In 1963, when anticommunism was still a centerpiece of mainstream American political ideology and censorship still a real threat to writers, the Realist sold a red, white, and blue bumper sticker that read, FUCK COMMUNISM. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut described the publication as “a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s E=mc2 . . . At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable . . . By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.” Krassner made thousands of dollars selling the bumper stickers and with some of the proceeds he paid for a ticket for radical journalist Robert Scheer to travel to Vietnam, one of the first nonestablishment writers to report on the war.
Until his early thirties, Krassner eschewed all drugs and alcohol, but after hearing about LSD from many friends, he took it for the first time in April 1965 at Timothy Leary’s house in Millbrook. Just as Aldous Huxley has been transported by listening to Bach a decade earlier, Krassner absorbed the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night and wept. For his second trip, he hung out with Richard Alpert at the Village Vanguard. Then, in early 1966, he went to San Francisco and participated in one of Ken Kesey’s “Acid Tests.”
Krassner had the Diggers guest-edit an issue of the Realist and he himself did an interview with the Oracle in 1967. Here’s an excerpt:
Oracle: Did your atheism change after LSD in any quantitative way?
Krassner: No, no! How could it change? There was a different god I didn’t believe in. People were Christian before Christ ever existed. People were humanistic before Humanism was ever organized. People were very loving before LSD was ever discovered.
Oracle: Leary said that in ten years we’ll have a psychedelic president.
Krassner: Just because Bobby Kennedy takes Dexedrine doesn’t mean he’s psychedelic.
In San Francisco, Ramparts magazine had started as an insular Catholic publication earlier in the sixties with a circulation of several thousand copies, but in 1964 it became the most sophisticated of counterculture publications when Warren Hinckle took over as publisher. He immediately hired Robert Scheer, the journalist Krassner had sent to Vietnam, and soon named him as editor. Ramparts was the only underground publication to have a glossy cover that could be displayed along with straight magazines, and it was one of the few with original international reporting. In 1967, it ran a photo essay titled “The Children of Vietnam,” one of the key catalysts that led Dr. King to criticize America’s involvement in the war for the first time. Ramparts published Che Guevara’s diaries, including an introduction by Fidel Castro. Ramparts was also the first to publish the diaries of future Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, which were later expanded into the best-selling book Soul on Ice.
When Greek prime minister Andreas Papandreou was imprisoned by a military junta in 1967, his then-wife Margaret asked for help from Los Angeles activist Stanley Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum met with several of the junta’s chief witnesses against Papandreou, who said their testimonies against the prime minister had been coerced; they then reiterated this on the record to Scheer. The resulting Ramparts article triggered Papandreou’s release.
The magazine was also known for compelling covers, such as one which had a photo of four hands of the magazine’s senior staff burning draft cards. By 1967, Ramparts’ national circulation was up to a quarter of a million.
My favorite example of the way the underground/mainstream media feedback loop worked is a false story that spread like wildfire in early 1967 suggesting that people could get high by scraping the inside of banana peels, boiling the residue, drying it, rolling the resulting “bananadine” into a joint, and smoking it. As with many stories from the stoned sixties, there are various versions in print, but I am pretty sure it all started at a concert by Country Joe and the Fish.
EVO, the Oracle, and the Realist all blurred the lines between reporting, embellishing, and being taken in by a story that was too much fun to ignore. (The EVO’s website has a great recap of this story in a piece called “Anatomy of the Great Banana-Smoking Hoax of 1967,” by Cary Abrams and Brooke Kroeger.) As Joe McDonald wrote on his website in 2008, the band was on a plane ride to a gig at the Kitsilano Theatre in Vancouver in mid-February 1967 when the band’s drummer, Gary “Chicken” Hirsh, told him that he had heard that there was a chemical in banana peels that could get you high if you smoked it. Hirsh’s notion that banana skins had the same hallucinogen in it as marijuana was erroneous, but Joe was happy to believe it for the moment. “We were living on peanut butter and banana sandwiches at the time and just throwing the peelings away, so this seemed like a good idea.”
At the very same concert, the band’s crew told them they were putting LSD into a water bottle in case anyone wanted to trip. They all had some, but because water with LSD tastes just like water without it, and because the banana thing had such an appeal to them, when the band got very high during the show, they attributed it to smoking the “bananadine” joints they’d rolled.
A week later, when they noticed that the subsequent smoking of bananas didn’t have any effect on them, they realized that it had simply been the acid. However, during those few days before that occurred to them, their manager ED Denson wrote a Berkeley Barb column that referenced people getting high on smoked banana peels in Vancouver and even provided the “recipe” for how to do so.
At almost exactly the same time, Donovan’s Mellow Yellow album was released. A few months earlier the title song had been a hit single so everyone in the hip world knew the lyric, “Electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze.” Years later, Donovan would reveal that he was referring to a banana-shaped vibrator that had just been produced in England, but having heard about the banana-smoking rumors in America just before the album’s release, he was coy about it in interviews at the time and he succeeded in making himself seem like he was ahead of the curve.
