When Woodstock Came to Texas

Poster for the Texas International Pop Festival,
August 30 - September 1, 1969.
(from Wikipedia)

It may surprise some of my truckbuddies to learn that Texas had its own hippie rock concert on Labor Day weekend, 1969, just a couple of weeks after the famous one in New York state.  I'm surprised, too:  I never heard of it, and neither did M.P.  We were both still in high school, far away from Dallas. And I was too square to care; still am. But as matter of social history in my own lifetime, it was interesting to stumble upon these news videos and reminiscences of the event, which some surviving participants say was life-changing.

First, an official video from the City of Lewisville, a little ways north of Dallas proper, where the festival was held in a large open field next to Interstate 35.  The site has been heavily redeveloped since then (see maps).  The promoter who first appears at 1:36 is a son of the founder of the Six Flags theme parks, Angus Wynn, Jr.

It says a lot about small-town Texas that the upright, God-fearing citizenry at the time were outraged, not by the long hair, rock music, and drugs, but by all the nekkid bodies skinny-dipping in the nearby lake in broad daylight!  The locals knew the kids were naked because they were out there in their motorboats, intently scrutinizing all that indecency through binoculars.

Notice what the newsman in the next clip says about "it's hard to know what to call these young people" - most of them were "weekend hippies" whose hair and clothes were still within the limits of respectability. In the next few years, what was strange and different, even shocking, in 1969 became ordinary:  that's how the fashion industry works. 

Just a couple of years after this event, I was sitting in a goverment class when the instructor posed a discussion question:  "What is a hippie?"  We all looked at each other mutely as we realized that "hippie" had become "normal."  Long-ish hair, flares or bell-bottoms, wide belts, long sideburns, mustaches, beards, and hip-hugging blue jeans - most young men dressed that way, at least for slogging around campus, regardless of their socio-political orientation.  The words "hippie" and "groovy" were already obsolete; but blue jeans - workman's clothing - became the default choice for casual wear, and remain so to this day. 

But 1969 was the starry-eyed Age of Aquarius:  harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding.  It's poignant to hear the earnest young folks in these clips spout all those utopian sentiments of peace, love, and joy: "just be yourself, do what you want to do - people will love you for it." A happy thought, a hopeful thought - but mistaken. Human nature just doesn't work that way. But they surely found that out later on. 

This last video opens with a crotch shot that proves more than words ever could that rock and roll is all about sex, and vice versa.

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What We're Watching: The International Male Story

We watched this last night while eating supper at the kitchen bar. I'm sure many of my truckbuddies will recall thumbing though those catalogs as M.P. and I did in the 70's.  It wasn't nearly as good as Playgirl, but sometimes it was all you had to dream on.

Bonus: In this a local news report on West Hollywood in 1980, you will get a glimpse of the International Male store there. I never knew they had an actual store building.

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Waitin' for the Weekend

Clint Collide celebrates the male gaze.  Boy howdy!

Historical note:  The height of fashion when I was in high school, say from 1965 to 1969, is exmplified by the two young men at the :30 mark.  A very neat look:  the still-short hair parted on the side and falling over the forehead a bit; shirts tucked in, even when not in school; belt worn at the traditional waistline, instead of down around the hips; and tapered legs ending a couple inches above the ankle, the better to show off your cotton socks, which came in a rainbow of colors in the late 60s.  It was extremely chic to have your socks match your shirt, so it looked as if you were poured into your pants.  Though outside of school, it was de rigeur to wear your penny loafers without socks - and believe me when I tell you, there is nothing quite so enticing as the sight of a well-turned bare ankle, preferably tanned from spending weekends in the sun.  Seriously.

Contrary to careless artists' depictions, men and boys and even hippies did NOT wear bell-bottoms in the 1960s, at least not in the Deep South where I grew up - but go study some movies made in the 60s and you will find confirmation.  Girls started with the bell-bottoms in 1965 or so - a la Cher - but we guys had to wait until the fall of 1969, and even then, what the stores were selling were flares, not true bell-bottoms, which were hard to find, even in jeans.  I remember all this distinctly, since I was at the age when fashion first becomes all-important to a young (gay) man.  

The hair got a little longer year by year, and then in the fall of 1969, mustaches and mutton-chop sideburns were all the rage for those who could grow them.  I was still shaving just once a week or so, bummer.  Plus I was in a very strict, fundamentalist church which forbade long hair and all such sinful things (the Bible says!).  

(O/T)  But I made up for it later, after I left the church:

Junior college graduate, 1977

Ready for fun in the sun, spring 1979 - 
my arms and legs were hairier than they appear in the strong sunshine.

Another bright spring day in 1979, before I came out.
Twenty years later, I was getting a cowboy buzz cut.
(See photo under "My Story" in the sidebar > > >)
Nowadays, it's anything goes, I guess.

