Though it savvily repackaged the counterculture, making it safe for the masses, Tom O’Horgan’s staging retained a subversive spark. “Hair was an antiwar play,” Walter Michael Harris emphasized. “It wasn’t ‘happy hippies doing their trippy thing,’ which is what a lot of people think about when they think about Hair today. In Tom’s hands, it was really quite focused on opposition to the war in Vietnam—which was a big, big reason why it was written to begin with. I know Jim and Gerry were really fascinated with youth culture at the time, and what the young people were doing and saying and thinking, and what their hopes and dreams were.” The final number, “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In),” could easily be reduced to a hippie cliché, but it was a sober reminder of the horrors of the Vietnam War when the death of Hair’s main character, Claude, was revealed on the Biltmore Theatre’s stage. “Nobody was smiling, nobody was waving the peace sign, nobody had flowers, it was very serious stuff,” Harris recalled. “What the audience saw was Claude laid out on a funeral bier, on top of the American flag, dead.” It was a shocker, a belly punch to the audience—who were left in darkness for a minute before the curtain call, contemplating what they had just seen.

From Chapter 20 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

The night before the Broadway opening of Hair at the Biltmore Theatre, Walter Michael Harris and three other cast members snuck into the theater to conduct a kind of holy ritual. Knowing the theater well, they hid in different locations to evade the security guards, who locked the theater and left for the evening. “Basically,” Harris said, “the idea was to purify the space with our presence, with our chants, so that it would be ready for the opening night. We also probably took LSD, or mescaline, or something like that.” Who knows how effective this ritual was, but the show was an aesthetic and commercial success. “Yet with the sweet and subtle lyrics of Gerome Ragni and James Rado,” New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes wrote, “the show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday. It even looks different. Robin Wagner’s beautiful junk-art setting (a blank stage replete with broken-down truck, papier-mâché Santa Claus, juke box, neon signs) is as masterly as Nancy Potts’s cleverly tattered and colorful, turned-on costumes.” Barnes’s rave review ensured that the show sold out for months, turning Hair into a massive pop culture hit, complete with a best-selling soundtrack and international tours. Musicals had long been a prominent part of twentieth-century popular culture and had spawned many a hit record, but Hair was truly the first modern musical. It established the template for the Broadway blockbuster and was an obvious precursor to contemporary shows such as Rent and Hamilton.

From Chapter 20 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Even though Walter Michael Harris maintained his underground theater roots during his time in Hair at the Biltmore Theatre he was uneasy about being in a Broadway show. One day he called in sick, hopped on a plane, and headed out to San Francisco. He felt a bit hypocritical being paid to play a hippie when he really wanted to be more like his brother, George, and be a hippie—so he quit the show. “I went into Hair as an actor,” he said, “but I came out as a hippie, and it was George who inspired me to come West.” Before forming the Cockettes, George Harris III, aka Hibiscus, initially lived at the Friends of Perfection Commune—informally known as Kaliflower—which was run by Irving Rosenthal, a writer and editor who was part of the Beat scene. “Hibiscus had been a lover of Allen Ginsberg and various bohemians,” recalled Cockette Lendon Sadler, “and Irving immediately fell for him.”

From Chapter 20 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore