An ever decreasing proportion of youse out there will remember the 1960s and an even smaller subset of youse will remember The Incredible String Band. For those of you who belong to neither of the aforementioned groups, the 1960s were the years in which your parents, or even grandparents, grew up and in which much of the population of the privileged western world discovered dope, LSD, rock music and how to identify and talk about STD’s. Many stopped shaving–or, indeed, cutting hair of any kind–and some began pondering, yea, even acting on the theretofore alien idea that people with different shaped reproductive organs and/or manifesting variations of other superficial phenotypes might also be members of their own, misnamed species, homo sapiens sapiens.
Though this latter idea has yet to really gain traction with the general populous, the hair thing really took off leading to a mighty surplus of bearded lads in sandals running about the place. Three of those lads formed the ISB in 1966 and the most bearded and sandled one of them all, Robin Williamson, composed October Song.