Yet, for all that happened in this pivotal year, my focus is on the feeling, not on the calendar, and there are moments integral to the story that occurred both before and after 1967. Nevertheless, 1968, taken as a whole, was much darker—Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy (who joined the presidential race early in the year) were both assassinated, and that year’s primary political legacy was the violent police reaction to protests outside of the Democratic National Convention, and the subsequent election of Richard Nixon.
Forces in the government and corporate America conspired to crush the cultural rebellions, but they were aided by infighting on the political left, a syndrome which, legend has it, led Che Guevara to quip that if you asked American leftists to form a firing squad, they’d get into a circle.
Hubris and/or paranoia distorted the behavior of would-be leaders, while in many corners of the subculture there developed smug, hip parochialism that grew rancid over time. Too often, “heads” looked down on “straights,” which caused more polarization than brotherhood.
By 1968, heroin and speed were ubiquitous in hippie culture. An assortment of lowlife parasites rushed in to exploit the explosive hippie scene and virtually erased the fragile, intense meaning the word “hippie” had embodied just a year earlier. Undercover FBI agents could grow their hair long and wear brightly colored clothes.
The market for products that hippies liked created a class of hip capitalists who had varying degrees of commitment to ethical and spiritual ideals. The shallower aspects of Hollywood started to take their toll. Words like “cool” and “groovy” and sitar riffs could all be dumbed down to support sitcom gags and could be appropriated by superficial bullshit artists.
As the decades passed, the music of the period would prove to be the most resilient trigger of authentic memories, but even some of the songs of the era were gradually drained of meaning by repetitive use in TV shows, movies, and commercials, all trying to leverage nostalgia. Nostalgia for what?
The efforts of millions of peace activists were sometimes overshadowed by the destructive, violent acts of a few dozen delusional radicals. An earnest spiritual movement became obscured to most observers by stoned, pontificating buffoons. No wonder the punk movement that began in the midseventies detested the cartoon distortion of hippies.
Even so, every other belief system has had its pretenders. If one extends the religious metaphor to the hippie idea, it’s not really surprising that its existence didn’t eliminate most of the darkness of the world. Neither did Christianity nor the Enlightenment. But the counterculture did broaden the idea of what it is to be a human being in the Western world.
There is a direct line from many of the leaders of 1967 to contemporary figures such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bernie Sanders, Judd Apatow, and Oprah Winfrey, all of whom acknowledge important influences from the figures I am writing about. The environmental movement, which is a direct offshoot of hippie ideas, continues to be a major social force, and “mindfulness” and yoga are even more prevalent in the United States of 2017 than veggie burgers.
Researching 1967 has been a roller coaster ride for me. Sometimes it rekindles the “lost chord” and inspires me. At other moments I yearn to go back in time and warn my heroes that they are about to walk down a path they will regret.
As I explored the forgotten intricacies of 1967, the hippie idea that entranced me as a teenager still seems like an alchemy that produced something unique and special out of the energies and aspirations of dozens of disparate, intense, and cantankerous people, many of them deeply damaged, all of them in one way or another very far out.
That line—if you remember the sixties, you weren’t really there—does have some truth to it. In addition to hallucinogens, the drug of fame often led to fanciful mythmaking. Some stories have been repeated so many times that they have taken on a life of their own. Even close friends have different versions of well-known events. The underground press, whose writers were often the only public witnesses to countercultural activities, had little or no fact-checking capabilities. I have done my best to get it right, but apologize in advance for any faulty assumptions.
Examined up close, there were dozens of separate subcultures, each of which felt it owned the late sixties. San Francisco and Los Angeles rock-and-roll people were deeply suspicious of each other. The Beatles lived in their own world. New York hip life was more intellectual. Black nationalism, the nonviolent civil rights movement led by Dr. King, Muhammad Ali, and the Nation of Islam had fierce disagreements with each other, and they all had different views of the antiwar movement. Student radicals, the old left, liberal antiwar Democrats like Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy, and anarchists often detested each other. Beatniks, psychedelic evangelists, and mystics were often on separate planets.
