SOTU 476 "All You Need is Love" or.....

Barbablanca

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or "What's so Funny 'bout Peace, Love and Understanding?"



On Wednesday of this week, I will be 67... the same age the last century was when I became a teenager. It was also the year that the Hippy Movement went from being an Underground Movement to an open challenge to "straight" society. Much to my father's horror, I absorbed as much information as I could about this new social phenomenon and If I hadn't been living in Lagos, Nigeria at the time (a country then in the midst of a Civil War) - I would no doubt have attempted to run away from home to try and join a hippy commune.

The hippy ideals had a tremendous appeal to me:
Peace & Pacifism seemed a brilliant idea in a country torn apart by a fratricidal war (and the TV images of the Vietnam War on the news every night underlined that).
Love and Open attitudes to Sex were an obvious magnet for a blossoming youth who was always falling in love with the wrong girl and ignoring those who secretly adored him. As well as coping with unsettling attractions to beauty in both sexes.
Alternative Consciousness Exploration also fascinated a young lad rebelling against the remnants of the old colonialist order and seeking to discover "who I was".
Psychedelic Rock and Drugs: the former I was very familiar with, indeed, for a long while it was my religion. The latter, in the form of marijuana, was more easily found in Lagos than on the streets of San Francisco... But I was wary of getting into that scene at 13 and 14. My trips down that particular cul-de-sac were a few years away in the future.
Anti-Materialism: as a privileged white kid, surrounded by a native population living in often squalid and impoverished conditions, the idea of turning our backs on money making and spreading the wealth had its appeal too. Living in a city that had grown from 300,000 to over 2,000,000 in the seven years since we'd arrived in Nigeria also led me to embrace ideas of "back to nature" - because the urban sprawl that Lagos was becoming was an anathema to anyone's aesthetic sense. The city must now be a true nightmare with its current population of over ten million.

Anyway, these were just some of the main themes that drove the Hippy Movement. Other offshoots of that rise in consciousness were a rejection of racism along with movements to support equal rights for women, the gay liberation movement and an awareness of environmental issues.

These are all ideals that I still believe the world could benefit from. So, it is these ideals I want to celebrate this week.

What I want those of you who like covering other artists to do is to submit songs from 1967 and 1968 (the Hippy Zenith) but only those songs which celebrated some aspect of the culture behind the long-hair, tie-die shirts and bell bottom jeans.

There was a lot of commercial crap produced in those years and none of that interests me. This was the age of Hendrix, Cream, The Incredible String Band, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, of albums by former "pop" bands that had caught the zeitgeist such as Sgt Pepper's, Their Satanic Majesties' Request, In Search of the Lost Chord, etc, etc.

So, help me, at 67, celebrate that formative period of my life and the ideals which I imbibed and have never really sobered up from.

For the Song-Writers among us, please give me songs of yours that similarly pay tribute to the hippy ideals, or else reflect on how it was targeted for destruction by a worried straight society, or else celebrate its legacy today, etc.

I'll leave the last word to one of my hippy heroes Robin Williamson, who, reflecting on the hippy period, came up with these lines in his song "Sands & the Glass" on the American Stonehenge album:

"I think we were duped
But I don't forget
The things that were true
I believe them yet
I've seen a new day
Beyond the sad sunset
It looks so fine
Let it shine...."

Hear it here:
https://youtu.be/u6N4hcZ5KpE

Usual rules apply:
There should be a prominent role for a Ukulele (or three).
Please listen to the submissions of others.
The Season starts at midnight Saturday 27th March and ends on Sunday 4th April at Midnight (both Hawaii Times) .

Please limit the number of songs to one a day. I rather foolishly took this week without noticing that it fell at Easter and if my wife doesn't get at least a couple of days away from home, these holidays, she will not be pleased. Especially as inter county restrictions have now been lifted.

And the winner is....
I may decide on a prize for the winner(s) this time around, but it won't be a ukulele. Thinning my collection out may be a good idea, heavily promoted by my dearest Carmen, but the postage to send out even a Soprano Ukulele here is incredibly expensive.

