@rojo…and much, more. Thank you, rojo. It wasn’t just sex, drugs and rock & roll. Far, far from it.
I just woke up from a delightful nap, am coffee’d to the max, and quite disturbed by some of the shit I’m seeing on this thread. God, some of these cliché answers rate posting on SodaHead, not Fluther. Thoughtless parroting.
We didn’t call ourselves hippies. That was a media invention, I think. We referred to ourselves as heads, or freaks. There were many, many different kinds as the whole idea was that you could be anything you wanted to be as long as you were happy being it. There was too much shit in the world and one kind of freak would find happiness ignoring it and doing something totally different and positive and another kind of freak would dig in and change it. Or their part of it.
My experience in freakdom started in the San Francisco Bay area as a kid observer through frequent visits to my Aunts house, and through older friends and teachers, but I wasn’t really old enough to get into the scene until rather late, early 1969 or so. The Summer of Love had long passed, and people were leaving the urban thing behind. But there was still some good things going on. I believe it all started with the Beats and through Beat literature and acquaintances, the next generation of kids embraced it and then tweaked it a bit, finally co-opted it, made the Beat thing more fun in many ways, more intense in others and eventually were loved by Beats like Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and hated by guys like Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac.
I think what is referred to today as the hippie thing, well read in beat and radical literature, grew out of the early 1960s Freedom of Speech Movement at UC Berkeley headed up by the eloquent Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art and Jackie Goldberg, This soon spread across America; first the Ivy Leagues and then on to state colleges. Ward and June Cleaver’s world was expanding, changing, the fantasy was about to crumble under the weight of lies and the people at Berkeley were first to feel it. Good laws concerning civil rights had been enacted ten years previously, but never enforced in many states. Something wasn’t right about the JFK assassination investigation and the almost immediate escalation of the “police action” in Viet Nam. There was some evidence that We, the good guys, were involved in state sponsored political assassinations to forward both our political and corporate interests abroad—and had been since at least 1953. Just before the escalation to 20,000 troop “advisors” in January, 1964, there had been the assassination of Diem, our hand-picked leader in South Viet Nam. Respectable news agencies were hinting that our own spooks had a hand in it, but Washington denied it for years. The Selective Service was gearing up for a draft into a conflict 10,000 miles away in a backwater nobody had ever heard of before. At the same time, the propaganda machine was busy working overtime to convince America that there would be no escalation – with the belated caveat: But if there should be an escalation it would be due to the creeping communism in that area immediately south of China and it was our job to preserve the people who lived there for Democracy and against the Domino Theory. As we were the ones whose lives were to be interrupted, we had the impudence, the temerity to ask for an explanation; a proof of certainty as to the Domino Theory, and an answer to the question: Why the U.S.? Hadn’t this Viet Nam place been a French colony?
Soon, people were being thrown off campuses for doing exactly what they were taught to do: to exercise their right to speak out their concerns during peaceful assembly; to question authority with the naïve expectation that said authority would answer. Forums, facilitated by faculty, were set up on campuses ready to accept guest speakers from the government and weapons manufacturers. It was a typically collegiate thing to do at the time; to engage in civil discussion with the opposition. It was also very naïve as it turned out, because Ward and June’s world had changed. Many invitations were not taken seriously and left unanswered. Many arms manufacturers funded research on these campuses and when student leaders attempted to open these forums, the University presidents – and by the laws concerning shit running downhill—certain faculty members, found themselves deep in said shit. Many times, too many times, there were no discussions, only speeches by great orators like Mario Savio to fill the empty space, who illuminated the dissonance between the world we were taught we lived in and the world we actually lived in and supported with our silence, our ignorance.
The answers received from the authority often came from the State, in the form of cops in riot gear, billy clubs, teargas, National Guard, injuries, arrests, expulsions, and the destruction of printing presses both on and off campuses. People were surprised at the vehemence. They immediately saw the correlation to the Freedom of Speech Movement and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. M L King saw the ham fist used on the students at Berkeley and asked them, Isn’t this all about Civil Rights? There were crossovers from the FSM to the CRM, as the FSM was quickly becoming the Anti-War Movement after the escalation. Since we were doing CRM anyway, the fledgling Women’s Rights Movement who were eventually, logically aligned with the new Gay Rights Movement backed the Anti-War Movement which enveloped the FSM and the whole thing mushroomed nationally as the government poured more and more troops into Nam. The protests got bigger, the opposition got bigger and meaner, the propaganda machine became more bleating and strained, and soon two ideologically different generations of Americans were at each other’s throats: the parents vs their children, were divided and at war.
