In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  I believe that the operatic intensity of Leary’s life in the sixties and early seventies obscures the depth of his contributions to society. He and Richard Alpert always maintained that LSD should be regulated and studied. In 2016, when “microdosing” of psychedelics was growing in use by therapists and there were Department of Defense–sanctioned experiments with the use of LSD to help veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, the “establishment” attitude was very different than it had been decades earlier.

  In an Oracle interview in 1967, Alpert was asked whether he thought the United States needed a revolution, and he answered that it was unnecessary because there would be a psychedelic majority in eight years. In 2016, I asked him about this inaccurate prognostication and he said with a laugh, “What we were doing wrong was predicting the future when we were on acid. What I was wrong about was saying eight years. Because if you look now and you see universities all over the country getting government permission to sponsor studies for all kinds of ways that psychedelics can help humans, this is another step forward.”

  Alpert traveled to India at the end of 1967. “I went because after years of experimentation with psychedelics, I kept seeing that I kept coming down, and I was looking for a map of consciousness which psychedelics did not provide me—so I realized that because of Huxley introducing Tim and me to The Tibetan Book of Dead that I had to go to the East to get that map of consciousness.” There he met his guru Neem Karoli Baba, who was often called Maharajji. Alpert was given the name Ram Dass, which means “Servant of God.” He came back to America in 1969 and created a linkage between hippie culture and ancient spiritual cosmology, first in lectures broadcast on underground radio stations like WBAI and eventually in the book Be Here Now, which has sold over two million copies since its first publication in 1971. It inspired me then and it still does today.

  In June 1970 there was an Alternative Media Conference at Goddard College in Vermont where hundreds of underground radio and press people met each other. A chartered airplane brought the Grateful Dead and their extended family there, most of them tripping. The recently formed J. Geils Band was introduced to radio deejays. Jim Fouratt hectored the crowd for being insufficiently political. Ram Dass spoke about the spirit. Harvey Kurtzman explained the thinking behind the early years of Mad magazine. WBAI’s Bob Fass ladled soup to attendees in the cafeteria. I wrote a piece in Crawdaddy that suggested it was the beginning of a new era, but I was wrong. It turned out that Blue Meanie forces were even more effective in diluting hippie values in the media than they had been in the LSD business. Within a year, alternative papers and stations were being directed by their owners to deliver information pleasing to advertising agencies. Any hip aspirations by underground radio folks needed to be justified by ratings.

  There were also self-inflicted wounds in the counterculture, some of which were identified by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master whose teachings were embraced by Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg. Trungpa had escaped from Tibet with the Dalai Lama a decade earlier and had served as the spiritual adviser for the Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie, India. He arrived in the United States in 1970 and soon coined the phrase “spiritual materialism” as a critique of attachment to external symbols of spirituality at the expense of inner work. Trungpa counseled against turning the pursuit of spirituality into ego trips, such as flaunting supposed spiritual credentials.

  On a broader scale, insularity had developed in many hip circles, which undermined the spirit of agape. One of the most popular posters in head shops was Humbead’s Revised Map of the World, which depicted a hip world revolving solely around centers in New York, San Francisco/Berkeley, Cambridge/Boston, London, and Los Angeles. This kind of smug snobbery turned off many good people, both at the time and in subsequent generations.

  Flash Forward

  Decades later, many younger people viewed the late sixties as a time of superficial trends like the Roaring Twenties, worth remembering primarily for the interesting music and colorful fashions. To be called “stuck in the sixties” became the ultimate insult from “serious” people, who rolled their eyes at what they perceived as stoner nostalgia. I like to think that this trivialization of the era is primarily due to the effectiveness of cartoon versions of the sixties in obscuring the deeper realities of the hippie idea.

  Although the mass media no longer followed the glow of Allen Ginsberg’s “bohemian torch of enlightenment,” in the global village writ large, there were several positive reverberations from 1967.

  After its success on Broadway, Hair was produced in dozens of cities around the world. June Christopher, a younger Fieldston classmate who hung out with the heads, joined the Munich production in 1969. “They needed people of color for the rainbow tribe in the play,” she explains, “and there weren’t many blacks who also spoke German.” (June’s father was African American and her mother was a German Jew whose family had left Berlin in the 1930s as Hitler was coming to power.)

  There is a scene in the musical in which the entire cast is nude, which June recalls as “truly amazing. It was not sexual, it was an affirmation that we were all babies of God. The feeling on the stage was, Here I am like I came into the world.” June was always moved by the plight of the character in the play who gets drafted to fight in Vietnam and is killed there. “The idea that you would take these beings of love and make some of them kill or be killed was so horrible.” One of the other cast members in the Munich production was Donna Summer, who hired June as a backup singer a couple of years later when she had her run of giant disco hits.

