Pretty funny article in today's Salon.com.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/08/22/hippie_parents/index.html

The sub-heading is "Benign neglect and noodle-dancing to Ravi Shankar do not a healthy childhood make."

I am the same age as the author of the piece, but growing up in a small town in Northern Ireland was just a tad different.....I don't think my folks ever heard of Wavy Gravy.

JC

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), August 21, 2001

Answers

I have often how the children of hippies would feel after they grew up.

I like what she wrote at the end:

Which brings me to why I’m writing this. In the past few years, hippie culture has had something of a revival. Hippie music, hippie clothes, hippie politics, even hippie hairdos are big. More and more, I see VW buses with cedar peaked-roof add-ons, lumbering up Highway 1 on their way to Reggae on the River, the happy scruffy singing hippies inside dandling little newborns in tie-dyed Garanimals.

It isn't surprising that in an era tinged with the paranoid ultraconservatism of the '50s, people seem to want back some of the '60s freedom and revolutionary feeling. The George W. Bush presidency is almost enough to make me sell everything and buy one of those buses myself. Almost.

Growing out of the anger I felt has allowed me to admit that I also long for some of the feeling of that age, but I don't want nouvelle-hippie parents to make the same mistakes with their kids that the first hippies did. Once you have kids, finding yourself should never trump the goal of giving your kids a safe, thoughtfully limited environment.

So this is a cautionary tale. Go ahead, eat carob. Weave your own dashiki. Get off the grid. Open your mind to new experiences. But when your microbus pulls into the festival lot, don't drop acid and ditch your daughter at the child-care tipi. Sometimes your mind can be so open, your brain falls out.

********

Then I followed one of the links in the story and read this, in an interview Trey from from the band Phish,

Question: So many bands go for the lowest common denominator -- three chords and cliched lyrics. You guys go the other direction. What gives Phish the permission to try to take their audience to higher places?

TA: "I've been thinking about this a lot for a while now. Something about this culture, when you watch TV and advertisements, there's this philosophy -- you know, the whole 'stupid is cool' philosophy; if you're inarticulate and meat-heady, it's cool. I just did some work with an entire eighth grade class, and I think that the 'apathy is cool' attitude has gotten so insulting. I think that it's about to go the opposite direction, thank God.

"The media is so powerful. I was watching the Flyers game, and when these commercials would come on glorifying stupidity, it got me so mad. I kept thinking 'What is all the media moguls go together and said, 'let's just change our whole outlook; let's glorify brilliance for a while, and let's see what happens to all the kids in this country, when all of a sudden it's cool to think.' Wouldn't that change everything? It would."

-- Cherri (jessam6@home.com), August 22, 2001.

[Excerpt from the "Noodle Dance" link found in the Salon article, an interview with Trey (TA) from Phish:] JN: How do you all know to go to the musical places you go when you jam, and how do you know when you're done? TA: "The funny thing about knowing when you're done -- and this has always kind of convinced me that musicians are not tally creating the music, that the music is sort of going through you -- inevitably everybody knows when it's over. You just know. Bands that do a lot of improv -- it so often comes to this nice conclusion without anybody having to say anything. The other thing that you know; you definitely know if you've gone too far. It's the same kind of thing; it makes me believe that the music is coming through us, and what you're really doing is opening channels; by doing all those exercises you're allowing yourself to be more open. It's like a connection with the audience. During the biggest jams I feel like a hole, like this giant tube or something. How'd we know where to go? I think that the way that you know, in this band at least, is to listen. It comes from rehearsal and philosophy."

I can't say that I've ever heard a Phish tune. I will seek to do so after having read the interview with one of the band members. Wow.

Frank Zappa was a master at creating space for improv in his live shows. One didn't attend a Zappa show with the thought that he'd simply re-create his studio work in a live venue. Uh-uh. The essence of live performance was creation born of hard work in the studio with his bands. Months and months of getting to know the strengths and weaknesses, the personalities of each member - Zappa had literally dozens and dozens of band members over the years - so that when on stage there could be a melding, one mind guiding or drawing the next notes out of them.

TA: "...The way I see it, what I was doing last night and what we do every night I couldn't imagine being more alive. I love communication through improvisational music so much that, I mean, it's the deepest kind of passion. I couldn't ask for anything more in life."

Communication as a passion. Imagine that.

-- Rich (living_in_interesting_times@hotmail.com), August 22, 2001.

Groovy

-- (nemesis@awol.com), August 22, 2001.