The fabulous sixties

Flashback

It may seem strange (maybe not), to turn this brief citation of Albert Ayler into an epigraph. Albert was a great man, born in Cleveland, Ohio, July 13th in 1936, and found dead in New York, in the freezing East River waters, on November 25th, 1970. This small gimmick may seem strange, we were saying, but to us it is not strange at all, for Ayler’s artistic-existentialist parable is the perfect representation of the painful- tragic- desperate- breathless transition from the Sixties’ Dream of Love to the exasperated Rawness of the Seventies.

It is not necessary to be an African- American art specialist to understand what Carles and Comolli write in their "Dizionario Jazz" (Dictionary of Jazz), that Ayler’s music is "an expression of unresolved contradictions and paradoxes." On one hand there is sound. The sound of a tenor sax, which had John Coltrane dreaming. The sound which in itself gathers power, violence, harshness (due to the use of the toughest reeds sold at the time), fullness, and immediateness; all characteristics present in this unique period. On the other hand (better, straight from the soul) surfaces the sincerity (and also the agony, in its fullest and most noble sense), of the word of peace, love, and spirituality. This "word" is often screamed with (expressionistic) rage, as was in jazz music, which literally explodes from the archaic forms of spiritual music, military marches played by brass bands, psalmodized litanies, and even from church songs. Exactly for these reasons the "New Ghost" of 1968 (September 5th and 6th, for the lovers of statistics) is more interesting than the, also unforgettable, "Ghost" of 1965. Before there only (sorry) was the dismantling and destruction of the harmonic-melodic material, passed down from the jazz tradition which proceeded the epic of free, now there appears a "supreme synthesis." The message (of peace, love, liberty, and fraternity) which sedimented for a decade is echoed in the title (ex. "Message from Albert", "New Generation", "Heart Love", and "Free at Last") and uses Ayler’s incomparable voice to manifest itself to the world. It is as if it once again it desperately declares its right to exist, and to survive.

Yes, survive, you read well. It seems we all can agree with what Andrea Barbato wrote in his essay published in 1981, in a collective volume called "Il sogno degli anni ‘60" (The dream of the sixties, published by Savelli, and now by Feltrinelli). In his essay he states, "I remember it as if it happened yesterday, those tears on Frank Manikewicz face, at two o’clock the morning of the fifty of June, 1968, in the auditorium of the Good Samaritan hospital. He moved closer to a small stage, the reporters were quiet, everyone had understood already, but they listened in silence. ‘I would like to make a brief announcement. Senator Robert Kennedy died at 1:44 this morning: He was 42 years old.’ He did not say anything else, no one said anything else. The people waiting outside, with the agents and guards left in silence, as well."

"For me the sixties had died a few hours earlier on that June night, in a both luxurious and vulgar hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. Not because Bob Kennedy, whom had been killed in that hotel, was the trustee of the meanings of that decade, after all in those same years John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X had died a violent death, but because it all seemed meaningless. The fervor, hopes, disapproval, and passion seemed useless. The idea that the magma of a generation’s revolts, political and racial uproar could become a project seemed meaningless. It had not ended before, with the rifle shots in Dallas, but after the gun shots at the hotel Ambassador it was really over."

That feeling of uselessness, which Barbato mentions, is an important category (which can not be traced back to the United States alone). It is probably the same feeling against which Ayler, with paroxysm and frenetic fervor, casts his utopian message: "And night and day will pass away but love will always be. And night and day will pass away but love will always win." It is the same feeling against which Jimi Hendrix hurls his guitarist cacophonies in "Star Spangled Banner". Little does it matter that the metaphor of death is incumbent, becoming visible in the movie "Woodstock" (filmed between the 21st and 23rd of August in 1969, and shown in Hollywood on April 1st of the following year or in the New Era) through piles of garbage and flying papers which counterpoint Jimi’s vital splendor. What mattered to two unyielding like them, is to send a message of hope and resistance to the world. What mattered is not to loose a cultural richness gained in those years in which all seemed at hand, all possible and easy to achieve. What mattered was not to allow "Young Music", be it rock or jazz, to become immediately something consolatory, alienated, aseptic, and estranged. This last concept is better stated in Thomas Pynchon’s book "Vineland", "… One of the many ways to chain our attention, since that certainty we had acquired starts to fade, and soon they will again be able to convince us that we all must die. They will fuck us over again." (Meanwhile, outside, America sees its near youth transforming to become "a State of blacklegs and cops.")

