GREAT MOMENTS IN MUSTACHE MUSIC HISTORY: 1979: BLOW AWAY

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With Mustache March sadly coming to a close, we want to thank all our mustachioed readers this month. We’d also like to leave you all with some positive mustache music vibes and another great moment in mustache music history – to leave a smile on your face, even if it’s hidden beneath some hair.


1979: George Harrison resurfaces from a three-year beard stint with the eponymous album release George Harrison. Sporting a very handsome classic chevron and feathered bangs, Harrison spreads an infectious, positive, up-tempo, stache-pop vibe into the disco wasteland of the late 1970s. He also provides a glimmer of light in dark times: a hostage crisis in Tehran, oil hitting $24 a barrel, Three Mile Island, the untimely death of Sid Vicious’, a gratuitous YMCA libel suit against the Village People, and Chic’s “Le Freak” going #1 on Cashbox. Enough was enough.  The world was in convulsions from, not one, but several sucker punches to its proverbial balls.

But the winds of stache-pop are about to blow away those dark clouds.The appearance of George Harrison’s philtrum-warmer – “the yang to [his] yin” – signals a change as well as a celebratory period of domestic happiness for the quiet Beatle – a time of integral vision, peace, jhana, or kwanthat often accompanies the liberation of face and body consciousness. Ten years later, the same fur pelt that saved the Beatles from disbanding in ’69, saves George from a period of personal strife: his album peaks at number 14 on U.S. billboard charts and goes gold with “Blow Away,” which many have interpreted as a lyrical love letter to his own crumb-catcher. George’s message in this ballad is simple: “all I’ve got to do is to, to love you. All I’ve got to be is, be happy.” In fact, the wisdom proffered in these lines is a recurring theme in George’s personal and professional life of the 1970s, as he explores eastern religions in his quest for personal contentment.

“Blow Away” becomes one of George’s most popular solo-stache career hits, solidifying the mouth mane as the true path to success. The simplistic, styled video is pioneering in mustache music videos, introducing the super-imposed, mirror-image profile mustache shot. At the end of the original Concert for Bangladesh vinyl, George sneaks in a subliminal message that, to this day, has yet to be deciphered. It is rumored to be a nod to the Beatles – perhaps some Krishna wisdom. There is, however, a strong case to be made that George’s cryptic message has always been the same:

Mustache consciousness is not something imposed on the mind. On the contrary, it’s already inside of each of us, waiting to come out, like fire in a match. Growing a mustache brings out that natural, pure state of mind. We’ll become happy, and our lives will become sublime. Wherever there is mustache, there will be everlasting prosperity, victory, happiness, and morality.

Discosalt could not agree more. Until next year, champange wishes and mustache dreams!

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