In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  At one of Ken Kesey’s events in 1966, Ginsberg had given many of the local Angels LSD, and for that moment they had been on the same page as the hippies. One of the reasons for naive optimism about the effects of LSD in the community was that incongruous bonding of a gay Jewish poet with members of the outlaw motorcycle gang who had not so long before beaten up antiwar protesters. (In August, when Chocolate George was killed in a motorcycle accident on Haight Street, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company played at his wake, and Grogan and Coyote of the Diggers also attended.)

  The Angels’ appeal to the Diggers, Coyote explained to me, was that they were fellow anarchists who resisted conventional authority. During my brief time of living in the Bay Area in 1967–68, I shared that romance about the Angels. The fact that I knew people who were close to some of them gave me the same kind of illusion of protection that kids who grew up playing with the offspring of Mafia families had in some urban neighborhoods. In retrospect, I feel that nonviolence means nothing unless it applies to everyone, including people who otherwise seem very cool.

  The bands who played at the Be-In had developed a passionate local following with little or no connection to the music business. Only the Airplane had released an album, but most of the others would be signed to major record companies within the year.

  The coin of the realm for bands in the San Francisco scene was the ability to play extended semi-improvised solos and jams which sounded especially good when the listener was high. No one did this more effectively than the Grateful Dead, who were the last band to play, ending with a psychedelicized version of the Motown song “Dancing in the Street,” to which Ginsberg danced ecstatically as Jerry Garcia sang, “It doesn’t matter what you wear just as long as you are there,” followed by a long, trippy guitar solo. Jim Morrison and the other members of the Doors (who were in San Francisco for a gig at the Fillmore) did not play at the Be-In, but wandered around Polo Field cheerfully tripping on Owsley’s acid.

  At some point during the Dead’s set a parachutist who’d jumped from a small plane floated down into the middle of the celebration and was greeted by many stoned oohs and aahs. Not long afterward, Ginsberg took the microphone again, gently cradling a four-year-old boy, and said, “If the parents are here for this child—please come and take him.”

  The music was fun and served as a magnet for the crowd. San Francisco rock was at its innocent peak. But the day was still permeated by an elusive but palpable sense of nondenominational cosmic purpose that made it very different from a regular party or concert. The main point was for members of the crowd to experience each other. There were so many freaks! It was like the straight world had just melted away.

  As the afternoon drew to a close, Allen Cohen repeated three times, “You are your own salvation, man!” He continued, “I have had one of the fullest days of my life. In that day, there was much good. There was also bad. But my day was full. I am thankful that each and every person here came to share this day with each and every person here . . . I would ask you to, at this moment, realize that the sun is setting and our day is at an end. I would ask you to turn and face the sun, and Allen Ginsberg, along with Gary Snyder, will chant the night . . . Thank you for sharing the day with all the people here, and please, please take it home and realize the beauty that can come forth . . . I would say this to all the members of the establishment—we are happy and proud to have you in our brave new world.”

  Ginsberg chanted, “Om Jai Maitreya, Om Jai Maitreya.” Dozens of people, some holding paisley flags and the rest holding hands, danced in a circle on the periphery of the crowd. Ginsberg ended with a request for civic responsibility: “Now that you have looked up at the sun, look down at your feet and practice a little kitchen yoga after this first American mela. Please pick up any refuse you might see around you. Shanti.”

  Present throughout the day was Leary’s protégé Richard Alpert, who was then thirty-five. Alpert had been among the elite in the American psychedelic scene for the last five years and his name had appeared on the Be-In posters. On the surface Alpert seemed optimistic and ecstatic, but in the days that followed he would start to talk and write a lot about “the problem of coming down.”

