From: Fritz the Cat <f-wilson@nwu.edu>
Subject: Re: the date of the end of student deferments
>In the musical _Hair_, one of the characters (Berger) gets expelled from
>high school by his "principal" Mr. MacNamara. In their tete-a-tete,
>Berger remarks that "this is 1968, not 1967". What's the relevance of
>this remark? I'm assmuing it has to do with deferments, but I'm not sure.
>It could just be relevant to the number of and increasing militance of
>international anti-war movements, though, or a comment that the war's been
>long and must certainly be reaching its end? Thoughts?
I'm not so sure about this, but I was in Hair in high school and I thought
that the line was "this is 1968, not 1948", reflecting the changes in
generational attitudes and outlooks on life. I think that there are
different versions of "Hair" out there, though, and it could be that one of
them had the line "not 1967" though I couldn't say which version it would
be. Interesting.
Fritz V. Wilson
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. USA
f-wilson@nwu.edu
____________________________________
[2]
From: Tom Condit <tomcondit@igc.apc.org>
Subject: "1968 not 1967"
At 05:41 PM 3/12/97 -0500, Anne Marie Ellison wrote:
>A question spun off of this discussion and some of my own research:
>
>In the musical _Hair_, one of the characters (Berger) gets expelled from
>high school by his "principal" Mr. MacNamara. In their tete-a-tete,
>Berger remarks that "this is 1968, not 1967". What's the relevance of
>this remark?
This is *really* reaching, but it could be an oblique reference to the 1950s
folk parody "The Ballad of Pete Seeger", which goes like this:
Oh, they gave him his orders down at party headquarters,
Saying Pete, you're way behind the times--
This is 1948, not 1937,
and there's been a change in that old party line!
Well, it's a long, long haul to Greensleeves from Freiheit,
and the road is more than long,
but that brave little outfit that they call the People's Artists
is on hand with those good old people's songs.
Their motives are pure, though their material is corny,
and their spirits will never be broke,
as they roll right along in that great noble crusade
of teaching folksongs to the folk!
I think Roy Berkeley wrote it. In a moment which tells a lot about certain
people, Roy (if it was him) sang the song to Seeger and his entourage after
a concert. Seeger was amused, his wife was annoyed, and Irwin Silber (then
Seeger's manager before becoming a big marxist-hyphenist honcho) threatened
to sue. It was widely sung in New York City during the late 1950s and early
1960s and I'm sure that the makers of "Hair" were familiar with it, since
they moved in the same circles it did.
Tom Condit