War, Hate, and Misunderstanding: The Best Albums of the Late Sixties

Who ya gonna call?

I've never been a particularly groovy guy.  I don't believe that smoking pot makes you smarter or more creative.  Nor do I believe in the magical properties of pyramids, magnets, or crystal deodorant.  I don't think that the position of the stars at the time of our birth influences our personality or that the human race was seeded by extra-terrestrials.  I maintain that the government's decisions to put fluoride in the water supply and inoculate infants against deadly diseases were good ones and not conspiratorial plots to poison us or track our whereabouts.  I also bathe regularly, I don't recycle, and I refuse to pay three times as much for eggs or produce because it has a sticker on it that says "organic."

Basically, I'm not a hippy.

Fox News Headline 1967:
Police dog defends self against taunting Negro.
"Boy was eyeballin' me," dog explains.   

Along with Vietnamese children running down the street with their skin on fire and police beating the shit out of black people for daring to want the civil rights they actually already legally had, hippies are among the first things that come to mind when people think about the sixties.  For me, it's the image of a dirty, lazy, stinky, hairy, Tommy Chonger falling out of a VW bus in a cloud of bong-smoke, face-first into a pile of dogshit, then getting up, adjusting his poop-smudged granny glasses, and mumbling, "oh, wow, man.  Far out," to no one in particular.

Down South, Santorum is still all over the place,
but elsewhere things have pretty much dried up.

Though I blame the hippies for much that is wrong with the world today, I still have mixed feelings about them.  Kind of like I do about Christians.  I mean, hey, Christians built the Sistine Chapel and Chartres Cathedral.  They include among their members some full-on, shitkicking motherfuckers like Dante, and St. Francis, and Leonardo da Vinci.  Then again, they also tore down the monuments of the ancient world, destroyed most of its art and literature, and plunged western civilisation into a dark age for over a thousand years.  They also gave us the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, witch-burning, and more recently, Rick Santorum.

The hippies, contrary to their inflated opinion of themselves, are obviously less historically important.  Nonetheless, few special interest groups have had a more pervasive influence on contemporary culture than Jerry Garcia and his patchouli-stanking ilk.

Let's start with the good stuff, which can be summarized simply, easily, and most importantly, obscenely:

Fucking.

One, no, make that two of the things
I like about hippies.

The hippies brought an awareness of fucking, in all its forms, into the forefront of popular culture: fucking each other, fucking the Man, fucking the dog, and getting all fucking fucked up.  Since then, AIDS, the war on drugs, and the rise of the religious right have pretty much put the kaibosh on all this, but hey, I still dig it the most, Daddy-O.  Calling in sick to work, laying in bed all day, getting high, playing with one another's peepees, and plotting the overthrow of the military-industrial complex is some groovy-ass shit.

Fuckin' A, man!

However, aside from championing the obvious merits of zonking and bonking, the hippies' emphasis on wishy-washy open-mindedness pretty much boils down to a philosophy in which the willful suspension of critical thinking is deemed a virtue.

And it is this unwillingness to recognize qualitative distinctions between things, much more than sex, drugs, and revolutionary sentiment, that has had an altogether pernicious effect on contemporary culture.  Since the sixties, people just don't seem to value or even use their reason much anymore.  Besides the harmless stupidity of mood rings, liking Pink Floyd, and thinking its okay for white people to have dreadlocks, we now live in a world where someone can have misgivings about the moon landing, the origin of species, and whether the holocaust happened, while remaining a steadfast believers in ESP, the trans-substantiation of communion wafers, and the reality of pro-wrestling.  And then run for elected office.  And win.  I mean, in Canada, the current science minister is a fucking chiropractor and a young-earth creationist.  The hippies made it okay for all of us to be entitled to our own opinions, even our own truths, regardless of whether they're contradicted by every shred of evidence anyone has ever found.

It's like, all relative, dude.

 At Nuremberg, Donald insisted he was "just
following Walt's orders."  

Okay, maybe you can't totally blame the hippies for the fact that people have seemingly become more irrational and retarded over the last forty years.  But even the best and brightest of them haven't exactly done much about it.  Throughout the seventies and eighties, while their enemies were out there in the world dismantling the welfare-state, breaking labour unions, bombing abortion clinics, and conducting a full-scale war on Blacks and Hispanics masquerading as a war on drugs, the hippy intelligentsia were sitting in their ivory towers, listening to Enya, while they whined about insensitive pronoun use, racist imagery in Disney movies, and how porn makes fat chicks feel shitty about themselves.  Not that these issues don't matter, it's just that, when the Man's ass-raping you, the first thing you do is try to get that dick out of there, not criticize his cocksmanship.

