by Ann Powers
Despite these realities, within that ritualized realm of music and dancing people experienced some kind of erotic enlightenment. As Kramer points out, dancing free-form, not in couples, allowed women a kind of liberation, however momentary and contingent, from male harassment and the constraints of typical gender roles. Dancers engaged in symbolic free love as they grooved to the long, stoned jams that blew through so many doors in San Francisco between 1965 and 1969. According to certain sensationalistic reports, some participants took it to a literal level; an eyewitness account from a ballroom habitué known only as Peter stated, “After six hours of acid, pot and rock, the evening ended with virtually the entire audience making love on the floor of the ballroom—a thousand-headed god with no cameras permitted.”13
Oddly enough, this divine force was often stirred to life by a bunch of hairy hippies who loved old-timey music. To confront free love as a musical ideal is to come to terms with the eroticism of the Grateful Dead, a band that on its surface is as unsexy as rock and roll gets. Few artists—certainly none in the era of titanic hotness that was the 1960s—possessed less bottle-ready, marketable mojo. The band formed from the remnants of a jug band around 1965 and always retained that unwashed folkie vibe. Its unofficial sex symbol, Bob Weir, had the phlegmatic charm of a proto-slacker, while the most conventionally macho member was a very hairy scruff known as Pigpen. Leader Jerry Garcia owned up to his own sexual repression. “He would concede,” writes his official biographer, Dennis McNally, “that sex and women were never his primary concern.”14 Yet the Dead embodied the free love energy that organized psychedelic rock, transforming its audiences and the concertgoing experience. The band’s live performances made possible the turn from pop as a courtship facilitator to a more sensual, emotionally open-ended experience, and accomplished this precisely by not fulfilling the norms of pop allure.
The Dead found an identity as house band for the Acid Tests staged in the mid-’60s by writer Ken Kesey and his anarchist performance troupe the Merry Pranksters. These carnivalesque evenings included poetry, improvised theater, live art making, and whatever else anyone wanted to do while high. The Dead’s players often took hallucinogens before performing; Garcia’s nickname was Captain Trips. So it’s fair to ask whether drugs, not music, enabled the polymorphous release many experienced during San Francisco’s long Summer of Love. Anyone who has taken hallucinogens knows that, if anything, LSD startles people out of their customary routes to erotic satisfaction. New Age teacher Ram Dass, after a 1969 study on using LSD in sex therapy, concluded that the “perceptual-cognitive-affective re-organization” that the drug produced rearranged people’s understanding of their objects of desire: “Our male subjects report over and over again that to look at one woman is to see ‘woman’—the harlot, the virgin, the seductress, the juvenile, the matron, the mother and so on, with all feelings—lust, anger, love, kindness, protectiveness, vulnerability . . . and to look at any man is to see ‘man.’” This change in perception could be erotic, terrifying, or profoundly distracting. Stars of the classic rock era reacted in different ways to the dissemination of these altered states. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, for example, very consciously engaged codes of potency he’d picked up from the African American blues stars he admired and women he dated. (He learned his trademark strut and, arguably, much of his sexual bravado from Tina Turner, the incendiary R&B shouter who, with her then-husband Ike, toured with the Rolling Stones in 1966.) Jagger’s pouty-lipped act became a portal for all kinds of fantasies of androgyny and racial amalgamation. Jimi Hendrix, conversely, challenged the stereotypes that haunted him by both leaning hard into them and declaring himself a free spirit who didn’t believe in their boundaries. Both men used the widened perceptual field psychedelics created to build their hyper-potent images.15
The Grateful Dead never made such shows of altered masculinity. Garcia didn’t consider the Dead to be playing for an audience—“Everywhere you looked you saw somebody you knew. We didn’t start getting audiences until we started going out of town.” He scorned Jagger’s manipulation of his fans: “Well, see, the Rolling Stones never did have a cool audience. When they started playing, people were screaming. Then they knocked off for two or three years and now they come back, and it’s back to screaming.” Garcia explicitly rejected star-fueled hysteria as a route to rock liberation. In the mutual exchange of an Acid Test, the performer doesn’t drive the crowd to a frenzy; everyone present finds his or her own way, with the music serving as a net instead of a push.16 Dancing at Dead concerts was orgasmic, a full-body moment of jouissance. The experience was polymorphous, enveloping the whole body; it might be homoerotic, come in waves like a woman’s orgasm, or remain blissfully self-directed. This is how the thousand-headed god manifests—not through stars’ performed prowess but in a vast circle where everyone is pleasuring and being pleasured.
