The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  There was a pause.

  “I’ve learned a lot in these past few years,” Dylan said softly. “Like about beauty.”

  I reminded him of what he had said about his changing criteria of beauty in some notes he did for a Joan Baez album. There he had written that when he first heard her voice, before he knew her, his reaction had been:

  “I hate that kind a sound,” said I

  “The only beauty’s ugly, man

  The crackin’, shakin’, breakin’ sounds’re

  The only beauty I understand.”

  Dylan laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I was wrong. My hangup was that I used to try to define beauty. Now I take it as it is, however it is. That’s why I like Hemingway. I don’t read much. Usually I read what people put in my hands. But I do read Hemingway. He didn’t have to use adjectives. He didn’t really have to define what he was saying. He just said it. I can’t do that yet, but that’s what I want to be able to do.”

  A young actor from Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre troupe stopped by the table, and Dylan shook hands with him enthusiastically. “We’re leaving for Europe soon,” the actor said. “But when we come back, we’re going out on the street. We’re going to put on plays right on the street, for anyone who wants to watch.”

  “Hey!” said Dylan, bouncing in his seat. “Tell Julian and Judith that I want to be in on that.”

  The actor said he would, and took Dylan’s telephone number. Then he said, “Bob, are you doing only your own songs now—none of the old folk songs at all?”

  “Have to,” Dylan answered. “When I’m up tight and it’s raining outside and nobody’s around and somebody I want is a long way from me—and with someone else besides—I can’t sing ‘Ain’t Got No Use for Your Red Apple Juice.’ I don’t care how great an old song it is or what its tradition is. I have to make a new song out of what I know and out of what I’m feeling.”

  The conversation turned to civil rights, and the actor used the term “the Movement” to signify the work of the civil-rights activists. Dylan looked at him quizzically. “I agree with everything that’s happening,” he said, “but I’m not part of no Movement. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but be in ‘the Movement.’ I just can’t have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no Movement would allow.” He took a long drink of Beaujolais. “It’s like politics,” he went on. “I just can’t make it with any organization. I fell into a trap once—last December—when I agreed to accept the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. At the Americana Hotel! In the Grand Ballroom! As soon as I got there, I felt up tight. First of all, the people with me couldn’t get in. They looked even funkier than I did, I guess. They weren’t dressed right, or something. Inside the ballroom, I really got up tight. I began to drink. I looked down from the platform and saw a bunch of people who had nothing to do with my kind of politics. I looked down and I got scared. They were supposed to be on my side, but I didn’t feel any connection with them. Here were these people who’d been all involved with the left in the thirties, and now they were supporting civil-rights drives. That’s groovy, but they also had minks and jewels, and it was like they were giving the money out of guilt. I got up to leave, and they followed me and caught me. They told me I had to accept the award. When I got up to make my speech, I couldn’t say anything by that time but what was passing through my mind. They’d been talking about Kennedy being killed, and Bill Moore and Medgar Evers and the Buddhist monks in Vietnam being killed. I had to say something about Lee Oswald. I told them I’d read a lot of his feelings in the papers, and I knew he was up tight. Said I’d been up tight, too, so I’d got a lot of his feelings. I saw a lot of myself in Oswald, I said, and I saw in him a lot of the times we’re all living in. And, you know, they started booing. They looked at me like I was an animal. They actually thought I was saying it was a good thing Kennedy had been killed. That’s how far out they are. I was talking about Oswald. And then I started talking about friends of mine in Harlem—some of them junkies, all of them poor. And I said they need freedom as much as anybody else, and what’s anybody doing for them? The chairman was kicking my leg under the table, and I told him, ‘Get out of here.’ Now, what I was supposed to be was a nice cat. I was supposed to say, ‘I appreciate your award and I’m a great singer and I’m a great believer in liberals, and you buy my records and I’ll support your cause.’ But I didn’t, and so I wasn’t accepted that night. That’s the cause of a lot of those chains I was talking about—people wanting to be accepted, people not wanting to be alone. But, after all, what is it to be alone? I’ve been alone sometimes in front of three thousand people. I was alone that night.”

  The actor nodded sympathetically.

