Next to “Who do you like in the fifth at Gulfstream?” and “Why doesn’t Batman DO something about Lindsey Graham?” this is the question most asked of me in the last 30 years. It’s as if I attached tiny tracking devices to Subterranean Circus customers’ proto-pipes, sneaked little cameras into the blacklight fixtures to follow them along life’s journeys.
The simple answer, of course, is that evolution grabbed them by the nape of the neck and shook them til their beads fell off, dispersing thoughts of commune life, free rock and roll concerts and nightly deliveries by the ganja man in the ice-cream truck. The realization dawns that Wavy Gravy and the Diggers will no longer be pulling up in the chuckwagon at 5 p.m. to deliver meat pies and baklava, that doobie tosses will become increasingly rare, that Lysergic Acid Diethylamide is not the answer to all the problems of the universe, not that we can remember, at least.
Or maybe they just took a wrong fork in the road somewhere on the way to Nirvana, the one that led to the Land of Accumulating Stuff. Could be when Lester Stormcloud married Indigo Skye the infant produce of the mating caused Dad to plan a sounder future, get a job with the Prudential Insurance Company, trade in his nifty Schwinn. There comes a sad day for everyone except Deb Peterson when a hippie realizes that All You Need Is Love is not entirely correct, that you also need a revenue source and some good socks.
When all this comes to pass, we have to hope that some small shards of the old mantra remain in his or her tattered backpack, that peace and love are still important, that caring for one another is paramount, that accumulating wealth never becomes the be-all, end-all of their existence. Baba Ram Dass wouldn’t like it.
Down Yonder, Down On The Farm
In 1971, Stephen Gaskin and 320 fellow-travelers in a winding caravan of 80 school buses drove 2274 miles from San Francisco to found The Farm in rural Lawrence County, Tennessee near the hamlet of Summertown. The new settlement was based on the principles of nonviolence and respect for the Earth. Not that they were overly optimistic, but the banner on one of their buses read, “Out To Save The World!” What the hell---in for a dime, in for a dollar.
Writer Melvyn Stiriss, a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey, was one of the original cast, a founding member of The Farm. “There was so much good stuff to tell about the place,” he reflected recently. “Living life not in competition but in cooperation, working hard but not for money and surrounded by the good vibes of community members who were good, honest, hard-working, cool, fun-loving, kind-hearted, generous people.” Rookies who had devoted themselves completely to a bold test of the question: Can greenhorn, spaced-out city people do what it takes to grow food, build shelter and infrastructure and survive in the country?
Their leader convinced them they could and they adored their leader. Stephen Gaskin was an imposing 6-4 bundle of energy and optimism who High Times magazine dubbed “The Gandhi of the American counterculture,” which seems apt. After all, how many people do you know who can deliver 80 busloads of neophytes to the Tennessee countryside on a wing and a prayer?
“When we started out, I was tripping on LSD,” said Stiriss. “I thought Stephen was the next Avatar, the next Christ, whatever you want to call it, a redeemer who had come to shake things up, make things better. I wasn’t alone in my thinking.”
The first winter was hard, but promising. The longhairs set up a working village with an agricultural area, a soy creamery, a bakery, a coterie of midwives, a printing press and, naturally, their own rock band. They did it all while smoking copious amounts of grass. Alcohol, hard drugs and cigarettes were verboten. So was birth control. The Farm prospered and at its peak was home to 1500 self-sustaining vegan hippies. For a dozen years, the commune’s numbers swelled. New people arrived almost daily. But like many other happy places, The Farm had become too much of a good thing. By 1983, the increasing numbers were so debilitating the financial situation became desperate and Gaskin began to charge dues. Soon it became obvious the Golden Days were sliding away. Slowly but surely, the Farmies began to move to repositories of greener grass.
Stiriss and his family emigrated to hippie-friendly Austin, Texas, along with about 200 other Farm expats. He worked in construction, fending off the culture shock of seeing people puffing on cigarettes, wearing makeup and dining abominably. He’s got a more respectable short beard now but remains a vegan after 50 years. “When all is said and done,” he smiles, “my freak flag still flies within my heart.”
Today, The Farm remains, diminished to little more than 200 people living on 5 square miles of forested highland. Saving the world may be beyond their powers but keeping the dream alive after four generations is apparently not. “We are still here,” grins one of the current residents. “We are still together and many of the old hippie tenets remain. And we still believe in peace, love and rock ‘n’ roll.” Hippies thriving after 50 years in the surly bowels of Tennessee. Who’da thunk it?
