Bill and Siobhan are dive-bombing Idaho for the next couple of weeks, boating down rivers, panning for gold and generally running amok. The following priceless columns are from the early years of the Flying Pie, so anyone who reads it for the pictures is in trouble.
Anatomy Of A Decade—Part III: The Salad Days
Who says nobody likes to read about hippies? Last week’s column, aided no doubt by our recent interview on Court Lewis’ radio show and 27 errant Frenchmen (Gilbert Shelton lives in Paris, after all), was read by 1 1/2 times as many people as any other column. Go figure. Even with the radio help and the French Kiss, that’s a hell of a one-week jump. We’re not getting carried away with the European fans, however. The French think Jerry Lewis is a comic genius, so what do they know?
Question 3. What was the prevailing mood a few years into the hippie phenomenon?
When John F. Kennedy was elected president, there arose an enormous wave of optimism among the youth of the country. Kennedy seemed more than human, capable of leaping tall buildings with a single bound. His agenda was ambitious but his oratorical skills led us to believe all things were possible. JFK had the appearance of a true idealist and, at 43, he was the youngest president ever elected. The excitement was palpable. Most of us did not reckon with the Other Side. And, as we have increased in years, we now realize there is always an Other Side.
Nonetheless, Kennedy initiated the Peace Corps, a resounding success, which sent altruistic and adventuresome young (and a few older) Americans around the globe, especially to third-world countries, to raise up their fellow man. He started the successful program to place an American on the moon within the decade. With his feisty brother Robert, then the U.S. Attorney General, he embarked on a civil rights initiative which turned the oppressive segregated South into a far more comfortable place to live for what were then called American Negroes. (His thanks for the latter was the disintegration of the “Solid South,” a Democratic Party voter bastion since the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Barack Obama has inherited the neverending enmity of Bigotland.)
Kennedy also developed other antagonists. An ill-fated invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles and a couple of wretchedly unsuccessful attempts on Fidel Castro’s life left the revolutionary leader one unhappy camper. The American Mob, large contributors to JFK’s campaign via his father, Joe, were likewise perplexed and none too appreciative of brother Robert’s broad assault on crime. And then, of course, those merry Russians decided to ship a mess of weapons to Fidel, bringing about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps derivative of all this—but who really knows?—John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November of 1963, crushing the dreams of his young admirers and, temporarily, at least, the spirit of a nation.
Hippies To The Rescue
Lyndon Baines Johnson succeeded Kennedy as President and rammed virtually all of JFK’s programs through a Congress, which, in part, wanted to memorialize John Kennedy, but also was a little terrified of LBJ, who knew where everybody’s skeletons were buried. Johnson also expanded the unpopular Vietnam War, however, an effort which led to his eventual demise and the hilarious presidency of poor old Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, there was craziness afoot in California. Young kids were streaming to San Francisco (and even L.A.) in droves, creating sub-societies of their own, which marched to a different drummer. Capitalism was eschewed, money was excoriated, war was the ultimate villainy and the government, in all its phases, became the enemy. It was not a wonderful time, shall we say, to be a cop.
On the East Coast, everybody was trying to catch up. Greenwich Village in New York City led the charge. When I went there, in September of 1967, to look for stuff to sell in my store-to-be, the Village was a wondrous place. It looked, smelled and felt like nothing I had ever experienced. There were new little underfinanced shops everywhere, selling everything from posters to buttons (thousands of buttons) to handmade pipes to Cossack shirts to incense, enormous quantities of incense, scents spilling from the shops into the streets, overwhelming all. Everything was NEW. Christ, who was thinking up all this stuff? The psychedelic poster art was absolutely brilliant, the new clothing lines colorful and outrageous. As you walked down St. Mark’s Place or Bleeker Street, there was one amazing discovery after another to be found. There was no end to the creativity. Even the music was different. Again, as with Kennedy, all things seemed possible. Hippiedom had arrived.
Meanwhile, Back On The Ranch….