  Dylan snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot,” he said. “You know, they were talking about Freedom Fighters that night. I’ve been in Mississippi, man. I know those people on another level besides civil-rights campaigns. I know them as friends. Like Jim Forman, one of the heads of S.N.C.C. I’ll stand on his side any time. But those people that night were actually getting me to look at colored people as colored people. I tell you, I’m never going to have anything to do with any political organization again in my life. Oh, I might help a friend if he was campaigning for office. But I’m not going to be part of any organization. Those people at that dinner were the same as everybody else. They’re doing their time. They’re chained to what they’re doing. The only thing is, they’re trying to put morals and great deeds on their chains, but basically they don’t want to jeopardize their positions. They got their jobs to keep. There’s nothing there for me, and there’s nothing there for the kind of people I hang around with. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I guess I hurt the collection at the dinner. I didn’t know they were going to try to collect money after my speech. I guess I lost them a lot of money. Well, I offered to pay them whatever it was they figured they’d lost because of the way I talked. I told them I didn’t care how much it was. I hate debts, especially moral debts. They’re worse than money debts.”

  Exhausted by his monologue, Dylan sank back and poured more Beaujolais. “People talk about trying to change society,” he said. “All I know is that so long as people stay so concerned about protecting their status and protecting what they have, ain’t nothing going to be done. Oh, there may be some change of levels inside the circle, but nobody’s going to learn anything.”

  The actor left, and it was time for Dylan to head back upstate. “Come up and visit next week,” he said to me, “and I’ll give you a ride on my motorcycle.” He hunched his shoulders and walked off quickly.

  Jane Kramer

  AUGUST 17, 1968 (ALLEN GINSBERG)

  “You’re such an experimenter, Allen.”

  —Louis Ginsberg to his son Allen, Paterson, New Jersey, March 18, 1967

  IN JANUARY OF 1967, on the night before the first evangelical picnic anywhere to be called a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In, Allen Ginsberg, the poet, took off his shoes and sat down cross-legged on the living-room floor of an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, to preside over what was very likely the oddest planning-committee meeting in the city’s crazy and indulgent history. There were eight people in a circle on the floor with Ginsberg. It was their last chance to arrive at some sort of schedule for the next day’s program of poetry readings, sacred Sanskrit chanting, psychedelic-rock concerts, and communal love, and they worked together smoothly for about an hour. Then, when they were down to the last item on the agenda—determining whether the LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary, who was coming to the be-in all the way from New York, was to be considered a poet, and therefore allotted seven minutes on the bandstand, or a bona-fide prophet, and therefore entitled to a full half hour—the committee members found that they could not agree. Philosophically baffled by the fine line between poetry and prophecy, they took a break, at Ginsberg’s suggestion, to think things over and wait for guidance. Gary Snyd
er, a red-bearded Zen monk from the state of Washington, who is a poet himself, immediately stripped for meditation down to the earring in his left ear and went to work displacing his rib cage with violent yogi machinations. Near him, a chubby Hasidic book reviewer named Leland Meyerzove started bouncing up and down with his eyes shut tight and was soon transported, wailing softly in tongues. Lenore Kandel, a local love priestess and poet, began belly-dancing in front of an attentive, tweedy English professor from Berkeley, who sucked contemplatively on his pipe, and Michael McClure, the poet and playwright, who lived in the apartment, picked up his autoharp from a coffee table and, accompanying himself, cherubically crooned a song that he had just composed, called “Come On, God, Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz.” The official master of ceremonies for the be-in, a neighborhood guru with the nom de psychedélie of Buddha, wandered around the room in a radiant array of pink, orange, green, and purple silks and velvets, kissing everybody until he was faint with affection and sank down on the floor next to a pretty young photographer, who was stretched out on her back taking pictures of the ceiling. The last committee member was Freewheelin’ Frank, the secretary of the San Francisco Hell’s Angels and the commandant of a be-in honor guard of motorcycle outlaws, who were going to protect the celebrants and their electronic paraphernalia from saboteurs. Freewheelin’, who had been leaning against a wall nodding noncommittally from time to time, took stock of the available opportunities for spiritual refreshment, shrugged, and began pacing Mr. Meyerzove’s bounces with a tambourine that was fastened to one of the cartridge rings on his leather belt.

