In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  LSD advocates were not the only people who were questioning the Freudian fundamentalism of the time. Gary Greenberg, a historian of psychiatry, says, “What became clear by the sixties was that analysis had become a force for conformity and adaptation.” This orthodoxy was rejected by younger therapists who defined themselves as humanists. Ground zero for the humanist movement was the Esalen Institute, which was started in 1962 in Central California by two Stanford graduates—Dick Price, who had been influenced by an Aldous Huxley lecture on “human potentialities,” and Michael Murphy, who had spent time at an ashram in India. By 1967, Esalen’s most well-known figure was Fritz Perls, who, along with Paul Goodman, created “gestalt therapy,” a post-Freudian approach to psychology that incorporated theories from Eastern traditions and had a much broader concept of what constituted mental health.

  In the wake of these non-Freudian newcomers, and the spread of LSD, some conventional analysts became defensively hostile to the counterculture and formed theories that would be used by cultural conservatives in years to come. One such therapist was Dr. Ernest A. Dernberg, who was the psychiatric director of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, in addition to his duties at two San Francisco hospitals.

  Free Clinic director David E. Smith published Love Needs Care in 1971. In the chapter “The Hippie Modality,” Smith described Dernberg’s conviction that the hippie lifestyle was a pathology. Appalled that Episcopal bishop James Pike compared hippies to early Christians, Dernberg complained to Smith that “hippies invested ‘love’ with a great many meanings but it signified less an intimacy and mutual respect between two people than an all-embracing feeling for man and nature. The feeling was probably an extension of the oceanic oneness associated with LSD and the toxic afterglow of hallucinogenic experience, a toxicity so strong that the young people sought to dispense with ego and see themselves as part of a psychologically undifferentiated organism, a group mind.”

  This disdain for agape could apply to any form of mystical or spiritual experience, not solely the “afterglow” of LSD, and it is really a theological attack cloaked in the language of science. Dernberg may have been influenced by Freud’s book Civilization and Its Discontents, which views “oceanic consciousness” as inherently psychotic.

  For some reason Dernberg had a particular animus toward Marshall McLuhan, as if the Canadian professor was personally responsible for the whole thing. Smith wrote, “Instead of thinking sequentially, some of them focused only on lights, color, and sound. This condition may have seemed promising to McLuhan and others who considered it an inner trip, but for most of Dr. Dernberg’s patients the circus never seemed to end.”

  According to Smith, Dernberg detested hippie slang and rock concerts, and he also mocked interest in Eastern spirituality. As with many rationalist hippie critiques, it is hard to tell if Dernberg was dismissing all mystical philosophies (as Freud did) or merely those without kosher Western credentials. Even health food was suspect.

  Smith and Dernberg did provide desperately needed medical services to people in Haight-Ashbury who had nowhere else to go. However, they had a concept of mental health that was suffocatingly narrow. As Gary Greenberg explained to me: “Like most psychiatrists in 1967, Dernberg would have been trained in the psychoanalytic theory that if you don’t resolve your Oedipal conflicts, your psychosexual life will be a disaster. Homosexuality, promiscuity, fetishes, plus the symbolic versions, rebellion, fecklessness, underachieving, overachieving, all could be traced to this supposed ‘failure.’ The paradigm case is Bruno Bettelheim’s denunciation of Vietnam War protesters as just so many neurotics who still wanted to kill their fathers and fuck their mothers.”

  Even if the word “hippie” was dead, there was no way that millions of people who had briefly identified with it were going back to blindly obeying such “authority.”

  Birth of Yippie

  Indifferent to such reactionary currents, Abbie Hoffman, his wife Anita, and Paul Krassner took a vacation in Ramrod Key, Florida, where they rented a small house the week before Christmas. It was the same week that Stokely Carmichael came back to the United States. “We would have been there cheering for him had we been in New York,” Krassner wrote in the Realist. “For Stokely had said in Paris that ‘we don’t want peace in Vietnam. We want a Vietnamese victory over the US.’” (There was not a consensus about this attitude in the antiwar movement. Many of us did want peace.)

  One night they planned to see Hoffman’s favorite movie, The Professionals, but it was playing too far away, and a storm was brewing, so instead they watched the Dino De Laurentiis version of the Bible. In a 2007 essay in the Los Angeles Times, Krassner wrote, “Driving home in the rain and wind, we debated the implications of Abraham being prepared to slay his son because God told him to. I dismissed this as blind obedience. Abbie praised it as revolutionary trust.”

  After the film they all took LSD and got back to the house just as the storm reached full force and the acid was coming on. According to Krassner, “We watched Lyndon Johnson on a black-and-white TV set, although seen through psychedelicized eyes, Johnson’s face was purple and orange. His huge head was sculpted into Mount Rushmore. Johnson said something like, I am not going to be so pudding-headed as to stop our half of the war, and I told Abbie we had to protest against the war at Johnson’s convention the next summer in Chicago.”

  Back in New York a week later, Krassner and the Hoffmans were joined by Jerry Rubin. They stayed up all night smoking Colombian weed on New Year’s Eve, talking about what to do at the convention. Krassner recalls, “I came up with ‘Yippie’ as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross-fertilization at antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet.”

