Inside the song: “Hippie Hair (for the First Time)”
“Hippie Hair (for the First Time),” released as a single in February 2022, is a different sort of pandemic song—playful, nostalgic, celebratory. Here’s how it came to be.
It started as a joke.
In the first meeting of my long-running songwriting class at Syracuse University in fall 2021, I asked students to make up catchphrases for themselves, to get to know a little something about each other. One I came up with for myself was “Hippie hair—for the first time!” Which cracked me up.
The next day, while out walking, that phrase suddenly appeared in my head attached to a high, triumphant-sounding melody—which cracked me up again.
I still thought the whole thing was a joke, but I went to my guitar and started building on it…just playing around and having a blast. And a song was born. Amusing yourself is actually a great impetus for songwriting.
It’s a true story.
The words of “Hippie Hair” are one hundred percent true, from being a child of the ’60s but (as the song says) “far too young for dropping out,” to growing long hair during the pandemic (and my mother’s reaction!), to meeting Jerry Garcia and playing his Wolf guitar.
To be specific about the Garcia bit: As founding editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine, I interviewed Garcia along with David Grisman at Grisman’s home studio in 1993. Decades later I played Wolf at the current owner’s home and then onstage at the legendary Club Passim, during a Garcia birthday concert. (I lead an acoustic collective called Dead to the Core celebrating the music of the Grateful Dead.)
At left, my 1993 cover story on Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. Above, playing Garcia’s Wolf guitar at Club Passim, 2018.
Many of the lyrics started as prose.
In fleshing out the words, I was fortunate to have written a little prose snapshot back in 2020 about growing my hair. Many details and phrases in the lyrics came directly from that piece:
Early March, the head in the mirror is starting to look a bit poofy, and I’m thinking I’ll get a cut next week. But then the hair salon goes dark along with so much else. We hunker at home. We vanish into screens. And the hair grows, always vertically at first, a mushroom dome evoking the queasy memory of Donny Osmond. I try to tamp it down with brush and water, to little avail.
None of this matters amidst all the life-and-death struggle of 2020, yet my hair starts to reveal curls and waves I’ve never known, glimpsed in the inset of a Zoom screen. I resist the urge to clip it all away and restore order, even after the salon reopens. Because this is now my pandemic project, one thing I’m gaining while losing so much else, and I feel myself sliding toward the ’70s—back to my teenage bedroom with Farrah Fawcett on the wall, Mad magazine on the night table, Doobie Brothers on the radio.
One windy night I’m at the microphone with my guitar and my hair is everywhere, sweeping my face like a windshield wiper, feeling as big as Peter Frampton’s on Frampton Comes Alive. It’s ridiculous but it’s mine. I’ll take what I can get.
One of my mantras as a teacher of songwriting and creative writing is that when any kind of inspiration hits, write write write write write. Don’t stop, don’t filter, don’t judge—just get it down, in whatever form it takes. That’ll give you a pile of raw material to sort through later, and it’ll make your job so much easier. As this snapshot did for me in writing the lyrics to “Hippie Hair.”
It’s a nostalgia trip.
While songwriters often go to great lengths to avoid recalling other songs, in “Hippie Hair” I totally embraced the connections to music from my teen years. I count eleven references embedded in the chords, guitar, and lyrics, as follows. Perhaps you’ll find more?
“The Weight,” the Band
When I first put my hands on the guitar to work on the song, I had in mind the groove of “The Weight,” heard in many other mid-tempo roots-rock songs as well.I also adapted the chord progression in my verse: “The Weight” starts off with I–iii–IV–I. “Hippie Hair” makes a few substitutions to arrive at I–III7–ii–V. (To all the harmony nerds out there: that major III, a nondiatonic chord, is the secret sauce. Read more in this lesson on chord substitutions.)
“Let It Grow,” Eric Clapton
Clapton’s song, which I played as a teenager, was the other chord progression reference that popped in my head. “Let It Grow” starts off Bm–F#–D–E. “Hippie Hair”: Bm–F#/A#–A–E/G# (capoed up three frets). Unintentional bonus that the song I was lifting from is titled “Let It Grow”!
Additional note for harmony nerds: the contexts of these chord progressions are not the same. “Let It Grow” starts in the key of Bm, so that progression goes down from the i chord. In “Hippie Hair,” the Bm is the vi chord of the key (D). But the movement of these two progressions is similar.
“Almost Cut My Hair,” David Crosby
Perhaps the most obvious reference in “Hippie Hair”: “Think I’ll let my freak flag fly.” How fun is that to sing?
“Feelin’ Alright?” Traffic
When I was writing the chorus, I had “Hippie hair for the first time,” and then wanted to repeat “Hippie hair…” followed by a different phrase. But what?