Not long after the Acid Tests, the Dead began appearing in Golden Gate Park, notably at the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In of January 1967. By making the choice to perform in the beautiful green space adjoining their own neighborhood, the Dead connected to a long history of encounters that brought private desires into the public sphere and took the scene beyond the realm of the subcultural. In Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, Josh Sides argues that Golden Gate Park was destined to be rife with trysts as well as crime: “The very design of the park—its winding roads, high shrubs and isolated dells—allowed people to act out their human penchant for violence and sex with anonymity and, usually, impunity.” If sex already was key to the park’s legend before hippies arrived, the difference was that the hippies performed their erotic acts in public. Nudity became common in the Panhandle and on “Hippie Hill” at the eastern end of the park, and it was normal for the audience to strip down and dance. When that happened, the insular experience of free-love music turned outward and became political.17
The hippie takeover of Golden Gate Park provided a template for festivals like Monterey Pop and Woodstock, defining events in the counterculture. The Dead endured for decades, even after Garcia’s death in 1995, and became the foundation of a subculture that kept hippie ideals alive long after the counterculture itself lost hold of history. For all the communality of this experience, countercultural rock was still entertainment, and the American pop machinery demanded stars. There were many, and each claimed a spot on the eternal wheel of erotic archetypes. English imports like the Rolling Stones’ Jagger and Keith Richards evoked both elegant exoticism and outlawry, selling their loving theft of American blues music as a rogue’s journey, with the Stones as modern-day Candides chasing women and enlightenment. Protest music pinups like the erstwhile lovers Bob Dylan and Joan Baez connected with the civil rights movements of the time, but also showed young people how seriousness could be sexy. From within the African American fight for equal rights, Aretha Franklin made secular gospel music showing how Martin Luther King Jr.’s governing principle of “somebodiness” applies to the love between a man and a woman, uplifting the nation from every bedroom on out.
Among these idols, three stood out, all emerging from the Arcadian, hedonistic West Coast and known for performances that rode on each star’s almost excessive sense of self, inspiring descriptions like “shamanistic,” “primal,” and, over and over again, “orgasmic.” Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison made being a sex symbol psychedelic and nearly revolutionary. “Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in?” Morrison would shout to his fans as each mesmerizing concert by his band, the Doors, began. These countercultural sex symbols showed how individuals fleshing out a generation’s ideals could take both star and fan into realms of bodily response and emotional insight that felt so new, they were disorienting. That these artists were all dead by 1971 does not define them, though it speaks to the particular dangers of pushing edges in a moment when the edges were collapsing—the critic Ellen Willis’s distinction in describing Joplin as “not so much a v
ictim as a casualty” applies to all three. What united Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison during the height of their fame was how each absorbed the sexual revolution into their music, into their very bodies. That this process remained incomplete reveals the restrictions of the counterculture.