Yet to many teenagers at the time, this collection of energies somehow harmonized and created a single feeling, the lost chord that lasted briefly, but penetrated deeply into the minds and hearts of those who could hear it. I admired something about all of them. I never felt aligned with just one faction but with the ephemeral collective vibe that permeated the culture. Time was so compressed that many of the signature events of 1967 happened within hours or days of each other. Often they were intertwined. My fascination is with the whole, not merely its parts. However, if I could time travel back to 1967, there is no question that I would begin in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco.
CHAPTER 1
being in
The precursor to the brief cycle in which Haight-Ashbury was the biggest counterculture magnet in the Western world is generally thought to have begun in the summer of 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada—just across the border from Northern California—where a rock band called the Charlatans played for several months. They took a lot of acid and created some of the first light shows and psychedelic concert posters. They wore Edwardian clothing, conveyed a weird nostalgia for idealized prenuclear America, and revered Native Americans. Although the Charlatans never developed the national following of other San Francisco bands, they were integral to many of the big rock events in the Bay Area in the late sixties. (Dan Hicks of the Charlatans would go on to form Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks.)
By the end of 1965, the Charlatans had moved to the racially integrated Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. It was near several university campuses and had become a center for artists, beatniks, and other bohemians, primarily because of its cheap rents. There were many large Victorian houses, which had up to six bedrooms and cost as little as $120 a month. By the end of 1966, the twenty-five square blocks had a distinctive culture. One could see mandalas made of yarn and drawings from Native American and Eastern religious traditions in many windows. A group of merchants with names like God’s Eye Ice Cream and Pizza Parlor had sprung up to service the new residents. Members of the new psychedelic rock bands Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company all moved into the neighborhood.
On January 3, 1966, the Psychedelic Shop opened on 1535 Haight Street, signaling a turning point in the growth of the area as a countercultural center. The store sold books on Eastern religion and the occult, records of Indian music, beads, incense, posters, pipes, and other paraphernalia. It would be the prototype for hundreds of “head shops” that would open up across America in the coming years. A couple of weeks later, the Trips Festival attracted what was at the time a staggeringly high number of people—six thousand over the course of a weekend—to the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco. Many of the attendees drank fruit punch spiked with LSD while watching performances by popular local bands.
By the end of the summer of 1966, several thousand hippies were living in the Haight, and in the fall a new publication called the San Francisco Oracle appeared. During its brief but glorious eighteen months of existence, the Oracle was as definitive a document as would ever exist of the messianic aspirations of the Haight-Ashbury scene. (Tattered individual copies regularly se
ll for hundreds of dollars on eBay.) The paper was conceived by editor Allen Cohen and art director Michael Bowen. Cohen said he had a dream of a newspaper with rainbows on it that was read all over the world. Both of the Oracle founders were acidheads. Cohen sold some of famed LSD maker Augustus Owsley Stanley III’s earliest tablets, and Bowen had been arrested with LSD pioneer Timothy Leary in Millbrook, New York.
The initial $500 investment for the Oracle came from Ron Thelin, who ran the Psychedelic Shop with his brother Jay. The Oracle featured brightly colored psychedelic art and essays by and about counterculture luminaries. In its first issue it had a manifesto with a founding-fathers-on-acid declaration: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to cease [obeying] obsolete social patterns which have isolated man from his consciousness . . . we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all hate-carrying men and women.”
The Oracle regularly printed articles by and interviews with luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Richard Alpert, and Timothy Leary. Within a few months the Oracle could be found in nascent hip communities in every region of the United States and many other parts of the world. With typical grandiosity Leary stated, “If the Buddha were alive, he would read the Oracle.”
However, the Oracle did not speak for most political radicals and it certainly did not represent the vibe of the Diggers, an American collective who took their name from a group of seventeenth-century British radicals opposed to the Church of England and the British Crown.