Start of one big paragraph Rant:
While American GIs died in Vietnam, while hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians died in Southeast Asia fighting them, while villages of civilians were being burned and carpet bombed, while civilian women and children were being killed by our own guys, while blacks were stoically practicing Ghandi-style peaceful protest and being dogged, hosed, jailed, beaten, tortured, and killed in places like Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida for their trouble, while white civil rights workers who were merely trying to get out the black vote were being beaten, arrested, and killed in the same places, while students became more cynical and radical and dangerous, while hardhats went at students at protest marches, while surprising cross sections of American youth began to burn their draft cards and drop into the underground, while the Black Panthers, who started out as a mutual aid society in poor black neighborhoods, became radicalized, militant and armed, while hopelessness set in and drug abuse began to swell among the youth, while the cops began to fortify with tanks, battlefield arms, and SWAT tactics, while protests became more violent and the Guard became ever present, while people lost their jobs at universities and others began heading for the hills and alternative lifestyles in intentional communities, while a nationwide, cellular, underground railroad was established to get dodgers and AWOLs to Mexico and Canada, while the propaganda machine churned out more and more bullshit and having a nightmare of difficulty convincing even the most ardent warhawk that we were winning the war after the losses during the 1968 Tet offensive and the resultant massive insertion of troops culminating into a half million GIs in little Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos by the following summer, while the propaganda machine spewed more venomous bullshit that hippies, which included all longhairs, were a communist conspiracy, a fifth column, working for a Ho Chi Minh victory specifically and out to destroy the very fabric that held the American way of life together generally, while the propaganda machine worked so hard to convince those who were still listening that the innate goodness, the divine righteousness of America still existed and (an idea later revived during the Reagan presidency) there was nothing wrong at all except the negative thinking of a few young people and that positive thinking would get us through this little rough spot in the road, while the American propaganda machine began puking out even more shit about hippies spitting on troops returning from Nam in American airports, while 130 cities burned in the summer of 1967, while the illegal release of documents such as the Pentagon Papers confirmed our suspicions that we had been lied to all along, while a supposedly utterly depraved generation was gearing up for the largest music festival and sex orgy in World History on tiny Yascar’s Farm—- While all this was going on, American TV’s typical programming was shows like My Three Sons and the number one fucking song throughout the summer of 1969 on commercial radio was Sugar, Sugar by the Archies. Anybody who mattered, anybody who had had their eyes open the previous few years, wasn’t listening anymore. Not even some of our moms and dads. Not even many Viet Nam War Veterans. End of rant.
Across the Bay from Berkeley, in a dormitory neighborhood near San Francisco State called Haight Ashbury and nearby Golden Gate Park, there was new music. There was the FM frequency that hardly anyone used and it was cheap to do a startup station. By the time Sugar Sugar was dominating every AM pop station in the US, other people were tuning into FM to hear little messages to the underground bracketed by Hendrix, Cream, Blue Cheer, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish—the good stuff that wasn’t often played on AM or not at all. There would be one hour solid blocks of music with 5 minute commercial breaks. Everyone of us knew who Slick’s black knight marching backwards was, and we all knew Alice. The commercials were spoken by the DJ in a calm voice for local establishments like Barney’s Beanery, Ferlinghetti’s Bookstore and the Truck Store. We knew these were good places and trusted the station to not give us a fuckall snowjob.
There were students and former students who began writing and performing plays and music for free in the Park fortified by a new drug not yet illegal made by a mad chemist at Berkeley named Owsley. There was Grace Slick and some guy named Thumper who listed himself in the yellow pages under bar fixtures, Gerry Garcia and the Warlocks, a poser – there were many—named Dino Valente who everybody thought was a narc, but later got a lot of street cred as lead in the Quicksilver Messenger Service. He used to yell at his girlfriend and boss her around a lot. Not cool behavior at all. There really was a Mountain Girl and she was perfectly depicted by Ron Crumb in the underground papers; her famous hour-glass body shaped and firm from riding horses in her youth in Sonoma. If you ran across her at a concert or in the Park, you instantly she was that girl, Crumb’s unrequited love. She had a beautiful, wide open face that lit up the world when she smiled – and she always smiled. He made her famous. There was this group of freaks with Day-Glo faces, feathers and flowers in their hair, led by a writer from La Honda and an old beatnik guy with an orange sledgehammer named Neal Cassidy. They would take pure Owsley acid and pour it into old gallon jugs of Red Mountain Red filled with Kool-Aid and pass it around in the crowds in the Park, at Winterland, at the Fillmore. In between the bands there were troupes doing Guerilla Theater, acting out the angst of our time. One of the favorites was a guy from New York named Peter Cohen. He used to help out at the Kauliflower Underground Food Pantry and Delivery Service. It was for the underprivileged and elderly in the Haight district. Government assistance was hard to get in those days.
