Galt MacDermot, Composer of the Rock Musical 'Hair,' Dies at 89.
'Galt MacDermot, who composed the score for “Hair,” the tribal rock musical that shocked mainstream theatergoers as it celebrated the drug-crazed, free-love, antiwar rebellious energy of hippies in the 1960s, died on Monday at his home in Staten Island. He was 89.
His daughter Molly MacDermot confirmed the death.
In 1968, when “Hair” opened on Broadway, Mr. MacDermot, a Canadian, cut an unlikely figure as its composer. His hair was short, he wore a shirt and tie, he didn’t smoke marijuana or drink alcohol, and he was approaching 40 — putting him on the far side of the generation gap.
John Lennon once invited him to a party, Ms. MacDermot said, but he didn’t go, preferring to head home to Staten Island, where he was raising his family.
“I never even heard of a hippie,” Mr. MacDermot told Playbill when he was asked to score “Hair,” whose book and lyrics had been written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni. . .
It was “the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday,” the critic Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times. Mr. MacDermot’s music, Mr. Barnes added, had “strong soothing overtones of Broadway melody, but it precisely serves its purpose.” . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=ADNbtAID5wM
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/obituaries/galt-macdermot-dead.html?