The sixties Diggers delighted in tormenting brothers and sisters in the hippie and radical political communities for being insufficiently pure. The Diggers did not believe in money or any external measure of accomplishment. They berated head shop owners, concert promoters, and others in San Francisco who made money from the culture, and they detested media coverage of the scene.
The Diggers had emerged from the avant-garde San Francisco Mime Troupe and were more about performance art than politics. On the streets of Haight-Ashbury, the Diggers sometimes wore animal masks, held up traffic, passed out joints to people on the street, and gave away fake dollar bills printed with winged penises. They also organized a lot of the free concerts that helped cohere the Haight-Ashbury community. They got ahold of a mimeograph machine and began printing and distributing a newsletter under the name the Communication Company. One of their flyers read: “To show Love is to fail. To love to fail is the Ideology of Failure. Show Love. Do your thing. Do it for FREE. Do it for Love. We can’t fail.”
The Diggers also felt a moral imperative to address the day-to-day realities of poor people. They made “Digger stew” from day-old food gathered from local markets and gave away hundreds of meals a week. They also briefly operated a “free store” in Haight-Ashbury that gave away donated clothing.
Emmett Grogan of the Diggers was an intense twenty-four-year-old from Brooklyn with movie-star good looks and a fierce vision of cultural revolution. In his memoir Ringolevio, Grogan expressed Digger thinking at the time, railing against “the pansyness of the SF Oracle underground newspaper, and the way it catered to the new, hip, moneyed class by refusing to reveal the overall grime of Haight-Ashbury reality.” He detested the “absolute bullshit implicit in the psychedelic transcendentalism promoted by the self-proclaimed, media-fabricated shamans who espoused the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out, jerk-off ideology of Leary and Alpert.” Grogan wrote that he “immediately dismissed as ridiculous the notion that everything would be all right when everyone turned on to acid.”
The other best-known Digger was the twenty-five-year-old Peter Cohon, who would soon change his name to Peter Coyote and in the decades that followed have a successful career as an actor in dozens of Hollywood films including E.T.
One person who was equally at home in the worlds of the beatniks, radicals, acidheads, and rock and roll was Allen Ginsberg. In addition to his explorations of psychedelics, he was an unrelenting critic of militarism. In 1966, he wrote a poem called “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which mocked Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had described one of his errors in escalating the war in Vietnam as a “bad guess.” The poem included some of the very few public references to the allegedly closeted homosexuality of J. Edgar Hoover and Cardinal Spellman of New York, who was also one of the biggest cheerleaders for the war in Vietnam: “How big is Cardinal Vietnam? / How little the prince of the FBI, unmarried all these years!”
I worked with Ginsberg on his last recordings in the early nineties and asked him if he knew that Hoover was gay. The poet nodded. Why had he not been more outspoken about Hoover’s sexuality at a time when the FBI director was wreaking havoc on the lives of so many decent people? Ginsberg told me he had a friend when he was a college student at Columbia who regularly had sex with Cardinal Spellman and who asked the prelate if he weren’t worried that his career would be ruined if his propensity for having sex with young men was ever made public. Spellman supposedly laughed and said defiantly, “Who would believe it?” Ginsberg explained to me that in the context of the repressive power of the establishment at the time, the words of the poem were as far as he felt he could safely go.
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” also made clear Ginsberg’s antipathy to Soviet-style communism, which, among its many moral shortcomings, was repressive in the arts.
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality—
Communism is a 9 letter word
used by inferior magicians
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
With his black horn-rimmed glasses, long black beard, and white Indian shirt, Ginsberg, despite being forty years old at a moment when youth was ascendant, was one of the most recognizable figures of the counterculture. Although he was often profane, was openly gay, and was an unapologetic left-winger, Ginsberg’s literary brilliance and flair for self-promotion had propelled him to a level of celebrity rarely found in bohemian history. Unique among the beat writers, Ginsberg had embraced sixties rock and roll and the hippie culture. He had taken LSD with Tim Leary and Ken Kesey, and had been befriended by the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
Known primarily for poetry, advocacy of free speech in the arts, and mysticism, Ginsberg was also a peace activist and had withheld a percentage of his taxes as a form of protest against the war. The IRS notified him at some point that they would seize $182.71 from his Howl and Other Poems royalties, which, among other things, was a testament to how little compensation there was in being America’s most famous poet.