Cohen later became Peter Coyote in Hollywood. He and I used to work with the Diggers, the people who started the Kauliflower Underground and other helpful things. I used to make runs down to Sonora and pick up a key or two. I’d return to the City and break it up into ounces and pack them into the Digger’s discarded Dutchman Tobacco tins. Diggers were big on Dutchman Tobacco and nearly always rolled their own cigarettes with it or used a pipe. They were friendly Beatniks. There were a lot of tins laying around Digger establishments and they showed us how to pack the grass nicely and how, once full, it always measured an ounce. Ten bucks. I paid around $30 for the key. We called the Dutchman cans packed with weed a lid. A Digger invention form the ‘50s – the original lid. That got me through the first two years of university.
Eventually, Owsley discovered that if he added glucose to his LSD-25, he could pour it onto a kind of cookie sheet, let it get plastic, then stamp it out in 1mm squares. This became known as Windowpane. There was also a glucose mixture that could be painted onto surfaces where, theoretically anyone brushing against it with bare skin could get high. Tom wolf said that Kesey did this to a hearing room at the San Francisco Courthouse. Nearly everyone, including Brand and some of the pranksters say this and DMSO is pure bullshit. It would be totally unethical. They never got anyone high without a kind of verbal informed consent and this includes the Be-Ins at the Park and the concerts at Winterland and the Fillmore. I tend to believe them. Tom Wolf was considered a bit of an asshole. A NYC guy that didn’t get it at all. He got his story and left.
Politics was frowned upon in this side of the part of town, unless it could be done with humour. It was way too heavy, better left to the folks who liked that shit, like the Berkeley-ites or some of the pedants down at Ferlinghetti’s bookstore. There you could find old guys who had fought Franco in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain in 37–38. Diehard libs, very in tune with what was going down at Berkeley and the other campuses. Totally different tribes from that in the Haight. Way too intense for that kind of hippie. But then again, there was a guy name Joe Macdonald whose act was funny as hell. And Barry the Fish. They made sit ins and protests at UCSF standup comedy, took the edge off. On this side of the Bay were the ones who would find the new way, a peaceful, constructive society. Zen, yoga, macrobiotics, living with the earth instead of against it. Many, including some of the bands, were already forsaking experimentation with drugs for cherry picking various religions and philosophies, vegetarianism, yoga, and growing gardens in the country together with like-minded people. The mountains surrounding Santa Cruz to the south and the redwooded ridges north of Marin were prime. Eventually, caravans headed for land in Oregon, New Mexico, and Colorado. By 1970, all that was left in the Haight were urban drug addicts and a few wealthy longhairs that could afford the old Victorian three story’s and begin gentrification. Hugh Romney eventually guided his tribe way out east to the Appalachians and the trip was documented in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue accompanied by flip art on the lower left hand corner of every other page for hundreds of pages. Divine Right’s Trip. Read the story and watch the movie at your own speed. Almost anything you would need to live off the land you could get by ordering it out of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue: A Book of Tools, much of which came from Mr. Brand’s Truck Store out on the highway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz.
Stewart Brand sold the Whole Earth Catalogue to Ramparts Publishing after only two or three years, and Ramparts killed it by commercializing it and making it smaller and glossier. They didn’t get it at all. Brand took some of the money and threw a huge party at the Palace of Fine Arts in the old 190-something world exhibition grounds where he left the money in a pile in the center of the building and let people take it as need be. Anyone who had seen the invitation in the Last Whole Earth Catalogue was invited. The money was all gone by morning and Brand took a lot of shit from the press for that, but he was smart and well-off, anyway. He hung with the Portola Institute and Stanford computer research people in the next few years, and eventually financially backed two kids named Jobs and Wozniak, and help them realize all their mutual dream of personal computers in every home with access to all the libraries of the world. The ultimate tool in Brand’s mind. He had watched the DOD develop the net, hand a portion of it over to the US university system and had been raving about it’s potential for decades. He helped start Sun Micro Systems with one of the MicroSoft guys and today works with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other pursuits. One helluva freak who most people have never heard of.
Many freaks became entrepreneurs, like Brand. It was the best way to have control over your life. Some never got beyond small clothes shops. Others became designers. Many did very well. The people who produced Red Zinger Tea, I forget the name of their company, were freaks. They started out combing the hillsides for the herbs they needed for their blends, packaging it themselves in small cellophane bags, and selling them on consignment in local shops. Colorado, I think.
You already know what happened to my old friend Peter Cohen. I can see he chooses his work very carefully and supports many liberal causes, lends himself to documentaries, etc.
Augie Owlsley moved on to design, build, sell, and patent sound systems after LSD became illegal in California. The Dead were big customers. I understand the technology is still competitive. Last I heard, he was residing happily on his ranch somewhere in the Australian Outback and makes and sells jewelry with his wife, mostly over the net. He’s got a site and is doing well.
Ron Crumb was still drawing his comics last I checked; his output is less, but much more valuable now. He moved to Paris a few years ago.