  Just as Hair had virtues that were not apparent to me in 1967, the Diggers had shortcomings that loom larger in retrospect than they did at the time. They were indeed integral to the soul of Haight-Ashbury at its best, and their creativity and aspirations of moral purity had an influence on the sixties underground scene far out of proportion to their numbers. But the extent to which they undermined other counterculture groups gives them a mixed legacy. There is a thin line between righteousness and self-righteousness, and between idealism and tribalism.

  Peter Coyote is appropriately proud of the Diggers’ legacy of performance art, free food, clothing, and concerts, and determination to expose hypocrisy in the hip culture, but he also sees some things differently with the distance of fifty years: “Sometimes when I see those blurry old videos of Emmett [Grogan], I am embarrassed by how bullied many of us were by him, the way he would wink at you like there was some deeper meaning to everything he was saying. He’s my brother. I memorialize his death every year [with] full Buddha ceremonies, but he did not look at his own problems. He always thought he could act out and he got caught short when [the] zeitgeist shifted. It wasn’t enough to be a streetwise gangster with refined sensibilities.”

  Michael Lerner, one of the radicals who met with the Haight-Ashbury hippies to plan the Be-In, had been a leader in the Free Speech Movement and was chairman of the SDS chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1966–68. Lerner continued to advocate progressive ideas while deepening his connection to Judaism. In 1986 he created Tikkun magazine, which combines many countercultural attitudes with a progressive critique of “mainstream” Jewish politics. He coauthored a book called Jews and Blacks with Cornel West, and joined coalitions opposing Israel’s activities in the occupied territories. He was ordained as a rabbi in 1995, and in 2016, at Muhammad Ali’s multifaith memorial service at which former President Clinton appeared, Lerner was the sole rabbi to speak. Ali himself had long before planned the memorial and appreciated Lerner’s support for him during his darkest times and his inclusive notion of spirituality.

  The Vietnam War was also a defining event for Bill Zimmerman, who was completing a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1967. He had met Ken Kesey and Richard Alpert in California earlier in the decade and spent time in Haight-Ashbury. “Everybody sharing everything,” he says. “There was naive optimism being expressed on streets everywhere. People you j
ust met offering you places to spend the night.” A couple of years later, Zimmerman immersed himself in the antiwar movement after he was fired by Brooklyn College for refusing to conduct sleep research that would be made available for military uses. He helped to organize demonstrations in Washington and worked with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

  Zimmerman did not participate in the protests in Chicago outside the Democratic Convention in 1968. “I failed to see what could be accomplished by a bloodbath,” he says. He regarded the Weather Underground with contempt: “In October 1969, they sponsored ‘Days of Rage’ in Chicago. The action consisted of nothing more than a few hundred ‘revolutionaries’ running through the streets, breaking car and house windows, taunting pedestrians, and throwing rocks at the police. Weathermen leaders assumed that such actions would inspire ‘revolutionary youth’ to join them. Instead they just looked ridiculous.”

  Zimmerman came to believe that the antiwar movement “had to make it easy for people to join us, not require them to carry foreign flags, risk arrest, or adopt a militant posture toward a government many still considered their own.”

  He visited North Vietnam in 1972, filmed the devastation visited on the civilian population by a Nixon bombing campaign, and sold some of the footage to 60 Minutes, which ran eight minutes of it in prime time. He also made his own film, Village By Village, which was screened for Congress and also during an antiwar show organized by Jane Fonda that toured US military bases.

  Along with Cora Weiss and a group of concerned physicians, Zimmerman founded Medical Aid for Indochina, which raised money for medical supplies for North Vietnam. In addition to its humanitarian virtues, he explains, “We avoided the disagreements over ideology and tactics that limited the larger antiwar movement. No one had an ideological problem with medical assistance.”

  Having visited Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi not long before American bombs destroyed it, Zimmerman helped raise money to rebuild the institution, as did Wavy Gravy, who organized a benefit concert by the Grateful Dead. (The Dead were still generally avoiding politics, but they found it impossible to say no to Wavy, who reciprocated by avoiding radical rhetoric onstage. He called the band “rainbow makers.”)

  A different kind of reverberation came from the mind of Stewart Brand, who had taken LSD in the early sixties as part of a legal study in Menlo Park, California. Over the next few years he became part of the Merry Pranksters and helped produce the Trips Festival in San Francisco in early 1966, which was the biggest psychedelic gathering prior to the Be-In. Brand developed an obsession with the rumor that America’s space agency NASA had photos of the earth taken from outer space. He thought it would enhance brotherhood if human beings could actually see that we all lived on the same planet. A campaign launched by Brand and Buckminster Fuller made buttons that read, Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? In 1967, the government finally released a satellite photo of the earth.

  In the fall of 1968, Brand used that photo on the cover of the first edition of the book-length Whole Earth Catalog that was subtitled, Access to Tools. It was a guide to books, maps, garden implements, specialized clothing, carpenters’ and masons’ tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, and early versions of personal computers. Among the more than one million people who bought the Whole Earth Catalog was future Apple founder Steve Jobs. In a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, Jobs said, “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation . . . It was sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” He quoted the farewell message placed on the back cover of the 1974 edition: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

  Although American environmentalism dates back at least as far as Henry David Thoreau, it entered a new phase in the wake of the sixties. Denis Hayes graduated from Stanford in 1969; he was an antiwar activist who, like David Harris, had been the student body president. Hayes came up with the idea of a national demonstration for environmental action. The first celebration of Earth Day took place in April 1970 at two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and in hundreds of communities across the United States. These days, Earth Day is observed in 192 countries, and coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, still chaired by Hayes.