The first day we opened the Subterranean Circus in September of 1967, we made $27, consisting almost exclusively from poster sales. We had posters, alright. They covered most of the walls and, eventually, even the ceilings. The store was about 25 feet by 80, so do the math. Soon enough, we parceled off a large section, installed blacklights and posters reactive to them and—voila!—the blacklight room. By now, Vietnam war vets were bringing home bamboo bongs, so we sold those. They were promptly improved upon by clever capitalists who manufactured them in everything from ceramic to glass to plastic. Our employee, Dick North, scrambled around gathering up lamp parts to make marijuana pipes but before long pipes of every material and description were being produced nationwide. There was no real competition, all other merchants being older and disconnected from all the contemporary hoopdedoo, so we got everything first. No store-owner in Gainesville had even heard of bellbottoms and we were selling 50 pair a day, minimum. We sold so many Cossack and Nehru shirts we had to hire an army of women to make them. And then, of course, came waterbeds.
Oh, Those Waterbeds!
Oh, those waterbeds,
We love ‘em when we’re hot!
Oh, those waterbeds,
We love ‘em when we’re not!
Oh, those waterbeds,
The girlies like ‘em, too!
Oh, those waterbeds,
They’re great for pitchin’ woo!
Oh, those waterbeds,
They make you slip and slide!
Sometimes they help you hit the spot,
Sometimes you override.
My first waterbed experience was at Mike Garcia’s apartment in D.C. He wouldn’t be home the first night I was visiting but I was welcome to sleep on his new waterbed. Groovy. I eagerly anticipated this fabulous new experience. Trouble was, Mike’s bed was plunked out on the floor like a giant amoeba, no frame to rein it in, help slosh it about, thus creating the true waterbed experience. Worse by far, it was extremely COLD. After a few minutes, your teeth were chattering. Garcia, rookie waterbed owner that he was, had no idea that it was necessary to cover your nice new waterbed with a 3/4 inch foam pad so your guests wouldn’t freeze to death. I left the next morning less than charmed by the exotic possibilities of the waterbed and less anxious to add them to my inventory. Eventually, though, I ordered three or four of them just for the hell of it. At which time I met the redoubtable Jim Hines, aka “Waterbed Man.”
Hines was a tall, blonde guy, handsome enough in a preppy looking sort of way. He could have just stepped out the door of the Sigma Chi house, straight as he was about almost everything, this leading to his thoroughly undesired title of “Waterbed Man,” staunchly implanted by one of my affable employees, Mike (Jagger) Hatcherson, a humorously sarcastic little fellow, very popular with the girls even though he wore his hair like Prince Valiant. There’s no accounting for some women’s tastes. Anyway, Waterbed Man—Jagger explicitly required we call him that and there would be no exceptions—came to me with a proposal. HE would sell waterbeds in the store and give us a cut of oh, say, 25%. I had already ordered my own waterbeds and didn’t think this guy fit in all that well so I told him 50%, figuring that would get rid of him. After blustering around to no avail, he suddenly decided to accept the deal. Great, I thought. Now I’ve got this schmoe to contend with. Jagger, on the other hand, thought it would be great to have a new foil around to play with.
In future weeks, we came to respect Waterbed Man’s knowledge of his business, if not him. He brought in about 40 waterbeds as the rest of us snickered. And he sold about 40 waterbeds in less than a week as his detractors reassessed. I was very happy for Waterbed Man as, with no investment, I was making more than he was—and he was making plenty. Waterbed Man hung around for a couple of years, successfully plying his trade, assembling a better wardrobe, attracting desirable females, emerging as a successful profit-taking entrepreneur. At which time, he approached Jagger with a simple request.
“Okay, I’ve paid my dues, I’ve been here two years, my business is doing great, I’m fitting in better with everybody in the store. I think it’s time you started calling me ‘Jim Hines.’”
Jagger regarded his prey with lowered eyelids.
“You know, if you get rich as a king—if you start going out with Jane Fonda—even if you can get me tickets to the next five Rolling Stones concerts,” Jagger promised, “you’ll always be ‘Waterbed Man’ to me.”
