this is not pitchfork

Hair was a lot of things to me. It was an awakening in so many ways, most of them unintended. At least unintended by mother, whose fault it is that I listened to this in the first place. My parents had gone to see Hair on Broadway and my mother brought home a souvenir from the play – a colorful, enticing book filled with pictures and lyrics. I was about seven years old at the time, no more than eight and mom made the mistake of letting me see her put the book in a place I could not reach. That pretty much tells a kid my age “Hey, look at this!” I mean, what could she possibly be hiding? After all, this was the play that brought us the good-time sing-a-long song, Let the Sun Shine In. So when dad was at work and mom was busy doing something, I grabbed a chair, stood on my toes and got that sucker down from its resting place.

Two hours later, after consulting a dictionary on many occasions, I came away knowing way more than I had bargained for. I learned about peace, love and….fellatio. I was a pretty smart kid; I was an early reader who excelled at reading comprehension. So I understood the context of a lot of those words. I may not have understood their use in the real world, but I could tell they were not words you would say in front of polite company or at Sunday mass or to certain people in certain neighborhoods. They were bad words. What I couldn’t quite put together was how all these words tied in to the Let the Sun Shine In. Or why the cover to this book, with it’s awesome colors and awesome afro-type hair was so, forgive the parlance of the day, groovy, and the inside seemed so dark and bad. And what the hell did this all have to do with hair?

While my mother took care to hide the book from us, she was not so careful as to not play the record when we were home. Did she think we weren’t listening? Well, we were, and she had only herself to blame when we would sing along about sodomy and LSD. The thing was, I enjoyed the music. I really liked some of those songs, even though the lyrics confused me. But I always had a thing for musicals. Still do. We all have our flaws, I suppose.

Many years later, when I christened myself a latter day hippie and decided to retroactively protest the Vietnam war by projecting all my too-late anger onto nuclear energy, I took out mom’s album and listened again. The music I misunderstood as a child was all there and I fell in love with everything about it. The lyrics, the music, the meanings, the protestations. However, my second love affair with the album was short lived. Two things happened: I decided I no longer wanted to be a hippie (we just refer to it as a phase now), and the movie version of Hair came out. The two events were mutually exclusive, but I was certainly glad to be shed of my 60’s couture when everyone took the opportunity to bash hippies all over again when the movie was released (the movie was pretty much bashed because of all the changes made from the play, but to this day, I can not watch the ending to Hair without crying).

All these years removed, I can sit back and enjoy some of this album, but in a retro sort of way. Most of the songs make me a bit uncomfortable, whether because of the lyrics or content, I don’t know, but that Flesh Failures/Let the Sun Shine In can still, to this day, give me chills reminds me that this album meant something deep to me once.

Movie version of Flesh Failures
Broadway version of Flesh Failures
(I have both the original cast recording and the movie soundtrack; I think the play version if far superior musically)