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Diana's Dresses

What kind of person would shell out a hundred grand or more for a second-hand dress? This 1999 BBC production takes a look at the designers, art collectors, Southern belles, drag queens, and shrewd millionaires who were involved in the hagiography of a troubled princess - which now, with the passage of time enabling a cooler look back at the frenzy surrounding Diana's death, provokes some profound reflections on fame, money, vanity, hero worship, and human nature.

Men, Women, and Clothes: Sense and Nonsense in Fashion

The second episode in the BBC color series, written and presented by fashion expert Doris Langley Moore. First broadcast on April 28, 1957, using all original costumes from the various periods.

How Fashions Come and Go

The first episode of a fascinating BBC series - unusually for 1957, filmed in color - on the history of fashion, presented by noted fashion historian and scholar Doris Langley Moore, who designed Katharine Hepburn's wardrobe for The African Queen. A young Vanessa Redgrave is one of the models wearing original period gowns; can you spot her?

Today's Quote

It’s great we live in a democratic society, but we’ve lost all sense of decorum and occasion. To be on Fifth Avenue is now about the same as being on the Coney Island boardwalk.

--"Shirtless Goes the City," The New York Times

 

 

Your Head Trucker has been saying the same thing for the last forty years, but nobody has paid me the slightest bit of attention. 

Beach Bums, 1951

I think my truckbuddies will smile at this ultra-fashionable collection of men's swimsuits from 1951.



The first model, Raymond, is totally studly.  I'd do him.


Via Americablog Gay.

Plus ça change . . .

Another venerable tradition dumped in the wastebasket of history.  Now the NYT reports that Frenchwomen are turning all modest, and not going topless at the beach:

Coralie Kosiada, 23, has never gone topless on a public beach, and doesn't plan to. "Honestly, I don't really like women who show their breasts," she said, pursing her lips and recoiling slightly. "There are not that many nice-looking breasts, so why display them? And it's a generational question. Mostly 50-year-old women do it. It's kind of passé."

Tant pis for the straight boys.  But fortunately, French men are still going topless despite the shifting winds of fashion.  Voici:

Approuvez-vous ?

Yikes Again

From the Yahoo news page, photo of generic shoppers somewhere in the USA.  Do my old eyes deceive me, or do I really see a young woman wearing high heels with big rolled-up jeans cuffs, a la the 1950's?  Is this a joke, or is this really the current fashion?

Once upon a time, in the days of my (sadly) well-spent youth, your Head Trucker was known for a snappy dresser.  But I haven't really paid much attention to the details of fashion since graduating from college, which was about the time Urban Cowboy was the current picture show, and yeehaw! - suddenly it was cool (as it had never been in my young lifetime) among city folks to go everywhere in your boots and jeans and cowboy hat.

And I still do.  It suits me.  And the cool, the very cool thing about Western style is that it's timeless, pretty much always the same.  You can dress it up or dress it down.  Here in Texas, where it's the national dress, so to speak, you can wear it 24/7 anytime, anyplace:  hell, with a decent sportcoat and bolo, you can wear cowboy boots and jeans and cowboy hat to dinner at the Adolphus in big D, and nobody will look twice at you. (But take your hat off when you get to the table, son; were you raised in a barn?) 

And speaking from my own point of view, it's a very masculine look.  Which some of us old boys think is kinda important when it comes to clothes.

But who can keep up with the ins and outs of women's styles, even if you wanted to?  A while back an elderly cousin wrote me that her granddaughters used to tease her about her bright red lipstick in old photographs; now the young'uns are in college, and wearing bright red lipstick themselves, just gotta have it.  It's just so cool, you know.

Which just goes to show, as I made remark in a comment post the other day, fashion is silly.  Damned silly, much of the time.  The herd instinct, first of all:  and deeper than that, the desire to fit in.  Deeper still, the terrible, blinding fear of being rejected - and worst of all:  ridiculed.  Physical courage is an admirable trait, but relatively common; very few people, however, have the moral courage to endure the ridicule of their peers.

Which is why the fashions you laugh yourself silly at today, you'll be wearing tomorrow.  And vice versa.  Your very own opinion of yourself, which at this second you think is entirely the product of your own judgment and reason, will be changed for you, 180 degrees.  It has nothing at all to do with what looks good on you, what flatters your face or your physique, what's convenient or comfortable.  And everything to do with what the people whose opinion matters most to you - and despite all your protests, that's usually not your nearest and dearest - what they are wearing. 

In other words:  the cool people; depending on the decade and the century, they might be rich or they might be poor, but they are always the people you would give your right arm if only you could be like them; better yet, please God, be one of them.

Right there is the ultimate, though often unconscious, motivation that underlies half the human activity on this planet at any given moment.  Think about it. 

Continue reading after the jump . . .

Brick House in the White House

The White House has just released the official portrait of the First Lady. Looking mighty fine there, Michelle, doing us proud.

That sleeveless look reminds me a lot of Jackie Kennedy; for those who care about such things, here's a Washington Post story on the two women and their role as fashion leaders, with some more pictures.