Jim Hines slumped off, forever a stranger in a strange land, and a short time later opened his own waterbed store. By that time, however, the Subterranean Circs was a true behemoth, eating competitors for lunch, and while Hines did fairly well, things were never the same for him. One day he called, interested in selling out his remaining stock. Mike Hatcherson took the call.
“Jagger,” Hines announced, “this is Waterbed Man.”
“Of course it is,” replied Jagger, winking to himself.
Oh Oh!
Next week, as luck would have it, Siobhan and I must trek to Kentucky for business purposes. Her business purposes, of course, since I have none. This means that we shall be unwinding an old blog just like we did in August. Whenever we do such things—and this is only the second occasion—we provide you with the column which has been most read over the two years of Flying Pie history. Unless, of course, something goes wrong and this one sits around for another week. By the way, we’re busily at work on Bill’s birthday blog and you know what that means: scandalous pictures, which have been known to cause viewers to cry and gnash their teeth, especially if their names are Stuart Ellison. So this is your first WARNING, there may be others. Or not. Proceed at your own peril.
That’s all, folks….
Question 3. What was the prevailing mood a few years into the hippie phenomenon?
When John F. Kennedy was elected president, there arose an enormous wave of optimism among the youth of the country. Kennedy seemed more than human, capable of leaping tall buildings with a single bound. His agenda was ambitious but his oratorical skills led us to believe all things were possible. JFK had the appearance of a true idealist and, at 43, he was the youngest president ever elected. The excitement was palpable. Most of us did not reckon with the Other Side. And, as we have increased in years, we now realize there is always an Other Side.
Nonetheless, Kennedy initiated the Peace Corps, a resounding success, which sent altruistic and adventuresome young (and a few older) Americans around the globe, especially to third-world countries, to raise up their fellow man. He started the successful program to place an American on the moon within the decade. With his feisty brother Robert, then the U.S. Attorney General, he embarked on a civil rights initiative which turned the oppressive segregated South into a far more comfortable place to live for what were then called American Negroes. (His thanks for the latter was the disintegration of the “Solid South,” a Democratic Party voter bastion since the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Barack Obama has inherited the neverending enmity of Bigotland.)
Kennedy also developed other antagonists. An ill-fated invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles and a couple of wretchedly unsuccessful attempts on Fidel Castro’s life left the revolutionary leader one unhappy camper. The American Mob, large contributors to JFK’s campaign via his father, Joe, were likewise perplexed and none too appreciative of brother Robert’s broad assault on crime. And then, of course, those merry Russians decided to ship a mess of weapons to Fidel, bringing about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps derivative of all this—but who really knows?—John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November of 1963, crushing the dreams of his young admirers and, temporarily, at least, the spirit of a nation.
Hippies To The Rescue
Lyndon Baines Johnson succeeded Kennedy as President and rammed virtually all of JFK’s programs through a Congress, which, in part, wanted to memorialize John Kennedy, but also was a little terrified of LBJ, who knew where everybody’s skeletons were buried. Johnson also expanded the unpopular Vietnam War, however, an effort which led to his eventual demise and the hilarious presidency of poor old Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, there was craziness afoot in California. Young kids were streaming to San Francisco (and even L.A.) in droves, creating sub-societies of their own, which marched to a different drummer. Capitalism was eschewed, money was excoriated, war was the ultimate villainy and the government, in all its phases, became the enemy. It was not a wonderful time, shall we say, to be a cop.
On the East Coast, everybody was trying to catch up. Greenwich Village in New York City led the charge. When I went there, in September of 1967, to look for stuff to sell in my store-to-be, the Village was a wondrous place. It looked, smelled and felt like nothing I had ever experienced. There were new little underfinanced shops everywhere, selling everything from posters to buttons (thousands of buttons) to handmade pipes to Cossack shirts to incense, enormous quantities of incense, scents spilling from the shops into the streets, overwhelming all. Everything was NEW. Christ, who was thinking up all this stuff? The psychedelic poster art was absolutely brilliant, the new clothing lines colorful and outrageous. As you walked down St. Mark’s Place or Bleeker Street, there was one amazing discovery after another to be found. There was no end to the creativity. Even the music was different. Again, as with Kennedy, all things seemed possible. Hippiedom had arrived.
