – not just for her amazing singing, but for her lifestyle and philosophy. Janis had it figured out away back when. She rambles between tunes on the Peace Train. "It's all about today, man," she says. "We know on the train, man. We know. Tomorrow never comes, man. Tomorrow never comes." Then she breaks into a gut-wrenching rendition of "Take It While You Can" and follows that up with "Ball and Chain". What do you say, man? What do you say? She knew, man, She knew. It's not about tomorrow.
I mourn the death of Janis and Jimi and Jim, and even of John Lennon 10 years later, but I'm glad they're gone. I'm glad they haven't survived to see what's happened on the planet and how they were betrayed. And I'm glad they didn't have the chance to be corrupted.
But the music of the mid to late '60's and into the early part of the 1970's was great. Wow! Get out your turntables and dust off your vinyl. Listen to Country Joe or Janis and listen to some live stuff. The quality of the recording isn't always that great, but the listening experience is worth it to hear some of the most amazing spontaneously creative music in the history of recording. It'll blow you away.
John Gardiner is a 25-year-veteran of the community newspaper business, but he is also a prolific writer of moralistic short fiction he refers to as "emotional thoughtscapes" or "adult fables". Samples of his fiction can be found at:
- Melancholy Man and Minister's Son
- Reality Check
- Grim Faerie Tale
- Once Upon a Visit
- Toward the End, Oyster Boy
- And It Was Christmas
- From Genesis to Revelations (Chapter 1) - the novel. the rest of the novel follows month by month
