In the week leading up to the Be-In, Fouratt was on the Bob Fass show, Radio Unnameable, virtually every night “anonymously” exhorting listeners to come to the event. As had been the case in San Francisco, a hip community which had previously never been known to exceed a couple thousand people had increased tenfold, seemingly overnight. The New York Be-In attracted roughly twenty thousand celebrants. Some had Easter Parade hats and others wore psychedelic robes. Many painted their faces in wild designs and colors ranging from chalk white to glowing lavender; they often included a dot, a tiny mirror, or a prism disk pasted on the forehead. One man was dressed in a suit of long, shaggy strips of paper. A tall man, his face painted white, wearing a silk top hat adorned with straw flowers, wandered ethereally through the Be-In holding aloft a tiny sign that simply read, LOVE.
Abbie Hoffman, then thirty years old, would not emerge as a media figure until later in the year, but he and his soon-to-be wife Anita were in attendance. Hoffman was a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, and had a thick New England accent, long dark hair, and a big Jewish nose. (Although Hoffman described himself as an atheist, he was proud of having been born Jewish and frequently mentioned it.) He had graduated from Brandeis and had gotten involved in the civil rights movement.
A few months earlier Hoffman had opened a “Freedom Store” on East 13th Street that sold products made by civil rights workers in the South. Unfortunately, the store did not do well. At the Be-In, Hoffman’s mind raced with ideas about how to synthesize the disparate cultural and political elements that were exploding before his eyes. He had become enamored with Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media, and as much as he enjoyed the Diggers’ intensity and creativity, going forward he would have no interest in anonymity.
Anita Hoffman described the scene in a roman à clef called Trashing, written under the pseudonym Ann Fettamen. “Someone gave us some orange and a chocolate. It was mind-blowing to be offered a poem or a daffodil by someone you’d never seen before. In New York you’d usually never speak to a total stranger.”
Among those mingling with the hippie kids were leaders of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation and Group Image artistic commune. Also flowing with the crowd were a number of New York jazz and rock musicians, including Ornette Coleman, and Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs.
The cops at the Be-In were cool. A police car arrived around six forty-five in the morning, and the few hundred people already gathered rushed the car and pelted it with flowers, yelling, “Daffodil power!” There were no arrests, not even of people who stripped and ran around naked, nor of those few couples who had sex out in the open. “The police were beautiful,” remembers Fouratt. “It was really strange and it freaked them out, but they were beautiful.”
Under Smith’s influence the Voice abandoned its lefty cynicism in their coverage of the Be-In the following week: “Laden with daffodils, ecstatic in vibrant costumes and painted faces, troupes of hippies gathered . . . Rhythms and music and mantras from all corners of the meadow echoed in exquisite harmony, and thousands of lovers vibrated into the night. It was miraculous . . . Layers of inhibitions were peeled away and, for many, love and laughter became suddenly fresh.”
Los Angeles
Hippie energy was spreading in Los Angeles as well. On weekends, teenage longhairs would crowd the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, causing the local merchants to complain. Eventually, the Los Angeles Police Department announced a curfew.
On Saturday, November 12, 1966, a demonstration was held to protest the curfew outside the popular Pandora’s Box nightclub on the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards. The ten p.m. curfew would effectively shutter Pandora’s Box and other nightclubs frequented by teenagers. A thousand young people demonstrated and the LAPD overreacted and declared it a riot, beating and handcuffing many of the participants.
Stephen Stills, a twenty-one-year-old guitarist and singer for the new rock group Buffalo Springfield, wrote “For What It’s Worth” about the Sunset Strip “riots,” and the band recorded it on December 5, 1966. The song would later be used in countless movie montages of antiwar protests, but had been written to celebrate the simple idea of teenagers expressing themselves.
On the same Easter Sunday in 1967 that the New York Be-In took place, a Love-In occurred in Downtown LA in Elysian Park, near where the Dodgers played. The psychedelic posters urged people to “bring incense, bells, flowers, and joy.” The turnout was around twenty thousand, roughly ten times as big as the hippie dances and events in Los Angeles during the preceding year.
Elliot Mintz, then twenty-one years old, had a talk show on the Los Angeles Pacifica station KPFK. Someone at the station had decided they should reach out to younger audiences and Mintz had sent in his resume at the right time. He was the youngest person on the radio in LA and was making it up as he went along.
Around the same time, Peter Bergman and Philip Proctor, who would soon form the underground comedy group the Firesign Theatre, were creating trippy audio montages for the station. “I was intimidated,” remembers Mintz. “I had no knowledge of how to edit in sound effects or write conceptually the way [Bergman and Proctor] did.” Instead, Mintz initially played an eclectic blend of music until he found his métier as an interviewer of young musicians, actors, writers, and hip philosophers.
“I talked the Love-In up every night and gave driving directions, parking info, and kept reminding people it was free.” Mintz and Peter Bergman played the roles of a very laid-back masters of ceremonies, introducing the bands who played.