Mountain Girl went back to Sonoma, got a ranch near Garcia and Alice Walker and continues to ride her horses.
Dino Valenti is dead as are many of the most creative people and innovative musicians, singers, and writers of the time. Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison all seemed to go within months of each other. Phil Ochs didn’t make it, neither did beautiful Savio. Brautigan, my favorite writer of the period, a serious, humble guy who could be easy to talk to on the street, a poet at heart, put a bullet in his brain in a beautiful old beach house in Bolinas. The list is very, very long.
For a time, I bought keys and packed lids, and made welcome deliveries to northern California, Oregon, and Washington communes on my trusty Norton 750. My workhorse. I got to know many of these people and watched them slowly people change and the communes disappear. What happened was people began having children. That changes everything. Most freaks who headed to the land were anarchists at heart and had a real aversion to structure. There has to be at least a village structure to raise kids and many times there just wasn’t the desire for that, so the women took their babies and left with their men in tow and if enough skilled labour left these places, they fell apart. A Berkeley intellectual was interesting to talk to around the campfire, but absolutely useless if he or she couldn’t drive a nail, plant and sow crops, use a saw, or put together a basic structure. Then the dregs began showing up; old buddies from the Haight days who now carried a monkey on their backs, or no skills, or no work ethic. These people would drag a place down quickly if they showed up in numbers too large. And in many cases they did. Many went off into blue collar labor, or “honest labour,” for awhile, and soon waivered, then went off to finish their degrees, melt back into the establishment and raise their kids. Many became entrepreneurs. Many got drafted before the war was over. Many went to Canada and assimilated there. Some ended up on the street. Some went crazy and some died. Just like in any population.
There were strong personalities and those who followed them, but this was necessary and most places were loose democracies. Rarely did I see groups blindly led by megalomaniacs. There was a Sufi Camp run by a madman up near Gualala for awhile, but American kids wouldn’t put up with him and they soon drifted off. There was an urban commune out of Oakland named Morehouse that set up a country franchise at a nice Sonoma horse ranch that may still be around. They were a sex cult. They would have confirmed every paranoid statement Governor Reagan ever made about the sex-and-drug-crazed hippies. They made their money selling sexual freedom courses to horny, uptight middle class couples. They were basically selling the swinger lifestyle to sexual tourists while they weren’t looking. Teaching wives the fine art of felatio, introducing the hubbies to the joy of cunnilingus, and then encouraging them to practice on their fellow classmates. Telling them it is an open secret within Medical circles that these two sexual techniques alone could prevent 35% of the cancer cases in sexually repressed America. It’s amazing what bored, horny people will believe to make it safe to live out their sexual fantasies. This group had tapped heavily into that and was quite successful and moneyed. They had a nice big private lodge in Tahoe where they held the more advanced intense, 48-hour, sleep deprived classes at. The ground troops were thoroughly brainwashed and controlled by a small, hard core leadership. I later realized they were using the same techniques to control their young people as that of Scientology. The terminology was nearly the same. I’m guessing the leadership were probably Scientology refugees. The leadership were basically pimps and they used their better looking members to recruit better looking members with sex. Other than that, I never saw much cultism.
I saw mostly very good people desperately trying to find alternatives to the brutal world we had awakened to, searching for solutions, enlightenment wherever it could be found in order to leave to our children a better world, a cleaner world, a more equitable world. We experimented with everything, searched for answers everywhere, and most of us dropped the dead ends like hot potatoes. The ones that didn’t do this burned out early, pithed their souls with drugs or other obsessions, or turned to violence and became their own worst enemy.
It was a strange, strange time and if you weren’t there, there is no way you could comprehend how it felt for it to go down around you. I was just a kid, and at best an observer. It was weird and wonderful.
I soon grew out of selling weed to the communes. It was nice while it lasted, but the cops were getting smarter and their equipment more sophisticated, their techniques more aggressive, and it was only a matter of time before I’d find myself in a shower and be hesitant to pick the soap off the floor.
Then the war ended and my life took a turn in a totally different direction. I learned a lot at a formative period and much of it is still with me. I learned when people put their mind to it, diverse groups of them can live together peaceably, constructively. I learn about open generosity, that true altruism must always be anonymous to ensure it is passed on to someone else, and one act can then take on a long life of it’s own. That people respond better to and learn easier from gentility and civility rather than force and hostility. It takes longer, but it takes and is more effective in the long run. I learned that giving is really a selfish act, because it feels so good in the right places and in the end you realize that you’re doing it to relive that high as much as helping the other guy. I learned that true poverty is when you have run dry and can no longer give. I learned that change really can happen with the right people at the right time. It was a good time to be alive, a miracle of an era and it has been totally and willfully misunderstood.
The coffee has worn off. I hope I didn’t do too much damage here, but I had been visiting this string off and on all day and I just couldn’t stand it anymore.
Composing members:
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