On the day the editors of EVO came across Denson’s column in the Barb, Paul Krassner happened to be hanging out in their office. He had just finished reading a metaphysical book called The Morning of the Magicians, which said that one of LSD’s primary effects was the release of serotonin in the brain. He mistakenly thought that bananas contained it too. That was enough for EVO to run a story about bananas. The Oracle, not wanting to be left behind, ran its own version of the story as well.
Within days, on March 4, the San Francisco Chronicle had a front-page story saying a Haight Street store window had a recipe for how to prepare banana peels to get high. Jerry Rubin, who in the wake of the Be-In was doing everything he could to cozy up to hippies, told the reporter that bananas “work every time.” By March 14, UPI picked it up from a student newspaper in Ann Arbor and it became a national story, soon covered in the New York Times.
To a teenager like me, rock stars like Donovan seemed to be a vessel for wisdom. If Donovan said something was going to be the “next phase,” it seemed like a good bet. And we wanted to believe it. To be able to easily get high without having to worry about being busted or feigning friendship with dope dealers? Heaven!
Thus, like many thousands of kids subject to the same echo chamber, some of my friends and I tried smoking bananas and we found out immediately that this did absolutely nothing to alter our consciousness. As far as we were concerned it was a dead issue, but the “story” would linger for a few months.
On March 30, the Wall Street Journal had a story with the headline, “Light Up a Banana: Students Bake Peels to Kick Up Their Heels. Exhilarating Effect Is Gained by Legal Puffing, Some Say; A Marijuana Farm Lies Idle.” On April 7, Time ran a piece focusing on the speed with which information about the psychedelic counterculture spread.
Some on the radical left took the banana fad as an example of hedonism on the part of stoners. Todd Gitlin wrote an “Op
en Letter to the Hippies,” reminding them that the primary importer of bananas to the United States was the United Fruit Company, which was complicit in imperialist oppression in Latin America.
On the April 10 telecast of the Academy Awards, host Bob Hope quipped, “Instead of dinner tonight I just smoked a banana.” It had taken less than two months for a hippie fantasy to become a mainstream joke.
Politicians predictably jumped into the fray. On April 19, Congressman Frank Thompson, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced the Banana Labeling Act, requiring a warning sticker similar to that on cigarette packaging. Shortly thereafter, Dr. James Goddard, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), declared that the agency would be conducting tests to determine if smoking banana peels was intoxicating. On May 29, the FDA announced that the tests resulted in “no detectable quantities of known hallucinogens.”
The Cover of Time
Time had a long tradition of naming a “Man of the Year” (now, “Person of the Year”), and at the beginning of 1966 they had given the nod to the head of the US armed forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland. One year later, they named the entire generation of people “twenty-five and younger” as their “People of the Year.”
On July 7, 1967, Time’s cover story was “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture.” Group Image, the New York music and art commune, designed the cover. Although there were a few obligatory sarcastic lines (a photo caption read, “Beards, beads, and bangles—conforming nonconformity”), the writer (Time did not have bylines with their pieces in those days) clearly had more affection for the culture than was typically found in mainstream media. The piece began: “One sociologist calls them ‘the Freudian proletariat.’ Another observer sees them as ‘expatriates living on our shores but beyond our society.’ Historian Arnold Toynbee describes them as ‘a red warning light for the American way of life.’ For California’s Bishop James Pike, they evoke the early Christians: ‘There is something about the temper and quality of these people, a gentleness, a quietness, an interest—something good.’” Only in the second paragraph was it acknowledged that to worried parents, “[hippies] seem more like dangerously deluded dropouts.”
The article asserted that if there were such a thing as a hippie “code,” it would include:
—Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want.
—Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly.
—Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun.
Time estimated that there were around three hundred thousand self-identified hippies in the US at the time, and that they were predominantly white, middle class, educated, and ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-five. “Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy, and nonviolence . . . Their professed aim is nothing less than the subversion of Western society by ‘flower power’ and the force of example.”
In deference to Time’s Cold War politics (and consistent with the worst nightmares of political radicals), the five pages of text and six additional pages of photos mentioned neither Vietnam nor civil rights nor any other political issues intertwined with hip culture. The closest they came to acknowledging hippie engagement in the larger society were references to a New York protest of leash laws for dog owners, a $2,100 bail fund for people busted for pot, and a report from Dallas that a hundred “flower children” had protested an ordinance that would prohibit public gatherings at Stone Place Mall. (In other sections of the same issue, Time reported on the recent race riots in Buffalo and how troop levels in Vietnam were up to 463,000 while some generals said they needed to get the number to 600,000.)
Most of the photos showed anonymous hippies at locales such as a rural commune, a crash pad on the Lower East Side, and a geodesic dome in Drop City, Colorado. The only images of living celebrities were of Timothy Leary (“Grand shaman of psychedelia”), the Grateful Dead, and the Beatles. There were also photos of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Gautama Buddha, and St. Francis, who were called “antecedents from the past.”