Meanwhile, Back On The Ranch….
The first day we opened the Subterranean Circus in September of 1967, we made $27, consisting almost exclusively from poster sales. We had posters, alright. They covered most of the walls and, eventually, even the ceilings. The store was about 25 feet by 80, so do the math. Soon enough, we parceled off a large section, installed blacklights and posters reactive to them and—voila!—the blacklight room. By now, Vietnam war vets were bringing home bamboo bongs, so we sold those. They were promptly improved upon by clever capitalists who manufactured them in everything from ceramic to glass to plastic. Our employee, Dick North, scrambled around gathering up lamp parts to make marijuana pipes but before long pipes of every material and description were being produced nationwide. There was no real competition, all other merchants being older and disconnected from all the contemporary hoopdedoo, so we got everything first. No store-owner in Gainesville had even heard of bellbottoms and we were selling 50 pair a day, minimum. We sold so many Cossack and Nehru shirts we had to hire an army of women to make them. And then, of course, came waterbeds.
Oh, Those Waterbeds!
We love ‘em when we’re hot!
Oh, those waterbeds,
We love ‘em when we’re not!
Oh, those waterbeds,
The girlies like ‘em, too!
Oh, those waterbeds,
They’re great for pitchin’ woo!
Oh, those waterbeds,
They make you slip and slide!
Sometimes they help you hit the spot,
Sometimes you override.
Hines was a tall, blonde guy, handsome enough in a preppy looking sort of way. He could have just stepped out the door of the Sigma Chi house, straight as he was about almost everything, this leading to his thoroughly undesired title of “Waterbed Man,” staunchly implanted by one of my affable employees, Mike (Jagger) Hatcherson, a humorously sarcastic little fellow, very popular with the girls even though he wore his hair like Prince Valiant. There’s no accounting for some women’s tastes. Anyway, Waterbed Man—Jagger explicitly required we call him that and there would be no exceptions—came to me with a proposal. HE would sell waterbeds in the store and give us a cut of oh, say, 25%. I had already ordered my own waterbeds and didn’t think this guy fit in all that well so I told him 50%, figuring that would get rid of him. After blustering around to no avail, he suddenly decided to accept the deal. Great, I thought. Now I’ve got this schmoe to contend with. Jagger, on the other hand, thought it would be great to have a new foil around to play with.
In future weeks, we came to respect Waterbed Man’s knowledge of his business, if not him. He brought in about 40 waterbeds as the rest of us snickered. And he sold about 40 waterbeds in less than a week as his detractors reassessed. I was very happy for Waterbed Man as, with no investment, I was making more than he was—and he was making plenty. Waterbed Man hung around for a couple of years, successfully plying his trade, assembling a better wardrobe, attracting desirable females, emerging as a successful profit-taking entrepreneur. At which time, he approached Jagger with a simple request.
“Okay, I’ve paid my dues, I’ve been here two years, my business is doing great, I’m fitting in better with everybody in the store. I think it’s time you started calling me ‘Jim Hines.’”
Jagger regarded his prey with lowered eyelids.
“You know, if you get rich as a king—if you start going out with Jane Fonda—even if you can get me tickets to the next five Rolling Stones concerts,” Jagger promised, “you’ll always be ‘Waterbed Man’ to me.”
Jim Hines slumped off, forever a stranger in a strange land, and a short time later opened his own waterbed store. By that time, however, the Subterranean Circs was a true behemoth, eating competitors for lunch, and while Hines did fairly well, things were never the same for him. One day he called, interested in selling out his remaining stock. Mike Hatcherson took the call.
“Jagger,” Hines announced, “this is Waterbed Man.”
“Of course it is,” replied Jagger, winking to himself.
Oh Oh!
