Post-war years are always kind of odd. You really don’t know what to do with yourself. You don’t have troops to support, you don’t have an Axis of Evil to hate, and after WWII, you could even stop pretending that you liked your Jewish neighbors, if indeed you were a goyim of little brain and big thoughts bothered you. After The Great War (WWI) we were assumed that we would never have to go to war again ever because that was nasty, stupid, and to all intents and purposes futile. Following The Really Super Smashing War (WWII) we again had the expectation that wars, as we knew them, would blow the entire planet out it’s own ass. Oddly enough, it was this same theory of Mutually Assured Destruction which had led to WWI, but hey, who knows their history these days? But in in46 to 1949, life was kinda interesting: no great depression, no need for a new deal, people had jobs, money, housing and a booming faith in the science that had indeed ended the war in two quick uppercuts. Science itself however had kinda found itself at a loose end. You don’t need atom bombs as much? You don’t need new tanks, new ships, new drugs to keep the baseline troops trooping? It seemed for a brief moment that perhaps we had to have perpetual war, that we had to have an enemy, that we were destined, eventually, to blow ourselves to kingdom come and you can’t un-invent what was invented? Perhaps, it was mused we are that stupid. Oppenheimer took his own life, knowing that with all probability he had destroyed the entire future.

Aside: Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” comes up with a really good reason why we’ve not contacted and other space bound travellers. Given the universe is very very large (and still largering), Sol Three is very, very, very young, why isn’t there a Galactic Symposium to greet us? A Star Trek: First Contact moment? A simple segue into realizing our petty squabbles were nothing more than two-bit drunks aiming to set up a bar fight? The reason, Carl hypothesizes, is that life on any other planet would follow life on Earth: the basics of the atom are unchanged, the development of life is unchanged, the process of evolution brings every planet to one of two same stages: political differences backed by nuclear weapons threaten to destroy the planet, firstly; or the inhabitants will start to overuse the resources or over pollute the atmosphere—often on the understanding that this life, this world, is temporary and we will indeed become dust again. Star-stuff. To hear some people tell it, dust is freakin’ great: all the good dust lands on top of the bookcases, the bad, bad dust on the floor, where the deity’s cleaning woman shall torment it day after day—that’s fine, if that is our destiny. For now, can we work on the assumption that it’s not and this shitty life with the shitty job in the shitty apartment with the shitty landlord and your cats is all that there is? Would that be so bad?

So perhaps, per Carl (and others), we don’t make contact with them because simply they don’t exist. Perhaps it is impossible for any culture to develop beyond a state where it must first destroy itself. Sure, we may have a moon base by 2020, but without a supply from Earth it will die in 9 months. A perfect ruin. Maybe the chips are indeed down. We may make our own days end.

Sadly, we don’t seem to think about this much: instead we research “mini-nukes,” new variations on weapons that destroy flesh, not concrete. Our level of thinking is really no better than the ape on ape conflicts our brothers have, we just have bigger and better and more efficient ways to blow each other into nothing.

But back to what I was talking about. The 1950s for music were a great period of advancement: white folks ripped off black folks tunes, popular phonographs became viable (the Dansette, for example), and there was a sense that from the mix of R&B and Modern Jazz (both valid forms in and of themselves) something new would turn up. And turn up it did. The early ‘60s were a complete renaissance for music, not just cover versions, not just simple beat songs, not the noodly Modern Jazz stuff: something more and better and an actual recordable achievement.  Between 1960 and 1965 bands such as The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Small Faces, The Zombies, The Yardbirds and countless others came up with a fusion of the 1950s music, laced with some intelligent, wistful lyrics, and off things went.

I am not, by the way, a big fan of the Beatles. Yes, they brought something new to America, yes Revolver was a good album—but overall rehashed tunes and lyrics that wouldn’t challenge a 13 year old to write? Pshaw. Outside and beyond though: great pop songs, great rock songs, experimentation that still worked. The music developed. Somehow, this coming together of styles made intercontinental world conflict less likely (if we can bring these musics together, then the musicians, then the people...). Or at least provided an escape.

Sadly, one of my favourite bands of the period brought this to a close. The Small Faces in 1966 recorded an album titled Ogden’s Nut-Gone Flake. Side one was typical modern pop rock music, side two was a “song told in story” (but not in the awful way that classical music (by babies! for babies!)” had attempted this). A simple story to be sure, but the idea, that linking pop-songs with some chat by Stanley “The Man” Unwin, for a whole half of an album? Let’s just say, management was not well pleased and the Small Faces had to set up their own label to get the record published (Immediate Records). By the time O.N.F. hit the stores, the idea had leaked and so too had another “concept” album. Although this was much more filler and throwaway material and had no story, none the less it covered two sides of an album. (The Small Faces had intended only one side on purpose, so that the listener would get to hear the whole story without getting up out of their chair, turning the record over, and blowing the dust off the needle—breaking the moment, you might say). Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band took off. Ogden’s Nut-Gone Flake fared reasonably, but by this time the Small Faces were seen as a wanna-be follow-up group, not a trend setter. Still, it had happened: making an album about one thing was now in the public domain.