I will update this section later in the week when I have thought of what I might send the lucky winner(s).

Have a good one:

Playlist:
 
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Yay! That is all.
 
It turns out that quite a few songs I have been wanting to learn are from those years.
And though I don't consider them very hippie-esque myself, being born too late to know the difference, they seem to pop up on lists of top hippie songs :)

I hope that easter will give me time to learn one or two, this is a most pleasant theme to encounter!
 
Now that’s a real With It theme, Berni! I can think of so many things I’d like to do for this season.

I’m so disappointed though, that I won’t be able to post til later this week if even then. I planned out what I was going to do and rehearsed a bit. Then when I sat down to start recording my track I realized my computer power supply had abruptly ceased to function. Replacement ordered but until it arrives I’ll be lurking, phonebound.
 
Groovy, Baby ... Er, Berni!!!!
 
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Happy Birthday Berni! I am 10 years minus a day older than you.
I wish I were 67 again, but 77 was Ralph Toohy's (Toohy The Terrible") number (an offensive and defensive end for the Hamilton Tiger Cats when I was a kid) and also seventy-seven is the sum of 3 consecutive squares (4x4 + 5x5 + 6x6) and is the smallest positive integer requiring five syllables in English.
'67 was Canada's centennial year and was the year I hitch-hiked from Dundas, Ontario to St. John's, Newfoundland with $100, a lump of hash and 2 harmonicas in my pocket.
 
Happy Birthday Berni! I am 10 years minus a day older than you.
I wish I were 67 again, but 77 was Ralph Toohy's (Toohy The Terrible") number (an offensive and defensive end for the Hamilton Tiger Cats when I was a kid) and also seventy-seven is the sum of 3 consecutive squares (4x4 + 5x5 + 6x6) and is the smallest positive integer requiring five syllables in English.
'67 was Canada's centennial year and was the year I hitch-hiked from Dundas, Ontario to St. John's, Newfoundland with $100, a lump of hash and 2 harmonicas in my pocket.

For 77, you're doing really great Jim... I'm terrible with maths. Is your birthday on April 1st, (making you a foolish fellow) or March 30th? My first love was born on April 2nd, so we both escaped being April Fools by a day. :eek: - As adolescents we thought that was "a sign" - but she still ended up dumping me! :rolleyes:
 
I'll be 71 this year(!) - but if you put it another way - 17 - & some days that's what I feel like, just the body doesn't agree. :D

Have a good week, Berni. :)
 
The Rolling Stones 1967
i know i can't carry a tune in a bucket at the best of times, but i made a right pig's ear of the singing on this one

 
Thanks Berni. I had my 65th birthday a couple of weeks ago. Bought myself a present yesterday. A Cordoba Guitarlele. Debuting here. It's tuned A-A .But I did a drop tuning of the low A to G here. It's such a punchy instrument. Unamplified here but It sings out. Really enjoying it. Tim Hardin song from 1967. I think he and the song was of the zeitgeist.
 
Hello, Berni ... and thank you for hosting! This is the trippiest, hippiest song I know, and it doesn't originate from San Francisco, but from Birmingham (a city in the English Midlands) - the reference to "sixpence for the phone" is a dead giveaway! It was the debut album of rock band, "Traffic" in 1967 ... they disbanded two years later. I tried to capture a sort of hippie vibe with an added shruti box, wind chimes and sleigh bells.

 
Hi Berni, happy birthday! I hope this is the sort of thing you had in mind.
It's Itchycoo Park, by Small Faces. Apparently it was briefly banned by the BBC for the drug references, but then unbanned when the band explained it was about a piece of waste ground they used to go to. Supposedly the "getting high" reference is from the feeling they got while bunking off school. Whatever... Not that I'm recommending that, of course :). Also, the only mind altering substance I had while recording this was caffeine.



This is on an 8 string baritone, with a tenor, some keyboard and some backing vocals.
 
Val broke the seal on Traffic, so here’s another ... 1968 ... Dave Mason wrote it. Everybody’s covered it!

 
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