The Time cover story printed the Random House Dictionary of the English Language’s definition of “psychedelic”: “Of or noting a mental state of great calm, intensely pleasurable perception of the senses, esthetic entrancement and creative impetus; of or noting any of the group of drugs producing this effect.” The magazine went on to write favorably of “an impassioned belief in the self-revealing, mind-expanding powers of potent weeds and seeds and chemical compounds known to man since prehistory but wholly alien to the rationale of Western society.” University of Chicago theologian Martin E. Marty was quoted on the subject of hippies: “They reveal ‘the exhaustion of a tradition: Western, production-directed, problem-solving, goal-oriented and compulsive in its way of thinking.’” An unnamed West Coast hippie defined shared counterculture values: “The standard thing is to feel in the gut that middle-class values are wrong . . . the way America recognizes that communism is all wrong.”
The piece ended on as positive a note as it had begun:
Indeed, it could be argued that in their independence of material possessions and their emphasis on peacefulness and honesty, hippies lead considerably more virtuous lives than the great majority of their fellow citizens. This, despite their blatant disregard for most of society’s accepted mores and many of its laws—most notably those prohibiting the use of drugs—helps explain why so many people in authority, from cops to judges to ministers, tend to treat them gently and with a measure of respect. In the end it may be that hippies have not so much dropped out of American society as given it something to think about.
Michael Simmons, who was twelve years old at the time and would later edit the National Lampoon and write for Mojo and Rolling Stone, recalls treasuring that issue of Time: “I carried it around for years.”
Of course, while all of this media, above and underground, were making connections in the “global village,” there was another form of communication in 1967 that touched most baby boomers more deeply than all of the underground and mainstream papers and TV shows put together, and it usually involved a guitar.
CHAPTER 4
electric music for the mind and body
The “lost chord” of this book’s title is metaphorical, but many of the actual chords of sixties music are the most evocative surviving manifestations of the spirit of the times. There are hundreds of books focused on individual artists who made memorable music in 1967, as well as countless playlists, box sets, radio programs, and PBS fundraising specials that enshrine and comment on them.
As a former rock critic, I am well aware that any attempt to curate music from the sixties is fraught with peril. I reiterate that this book is a subjective history and it is not remotely comprehensive. The intent is to give a bit of context for how some music of the period interacted with other aspects of the culture. Dozens of great artists and pieces of music go unmentioned, including many whom I love.
Underground Radio
Even though as a teenager in the sixties I had no idea that there was a music industry that helped connect us to the songs that reflected our version of the real world, business did indeed affect us. The most effective way for artists to reach listeners was to get their music heard, and the most effective means was radio play. Previously, this would have excluded a lot of “underground” bands, but American radio was being reinvented in San Francisco in 1967.
Tom Donahue was a successful thirty-nine-year-old deejay on the San Francisco Top 40 station KYA; he began each show with his trademark line: “Here to blow your mind and clean up your face.” He had become a fan of the local acid rock scene, even though most of these artists never got played on Top 40 radio. The Doors did have a Top 40 hit with “Light My Fire” on their eponymous debut album, but one night in January 1967, Donahue stayed up all night playing the album over and over again, and it occurred to him that there was an unserved audien
ce who were drawn to entire albums and songs like “The End,” which was more than eleven minutes long, nearly triple the length of anything that could get played on Top 40 radio (and way too weird).
The Pacifica radio stations’ foray into hip late-night programming in LA and New York were anomalies. Hundreds of other FM stations in America primarily aired classical music and foreign-language or public-affairs programming, and they made very little money. Donahue discovered that KMPX in San Francisco was hovering near bankruptcy and he persuaded the owners to give him control over most of their programming for the new format that he would create, focusing on the music young hippies liked.
On Friday, April 7, 1967, Donahue’s new format of “free-form,” album-based rock music was launched with “no jingles, no talk-overs, no time and temperature, no pop singles.” It was an immediate success. By the time I first visited the Bay Area in August, it seemed like KMPX was being broadcast in every store and every car in Berkeley. One could walk several blocks and never miss a song or an intro. Advertising money quickly came from hip stores and concert promoters. Since Donahue insisted that commercials either be tailored for KMPX or produced by his staff, the ads didn’t interfere much with the vibe of the station. Local artists like Janis Joplin regularly showed up at KMPX. When Joe Smith of Warner Bros. Records wanted to offer the Grateful Dead a record deal, it was Donahue who made the introduction.
Within months, FM stations in many other cities were hiring freaks to replicate Donahue’s format. There was a new baby boomer market to address, and more than half of FM receivers in the country could now broadcast in stereo. There was also legal pressure. Effective in 1965, the FCC had ruled that in markets with over one hundred thousand in population, FM stations that were owned by AMs had to limit the amount of time they simulcast the AM signal; this created a need for cheap, original programming.
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 10
