The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “I’m sittin’ in the railway station,

  Got a ticket for my destination.

  On a tour of one-night stands

  My suitcase and guitar in hand.”

  He looked up at the rows and rows of empty seats, and then up toward the last row, where Garfunkel, silhouetted against the blustery sky, stood listening.

  “And ev’ry stop is neatly planned

  For a poet and a one-man band.

  Homeward bound.”

  Then Garfunkel waved with both arms to Simon, signalling that the sound was fine, and Simon finished the song as Garfunkel came bounding down the concrete steps.

  An hour later, the stands had filled with fifteen thousand people, and the concert began.

  Ved Mehta

  JUNE 1, 1968 (FROM “INDIAN JOURNAL PART III”)

  I HAVE JUST SPENT some time at Jhusi, which is one vast stretch of saffron tents interrupted by straw huts, by sheds roofed with sheets of corrugated iron, by bamboo towers, and by bamboo poles flying the flags or signs of every imaginable sect of sadhus. And though I am not clear yet about what those dreams are that come true here, at times I did feel as though I were sleepwalking through some celestial bazaar….

  · · ·

  One large colony of tents is marked by a sign that reads “Spiritual Regeneration Movement Foundation of India.” This is the headquarters of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I know of him, or know the few available facts about him (all uncorroborated): that he was born around 1910; that his father was a revenue inspector; that he attended Allahabad University; that he worked in a factory for a time; that for some years he studied in the Himalayas with the jagadguru (Sanskrit for “universal teacher”) Shankaracharya of Badri ka Ashram; and that, unlike most Indian sages, who use one religious title, he prefers to use two—Maharishi, which is Sanskrit for “great seer,” and Yogi, which is from the Sanskrit “yoga,” meaning “effort.” Inside the first tent, which is packed with such items as tomato sauce, cornflakes, soap, toothpaste, and chewing gum—all imports, to judge from the labels—a man in a brown lounge suit and with a vermilion mark on his forehead comes up to me. He tells me his name and continues, in English, “I am America-returned. I am M.A. and Ph.D. in public administration from the States. Guruji has fifty-four chelas from distant foreign lands here at Kumbha. I myself am going to be initiated on this Amavasya, when Guruji will recite some mantras to me by the side of Mother Ganga, and I will recite them back. I met the Guruji only a month ago. After I set my eyes on Guruji, I left my five children to follow him.”

  He takes me to an open area among the tents, where many Westerners, some in Indian dress, are standing around a serving table finishing a meal of macaroni and custard. I accept a small dish of custard from a girl in Western dress. She has very long eyelashes and the slightly bored expression of a fashion model.

  “Where are you from?” I ask her.

  “From Canada,” the girl replies. “Guruji is a fact, and, like a fact, he manifested himself to me in Canada.”

  When I ask her to tell me something about the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, she says tersely, “You must address any questions you have to Guruji himself.”

  An Englishwoman joins us. “Guruji has been around the world six times, and now we have a half-dozen Spiritual Regeneration Movement Centers in Britain,” she says. “They teach Guruji’s simple technique of meditation.”

  The members of the group start moving into a tent. They arrange themselves as best they can on the floor in front of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a merry-looking little man with smooth skin, blunt features, and long, well-oiled hair. He is dressed in a flowing cream-colored silk robe. Three tape recorders stand near him on the floor, as sacred books might surround another guru.

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi urges the audience to ask questions, and I ask a general question about the nature of his movement.

  He asks me to identify myself, and when I do, he says, in English, in a soft, rich, bemused voice, “All I teach is a simple method of meditation. We are all conscious on a mundane level, but beneath that consciousness, in each one of us, there is an ocean vaster than any in the world. It’s there that most new thoughts originate. The bridge between the mundane level of consciousness and the ocean is meditation—not reading, because if you read you can have only second-hand thoughts. Meditation expands the consciousness and leads to the greatest production of goods and services. The ultimate test of my method of meditation is therefore its utility—the measure of the usefulness of people to society. Through my method of meditation, the poor can become as rich as the rich, and the rich can become richer. I taught my simple method of meditation to a German cement manufacturer. He taught the method to all his employees and thereby quadrupled the production of cement. As I said when addressing a meeting in the Albert Hall, in London, my technique does not involve withdrawal from normal material life. It enhances the material values of life by the inner spiritual light. My method is, in my London example, ‘like the inner juice of the orange, which can be enjoyed without destroying the outer beauty of the fruit. This is done simply by pricking the orange with a pin again and again, and extracting the juice little by little, so that the inner juice is drawn out on the surface, and both are enjoyed simultaneously.’ ”

  During the rest of the session, which goes on for a few hours, with the tape recorders running, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi expounds on his simple method of meditation. He has a way of dismissing everything. Not only does he rule out at the start all questions concerning morality, theology, and philosophy—implying at one point that men are free to do anything in their personal lives, to themselves or to others, as long as, by the technique of meditation, they experience the bliss that is within themselves—but he seems to remove himself from the whole process of intellectual discourse by giggling at every question put to him and then at his own answer to the question, so one feels that no matter how long one talked to him one would come away with, at worst, chagrin at having been ridiculed and, at best, vague excitement at having been tantalized.

