Someone at work referred to me as a hippy the other day. I contemplated a bullying and harassment charge or even criminal defamation, before settling with an empty threat to illustrate my offence. “Call me a hippy again and you’re dead meat,” I retorted, invoking the empty schoolyard language of my (not-at-all hippy) youth.
But as my once-hippie wife reminds me, hippies aren’t all that bad. After all, would an album of the glistening psychedelic beauty of Shadow Band’s Wilderness of Love have ever been created without the middle-class drop-outs and purveyors of vacuous philosophical discourse of generations past and present? Why shouldn’t the world hear the mesmerising, ethereal nocturnal lysergic wonder of Endless Night, the haunting post-Brian Jonestown Massacre introspection of Shadowland or the Nancy Sinatra and Jim Morrison ornithological psychedelia of Eagle Unseen? Or what of the cosmic enlightenment of Morning Star, the Buffalo Springfield splendour of Mad John or the cerebral awakening of Darksider’s Blues?
Hippies can be as annoying as fuck, but they did, sometimes inadvertently, pave the path for psychedelia. And without that path we wouldn’t have Shadow Band.
By Patrick Emery