  Robbie Conal was an artist from New York, a “red-diaper baby” whose schoolteacher dad was followed by the FBI during the blacklisting era. He began attending San Francisco State and lived in Haight-Ashbury starting in 1963, so he had watched the whole scene unfold. Conal stayed in college as long as he could without graduating to retain a draft deferment, but says of the time, “I was taking psychedelics and smoking dope. I was as far away from politics as I’d ever been.” He was in Golden Gate Park almost every day, but the Be-In touched him deeply. “What stayed with me was Ginsberg. You don’t get to see a guy like that very often.”

  Also among the attendees in San Francisco were James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who shortly thereafter wrote the musical Hair, which premiered in New York the following year, by which time much of the essence of the culture they were exploiting had dispersed. Most early hippies viewed the musical as a dumbed-down version of their evanescent culture, but over the years, millions of people have professed to having picked up shards of light from it. The spirit moved in mysterious ways.

  In the early evening following the Be-In, Bowen hosted a party at his place. Around eighteen people squeezed into his meditation room, including Ginsberg, Snyder, Leary, and two local TV cameramen. The New Yorker’s Jane Kramer hung out with the effusive Ginsberg. “I thought it was very Eden-like today, actually,” he told her. “Kind of like Blake’s vision of Eden. Music. Babies. People just sort of floating around having a good time and everybody happy and smiling and touching and turning each other on. A lot of groovy chicks all dressed up in their best clothes.”

  One of the TV guys interrupted him to ask, “But will it last?”

  Ginsberg shrugged. “How do I know if it will last? And if it doesn’t turn out, who cares?” Once was enough.

  Around nine that night, a crowd assembled on Haight Street and cops said they were blocking buses. Twenty-five people were arrested for causing a nuisance. Nonetheless, the scale and colorful nature of the crowd that had gathered during the day created a significant impression. Photos of the Be-In appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world.

  McClure would later write, “The Be-In was a blossom. It was a flower. It was out in the weather. It didn’t have all its petals. There were worms in the rose. It was perfect in its imperfections. It was what it was—and there had never been anything like it before.”

  Of course, to a huge part of the country, the Be-In was of no particular consequence. Far more Americans paid attention the next day, January 15, when the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10 at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the first Super Bowl.

  Meanwhile, the Diggers were worried that the publicity from the Be-In would change people’s heads in the hip community for the worse, so they held their own event called “The Invisible Circus at the Glide Church.” It took place in San Francisco a month later, on February 24, with no posters or advertising that the media would notice, just word of mouth. It went all night and had more nudity, sex, and intense drug use than the Be-In had (and nary a Hindu chant).

  New York: Lower East Side

  New York City’s Lower East Side was Haight-Ashbury’s psychic cousin. At times it seemed like they were two pieces of the same puzzle, but there were differences. The Lower East Side was economically poorer and more crime ridden, and in New York the hippies had a lot more competition for possession of the cultural zeitgeist.

  Greenwich Village, which was just a few blocks west and north of the Lower East Side, had been a haven for rebel culture at least as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. Even though Bob Dylan had taken a lot of the air out of the folk world (no one could compete with his brilliance), the folk scene that spawned him was still there, and so, on occasion, was Dylan himself. There was a re
volutionary art world that included Andy Warhol, and a fierce literary community that included the likes of Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, George Plimpton, and Norman Mailer.

  Harlem had its own vast energy and many of the jazz geniuses of the age—such as Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—were still in their prime. John Coltrane, whose 1965 masterpiece A Love Supreme was as influential a musical/spiritual opus as any rock record, would die of cancer at the age of forty in July of 1967.

  Most record companies at the time were based in New York (although Los Angeles was rapidly expanding and would soon be an equal music business center), which was also the American home of Broadway as well as avant-garde theater, most notably the Living Theatre.

