In February 1967, there was a counterculture conference at the University of Toronto called Perception 67 which featured appearances by the Fugs, Paul Krassner, Richard Alpert, and hip fashion designer Tiger Morse. (Leary had been invited, but the Canadian government would not allow him entry into the country.)
Alpert and Dr. Humphry Osmond, a Candian psychedelic peer of Oscar Janiger, debated with antidrug crusaders including philosopher Charles Hanly, who called LSD “an opiate for the mentally lame, intellectually halt, and morally blind.” Alpert countered, “If I have to wind up psychotic to break the status quo and get to a meaningful future, I’m ready.”
On another panel, Allen Ginsberg said that LSD provided the same high as having sex, solitude, or mountain climbing, but was more reliable than any of these activities.
The last night featured Paul Krassner performing a monologue, poetry by Ginsberg, a musical set by the Fugs, and ended with remarks by Marshall McLuhan, who was wearing a prismatic disc on his forehead.
London
In July 1967, at the Roundhouse in London, there was a two-week conference portentously titled the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. Originally conceived by therapists known as “antipsychiatrists,” such as R.D. Laing, to discuss issues like treatment of schizophrenia, the mission of the congress transformed into “a unique gathering to demystify violence in all its forms,” and became London’s major intellectual countercultural conclave of the decade.
Most of the speakers were the big radical academic brains of the Western world at the time. Among them were my friend Joel’s uncle Paul Goodman, then fifty-five years old, and Herbert Marcuse, almost seventy, who was a German Socialist and political theorist who had emigrated to the US. Marcuse was the ideological idol of many radicals around the world, including Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis. (In Revolution for the Hell of It, Hoffman wrote that Marcuse smoked hash at the conference, but it is possible this was wishful thinking.)
The organizers were old-school intellectual radicals. Paul Goodman had developed a disdainful attitude toward much of the youth culture, and he lamented the hippies’ apparent lack of respect for expertise, criticizing what he perceived as an obsession with “inner” experiences. In his 1970 book New Reformation, Goodman wrote, “I knew that I could not get through to them. I had imagined that the worldwide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which I was sympathetic, but I now saw that we had to deal with a religious crisis of the magnitude of the Reformation in the 1500s.”
Other old lefties worried that a stoner departure from rational thought could make the movement susceptible to dark social forces. British playwright Arnold Wesker, one of the founders of the Roundhouse and an antinuclear activist, had referred to hippies as “pretty little fascists.”
To many in the counterculture, these criticisms were akin to those of folk music purists who had freaked out when Bob Dylan went electric. San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason, who would become one of the founders of Rolling Stone, mocked many in the old left as “prisoners of logic.”
There would be no rock and roll, tabs of acid, or nudity at the convention, but in a nod to the burgeoning youth culture, a panel with Emmett Grogan, Stokely Carmichael, and Allen Ginsberg took place on the last day.
Grogan wore a work shirt, corduroy pants, and a necklace of wooden beads. He gave a fiery oration that ended with the statement, “History will judge the movement not according to the swine we have removed or imprisoned but according to whether the revolution has succeeded in returning the power to the people.” Grogan was rewarded with a standing ovation, after which he revealed that the words had been an English translation of a speech Adolf Hitler had given to the Reichstag in 1937. The point was to sensitize the radical audience to the moral emptiness of much of what passed for revolutionary rhetoric.
Carmichael had stepped down as leader of SNCC but remained affiliated with the organization, and had recently been named honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. He was dressed in a gold suit and wore dark glasses. Immediately prior to the panel, Ginsberg had introduced Carmichael to Grogan, but the Digger had just shot some heroin, which was perhaps why he refused to shake the civil rights leader’s hand. Carmichael was infuriated at the slight as he walked onto the stage, but he had long before learned how to channel hurt feelings into effective public speaking.
He spoke so powerfully that Ginsberg admiringly called him “a young shaman.” Carmichael referred to urban riots as “rebellions or guerrilla warfare,” and rhetorically aligned America’s racial struggles with movements by people of color in Africa and other parts of the third world. He lamented the recent death of Che Guevara and insisted, “[R]evolutionaries of the world [must] redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of imperialism.”
Carmichael ended his remarks by expressing contempt for the “flower power” of young white hippies. This ephemeral “tactic,” he felt, had absolutely no effect on reducing violence against black people nor in stopping the war in Vietnam. The audience of intellectuals gave him a standing ovation. A lot of the old left already believed that hippies were a self-indulgent movement of “haves” who had far too little compassion for the “have-nots.”
Ginsberg had just spent several weeks in Rapallo, Italy, with the eighty-two-year-old Ezra Pound, who at that point in his life was in such a state of melancholia that he often went weeks without uttering a word. Even with such an idol, Ginsberg was an evangelist for youth culture. He played the Sgt. Pepper’s album, Donovan’s Sunshine Superman, and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and before Ginsberg left, Pound spoke to and embraced him.
The day before the congress commenced, Ginsberg had done a Hare Krishna chant at a rally to legalize marijuana in London’s Hyde Park attended by five thousand British heads. Early on during the congress, Allen sang a musical melody he had written to an English translation by Shunryu Suzuki of the Prajnaparamita Sutra.
