Blind Faith: Do What You Like
[purchase]
I happened to be in Seattle in the summer of 69, and although I was just barely a teen (14 counts, doesn’t it?), my parents gave me and my younger brother permission to see Blind Faith. We got mugged on the way back home after the concert, but that’s another story and that was in the days before “terror” carried the meaning it does today.
Like so many others, including boyhowdy, my brother and I wore our hair long. Mine being thin (in more ways than one), I wore it tied back; his was even longer, kind of a cross between Tiny Tim’s and Ginger Baker’s. I kept mine long until I took a full time job after college.
I was schooled in a co-ed boarding school in the Philly area in the early 70s. Although it is a little bit of a stretch to say I was a hippie, there were forays into the culture – to the extent that circumstances allowed (maintaining a passing gpa, staying on the tennis team…). The school was bordered on one side by a river called the Neshaminy, and there were times that we would leave our clothes on the school-side riverbank and cavort nekkid in the field/woods on the other side for an afternoon’s fun. All very “Hair” even if we were only teens.
Do What You Like, from the only album Blind Faith made (the band came together in early 69 and disbanded in late 69), has lyrics that espouse the mentality of the hippy lifestyle:
Do right, use your head (one wonders exactly how)
Get together, break your bread… (peace, man)
The song also has the prerequisite extended jam that the hippie generation loved: nigh on 15 minutes of it, and it ends in a rather spacey ramble of notes.