Indeed, the best-known San Francisco rockers quietly moved from the increasingly chaotic Haight-Ashbury streets to Marin County, including Janis Joplin, the Dead, and the Airplane. Even the Diggers increasingly occupied Morningstar Ranch in Sonoma, which had originally belonged to Lou Gottlieb of the folk group the Limelighters.
Lower East Side
Looking over copies of the East Village Other from 1967, it seems as if the Fugs performed weekly in New York at a benefit show or protest rally. The obscenity trial for the Peace Eye Bookstore finally came to court, and the store was acquitted. On February 17, 1967, Life put Ed Sanders on its cover, proclaiming him “a leader of New York’s Other Culture.”
This kind of visibility gave Sanders the clout to negotiate a deal with the mayor’s office to allow a series of free concerts in Tompkins Square Park. Naturally, the Fugs played at one of them. The Lower East Side had been a predominantly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood before the hippies descended to take advantage of the low rents and there were bitter disputes about what kind of music should be played in the park.
However, all the groups were cool with a performance in the park by the Grateful Dead on June 1, 1967, on the band’s first visit to New York. In appreciation of their temporarily unifying influence, NYC Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving arranged for the New York Police Department to escort the Dead to the gig, where the band was met by a welcoming parade of approximately eighty Lower East Side hippies. The band member Pigpen was given a “key to the city” made of white carnations, which he placed on his organ for the concert. The small park was packed with three thousand people. Although it was just a few days after the cops had busted forty-one people in the neighborhood, this time the police looked the other way when joints were thrown from the stage. Maybe it was in deference to the newfound celebrity of the band, or maybe there were just too many people smoking pot to bust them. During one of Garcia’s solos, a framed picture of Jesus was thrown onto the stage, damaging Pigpen’s organ.
The next day, the Dead visited Timothy Leary in Millbrook and he played them the just-released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. The band then returned to the city for a couple more shows. On June 9, just before an appearance at the Café Au Go Go, the Dead had dinner at an Italian restaurant called Emilio’s with Tom Wolfe, who was putting the finishing touches on his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In the early spring of 1967, Emmett Grogan, Peter Berg, and other Diggers had visited the Lower East Side and were “received in the hippie community like visiting royalty,” according to Don McNeill in the Village Voice. Within days, Berg was a guest on The Alan Burke Show. Burke had a populist tough-guy persona, but he liked to have countercultural people on to argue with. He was no match for the Diggers, though, and he lost control of his show when Berg shoved a pie into the face of an audience member, a woman whom he absurdly claimed was Emma Goldman, the legendary anarchist who had died in 1940. (Some accounts of the exchange say that Berg actually called her Emma Grogan, a riff on the name of his Digger colleague). The audience member was in on the stunt, and the appearance by Berg influenced at least one New Yorker—Abbie Hoffman. While still relatively unknown, Hoffman watched carefully and plotted how to adapt Digger energy to the Lower East Side scene.
For serious old peace-movement types like Cora Weiss, Abbie was too weird. “I liked him a lot personally, but when he’d look at me at rallies to try to get a speaking slot, I wouldn’t let him on,” she says. Weiss’s branch of the movement aimed to convert older adults who were getting disillusioned by the increasingly implausible Cold War rhetoric coming out of Washington.
Sometime in 1967, Hoffman had published a pamphlet called Fuck the System under the pseudonym George Metesky (the real Metesky was known as the “mad bomber” for having planted thirty-three bombs around New York City in the forties and fifties, and had long been held in a mental institution). The pamphlet listed ways of getting things for free in New York City, and advice on how to deal with the cops.
This very irreverence that made Abbie appealing to kids like me made him problematic for the more mainstream peace movement’s agenda. Although he was an old man of thirty in 1967, Abbie had a knowing twinkle in his eye that made it obvious he was one of us, not one of them.
On the other end of the antiwar continuum, Abbie was criticized by Diggers like Coyote, who considered him to be a “media junkie.” Emmett Grogan was even more cutting in his criticism of Hoffman’s penchant for visibility and the two became bitter enemies. Paul Krassner told me that Anita Hoffman had told him that during this period Grogan raped her as a way of humiliating her husband.
These internecine tensions were invisible to me when I was a teenager. Hoffman’s media presence was one of the things about him that I appreciated. Kids like me had no other way of being turned on to the sort of humorous but uncompromising rebellion that he had become famous for.
Hoffman’s first full-length book, Revolution for the Hell of It, was published under the pseudonym “Free,” but everybody knew who the real author was, as the Diggers bitterly pointed out—a Richard Avedon photo of Abbie jumping for joy was featured on the cover. The book reached hundreds of thousands of kids around the country who had never seen one of the mimeographed pamphlets the Diggers handed out.
One attitude Hoffman borrowed from the Diggers was a fierce differentiation from flower children. “Personally I always held my flower in a clenched fist,” he wrote in his autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. “A semi-structure-freak among the love children, I was determined to bring the hippie movement into a broader protest.”