  Hendrik Hertzberg

  NOVEMBER 15, 1969

  SEVERAL AFTERNOONS AGO, we found ourself in the Grand Ballroom of the Holiday Inn on West Fifty-seventh Street, where the Who were to receive gold records for having sold a million dollars’ worth of albums of the rock opera Tommy. The Who are the third most important of the English rock bands (after the Rolling Stones and the Beatles), having first attracted public attention through their custom, since abandoned, of smashing their instruments to bits onstage. Tommy is their opera—the first rock opera ever written, in fact—and they were in town performing it for a week at the Fillmore East.

  At first, we thought we had come to the wrong ballroom, since it was empty except for a little knot of perhaps a dozen people in one corner, and nothing especially ceremonial seemed to be going on. Then the four members of the Who separated themselves out, and, holding their gold records, which were mounted and framed, lined up to be photographed. They were dressed in a variety of imaginative costumes, and, of course, they all had long hair. A well-barbered man whose black hair was going gray, and who was wearing a blue suit, a blue shirt, and a blue tie, lined up with them.

  “Who’s that?” we asked a handy public-relations man.

  “That’s the executive vice-president of Decca Records,” he whispered back.

  The well-barbered man stepped to one side, and another well-barbered man, also with black hair going gray and also wearing a blue suit, a blue shirt, and a blue tie, took his place.

  “Who’s that?” we asked.

  “That’s the executive vice-president of the Music Corporation of America,” the P.R. man said.

  A third man moved up to be photographed with the Who. He was like his two predecessors in every respect except that his well-barbered sideburns (which were going gray) were half an inch longer and his blue suit was double-breasted.

  “Who’s that?” we asked.

  “That is the director of creative
services of Decca Records,” the P.R. man said, a bit edgily.

  The photographer left, thus putting an end to the ceremony, and the Who went upstairs to relax for a couple of hours before going downtown for their performance. When we joined them, a few minutes later, they were talking about the Woodstock rock festival.

  “That was the worst gig we ever played,” Roger Daltrey, the lead singer, was saying, in a gravelly voice. He was wearing suède bell-bottoms and a ski sweater, and a halo of dark-blond curls surrounded his bony face. “We waited in a field of mud for fourteen hours, sitting on some boards, doing nothing, and doing nothing is the most exhausting thing in the world. As a result, we gave one of the worst shows we’ve ever done.”

  “From a human point of view, it was great,” said John Entwhistle, the bass guitarist—a hulking, broad-shouldered man wearing, among other things, a pair of snakeskin boots. “Three people died and two people were born and half a million people managed to get on together. But musically it was awful. The only good thing was when the sun came up just as we were getting to the end of Tommy. That was marvellous. It felt like a blessing from God.”

  There was a soft knock at the door. Keith Moon, the drummer, who had on an electric-blue suit that matched the chair he was sitting in, called out “Come in!” and then added “Better still, get out!”

  “The girl from last night is here,” said a man’s voice outside.

  Moon raised his eyebrows and lowered them.

  “I don’t think we’ll be playing gigs like Woodstock in the future,” said Peter Townshend, who is the leader of the Who and the composer and librettist of Tommy. He is thin, with large hands and wrists, a small chin, and an oversized nose. “A festival is essentially a public occasion, and the music is just background. We haven’t seen the worst yet. One promoter I’ve heard about is trying to organize a festival in Wyoming next summer. Not any particular part of Wyoming—the whole state.”

  There was another knock, and the same voice said, “The girl from the third row is here. She said you’d know.”

  No one seemed to know.

  Townshend continued, “Whether or not you participate in something like that depends on whether you regard rock as a commodity or as something more—recognizing, fair enough, that it’s something that can make a lot of money. But it’s not going to stop tomorrow, it’s not going to die, and so there’s no need to wring it dry today. For example, we could have played Madison Square Garden instead of the Fillmore and made more money in one night than we’ll get for the whole week. But we’ve become so serious and so obsessed with keeping happy and performing that we’re willing to turn down huge offers for the chance to reach an audience. The problem with a place like the Garden is that the audience can’t see you wince. They can’t see you smile. And that’s important to us, because to us a rock concert is as much a theatrical performance as a musical one.”

  We asked the Who if anything in particular had struck them about America during their visit, and Roger Daltrey said, “The generation gap. It’s about fifty times worse here than it is at home.”

  “In England, I’m a respected member of the community,” Entwhistle said. “Here, right here in the lobby downstairs, somebody came up to me yesterday and called me a dirty hippie. Why is everybody with long hair automatically considered dirty? If you don’t have hair that’s so short you can see the scalp through it, you’re not quite human. In England, even the politicians have long hair—to keep the draft off their necks. It’s a cold country.”

  “Our parents spent six years in air-raid shelters while their houses were being blown up over their heads,” Daltrey said. “They built up a sense of humor. We respect them, and they respect us.”

