Another slice of ‘In Search of Captain Beefheart – This is Hip & Cool & Occasionally hairy

Posted on by Opher

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

This is Hip & Cool & Occasionally hairy

Some time in your life you have to make a decision whether to be hip and cool or straight.

First it helps if you know what being cool is. It is a commitment. Cool is an indefinable quality that some people have. Jack Kerouac had it, Miles Davis, all the black blues guys, the jazz singers and swingers, black culture was hip, white culture was crap. The Stones, Kinks and Prettythings were hip for a while. The Tremolos, Dave Clark Five and Hollies were never cool.

In the present time anything connected with Simon Cowell is shit. All musicals, tribute bands and chart singers are by definition shit. All things connected with the Voice and Britain/America’s got talent is shit. Abba are not cool. The North Mississippi All-stars, Tinariwen and Nick Harper are cool.

Back in the 60s the Beatles and Stones were cool. For a time during his electric period Dylan was the coolest dude on the planet with his polka dot shirt, shades and frizzed out hair complete with snarling lyrics and attitude.

In the late 60s Hendrix, Cream, Floyd and the West Coast bands were the coolest. The Monkees were not cool.

 Magic Band still cool in 2005

Being in the singles chart was not cool unless you were a Soul singer like Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin. They could get away with it.

An ingredient of being Hip is to be outside the normal boring limits of society and be individual, to have style, a philosophy and a way of life that sets you apart. It’s not about being a dork with a million tattoos, piercing and elaborate beard and hair or wearing outrageous costumes that make you stand out like a turd sticking to a white wall. If you have to try it’s wrong. That’s pretentious.

Being cool has to come from what you genuinely feel inside.

It pisses me off to see the 60s being represented on newsreels by the Carnaby Street plastic weekend Hippies.

The 60s was about a counter culture, an alternative that you either bought into a hundred percent or didn’t. You couldn’t dress up at weekends. You had to live it. It was about the rejection of the grey brigade, the 1950s straight-lace, stiff upper lip culture and replacing it with fun, colour and frolics.

Being hip was liberation from boring society without regard to the future. For a while being cool was associated with Rock culture. That is because Rock culture was so creative and out there.

Of course it was still pretentious, idealistic and doomed to fail but it was also creative, fun and produced a great deal of really great stuff. It spawned equality, women’s liberation, Green awareness and greater freedom.

In 1963 we set about, in our own Thames Delta fashion, being hip.

We started growing our hair, sideburns, beards and getting the tightest jeans we could get our legs in. We wore hipsters and Cuban heeled boots or desert boots. I had jean jackets and leather jackets.

The girls skirts got shorter and shorter, their tops tighter and their hair layered.

It caused chaos at school. I was constantly sent home for having trousers too tight, hair over my collar or sideburns below my ears. At one time I was told to go home and shave my beard of. I shaved an inch down the middle of my chin. 

‘I thought I told you not to come back until you’d shaved your beard off?’

‘I have!’ I protested. ‘These are sideburns and this is a moustache!’

On another occasion I was told not to come back until I had shaved and I stayed off. After three weeks the twagman came round to see where I was and I explained – I had been told not to come back until I had shaved and I hadn’t shaved yet!

The girls had to kneel down in assembly and had their skirts measured to see if they were too short. We all applied for that arduous job.

But fashion is not cool. Some cats have an’ some cats ain’t. But we bought in to the black culture. That was cool. They might be exploited but they knew how to let it all hang out, dress up and have fun. Everyone started to adopt this rather phoney American Black slang, man.

By the latter part of the 60s my hair was down my back, my jeans had frayed out tassels, bell-bottoms and I wore an assortment of stuff that was bright and colourful. I felt good. My parents weren’t too keen. They thought it affected my employability. I didn’t give a shit. I was reading Kerouac, Ginsberg, Rubin and Cleaver. It was the revolution, man.

Rock was cool. West Coast and Underground was hip. Careers and straight society was square.

We looked to our hip Rock bands to show us the way. It doesn’t feel as if there’s much hipness left in Rock culture these days. There’s too much money; too much phoniness. The big labels took it over and sanitised it; they overproduced the crap out of it, marketed it and came up with a product designed to make money.

There doesn’t feel to be any hipness left in the world anymore. It’s all fashion, pretension and froth.

All is phoney.

Life was there for the cool and hip to live, discover and enjoy. Life was there for straight culture to endure.

The 1960s rebellion was a revolt against the grey, class-ridden, over-bearing, claustrophobic culture of the 1950s. We wanted fun, exploration, colour, meaning, and a reason why! ‘Because we say so’ was not enough.

