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Galt MacDermot
Sagittarius
Composer
Born in Montreal, and educated at Capetown (South Africa) University, Mr. MacDermot has been a church organist, dance band musician, and composer of "African Waltz" - a smash hit in London, and winner of a
Grammy Award in the USA. "Hair" is his first musical. Mr. MacDermot was asked to explain his entanglement in "Hair," and with characteristic modesty, he replied in the third person.
"Take a hippie, wash, shave and trim him. Dress him in a tweed suit and put him on a restless camel facing south on the northern edge of the Sahara, and you will eventually have a hot property."
By the same token, if you take the Arab goatherd that you see there, bring him slowly back to New York and put him on Houston St., will you have a hippie? Only time can tell. But this is what happened to MacDermot. He was found in the wilderness herding goats, eating figs and flaunting his oaten airs. He was brought to New York and placed at a table on which lay a book called "Hair" with instructions to set it to music.
Like any well brought up goatherd he quickly sorted the wheat from the chaff and constructed a typical tribal love-rock occasion in which the hands of all the great masters (Zerton, Flabula, Caribee) could be seen but where MacDermot's individuality still was able to vibrate at its own characteristic 64321 per NTM's.
It's not important whether MacDermot understood what he was doing. He claims that his method is to set to music the mentality of the poet and let the literal meaning of the words take care of themselves.
Another theory is that there was a mix up in the Sahara and the hot hippie was mistaken for the goatherd.
Whatever the ultimate truth is (some even say "Hair" is not a tribal love-rock musical but actually a Broadway musical disguised as an opera) the fact is that "Hair," or crystallized Ragni-Rado, whichever you prefer, exists with all its meaning - literal, rarefied, subjective, absolutional - intact. Or possibly not - only time can tell.