THE ULTIMATE THREESOME
In the inverted world of the countercultural happening, things often got out of hand, but the evening of March 18, 1968, brought a possibly unmatchable moment of onstage mayhem. Jimi Hendrix, whose revolutionary guitar playing and stoned-sprite style was then redefining both rock and the blues, had found a pick-up gig with the soul group the Chambers Brothers at a midtown New York club called the Scene. In the audience was Jim Morrison, singer for the LA proto-art-punk band the Doors and the media-and teenybopper-appointed “sexiest man in rock and roll.” Janis Joplin, the biggest female star rock had yet produced—who like Hendrix was in town recording a new album—sat at a table drinking whiskey. It’s unclear whether Morrison was invited onstage or simply stumbled up there, wasted on his own excess of alcohol. But a recording exists of him slurring about perverse sex acts while Hendrix tries gamely to respond with lascivious licks. At some point Morrison allegedly encircled Hendrix’s slender hips with his arms and muttered, “I want to suck your cock.” Joplin wasn’t having that, say some accounts—she jumped onstage herself and hit Mr. Mojo Rising on the head with her Southern Comfort bottle. The three descended to the floor, brawling in a tangle of very valuable velvet- and leather-covered limbs.18
You could call Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison “erotic politicians,” the term applied to and used by the Doors singer during his late-1960s prime. At their peak, in the live performance settings that allowed them the most room to protest and to play, these stars tested the confines of identity with a forcefulness informed by musical restlessness and an acute awareness that at any moment they could become stuck within shrinking versions of the very archetypes they refreshed. Their performances also made clear how the confines of sexual convention persisted and pushed countercultural adventurers back into positions not that different from the ones they’d run from or rebelled against. “I tried to stimulate a few little riots, you know,” Morrison said to an interviewer in 1968, a few months after he’d told his bandmates he thought he might be having a breakdown and wanted to quit, and two years before he expired in a Paris bathtub, still a member of the Doors. “After a few times, I realized it’s such a joke . . . because it leads nowhere.” The revolution in Morrison’s head, in Hendrix’s fingers, and in Joplin’s scarred but miraculous throat remained incomplete. The arcs of their musical careers were tragedies not defined by the chemical misadventures that took their lives, but by the rage each was expressing by their final months, a frustration reflective of the darkening realization among many Americans that the promise of a sensual utopia was being smothered in the quagmire of racial and gender inequality.19
That was the story of the sexual revolution as enacted by hippies and freaks: floridly sweet-tempered idealism stagnated at key junctures by bad behavior accommodating the hierarchies the new generation was supposed to abolish. The era’s beauty was typified by statements like this one, from a manifesto by Tuli Kupferberg, a member of the New York band the Fugs, known for boisterous pro-sex songs like “Boobs a Lot”: “The world is an art form. He [the enlightened hippie] will decorate his body as a work of art. He will bead it, paint it, clothe it in rainbows and the idiosyncratic style or mixture of styles of all times all place; there is no CORRECT way to dress; there is no correct way to fuck. Let 1000 bodies bloom!” The stagnation stunk in accounts of sexual assault in neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, whose guardian angel group the Diggers posted a bulletin in 1967: “Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about and gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3000 mikes and raffles her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last.” The flyer concluded, “Rape is common as bullshit on Haight Street,” in stark contrast to Kupferberg’s dream. Wonder and horror coexisted in the same erotic space.20
Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison found notoriety as part of a larger pantheon of young musicians quickly elevated to the status of generational spokespeople, but were united by an aura of erotic challenge that few of their peers could match. They incarnated both the promise and the oppressive disappointments of the time. Beyond that night at the Scene, their biographies say Joplin had sex with each man on at least one occasion; Joplin and Hendrix enjoyed career breakthroughs with incendiary sets at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival; each debuted with 1967 albums that remain central to the rock canon today, then died within a year of each other, at the same age, twenty-seven. Those final coincidences have led many to see more sorrow in their stories than anything else. What’s less discussed is that fury each expressed at being pushed back into the confines of conventional self-expression, even as their performances showed, with humor and nuance, how constructed those categories were.
Jimi Hendrix’s African American virility was conspicuous, but somehow translucently elusive. Janis Joplin survived the shame of an ugly adolescence to become the “first hippie pinup girl,” but the lust she owned contained an oppressive note of ruefulness. Jim Morrison was her male counterpart—a highly unstable, aggressively strange drama club kid whose accounts of weird scenes inside the male subconscious became a mainstream turn-on; but also an out-of-control drunk partly driven to his excesses by denouncers who compared him to a stripper and a clown. The erotic breakthroughs of these culturally appointed savior-fools were doubled from the beginning by humiliation, censure, and defeat.21
JIMI HENDRIX: AMBITION TO BE A MOVIE
Hendrix was, in the words of influential promoter Bill Graham, “the first black sex symbol in white America.” He was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man brought to light within a Pacific Northwest outlier’s science-fiction dreams. But he also endured accusations of being a “psychedelic Uncle Tom” catering to the demands of white crowds who gathered round him as if he were a dancer in Congo Square.
