Early March, the head in the mirror is starting to look a bit poofy, and I’m thinking I’ll get a cut next week. But then the hair salon goes dark along with so much else. We hunker at home. We vanish into screens.

I feel myself sliding toward the ’70s—back to my teenage bedroom with Farrah Fawcett on the wall, Mad magazine on the night table, Doobie Brothers on the clock radio.

And the hair grows, always vertically at first, a mushroom dome evoking the queasy memory of Donny Osmond. I try to tamp it down with brush and water, to little avail.

None of this matters amidst all the life-and-death struggles of 2020, yet my hair starts to reveal curls and waves I’ve never known, glimpsed in the inset of a Zoom screen. I resist the urge to clip it all away and restore order, even after the salon reopens. Because this is now my pandemic project, one thing I’m gaining while losing so much else, and I feel myself sliding toward the ’70s—back to my teenage bedroom with Farrah Fawcett on the wall, Mad magazine on the night table, Doobie Brothers on the clock radio.

One windy night after live music begins its tentative return, I’m at the microphone with my guitar and my hair is everywhere—sweeping my face like the floppy curtain in a car wash, feeling as big as Peter Frampton’s on the fold-out cover of Frampton Comes Alive. It’s ridiculous but it’s mine. I’ll take what I can get.

This piece, written in 2020, was the seed of what eventually became a song of the same title.

Hippie hair—for the first time

I feel myself sliding toward the ’70s—back to my teenage bedroom with Farrah Fawcett on the wall, Mad magazine on the night table, Doobie Brothers on the clock radio.

Hippie hair—for the first time

I feel myself sliding toward the ’70s—back to my teenage bedroom with Farrah Fawcett on the wall, Mad magazine on the night table, Doobie Brothers on the clock radio.

Guitar Sessions 57: Play Bob Weir’s “Only a River”