In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  Cohen got HIP to agree that Haight stores would all be closed on the day of the Be-In so at least there wouldn’t be immediate profit from those who came in the name of idealism. The Diggers scored an additional agreement with a different kind of capitalist, Augustus Owsley Stanley III (known mostly as “Owsley” or his nickname “Bear”), who agreed to give three hundred thousand tablets of “White Lightning” LSD to the Diggers to distribute free to attendees of the Be-In. Owsley also provided the seventy-five turkeys from which free sandwiches would be made. Although Grogan would later mock the spiritual aspirations of the Be-In, the Diggers stuck to a commitment not to bad-mouth it beforehand.

  Cohen also had to reassure the San Francisco rock musicians who had emerged as key thought leaders in the community. The musicians were a generation younger than the beatniks. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead was nineteen; Janis Joplin was twenty-three; Jerry Garcia and Marty Balin were twenty-four; Jefferson Airplane’s new singer, Grace Slick, was twenty-seven. The Airplane, the Dead, and Joplin all had houses in the Haight within a few blocks of each other. Their primary concern was maintaining a vibe that fostered creativity.

  British folk-rock singer Donovan had followed in Bob Dylan’s footsteps and had gone electric in 1966 with the album Sunshine Superman, which included the song “The Fat Angel,” the chorus of which paid homage to the Haight rockers: “Fly Jefferson Airplane, gets you there on time.” The Airplane was the first local band to get a record deal (with RCA). Grace Slick had not been a member on their first album but joined in late 1966. Two songs on which she sang lead on the band’s second album, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” (which she also wrote), both became massive hits in 1967, the first emanations of the Haight culture to go mainstream.

  Yet another “tribe” in the counterculture who initially resisted participation in the Be-In were the Berkeley radicals who by 1967 were primarily focusing on trying to end the Vietnam War. The weekly underground paper across the Bay, the Berkeley Barb, centered far more on radical politics and far less on spirituality than the Oracle.

  Cohen explained, “Bowen and I had become concerned about the philosophical split that was developing in the youth movement. The antiwar and free-speech movement in Berkeley thought the hippies were too disengaged and spaced out, and that their influence might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The hippies thought the movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment that would recoil with violence and fascism . . . In order to have a Human Be-In, we would have to have a powwow.”

  The meeting took place at Bowen’s pad at the corner of Haight and Masonic. The Berkeley radical contingent included Max Scherr, who was the publisher of the Berkeley Barb, and antiwar activists Michael Lerner and Jerry Rubin. Rubin was a twenty-eight-year-old native of Cincinnati who had enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, in time to witness the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Later that year he was among a group of American students who traveled illegally to Cuba and met with Che Guevara. In 1965, he was one of the organizers of the Vietnam Day Committee—a small group who tried to block trains filled with GIs who were ultimately headed for Vietnam. Rubin and fellow radicals Mario Savio and Stew Alpert served short jail sentences after being convicted of “public nuisance.”

  Rubin and his girlfriend Nancy Kurshan had recently met with then-unknown Eldridge Cleaver, who had been released from prison in late 1966 and would soon join the Black Panther Party, eventually becoming their Minister of Information. In an introduction to Rubin’s book Do It! Cleaver recalled, “Thinking back to that evening in Stew’s pad in Berkeley, I remember the huge poster of W.C. Fields on the ceiling, and the poster of Che on the wall . . . This was our first meeting. We turned on and talked about the future.” Now the question was whether Rubin could relate equally well to the San Francisco hippies.

  While Rubin tried to soak up the hippie ethos, his comrade Michael Lerner earnestly asked the group, “What are your demands?” The hippies and musicians were amused. “Man, there are no demands! It’s a fucking Be-In!” Still, it was agreed that Rubin could make a short speech.

  Ginsberg said that the Be-In would be “a gathering together of younger people aware of the planetary fate that we are all sitting in the middle of, imbued with a new consciousness, and desiring of a new kind of society involving prayer, music, and spiritual life together rather than competition, acquisition, and war.”