Anyways, despite all that, the late sixties was a great time for music, even if you're like me and not all that into The Beatles, The Stones, or Led Zeppelin.

...And some of it was even made by hippies.

Enjoy.

10.  The Shaggs: "Philosophy of the World, 1969"

Song Selected: Who Are Parents?"

Imagine a crazy old lady in rural New Hampshire has a premonition while reading her young son's palm.  Her gypsy intuition tells her he will marry a strawberry blonde and have three daughters.  The three girls will form a band and become famous musicians.  The son takes the old bat seriously, especially when the first two predictions came true.  When his daughters become teenagers, he buys them instruments and, even though the girls couldn't play all that well and have absolutely no knowledge of musical structure or convention, he gets them to write an album's worth of songs and books studio time in order to capture their sound "while it's still hot."

Crazy, right?  The really crazy thing, though, is that this actually happened.  The girls are The Shaggs and the album they recorded is "Philosophy of the World," one of the most delightfully demented albums ever made.


9.  The Mothers of Invention: "Freak Out! 1966"

Song Selected: "Hungry Freaks Daddy"

A lot of people hate Frank Zappa.  Even hard-core fans of the Z-man, such as yours truly, have some difficulty disputing that his fusion of Edgar Varese, doo-wop, and sophomoric locker room humour is sometimes, well, kind of retarded.  But Zappa at his best and Zappa at his worst occasionally overlap in a sublimely ridiculous sort of way, as they do on this debut offering by The Mothers of Invention.  As well as being credited by many as being the first rock concept album and influencing both The Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," on "Hungry Freaks Daddy" and "Wowie Zowie," it also features the best use of xylophone and kazoo in the history of rock 'n' roll.  Let the Mothers help you get your freak on, bitches!


8.  The Fugs: "The Fugs' Second Album, 1966"

Song Selected: "Dirty Old Man"

The "Fugs' Second Album" evokes the all of best things about the sixties counterculture.  It's kind of like a Robert Crumb comic set to music:  an LSD-addled orgy of ejaculating cocks, hallucinatory gobbledeegook, dirty jokes, rabble-rousing faux-Marxist propaganda, and big, bouncing titties.

I could say more but I don't think I have to.


7.  Mississippi Fred McDowell: "I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll, 1969"

Song Selected: "Good Morning, Little School Girl"

Mississippi Fred McDowell is actually from Tennessee, not Mississippi, but he's still the shit as far as authentic Delta blues goes.  He was an old man by the time he was discovered by Alan Lomax in 1959 and had never recorded before.  Instead, he'd made his living share-cropping and busking outside a candy store in Como, Mississippi for extra cash.  What's great about this album is that you get to listen to old-time Delta blues recorded with modern techniques and equipment.  It's like getting to hear Charley Patton or Robert Johnson without having to aurally squint through the hissing crackle of a shitty 1920s or 30s recording.  It's also cool to hear McDowell babble almost incomprehensibly about all sorts of shit.  Like why he don't play no rock 'n' roll:

Because it sucks.


6.  Bob Dylan: "Blonde On Blonde, 1966"

Song Selected: "4th Time Around"

At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Dylan basically stuck his middle finger up at the American folk audience by going electric.  He got booed, but in typical Dylan fashion, he didn't give a rat's ass, and recorded a couple of raucous folk-rock albums, "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited," to rub their folky faces in it.  "Blonde On Blonde" is a much less grating and angular affair, softened as it is with C&W warmth and R&B soul.  Besides the ultra-irritating "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35" that opens the album (otherwise known as "Everybody Must Get Stoned"), every track on "Blonde On Blonde" is either, poignant, or interesting, or sublimely beautiful, or all three, as in the case of "Visions of Johanna," "One Of Us Must Know," "I Want You," "Just Like A Woman," and the above-mentioned "4th Time Around."  With the possible exception of 1975's "Blood On the Tracks," this is Dylan's best shit.