  Jim Fouratt soon joined as a Yippie organizer. In a 2013 AlterNet essay, Krassner wrote:

  Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life. While the Democrats would present politicians giving speeches at the convention center, we would present rock bands playing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft. Our mere presence would be our statement.

  Hoffman and Rubin would continue to switch back and forth between being counterculture types and being radicals. In Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s book Seize the Time, he quotes Jerry Rubin as saying that he and others had formed the Yippies because hippies had not “necessarily become political yet. ‘They mostly prefer to be stoned.’”

  Given what happened the next summer in Chicago, perhaps being too stoned to go would not have been such a bad idea. By then the notes in the culture had changed enough that the chord of 1967 was indeed lost.

  EPILOGUE

  reflections in the crystal wind

  1968–1970

  Although elements of the countercultural and antiwar movements would flicker for several years, the balance of energies changed, and changed quickly. On January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, which proved the futility of the war to many in the media and in some sectors of the establishment.

  It was not the Yippies who wrought the biggest changes in American political culture in 1968. That awful distinction belonged to the assassins of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. There is no way to overstate the impact of losing them.

  In future decades, some Democratic pundits would blame the 1968 election of Richard Nixon on the demonstrations outside of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, but it was the party’s establishment, not the peace movement, who created the space for the Republican victory. The protest was against the support for the Vietnam War by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had been nominated for president even though the antiwar candidates, Senator Eugene McCarthy and the slain Senator Kennedy, had fared better with pr
imary voters. The war itself was the problem, not the opposition to it.

  If I could have voted in the general election in 1968, I would have held my nose and voted for Humphrey, but to the extent that antiwar people were not inspired to do so, the blame lies not with traumatized peaceniks but with the candidate himself. Humphrey was apparently so intimidated by President Johnson that he didn’t address the concerns of the antiwar movement until the last minute, and even then in an oblique manner, too little too late.

  There had not been a consensus in the counterculture about the actions in Chicago. The Yippies and Tom Hayden promoted them. Allen Ginsberg and the Diggers had counseled against them. (Despite the fact that his worries about violence were ignored, Ginsberg decided to show up and chant to try to mitigate the bad vibes.)

  Fragmentation of the left got worse as the months went by. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon in which he quoted from the Book of Romans. “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” He warned that in the movement there were too many “non-transformed nonconformists, people who do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” In 1968, much of the radical community was damaged by infighting and intense pressure from the government, which included the use of provocateurs to further splinter the movement. SNCC soon ceased to exist. The Black Panthers were heavily persecuted by the FBI. Although SDS would not formally disband until 1974, it was tearing itself apart.

  The Weather Underground was created around a militant strategy that included bombing government buildings. They drew a disproportionate amount of attention in the underground press, and over the next several decades, the perverse glamour of their outlaw life attracted many novelists and filmmakers. In reality, the Weather Underground never had more than a few hundred members, and in my opinion they contributed nothing of value to the antiwar movement.

  However, neither the Weather Underground nor other radicals can be blamed for the continued darkness of the war and the domestic costs of pursuing it. The Nixon administration continued the government’s opposition to the antiwar movement. Their rigid determination to equate patriotism with support of the war contributed to the climate in May 1970 when nonviolent protesters were killed at Kent State and Jackson State universities by National Guard troops.

  Peter Coyote believes that the greater impact of the sixties are cultural: gay rights, legal pot, the proliferation of mindfulness, yoga, nontraditional medicine, health foods, and most currents of the environmental movement. There is no question that many of the digital geniuses who created a lot of the architecture of the Internet were influenced by the psychedelic culture of the sixties. But it’s important to recognize that the political forces protecting the status quo of the military-industrial complex and other massive economic interests were and are far more powerful that those which resist change on social issues.

  The antiwar movement was fragmented and sometimes incoherent, but it was right. The premise that justified the Vietnam War was false. There was not a viable opposition to Ho Chi Minh, and the puppets supported by the United States had little or nothing in common with democratic values. Nor was a Communist North Vietnam ever any kind of real threat to the United States, and its ultimate victory didn’t have any effect on the Cold War balance between the United States and the Soviet Union or China. Vietnam is now a popular (and safe) vacation spot for Americans.

  More than any other antiwar leader, Tom Hayden remained a significant voice in political conversations on the left for decades. He was married to Jane Fonda from 1973–1990 and together they were influential thought leaders in “liberal Hollywood.” In 1982, Hayden began an eighteen-year run as a member of the California legislature, departing only when term limits forced him to. He was a powerful voice on dozens of issues, including the environment, Mexican-American rights, and economic justice, and wrote twenty-two books on a wide range of issues.

  I spoke to Hayden in the spring of 2016, a few months before his death, and he still had very mixed feelings about the effect of hippies on the antiwar movement. In Hell No, his posthumous book about the protest movement against the Vietnam War, he was still suggesting that CIA was complicit in flooding Haight-Ashbury with LSD.