Be it that as it may, there is something extremely emblematic and unequivocally evocative in those "famous deaths" which quickly follow in the dawn of the New Era. One is only to think of, Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson, leader of the Canned Heat, September 3rd, 1970; Jimi Hendrix in London September 18th, 1970; Janis Joplin in Hollywood, on October 4th of the same year; Albert Ayler in New York on November 25th; Jim Morrison in Paris, on July 3rd, 1971. It is as if some of the best voices created by the decade of Utopia, would have rather died than give up to the destruction of their ideals. It is as if the "Season of Love", seeing as useless all its attempts to impose to the world its reasons and passions, had decided to part with something similar to a swan’s song, desperate but conscious of not having lived in vain.

In fact due to these principles (the Dadaists add yet another, that regarding Inter de Milan’s double loss of the championship and "Coppa Campioni", unmistakable forewarning sign that ’68 was dead even before its birth) the New Era develops along much more cautious and respectful guiding principles, than expected. It is thanks to the unsuspected and sublime power of that swan’s song, that for all the 1970 the "Season of Love" seemed to react, being able to ward off all the old and new deaths (for example that of the four Kent students, shot on May 4th by the police). This is also why the papers of the time talk about a Festival, the one on Wight Island, celebrated between August 26th and 28th, still rooted in the binomial "Peace & Love". There is also mention of an anti- nuclear concert celebrated at the Shea Stadium in New York on August 6th, on the 25th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, and the idea that the "cult movies" of the time as "Love Story", "M.A.S.H.", "Great Small Man", "Woodstock", and "Zabriskie Point" are all distressfully humanistic and romantically hippie.

It all changed in 1971. The lovers of symbolism had had a premonition of this during the last scene of "Zabriskie Point", when the luxurious mansion explodes in the middle of the desert, for to them it did not represent the annihilation of the materialism of the "American Way of Life" but the cultural and physical disaster of those whom according to Walter Benjamin, were responsible for "making the continuity of history jump." As predicted by the gloomy forewarning (as Murphy’s law states, "if something can go wrong it will go wrong"), 1971 starts with the symbolic, but strongly emotional death of the Beatles, legally prepared by Paul McCartney. The years follow with feelings against the hippies’ mocking attitude towards a "normal" society, against the Weltanschauung of Woodstock’s population, against the unaccomplished dream of a planetary and hegemonic counter- culture. Only the "worst" is taken from the preceding years, that "worst" which in an optimistic historical vision is interpreted as a mere deviation, painful but irrelevant, from the road leading to the affirmation of "Universal Harmony."

All this "worst" is represented , here grossly synthesized, by the murder of a young African American by the Hell’s Angels at the Stones’ free concert in Altamont (CA.) in December 1969. Even more representative was the massacre done a year later by Charles Manson and his "family". They penetrated a mansion in the southern Californian desert and sloughtered Sharon Tate and her friends with a knife. According to Ian Chambers, an English sociologist, it is this last heinous crime to strike the deadly blow to the precarious and carefree aspirations of the "alternative society." In fact "the trip through drugs, music, commuity life, and other exotic experiments foreshadowed a new type of subjectivity, which was turning into an ugly parody, an apocalyptic dream, and a terryfing trip." ("ritmi urbani", Costa & Nolan)

This "terryfing trip" has a few moment of resistance, as bold as symbolic. They are represented by the begining of the transmisions of Radio Hanoi ( Which opened on March 4th with Hendrix’s "Star Spangled Banner") which played "Power to the People" by John Lennon, recorded at the "Concerts for Bangladesh" (Madison Square Garden, New York, August 1st).One started the process could not be stopped. The movies seen that year were a radical antithesis of those seen the year before, the most popular being, "Clockwork Orange", "Duel", Straw Dogs, and "Shaft". This was sadly reflected in the social sphere where a new subculture of skinheads makes itself known, reaffirming a rooted proletarian mythology which favored white ethnocentrism, by fighting those considered enemies, such as minorities, gays, and hippies as well.In the music field the disaster was completed rather than imminent. As H.S. Thompson stated in his "The great shark hunt," "many figures of the counter-culture started signing compromizes merely to survive personally, contributing to melt the link which tied "progressive" rock to a rich and heterogeneus cultural moment, and restricting the concept of progressive to a manifestation of increasingly limited musical and formal horizons."Regardless Ayler’s dreperate move the end inevitable. It is not a coincidence that one of the protagonists of Pynchon’s previously stated novel, before the devastating brutality of the "redde Rationem" sighs "We had a great time, until it lasted." Agreed, but, Alas, how long did it last?

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