Going Down
I recently saw the touring revival of Hair. A lot of fun. It was fascinating to see what was once a controversial, cutting-edge (for Broadway) show is now an exercise in nostalgia, attended mostly by aging hippies. (Okay, maybe they weren't hippies, but they were old enough to be reliving the 60s.)
I don't know if any book show (as it were) has ever had so many songs. There are forty separate numbers (and more were dropped along the way in the original production). The revival featured new arrangements, but most were similar enough to the originals.
So I was a little surprised at how much they re-did a lesser-known number that've I've always liked, "Don't Put It Down." The number is meant to be sung in an exaggerated, mocking style, but the backing is very much mellow guitar riffs that you haven't heard in decades.
For some reason, in the revival, it's countrified. Perhaps they thought the old version was too dated, but I missed it.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:01 AM
2 Comments:
I had every line of Hair memorized growing up. I actually borrowed the record from my school library, and accidentally left it on the heater in my room one night and had to buy a new one for the school, but the warped one was still playable.
You link for the original track isn't working, but I recall it being sort of a morose country ballad. I always thought the song was supposed to reflect a true patriotic sentiment America, and a protest that "just because I look different, you think I'm subversive" [but I'm not].
Giving it a country pop sound makes me think this interpretation is ironic - a way to mock patriotic sentiment. But maybe I'm reading too much into it - or maybe I didn't read enough into it when I was a kid.
It's weird the music isn't working, since all the other stuff from the album on YouTube still is.
I'm not sure how we're supposed to take the original song, though it's odd enough that it's hard to believe it should be taken in a straightforward way. I might add that in the show, the hippies play around with the flag, which is no big deal today, but was pretty shocking to some back then.
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