  Ginsberg himself—forty years old, getting bald and a little myopic—stayed in the middle of the floor, his horn-rimmed glasses on and his shoes off, staring at a pair of unmatched socks. He made a comfortable, avuncular presence—a rumpled, friendly-looking man with a nice, toothy face, big brown owl eyes behind the glasses, and a rather affecting weary slouch. Without his beads, and the bushy tangle of full beard, droopy mustache, and long black ringlets, hanging like a thatch corona from his bald spot, that has become as emblematic as the Beatles’ bangs or Albert Einstein’s mop of wild white hair, Ginsberg might have passed for the market researcher he once was, for a few years in the fifties. Tonight, he was dressed in chinos, a worn white button-down shirt, and an old striped Shetland pullover. He had put on two necklaces for the meeting—a string of blue Hopi stones and some Yoruba beads, from Cuba, in the seven colors of the seven Yoruba gods—and also had a Mexican Indian metal god’s-eye dangling from a piece of rope around his neck, and he was wearing a Tibetan oracle’s ring on the forefinger of his right hand. On the floor in front of him were two brass finger cymbals from Times Square and a purple woollen shopping bag from Greece. The bag contained a large address book, an appointment pad, one of the School Time composition books in which he likes to jot down thoughts, and a tattered copy of Prajna Paramita Sutra, a sacred Buddhist text concerning the ultimate nature of the universe.

  “Man, I’d just as soon no one says a word tomorrow,” Buddha said to Ginsberg half an hour later, when the thinking was over and the committee had formed a new circle on the floor. “Just beautiful silence. Just everybody sitting around smiling and digging everybody else.”

  “What we really should have is a sunset celebration on the beach,” Ginsberg said.

  “Yeah, naked,” Snyder said, getting up and stepping back into his pants. “That would spook the city of San Francisco.”

  Ginsberg banged his cymbals. “And maybe, at the end, a groovy naked swim-in,” Ginsberg said.

  “Tim Leary’s a professor—he’s not going to want to smile and walk off, or swim,” Meyerzove broke in, panting a little and pushing back a peaked astrakhan hat, which had slipped over his forehead during his trance.

  “Well, how much time do we allow Leary?” Ginsberg asked, laughing. “I say he gets the same time as the poets.”

  “Is Leary a prima donna?” the photographer, Beth Bagby, asked. She was still lying on her back.

  “Man, I don’t think so. After all, he’s taken acid,” Buddha replied.

  “Leary just needs a little of the responsibility taken off him,” Ginsberg said firmly. “Seven minutes, and, anyway, if he gets up tight and starts to preach, Lenore can always belly-dance.”

  Seven minutes was set aside for Leary’s speech, and Ginsberg, who had been eying his cymbals, announced that now, if no one minded, he was going to chant. Looking extremely happy, he closed his eyes. He rocked for a while to the high, clattering counterpoint of the cymbals, and then he began a mantra to Siva, the Hindu god of destruction, preservation, and cannabis. The words of the mantra were “Hari om namo Sivaye,” and he chanted them slowly at first, in a kind of low, plaintive wail. His voice was deep, sweet, throbbing, and full of melody (“He sounds more like a rabbi than a swami,” Meyerzove whispered to McClure), and soon most of his friends were up and dancing around him. Miss Kandel began to whirl, her arms kneading the air and her stomach rippling to the mantra sounds. Meyerzove shook, groaning ecstatically. Snyder bounded around, samurai-like. Buddha hopped, waving a nursery rattle. And Freewheelin’ swayed, shaking his tambourine. Ginsberg chanted faster and faster, until he was sobbing, singing, and laughing at the same time. His head pitched forward with each beat of the cymbals. He seemed on the edge of consciousness, and then, for a minute, he seemed beyond consciousness and part of the strange, hypnotic rhythm of the chant. Suddenly, he was exhausted. He slumped forward, with a shudder. One by one, the others dropped onto the floor.

  “Wow!” Freewheelin’ Frank said.

  “We should be doing this tomorrow, in the park, with like five hundred thousand people,” Ginsberg said. His eyes were shining.

  “Yeah, but for a minute there we were really on our way to the delicatessen!” Buddha cried, shaking his head.