The LA Love-In was neither as minimalist as the New York Be-In nor as structured as the one in San Francisco. There was a stage where local LA rock bands played—including the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, and Clear Light—but there were no poems, political speeches, or spiritual ceremonies. (Noting the magnitude of the newly expanded scene, the bigger LA rock bands—the Byrds, the Doors, Love, and Buffalo Springfield—showed up and played for free at subsequent Love-Ins in Griffith Park later in the year.)
Among those in the swarm of mostly teenage hippies were Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork of the TV band the Monkees. The group was dismissed by many “serious” rock fans, but the guys in the band were determined to bond with the hippie community. (Tork had recently “invested” $5,000 in the Oracle.)
Also in attendance was Peter Fonda—the twenty-seven-year-old son of Hollywood icon Henry Fonda—who had started a minor acting career of his own. In August of 1965, the Beatles had rented a house on Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, and Fonda had taken LSD there, along with John Lennon and Ringo Starr. At one point while tripping, Fonda announced, “I know what it’s like to be dead.” Lennon used the phrase in the song “She Said She Said,” which appeared on Revolver, an album the band released in August 1966. Fonda had been among those roughed up by cops at the Sunset Strip “riots.” He had grown his hair long, which prevented him from getting most acting jobs for the moment, but he and his friends Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper were convinced that the same hippie energy that was transforming rock and roll would soon come to Hollywood. Later in the year, Fonda starred in a low-budget film written by Nicholson called The Trip, playing a TV commercial director who takes LSD. Hopper played the dealer. Encouraged by the experience, Fonda and Hopper wrote a more serious movie about the hippie scene called Easy Rider (cowritten with Terry Southern) which would be released in 1969, and would achieve massive commercial success, ushering in the era of what was called “the new Hollywood.”
Another attendee at both the San Francisco Be-In and LA’s Love-In was eighteen-year-old Pamela Miller, who would soon become well-known as “Miss Pamela” of the GTOs, a band signed to Frank Zappa’s label, and eventually became even more famous for the memoirs she wrote as Pamela Des Barres about her experiences with numerous legendary rock musicians. She recalls hitchhiking to the San Francisco Be-In: “I was a hippie turning into a flower child before I turned into a freak.” In San Francisco, sh
e made out with Bobby Beausoleil, then a good-looking nineteen-year-old aspiring rock singer and actor. (Later that year Beausoleil would meet Charles Manson when he was released from prison and moved to Haight-Ashbury; in 1970 Beausoleil would be convicted of a murder said to be made at Manson’s behest.)
Miss Pamela came to the LA Love-In with a friend. They’d made dozens of cupcakes to give away. “They were taken and eaten immediately,” she says with a laugh. Soon after, she met Jimi Hendrix, and appeared in a “short film” (what would now be called a music video) made for “Foxy Lady.” She fell in love with her first serious boyfriend, Noel Redding, the bass player of the Jimi Hendrix Experience; in the 1970s she went on to marry rock singer Michael Des Barres.
As at the other Be-Ins, the crowd brought lots of balloons, flutes, and tambourines. Many wore flowers in their hair and had drawings on their faces. Hippies were dancing, playing conga drums, looking through kaleidoscopes, flying kites, and blowing soap bubbles. Miss Pamela warmly remembers people “tangled up in each other’s daisy chains and making out with strangers.” There was at least one couple actually having public sex. But her primary memory is a “sharing atmosphere with kindred souls. I was so thrilled that I was actually a part of it.” By the following year, Miss Pamela and her friend Sparky (also in the GTOs) were pictured on a poster advertising the next Easter Sunday Love-In. “It was in all the head shops. I was half-naked in a dress I’d made out of a tablecloth and Sparky was holding a gigantic stuffed bunny.”
The main drug at the event was marijuana, and although the LA cops were more confrontational than those in San Francisco or New York, there were only around a dozen arrests. There were several large hand-painted signs with the Egyptian ankh symbol on it and a colorful banner for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and the big acid dealers in Orange County gave out samples of their wares, although not in the quantity that Owsley had distributed in San Francisco.
Sweep-In
Back in New York, Abbie Hoffman felt that the “Fly-In” and “Be-In” had been too self-involved and that the community should do something with a “good purpose like cleaning up junk on the Lower East Side.” So, on the day after Easter on Fass’s WBAI show, they announced a “Sweep-In” where they asked the people who had attended the other events to come clean up the block on the Lower East Side where Paul Krassner lived (7th Street between avenues C and D), which was usually strewn with garbage. (Some accounts of the Sweep-In say that it was Emmett Grogan’s idea.)
It was essentially at this moment that Hoffman emerged as a public figure, and his sense of humor and fearless defiance in the face of all forms of authority made him an instant hip celebrity—exactly the kind of thing the Diggers had sworn they would prevent from emerging. Grogan himself had moved to the Lower East Side and became a bitter critic of Hoffman, accusing him, among other things, of leading a bunch of self-aggrandizing suburban white kids into poor neighborhoods without respecting the needs of the minority communities there.
Hoffman and Fass planned the Sweep-In for April 8, 1967, and word of the upcoming spring-cleaning quickly reached New York’s sanitation department. Apparently embarrassed by the idea of dirty hippies doing their work for them, city trucks were dispatched in the wee hours to clean the block from top to bottom, an unprecedented occurrence.
