Original Broadway Cast – Hair (1968)

I want it long, straight,

Curly, fuzzy,

Snaggy, shaggy,

Ratty, matty,

Oily, greasy, 

Fleecy, shining,

Gleaming, streaming, 

Flaxen, waxen,

Knotted, polka-dotted,

Twisted, beaded, braided,

Powdered, flowered, and confettied,

Bangled, tangled, spangled,

And spaghettied!

When I was a high-school junior living in Joplin, Missouri, my parents subscribed to Newsweek.  That’s probably where I read about Hair, the iconic musical that opened on Broadway in 1968.  (Its official name was Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical – which is quite a mouthful.)

I ran right out to the nearest record store, bought the soundtrack album, and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to it with two senior girls who were musicians like me.  (Unfortunately, each of these girls was my “girl friend,” but not my “girlfriend” – would that they had been!)

After returning home with my new record, I wanted to keep listening to it.  I didn’t dare play it on the Magnavox console stereo in our living room – the lyrics were a little racy for my parents' taste.  (E.g., here’s the first line of one of the songs: “S*d*my, f*ll*t**, c*nn*l*ng*s, p*d*r*sty.”)  

So I closed the door to my bedroom and listened to it over and over and over on the little portable record player I had won in the local spelling bee when I was a fourth-grader.  As I listened, I wrote down the lyrics to all the songs, one line at a time – including the parts that made no sense to me.

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When I went back to my hometown for my 40th high-school reunion, I found the three-hole, wide-ruled notebook paper on which I wrote down the lyrics.  My mother (God bless her) never threw away anything of mine  – we’re talking report cards, class photos, piano recital programs, etc. – except all my old baseball cards.  (If she had kept those cards, I could have retired early – but she ditched them, so I had to slave away at my law firm until I was 65.)

My handwritten Hair lyrics – which I hadn’t seen for 40 years – were perfectly preserved because my mother had put them in a Rubbermaid storage box, which she had placed on a closet shelf.

Here's one of several pages where I scribbled down fragmentary lyrics to the song “Hair.”  (Some of the songs on the album were easy to decipher, but "Hair" took a lot of work.)  

My handwriting was much better then:

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To say that this record had a major impact on me is an understatement.  (Is the Pope Catholic?  Does a bear . . . etc.?)  I thought it was the greatest thing in the history of Western civilization, and I listened to it until I essentially had memorized the whole thing.

There have been a lot of great Broadway musicals – South Pacific, Damn Yankees, The Music Man, West Side Story, and Les Misérables among them – but none of them are  better than Hair.

Except maybe The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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Click here to buy the original Broadway cast recording of Hair – one of the ten best albums from the first half of pop music’s “Golden Decade” – from Amazon.