Next week, as luck would have it, Siobhan and I must trek to Kentucky for business purposes. Her business purposes, of course, since I have none. This means that we shall be unwinding an old blog just like we did in August. Whenever we do such things—and this is only the second occasion—we provide you with the column which has been most read over the two years of Flying Pie history. Unless, of course, something goes wrong and this one sits around for another week. By the way, we’re busily at work on Bill’s birthday blog and you know what that means: scandalous pictures, which have been known to cause viewers to cry and gnash their teeth, especially if their names are Stuart Ellison. So this is your first WARNING, there may be others. Or not. Proceed at your own peril.
That’s all, folks….
Anatomy Of A Decade—Part IV: The Pendulum Swings Back
All good things, they say, must eventually end and so it was with hippiedom, which began in a burst of color and song and ended not with a bang, but a whimper. Today, we’ll try to answer the final questions. Credit again for inspiration for this four-part odyssey to Court Lewis and American Variety Radio, whose interview with us started the introspection.
First came the beatniks, whose reign was brief. The hippies followed but eventually suffered the same fate. What happens to these counterculture societies, once so popular, that brings about their eventual demise?
Well, let’s take it one counterculture at a time. First, the beatniks were a much smaller subculture than the hippies, finding their greatest numbers following the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road, which celebrated a freewheeling new lifestyle in an era of no-questions-asked conventionalism. Let’s hear from Kerouac, himself, on the question:
The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg, in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly, graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on street corners in Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We’d even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebabies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization….
The postwar years in America were economic and emotional boom times, remember. A scary enemy had been vanquished and a depression overcome. The U.S. was a major manufacturing country and jobs were plentiful, even for the large numbers of returning veterans, who had the exciting alternate option of going to college on the G.I. Bill, which many of them did. The Government had won the war and had now become a good provider. What’s to worry?
Well, there’s always that 10 per cent, the outsiders who bristle at regimentation, equate sameness with mediocrity and begin to push the envelope. They create their own look, their own literature, gravitate to their own music—in this case, jazz. The general public saw “beatniks” as an odd lot of black turtleneck-wearing, bongo-playing, dark glasses-wearing freaks, but it is always the “freaks” who pull society in another direction, questioning the status quo, opening windows into other possible worlds, generally broadening the prevailing gestalt. The bulk of society never realizes its eventual concessions to these countercultures, to the richness they add to the recipe, but these things occur nonetheless. And that is one of the answers to “what happens” to these subsets—they are, to some degree coopted by the society at large, which accepts the gentler precepts of the rebel group and incorporates them into the whole. The other thing that happens, particularly for the counterculture purists, is that the movement eventually runs out of gas, brought down by the same forces which rule straight society. What is cool today will almost certainly NOT be cool tomorrow. Look at fashion. And hairstyles. And music. The old admonition that anything which is not growing is dying is largely correct. So keep an eye on those peaks.
The Hippie Extravaganza
Growing up in the fifties, everybody respected authority. The President was put on a pedestal. The college deans were paragons of virtue. The police were not to be questioned. And if we had the temerity to ask, “Why, Dad?”, we were answered with “Because I said so.” When I began to poke around at Oklahoma State, trying to determine the reasons for the death of the campus magazine, The Aggievator, (and one of the reasons might have been apoplexy with the name), it became obvious that the magazine made the OSU administration uncomfortable in a way that the straight-laced campus newspaper wouldn’t dare to do. I was a little surprised to discover that the holier-than-thou deans might occasionally proffer an actual LIE or two and the university president was not above obfuscation. Other humor magazine editors around the country discovered the same astounding phenomena and many of these magazines became the bane of administrators’ existences. At Florida, the Charlatan’s obstreperousness pricked the conscience of the campus newspaper, The Florida Alligator, the editors of which began to increasingly question the UF administration, especially with regard to en loco parentis matters, which placed the administration in the role of a parent. One group of Alligator editors was summarily dismissed by the university (and immediately hired by various Florida newspapers who admired their chutzpah) and the anti-authority genie was beginning to find his way out of the bottle.