  Ed Sanders, a native of Missouri, had moved to the city to attend New York University, from which he graduated with a degree in Greek. An impassioned supporter of the peace movement, he was arrested at a protest near a nuclear submarine when he was twenty-two years old in 1961 and wrote his first poem in jail. Shortly thereafter, Sanders started an avant-garde literary magazine called Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

  In 1964, Sanders and beatnik poet Tuli Kupferberg started a rock band called the Fugs, named after the euphemism Norman Mailer had invented to substitute for the word “fuck” in his classic World War II novel The Naked and the Dead. The Fugs combined literary sophistication with profane, hip rage. They set William Blake poems to music, but would follow them with songs like “Coca Cola Douche” and “My Baby Done Left Me” (the chorus of which had the brokenhearted narrator singing, “I feel like homemade sh—”).

  The Fugs also had a political side and participated in numerous anti–Vietnam War rallies. They wrote “Kill for Peace,” which they performed at Carnegie Hall at a “Sing-In for Peace” that also featured Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and civil rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer.

  In 1965, Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore at 383 East 10th Street, which became one of the key meeting places in the Lower East Side hip community. At the grand opening the Fugs and the hippie/bluegrass band the Holy Modal Rounders played. (The Rounders wrote a new verse to the jug band standard “Hesitation Blues” in which they said they were wearing “psychedelic shoes.”) Andy Warhol gave Sanders three large silkscreen prints of flowers for the walls. Among the literati who attended were Allen Ginsberg, George Plimpton, William Burroughs, and best-selling novelist James A. Michener, who arrived in a limo.

  Sanders had a mimeograph machine at the bookstore to continue publishing Fuck You as well as the prolegalization Marijuana Newsletter. On January 1, 1966, police raided the Peace Eye Bookstore and charged Sanders with obscenity.

  Ginsberg was in Los Angeles at the time and held a benefit poetry reading in Hollywood to raise money for initial legal fees. The ACLU quickly stepped in to defend Sanders, which limited future costs.

  In Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he quotes Ken Kesey telling him in 1966, “No offense but New York is about two years behind [California].” By 1967 this was no longer the case. It had become easy to get LSD in New York and both Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side had proud bohemian traditions. New York’s counterparts to the Oracle were the late-night shows on WBAI-FM, a radio station that created a similar sense of a psychedelic/revolutionary community.

  WBAI was part of the small, feisty, and noncommercial Pacifica Network, which had been created in the late 1940s by a pacifist named Lewis Hill. The first affiliated stations were KPFA in Berkeley and KPFK in Los Angeles. In 1960 Pacifica was given WBAI in New York. (In later years, Pacifica added stations in Houston and Washington, DC.) The idea of “listener-sponsored” radio, without commercials, was a novelty (National Public Radio wasn’t founded until 1970), and the audiences for Pacifica stations were passionate and engaged. The stations offered a combination of classical music and public affairs programming with a pronounced left-wing tilt.

  Among WBAI’s virtues was an extremely strong signal that reached up to Westchester where my parents lived. The station published monthly programming folios for donors. A glance at the first week of programming from March 1967 gives an idea of the cultural footprint WBAI had in the New York area.

  In keeping with the sensibilities of the FM radio audience of the time, they broadcast a large sampling of classical music, including Clementi piano music, Carl Orff’s adaptation the thirteenth-century poem “Carmina Burana,” Schubert’s “Octet in F Major,” sacred compositions by Benjamin Britten, and Beethoven string quartets. Other highbrow programming included Shakespeare with a Difference, hosted by Alfred Rothschild, the editor of Bantam Classics’ Shakespeare editions, a recording of a full performance of the Bard’s Measure for Measure, a program dedicated to Indian music played by Ravi Shankar, and a jazz show hosted by Downbeat editor Ira Gitler.

  Weekly programming included Commentary, a production of the New York chapter of SDS, a review of the Soviet press, satirical shows by Paul Krassner and Hugh Romney, and a panel discussion by the board of the Ethical Culture Society (a religion created by rationalist Jews earlier in the century who had founded Fieldston, the high school I attended). Specials during the first week of March included one on the trials in Newark of African American poet LeRoi Jones, another on the “police harassment” of Timothy Leary in Millbrook, and a conversation between antiwar congressman William Fitts Ryan (whose district included Manhattan’s Upper West Side) and former army general David Shoup, who had turned against the war. WBAI also offered new, original reporting from Vietnam (they had sent reporter Chris Koch there as early as 1965), and later in the year the Pacifica stations broadcast a live interview with Che Guevara a few months before he was killed.