5.  Aretha Franklin: "I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, 1967"

Song Selected: "A Change Is Gonna Come"

Though her career as a recording artist goes all the way back to 1956, Aretha didn't really begin her reign as the Queen of Soul until she recorded "I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You."  Then she busted out into the popular consciousness like a pair of double Ds out of a B-cup bikini top.  "I Never Loved A Man..." is often cited as the best R&B album of all time and it'd be tough to dispute this, packed as it is with songs of sexy sin, sultry salvation, and full-on I-am-woman-hear-me-roar-type female empowerment.  Limp-dick, do-wrong motherfuckers beware!  The Queen'll bite that shit right off.  Respect!


4.  Sly & The Family Stone: "Stand! 1969"

Song Selected: "Everyday People"

James Brown may have been the first to hit it on the one and vamp it 'til it bleeds, but Sly Stone and his supergroovy family perfected it, tossing heaping scoops of rock, psychedelia, and utopian interracialism into the funky mix.  Sly later became rock's most notorious unfatal drug addict and scam artist, regularly ripping off promoters by getting advanced for performances he was always a no-show to, but for a few years during the late sixties and early seventies, he was probably the coolest and funkiest man alive.


3.  Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: "Trout Mask Replica, 1969"

Song Selected: "Moonlight On Vermont"

Featuring songs about the holocaust ("Dachau Blues"), the nocturnal hallucinations of aquatic invertebrates ("Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish"), and a two-movement homage to the female pudenda ("Hair Pie: Bake 1 & 2"), needless to say, this Zappa-produced offering from Don Van Vliet and his merry band of hippy freaks is truly one of the weirdest albums ever made.  It's also one of the best.

2.  The Beach Boys: "Pet Sounds, 1966"

Song Selected: "Hold On To Your Ego"

Ask yourself what kind of music Ludwig van Beethoven might make if he was reincarnated as a fat, ultra-uncool California kid who couldn't surf, was deaf in one ear, and was ruthlessly bullied by his dad.  The answer would be "Pet Sounds."  Brian Wilson here creates a rhapsodic symphonic soundscape in which to act out his own unrequited California dreams.  Though always seemingly but a swoon away, the fulfillment of these longings remains ever-elusive, like a hallucination of happiness you know in your heart of hearts isn't real, but that you refuse to give up believing in.  A heartbreakingly beautiful ode to joy from a man that madness and sadness would keep silent for almost forty years afterward.

1.  The Velvet Underground: "The Velvet Underground, 1969"

Song Selected: "What Goes On"

Many would argue that this eponymous third album by The Velvet Underground, while undoubtedly great, still pales in comparison to their Warhol-"produced" debut with the German chanteuse, Nico.  They would be wrong.  "The Velvet Underground & Nico" is unquestionably a revolutionary album and it sounds as such, replete with all the paradigm-overturning highs and frustratingly dated lows of what 1967's avant-garde thought the new world would sound like.  "The Velvet Underground," on the other hand, is the sonic equivalent of the perfect fuck: bursting with anticipatory swellings, sweaty, communion-inducing interplay, and climactic discharges of energy.  And it ends by snuggling up against you like a groggy lover while you drift off to a deliciously dreamy sleep.

Given a choice between fucking and fighting, I'll take fucking, and so should you.

***DICK'S PICKS*** 

for the week of March 11, 2012

New Shit:

Tennis: "Young And Old"

Song Selected: "My Better Self"

Great story about this band.  Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore met in college, fell in love, dropped out, bought a sailboat, and decided to spend a year exploring the eastern seaboard on it.  When they were done, they figured they'd write and record a bunch of songs about the experience.  The result was the fucking fantastic "Cape Dory," which beautifully commemorates their adventure of love on the not-so-high seas.  While the theme of "Cape Dory" is, as you might expect, largely nautical, "Young and Old," though slightly more earthy, is no less sun-soaked.  Kind of like a premonition of springtime during these darkest, coldest days of the year.  Check it out.


Old Shit:

Chic: "Dance, Dance, Dance: The Best of Chic"



Song Selected: "Good Times"

Though Disco is, with some justification, the most maligned of R&B's many incarnations, only the seriously boogie-averse can resist the shit shaking appeal of Chic.  Chic was the brainchild of guitar and bass duo Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, who also created Sister Sledge and all that funky shit you used to hear on Sesame Street.  The twelve-inch singles collected here offer a utopian vision of a boogie wonderland where the champagne flows like the crystal streams in heaven and the cocaine never runs out.  Combined with a handful of Tylenol 3s, a bubble-bath, and a vigourous session of masturbation, "Dance, Dance, Dance, The Best of Chic" is also the best cure for a hangover I can think of.