  Bowen and Cohen consulted Gavin Arthur, a philosopher and astrologer who was the grandson of US President Chester Arthur. According to Gene Anthony’s The Summer of Love, Arthur said that January 14 was the day “when communication and society would be most favored for a meld of positive communication for the greatest good.” He also claimed it was “a time when the population of the earth would be equivalent in number to the total of all the dead in human history.”

  The Oracle cover story about the upcoming Be-In said, “A new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old . . . Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.” The issue featured a centerfold with an ornate trippy drawing by Rick Griffin in which the faces of ancient mystics emerged from hookahs. In its center was a heart-shaped depiction of a lecture Ginsberg had given to Unitarian ministers in Boston the previous November called “Renaissance or Die,” in which he associated his philosophy with that of Thoreau and Emerson and then urged everyone over the age of fourteen to try LSD at least once. The Barb also ran an announcement on their front page.

  A poster designed by psychedelic artist Stanley Mouse was put up in Marin County, Berkeley, and the Peninsula, as well as around Haight-Ashbury. It featured a trippy drawing of an Indian sadhu with a third eye, and the typeface used stylized art nouveau lettering that required a great deal of concentration to read.

  Saturday, January 14, 1967, 1–5 p.m.

  A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In

  Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Michael Mclure

  [sic], Jerry Ruben [sic], Dick Gregory,

  Gary Snyder, Jack Weinberg, Lenore Kandel

  ALL SF ROCK GROUPS

  At the Polo Field, Golden Gate Park

  FREE

  Bring food to share, bring flowers, beads, costumes,

  feathers, bells, cymbals, flags

  * * *

  It was just past dawn on the morning of the Be-In and Allen Ginsberg wasn’t really worried about the rumors, but he wanted to sanctify the gathering anyway. The day before, word had spread through San Francisco that a satanic cult had put some sort of a curse on Polo Field where the Be-In was scheduled to take place. A couple of hippies who lived near the park had found some chopped-up pieces of meat and bones in the field. In a community with a lot of mystics, many of them high on psychedelics, it hadn’t taken long for the paranoid theory to reach the ears of some of the “elders” who had been planning the event. Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, had given a blessing, but many in Haight-Ashbury were still a bit unnerved. Ginsberg, who had spent a lot of time in India the previous year, knew just what to do.

  It had been an unusually rainy winter in the Bay Area but the sun was shining with barely a cloud in the sky and the temperature was around fifty degrees. Shortly after sunrise, Ginsberg, along with fellow poet Gary Snyder and a few of their close friends, performed a Hindu ritual called “Pradakshina,” which consisted of a slow, solemn walk around the field (which was 480 feet wide by 900 feet long) while reciting sacred prayers. This, the poets explained, was crucial for ensuring that the Be-In would be a mela—a pilgrimage gathering—and not just a big stoned party.

  A dozen years earlier at the Six Gallery, which was just five miles away on Fillmore Street, Ginsberg had read his groundbreaking epic poem “Howl” for the first time. (The famous first line of the poem is, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” but the poet’s own mind, no matter how far out he got, was as sharp as a razor.) Alo
ng with his friend Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Ginsberg’s poem expressed a radically different vision of sexual morality, art, and the very meaning of life than that which characterized the prevailing ethos at the peak of the Eisenhower era, which was still under the dark shadow of McCarthyism. In the succeeding decades, Ginsberg and Kerouac became beacons of light for thousands of marginalized smart kids. One of those was Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who said in the late sixties, “I can’t separate who I am now from what I got from Kerouac . . . I don’t know if I would ever have had the courage or the vision to do something outside with my life—or even suspected the possibilities existed—if it weren’t for Kerouac opening those doors.” Ironically, Kerouac hated the hippies; he just couldn’t connect with the next generation. But Ginsberg had dived fully into the heart of the hippie movement.

