Lead—Deer Mountain Retro Love-In in Two Voices
Anna Martinez:
Long-haired vendors in tie-dyed shirts and high top moccasins, beads, bumper stickers and buttons reading “Born Again Hippie” unload their displays on Sunday morning on the last day of the Memorial Day weekend. A half hour later, it seems like a nostalgic swoop from the late sixties settles in on the Deer Mountain ski lodge like a cloud of sandalwood incense punctuated by patchouli in high-camp paisley pants.
The brainchild of O.J. Laier and Patty McFarland Leyba, the Deer Mountain Retro Love-In benefits the fledgling Black Hills Musicians Guild. This annual gonzo fun event pounces and plays with the memories of those of us who had our youthful hippie/activist/head heyday in the late sixties.
It’s time to slide down this well-planned rabbit hole into a place where there is no discomfort in paradox back to a world of contradictions and passionate, wistful idealism. Welcome back to the New Age of Aquarius where the songs of the sixties reassert their power again for a new generation of Black Hills Songwriters and their audiences. We’re out to change the world, but are changed by it in profound ways. Alice’s caterpillar and the stars will guide you.
The Retro Love-In is an opportunity to experience the feelings of peace and love and great music, circa 1967, without the omni-present cloud of Mary Jane or danger for those who were too young to be there. It’s an act of creative anarchy without the threat. Flashing rainbow peace signs, the huge speakers blast an anthem “Come on, people, now smile on your brothers, everybody get together right now.” You enter a time warp without ingesting magic mushrooms or eating anything more dangerous than French fries. You ask yourself, “Is this is a put-on? Or a light-hearted family outing or a concert? Or just a bunch of local songwriters and musicians getting together to make music at a gray-haired hippie gathering?” It’s all of that, more than the sum of the whole plus an eight-hour family party with great music and a lovely green area outside for playing Frisbee. There’s a special room for kids featuring crafts and games. A Rekii Master gives Angel Card readings. There are trail rides, a food concession, and a bar, and surreal concrete busts of dead and not quite presidents to top off the whole scene, which is enough to catapult Jerry Garcia into a heavenly acid flash. There is a plethora of balloons, bubbles, buttons, beaded curtains, silk flowers around an arbor gate, kids running wild and free. An old green truck called “Amos” is waiting for an Electric Kool-Aid paint job in tempera paints, an exercise in concrete Zen.
There are psychedelic posters in the windows… musical icons on the 60’s, including a triptych of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. The flashbacks come with the songs and smells…In the window I imagine Mt. Rushmore as I’d like to see it, with Bob Marley in Teddy Roosevelt’s place, flanked by the three “J’s.” The walls breathe. I look over my shoulder. I hear a roaring question from the speakers, an informal poll of the audience, “Who here is not a musician?” and I see one lone hand puncturing the ceiling. Every one is wearing flowers in their hair.
Flashing the peace sign, a wandering politician campaigns. A charming little girl with a basket of flowers with a flower painted on her cheek roams around the room solemnly handing out silk flowers, later she drifts by with a basket full of Chinese finger-traps. A fat poetess hands out cheap pennywhistles like candy on Halloween. “That’s my thing,” she says, “nobody should go without the means to make music.”
Many local Black Hills musicians perform mimimal formalities. The best at beating swords into plowshares and penny whistles, were the outstanding performances by Norman Liota of Toronto, with Mike Reardon, on bass adding touches of harmony here and there. Norm’s work slam-dunks us back into the 21st Century with his thoughtful, neo-impressionistic lyrics and virtuoso guitar. Norm starts to play “A whiter Shade of Pale” and I see Henri Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy” and wonder what the lion will tell him next. Yep, Norm, the picture is bigger than the frame.
Cliff Wineteer, the Newcastle Blues Man, inheritor of great Chicago black’n’blues, performs with Rick McBride. Steve Thorpe, the grand-daddy of Black Hills acoustic music and song catcher, sings his mellow songs. Laz Martinez, looking every bit a wild-haired outlaw hippie-biker fresh from Altamount with David Johnston (guest harp-man and vocalist and harp with the Faheys) rocks the gathering with his 9/11 song.
I hear two older women whispering across the table, “My God, he teases with that harp! Just a touch here and there and just enough to make you want more.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely ‘come make love, not war’ music!”
The day is topped off by the high-energy bluegrass band, Six Mile Road. (Trappor Masson, Jake Jackson, Dan Cross, Dave Currington and guest guitarist and vocalist, Tyler Melton).
A man wanders into the gathering wearing too short polyester plaid pants, a striped shirt topped off by a top hat and wire rim glasses, I want to cheer, he seems like somebody I knew in Chicago, just a little grayer. Charming teenage girls in long tie-dyed jumpers and bandanas smile serenely. Tiny babies in slings ride around sleepy and secure on their father’s chests.
