I mean, you search for a mental feeding trough of your very own and what do you find? Everywhere is an arrow and a “next window please.” Mallternative is played-out, in fact built-in obsolescence is the only thing that’s kept it afloat in the latter half of the 90s. Ska is just a desperation move toward anything-at-all that hadn’t been beaten to death by 1989. Heavy metal has been a toothless bearded hag since 1972, which has something to do with why it may be coming back. Hardcore punk is and always was irrelevant to reality as 99% of the human race perceives it. (No, 99.998%. That would come out to around 1.2 million, which is still generous. If it matters, hippie-types are a slightly larger fraction of the human race. They have more fun, too.) Electronica? Oh, please...Eurodisco (like ska) was interesting the first couple of times around, but not to very many people. At this point, it has performed an illegal operation and will now be shut down. Nu-country? Talk about desperation moves--I’ll be long dead before I ever get that old.

All of those categories come (like Barbie & Ken dolls) with a matching set of accessories: their own subculture, dresscode, market niche, sitcom cultural referents somewhere on cable TV if not network, etc etc etc. So all of these cateories have their adherents. Yet none of them has any particular vitality, for the reasons given above. I can barely be bothered anymore even keeping track of such things. Clear them away, plus all the other crap, and what’s left? Not a hell of a lot--just life, the universe and everything.

It’s only the hippies who have never been assimilated. It’s not that they’re so utterly removed as the Moonies, or even the militia nuts. It’s not like there are less of them--some people grow out of being hippies, but there’s a freshman class every year. They’re easy enough to find if you know where to look, and they’re at least as friendly as you are. They just don’t register in the scheme of things, like the bumblebee who never heard the laws of aerodynamics that make it impossible for such a creature to fly. They’re not even a blip on the screen culturally, they have no inherent flamboyance, they leave nothing behind but footprints. They’re ninjas. Since they don’t officially exist, they’ve never been successfully co-opted. Much less successfully than most of the other groups, anyway.

Why is that? I think it’s because there’s not much money to be made off of them. Not for lack of trying; merchandise is available. The set of matching accessories exists, sort of, but it’s relatively low-overhead, high-durability and low-maintenance (no wonder they don’t register). You can go to a head shop (which may be located in the mall) and buy a tie-dye, a bong, a lava lamp and various other overpriced crap, but except for the lava lamp most of it can be made with your own hands if you’re so inclined. It’s not about “stuff”. Being a hippie is primarily an attitude. It’s about your perception of reality--there were plenty of poseur hippies in the late 80s/early 90s who dressed to perfection, and plenty of real ones who couldn’t be bothered. The only reason you might need any “stuff” is if you care to “make a statement.” (In the case of plastic hippies, the statement is: “you can blow bubbles in my head without inserting soap.”)

Beyond that you’re on your own. It doesn’t take much to be a hippie, and that’s part of the point of being one. If you want to go see a band, all you need is a pair of ratty old jeans, a tie-dye and/or a pancho, maybe a big floppy hat. Maybe some trinkets hanging around your neck or something, but nothing is mandatory. (Compare price tags with a new wave kid going to a club, or a raver, or a goth, or a discoid.) What can you sell these people? A pouch of quartz crystals? A blacklight? Some posters? Holographic stickers? The really committed ones don’t care about stuff, most of what they buy is strictly for use rather than status. Cheap food, good drugs, candles, incense, beads, blankets, maybe that lava lamp, a few high-ticket items here and there such as a bitchin’ stereo system, a reasonably good computer, reliable transportation, someplace dry and warm to lay down at night--and that’s about it. They don’t give a shit about having a house on a hill or a lawn to mow. No wonder the rest of society tries to pretend they don’t exist--if there were more of them, the entire economy would collapse. (It will anyway, sooner or later, because economies tend to do that eventually, just like people. But for different reasons. I think.)

The music industry does its best to ignore them as well. Most “hippie bands” that get signed at all get filed under “alternative,” yet they never get more than a token push on the radio. The record labels figure that since these bands will tour 40 weeks a year, their P.R. potential is maxed out right there and payola resources are best diverted elsewhere. In return, the hippie audience not only ignores the biz, to a large extent they get around it. I don’t mean just that they roll their own indie labels, nor that they shoplift their CDs (though it’s common sense never to buy one new without first checking to see if you can get it used--always remember, they cost less than a dollar to manufacture and the list price will be up to $20 as soon as the market will bear it). I’m referring to the system of interlocking mailboxes whereby the Grateful Dead could play a show on the East Coast and people back in California would be trading tapes of it within two or three days.

Tape trading is a subculture unto itself, it’s not at all as if the hippies have a lock on it. Still, the Dead were the first major band to set up a “taper section” for people to mount their microphones out of everybody else’s way. Various other bands (Metallica for one) have followed suit, realizing that they’ll pick up fans and ultimately sell more CDs if they let the tapes circulate freely. (I remember back in the 80s, a friend of mine asked the Hoodoo Gurus’ manager if he could plug into their soundboard. “Naaah, it’ll hurt our live album if your bootleg is out there. I can’t let you do it--this band is too hot!!” A year later, they were no more.) And they do circulate freely. It keeps things legal. Hardcore traders frown upon exchanging money--trading an extra blank (“2-for-1”) is acceptable for beginners, but only in extreme cases would someone put out cash for a cassette, much less $30 for an ‘underground’ CD of questionable quality.