In the spirit of so many songs from the ’60s and ’70s, I realized I should just sing “Alright!” And it felt…alright! The Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Just Alright with Me” is one classic “alright” song I thought of; Traffic (and Joe Cocker) certainly made hay with the word in “Feelin’ Alright?”
“He’s Gone” and “Tennessee Jed,” Grateful Dead
After the first chorus—and right before the lyrics reference the Dead—I mashed up guitar riffs from these two songs (transposed from other keys).
Roger Daltrey, Doobie Brothers, and Peter Frampton
Not specific song references, but all of these artists who had magnificent manes in the 1970s are name-checked in the bridge.
“Reeling in the Years,” Steely Dan
OK, this one is subtle, but the Steely Dan song did cross my mind when I wrote “In my mind I’m reeling through my teens again.” Probably in part because I recently saw Steely Dan perform… Plus Walter Becker had seriously long locks back in the day.
“Loser,” Grateful Dead
Bonus points to anyone who notices this, but the song’s closing guitar lick uses artificial harmonics in a way I associate with Jerry Garcia’s soloing in “Loser” and other songs.
Speaking of Jerry, in the lead guitar track, I take my best shot at answering the question “What would Jerry do?” (the topic of this video lesson I later created).
My improv nods to a few classic Jerry moves, as well as his distinctive style of low-register riffing. What Jerry would do in particular is play the melody, so that’s how I opened the solo. He was the absolute master of restating a melody and spinning out variations.
It’s a different kind of pandemic story.
A lot of songs have come along to document the struggles of the COVID years. It’s a universal experience, so has real songwriting potential in that respect. Yet I also didn’t particularly want to add to the burden or dwell on the difficulties.
In the midst of so much loss, “Hippie Hair” takes a moment to celebrate something gained during this time. Which feels very good to me. Laughter is medicine.
The challenge I faced in the writing, though, was to acknowledge the seriousness of what everyone has been going through without trivializing it. I needed to place this story in the pandemic shutdown but did not want to stay stuck there.
As a lyricist, I felt like I really had to thread the needle to accomplish all this. I gave myself eight lines, less than 30 seconds, to get it done—that’s the intro.
The video documents the actual hair growth.
Ever since March 2020, I’ve been producing Guitar Sessions video lessons every month. That means I have a complete record of my hair growing out, as can be seen in the “Hippie Hair” video.
Also appearing in the video are photos of my high school band (named, not originally, the Rhythm Method), my original duo with my brother (eventually called Heavy Wood), and lots more goodies unearthed from family scrapbooks.
My brother, Dru, and I as a teenage duo.
It’s recorded remotely.
The track features my full band with everyone recording separately in home studios.
I started with the rhythm guitar and lead vocal tracks. I did them live and together, with no click, though that approach can be problematic from an engineering standpoint, because I wanted an organic feel. I used vocal and guitar mics (angled to minimize bleed) plus the dual output from my guitar pickup and internal mic.
Jason Fridley added bass, and Josh Dekaney locked in the groove with his one-of-a-kind percussion kit, which includes parts of a drum set as well as a horizontal cajón and a creation of his own called the bucket snare—a metal bucket from Brazil with loose bolts in it and a drumhead on top.
Then Wendy Ramsay played accordion, and she, Jason, and I layered lots of “oohs”—an additional ’70s homage that felt so good.
Ace engineer Jeremy Johnston, who recorded our last full-length release, Live and Listening, mixed and mastered the tracks at his own studio.
No miles were traveled to get this song recorded and released.
Lyrics
Hippie Hair (for the First Time)
Just like that it all shuts down
We vanish into screens
The bars go dark, the streets are clear
The days pass like a dream
While out there on the front lines
The news is only grim
And the least of all concerns is that
My hair could use a trim
But looking in the mirror I see a rising dome
A shaggy dude with waves and curls
Like I have never known
A few more months, salons are back
But I make up my mind
Though my mother wonders why
Think I’ll let my freak flag fly and grow...
Hippie hair for the first time
Hippie hair alright
When I sing hippie songs
For the first time I kinda look the part
I am letting it grow for my art
I was just a toddler at the dawning of the Dead
Far too young for dropping out
I’ve got no ’60s cred
Still I did meet Jerry and I played his Wolf guitar
Never like to join a crowd
But I’m feeling strangely proud I’ve got...
Hippie hair for the first time
Hippie hair alright
When I sing hippie songs
For the first time I kinda look the part
I am letting it grow for my art
In my mind I’m reeling through my teens again
From Daltrey to the Doobies
All the rockers had a mane
Is it much too late to strive
To be Frampton Comes Alive with my…
Hippie hair for the first time
Hippie hair alright
When I sing hippie songs
For the first time I kinda look the part
I am letting it grow for my art
Words and music by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, © 2022 (Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Music/ASCAP)
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