In August, during the Newark riots, Abbie trucked in food, clothing, and blankets to the embattled city, but after that, his political and cultural actions were defined by his passion for bringing radical ideas to the mass media. With the exception of Dr. King, Hoffman understood this art better than any other activist in the sixties.
On August 24, Hoffman, Jim Fouratt, and a dozen friends entered the visitors’ entrance to the New York Stock Exchange. Among them was Jerry Rubin, who had just moved to New York to help plan the protest scheduled for later in the year outside of the Pentagon. Rubin, having fully morphed into hip culture, would now say that he and Abbie were Marxists, “in the revolutionary tradition of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl.”
Although Hoffman would later make the dubious claim that he had not alerted the media, several TV camera crews showed up. The cameras made the security people nervous and they asked for the visitors’ names, to which Fouratt replied, “George Metesky,” and said they were with the “East Side Service Organization” (the acronym of which was ESSO, the name of one of the Rockefeller oil companies). A guard confronted them and said, “Hippies are not allowed in.” Abbie snapped back, “Well, look, we’re Jewish. You don’t let Jews in the Stock Exchange?” Perhaps worried about the prospect of a headline reading, “Stock Market Bans Jews,” the guard dutifully wrote, George Metesky and friends, on his notepad and escorted them to seats in the visitors’ gallery just above the trading floor.
Immediately, the group began throwing handfuls of one-dollar bills over the railing, laughing the entire time. (The exact number of bills is a matter of dispute; Hoffman later wrote that it was three hundred, while others said no more than forty were thrown.) A number of the people on the floor scurried and pushed each other out of the way to get the bills. The chaos itself was the conceptual art that Hoffman had envisioned—the greed of people on Wall Street was so ingrained that they would act like desperate kids in a playground even for an extra dollar or two.
The bills barely had time to land on the ground before guards began removing the group from the building. The stunt had a poetry to it that implied contempt for the selfish side of capitalism, and the news coverage of the morning made Abbie Hoffman a celebrity overnight. (A few months later, the stock exchange installed bulletproof glass panels around the visitors’ gallery, as well as a metal grillwork ceiling. A spokesman
told the New York Times that this was for “reasons of security.”)
Once outside, Hoffman, Fouratt, and the other activists held hands and chanted, “Free! Free!” Hoffman then lit the edge of a five-dollar bill on fire, but a guy in a suit grabbed it from him, stamped on it, and said: “You’re disgusting.” (A few months earlier, the Diggers had burned money at a demonstration outside of the East Village Other’s offices, but got far less attention than Hoffman and his crew did at the stock exchange.)
Hoffman was now one of the most visible figures in the theoretically leaderless hip community of New York. He was arrested and beaten at many protests, but at the same time developed a relationship with Captain Joseph Fink of the Ninth Precinct that covered the Lower East Side. (Like many of Hoffman’s political adversaries, Fink was Jewish, and Hoffman tried to connect with him on that basis.)
Hoffman showed up as a speaker at New York events as diverse as a seminar at the radical Catholic Worker and a meeting at the Hudson Institute, the think tank run by military-industrial-complex theoretician Herman Kahn.(One of Kahn’s colleagues told Hoffman, sotto voce, “We’re glad you brought your girlfriends. They are a lot prettier than ours.”)
Hoffman strove to synthesize the various aspects of the left and counterculture. Although his own personal dramas would interfere with his legacy, some of the “words of wisdom” he wrote in his first book stand up pretty well as a document of the attitudes of those few who tried to fuse together hippies and “revolutionary” politics.
“The first line of defense is to turn on the enemy.” (I’m pretty sure Abbie meant “turn on” in the sense of offering an adversary a joint, or at least a loving insight.) And later he instructed: “When you meet a brother, never preach to him” (just exchange info), and, “Never forget that ours is the battle against a machine not against people.” He also addressed his and others’ commitment to nonviolence: “Although I admire the revolutionary art of the Black Panthers, I feel guns alone will never change this System. You don’t use a gun on an IBM computer. You pull the plug out.”
* * *
On February 22, 1967, the Off-Broadway satire MacBird! opened at the Village Gate. The Realist’s Paul Krassner invested $3,000 in it, and I found out about the play in his publication. It was written by Barbara Garson, a Berkeley playwright and activist. I was mesmerized by the savage wit with which she adapted the plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to modern American politics. It starred the then-unknown Stacy Keach as the Johnson-like title character, Rue McClanahan as Lady MacBird, and William Devane as Robert Ken O’Dunc, obviously based on Robert Kennedy. In tune with the resentment (some of it irrational) that had developed for President Johnson in the counterculture, the harsh satire suggested that the Texan had been responsible for President Kennedy’s murder. In real life, President Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, had made beautifying the highways her personal project. In the play, Lady MacBird had an exaggerated obsession with flowers related to her guilt, riffing on the “out, out damn spot” moment that Lady Macbeth has in Shakespeare’s original work. The New York Times panned its “crackpot consensus,” and the New Yorker reviewer Edith Oliver wrote, “The cruelty and vulgarity are almost beyond description.” Even more remarkably, the magazine refused to run an ad for the play. Although I didn’t believe that Johnson killed Kennedy, I did believe he killed a lot of the spirit that Kennedy had inspired in America. And I knew how to differentiate between docudrama and satire. Once again, the “establishment world” and our “real world” were two very different places.