Death to the joyless machine! Long live the right to experience! Opher circa 1967

Two Novels straight out of the 60s Underground culture.

Posted on by Opher

I have just rewritten these two novels. They are both based in the sixties and reflect the life and attitude that pervaded the time. I guess I’m still living it! Fancy some nostalgia? Want to learn more about the reality of living in the sixties?

301 Bedsit Land

It is the sixties, bedsit land, 301 Green Lanes, and the story of a moment in time, a building and a colourful assortment of characters, some good, some bad.
It is also Danny’s story: how he stumbled upon a place to live and a series of unlikely friendships that saved his life.
This is the story of a house that became a home.
It is the story of an assortment of desperate people who were all lost and some became found.
It is a real story of how people who are worthless and have no respect for themselves yet came together to form a community.
It is a story that tells us that there is a reason for everything; that chance works in strange ways and that often salvation appears out of the strangest circumstance.
This is the story of Danny Charles.
It’s also a love story.

301 Bedsit Land: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9798853928572: Books

Goofin’

This is the ultimate sixties book – a novel from the British Underground with all its sex, drugs, dreams and music; those times of crazy people high on life and mad for experience – from a time when anything was possible.
Capturing that idealistic naïve impossibility permeated with vitality and careering love and dreams, the wild rush for adventure without a thought for the future because the dream was going to last forever.
– Seemingly, as Love said: Forever Changes!
It spans continents as it trips its way through time, space and minds in a mad rush to discover life and experience everything or die trying.

Goofin’: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9798854960403: Books

Richard Neville – Opher’s World tribute. OZ and IT for ever!!

Posted on by Opher

Back in the days of the 1960s Underground we were busy living in an alternative universe. It existed next to straight society and it followed completely different rules.

We weren’t in the business of making lots of money.

We were not interested in trashing the planet for profit.

We didn’t think that sex was dirty.

We liked to enjoy ourselves in a hedonistic fashion.

We felt there had to be a greater purpose to life.

We disliked the hypocrisy of the middle classes.

We were egalitarian.

We were opposed to sexism, racism and any other ism you could think of.

We liked loud Rock Music with a message.

We were libertarians who wanted to sweep away the  grey lives of our parents and replace it with colour, vibrancy and fun.

We would go down to buy IT and OZ off our local street vendor – a fellow freak – and lap it up. OZ had come over from Australia and was run by Richard Neville. It was one  of the Underground Press’ major papers. We read it avidly and it spoke to us – the freaks. We were building a new world. We were going to change everything.

OZ was a frolic of great libertarian writing for the new age. Sex, drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll – ah we were naïve but glorious.

I read Playpower and still have it on my shelf.

Felix Dennis has already gone in 2014. The generation that set out to change the world is fast disappearing. Their story has been purloined by the State, ridiculed and made safe.

Thank you guys for helping make my life more real. I shall miss you!

 

We’re all victims, to one degree, of the era we grew up in.

Posted on by Opher

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We human beings are tribal. We haven’t evolved very long. We form allegiances easily and get ourselves bogged down in them so that we find it hard to adapt and change.

I listen to programmes where someone chooses songs that they identify with and it is inevitably choices from the era in which they were young and forming their identity.

I am a child of the sixties. My likes and preferences still reverberate around the idealism, positive attitudes, political involvement, social improvement, and sensitivities of that era. I have great distrust of the establishment and authorities. I have seen the bad decisions, lies and prevarication. I do not like being manipulated.

My choice in music tends to be the rebellious anti-establishment music. I like music that says something or represents something. I am not happy with a ‘product’ or a ‘pop song’. Rock Music to me is rebellion.

It was not until I ran my History of Rock Music classes and wrote my books on Rock Music that I realised how partisan I had been about different genres. There were whole areas that I had written off because they did not square with my ‘tribe’. When I came to teach about them and had to listen I found there were lots of good things in there.

I am less partisan now but am still a victim of my era to a great extent though I do my best to keep an open mind. I hate the sanitised, over-produced ‘product’ being put out by the major labels at the moment. I miss the unified rebellion of the sixties underground and punk movement.

Music isn’t just entertainment for me; it’s reinforcement of my idealism. It is the glue of the tribe I align myself with. It’s an identity thing. It is a passion.

Pink Floyd – Opher’s World pays tribute to genius.