  The posters that had been put up around the Bay Area said that the Be-In would start at one in the afternoon, so Ginsberg was pleasantly surprised when dozens of people were already arriving by nine in the morning, just as the Pradakshina was ending. They kept coming and coming and coming. Previously, the biggest hippie gathering had been six thousand at the Trips Festival a year earlier. Before the afternoon was done, at least thirty thousand had shown up “to be.” Where the fuck had they all come from?

  Although there were various theories about the best way to take LSD, there was no question that the drug created a powerful inner experience only some aspects of which lent themselves to verbal explanations. Experiences in which small groups of friends discussed the various theories of the meaning of life were not necessarily the same “trips” as those of people doing the same things in different homes, in different neighborhoods. So the idea of a “tribe” did not merely refer to high-profile clusters of hip celebrities like the bands or the Diggers or Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters or the Free Speech Movement veterans of Berkeley. It applied to hundreds of small groups with varying notions of community and inner experiences.

  One of the reasons the external manifestation of tens of thousands of freaks felt so extraordinary was because of the notion so vividly held at the Be-In that an integrated matrix of hundreds of tribes could function as the nucleus of a new society. Looking back, it is not at all surprising that this turned out not to be the case. What was remarkable was that it ever felt that way on such a mass scale, even for a moment.

  Many at the Be-In brought cameras, and within weeks, photos would be seen in magazines and newspapers around the world of the massive crowd, which included barefoot young women in madras saris, folk singers, self-proclaimed shamans, and motorcyclists. Some of the men dressed in Victorian clothes, Edwardian jackets, and velvet cloaks, with stovepipe or porkpie hats. Others looked more like cowboys, or Native Americans, and a few, like Ginsberg, like well-fed sadhus. There were lots of feathers, drums, esoteric flags, soap bubbles, and balloons.

  Hundreds of the men had really long hair, way past their shoulders, longer than that of the Beatles. Many of the women wore long dresses, while others wore miniskirts and see-through tops; there were also quite a few mothers with small children. Some had masks and body paint; there were astrologers, jugglers, and a couple with shining eyes passing out tarot cards. But these were the veterans of earlier hippie gatherings. The bulk of this expanded community was still in jeans and khakis and wouldn’t have looked out of place at a folk festival.

  Although Haight-Ashbury was a relatively integrated neighborhood, the hip community in the Bay Area at that moment was mostly white. Dick Gregory was the only scheduled African American speaker and he bailed at the last minute to attend a protest at Puget Sound. Jazz virtuosos Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Lloyd, who sat in on a couple of Airplane and Grateful Dead songs, were the only black musicians to perform.

  A group of Krishna devotees with their distinctive shaved heads and single braids danced. On the periphery, a sole Christian evangelist with a bullhorn vainly tried to argue that hell and damnation awaited those who followed the lead of the speakers. The hippies smiled sweetly at him as they sauntered by.

  Adding to the surreal feeling in the huge crowd was the fact that its transcendental craziness was happening adjacent to apparent normality. Golden Gate Park is one of the largest parks in an American city and a rugby game was being played on the other end of the vast field. A few local cops on horseback surveyed the crowd, but didn’t make any busts. For the moment, it was live and let live.

  The sheer sense of a newly expanded community, collectively tripping out to an inchoate notion of universal love, and the feeling that the ideas, fashions, vibes, and music would spread and spread and spread, was in and of itself the main memory that many in the crowd would have. But there was a “program” that tried to shape and enhance the energy.

  It started, as scheduled, at 1 p.m. sharp with the blowing of a conch shell by poet Gary Snyder, who had lived at a Japanese monastery for about ten years before his recent return to Northern California. He had longish brown hair and a beard and was wearing a dark turtleneck and a darker vest with a single string of beads around his neck and an earring in one ear (very far out for a man in those days). Sitting next to Snyder on the stage was Ginsberg, who chanted a Hindu mantra in his earnest off-key voice and then switched to English: “Peace in America, peace in Vietnam, peace in San Francisco, peace in Hanoi, peace in New York, peace in Peking. Hari Om Nama Shivaya.”

