Vinyl Release

After the controversial stage musical birthed a succession of chart-topping hits, Hollywood came knocking. Steve Sutherland lets the sunshine in with this 180g reissue

Michael Butler had already had an illustrious career. He’d served as a Special Advisor to Senator John F. Kennedy, worked as the Commissioner of the Port of Chicago, and been president of the Organization of Economic Development in Illinois. He’d then ditched his nomination to the US Senate in protest against military action in Vietnam and found himself on President Nixon’s ‘Enemies List’, before stumbling into being the Broadway producer of the hippie stage play Hair and being accused of profiting from perversity.

The show’s nudity, obscene language, advocacy of drug taking and free sex, racial integration, questioning of established religion and, most monstrously of all, the anti-war desecration of the American flag, had seen legal action in the courts, violent threats to the performers, and picketing from church groups. The Chief of the Licensing Bureau in Boston said, ‘anyone who desecrates the flag should be whipped’. Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert walked out of the show at New York’s Biltmore Theater in protest of its perceived anti-Americanism. A bomb was thrown at a theatre playing Hair in Cleveland, Ohio, shattering windows. On this side of the Pond, London’s stage censor, the Lord Chamberlain, refused to license the musical, delaying its opening until Parliament passed a bill stripping him of his licensing power.

Naked ambition

So, you might assume that Mr Butler had heard and seen it all. But here he was, having to hire security to stop the entry of two men kicking up a stink outside. Why such a big deal? Because the troublesome twosome just happened to be Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the show’s creators.

Although Hair had been doing great business for several months, Ragni and Rado, while no longer acting in the production, felt it was their right – nay, their duty – to change it up every now and again to keep it fresh, messing with the lines, improvising new scenes, and causing chaos and confusion for the cast and customers alike. Just recently they had been ejected from a Los Angeles theatre because they had walked up the aisle naked during the nude scene on stage, Ragni with a red feather sticking out of his bottom.

Above: Hair was directed by Miloš Forman and released in cinemas in 1979

The upshot of this was, in a bid to avert more sabotage, Butler engineered a pow-wow involving the duo with a guy called Galt MacDermot as referee. They eventually brokered a kind of truce where some of their innovations, and a few new songs, were written into the script going forward.

The stars align

Ragni and Rado had been jobbing actors scuffling around New York when the notion of Hair came to them. They’d noticed the nascent hippie movement and had friends who were trying to dodge the draft, so they grew their hair and started fashioning a theatrical ‘be-in’ to reflect the times.

They wrote song lyrics for the show but had no real musical talent, so were introduced by producer Nat Shapiro to MacDermot, the aforementioned referee. A composer with an ear for African tribal beats, MacDermot took their 13 poems away and added tunes to such stunning effect that, within two years, many of the songs had been copiously covered and three had raced to the upper reaches of the US charts.

‘Aquarius’ was based on the astrological notion that the world would soon be entering an age of loving enlightenment, signified by the lyric, ‘When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars’. This has since been pooh-poohed because Jupiter aligns with Mars several times a year and the moon is in the seventh house for two hours in every 24. Still, the tune was celestial, a real heartwarmer, and crunched together with the equally uplifting ‘Let The Sunshine In’, it took an exceptional pop/soul vocal outfit called The 5th Dimension to the top of the charts for six weeks in the spring of 1969, winning the band a Grammy to boot.

‘Good Morning Starshine’, another bright and brilliant song from Hair, reached No 3 in the US when covered in a chipper fashion by a folkie called Oliver, which incredibly had the entire nation joining in with a chorus that began, ‘Glibby Gloop Gloopy, Nibby Nabby Noopy, La La La Lo Lo, Sabba Sibby Sabba, Nooby Abba Nabba’. And the third smash was the hilarious title song, which went to No 2 in a severely doctored version by the family group The Cowsills. What song kept it off the top? The 5th Dimension’s ‘Aquarius’!

The rest of the musical’s soundtrack isn’t in the same stratosphere – ‘Sodomy’, ‘Hashish’ and ‘I’m Black’, are, as their titles suggest, a bit gauche (but top points for irritating the status quo). But ‘Ain’t Got No’ and ‘I Got Life’ were fabulously combined and reworked by Nina Simone for her wondrous Nuff Said! LP in 1968.

From stage to screen

Not everyone was onboard with Hair’s musical merits, though. Of the older generation, Leonard Bernstein remarked ‘the songs are just laundry lists’ while Richard Rodgers dismissed the soundtrack as ‘one-third music’. Contemporary-wise, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty declared Hair ‘a watered down version of what is really going on’.

None of which stopped the recording by the original Broadway cast winning a Grammy. The version we’re talking about today, though, is the soundtrack to Hair’s 1979 movie adaptation, directed by Miloš Forman as his next project after One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. And Hair the film, it surely comes as no surprise, was beset by its own controversies.

Above: Don Dacus, Chicago guitarist from 1978-80, as Hair’s Woof Dachshund

The play’s original plot was somewhat free-wheeling and non-linear, so the movie version had to be ‘Hollywood-ised’. Some of the songs were cut, others edited, the plot was wrestled into a moral narrative and the soundtrack fully orchestrated. Ragni and Rado were furious, considering the hippies in the movie to have been miscast as ‘oddballs’ rather than the driving force behind the drama. ‘Any resemblance between the 1979 film and the original Biltmore version, other than some of the songs, the names of the characters, and a common title, eludes us’, they announced.

But the critics were kinder. ‘If ever a project looked doomed it was this one’, declared The New York Times. ‘But Hair succeeds at all levels – as lowdown fun, as affecting drama, as exhilarating spectacle and as provocative social observation... Like the best movie musicals of the ’50s (Singin’ In The Rain) and the ’60s (A Hard Day’s Night), Hair leaps from one number to the next. Soon the audience is leaping too’.

Re-Release Verdict

Issued in February 2025 by Music On Vinyl/RCA Victor as part of the ‘At The Movies’ series [MOVATM426], the original soundtrack recording of Hair (1979) is split across 2x180g translucent magenta LPs and limited to 1500 numbered copies. Opening with ‘Aquarius’ and closing with ‘Let The Sunshine In’, the 27 tracks include one (‘Somebody To Love’) written specifically by Galt MacDermot for the film, plus five that didn’t make the cut. The arrangements? Funk-tastic.. HFN