Long Hair Music

I received your email with your snail mail address and will send you a tape the next time I go to town. Side one was supposed to be my songs about the Bliss Fest, and side two was supposed to be songs about different subjects. After recording all the songs, the recording guy said that side two had to be either shorter or longer than side one, I forget which. It had something to do with the way some cassette players automatically reversed themselves to play the other side. So it came to pass that side one became side two and vice-versa. You will notice how, towards the end of side one, which originally had been side two, my voice gets a little shaky. That's because we did it all in one marathon session, which nobody in the business does. I found out later that most guys record no more than one song a day, and they keep doing it over and over again until they get it perfect. This one was more like recording a live concert, whatever mistakes were made were left in there. I had no illusions about this thing going gold, and I tried to do it as simply and cheaply as possible.

The draft lottery you mentioned was something different than the one I was familiar with. I must have seen this in an old movie or newsreel. They had this rotating wire cage like the one they use to draw the numbers for Bingo. They would give it a spin and then reach in and pick out a name, and then they would do it again until they had as many names as they needed. I don't know if they kept picking until all the names had been drawn, but I doubt it. What would be the point of that?

Funny thing about beards and hair styles in the 60s, people used to get all emotional about it, but nobody cares nowadays. Abraham Lincoln had a beard, as did a lot of other guys in the 19th Century, and I don't think anybody made a fuss about that.

I remember when they gave us all our first G.I. haircuts in basic training. My hair was pretty short already, so it was no big deal for me, but a lot of the other guys had really long hair. When they came out of that barber shop I didn't recognize any of them. Of course, I had only known these guys for a few days, but they still seemed like they became different people after they were shorn. After basic training, they let us grow the hair on top of our heads as long as we wanted, but any part of it that showed when we wore our caps had to be buzzed off short once a week. We used to call it a "whitewall haircut". The British and French armies had no such requirement, they could grow their hair as long as they wanted. I'm not sure about the German army, but most of the German civilians had long hair. We used to wear civilian clothes when we went downtown on pass, but you could always pick the Americans out of any mixed crowd because of their whitewall haircuts.

When I was a young kid, people commonly referred to classical music as "longhair music". I was told that was because most of the classical music stars in those days came from Europe, where long hair was in fashion. Later, some forms of popular music came to be called "longhair", I think to distinguish it from the "greaser" music of the 50s. One day, when my daughter was quite young, we were watching a classical music concert on TV. All the males in the orchestra were clean shaven and had short hair. When the conductor came on stage, we noticed that he had a Japanese sounding name, but he looked like a young American college student with shoulder length blond hair. He had to be younger than anybody in the orchestra, which was unusual in itself, and he must have had as much hair any half dozen of them put together. I said to my daughter, "Pay attention, for this is an historic moment that you can tell your grandchildren about someday: Longhair has finally come full circle."