  Contrary to the perception that acidheads ignored suffering in the world, Dr. Larry Brilliant, a colleague of Wavy Gravy and a disciple of Ram Dass’s guru Neem Karoli Baba, got a job with the World Health Organization and was part of the medical team that eliminated smallpox from India.

  In 1978, Brilliant, Wavy Gravy, and Ram Dass started the Seva Foundation to provide health services in impoverished parts of the world. It was initially funded by a donation from Steve Jobs and a benefit performance by the Grateful Dead. Over the years, more than four million people have been cured of blindness by Seva workers in Nepal and other third world countries.

  It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

  Some Hindus believe that this era of humanity is the “Kali Yuga,” a time of spiritual darkness. Some believe there is a golden age coming. Some of us thought that it was coming in the late sixties, which definitely turned out to be wishful thinking. Some astrologers say that there is an Age of Aquarius, but even Wikipedia tells us, “Astrologers do not agree on when the Aquarian age will start or even if it has already started.” Of course, many smart folks feel that such ideas are superstition or akin to fairy tales. As far as I can tell, Paul Krassner is among that latter group, although one can never be sure with the self-described “Zen Bastard.”

  Perhaps there was an emanation from another plane that created the counterculture that peaked in 1967, or perhaps it was just the temporary product of various historical forces. All I know is that despite the folly and the disappointments of the time, I continue to be inspired by Allen Ginsberg and Martin Luther King Jr., by dozens of those I’ve written about, and by hundreds who made sure their names were never known but who collectively created something beautiful, something that continues to reverberate in times both good and bad.

  One of Tom Hayden’s last speeches was at a 2015 conference called Vietnam: The Power of Protest, intended to counteract government attempts to marginalize the antiwar movement fifty years later. “[T]he struggle for memory and for history is a living thing. It’s ongoing. It does not end . . . We challenge the Pentagon now on the battlefield of memory.” Referring to a recent speech by President Obama, Hayden pointedly noted, “[He] has reminded us to remember . . . Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall. But not Saigon, not Chicago, not Vietnam. We have to ask ourselves collectively why that omission exists . . . [V]ery powerful forces in our country . . . stand for denial, not just climate denial but generational denial, Vietnam denial.”

  Hayden knew better than anyone the foibles of the movement: “We lived like small boats floating on the sea with raging tides under us, raging crosscurrents that we could not control, only had the illusion of control. Did we think we could swing a majority of Americans to a Marxist analysis or a revolution because of the draft? Come on!” Hayden’s biggest regret was, “We said we would not be like the old left, but we became like the old left. We fell into the same sectarian divisions.”

  On the other hand, he said, “I think we can take credit for constituencies that brought about Ron Dellums, George McGovern, Bella Abzug, and Bernie Sanders. Radicals initiate a process of social change and finally enter the mainstream . . . We took it as our mission to live fulfilling lives instead of making money.”

  A month after Hayden died, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I asked Ram Dass if he felt that more light than darkness had been generated by the counterculture. His response: “I think that it added light, but I think that what’s happening now is a direct reaction from the sixties. We were very naive to think that there would be instant world peace. In the sixties the
re was a reaction of the right that we did not predict that is still reverberating today in this situation.”

  It is worth remembering that the heroes of 1967 were themselves dealing with extremely dark forces, forces that would soon assassinate the most inspiring mainstream progressive leaders, that animated a profoundly destructive FBI, that supported a racist campaign by George Wallace and then a “Southern strategy” by Richard Nixon to peel off enough Wallace voters to win the presidency. The atmosphere of 1967 included a military draft and an American war which killed thousands per week. It included a political and cultural environment in which feminists and gay activists were far more vulnerable and powerless than they would be fifty years later.

  When my parents were in their early twenties, they lived in an America permeated by McCarthyism and ideological purges from government jobs, academia, and mainstream entertainment. Propaganda tools to manipulate millions of Americans date back at least as far as the early twentieth century and the PR efforts by George Creel and Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays to manufacture American support for World War I. Thus, as Billy Joel wrote, “We didn’t start the fire,” but it is well worth looking at mistakes that radicals and hippies made in the sixties to try to avoid them again.

  One misperception was a distorted sense of time. Lenin said that a revolutionary day can seem like ten years, and there were relatively brief moments, such as the Montgomery bus boycott, the quick spread of hippie fashions and drugs, the instant ubiquity of “All You Need Is Love,” and the virtual end of artistic censorship, that may have raised expectations among young people that peace and love could permeate the world in their lifetime. Patience is not unhip.