DisinHAIRited -- The 411

In discussing my adaptation of Hair for film with devotees of the show and score, people who've worked on it in the past, or just plain theater buffs, they always tend to ask me one question: "Are you going to use anything from DisinHAIRited?"


 If you don't know what DisinHAIRited is, I'm going to endeavor to explain, in the words of Hair recordings expert Sean "Dauber" Courtney:

In late 1969, the current Broadway cast of Hair, along with authors Gerry Ragni, Jim Rado, and Galt MacDermot, recorded a collection of songs that either were in Hair but didn't make the Broadway cast recording for various reasons (such as "Electric Blues" and "Going Down"), songs that were once in the show but dropped when it reached Broadway (including "Exanaplanetooch" and "The Climax"), and some songs that were not really songs used in the show but dialogue from the show set to music (such as "I'm Hung" and "I Dig"). Unlike the original Broadway cast recording, this album wasn't a rush job, and as a result sounds much more like a raw rock 'n' roll record than the Broadway cast recording was, and more than likely is closer to how the songs actually sounded when performed on stage. The album was released at the tail-end of 1969 and has been out of print since, although it's a fairly easy album to find in used record stores and eBay for pretty cheap.

It's certainly interesting to have miscellanea, errata, and whatnot available (if you look for it) to throw into the mix when adapting Hair. It's also interesting to consider the prospect of using the musicalized dialogue to aim at making Hair more of what it was initially intended to be (i.e., the first rock opera ever staged on Broadway; with the loss of some sung recitative such as that featured on this album, it lost that selling point and became simply the first rock musical on Broadway, which is by no means a lesser feat).

DisinHAIRited is also a chance to see the first drafts of the "character introduction" songs. For example, if you've ever read the Pocket Books edition of Hair, you'll note that Berger didn't always sing of his love for the sixteen-year-old virgin we all remember fondly as Donna. His initial introduction piece was a song called "Manhattan Beggar" -- it's occasionally featured as bridging material in some productions of the show, most notably Randy Bowser's; it's not particularly memorable in my opinion, but as recorded on DisinHAIRited, it still sounds like something fun and catchy. Similarly, making an educated guess, it's my belief that "Reading the Writing" for Claude, Berger, and Sheila was the initial version of the song for the slot now occupied by "I Believe in Love" due to the similarities in key, structure, tempo, and general feel (plus the fact that, as in later productions, it was banded together with "Sheila Franklin" [in a slightly longer version]).

So, the question becomes: Alright, let's say you do use material from DisinHAIRited. Which songs, and for what? Well, at the moment I'm playing with the idea of using the dialogue-as-music material like "I Dig," "I'm Hung," etc., as a sort of backlash to the idea that songs from any musical necessarily have to be cut for the film to succeed. Not to say that I don't think some songs should be cut for any number of reasons, just that for once I want to see a musical film with more songs instead of less. Plus, I think that if the authors musicalized this material so soon after the Broadway production, then much like using a different line in "The Long and Winding Road" on Let it Be...Naked because it reflected a change the songwriter had decided to make in a later take and it was the engineers' feeling that it was the final rewrite based on the date, it stands to reason that we should give it a try because it was clearly their intention for the moment to be musicalized for the same reasons.

Also, there is potential with the music for DisinHAIRited to create underscoring for portions of the film, to go along with the instrumental moments already in the show. Character intro songs can easily become character motifs, for example. In a sense, with these two ideas for using the DisinHAIRited resource combined, we get the "kitchen sink" effect that allows us to use the entirety of the whole score for Hair, so to speak, without bogging down the picture and creating problems of time constraints.