Happy 4:20!

A Child's Garden Of Grass: A Pre-Legalization Comedy (Elektra, 1971)

Enjoy!

Happy 4/20 Day!

 

 (PASSING THE VIRTUAL HASHPIPE TO YOU.....)

 

Photo: The Night Owl

Photo: Welcome To The 70s

Photo: Inside The Rock Poster Frame

The Crimping Iron

Electric hair crimping of some kind has existed since the 1920s....

....and the first crimping irons appeared shortly after the first portable electric curling iron wands in the early 1970s.

But the Somebody-Just-Dumped-A-Bowl-Of-Top-Ramen-Noodles-On-My-Head look didn't become all the rage until the late 1980s.

They were popular from 1984 until 1992. But it wasn't until 1987 when pop star Taylor Dayne turned crimped hair into a national epidemic.

You probably knew some chicks (and even a few dudes) with crimped hair. Photo: Back To The '90s

The crimping iron, by frying your hair, added poofy volume to it. Tease it out and you had something like this.

Next to the can of Ultimate Hold Aqua-Net hairspray to shellac your 'do with, they were staples of anyone with big hair in the late 1980s.

I shellacked my hair with enough of this crap in my big hair days to collapse a mile of ozone. And Mother Nature is starting to get back at me for it.....

Chris Gaines

In 1999, a greatest hits album dropped onto the record store shelves that left everybody puzzled in how to explain it without saying "You better sit down for this".....

It was from somebody named Chris Gaines. An Australian singer who did something no other Australian singer could do; look and sound exactly like Garth Brooks.

This of course, was actually a Garth Brooks album. The concept behind it was a planned, but never materialized movie called The Lamb starring Brooks as Chris Gaines, an Australian pop singer who's life, from the early press buzz at the time, seemed loosely based on the life of INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence (who died in 1997.)

Garth Brooks' fans literally thought he lost his mind. Country stars aren't supposed to do that.

But with all fairness, it did reveal Garth Brooks wasn't just a one trick pony. He could cross genres and do a very good job of it musically. Some say (and I still think) his biggest mistake was the Chris Gaines alter-ego. If he had just kept the Garth Brooks identity and said this was a pop-leaning album, he might have had another mega-platinum smash.

While the Chris Gaines album went double platinum (still very respectable in 1999), it was Garth Brooks' LEAST selling album.

In a way, it might have been a blessing. Garth Brooks was at the very peak of his fame and the endless touring, TV appearances, interviews and record company obligations to Capitol was getting too much for a now very wealthy man who was witnessing what everything was doing to his young family. Something had to give.

The songs range from classic Garth sounding numbers ("It Don't Matter To The Sun"), to an R&B vocal track that sounded like anything L.A. Reid and Babyface could have produced.

 
 ("Lost In You" - credited to Chris Gaines and not Garth Brooks, actually got airplay on Smooth Jazz radio stations in 1999/2000!)