CW45

“Hippies”

Hippies through the ages
Hippies here right now
Do you hear the raindrops falling?
Do you hear the drumming sound?
Hippies on the porch swing
And hippies on the floor
Don’t you say I’m not a hippie 
Anymore

If you saw me back in high school
You would say that I was one
Sitting pretty in the meadow
With my Yamaha to strum
Though I wasn’t smoking nothing
You could see it in my eyes
I was flying with the hippies 
In the sky

Hippies 
Love the Earth
Hippies
Love to dream
Hippies 
Take their shoes off
And relax
By the stream

I’ve done my share of trials
And I’m on the other side
I just drink my morning coffee
And I totally am flying
And though meditation’s mostly
Just to keep me on the ground
There are times where it will send me 
All around

I was just outside there, sitting
On that bench upon the hill
Perched in honey sunlight
With a touch of autumn chill
And the dappled light that morphed upon my 
Line-of-vision tree
Always seemed to make a face 
For me

Hippies 
Love the Earth
Hippies
Love to dream
Hippies 
Take their shoes off
And relax
By the stream

Hippies through the ages
Hippies here right now
Do you hear the raindrops falling?
Do you hear the drumming sound?
Hippies on the porch swing
And hippies on the floor
Don’t you say I’m not a hippie 
Anymore 

When I was a sophomore in high school (1992/1993), one afternoon I was sitting in the driveway,* with long hair and probably a tie-dye on and definitely no shoes, writing a song on my Yamaha steel-string. My sister, Emma (born two days after my 7th birthday), got dropped off by the school bus in front of the house. She walked over to me and reported that the bus driver had said, “Your brother’s a hippie.” She told me this as if she had just been given information she did not previously fully possesses.

*Why sit on the asphalt when I could have been on the lawn? I do not know, but that’s what my memory tells me. I also remember what Clov song I was writing: a short novelty number called “Yellow.”

I don’t know whether the bus driver was implying I was on drugs, or if my sister was concerned (like some of my teachers at the time) that I might be, but I was not, and had never been. Later in high school I would experiment with alcohol and get addicted to cigarettes, but nothing beyond that until graduating (and then very little—I was scared to try drugs, and apparently even pot scared me (that’s an understatement) to take).

But I was definitely a hippie. Junior year I cut my hair and stopped dressing so legibly—I was telegraphing experimentation and “artist” more generally. Which probably just made me more like a real hippie and less like a Woodstock Halloween costume.

I’ve gone through a lot of phases, but being a hippie is like being a jazz musician. Once you’re in there, everything you do to shake loose of the label and take things “even further” just makes you… seem more like a jazz musician, or more like a hippie. When the ideal of the way of life is to defy categorization, to omnivorously roam wide and free, then a paradox sets in. The more you try to transcend it, the more you become it.* It’s like a very-groovy trap.

*Expand beyond, not negate—I’m not talking about someone becoming, say, suddenly right-wing or bigoted. I’m thinking of the transcendentalist who wants to transcend transcendentalism but keeps becoming more transcendental!

I was just writing (not for the first time) about my later-on drug life—which began when I conquered my fear of weed in 2005, a few months before turning 30—in CW43. But this song, from the 2021 album Folly Builder, compresses all that into: “I’ve done my share of trials / And I’m on the other side.” I.e., the song elides my most-legit hippie years into an overly-decorous, obfuscating blip, and privileges my hippie life before and after drugs. As if to say: I was so much higher before the diminishing returns of substance reliance. And: now I’m a real hippie again. Actually free. 💕

I thought of doing this song today because of the part about meditating, which connects it to last-week’s post. And the tree I’m connecting to connects it to the post the week before that.

This song, to me, is both comic and wholly sincere; it seems to vibrate along that tension. (It feels like a song from a musical (see also “An Increasing Pressure On The Moon,” from the same album), and there’s something funny about writing about this subject in that voice.) But maybe the majority of my music, with words or without, rides that line. Is that true? In any case, it doesn’t feel to me like a compromise between tones. It feels more like they heighten and electrify each other. 💕