Hair
Original Broadway Cast Recording
1968/1988: RCA 1150-2-RC
Doors locked, blinds closed, lights low, flames high: “My body, my body, my body....” “Walking In Space” is as supreme a moment as can be found on this recording, shining and pure with its delight. That’s the one time in which the appreciative core of the hippies gets to speak without sniping at the Establishment and everything else that hinders its joy in marijuana tripping (although even that falls apart by the end). The rest of the recording is peaks and valleys of various quality, and although I personally love it to death I can see how hard to appreciate it is to most people...my introduction to it was personally timely and reasonably well preceded by a sufficiency of contextual education. So I can enjoy the bulk of it without effort, and I can wave aside the issue of “dated” content and take it all in as it is and was.
And enjoying it means dancing around like a spastic apache to “Donna,” bumping and grinding with all appropriate moves to “Black Boys/White Boys,” thrashing to “Electric Blues,” self-pityingly crooning along with “Easy To Be Hard,” and especially trying to keep up with the lyric-pastiche singalong trip of “Ain’t Got No (Reprise)” which, even with a copy of the script at hand, is mighty goddamned hard and I think would make an excellent base for a stop-motion-animation video along the lines of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” actually.
Comments © 2005 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.