  * * *

  Any idea that the struggle against racism had been solved by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act was contradicted by the millions of votes that Alabama governor George Wallace received in his third-party bid in 1968. The rationale of Wallace’s campaign was the so-called white backlash. Lyndon Johnson had predicted that the passage of the Civil Rights Act would lose the South for Democrats for a generation. As things turned out, he underestimated how long racism would be a political force in America.

  Drugs changed in 1968 as well. Heroin and methedrine (smack and speed) suddenly showed up in the rock-and-roll scene and throughout the hippie world, where just a few months earlier pot and psychedelics were all that was considered cool. At seventeen, I was no exception, mindlessly shooting hard drugs for months in 1968. There is no question that criminals could make a lot more money selling junk, and there are some on the left who harbor suspicions that the government encouraged hard drugs as well. Jim Fouratt tells of a pound of heroin mysteriously showing up at the Oracle. But the fact that bad guys had an agenda does not explain why so many hippies made such a destructive turn.

  Peter Coyote would become a junkie for over a decade before turning to Buddhist meditation, with guidance from Gary Snyder. How, I asked him, did so many of us go from taking sacraments to reach for universal love to grasping for short bursts of euphoria or warm numbness that soon led to degradation? Coyote suggests that authority figures had lost so much credibility with their insane advocacy of the Vietnam War, demonization of marijuana, and repression of sexual energy that all authority became discounted, including those offering good advice about the perils of hard drugs. For Coyote and Grogan, the fact that jazz geniuses like Charlie Parker had shot heroin gave the drug an exotic allure. “When you’re inventing a new world, you’re not looking at yourself objectively.”

  Even LSD was no longer the same. Owsley and the Orange County acid dealers, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, were missionaries who were obsessed with the purity of their LSD. Their messianic belief in acid transcended conventional business logic. This attitude was not shared by old-school criminal drug dealers who got into the game once the money was big enough. Some acid was mixed with speed and strychnine, causing a lot of bad trips. One such tainted batch was the “brown acid” that attendees at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 were cautioned to avoid.

  Michael Lang, a Woodstock promoter, had the foresight to ask Hugh Romney and his commune, the Hog Farm, to oversee the festival tent where kids having bad trips could get help. The clan had taken a lot of psychedelics over the years and exuded joyous empathy. They were an extraordinarily positive force at the festival, transmuting bad trips into good ones, and they taught those recently in distress to similarly help others.

  I went to Woodstock at the beginning of my career in the music business, at a time when I wasn’t even smoking pot—but I recognized the beauty and camaraderie of the crowd as an inspiring afterglow of the hippie idea that had so captivated me a couple of years earlier.

  That magic was absent at the infamous Altamont Festival later in 1969, where more of the acid was bad and there was no Hog Farm. A member of the Hells Angels stabbed an unruly fan to death. The films Woodstock and Gimme Shelter are excellent documents of the two events.

  1969 was also the year of the Atlanta Pop Festival. At one point, Romney was lying on the stage tripping when blues master B.B. King stepped over him and asked with a big smile, “Are you wavy, gravy?” (King was probably referring to a track by jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell called “Wavy Gravy” on his 1963 Midnight Blue album.) In any case, from then on the Hog Farm leader’s name was Wavy Gravy.

  1969 was also the year that Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather was published. It was a huge best seller and the
basis for the 1972 movie that is perennially listed among the best American films in history. The Godfather and its sequel are among my favorite movies as well, but the view of human nature and the meaning of life is as close to the opposite of “All You Need Is Love” and the hippie idea as Ayn Rand’s novels are.

  Timothy Leary had several stressful years. After the San Francisco Be-In in January he was the opening act to a Grateful Dead show and said, “Fuck authorities. To hell with your parents.” His tone even made Owsley nervous: “Everybody was saying, Look, Tim, you’re out of control. You’ve got to cool it. You’re bringing too much heat.” At the end of the year, Leary moved to Orange County to live with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. He was soon arrested again for possession of pot.

  Leary was convicted and given a ten-year sentence early in 1970. As a young therapist he had helped design the psychological tests used by penal authorities to evaluate inmates. Perhaps that is why he was able to get an assignment as a gardener in a lower-security prison, from which he later escaped with the help of the Weather Underground. He spent a few years in hiding outside of the United States, was extradited and reimprisoned in 1973, and was then pardoned in 1976 by California Governor Jerry Brown.

  There are some in the counterculture, including Peter Coyote, who believe that Leary was released early because he informed on others. Leary’s friends maintain that he never gave authorities any information they did not already have.

  Although Leary liked the spotlight, he couldn’t have imagined what the intensity of the late-sixties media would be like for him, nor the ferocity of the government’s reaction. I got to know Leary during the last decade of his life and found him to be brilliant, loving, and self-effacing, with a perpetual smile on his face and gleam in his eye. He cared little about money and was a mentor to dozens of young people during the years when personal computers and virtual reality emerged; he was also an inspiration and friend to many rock musicians. Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Ram Dass all warmly reconnected with Leary, and he raised a son named Zach who adored him. When he died at the age of seventy-five in 1996, his last word was “Beautiful.”