John Popper of Blues Traveler was arrested for speeding (111) and according to Yahoo News, "Inside the black Mercedes SUV, officers found a cache of weapons and a small amount of marijuana...A police dog searched the vehicle, finding numerous hidden compartments containing four rifles, nine handguns and a switchblade knife. Authorities also found a Taser and night vision goggles."
I had to endure years of my so-called friends telling me that Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors, etc. were somehow a continuation of hippie music and thought. Both bands were so obviously bland bar-bands. The only new hippie band was Phish, who, no matter if you liked them or not, had a clear sense of roots and influences: look at how many older musicians deigned to join them on stage. I never made fun of Popper's weight, and his harmonica playing is phenomenal (even though I don't like it--one still must admit skill), but I always knew that this band had nothing in common with hippies.
I sound as if I'm trying to argue for authenticity, of "true" hippies. Well, in a way, I am. Popper and Hitler Fudd are both examples of hypocritical redneck assholes who would get along better with Ted Nugent than with Martin Luther King, Jr. The rest of the hippies liked to party and talk about how the "ocean water makes love to the sand" and how "you're over there and I'm over here, but we're not separate, you know?" But there were some who moved beyond the "Like Father Like Son Like Hell" mindset and criticisized the social institution of marriage (beyond the misnomer "free love"), the practice of war, etc. I don't know who they are, and I don't know what they did, but I know they existed. In 1967 I would have been one of them. When The Doors were banned from Woodstock for being too "dark" for flower power, I would have ripped up my ticket. Eventually I would have become a punk, I guess.
I love that the real world and the world of TV and video games are so completely separate for me. Fuck Baudrillard. In Grand Theft Auto I blow suckas faces off. In the real world, I do not even own a gun or care to shoot one or hide one in my secret "weed compartment." Dumbass.
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Yeah as we *all* know from reading Foucault, resistance is always inside power. I would have been a hippie too, and then a punk, and then a New Wave kid, and then the next thing that came along (as long as it pissed off conservatives in some way).
My first year of college in Missoula, MT, the phish-heads and generally most performative of the hippies (which whom Missoula positively swarmed) were actually trustafarians from Connecticut. They would roll out of their plushy dorm rooms looking as though they just tumbled down a mountain, stop at the ATM to get some of that oh-so-abundant parental cash, and then go to the local hipster diner for a breakfast fit for someone who had actually been hiking for a week instead of what they actually did--skip class and play friz-bee (?)in the quad. When in doubt, you could always spot a trustafarian because they would drive really beat up cars with AMAZING sound systems. That way that got to LOOK poor without listening to the Dead on re-recorded cassettes. They probably just didn't have guns because it didn't occur to them. Yet.
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