In The Warm California Sun
In the 1970s, The Brotherhood Of The Sun in California emerged as one of the most successful communes in U.S. history. Perhaps their greatest accomplishment is their continued existence in the face of one irrefutable fact; practically all such places have an expiration date on their packages. The Brotherhood, however, not only persevered, it morphed into Sunburst Farms, a multi-million dollar business. What did they know that so many others didn’t?
It all began in a SoCal psych ward, where local bricklayer Norman Paulsen was trying to chase away the voices in his head at Santa Barbara County Hospital after a medication overdose. He temporarily calmed the noise but the voices would return from time to time, offering suggestions. Six years from the original bout, they encouraged Norman to find an exit ramp from the mounting anxiety of the era, a haven away from his constant worries.
“The center was not holding,” wrote Joan Didion of the fall of the 60s in her book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was a country of bankruptcy notices and commonplace reports of casual killings. People were missing. Children were missing. It was not a country in open revolution. It was a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold, late Spring of 1967.”
Haight-Ashbury overflowed with pre-teen junkies and the Tate murders threw cold water on the counterculture. Flower power might be flourishing elsewhere but in most of California it was at a tipping point. But Norman Paulsen, an unlikely champion, was ready to give the dream one last chance to succeed.
In the fading moments of the sixties, Paulsen began leading meditation sessions in an old ice-cream warehouse in Santa Barbara. Before long, dozens of young people from all walks of life heard about Norman and made his bailiwick their Mecca. By 1971, he had amassed hundreds of followers and moved to a 160-acre ranch, where his disciples built teepees and adobe houses, planted orchards and herded Nubian goats and (for some reason) French Percheron horses. The goal was to consume cleanly and only what they needed.
The hideaway was strictly no drugs, no outside possessions, no sex outside of marriage. “Before we started our day, we would join hands in a circle to thank Mother Earth for the bounty she has given us and pray for the healing of our precious planet, much like the native peoples who came before us,” said member Mehosh Dziadzio, a photographer whose lasting images paint a dreamy picture of Sunburst in its glory years. “With self-sufficiency as our goal, we learned all the skills and trades necessary in working with the land. We had cowboys and sailors and blacksmiths and weavers, we had storekeepers and beekeepers.”
The agricultural efforts of The Brotherhood were so successful they soon had a surplus of nice fresh organic fruits and vegetables, so they opened a market, then another. Their famous granola was world-class. Customers could order fresh carrot and vegetable juices to go. The Sunburst stores were funky and different, but always very clean. Patty Paulsen, at Sunburst since 1975, recalls “I was from the East Coast, but I felt this calling to California. I had to go. I was in my twenties and looking for a way of living that deepened my understanding of living with awareness and in connection with others.”
By April of 1975, Sunburst was a $3 million business that had a school for members’ children and a 3000-acre ranch adjacent to land owned by Ronald Reagan and John Travolta. It was the largest organic farm in the USA. “I don’t know what it was,” Patty says when asked about what made the commune work. “It was something in the air, something about being young and free. I think when people hit about age 28, though, something happened. They either stayed or left, it was decision time, but the ones who stayed were like a big family.”
The local people’s perception of the family was that it largely kept to itself. “They were so insular nobody really knew what went on in their culture,” said Ernest, who lived nearby and keeps his family name under wraps. “They were driven in school buses to the markets each morning and picked up at night. We tried to talk to the girls at the checkout but they just smiled and didn’t respond. They all wore hand-made tie-dyed clothes, had long hair and went barefoot.”
Norman Paulsen died in 2006. Patty talks about him lovingly as a leader who inevitably “had to carry the responsibility of his vision, a tall order.” Norman was the son of a blind judge from Lompoc named Charley Paulsen, who played piano at the local silent movie theater and was a disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, who brought yoga to America.
In 1971, to avoid taxes, Paulsen declared The Brotherhood to be a Christian non-profit operation despite the fact the commune was a mix of Christians, mystics, adherents to Kriya Yoga and others who subscribed to indigenous tribal beliefs. Sunburst soon achieved tax-free status. By the late 1970s, Sunburst communities had arisen in cities in Utah, Arizona and Nevada, and Norman Paulsen was a rich man. A 1982 Drug Enforcement Agency investigation found that he’d spent $60,000 on narcotics but commune members said it was more like $200,000. Members were defecting left and right. Former member Michael Ableman told the L.A. Times that “On the day I left, Norm was sitting in a very dark room in his house, shirt off, quite drunk. He said to me, ‘I am the man they call Jesus of Nazareth. If you believe me you can stay. If not, get out.’ They gave me a day to leave.”