This was also the time when anti-war organizations like Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) began to rise up in opposition to the Vietnam War. Men as young as 18 could be drafted into the military in those days so SDS and like organizations had a vast potential audience, despite straight society’s loud howling about lack of patriotism and communist leanings. Not only was authority being questioned, it was now being defied. Anti-war marches were held, drawing vast numbers of participants, many of whom had practiced in civil rights demonstrations. Confrontations with police and national guard troops made news from coast to coast. Young people began losing respect for their elders’ ideas and restrictions. Folk music graduated from the Kingston Trio to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. And we all know it’s dangerous for dissidents to be provided with an anthem.
By the mid-sixties, hippies were flowing into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco (coincidentally—or not—the provisional capitol of the beat generation), as well as L.A., Greenwich Village and innumerable other places deemed cool, including Austin and Gainesville. The early hippies inherited the countercultural values of the Beat Generation, created their own communities and frolicked to their music, largely psychedelic rock. Drugs like marijuana, LSD and magic mushrooms were plentiful. From all this encouragement arose the sexual revolution, investigation of Eastern religions, the onset of the health food mania and gigantic musical festivals like the iconic Woodstock. Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, celebrated this period. One of his main characters, Neal Cassady, had been the hero (or anti-hero, Dean Moriarty, as the case may be) of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. The San Francisco Summer of Love, in 1967, was probably the peak of the Hippie Era. It was estimated that about 100,000 people travelled to the City by the Bay during that period and the media was right behind them, lending authenticity and increased attention to the movement. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released at this point and became indigenous to hippiedom.
Needless to say, logistical nightmares prevailed for city governments suffering the sudden influx of armies of hippies, especially in San Francisco. The Diggers made a valiant attempt to feed everybody and succeeded for a time but the huge numbers of charity cases made long-term success unsupportable. Meanwhile, alert capitalists made hay while the sun shone. Record labels signed up every band with an unusual name they could find. Dance halls like the Fillmore proliferated. Poster artists moved into a new tax bracket. And headshops were everywhere. The popular Broadway musical, Hair, was presented in 1967. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end, we’d sing and dance forever and a day. Not so fast, my friend.
The Worm Turns. Slowly, But Nonetheless….
If the Summer of Love was not the peak of the Hippie Era, then that honor would have to go to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which took place in the tiny hamlet of Bethel, N.Y. in 1969. Over 500,000 people showed up, abandoning cars on the irretrievably clogged highways, and finding their ways to the iconic festival to hear many of the most notable musicians and bands of the day, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Carlos Santana. Naked, free-loving hippies were everywhere, smoking dope, swimming in the creeks, blissing out to the music, even in the face of monstrous cloudbursts. The New York City newspapers bellowed:
HIPPIES WALLOW IN MUD. Despite the difficulties, Woodstock was considered an enormous success by the hippie world. Not so much by the cities and towns who watched the chaos and began turning down every request for future hijinks of the sort. The disenchantment grew after a December, 1969 concert at Altamont, about 30 miles east of San Francisco, initially billed “Woodstock West,” where about 300,000 people gathered to hear The Rolling Stones and others. You might want to give a second thought to employing the Hell’s Angels as your security team for these affairs: an 18-year-old named Meredith Hunter was stabbed and killed during the Stones’ performance after he brandished a gun and waved it toward the stage.
The 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by Charles Manson’s “family” was also laid at the feet of the hippies, although the term hardly describes Manson, a crazed egomaniac parasite who merely took advantage of the setting. On October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose, close on the heels of a similar incident in which Jimi Hendrix died on the way to a hospital, asphyxiated on his own vomit mainly containing red wine. Talk about the gild coming off the lilly. The innocent, brighteyed beginnings of the hippie episode, promising in their early openness and emphasis on peace and love and freedom, were unraveling in spades. But even without these cataclysmic events, it was only a matter of time. Free love inevitably succumbs to free jealousy. LSD is very pretty but take enough it and you will be relegated to the space museum. And nice as marijuana can be for listening to music, I would rather read a book in a few days rather than the weeks it takes when you have to reread each paragraph five times. It certainly was fun while it lasted but unless you are an unrealistic, unreconstructed hippie, you realize that everything has its time and, sooner or later, we move on. Society has assimilated many of the happier aspects of the hippie days, some of us more than others. Tolerance, for one thing. An openness to strange ideas. A closer investigation of rules. A thirst for justice. Multiculturalism. Keep the lovelight glowing.