It’s gotten to where bootleg albums or discs are the merest tip of the iceberg--there’s an entire universe of material on tape, available for the cost of cassettes, postage and a little effort. Name an artist and there’s almost certainly a wealth of apocrypha circulating, much of it of excellent quality, and far more than ever could be released in the stores. If you have all the artist’s CDs and you still want to hear more, or want to take a chance on something new without getting burned, then have I got a hobby for you...

If you’re not careful, you’ll love it--it’s a way of life. You might find yourself going into a CD store only for the oddest of reasons--checking the spelling on a songtitle you’re not sure of, or the year it was released. You can get to where you own a library of music, far more than you could reasonably expect to listen to, having paid a mere fraction of what you would have spent for CDs--and the record companies are out of the loop! All perfectly legal, just like what they do to the artists. That’s what they’re talking about when they say “home taping is killing music!” Funny, considering what happens to most indie bands once they get signed to major labels, I’d always assumed it was the record companies that were killing music. Sorry. I must not think bad thoughts.

The artists? They got paid when they played the concert (and made out a lot better than they ever do from royalties). If it was a radio show, they knew perfectly well it was going out over the airwaves. Even studio outtakes aren’t that big a deal--compared to the “creative accounting” many labels indulge in when dealing with their artists, bootlegs barely make a dent. They’re made by fans, for fans, and their existence generates new fans. So much for the ethics of the thing.

This has been going on for years and years, but the phenomenon exploded in the 80s. There were ten times as many Deadheads as before, so there were ten times as many traders too. Obviously, I was one of them.

OK. Fast forward. 1988. Trading tapes w/Becky from Vermont...one day she slipped one in by this great new band all her friends at school were getting into. It sounded suspiciously like a cult, but once I heard the tape I was a convert. I remember for a couple of years after that, I would play Phish for various friends whose tastes were such that (strictly on the recorded evidence) one would think they’d have been pretty much obligated to fall in love. I’m talking about people who had massive collections of progressive rock, and had spent their formative years listening to Return To Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Yes, the usual overwrought 70s stuff.

“The best unsigned band in America today,” that was my stock quote. Most of what I was listening to at that point had been recorded 10 or 20 years previous, and/or released on obscure indie labels or never released at all. It was more utterly encouraging, I mean truly restoring my faith in people’s ability to hear music for music’s sake (in an era when Paula Abdul was quintessential; lovely girl, nice person too, but all she knew how to do was dance), to see a new band getting somewhere and being able to care about where they’d end up. It had been longer than I could recall to see a group on the verge of their first album so unabashedly flashing their chops while caring not at all about pummelling you with their virtuosity. (If I’d known about the Violent Femmes in 1981-2, perhaps, it would’ve been like that.) To see them brandishing lyrics that were by turns witty and surrealistic (or just plain dada: “David Bowie,” “Dinner and a Movie”--those titles more or less are the lyrics), and above all combining an inborn sense of adventure with such unashamed intelligence, well, it warmed my heart. I didn’t think they made bands like that anymore either.

Or rather, I was well aware that they existed, but it was altogether too life-affirming a sight to see one of them actually being heard and appreciated by people other than their own small circle of friends.

As for my small circle of friends, they seemed to like Phish OK. Well, kinda. Kindasorta. Except that Phish was...well...contemporary. It made them nervous. (Rather like Marillion some years earlier; though they ended up falling for ’em while I quickly got bored.) It’s much easier to like something that’s dead and gone and buried and will never disappoint you, hell I know! And they were all too accustomed to crying into their beer about how all modern music sucked; The Police and Rush were about the last gasps of Good Music and nothing had ever been the same since Spirit had failed to properly follow up the Dr. Sardonicus LP. And here was a band right in front of their noses that was more than capable of fulfilling promises that Spirit had never even thought to make.

Fortunately, there was a way out--for all their jazz chops, it turned out that Phish were...shudder...a Hippie Band!! Yaaaay! That settled it. Don’t have to deal with them. No need to take them seriously. Look at their fans...they look like Deadheads, for Chrissake...don’t bring that stuff around here anymore, OK? *sigh* One of my fave mottoes: Gently pity those whom you can’t persuade...

So I kept my tapes to myself, and I didn’t attempt to drag any of those guys along with me the first time Phish came to town. They played in an old roller rink. Sure enough, there were hippie kids there. They were even sitting on the floor and smoking dope. It was horrible. (For some reason, this kind of behavior seems to really bug some people. That’s precisely what makes it rock and roll.)

But I still respected Phish in the morning. And I had the last laugh when they soon were signed to a major label and their CDs started appearing in stores where they’d belonged from the first (not to mention the record club, the ultimate in Status doncha know). I couldn’t have been happier. For a year or two. Then the third or fourth album rolled around. To my ears, it was too much of not enough--or rather, all the usual things happened that happen when a band makes the bigtime. It was never the same for me after their first two albums. (Maybe I’d be pleasantly surprised at their new stuff? I like to think so.) They became less radical on record, and so I stopped listening. (I loved those 15-minute epics that were still epic even if they sounded nothing like Yes.) But don’t take my word for it. The band themselves have often pointed out that if they’d pandered to everyone who’d ever accused them of selling out to reach a wider audience they’d have never left their bar gig in Burlington, VT. So more power to ’em. And blessed be.