Hair (Original Broadway Cast Recording)

Hair: An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical
Psychedelic green and yellow colorized photo-negative of a man's face with a bushy "afro", reflected below in red and yellow.
Cast recording
Released1968
RecordedMay 6, 1968[1]
StudioRCA Victor, New York City
GenrePop rock, psychedelic rock, funk, R&B
Length40:25
LabelRCA Victor
ProducerBrian Drutman, Denis McNamara, Norrie Paramor, Andy Wiswell[1]

Hair is a 1968 cast recording of the musical Hair on the RCA Victor label. Sarah Erlewine, for AllMusic, wrote: "The music is heartening and invigorating, including the classics 'Aquarius,' 'Good Morning Starshine,' 'Let the Sunshine In,' 'Frank Mills' ... and 'Easy to Be Hard.' The joy that has been instilled in this original Broadway cast recording shines through, capturing in the performances of creators Gerome Ragni and James Rado exactly what they were aiming for — not to speak for their generation, but to speak for themselves."[1]

The album charted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the last Broadway cast album to do so. Hair's cast album stayed at No. 1 for 13 weeks in 1969.[2]

The recording also received a Grammy Award in 1969 for Best Score from an Original Cast Show Album[3] and sold nearly 3 million copies in the U.S. by December 1969.[4] The New York Times noted in 2007 that "The cast album of Hair was ... a must-have for the middle classes. Its exotic orange-and-green cover art imprinted itself instantly and indelibly on the psyche. ... [It] became a pop-rock classic that, like all good pop, has an appeal that transcends particular tastes for genre or period."[5] In 2018, the Original Broadway Cast Recording was added to the National Recording Registry.[6]

  1. ^ a b c Erlewine, Sarah. "Hair [Original Broadway Cast Recording]", AllMusic.com, accessed October 1, 2015
  2. ^ Grein, Paul. "Chart Watch: The Hamilton Mixtape Makes History" Archived December 13, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Yahoo Music, December 12, 2016
  3. ^ "Grammy Awards 1969", AwardsandShows.com, accessed March 6, 2017
  4. ^ "Television: "Hairzapoppin'"", Time (December 12, 1969). Retrieved on June 24, 2020.
  5. ^ Isherwood, Charles (September 16, 2007). "The Aging of Aquarius". The New York Times, accessed May 25, 2008.
  6. ^ Culwell-Block, Logan. "Hair Original Broadway Cast Album Inducted Into Library of Congress' National Recording Registry", Playbill, March 21, 2019

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