I was never much of hippie, the laconic lifestyle necessary just doesn’t work for me. That may come as a surprise to some people – more than once in my life I have worn my hair in a ponytail, after all. Most would probably convict me on that basis alone.

That said, it must have been nice. As devoted as I always was to punk aesthetics, when I was in university I listened to a lot of 60s music. I suppose everyone does, when they are at college. It just seems to fit. I saw the Woodstock movie for the first time around the same era. It was genuinely hard for me to put myself in that mindset. Everyone in that movie seems so absurdly optimistic, and genuinely delighted with themselves. 

Hippies were a bit thin on the ground in Newfoundland. I was obviously an infant during the era, but judging by my parents and their friends, the whole thing barely touched us in Newfoundland. Judging by their college yearbooks, to all appearances we skipped the whole fun summer of love thing and went right from Grease into the dreary 70s recession. Perhaps as a people we are better suited to hard times then dancing around with flowers in our hair.

On the other hand, the hippies sure had some great tunes. My personal favourite is Ride My See-Saw by the Moody Blues. It is from their breakthrough album, In Search of the Lost Chord. The song is over the top, but then again the whole project reeks of patchouli. The cover features one of those classic comic book style depictions of nirvana, as done by a teenager with new magic markers. Instead of liner notes, the album’s back cover has a useful explanation of the tantric term ‘om’, along with its various uses.

All foolishness aside, See-Saw is a classic, and it easily rises above the era’s nonsense. At first glance the title seems a bit silly, one of those faux nursery-rhyme things favoured by Jethro Tull and the Genesis of that era. When you dig into it a bit, you realize it is the opposite. The band is using a see-saw as a metaphor for the soul-numbing life of boring jobs and pointless education. It is an interesting idea. Children are often disappointed by see-saws – they go up, and then down, and then up again, and then the child is off to find something more exciting. The Moody Blues perfectly captured that idea. They were from the industrial English midlands, not the jolliest place in those days, and you can hear their relief at escape in every joyous note. The band came from the same area that spawned Black Sabbath, yet their sunny demeanor is pure California.

There are other reasons to listen to this piece. Electric guitars were still interesting when this song was recorded in 1967. They use distortion like a cello, booming chords that swing over the song’s tight groove, crackling and bubbling away out of time, as novel as a sitar. The hook itself seems compiled of a dozen 12-string guitars, all furiously strumming away like Django’s Hot Band. My favourite aspect is the massed vocals – the whole band sings together, in a loose choir. Combined with the ubiquitous melotron, it sounds incredibly warm and rich.

In another very real way, the song is a relic. These days, such overt optimism would be considered naïve. And the buttery warmth of the audio is irreplaceable. Not just a huge dose of good vibrations were lost in the 1970’s – in the 1960s, bands were forced to rehearse, to really learn the finicky listening and singing skills that allowed bands like the Moody Blues to sing that well together. They had no choice – the primitive 8-track recorders and monitors of the era required it. There were no elaborate overdubs. All the sounds on See-saw are real, played at the same time. The result is a clarity, and at the same time strength, that even a hundred overdubs cannot achieve.

Maybe that’s the magic of it. You just cannot reproduce anything like this. The skills required to make great records are completely different now, and the technology has moved so far away as to be unrecognizable. Yet, you can still hear their youth and excitement, almost a half century later. We know they are probably elderly men now, and likely as cynical as the rest of us. Thankfully, it doesn’t really matter. For me, they are frozen in 1968, their voices clear, their motives pure, their optimism intact.

Like I said, it must have been nice.