  Ginsberg jumped up, and started laughing. “Hey, I’m hungry,” he said. “Who wants to hit the doughnut shop?”

  · · ·

  In a country that has never been very comfortable in the presence of poetic heroes and prophetic poets, Ginsberg is a poet, a hero, a prophet, and a man who was largely responsible for the love-happy condition of a multitude of children. He has been revered by thousands of flower-wielding boys and girls as a combination guru and paterfamilias, and by a generation of students—who consider him a natural ally, if for no other reason than that he terrifies their parents with his elaborate and passionate friendliness—as a kind of ultimate faculty adviser. Flower Power began in the fall of 1965, when he presented a rally of beleaguered and embittered Berkeley peace marchers with a set of instructions for turning political demonstrations into “exemplary spectacle…outside the war psychology”: “Masses of flowers—a visual spectacle—especially concentrated in the front lines. Can be used to set up barricades, to present to Hell’s Angels, police, politicians, and press & spectators, whenever needed or at parade’s end….” Later, preaching and colonizing a brave new never-never world of bearded, beaded, marijuana-smoking, mantra-chanting euphoria, Ginsberg set the tone of the countless be-ins, love-ins, kiss-ins, chant-ins, sacred orgies, and demon-dispelling exorcisms of local draft boards, all of which began with the San Francisco Gathering of the Tribes.

  A year and a half has passed since the Gathering and the first epidemic of hippie celebrations. Although there are still many hippies around—this summer particular attention has been given to those on Boston Common—they have begun to drop back into history. In the youth movement, the emphasis has shifted from love to political activism. The Haight-Ashbury has outlived its short, exemplary season and has deteriorated into a bizarre and shadowy nighttown, feeding on some of the hippie culture’s more grotesque innovations, but it has been replaced as a Utopia by hundreds of hippie enclaves in cities and towns, and on campuses, across the country. Two hundred thousand children are estimated to have left home to try anything from a weekend to a life of sackcloth and marijuana ashes, and, from all reports, a few million others have spent a good deal
of time wistfully thinking about following them. Over the past year and a half, while stern city councilmen debated hippie-curbing legislation (in Dallas, where an ordinance was passed last summer barring hippies from the downtown business section of the city, one impeccably bearded young pediatrician threatened a lawsuit against the municipality when policemen began rerouting his car as he hurried back and forth across town on house calls), the love people held their ground and, in fact, took over the landscape. They began calling press conferences to announce their metaphysical conclusions, and the media, in reply, took to carrying hippie news as a matter of national concern. Nearly every national magazine ran off a hippie issue, complete with on-the-spot coverage of the most alarming sort of LSD hallucinating and, invariably, an earnest, thoughtful “I Was a Hippie for Two Weeks” essay by one of its younger reporters. The San Francisco press boomed on fillers from the Haight-Ashbury, and toward last summer the minutiae of life in the East Village were recorded on an almost daily basis in the Times. The television networks, for their part, were busy dispatching camera crews to neo-Buddhist festivals and to teen-age “seed-power” collectives, where crops were tended on advice from the Ouija and the I Ching. The hippies, who were alternately worshipped, wooed, and taken over, soon became too fashionable to be altogether apocalyptic. By the time a group of fledgling hippie economists had torn up all their money and floated it down from the visitors’ gallery onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, chanting “Make Love Not Profits” and ringing bells, several of upper Fifth Avenue’s specialty shops were showing their first psychedelic collections and at least one brokerage house in San Francisco was offering the auxiliary services of a securities astrologer. Underwear was out and bare feet were de rigueur, according to the women’s magazines, which scoured the underground for signs of chic, and the barber business was trailing far behind the national growth rate, according to the International Herald Tribune’s recap of the financial year. Yoga replaced the Canadian Air Force exercises as the latest antidote to overeating; the Jefferson Airplane was being piped into office elevators, Greyhound waiting rooms, and Chinese restaurants; suburban couples started taking off their clothes at parties and painting each other to resemble Day-Glo Apaches; and a cheerful living-room poster of Ginsberg, whose name was once synonymous with the word “Beat” in all its connotations, became tantamount to an instant full-blown hippie ambience.