“First, we had a music that was all body, then we had a music that was all mind, now we have a music that is mind and body.” So an unidentified companion of Hendrix told the celebrity profiler Albert Goldman during the interview sessions for a 1968 New York magazine article. The quote must have triggered the literary pretensions of Goldman, who was an English professor before he began a long career digging up the lurid secrets of rock stars. It also echoed the pseudo-religious tone adopted by self-styled gurus such as LSD advocate Timothy Leary, whom Hendrix would soon meet while traveling in Morocco. Yet more subtly, the comment expressed Hendrix’s fondest dream of overcoming a racism rooted in the way people viewed his own body. For though writers like Goldman often questioned the authenticity of Hendrix’s blackness—dubbing him “SuperSpade” because of his “flash” performance, Goldman wrote, “Hendrix’s blackness is only skin deep”—the guitarist lived the reality of oppression every day, struggling to both acknowledge and transcend it.22
Hendrix had been raised in a city, Seattle, with a small African American population based in the Central District, adjacent to and melding with the Pan-Asian International District. One grandmother was part Cherokee, and after Hendrix was grown, his father would marry a Japanese American woman. “There was all kinda soul there and Chinese, too,” he told Goldman. Yet musically, Hendrix came of age in a different space: after first experiencing the brutality of the Jim Crow South as an enlisted army man stationed in Kentucky, Hendrix joined the touring circuit of African American musicians regularly barred from restrooms and diners and forced to drive fast through areas where the Ku Klux Klan still ruled. Settling briefly in Nashville, Hendrix played in an integrated band, the Continentals, whose gigs would sometimes be canceled when white patrons called the police in protest. It’s well known that Hendrix’s chitlin’ circuit
experience, supporting the likes of Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, taught him that “flash” he so perfected; the hip grinds and guitar-mouthing that astounded white New York and London fashionistas were common feats among black entertainers on this most demanding musical route. But even as he learned, he stood apart. “He wasn’t a black act,” Nashville singer Jimmy Church once said. “He was left-handed and had a little effeminate thing about him: soft-spoken, smiled a lot. And when he was onstage and flicked his tongue out, the girls really went for that.”23
Knocking women over with a flick of his tongue, Hendrix found a way to give the sometimes overbearing lasciviousness of the R&B performer a light touch. His “explicit mime of cunnilingus,” the critic Charles Shaar Murray notes, invoked what “was still considered an exotic activity that only wicked, depraved men would perform and even wickeder and more depraved women would want.” But it was also fun and funny, a sign that he would be an enthusiastic and engaging lover, not an overbearing one. “I think about sex a lot; it’s part of my nature,” Hendrix told AP reporter Mary Campbell in 1969. “I cry easy,” he told another reporter, gilding his allure with emotional vulnerability.24
Both African American and white women played significant roles in bringing Hendrix to fame. His first serious lover upon leaving Nashville for New York was Lithofayne Pridgon, a supremely well-connected Harlem-based paramour to stars like Little Willie John and James Brown. Linda Keith, an English blues connoisseur who was then dating Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, discovered Hendrix playing in Greenwich Village’s Cafe Wha? and introduced him to his future manager, Chas Chandler. The day he moved to London, he met Kathy Etchingham, who became his longtime companion and social connection to the rock glitterati who would soon pack rooms and gape at his performances. After fame, when he became known for the mixed-race female entourages accompanying him everywhere, Hendrix would tell reporters that his erotic color blindness (and sense of entitlement about crossing those lines) originated in adolescence. He was kicked out of high school, he said, because “I had a girlfriend in art class and we used to hold hands all the time. The art teacher didn’t dig that at all. She [the teacher] was very prejudiced.”25