The dream had burned down and a hallucination was stirring within the ashes. America confronted its bicentennial by a fog of paranoia, disillusioned and fearful. The president was a criminal, the Struggle had been for nothing, and, when you appeared anxious about any of it, the physician would get you hooked on Valium. It was time to look elsewhere. “We dwell in an odd time,” the mystic thinker David Spangler wrote in Revelation: The Beginning of a New Age. “A brand new consciousness of actuality, a brand new picture of humanity and of the universe is taking form in our midst.” We have been getting into a New Age.
No person may have anticipated the debut album from William Ackerman, a 26-year-old Palo Alto carpenter, to have a hand in ushering on this new consciousness. In Search of the Turtle’s Navel had been recorded on a whim and pressed in a restricted run. It was an impressionistic, instrumental people document, impressed by the fingerstyle guitarists John Fahey and Robbie Basho, and the turn-of-the-century French minimalist composer Erik Satie. He had ordered 300 copies from the urgent plant as a result of that was their minimal order, and he fairly moderately anticipated to have two-thirds of them in his closet perpetually.
As a substitute, In Search of the Turtle’s Navel lit the lengthy fuse of the brand new age music explosion and cleared a path for Ackerman’s personal wildly profitable document label, Windham Hill. Over the following decade, Windham Hill would develop so massive that it might successfully change into its personal style, with a sprawling roster of artists and an air of invincibility strengthened by hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in gross sales yearly.
Its gently evocative and wordless albums, technically excellent and all the time engineered in excessive constancy, had their very own part at some Tower Information places. The label spent a fraction of what the majors did on promoting, as a result of their albums principally bought themselves. George Winston’s Autumn, launched in 1980, did for Windham Hill what Keith Jarrett’s Köln Live performance had performed for the German jazz label ECM 5 years earlier than, promoting hundreds of thousands of copies and spawning a military of devotees who sought out the label as an alternative of particular person artists. To its myriad critics, it was “yuppie Muzak,” artless and passionless and formless, “the right music for laundry one’s BMW,” crowed a chunk in Time Journal. However that didn’t sluggish gross sales.
Together with his blue denims, thick cotton shirts, and unkempt ash-blond hair, Ackerman appeared much less like a businessman and extra just like the cool youth minister at your native Unitarian church—a picture enhanced by the acoustic guitar that accompanied him in most press pictures. He had grown up on the outskirts of the Age of Aquarius, adopted as a child by a professor at Stanford who lived subsequent to campus. As a child, he fell in love with the big folk-revival band the Kingston Trio, who practiced close by and let him hand around in their rehearsal house. His babysitter was a beatnik who smuggled him into bohemian cafes to soak up the zeitgeist, and a next-door neighbor taught him the fundamentals of the guitar—sufficient to play rhythm in a covers band.
