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Archives
Looking back |
Hair. It's a cultural dividing line. I have to remember this when wandering amongst the Lollapaloonies and inwardly cringing at the contortions to which I see human hair subjected. I shouldn't really worry about hair with more permanent body mods now disturbingly mainstream. After all, there's nothing that can be done to a head of hair short of total electrolysis that isn't wholly temporary. It's the piercing, tattooing and ritual scarring that really weirds me out. The meaning of all this alteration is clear, dress and hair alone are no longer enough let your freak flag fly, to show which side of the great divide you're on. It's a divide between youth and the lack of it but not only that. It's a divide between those who seek the edge (or at least those who think they do or wish to appear that they do) and those who do not. I'm grateful to have grown up when hair and clothing were enough. I might have been foolish enough to have made a lifetime commitment to a body-mod I'd live to regret. This maps imperfectly (though on the whole pretty well) onto a divide between different relationships to rock music. This is the divide between people for whom music is at most entertainment and at it's least just part of the noise floor, and those for whom it's something approaching religion and certainly, serious art. For those whose lives have never had rock music at their center, movies, television, magazines and the madding crowd are hairstyle influences. A haircut for most is just part of the ongoing effort to flatter ones own appearance and to conform. For some of us, hairstyles are greatly influenced by those of musicians. I always viewed my rock and roll heroes as living in a heightened existence, one that didn't involve banalities like going to school or to work. They were free, they were creative and they did as they pleased. This was the ideal to which I aspired. It's crap, but I didn't know this when I was 14. They followed nobody's dress code and I was determined to expand the limits of my own. My first yearning for cool hair came with my discovery of the Beatles. I was eight years-old and overnight decided to eschew parting my hair and combing it to the side, for bringing it down onto my forehead and willing it toward my brow in emulation of the fabs. For the next decade it was a continual struggle with adults to be allowed to wear it as long as possible. I didn't realize that this was the beginning of my submission to a subtle conformity of another sort. At the age of 12, at my second rock concert (the Doobie Brothers) I almost took a royal ass-kicking when I made the mistake of laughing at some guy's buzz-cut. Nothing could have looked less cool in 1972 than the shine of this guys scalp through his 1/4" hair. Only later did it dawn on me that this guy was a military conscript and his tonsorial faux pas was no fault of his own. What a smug little dick I was. It wasn't long after that I was a victim of the shears, having failed in my bid to hide from an escort to the barber's chair. My desire to let it grow ended in the era of punk and new wave. I first went spiky, then pursued a sort of Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame) look, with a brief digression during the rockabilly revival with the expected goofy results. As in the seventies when I envied the guys with hair down to their ass, marking them as non-functional in the straight world, I now envied the guys with foot-high, cherry red mohawks. By my late 20s I could see the ridiculousness of MTV haircut-fu. My heroes were Paul Westerberg, Gordan Gano and Bob Mould. They dressed normal and had normal hair. The idea was to actually be creative and not make an ass out of yourself by trying to look it. Their work spoke for itself. I liked that. I was an art student. That was enough of a rejection of the real world. Besides, I grew a full beard way before Mike Watt did. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and in the late '80s I became a full-time Dead head and a part-time stage hand. I back-slid. Most of my time was spent around either hippies or heavy metal roadies so I succumbed to the influence and started growing my hair. I didn't cut a strand between '88 and '93. When grunge came along I was already there, man. All I needed was the Doc Martens! I'd cut the beard back to a goatee when grunge was still called Sub Pop. In my early '30s I began holding down a real job, and the hair was just too high-maintenance. I lopped off the pony tail and went back to the no fashion stance. Recently I shaved my upper lip, leaving the rest of the goatee be. I think it's because every ballplayer in the bigs wears a goatee. Hell, cops will be next to sport them. There has to be a middle ground between no fashion and the mainstream. I'm working up the nerve to get a buzz just like that airman back in '72 had. Low maintenance, but with an attitude. I might like that. I have to face it. I'm a poser and a wannabe. I'm too old to really care about pursuing any sort of extreme rock and roll image, and besides, the latest hair fashions aren't just extreme, they're downright ugly. I now understand all the middle-aged men with little pony tails. I'll be the middle-aged man with dual earrings and a weird little half goatee. We're all just letting our freak little, enameled lapel-flag fly. We refuse to give it all the way up. We have an image to maintain, if only to ourselves.
Michael Newman writes music reviews for the Topeka Capital-Journal.
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