MAKE LOVE NOT WAR

Janis Joplin would have been 65 today. Just her name conjures up a whole vision of the era -- psychedelia, flower power, free love, tie-dyed T-shirts, Woodstock, Monterey, Ravi Shankar, patchouli oil, Dany the Red, incense sticks, Roger Dean album covers, cheesecloth, Vietnam, Herman Hesse, Doors of Perception, "Hair!", Scott McKenzie warbling about San Francisco, Angela Davis... of course (ahem!) I was far too young to be a hippie, but I do appreciate that it was a youth movement of great creativity and kindly intentions. They thought they were going to change the world and save the planet. Whereas today's yoof movements have no such lofty ambitions and simply want to wear lots of "bling", talk like Ali G and meet Bart Simpson. It breaks your heart, really it does.



As was the fashion in those days, Janis died aged 27 of drug-related causes. Knowing what we know now about the longer-term effects of prolonged drug use, we should praise her for her far-sightedness. Did you see dear old Ringo on the Jonathan Ross show last night? I fear Janis might have gone the same way had she lived. Still doing the V-sign for peace, bless him. You could tell he wasn't really with the programme any more couldn't you. He used to be my favourite too. I always fancied the drummers. Wossie looked a bit like a kindly nephew visiting a cantankerous old uncle in an old people's home. His new album was pretty rubbish too. I have a sort of theory that as you get older your musical tastes get more conservative. Old people who were 25 when Elvis was around are sitting in rest homes listening to Mantovani and military brass bands. My theory is that it all inevitably leads to Max Bygraves. When you find yourself grinning stupidly and tapping your arthritic old fingers to "Tulips from Amsterdam", the Grim Reaper is keeping time with his scythe.


This is just plain wrong! I have an elderly friend, Imelda, who is refreshingly groovy for an old fogey. She wears tie-dyed caftans and flowers in her hair on a Sunday, and still plays her old Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane LPs on an old stereo turntable. She is now 83 and still going strong despite smoking like a chimney, and even has a good-looking young man (not her son) who comes round and walks her to the post office to collect her pension. She gives him a little something for his trouble, as she is generous to a fault and like all old hippies, has no sense of the value of money. And where's the harm in that, I ask you? If I can afford a good-looking young man on my pension, I will do so.


Imelda is truly an ageing flower child. She claims not only to have gone to school with John Lennon but to have shared digs with Janis Joplin in San Francisco in the good old days (among a number of other outrageous stories). If you can believe her claims, she was at Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury, on the Magic Bus, on a kibbutz, had an affair with a Black Panther or three, danced down Oxford Street chanting Hare Krishna, and rode pillion with the Maidstone chapter of the Hell’s Angels. She even claims to have been engaged to Che Guevara but I’m not sure I believe that. The eroding effect on her brain of far too many substances over the years, not all of them legal, have left her a little, well, vague. But nobody really minds her being a little creative with the truth, as her stories are so entertaining. The one about Jimi Hendrix, the cleaning fluid and the hamster ... oh you'd crease up. Her anaesthetic of choice comes in amber liquid form these days. And I don’t mean Lucozade. But she refuses to roll over and join the cardigan-and-slippers brigade, and keeps a herbal cigarette ready in a wooden box for her final journey. Gawd bless her.


When I was a gel we had convictions (Imelda had one for possession if I remember correctly). The mood of the day was defined by the Vietnam War, which exercised us in Britain EVEN THOUGH OUR GOVERNMENT HAD THE GUTS TO TELL THE AMERICANS TO GET LOST WHEN THEY ASKED US TO HELP OUT. Now we don't have national service, or the "draft" as the Yanks called it, and one wonders if the US had had a professional army in those days, would the great unwashed have cared as much. You certainly won't see protests against Iraq in America or Britain like you did in the early 1970's. Vietnam was the wake-up call which dragged the hippies out of their technicolour dream, and stopped the sitar music suddenly with a discordant twang. Milos Forman's 1979 film of the musical "Hair!" missed the boat as far as the zeitgeist went but is a perfect depiction of the mood of the time. The final seven minutes still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. George W. Bush just wouldn't get it.


Peace and love, brothers and sisters. (V-sign).