Hippies and Hair
Everyone likes to talk about the late-1960s, the so-called “Hippie years”. It’s no wonder that Hair tickets are selling so fast. It was a time of prolific thinkers, or “heads” as they were known. The late-60s have endured as a symbol of innovation and playfulness in the human story. Hair tickets to Hair on Broadway will take you on a magic trip into the heart of that psychedelic maelstrom.
Psychedelic? What does the word even mean? Let’s take a look at some of the salient developments and important heads who rose up to change the world during the Hippie Years, also known as the Age of “Hair”.
San Francisco, California had learned tolerance to oddball sects way back in the 1950s, when the Beatniks settled there. The city had enjoyed an alternative lifestyle vibe for almost a decade when America’s flower children began to head there by Greyhound bus, motorcycle and Volkswagen camper-van. The Haight-Ashbury crossroads dissected an intense neighborhood of multicolor gingerbread houses packed with musicians, poets and wannabe witch-doctors. Hair was suddenly in vogue and Hair tickets were just around the corner.
Hair tickets brilliantly capture the psychedelic confluence that brought major heads like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg to the Haight to preside over a huge hippie gathering known as “The Meeting of the Tribes.” The Tribes gathered in San Fran in January 1967. That day a generation of frustration and fear was released like a technicolor volcano from America’s angry young people. It was a collective mindquake; creativity, literary flights and musical escapism reigned supreme. The way was paved for San Francisco’s Summer of Love – the pinnacle of the counterculture movement. It was a time when psychotropic plants, electric guitars and medeival science dovetailed and spawned a new animal on our green planet: The Hippie was born.
Hair Tickets are Born
While the psychedelic – the word means “consciousness expansion” – sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead snaked like smoke tendrils through the Haight area, all of America rose and jumped into the multicolor fray feet first. It wasn’t long before Ragni and Rado, plus composer Galt MacDermot (among others) were making Hair tickets a real thing: The Hippie culture had finally been crystallized as an art-form and Hair tickets were selling fast!
Can you imagine how thrilling it must have been for these unemployed, inspired young folk to have conceived and produced a world-beating musical that perfectly captured the spirit of Hippiedom and all its accoutrements? Those artists and actors performed a great service to society when they created Hair the Musical.
The Age of Aquarius
Buy Hair tickets and you’ll expect to hear the Age of Aquarius song in the flesh. “Age of Aquarius” is a term we hear a lot. What exactly is it?
Aquarius is one of twelve astrological ages. These ages pass slowly, in cosmic increments, millennia long. Aquarius, and all the other ages, are determined by the precession of the equinoxes. Equinoxes occur when night and day are of equal length. Equinoxes happen twice a year. The Vernal Equinox is the springtime equinox and is used as a calibrator to determine the position of the zodiacal constellations – that is, the various star clusters associated with ancient astrological symbols. There are 88 zodiacal constellations in all. Between each constellation is an “edge” determined by modern astronomers and ancient star-gazers alike. Because these zodiacal constellations are of different size, some Ages last longer than others – and we’re now entering a time of renewal and re-energization. It’s a New Age – The Age of Aquarius! Buy Hair tickets and take your new astrological expertise to the theater sometime soon!