A superannuated hippie, I am a veteran of many spontaneous love-ins in the sixties, when you just wandered into the park and followed the primitive sounds of the drums to where people were gathered and did your thing. This time there was no dope, no narks, no tear gas, just great music. It’s good family musical fun with the bad times edited out and no drums. Me, I was having happy hippie flash backs…re-living the past without 9/11 or the war (Vietnam or Afghanistan or the Chicago Convention of ‘68), remembering baking bread and my hippie wedding to my walking wounded Purple Heart Silver Star Vietnam veteran, who later commited suicide with booze and too much speed.
Every once in a while I would hear myself mutter, “Oh wow! Far out! Right-On! Heavy!” and give away another penny whistle
Steve Thorpe:
I was in Seattle, 64-66. There, the ‘hippie’ thing started Christmas break, 1965. They weren’t called hippies yet. The Seattle Post Intelligencer called them/us ‘fringies.’ This name came from ‘fringe element,’ which was,
supposedly a police term for marginal social types who had no political influence so, if they rousted members of the fringe element, they could beat 'em up without any possible consequences. Some of the young, dissident-types going to and hanging out around UW took to growing their hair, or kept growing it if they’d started growing it for different reasons ((I grew mine because I had come from Wyoming where haircuts were $.75 to a city where they cost $3.50. I was living on a student budget. The cost of a haircut was prohibitive)) in sympathy for our downtrodden brethren. It wasn’t a planned thing. Nobody talked about it in political terms. It just sort of happened, that, all of a sudden, there was a sizeable population of young people with long hair and beards on the boys and beads and feathers on both sexes.
As I recall, it was spring of 65 when Mario Savio was ‘imprisoned’ in a police car on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. Politics was a hot topic. Fledgling anti-war efforts were beginning in and around UW. The ‘movement’ as I saw it develop was more about music and having fun and accepting everyone without any kind of political or dress code. Of course, there were political implications to all this and they were used by people who wanted to
politicize things and by the press for purposes of their own.
In any case, Christmas 65, “The Ave,” which was University Avenue where all the bookstores, import stores, souvenir stores and coffee houses were located, was invaded by a huge band of kids who were pretty well short but who were doing the beads and feathers thing to way beyond acceptable, for the day, limits. The Eigerwand, a coffee house on the lower “Ave,” where I had looked forward to hours of quiet with a book and a pot of coffee, was flooded with young, fun-loving, pranksterish kids who knew Dylan’s “Freewheelin” album by heart and were trying as hard as they could to master the Dylanesque put-on. I don’t think “Freewheelin’” came out until spring 65; but the anachronism is as perfectly descriptive as I can get; and, even at the time, the whole thing felt like some kind or weird time-warp, anyway. Times were changing.
I recall one evening when a bunch of young girls in beads and feathers came through “The Eiger” handing out invitations to a party. The party turned out to be an anti-Vietnam fund raiser and protest organizer, put on by a bunch of politically active, suit-and-tie types from U.W. The clash of these politically active folk, expecting to discuss the political implications of the global aspirations of the government over wine and cheese, and this wave of fun-loving band of young wannabe-gypsies was comic in grand proportions. Everybody got drunk. I suppose quite a few of the kids were stoned; but I didn’t know what marijuana was, so I just figured they were mildly psychotic in a good-sort of way. When, at about four in the morning, we got the last of the drunk-and-sobbing girls safe rides home, the political types were shaking their heads and wondering what had hit them.
In late summer, 66, I enlisted in the Army, one very short jump ahead of the draft. 66-68 in Monterey, CA, I watched the hippie-thing develop; but, since I was a soldier, I was on the fringe of things and not to be trusted. There was, of course a short-haired, hippie culture within the military, which is probably why the government gave up the draft so readily.
By the time I came home in 70, the whole subculture had politicized to the point, I was unacceptable to a large part of my own generation because I was a ‘baby-burner.’ For ten years after I got out of the Army, I didn’t have
any friends who hadn’t served. We had ‘cooperated,’ therefore, it was all our fault. In 1985, I gave a reading from Walking Wounded in a bookstore in Laramie, WY. The owner had customers who were Vietnam combat vets and customers who had worked in the protest movement; and wanted to see if he could start a dialog. What became obvious from the evening, which was remarkable in many ways, was that, at base, the two factions still couldn’t sit down and talk to each other in a civilized manner. Based on general attitude, radicalization of thought and dress, my sympathies and inclinations go with the hippie soldiers. Political factions have always been too stodgy and steeped in political correctness for my taste.
In light of all this, the Retro Love-In is a breath of fresh air. It combines fun and music with its acceptance of various political attitudes into a kind of creative anarchy that defies political correctness on all fronts. It’s all for fun.
Let it shine! Anna “Dances with Weasels” Martinez
[ This Message was edited by: Anna Martinez on 2002-05-28 23:14 ]