  I had a limited appetite for this well-intentioned but often dull programming, yet WBAI’s late-night offerings rocked my world. From Monday through Friday, Bob Fass broadcast from midnight to four a.m. On Saturday and Sunday, it was Steve Post. Together, they created a sense of a secret, hip world, totally remote from the tedium of school and work. Bob Dylan often showed up in the wee hours of the morning to play a new song or exchange cynical cosmic observations with Fass, and regular guests on these shows included such luminaries as Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist and Lenny Bruce’s autobiography.

  Fass decided to try to find out how many engaged listeners he actually had and suggested that they all come to JFK Airport on the night of February 11 for a “Fly-In.” Despite the fact that it ended up being the coldest night of the year with temperatures near zero, several thousand bleary-eyed WBAI listeners (whom Fass affectionately referred to as “the cabal”) showed up.

  The next month, on Easter Sunday, there was a daytime Be-In in Central Park’s Sheep’s Meadow. Paul Williams and Jim Fouratt were the primary organizers. Williams was a precocious eighteen-year-old who had started Crawdaddy, the first magazine to write about rock and roll with the intellectual gravitas previously reserved for jazz, folk, and classical music. He had written all of the articles in the first ten-page issue, but the mimeographed magazine attracted enough attention in the blossoming rock world that other brilliant writers soon flocked to him, including Jon Landau, who would later become Bruce Springsteen’s manager, and Paul Nelson, who would sign the New York Dolls during a brief stint at Mercury Records. (Williams was a visionary but a terrible businessman. Both Landau and Nelson left Crawdaddy by the end of 1967 to write for a new San Francisco–based rock magazine called Rolling Stone.)

  I would meet Fouratt a few years later, by which time he was the “Company Freak” (this was his actual title!) at CBS Records, where, among other tasks, he was the primary liaison with Janis Joplin. He was also a central figure in the gay liberation movement that emerged from the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

  But in 1967, Fouratt, having spent time with the Diggers in San Francisco, was calling himself Jimmy Digger. He brought the Diggers’ anti-elite sensibility to the New York Be-In. “We really wanted not to have an audience and a stage and performers in an active/pas
sive situation. We wanted to make people figure out how to relate in real time.” Thus there were no speakers and no music. It was a pure vehicle for the community to come together and “be.”

  New York’s biggest alternative weekly, the Village Voice, founded in 1955, had been dominated by grimly grounded New York lefties who were invested in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and off-Broadway. The Voice had initially been dubious about the hippie scene but that was about to change.

  Howard Smith wrote a column called “Scenes” in the Voice, and he saw himself as an activist as well as a journalist. “Howard called me one day and said that the Voice was throwing out a Gestetner machine because they’d gotten a new one,” Jim Fouratt recalls. This was the same kind of mimeograph machine that the Diggers used in San Francisco. It was capable of printing tens of thousands of flyers in a few hours. Fouratt convinced some kids to pick it up on the street outside of the Voice’s office. At the time there were plenty of high school students hanging around the Lower East Side, some of whom went to private schools like Dalton. The students would steal reams of paper from their schools that would eventually become flyers for the upcoming New York Be-In.

  Pop artist Peter Max created a psychedelic graphic for free and printed up thousands of handouts, but the flyer had his name on it; Fouratt was incensed. “I told Peter that we didn’t want any individual having visibility and he was very good about it. He destroyed the first printing and gave us thousands more without his name. We tried to remain anonymous. People would ask who was organizing it, and we would give them a Be-In button and tell them, You are!” Another distinguishing fact of the New York Be-In was that the words on the posters and flyers were in both English and Spanish—as a result, thousands of Puerto Ricans showed up.