A Hippy Looks at Nineties Music

    My musical tastes were set in stone in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Well, maybe set is stone is factually wrong, only God and nature can create stone. Encased in concrete might be a better way of looking at it. God wrote the Ten Commandments on a stone tablet a long time ago. I never thought about the idea that it was an allegory for the long natural process for how the true guidelines to man's better nature revealed themselves over time.

      In the late 1960s, we would have whipped up some fucking cement,  and, because we were such an impatient bunch of twits, we would have  engraved it with one written rule, using Jimmy Page's erection (rumored to be able to cut diamond) to do the honors, "Do what thou wilt"  or Aleister Crowley's Law of Thelema, the saying that was engraved in the grooves of the album Led Zeppelin III.

       When people from the 60s brag about their music they have a lot to be proud of, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Dylan. In was, in fact, music that changed the course of history. But all of our boastful arguments can be brought to a screeching halt if someone mentions that the era also produced the likes of the 1910 Fruitgum Company and their scintillating hit Goody Goody Gumdrops. (In one of the world's greatest displays of misplaced temerity, the group actually put out a best of LP.)

         The era can also be shamed into silence by bringing up the several hits by faux rock group The Monkeys. There's  also The Strawberry Alarm Clock, Tiny Tim, Richard Harris's version of MacArthur Park, the totally insipid lyric 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I got love in my tummy', and any and all of the John Lennon and Yoko Ono collaborations. 

         In truth, most of us made no actual effort to listen to any of that crap, but it was there. You could never fully escape from its ubiquitous presence; it was part of the soundtrack of the era. For every "A Day in the Life" there were four or five songs like "Crimson and Clover."

        Which brings me to the the ultimate musical contribution of the era which was the crass commercialization of the music industry. The Monkeys were the iconic example, a fraud perpetrated on the public. They outsold both The Beatles and The Stones in 1967, the year The Beatles came out with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (arguably the best album ever) and the Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request. The Monkeys, on the other hand, were a made for TV band who only sang on their recordings.

       A lot of the real bands recording in the LA music scene couldn't protest too loudly though, as the same crew of backing musicians who provided the sound of The Monkeys were playing the music on their records too.

        I got caught up in defending the musical greatness of the era mainly because of watching the music industry do its thing of convincing the young and the gullible that the music of their own era was the greatest music ever produced. This process has continued down to these times where singers no longer have to be able to sing and musical nonentities like Miley Cyrus will one day be considered as legend.

           I traveled through the 90s in a musical cocoon. I heard the backing track but never paid enough attention to focus on any one thing. I had discovered my holy trinity by then, Bob Dylan, John Prine, and Al Stewart  and felt little need to listen to anything else, in fact, dismissing everything else as either irrelevant or mere noise.

            I'm older now and when looking back, I have come face to face with just how much I missed living in that cocoon. Every era has it jewels. That's just as much a statement of fact as the truth that every era creates a way more shit than jewels.

          I was watching Youtube videos recently and came across the song Lovers in a Dangerous Time, a Bruce Cockburn song covered by the Barenaked Ladies. The lovely opening lyric caught my attention,

     "Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by
      You never get to stop and open our eyes
      One day you're waiting for the sky to fall
      The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all"

Lovers in a Dangerous Time - Bare Naked Ladies

(I don't own the rights to this music)

 The song made realize that there was a lot of good music in the 90s that I had intentionally rejected out of loyalty to my own era. I spent the next few nights looking for jewels from the era.  I know that there is a lot more out there. These are just a few that caught my attention.

Don't Look Back in Anger - Oasis

I don't give a rat's ass about which brother is the good guy and which one is the dick. I heard one of them say some pretty dick like stuff once,  and it stuck with me, so I wrote Oasis off. I've never been one to think that a prancing rock star in eyeshadow is any more than someone who makes music,  the make-up, the prancing and the preening and the ninety pound snarl is off putting.

The song is formidable though. I like the lyrics,

 "Take me to the place where you go
   Where nobody knows if it's night or day
   But please don't put your life in the hands
   Of a Rock n Roll band
   Who'll throw it all away"

The song's melody has the wistful quality which was always the best part of the song "Imagine" by John Lennon. Noel Gallagher said he inspired by Lennon's masterpiece when he wrote the song.
​

(I don't own the rights to this music)

Soul Shine - Govt. Mule

Lets face it, Govt. Mule is an extension of 70s band The Allman Brothers and Warren Haynes is inarguably the best practitioner of the the sounds of that era still around. But he's a lot more than that. He is able to  take the sounds and influences of the late 60s and 70s era and bring them into a new time period while amplifying their beauty and making them sound fresh and relevant to the modern ear.  This song is a direct descendant of the Robert Hunter- Jerry Garcia collaborations that once filled the San Francisco night with strange colors and the pungent  odor of cannabis. The melody and these lyrics could have been lifted whole from the Dead's American Beauty.

"I grew up thinkin' that I had it made
Gonna make it on my own
But life can take the strongest man
And make him feel so alone."

(I don't own the rights to this music)

Why - Annie Lennox

Annie Lennox reminds me a lot of Van Morrison, great look, better voice, uneven choice of material. She had the looks and the talent. She was real big for a while but never as big as her talent warranted.

   This song is taken from the 1992 album Diva. She's singing about her concerns with going solo and the anxiety she felt for not having her writing partner Dave Stewart around. It proves she had nothing to worry about. 

"I tell myself too many times
Why don't you ever learn to keep your big mouth shut
That's why it hurts so bad to hear the words
That keep on falling from your mouth"

(I don't own the rights to this music)

Hero of the Day - Metallica

I have a hard time dealing with the imagery and swagger of heavy metal. I was around when it started up with bands like Blue Cheer, and I was there when it became kind of artistic when groups like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple came out. I owned all the Black Sabbath albums. I finally quit buying them because all the anti-god, Satanic  imagery made me feel guilty and confused.

    The Greeks were the ones who first created the heavy metal perspective with the invention of Tragic drama, and they swore it was cathartic and helped humans deal with the dark vision of our own mortality. At some point there has to be hope though; this was why they also created Comic theater, two sides of the same coin paired together to show the two extremes of being human. The ratio was a trilogy with two tragedies to one comedy with the comedy letting us know that we can also laugh at our morbid destiny. There is a need at times to soften the message or else you could just as easily turn Marilyn Manson fans into Charlie Manson fans.

     I started to feel that the heavy metal groups knew nothing about the ratio and were always, probably at the command of their record companies, spewing out an endless stream of despair and existentialism upon their fan's frustrations.

       Metallica has two songs that I find beautiful. Nothing Else Matters and this one. I've read that their true fans are dismissive of Hero of the Day because they don't think it's true metal.  If so that's a pity. Someone should point out that the fucking songs aren't actually made of metal and all of the machismo existential warrior shit is still just armour to protect the human within. Even Achilles, the greatest warrior ever, had a weak spot. It was what made him human. It was his lack of attention to that one chink in his makeup that got him killed.

"So tear me open and pour me out
There's things inside that scream and shout
And the pain still hates me
So hold me until it sleeps"    

(I don't own the rights to this music)
   
​Like I said, I'm totally new to the idea that other musical eras had something worth listening too besides the tinsel wrapped bullshit sold to the easily fooled and often misguided youth of any era. I am finding it a very interesting task to find what I had missed. I know that I left out a lot of good stuff from my excursion into the 90s only because of space and time.

    Maybe, next time, I take on something a lot more challenging like trying to find a jewel or golden nugget in the huge mountains of steaming vulture shit coming out the anus of the only in it for the money music industry of today. Even the maggots are starting to say enough's enough.