Grogan, who was a withering critic of most hip celebrities, made an exception for Ginsberg, calling him “the kind of good person that is hard to find.” For additional moral support, Ginsberg brought beatnik icon William Burroughs, author of the novel Naked Lunch. The Beatles had included Burroughs in their montage on the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. He didn’t speak at the conference but stood in the back, rarely removing his black raincoat and hat.
The closing-day panel with Grogan and Carmichael was to be Ginsberg’s last chance to communicate with this particular gathering of intellectuals, and he had promised not to chant. He began by respectfully challenging Carmichael’s depiction of hippies. “The best experience I have had has been with the younger people in America, and some few of my own generation who have had to confront the mass hallucination, or style of consciousness, or mode of consciousness, into which we were born, and had some kind of mental breakthrough, which clarified not only the nature of our own identity, but also the nature of others’ identities, as being the same as our own.”
Younger people! That was the key energy of the moment. Beats like Allen, left-wingers, and black nationalists had stood against both racism and materialism in decades past, but things were different now because of this vast new generation. Unlike older radical intellectuals at the congress, Allen was embracing them. He seemed to be saying that the same dominant culture that oppressed black people had stifled many young whites. The room was silent. Carmichael peered at him through his dark glasses. What possible connection was there between the “inner” worlds supposedly opened up by LSD that Ginsberg was so enraptured by and the moral nightmare of racism and other forms of oppression? Ginsberg continued, “That is not, necessarily, to preclude our taking detached action within the situation.”
Action! But Ginsberg was not referring to confrontations with police. “The most detached action that I have seen taken, within the situation, is the use of LSD by the younger people, for the purpose of demystifying their own consciousness and arriving at some sort of
meat-universe where they are sitting with flowers, ourselves.” Earlier in the year, Ginsberg had said, “Flower power is the power of the earth itself.”
The poet acknowledged that attempts by the hippie culture were experimental thus far. “We have very small community groups, in San Francisco and in New York, beginning to leave the money-wheel, and also beginning to leave the hallucination-wheel of the media, beginning to form small cooperatives, tribal units, societies of their own.”
He turned to Carmichael and continued, “The reason the hippies have taken on these beads, appurtenances, music, of shamanistic groups, of ecstatic trance-state types, is because they are beginning to explore, for the first time, the universe of consciousness of other cultures beside their own.” Some clusters of hippies were even “beginning to move in on authority with those weapons which have been called ‘flower power,’ being euphemistic for a simple, calm, tranquil equilibrium, nonviolent, as far as possible, as far as the self can be controlled, so that it can relate to other selves in disguise, including the police.”
Including the police! Carmichael had sarcastically said he would have more respect for flowers if they’d had any effect on the Newark police who had, in recent days, brutally quashed the riots in their city. This was exactly the sort of language that drove him crazy about the hippies.
“Mr. Ginsberg, I don’t know much about the hippie movement, but I would like to beg to differ with you,” said Carmichael. “I think the reason most of them are hippies today is because they are confused little kids who have run away from their home and who will return to their culture within a year or two.”
Ginsberg responded: “There’s no culture to return to.”
To which Carmichael fired back indignantly, “Before I find my individual self, I must find my group culture.”
The poet countered with a rueful smile. “We don’t have a viable group culture either, so we’re in the same boat, in that sense.”
Carmichael nodded respectfully but had another point to make. Nothing the hippies had done had reduced white-on-black violence.
Ginsberg was quick to answer: “Nothing anyone has done, not hippies nor the Black Power movement, has reduced such violence so far.” This quiet point seemed consistent with Grogan’s earlier dramatic put-on. The word “revolution” had an intoxicating sound, and angry tones could temporarily be cathartic, but what did it really mean if people’s day-to-day lives became worse in their wake?
The establishment was not charmed by the earnestness of the exchange. British authorities were terrified that American race riots would spread to black sections of the UK such as Brixton and Notting Hill. As things turned out, black people in Britain did not riot that summer, but when tapes of Carmichael’s remarks were made public the next month, he was banned from reentering the country.
There were a couple of other significant moments that the congress is remembered for. On the last day, six British women jumped onto the stage at the Roundhouse and bitterly complained about the inherent sexism of the meetings. Out of twenty-two speakers, only two were female and even they had been placed in secondary sessions. More effective struggles by women of the left to avoid such absurd disparities were soon to come.
Ginsberg’s favorite speaker was British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who conducted a seminar called “Ecological Destruction by Technology.” Bateson introduced his theory of the effect of pollution on increasing the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Shortly thereafter, Ginsberg told an interviewer, “You keep the heat up and the fog gathers up and pretty soon you have a cloud over the sky and you have the greenhouse effect and the earth will heat up and melt the poles and the poles will melt and drown cities.” This was one of the first times the concept of “global warming” was discussed outside of scientific circles.
Despite all of the brainpower assembled at the congress, it did not encompass everything that was going on in the minds of the counterculture. There was another note in the mystic chord of 1967. The very next month, the Beatles made front-page news by meeting with a man who had very different ideas about how enlightened human beings should use their minds.