Never forget the important things. Peace. Love. Transparent dresses….
First came the beatniks, whose reign was brief. The hippies followed but eventually suffered the same fate. What happens to these counterculture societies, once so popular, that brings about their eventual demise?
Well, let’s take it one counterculture at a time. First, the beatniks were a much smaller subculture than the hippies, finding their greatest numbers following the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road, which celebrated a freewheeling new lifestyle in an era of no-questions-asked conventionalism. Let’s hear from Kerouac, himself, on the question:
The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg, in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly, graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on street corners in Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We’d even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebabies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization….
The postwar years in America were economic and emotional boom times, remember. A scary enemy had been vanquished and a depression overcome. The U.S. was a major manufacturing country and jobs were plentiful, even for the large numbers of returning veterans, who had the exciting alternate option of going to college on the G.I. Bill, which many of them did. The Government had won the war and had now become a good provider. What’s to worry?
Well, there’s always that 10 per cent, the outsiders who bristle at regimentation, equate sameness with mediocrity and begin to push the envelope. They create their own look, their own literature, gravitate to their own music—in this case, jazz. The general public saw “beatniks” as an odd lot of black turtleneck-wearing, bongo-playing, dark glasses-wearing freaks, but it is always the “freaks” who pull society in another direction, questioning the status quo, opening windows into other possible worlds, generally broadening the prevailing gestalt. The bulk of society never realizes its eventual concessions to these countercultures, to the richness they add to the recipe, but these things occur nonetheless. And that is one of the answers to “what happens” to these subsets—they are, to some degree coopted by the society at large, which accepts the gentler precepts of the rebel group and incorporates them into the whole. The other thing that happens, particularly for the counterculture purists, is that the movement eventually runs out of gas, brought down by the same forces which rule straight society. What is cool today will almost certainly NOT be cool tomorrow. Look at fashion. And hairstyles. And music. The old admonition that anything which is not growing is dying is largely correct. So keep an eye on those peaks.
The Hippie Extravaganza
Growing up in the fifties, everybody respected authority. The President was put on a pedestal. The college deans were paragons of virtue. The police were not to be questioned. And if we had the temerity to ask, “Why, Dad?”, we were answered with “Because I said so.” When I began to poke around at Oklahoma State, trying to determine the reasons for the death of the campus magazine, The Aggievator, (and one of the reasons might have been apoplexy with the name), it became obvious that the magazine made the OSU administration uncomfortable in a way that the straight-laced campus newspaper wouldn’t dare to do. I was a little surprised to discover that the holier-than-thou deans might occasionally proffer an actual LIE or two and the university president was not above obfuscation. Other humor magazine editors around the country discovered the same astounding phenomena and many of these magazines became the bane of administrators’ existences. At Florida, the Charlatan’s obstreperousness pricked the conscience of the campus newspaper, The Florida Alligator, the editors of which began to increasingly question the UF administration, especially with regard to en loco parentis matters, which placed the administration in the role of a parent. One group of Alligator editors was summarily dismissed by the university (and immediately hired by various Florida newspapers who admired their chutzpah) and the anti-authority genie was beginning to find his way out of the bottle.
This was also the time when anti-war organizations like Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) began to rise up in opposition to the Vietnam War. Men as young as 18 could be drafted into the military in those days so SDS and like organizations had a vast potential audience, despite straight society’s loud howling about lack of patriotism and communist leanings. Not only was authority being questioned, it was now being defied. Anti-war marches were held, drawing vast numbers of participants, many of whom had practiced in civil rights demonstrations. Confrontations with police and national guard troops made news from coast to coast. Young people began losing respect for their elders’ ideas and restrictions. Folk music graduated from the Kingston Trio to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. And we all know it’s dangerous for dissidents to be provided with an anthem.