When the editors of the Oracle wanted to get the counterculture to the next level in early 1967, Allen Ginsberg was the indispensable man to help them do so.
Gathering of the Tribes
Ginsberg would later say that the Be-In in San Francisco in early 1967 was “the last purely idealistic hippie event,” but at the time the notion that the spiral of sixties countercultural growth and euphoria was peaking would have seemed absurd to those involved. There were more “heads” every single day.
Organizing an event with self-proclaimed revolutionaries, radicals, and cosmic explorers had not been easy. The very term “Be-In” was a mocking hippie twist on the civil rights movement’s term “sit-in” and the Vietnam War protest’s “teach-in.” The phrase was also a pun—another way of saying “being,” as in “human being.” (Like much hip language, the device had a short shelf life before going mainstream. An NBC network prime-time comedy show called Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In would debut in September 1968.)
There were intense factions whose conflicts with each other were at the center of day-to-day life at the center of the hippie storm. Hence the subtitle of the 1967 San Francisco Be-In: “A Gathering of the Tribes.” Tribes, plural.
The Be-In sprang from the minds of the Oracle’s Allen Cohen and Michael Bowen. Cohen saw the counterculture in glorious terms. Years later he would write, “The beat and hippie movements brought the values and experiences of an anarchistic, artistic subcultur
e, and a secret and ancient tradition of transcendental and esoteric knowledge and experience, into the mainstream of cultural awareness . . . [It] gave us back a sense of being the originators of our lives and social forms, instead of hapless robot receptors of a dull and determined conformity.”
A few months earlier, a police shooting of a black youth on September 27, 1966, led to riots in the Hunters Point neighborhood and a curfew was imposed in San Francisco. Bowen put up posters telling hippies to stay inside. Emmett Grogan, on the other hand, posted signs saying, Disobey the Fascist Curfew. Each took down the other’s signs. The two men ran into each other at a telephone pole, and they began an argument which would persist throughout 1967.
“The Diggers were . . . passionately critical of the commercialization of the Haight,” wrote Cohen. “Generally, the atmosphere around the Diggers was desperate, dark, and tense, while at the ordinary hippie pad, it was light, meditative, and creative, with a mixture of rock and raga music, Oriental aesthetics, and vegetarian food.” Maybe so, but at their peak the Diggers were providing five hundred free meals a week to people in the community, which brought them a lot of credibility on the street.
If Cohen and Bowen were going to be successful in pulling off the Be-In as a true “gathering,” they needed to avoid a torrent of negativity from the Diggers, who initially saw it as a gimmick created by an organization of head shops and a loose conglomeration of “hip stores” called the Haight Independent Proprietors (HIP). The Diggers were suspicious that HIP was hoping to attract national publicity so that they could sell “hippie products” to chain stores and at the same time attract more tourists to Haight-Ashbury.
While it’s impossible to know the inner motivation of every Haight merchant of the time, the Digger theory does seem to have been an unfair characterization of Ron Thelin, whose shop was part of HIP. Thelin soon thereafter told the Oracle, “The direction I see it taking is getting back to the land and finding out how to take care of ourselves, how to survive, how to live off the land, how to make our own clothes, grow our own food, how to live in a tribal unit.” (In October 1967 the Psychedelic Store would close and Thelin would move to Marin County, where for the rest of his life he worked as a cab driver, a mason, and a carpenter.) At the Oracle, Cohen and his colleagues lived hand-to-mouth and avoided the kinds of tabloid stories that drove up the circulation of typical “underground” newspapers; they rejected sleazy ads as well.
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 2