Fass was undeterred. When a thousand people arrived armed with brooms, mops, sponges, and cleaning solutions—only to discover that the original mission had already been accomplished—he directed them to 3rd Street and they started scrubbing there. The New York Times reported that a sizable group of participants were kids who came in from Westchester County and Long Island. I was one of them.
A new culture was being born, but like all births, it had originated somewhere else.
CHAPTER 2
before the deluge (1954–1966)
Fifties Culture
Later in his life Timothy Leary often said, “If you want to understand the sixties, you need to understand the fifties.” He was, for the most part, talking about the early experiments with psychedelics by psychiatrists, artists, and the United States government, as well as the oppressive shadow of McCarthyism and cultural and political orthodoxy.
When the Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine was released in 1968, it depicted the enemies of joy as “the blue meanies.” Some saw the cartoon villains simply as cops, but to a lot of us the blue meanies were a metaphor for materialists, racists, warmongers, repressive religious fanatics, and those who wished to censor artists. We imagined shadowy conservative white men wearing business suits who had won far too many of the arguments after World War II.
In the eyes of the counterculture, the “establishment” had created a materialistic and inhibited society that trapped many of our parents, a society which we, with the help of the Beatles, were determined to change for the better. All sixties change-agents, famous or obscure, owed a debt to the many who blazed progressive paths in the far less hospitable fifties.
Starting in 1952, Mad magazine satirized the materialistic advertising culture. In the early sixties, waiting for puberty to take hold, I used to read every word of every issue as if the contents were manna from sarcastic heaven. At the same time, older baby boomers were enjoying subversive comics like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Hugh Romney (who later renamed himself Wavy Gravy), Dick Gregory, and Lord Buckley as mind-expanding alternatives to the borscht belt humor of the vaudeville era. I loved the comedy routine 2,000 Year Old Man, which was recorded as a series of albums in the 1960s. Straight man Carl Reiner asks the ancient protagonist played by Mel Brooks what mankind’s earliest religion was. Brooks responds: “At first we worshipped Phil. He was the biggest and strongest among us and we worshipped him and we feared him. Then one day a bolt of lightning struck Phil and killed him. And we looked at each other and we said to each other, There’s something bigger than Phil.”
Elvis Presley and others created the first wave of mass-appeal rock and roll, which helped loosen sexual repression and forged a musical culture that was shared by whites and blacks. American music culture of the fifties also spawned a deeper and edgier jazz, and, in the early sixties, a feisty, liberal folk music boom that included Joan Baez’s mixture of vocal purity and pacifist politics and Bob Dylan’s early albums, which had several “protest” songs.
Hollywood gave the world antiheroes played by Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, and the sexuality of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Kim Novak.
The American intellectual community of the fifties and early sixties included radical thinkers such as Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer. J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye inspired millions of teenagers to mock “phonies.” (Salinger’s subsequent book, Franny and Zooey, has extensive references to mystical Christianity, Zen Buddhism, and Hindu Advaita Vedanta, and influenced the “new age” movement in future decades.)
The most radical white cultural expression came from the beatniks, most notably from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” which among its many lasting effects on Western culture began a decades-long process of defeating censorship in the arts.
It can be argued that the fifties ended in November 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. He was twenty-seven years younger than his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower. The following February, a month after he had taken office, President Kennedy crossed an American Legion picket line to see the film Spartacus, written by formerly blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The new president effectively ended the blacklist that had excluded hundreds of left-wing writers, actors, and directors from working in Hollywood films and network television, thereby creating the space for a more rebellious and diverse mass culture.
Ideas about sex were changing too. After World War II, Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist at the University of Indiana, researched the sex lives of thousands of Americans and published two books on his findings: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. In addition to stimulating more honest conversations about heterosexual sex, Kinsey’s works were among the first to bring information about homosexuality into mainstream culture.
1960 was also the year that birth control pills were introduced for mass consumption, a development that dramatically changed how everyone thought about sexual activity.
Civil Rights
In May 1954 the United States Supreme Court issued the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools. That lawsuit was filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been formed in 1909 to combat racial discrimination and in the ensuing years had become the “establishment” civil rights organization with the most conventional political clout.
The Montgomery bus boycott from December 1955 to December 1956 succeeded in ending segregation on the city’s buses and propelled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into international fame, and further popularized nonviolent civil disobedience, a tactic which the NAACP had eschewed. (Dr. King formed his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, shortly after the boycott.)
For the next several years, further progress was stymied by white segregationists. While the NAACP and Dr. King maintained leading roles, new more militant organizations also sprung up, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
By 1960, Malcolm X had emerged as a prominent spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI) and as a new militant black voice who was outspoken in his contempt for Dr. King’s use of nonviolence. Malcolm X grew to greater renown when he befriended Cassius Clay shortly before Clay upset Sonny Liston for the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship on February 25, 1964. Clay’s wit and poetry (he composed doggerel predicting the results of his fights) were a dramatic contrast to the mob-connected, glowering, inarticulate Liston, and at the age of twenty-two, Clay was the youngest man ever to win the heavyweight championship.
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 5