The 1990s saw Sunburst’s vast empire reduced to one last outpost in California, about a dozen miles southeast of Lompoc at Nojoqui Farms. You can still find a little over two dozen die-hard brethren camped out in a visual paradise at Sunburst Sanctuary. “We have about 30 old-timers still here,” Patty says. “We’re still farming but it’s for ourselves.” Their website explains everything from their online courses in meditation, their yoga retreats and a paleontology workshop.
The future remains uncertain. The community’s designation as a religious organization on an agricultural preserve in many areas has tied its hands. Bringing in new members when you can’t build the structures to house them is difficult. Still, the degree to which Sunburst has carved out a place for itself online and in social media is impressive. “We have one last store here in Solvang,” Patty says. “And we’re keeping the faith.
There’s something to be said for the commitment and devotion to the ideal of community displayed by the cast at Sunburst. The length of time some followers are willing to carry that dream into the next generation. The commune remains remarkable merely for battling through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and continuing on. It was—and is---a happy anomaly. If there is a final chapter in the Sunburst storybook, it still remains to be told. Godspeed, y’all, and Keep on Truckin’.
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| The inimitable Mountain Girl |
Where Have You Gone, Neal Cassady?
A citizen of two worlds as Jack Kerouac’s golden boy and Ken Kesey’s bus driver, Neal has, alas, graduated to that Great Be-In in the Sky, along with Jack and Ken. Cassady will be the one at the rear of the room handing out the acid tabs.
Mountain Girl is still around, though. Once the bride of both Kesey and Jerry Garcia, Carolyn Elizabeth Garcia (nee Adams) climbed on Ken’s magic bus Further at the ripe old age of 18 and never got off, eventually made famous by the sterling prose of Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Recalling the adventures on Further, Mountain Girl testifies, “The bus is the real talisman. It’s the thing that runs through all of this history. It’s not a thing anybody owns or controls. No matter how peeved you get with people, the bus always makes your heart jump. Everybody was attached to it.”
Today, Carolyn is 74 years old, many pounds heavier and no longer the spritely symbol of wild adventure. Her legend, however, is safe in the pages of Wolfe’s book and in the annals of the Grateful Dead. “She’s a person possessed of spirit and weight, will and energy,” says Jon McIntire, the Dead’s manager from 1968 to 1990. “She had the ability to meld her energy with the energy of others to do more than what one person could do by themselves. She had intelligence, joie de vivre and a directness that is really remarkable. And her beauty. She was amazingly beautiful.”
Wavy Gravy, alias Hugh Nanton Romney Jr., was not amazingly beautiful but nobody cared. There may have been more famous personalities on center stage for the hippie uprising of the 1960s but not many.
The one time Greenwich Village roommate of Bob Dylan toured in his youth as a comedian and monologuist. Romney founded the Hog Farm commune in California, the group which was hired to prepare the grounds for the Woodstock festival and was also in charge of security (he called his troops the “Please Force”). If all you remember from that event is the voice which promised the megacrowd “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 500,000 people,” you remember Romney.
Two weeks after Woodstock at the Texas International Pop Festival, he met with the late B.B. King, who gave him his new name. Where King got the inspiration nobody knows, not even Romney. Hugh has been Wavy Gravy ever since. The name is on his license. Ben & Jerry’s even named an ice-cream flavor after him. And he’s the only official clown the Grateful Dead ever had. WG has been the Master of Ceremonies at, and the only person to appear on the bill of all three Woodstock festivals. He’s only 84 these days and he’s avidly waiting for the next.
So where have all the hippies gone? To the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam. To boardrooms and barrooms and playrooms with mushrooms. They are paupers and millionaires and folks who save polar bears. They are hermits and pop stars and guys who sell used cars. They live for today and they hope for tomorrow. When it comes to their kids, they'll beg, steal or borrow. They remember with pride their time in the sun, and they'll bay at the moon til their days here are done.
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| The remaining Sunburst colony |
That's all, bothers and sisters. Peace out.
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
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| Wavy Gravy lives. |
