In 1964 I turned down going to the Beatles Concert in Detroit.
Later my father went back stage and interviewed the Beatles.
In 1969 or 70, I went to the opening of Hair in Detroit.
The original stars and play authors Rado and Ragni were there,
I was in the front row and refused to go on stage at the end of Hair to sing "Let the Sunshine."
At the time I had longer hair than most of the actors.
Hair in Detroit
1968 – The controversial rock musical Hair, with a book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot.
Hair tells the story of the "tribe", a group of politically active, long-haired hippies of the "Age of Aquarius" living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against conscription into the Vietnam War. Claude, his good friend Berger, their roommate Sheila and their friends struggle to balance their young lives, loves and the sexual revolution with their rebellion against the war and their conservative parents and society. Ultimately, Claude must decide whether to resist the draft as his friends have done, or to succumb to the pressures of his parents (and conservative America) to serve in Vietnam, compromising his pacifistic principles and risking his life.
After an Off-Broadway debut in October 1967 at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and a subsequent run in a midtown discothèque space, the show opened on Broadway in April 1968 and ran for 1,750 performances. Simultaneous productions in cities across the United States.
The West Coast version played at the Aquarius Theatre in Los Angeles beginning about six months after the Broadway opening and running for an unprecedented two years. The Los Angeles tribe included Rado, Ragni, Robert Rothman, Ben Vereen (who replaced Ragni), Red Shepard, Ted Neeley (who replaced Rado), Meat Loaf, Gloria Jones, Táta Vega, Jobriath, Jennifer Warnes, and Dobie Gray.[5]
There were soon nine simultaneous productions in U.S. cities, followed by national tours.[5][30] Among the performers in these were Joe Mantegna, André DeShields, and Alaina Reed (Chicago),[31] David Lasley, David Patrick Kelly and Shaun Murphy (Detroit),[32]Arnold McCuller (tour),[33] Bob Bingham (Seattle)[34] and Philip Michael Thomas (San Francisco).[35] The creative team from Broadway worked on Hair in Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, as the Broadway staging served as a rough template for these and other early regional productions. A notable addition to the team in Los Angeles was Tom Smothers, who served as co-producer.[36] Regional casts consisted mostly of local actors, although a few Broadway cast members reprised their roles in other cities.[37]O'Horgan or the authors sometimes took new ideas and improvisations from a regional show and brought them back to New York, such as when live chickens were tossed onto the stage in Los Angeles.[37]
It was rare for so many productions to run simultaneously during an initial Broadway run. Producer Michael Butler, who had declared that Hair is "the strongest anti-war statement ever written", said the reason that he opened so many productions was to influence public opinion against the Vietnam War and end it as soon as possible
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