In the spring of 1967, the Realist reached its peak connection to the American zeitgeist. In what would be both Krassner’s most famous and most infamous piece, he wrote a cover story called “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” Historian William Manchester had been asked by Jacqueline Kennedy to write a book about her husband’s assassination, but when he completed the manuscript, The Death of a President, the first lady took legal action, successfully forcing Manchester to remove portions of his account. Krassner’s satirical imagination of those portions was written in a pitch-perfect replica of Manchester’s style and stated that Jackie Kennedy had seen Lyndon Johnson literally fucking the fatal wound in John Kennedy’s head. Krassner, who had a keen interest in JFK assassination conspiracy theories, was on one hand creating a metaphor for the worst fears about the killing, while at the same time testing the credulity of his readers, some of whom initially took the satire literally. This was decades before “fake news” became a phenomenon.
The very same issue had a cartoon by former Mad magazine artist Wally Wood that depicted Disney characters having an orgy. Krassner heard that Disney executives had considered a lawsuit to protect their legendary intellectual property, but decided against it when they realized that the Realist had virtually no financial assets and that any lawsuit would give more publicity to what they considered to be a repulsive image.
Around the same time, Timothy Leary announced the formation of his new religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery, at a press conference at the Village Theatre. Some of the reporters in attendance were scared to drink the coffee on the buffet table because they worried it might be dosed with LSD. Leary told a reporter for Look, “Someday, instead of asking what book you are reading—they’ll ask what level of consciousness you’re at.” Krassner interrupted with, “But the same way they lie about what they are reading, they’ll fake levels of consciousness too.”
Leary was at his most unfiltered, asserting that children as young as seven or eight could safely take LSD. He also announced that three consciousness-raising “plays” were being produced, and would soon tour: The Death of the Mind, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and The Illumination of the Buddha.
As if Leary didn’t have enough pressure on him from various branches of the government and from attacks on his penchant for publicity from the Diggers, the Progressive Labor Party’s weekly newspaper Challenge asserted that he was actually working for the government. As “evidence,” the magazine wrote that by urging young people to detach from “games,” including antiwar activities, Leary played into the hands of the establishment. They found it sinister that the prowar Henry and Clare Luce had supposedly contributed to Leary’s defense fund and that Life had recently published a pro-LSD story.
Despite the dizzying array of left-wing antiwar factions, there was still a group of Lower East Side freaks who felt that no one represented the precise sensibilities of the neighborhood, so they formed Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers in 1967. Their name was taken from the LeRoi Jones poem, and they were described as “a street gang with an analysis,” claiming to be the Lower East Side chapter of SDS. (Todd Gitlin points out that “no application for an SDS charter was ever refused.”) For their first public action, the Motherfuckers carried garbage from the Lower East Side and dumped it into the fountain in front of the recently opened Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center.
Boston and Canada
Notwithstanding my myopic view that focused predominantly on New York City and the Bay Area, there were compatible communities developing in dozens of other places in the Western world by 1967.
Boston had the largest college population in the country. MIT was home to lefty icon Noam Chomsky, and Harvard had a lively SDS chapter, and had been where Leary and Alpert emerged as LSD advocates. Boston University, Brandeis, Radcliffe, Tufts, and Emerson were also among the many colleges based in the Boston area.
WBCN, which would become one of the most political and influential FM stations, did not start the “underground rock” format until March 1968, but in 1967, Boston hippies were able to watch a TV show chronicling hip culture called What’s Happening Mr. Silver? hosted by a twenty-two-year-old British transplant named David Silver, whose day job was teaching English literature at Tufts. Silver regularly covered Boston love-ins and peace protests and was host to a who’s who of the counterculture, including Abbie Hoffman and Julius Lester. He also had a surprisingly civil co
nversation/debate with conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was disarmed by Silver’s unpretentious decency.
In Montreal, a lot of countercultural activity was centered around a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller at the USA Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67. (In 2017 it is an environmental museum called the Montreal Biosphere.)
Like Marshall McLuhan, Fuller was a visionary intellectual from another time who was embraced by younger kindred spirits in the counterculture of the sixties. He was seventy-two years old in 1967, but was brimming with futuristic visions, which he expressed with machine-gun verbal intensity.
Fuller, a native of Massachusetts who mostly grew up in Maine and would later be considered one of America’s greatest intellectuals, was a Harvard dropout who had an epiphany in his early thirties following the failure of his business, the death of his young daughter, and a descent into alcoholism. While contemplating suicide, he had a vision in which he felt himself suspended several feet from the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”
Not long thereafter, Fuller invented the geodesic dome structure for which he became famous. A passionate environmentalist who coined the phrase “spaceship earth,” Fuller was one of the first public figures to focus attention on the perils of dependence on fossil fuels. As early as the 1960s, he believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power. He hoped for an age of “omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity.”
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 18
