Song 621: This week the playlist applauds Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures) by The 5th Dimension, written by James Rado, Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Tonight marks the first appearance of The 5th Dimension in this gathering, and I chose this particular hit because, on this past Tuesday, 6/21 - the first official day of summer, and the longest day of the year - songwriter James Rado left the land of the living, as did a personal friend, the realist artist I have long admired named Harvey Dinnerstein. Mr. Rado's real last name was Radomski, and he and his co-author Gerome Ragni had begun writing the musical Hair in 1964, getting it premiered off-Broadway in October 1967 and moving it to Broadway 6 months later. The musical got a lot of attention, and at some point during that stretch a group of singers/performers at my HS staged a segment from it for an audience of their fellow students which included me. I had already enjoyed the 5D record and experiencing the live display made it seem even better. Of course, I didn't even mention the incident to my fundamentalist family since they didn't approve of the devil's music and I did have a bit of a moral quandary over relishing a Broadway jaunt which I knew included onstage nudity in the professional version, but I didn't give myself too much guilt because I figured it unlikely that I'd ever see that sort of show. All these decades later, we still haven't reached the era of harmony and understanding with sympathy and trust abounding, and we have to have no more falsehoods or derisions to get to golden living dreams of visions, but perhaps mystic crystal revelation and the mind's true liberation can arrive when peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.
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