| Hippiefest Rocks Brooklyn; Mark Volman Speaks |
| Written by Sid Dishes | |||
Hippiefest 2007Thursday, July 26 @ 7:30 pm  A veteran of the original Woodstock, Country Joe McDonald will be appearing at Hippiefest on Thursday, this time without The Fish  The Zombies were responsible for '60s megahits like "Time of the Season"  Enjoy the hippie spirit with this summer's grooviest traveling concert tour  Peace, man... "I grew up in the Summer of Love and no one was loving me," said Howard Volman, lead singer of the 1960's pop band, the Turtles. "Media tends to try to create these concepts," he added, "the people making the music don't." Volman and the Turtles are headlining Hippiefest on the 26th at Seaside Park in Brooklyn. Also featured will be Felix Cavaliere's Rascals, The Zombies, Country Joe McDonald, Denny Laine, and Melanie. "Hippiefest is 19 or 20 shows in about 27 days," said Volman. "That's a significant tour. And we're playing all the places all the major tours go through: The Molson Amphitheater, Burnin Downs, Wolfrtrap, the Nokia Theater in Texas, etc. All arenas of 3000 to 15,000 seat capacity." Volman who came of age in the sexed-up and turbulent '60s and made his mark with such harmonic hits as "Happy Together" and the cover of Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe." "Singer- songwriters of the day provided a tremendous boon to reflection and expanded consciousness," commented Volman. "The hippie culture that flocked to California and came to Haight-Ashbury-a kind of a spin-off of the Beat Generation of 1950s--led a lot of young people to attack materialism, to question the meaning of their lives, and to throw away [such lifestyles]." "The Summer of Love and the hippies are part of America," he explained. "Obviously, the musical part of it led the way with the Beatles' 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' but hand in hand with this new sound came a way of life and a counterculture. The Summer of Love was a movement." The media, however, has treated the spontaneity of the 1960s as something separate from the people who made the movement happen. "They've blown this whole concept of the thing they call the Summer of Love out of proportion," said Volman. Rather than be a passing phenomenon, many of its counterculture characteristics last even to this. despite reports to the contrary, "one can see a prevalence of libertarian convictions among Americans even today." By recasting society's rules to their own thinking, "this successful, strong instinct of open-mindedness in the U.S. grew out of the concept of hippies. I think that drugs were also much a part of the Hippie movement of 60s." They also remain prevalent during the current era of synthetic, pharmaceutical mood-enhancers. Volman continued, "[In the mid-'60s,] radio was changing and anti-Vietnam activism was taking place at the universities. We had ecological consciousness grow out of 1960s and natural food as well as the concept of environment. Hippiedom and the music tied together the vibrant social dynamic of experimentation that was taking place in the country." Still, he added, "I didn't think what I was doing any more than music and living. From my stand point, change meant survival. Today the experimentation takes place in technology more than anything else." When hippies roamed the Earth, bales of herb were consumed in Tompkins and Washington Square Parks, college kids wore beads, and grew their hair down to their assholes. Natural food outlets played alternative radio where revolutionary rap from Berkeley's Free Speech movement could be heard between Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane cuts. Frustrated with Puritanism, polyester, and TV's ludicrously idealized portrayals of the nuclear family, young people awaited their draft notices with an eye for Plan B. For many, joining the mounting opposition in the parks was the only logical choice. Perhaps, more than anything else, the media stoked this awakening. But today's substitution of the love of living things for the worship of consumer goods suggests that that there can never be another period like the '60s. "Radio is formatted now," said Volman. "Commercialized. It has been bought up by corporations like Infinity and Clear Channel. When we grew up, one company couldn't own more than one radio outlet per city. That was illegal." www.myspace.com/floandeddie (c)2007nyr MR
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