Galt MacDermot, 1968. Photo by Larry Ellis.
Composer, pianist and arranger Galt MacDermot died at 4 AM Eastern Standard Time on December 17th, 2018, a day shy of his 90th birthday. While the cause of his death was undisclosed, he had been in failing health for some time. Now-Again’s Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, who worked with MacDermot and his Kilmarnock label from the late-90s to the mid-2000s, wrote an essay on his life and influence.
He was best known as the composer of the musical HAIR, a worldwide success, a crucible of the late 1960s, an indication that the counterculture had gone mainstream. And thus hit after hit from MacDermot’s pen made their ways around the world, from “Age of Aquarius” to “Let The Sunshine In.” These became indelible classics, at once of their time and beyond it. For MacDermot it was a happy, if unexpected, result of his talent and chance colliding, and while he loved the concept of theater, it was just an interesting stopping point in a lifelong musical journey. HAIR’s success was so unfathomable to him, he told me, that he first realized that his life had changed in an instance many of us would find mundane. While walking to his gig (he played in the musical’s pit band) on a rainy New York afternoon, he realized his feet were wet. He’d worn a hole in his sole – and for the first time in his memory, he walked into a shop and bought a new pair of his preferred Clark desert boots. I don’t know if we ever talked about financial success again except for how it could foster musical creation for those attuned enough to not be distracted by it.
Because, for MacDermot, what HAIR’s royalties bought him was the ability to do things on his own terms, to work with musicians he respected, and who respected him, as they recorded his ideas for issue on his own Kilmarnock Records. Kilmarnock’s founding predated HAIR– he’d issued albums such as The English Experience, an album by his warbly-vocaled alter ego Fergus MacRoy, and one of his masterpieces, 1966’s Shapes of Rhythm. That album contained the landmark performance of his “Coffee Cold,” a harbinger of everything to come in popular music. If only it had been heard more, like Lee Dorsey’s “Get Out Of My Life Woman,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” or MacDermot’s HAIR hits. It would take thirty years for Shapes of Rhythm to see its due, when hip hop producers, searching for deeper sampling sources, tracked down MacDermot in his Staten Island home, a converted turn-of-the-century school house situated on an acre of land at the top of Victory Boulevard, across the street from Silver Lake Park.
“Field of Sorrow,” from 1966’s Shapes of Rhythm. MORE