CHAPTER 7
being there then
Postsixties pop culture has been quite dismissive about the hippies’ interest in Eastern religion. Mike Myers caricatured yogis in The Love Guru. In the TV show The Sopranos, Tony’s homicidal sister Janice and suicidal girlfriend Gloria Trillo are both self-professed Buddhists. In This Is Spinal Tap, David St. Hubbins’s girlfriend Jeanine foolishly makes up itineraries with the astrological symbol of each band member on the tour book. Edina, the burned-out protagonist of the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, chants “Om” while inebriated. The film Bull Durham opens with this voice-over from Susan Sarandon’s character: “I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan.”
Putting aside the fact that Buddhists don’t worship Buddha, the ridicule reflects the shallowness of people who adopted superficial symbols of yoga and meditation while maintaining selfish, egotistical behavior. Like every other belief system, the Eastern religions that grew more popular in America in the sixties could be used as masquerades by bullshit artists and self-deceivers, but the existence of loudmouthed fakes didn’t erase the authenticity of sincere seekers.
In 1967, the growing presence of non-Western spiritual and esoteric traditions was part of the air that animated the hippie idea. On the mass media screen, no one was bigger than the Beatles, and George Harrison’s fascination with Eastern spirituality was as much a part of the band’s image in their last few years together as their haircuts had been when they’d first burst onto the scene. I became a vegetarian at the end of the sixties, and when people ask me why, I still sheepishly say that it’s because I read that Harrison was one.
The internationally known master of the sitar, Ravi Shankar, was a key catalyst in George Harrison’s interest in Hindu paths. Harrison, who took sitar lessons from Shankar, had first played the ancient instrument on “Norwegian Wood.” “Ravi was one person who impressed me,” wrote Harrison in the introduction to Shankar’s autobiography. “I mean . . . Elvis impressed me . . . but you couldn’t later on go round to him and say, Elvis, what was happening in the universe?” Harrison also found that several books about Hindu practices, including Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi and Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga, were consistent with his LSD experiences. In 1966, George and Pattie Harrison spent six weeks in India.
Harrison was only allowed one song as a writer and singer on most Beatles albums, and on Sgt. Pepper’s, the Harrison track was “Within You Without You.” It is the second longest on the album and the only recording that didn’t include other Beatles. “Within You Without You” has three time changes, a tambura drone, tablas, a weird (to Western ears) melody that Shankar had taught him, and the trippiest lyrics on the Beatles’ trippiest album. It fades out with the sound of the band members laughing as an antidote to the solemnity of the song.
The Maharishi
Sometime in the summer of 1967, George Harrison’s wife Pattie attended a lecture by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She was sufficiently impressed that three of the four Beatles (Ringo’s son Jason was a newborn) attended a talk he gave on August 24 at the London Hilton on Park Lane. The Maharishi was forty-nine years old, and had announced his intention to return to India at the end of this world tour, so this was supposedly his last public appearance in the West.
He was born Mahesh Prasad Varma, and had studied with several renowned spiritual teachers in his native India. The Maharishi had introduced the concept of Transcendental Meditation (TM) in 1955. By the midsixties, he had been on British TV several times and, because of his tendency to laugh, was sometimes called “the giggling guru.”
The Beatles were given front-row seats and were invited to meet the Maharishi in his hotel suite after the lecture. He had a long gray beard a
nd wore a garland of marigolds around his neck. Harrison noticed a faint scent of sandalwood.
The Maharishi gave a mantra to all students with the instruction to repeat it in sittings twice a day. The mantra for all four Beatles was “just a sound to help follow the thoughts which pass before you like a movie.” The master told them that if even 1 percent of humanity meditated, it would dissipate dark clouds of war for thousands of years. (I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, but it’s definitely the kind of grandiose claim that reinforces skepticism in the minds of rationalists.) McCartney’s song “The Fool on the Hill” on the Magical Mystery Tour album, released later that year, was inspired by the Maharishi.
He invited the band to be his guests at a training retreat in Wales, and the next day all four Beatles, their wives (minus Cynthia Lennon, who missed the train), Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan took the train from London’s Euston Station to Bangor, Wales. Mobs of fans and press photographers were waiting at both stations. This one moment literally transformed “meditation” from a term previously limited to small zendos and yoga centers into a household word overnight.
The Beatles had to leave after only a single day of the planned ten-day course because of the shocking news that their manager Brian Epstein had died at the age of thirty-two from an overdose of sedatives mixed with alcohol. This tragedy triggered another wave of enormous media attention.
George Harrison and John Lennon appeared twice on David Frost’s TV show in the fall of 1967 to talk about their involvement with TM. On one of the shows, John stated that, thanks to his meditation, “I’m a better person, and I wasn’t bad before.”
They made arrangements to spend more time with the Maharishi at his teaching center located near Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They, along with their wives, girlfriends, assistants, and numerous reporters, arrived in February 1968 to join a group of people training to be TM instructors, including Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and actress Mia Farrow.
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 19