By the mid-sixties, hippies were flowing into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco (coincidentally—or not—the provisional capitol of the beat generation), as well as L.A., Greenwich Village and innumerable other places deemed cool, including Austin and Gainesville. The early hippies inherited the countercultural values of the Beat Generation, created their own communities and frolicked to their music, largely psychedelic rock. Drugs like marijuana, LSD and magic mushrooms were plentiful. From all this encouragement arose the sexual revolution, investigation of Eastern religions, the onset of the health food mania and gigantic musical festivals like the iconic Woodstock. Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, celebrated this period. One of his main characters, Neal Cassady, had been the hero (or anti-hero, Dean Moriarty, as the case may be) of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. The San Francisco Summer of Love, in 1967, was probably the peak of the Hippie Era. It was estimated that about 100,000 people travelled to the City by the Bay during that period and the media was right behind them, lending authenticity and increased attention to the movement. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released at this point and became indigenous to hippiedom.
Needless to say, logistical nightmares prevailed for city governments suffering the sudden influx of armies of hippies, especially in San Francisco. The Diggers made a valiant attempt to feed everybody and succeeded for a time but the huge numbers of charity cases made long-term success unsupportable. Meanwhile, alert capitalists made hay while the sun shone. Record labels signed up every band with an unusual name they could find. Dance halls like the Fillmore proliferated. Poster artists moved into a new tax bracket. And headshops were everywhere. The popular Broadway musical, Hair, was presented in 1967. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end, we’d sing and dance forever and a day. Not so fast, my friend.
The Worm Turns. Slowly, But Nonetheless….
If the Summer of Love was not the peak of the Hippie Era, then that honor would have to go to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which took place in the tiny hamlet of Bethel, N.Y. in 1969. Over 500,000 people showed up, abandoning cars on the irretrievably clogged highways, and finding their ways to the iconic festival to hear many of the most notable musicians and bands of the day, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Carlos Santana. Naked, free-loving hippies were everywhere, smoking dope, swimming in the creeks, blissing out to the music, even in the face of monstrous cloudbursts. The New York City newspapers bellowed:
HIPPIES WALLOW IN MUD. Despite the difficulties, Woodstock was considered an enormous success by the hippie world. Not so much by the cities and towns who watched the chaos and began turning down every request for future hijinks of the sort. The disenchantment grew after a December, 1969 concert at Altamont, about 30 miles east of San Francisco, initially billed “Woodstock West,” where about 300,000 people gathered to hear The Rolling Stones and others. You might want to give a second thought to employing the Hell’s Angels as your security team for these affairs: an 18-year-old named Meredith Hunter was stabbed and killed during the Stones’ performance after he brandished a gun and waved it toward the stage.
The 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by Charles Manson’s “family” was also laid at the feet of the hippies, although the term hardly describes Manson, a crazed egomaniac parasite who merely took advantage of the setting. On October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose, close on the heels of a similar incident in which Jimi Hendrix died on the way to a hospital, asphyxiated on his own vomit mainly containing red wine. Talk about the gild coming off the lilly. The innocent, brighteyed beginnings of the hippie episode, promising in their early openness and emphasis on peace and love and freedom, were unraveling in spades. But even without these cataclysmic events, it was only a matter of time. Free love inevitably succumbs to free jealousy. LSD is very pretty but take enough it and you will be relegated to the space museum. And nice as marijuana can be for listening to music, I would rather read a book in a few days rather than the weeks it takes when you have to reread each paragraph five times. It certainly was fun while it lasted but unless you are an unrealistic, unreconstructed hippie, you realize that everything has its time and, sooner or later, we move on. Society has assimilated many of the happier aspects of the hippie days, some of us more than others. Tolerance, for one thing. An openness to strange ideas. A closer investigation of rules. A thirst for justice. Multiculturalism. Keep the lovelight glowing.
Never forget the important things. Peace. Love. Transparent dresses….