  The group broke up to get ready for the show, and we went along with Townshend to his room. While he changed his shirt, he talked about Tommy, which, properly speaking, is not an opera but an oratorio. It is about a boy, born during the First World War, who goes blind, deaf, and dumb after seeing his father kill his mother’s lover. He becomes a pinball champion, operating the machine solely through his sense of touch, and then is miraculously cured. He becomes the leader of a religious movement and acquires millions of followers, who finally reject him when he tells them that to achieve enlightenment they must tape up their eyes, ears, and mouths, and play pinball. All in all, not a particularly outlandish plot for an opera.

  We said that we had been impressed the night before by the Who’s energetic stage performance, which is full of leaps and grand gestures, and Townshend said, “Yes, the Who are very athletic. You have to be fit, and keeping fit is a serious problem on a tour like this. I’ve never been able to do anything athletic in the sense of sports or games, but onstage I can pour incredible energy out of nowhere, just by drawing on the resources that I think every human being has. I wish I could jump sixty feet in the air, land, and play a guitar note.”

  It was time to move on to the Fillmore, and as we left we asked Townshend if he thought rock was one of the causes of the cultural changes that have affected young people everywhere.

  “I don’t think rock causes change,” he said. “Rock doesn’t cause change; it’s there because changes have taken place. It’s a reflection of changes in ideas. If rock really is a reflection of the current mood, I can only be optimistic, and not just because I’m a part of it. I can’t pinpoint the changes; if I could, I’d be in government instead of playing the guitar. But rock is going in a certain direction, and I think it’s a good direction. I’m not worried.”

  A NOTE BY LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

  ONCE A DECADE becomes an adjective, it’s transformed into a cartoon version of itself, and it becomes very difficult to remember what living through it was actually like. This is the reason to read journalism long after its moment has passed: because it doesn’t know what’s coming. Historians know what’s going to happen, but journalists don’t, any more than their subjects do, and this ignorance can convey better than hindsight the peculiar temper of the time.

  It seemed, for instance, to Nat Hentoff, in 1964, as though the up-and-coming folksinger Bob Dylan might be around for a while, but who knew for sure? He was only twenty-three; maybe he was just a flash in the pan. When Allen Ginsberg told Jane Kramer, in 1968, that he had just met with Robert Kennedy in Washington to talk about the war, and was planning to go to Chicago for the Democratic Convention in August and stage “a mass manifestation of gaiety,” neither one of them had the faintest idea how vastly different America would be by the end of the summer. The only thing that anybody knew for sure was that the New York Mets would lose and keep on losing, but then, in 1969, they didn’t. They actually beat the Orioles in five games and won the World Series, and after that impossible event a great gray fog descended over the perceptible future, and all bets were off.

  As is often the case with decades, the sixties took a while to become the sixties. It was still the fifties for the first few years. The American military had been involved in Vietnam since 1950, but the real escalation didn’t begin until Lyndon Johnson took office. The Beatles didn’t appear on The Ed Sullivan Show until 1964. At the beginning of the sixties, Jimi Hendrix was in the Army, at Fort Campbell, Janis Joplin was a transfer student at the University of Texas, and Jerry Garcia was in East Palo Alto living in his car. Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay. Certain things were still surprising, in those early years, that wouldn’t be for long. It was still worthy of note in 1961 that some comedians (notably Elaine May and her partner, Mike Nichols) regarded their fellow-humans with outsider hostility rather than glad-handing bonhomie. It was worthy of note in 1964 that Bob Dylan didn’t wear a tie.

  In the second half of the decade, the sixties proper began. The New Yorker was, in the Summer of Love, forty-two years old. It was born funny, and it was still funny, but it was wry in a zany age. By 1967, it had lived through the Depression, Hiroshima, three regular wars, and a cold one. Just because a bunch of kids were taking their tops off and getting high in public parks, i
t didn’t believe either that civilization as we knew it was ending or that the glorious revolution had finally arrived. But something was happening, no question, and it wanted to figure out what.

  The magazine did not aspire to become part of the counterculture, like Esquire or Rolling Stone. It was not going to leap wildly about, throwing great fistfuls of exclamation points around like ripped-up money or flowers at a Be-In. It was not going to tear pages out of Webster’s and roll joints with them. But neither was it stodgily aloof. It kept its eye on developments in the Haight and upstate New York. No matter how crazy things got, it tended to remain deadpan, relying on sheer accumulation of detail—the tambourines, Sanskrit chanting, Yoruba beads, amulets, parachutes, jerkins, batik, wheat germ, conch horns, electric Tibet—to set the mood. It permitted itself, every now and then, a raised eyebrow—Jane Kramer referring, for instance, in a piece about Allen Ginsberg, to “a neighborhood guru with the nom de psychedélie of Buddha,” that nom de psychedélie being one of just a very few cracks in ten thousand words of otherwise resolutely straight-faced exposition and repressed commentary. But, for the most part, it let the decade speak for itself, in long, meandering scenes that allowed the electric-rainbow-jerkin-tambourine bizarritude to unspool according to its own rhythms.