  Although a few people strolled on the periphery, where the weak sound system didn’t reach, the bulk of the crowd sat attentively, straining to take in every word. Several minutes into Ginsberg’s chant, a beautiful blond woman wearing a short black dress with mirrored circles on it rose and danced sensuously to the rhythm of the poet’s hand cymbals. Ginsberg gently nudged the crowd: “You also need to sing.” He explained that the Hindu deity Shiva was, among other things, the god of hash smokers.

  Michael McClure had recently written a play called The Beard about a sexually charged fictitious meeting between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid. (It had been closed down by the cops in San Francisco at one point because of its depiction of cunnilingus.) McClure played a quirky song while accompanying himself on the autoharp, with a lyric that ended, “It is all perfect, this really is.”

  Lenore Kandel was a local poet with long brown braids who had met Jack Kerouac earlier in the decade and was later immortalized by him as Romana Swartz, “a big Rumanian monster beauty,” in his novel Big Sur. She had recently published The Love Book, a collection of erotic poetry, which had also been the subject of a local obscenity prosecution. (She was convicted after a five-week trial in which she was supported by numerous literary figures, but the case would be thrown out on appeal on First Amendment grounds.) Kandel earnestly told the crowd, “The Buddha will reach us all through love—not through doctrine, not through teachings, but through love. And looking at all of you—all of us—I feel more and more that Maitreya is not this time going to be born in one physical body but born out of all of us.” (Theosophists believed Maitreya to be the messiah of the future.)

  Then it was Jerry Rubin’s turn. He had a Trotskyite handlebar mustache and tufts of his midlength hair were blowing above his head in the breeze. He too wore a white shirt. “Boy, I’m happy to be here. This is a beautiful day. I wish today that all of America could be here.” Despite his best efforts to keep it mellow, an outraged tone crept into his voice. “The police, like the soldiers in Vietnam, are both victims and agents. I just came from the old world, here to the new world. The old world are places like jails—structures where a person cannot feel like a human being.” He asked members of the crowd to contribute to the bail fund for arrested protesters and awkwardly ended, “Our smiles are our political banners and our nakedness is our picket sign.” Despite his effort to fit in, Rubin retained an unmistakable whiff of self-righteous lefty hysteria. Jerry Garcia would later say, “I remember being at [the] Be-In and Jerry Rubin got up on stage and started haranguing the crowd. All of a sudden it was like everyone who had ever haran
gued a crowd. It was every asshole who told people what to do. The words didn’t matter. It was that angry tone. It scared me. It made me sick to my stomach.” After the Be-In, the Grateful Dead often avoided associations with radical politics.

  The last of the speakers was Timothy Leary, who mirrored Ginsberg’s holy man uniform, wearing a white shirt and pants. For the last several years, Leary had been the highest-profile American advocate of LSD, but he was based on the East Coast. The Be-In was his first public appearance in San Francisco. Leary had a yellow flower behind each of his ears and was barefoot. “We have to get Western man out of the cities and back into tribes and villages. The only way out is in.” He finished by solemnly intoning, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” a phrase he had unveiled in New York a few months earlier. Ginsberg, who was sitting beside publisher/poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the stage, leaned over and whispered, “What if we’re all wrong?”

  Then came the rock and roll. After the power line was cut during a Quicksilver Messenger Service song, it was quickly repaired, and thereafter the stage and electric generator were guarded by Chocolate George, a member of the Hells Angels who was so nicknamed because of his fondness for chocolate milk.

  Two years later there would be a now-infamous violent incident involving the Angels at the Altamont Festival, but at the Be-In they were in perfect harmony with their surroundings. (Lenore Kandel was married to an Angel named Sweet William.)