And here our troubles began.

Almost overnight, you couldn’t make an album that -didn’t- have a concept. You’ve good tunes? Interesting lyric? Well, all fine and good mate, but what’s your concept? The concept of making a “Good Album” just wasn’t enough anymore. The Beatles drifted off into ganja clouds, the Stones pissed out poor album after poor album without stopping to breath except if there was good cocaine on the in-breath. It’s possible, maybe probable, that something had to break the camel’s back. In 1969 The Who released Tommy— the worlds first (some dispute this) “Rock Opera.” For anyone who has not heard Tommy, it is basically a single album of decent tunes filled to the gills of a double album with bad songs, dull instrumentals, and without a doubt the most basic attempt to follow an opera format in a popular idiom. Looked back upon with a dispassionate eye, Tommy was very much a mediocre album, overdone, over long, over-produced, extended to two platters and with its head so far up its own arse it could see daylight.

The nascent Hippie movement glommed on to these musicians, and of course threw up their own little concoctions of two guys who’d just got guitars from their friends at the pawn shop and a really, really stoned fuck playing the bongos when he wasn’t vomiting into them. Bob Dylan [spit] had taken the protest folk movement that Phil Ochs had done so well at and turned it into so much awful, meaningless, artless, incomprehensible swill. Disagree? Go read the lyric or chord base to Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man—it’s OK, we’ll wait. Musically, a bed had been put in place to “turn off, tune out and drop dead” in.

Another defining moment came around at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1969. A new, supposedly hot guitar player walked on stage, played a version of a very, very bad song so very, very badly that most no-one knew even what the fuck it was. Hence, it must be great, right? Stoned-up hippies sitting in the mud and squalor didn’t even know what color it was. The set over, our hero took a bottle of lighter fluid from his back pocket, doused his equipment, flipped open his trusty Zippo and tried to set that mother fucker ablaze, to show, like, stuff and that! Like he had another guitar! Then he flipped again. And again. Fuck those crigger lighters! After five attempts, a roadie passed his roach lighter to Jimi and sure enough, the guitar started to go ON FIRE! Wow! Music as spectacle! This had never, ever been thought of before. Unless you count The Who wrecking their equipment at the end of some sets not because it was theatre, but because they should. Passion, man.This little lighter trick became a marquee of the Jimi performances—which thankfully were short-lived. However this was the second part of the puzzle: we can make a concept album, it can suck, but so long as we make sure every fucker listening is so high on weed they can’t see their own feet we are gorgeous mate, sick for sales! The more pretentious, vapid and void, the better: it was never that the music was bad, it was that the listener wasn’t “in vibe with the cosmos enough.” to appreciate it, or their “bad karma was hashing the high”. Feel free to spit at this point, punch something if you have to, if you have an unbreakable domesticated animal kick it clean across the room.

We all know what comes next. Progressive rock. Quadruple Yes albums that any sane person would say “No! Please no!” to “Supergroups” proving the sometimes the whole can indeed be less than the sum of it’s parts. Horrific pop bands such as the (no longer small) “Faces” made nursery rhymes for the 12 to 14 year old kids. Glam pop. David Bowie with a new persona for every album, shagging anything that moved. Iggy and the Stooges? Lost. The Velvet Underground? Lost. Instead “Let’s make side one be like we’re floating through space right, and side two can be we’re floating through space but there’s a planet kinda nearby, and sides—catch this man—sides three and four will be about how the gravity of the planetary body affects our motion, and how we almost hit an asteroid 5,000, 000 kilometers away! Listen I’ve got the main theme on my moog! Gavin? Did you move my moog?”

Either Gratefully or Deadly, but not the two combined, the youth of the day finally rebelled against this corporate SomaMusic: we don’t want records you listen to in planetariums by night, “look what I can do” supergroups. (If anyone can name a “well loved” track more puke worthy than Layla, you can have my first born child. Ah fuck, I thought of I Shot the Sheriff before you, I have to keep the brat—or step on it’s head while it’s still pretty young, I guess) . Instead, it became more important to put something of yourself on the line: express yourself clearly. Talk about how it felt to be growing up with no future, a constant death threat, and a horrid bleakness ahead of you. Inescapable. Why NOT hurl yourselves against one another bodily on a beer-stained, tiny bathroom of a club? Why NOT make first impressions count by getting a bright green mohawk and tattoos wherever you could find skin? Why NOT hunt down anyone playing C&W music on their car stereo and steal their truck and drive it ‘till you ran out of gas, then set it afire and look for one going the other way? At least it’s a life, not a living death.

Talking about running out of gas, it’s time to wrap it up. How did hippies hurt humanity? They got confused. They thought peace was love, love should be free and love was just another way of saying sex. When you make something, anything, free, you remove whatever it may have of intrinsic value, you obviate it’s emotional component, “It’s worth what you paid for it” swings both ways. By coming up with “Free Love,” the hippies took the most precious thing we had, the only thing that was truly ours, and not just cheapened it, but made it a synonym for basic rutting and fucking. By making love free, they make love worthless.

Prosecution Item #1. Hippies hurt humanity. M’lud.