Posted on by Opher

pink_floyd_girls
I can’t really imagine Pink Floyd as an R&B outfit. Even listening to the early couple of R&B tracks that have been released doesn’t help. They still sound like Pink Floyd. But an R&B band they were until Syd Barrett discovered LSD and it opened up worlds of possibility for his mind to invent sounds that had never previously existed. He investigated the guitar for noises and bleeps that nobody else had discovered before. He utilised feed-back, distortion and weirdness to harness it into strange new songs.
This was the mid-sixties age of experimentation. Nobody took it further than Syd and Jimi. Pink Floyd were all turned on by it and excavated a seam of music that had never been explored. They invented a psychedelic world inhabited by fantasy gnomes and Sci-fi excursions through the wonders of the galaxy.
On the West Coast of America Acid Rock was rampaging out of control as the Alternative Hippie culture invaded the citadels of mainstream America and took over the radio station, TV and bemused Music Industry. In London the alternative Underground was just as pervasive and giving rise to a cacophony of explorations with Indian Ragas, Jazz improvisation, Progressive Rock, Raw Chicago Blues and Electronic surrealism. British Beat groups had evolved to investigate every available avenue of possibility. It was adapt or die; the survival of the weirdest. This was the arena into which the Pink Floyd emerged.
They soon established themselves as the darlings of the new psychedelic dungeons of London. Their light shows, stolen from the West Coast scene, and hypnotic sounds were legendary from the beginning and formed the backdrop to the all-night events and happenings such as the infamous ‘Games for May’.
The first couple of singles flopped. The rest of the country weren’t ready for them. But then they had a couple of hits that brought them to the attention of everybody else other than the small London cognisee. The release of their first album signalled their arrival and established them as a major force. It was as much an event of the year as Sgt Peppers.
Their songs were just as importantly accompanied by wacky videos that served to accentuate the weird and wonderful dadaesque world of Pink Floyd. The new spacey sound was a million miles away from the Blues of Pink Anderson and Floyd Council from whom their name had been plucked.
The Underground scene took off like Apollo 12 and was augmented by a host of benefits, free concerts and festivals that were expressions of the new alternative culture. This was no longer all about making money. It was about sharing and community. Pink Floyd were there at the forefront. They were the mainstays of the scene, the premier psychedelic band. They started recording their second album and disaster struck.
Syd had been imbibing large quantities of LSD and had begun acting strange. He had always been eccentric but this was becoming more pronounced. It became harder to communicate with him and he became increasingly erratic. At some shows he would stand there and not play anything. In the end they brought in Dave Gilmour to cover for him.
Management were torn. They saw Syd as the creative force. They went with him and imagined the band would simply fall apart. Unfortunately it was Syd who fell apart while the band went from strength to strength. They consolidated the psychedelic spaceyness of the first album and came up with a successful second while Syd’s career stuttered and fizzled out.
Pink Floyd continued their psychedelic journey into the seventies with numerous experimental albums and maintained their status as the leading light in the Underground.
In the mid-seventies, when other Prog Rock bands like Yes, Emmerson Lake & Palmer and King Crimson had descended into tedious self-indulgence, Floyd produced the most amazing album of their career – and that’s saying something! Dark Side of the Moon catapulted them to a new level of brilliance.
It was a new type of experimental music based on what had gone before. Pink Floyd had become masters of the recording studio with their tape loops and quirky sounds.
The sound was to continue through the equally brilliant Wish you were Here, Animals and The Wall. They were the biggest band in the world.
Coupled with the music were extraordinary live stadium shows with huge inflatables and lavish stage sets. They were the masters of putting on an extravaganza. Their shows were the best.
Even when Roger Waters left they continued as a trio and carried on producing excellent albums and shows. They remained one of the best bands on the planet and a immensely creative force both visually and audibly. All that artistic ability had not gone to waste.
I still miss Syd and those early psychedelic times though. Those were the days. That was the place to be.

In the UK:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Opher-Goodwin/e/B00MSHUX6Y/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1464250562&sr=1-2-ent

Opher’s World Tributes to Rock Geniuses :

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ophers-World-Tributes-Rock-Geniuses/dp/1508631271?ie=UTF8&qid=1464250681&ref_=la_B00MSHUX6Y_1_25&s=books&sr=1-25

In the USA:

http://www.amazon.com/Opher-Goodwin/e/B00MSHUX6Y/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1464250895&sr=1-2-ent

Opher’s World Tributes to Rock Geniuses :

Kindle
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https://www.amazon.com/Ophers-World-Tributes-Rock-Geniuses-ebook/dp/B00U7LHYBU?ie=UTF8&qid=1464250935&ref_=la_B00MSHUX6Y_1_21&refinements=p_82%3AB00MSHUX6Y&s=books&sr=1-21

Thank you for looking!